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A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
November 18, 2001
C.G. Estabrook
American
Crusades
November 17, 2001
Zoltan Grossman
It Ain't
Over Til It's Over
November 16, 2001
Rick Giombetti
Rep.
McDermott and
the Decay of Liberalism
Fawzia Afzal-Khan
The Voices
of Muslim Feminists
Mokhiber/Weissman
Kill,
Kill, Kill
November 15, 2001
George
Monbiot
Blasting
Our Way
Toward Peace
Jack McCarthy
Hitchens
Mind-Meld
and Hot Bodies
Steve
Perry
Afghan
Puzzle Palace
RAWA
We Do Not Accept
the Northern Alliance
November 14, 2001
Jensen/Mahajan
The
Press Must Press Harder on Afghanistan
David Vest
The Great Unificator
Harry
Browne
Preventing
Future Terrorism
November 13, 2001
Peter Mahoney
Veteran's
Day, 2001
Rep. Ron
Paul
Expanding
NATO
Is a Bad Idea
November 12, 2001
Robert Jensen
Goodbye to
All That...
Patriotism
Nancy
Oden
My
Day at the Airport
CounterPunch Wire
East Timor
10 Years
After the Massacre
C.G. Estabrook
Instead
of Terror
Alexander Cockburn
Wide World
of Torture
November 11, 2001
Douglas
Valentine
Homeland
Insecurity: The Politics of Terror in America
November 10, 2001
Grover Furr
Seeking an Opposition
to the Afghan War
Bruce
Kyle
Anatomy
of a Green Smear:
Backstabbing Nancy Oden
November 9, 2001
Karen Snell
Torture By
Proxy
John Troyer
A
New Kind of Activism
Tariq Ali
Q &
A About the War
Michael
Colby
Schoolgirl
Gets Booted
for Anti-war Views
November 8, 2001
Mokhiber/Weissman
The
Cipro Rip-Off
Mitchel Cohen
The Smear Campaign
Against Nancy Oden
Steve
Perry
American
Roulette
November 7, 2001
Bahour/Dahan
Placebo Peace
Plan
Tom Turnipseed
Bush
Gives Billions
to His Oil Buddies
Cockburn/St. Clair
Greens, Airports
and
National ID Cards
Dr. Susan
Block
Ayatollah
Asscroft
Brian J. Foley
Bombing Campaign
Not "Self-Defense" Under International Law
November 6, 2001
Mark Scaramella
Where's
That Red Cross Money Going
C.G. Estabrook
Our Torturers
Sheperd
Bliss
Scott
Nearing on War
Rep. Ron Paul
Underwriting
the Taliban
Tariq
Ali
The
General Who
Came to Dinner
Evan Ravitz
Stop the War
Through
Direct Democracy
Steve
Perry
Hunger
in Afghanistan
November 5, 2001
Patrick Cockburn
Living
in the Minefields
David Price
Terror
and Indigenous People
November 3, 2001
Declan McCullagh
Nancy Oden Interview
Daniel
Wolff
The
Memphis Blues Again
Mark Weisbrot
War on Civilians
Dave Marsh
How
the RIAA (and the FBI) Cheat Musicians
Robert Jensen
Speaking
Out Against
War on Campus
November 2, 2001
CounterPunch
Wire
Green
Party Leader Detained at Maine Airport; Prevented from Boarding
Any Plane
Alexander Cockburn
FBI Eyes
Torture
November 1, 2001
Dean Baker
Dying
for Patents
Sami Amarah
US Attempts
to Recruit
Russian Vets of Afghan War
Molly Secours
Where
Are the Voices of Reason? Let the Women
Be Heard
William Blum
Unleashing the
CIA
October 31, 2001
Tom Turnipseed
Terrorize
the Poor,
Subsidize the Rich
Chris Clarke
Thank God
for Berkeley
Steve
Perry
The
Silent Genocide
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Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
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Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
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The Memphis Blues Again:
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The New Intifada:
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November
18, 2001
Shame On You, Chelsea!
Where Do We Bomb Next, Alabama?
By Jonathan D Farley
Oxford's ornately decorated town hall was brimming
with people. So many people... All of them there to protest against
the war in Afghanistan. Well, almost all of them.
On my way to the meeting, I had seen
a group of students standing outside the hall, one of them draped
in an American flag. I didn't think much of them until they came
in and sat behind me. There were several men and a few women
in their group - Americans, judging by their accents. At the
centre of attention was a smiling girl with curly brown locks.
She looks a lot like Chelsea Clinton, I thought, but I wasn't
sure. Then the meeting began.
The 600-person crowd sat in rapt attention.
But at one point, some of the Americans went to the front of
the room with their flag, an apparent protest against peace:
one of them tried to drown out the speakers by shouting. Embarrassed,
I got up to move away from them. The heckling Americans, who
were few in number, failed to derail the meeting, their jibes
deftly countered by the speakers.
Chelsea, to her credit, remained silent
throughout. But, according to recent interviews with CNN and
Talk Magazine, she has now broken her silence. Chelsea has said
that, because of anti-American and anti-war sentiment in England,
she no longer wants to "seek out non-Americans as friends".
Instead, she wants to "be around Americans" - by which
she means, I presume, people who support America's war against
terror.
Shame on you, Chelsea. There are millions
of people, every bit as American as you, who have every reason
to question whether or not this is really a "war for democracy",
a "war against terror" that will "keep Americans
safe". I am speaking about the millions of us who are Americans
of African descent, and the millions of others who oppose this
war.
While many black Americans felt wounded
after the September 11 attacks - indeed, only one of the 38 blacks
in Congress voted against giving Bush war powers - we're far
more circumspect than our white compatriots. Fully 20% of blacks
opposed Bush's response, compared to only 6% of whites (64% of
blacks were in support, compared with 83% whites). As bombs fell,
black opposition rose. We're less enthusiastic about America's
wars in the developing world because we are aware, as has often
been said, that no Iraqi ever called us nigger.
Don't misunderstand me: many black Americans
are remarkably patriotic. We've fought in all of America's wars.
But, 20 years after we helped liberate Nazi death camps, we still
could not vote in our own country. When black Freedom Riders
challenged America's apartheid laws, they were firebombed and
beaten. The police and FBI did not hunt down the "evil-doers"
responsible for these crimes; indeed, more often than not they
assisted them.
Mind you, just because the FBI broke
the law in the 1960s does not mean that they're wrong about Bin
Laden. But we have every right to question US "intelligence"
when the same FBI and CIA now chasing Bin Laden also once trained
their sights on Martin Luther King and Malcolm X (when both men
were shot, the first people to rush to their sides were undercover
policemen who had infiltrated their entourage).
In a country that refuses to pay reparations
for slavery, the FBI spent the equivalent of $500m to "neutralise"
black leaders - with frightening success, as the mothers of Black
Panther activists Fred Hampton and the exiled Assata Shakur can
attest. (The former was killed in his sleep in a police raid
in 1969, for which the government, admitting wrongdoing, was
forced to pay $1.85m in damages.) White supremacist murders and
police killings have claimed the lives of thousands of blacks
- most famously in the Tulsa massacre of 1921 - and the prisons
house nearly one million more.
So you see, Chelsea, African Americans
are not much less safe now than we were before September 11.
Even if we found out who was sending the anthrax tomorrow, innocent
black males in LA and New York and Cincinnati would continue
to have fatal allergic reactions to bullets fired by white cops.
Are blacks expected to line up to fight
the Taliban? How can we, when one of our own senators (ex-Klansman
Robert Byrd of West Virginia) once vowed that he would never
fight "with a negro by my side", preferring instead
to "die a thousand times"? Even now, while our FBI
is arresting anyone whose first name rhymes with Osama, the Klan
is operating openly and legally in all 50 states. Next time you're
in Tennessee, Chelsea, come visit Nathan Bedford Forrest Park,
named after the founder of America's al-Qaida, the KKK.
Absurdly, we're supposed to breathe a
sigh of relief now that we think the anthrax was sent, not by
Arabs, but by white supremacists. But why were black postal workers
treated a week after the whites on Capitol Hill? Has US attorney
general John Ashcroft detained 1,000 Christians without charge?
Is everyone with links to Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh
now under surveillance? And what terrorist-harbouring state will
be bombed next - Alabama?
The charge has been laid that the left
predicted a long war. "Look how they got it wrong, big-time!"
as Dick Cheney might say. But this phase of the war - the massacres,
continued bombing, the infighting as returning warlords reassert
themselves - is far from over, let alone what is likely to happen
once Bush turns his attention to Iraq. The irony is that it was
the right, especially the military, which expected the Taliban
regime to hold out. Last month, Donald Rumsfeld predicted that
the war in Afghanistan would take "years, not weeks or months".
So the real question is: how could the
military and the CIA have got it so wrong? After all, we're paying
them $300bn a year to (a) predict the fall of the Berlin wall,
(b) predict the invasion of Kuwait, (c) not bomb Chinese embassies
when we're not at war with China, (d) not train and fund Osama
bin Laden when he will later use our own weapons against us.
Maybe we deserve to be laughed at, left and right, for giving
the military and CIA so much money, when they've done such a
hopeless job.
So, Chelsea, please do not corral all
Americans into the pro-war camp. The stars and stripes your friend
draped across his back remind too many of us of the bloody stripes
that once laced our own. One of Bill Clinton's redeeming traits
is the fact that, when he studied at Oxford, he opposed America's
war. Maybe sometime, Chelsea, you will too.
Professor Jonathan Farley is a math professor at Vanderbilt University
and visiting distinguished scholar at Oxford University. He is
running for Congress in Tennessee as a Green candidate in 2002.
This column originally appeared in The
Guardian of London.
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