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June 13, 2002
Stanton / Madsen
Democracy
in Crisis:
What is to be Done?
Roldan Tomasz Suárez
Venezuela:
Five Facts
About the Coup
June 12, 2002
Fran Shor
Dirty Bombs, Blowback
and Imperial Projections
Dave Marsh
Shelley
Stewart, Radio and the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement
Chris Floyd
Murder, Inc.
June 11, 2002
Omar Barghouti
On Dance, Identity and War
Robert Fisk
The Bush
Afghan Gang:
Murderers, Gangsters, Stooges
Minerva Wright
The Donkeys of the Holy Land
David Krieger
Stopping
a Nuclear War
in South Asia
June 10, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
Executioner's Last Songs
June 8/9, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Mademoiselle
M.
Or Getting Screwed in Paris
Susan Davis
Sleepless
in the Suburbs
Curing Insomnia: a new use for The Nation?
George Sunderland
"Send
in the Weekly
Standard": The Screaming Pundits Assault Corps
June 7, 2002
Michael Colby
Bush to the Nation:
You're All Cops Now
Tanweer Akram
Howard
Zinn's "Terrorism
and War": a review
David Krieger
New Security Challenges
Sam Bahour
The Palestinian
Intifada:
A Very American Struggle
Tom Turnipseed
A Crisis of Confidence
in US Leadership
June 6, 2002
Michael Colby
White House
vs. EPA:
Political Hot Air and
Global Warming
Ron Jacobs
The Indo-Pakistan Conflict:
It's Just a Shot Away
Francis Boyle
Take Sharon
to The Hague:
Prosecute Israeli War Crimes
at Jenin
CounterPunch Bulletin
60 Minutes and President Chavez's
Censored F-Word
Mark Weisbrot
Spying
and Lying:
The FBI's Shameful Past
June 5, 2002
Robert Fisk
Berlusconi the Censor
Danielle Brian
Nuclear
Plants and Terrorism
Ardeshir Cowasjee
For What Do We Fight?
George Monbiot
Kashmir
on the Brink
Michael Neumann
What is Antisemitism?
June 4, 2002
Dave Marsh
Bono the Useful Idiot
William Evan / Francis
Boyle
Kashmir:
Invoking Intl. Law to Avoid Nuclear War
Cockburn / St. Clair
The Future Wellstone Deserves
June 3, 2002
Ramdas / Makhijani
India,
Pakistan and Nukes:
A Road Map to Peace
Fran Shor
Meanwhile, Back in Afghanistan
Neve Gordon
The Caterpillar
Effect
June 2, 2002
Fidel Castro
From FDR to Mister "W.":
Cuba, the US and Democracy
Arundhati Roy
Under the
Nuclear Shadow
Bernard Weiner
Bush 9/11 Scandal for Dummies
June 1, 2002
Norman Madarasz
The
Strange Math of Roberto Carlos: Brazil v. Turkey
Gavin Keeney
Bush and Mies van der Rohe:
Architecture and Ideology
Jeff Halper
Sharon's
Post-Incursion Plan:
Incarceration or Transfer?
Walt Brasch
Crumpling the Constitution
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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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
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:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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This Explosive
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Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
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June 13,
2002
Bush's Weird War
by Robert Fisk
The Independent
Mr Bush's Titanic War on Terror Will Eventually
Sink Beneath the Waves Meantime, all the men who claim to be
fighting terror are using this lunatic "war" simply
for their own purposes by Robert Fisk
First it was to be a crusade. Then it
became the "War for Civilization". Then the "War
without End". Then the "War against Terror". And
now--believe it or not--President Bush is promising us a "Titanic
War on Terror". This gets weirder and weirder. What can
come next? Given the latest Bush projections last week--"we
know that thousands of trained killers are plotting to attack
us"--he must surely have an even more gargantuan cliche
up his sleeve.
Well, he must have known about the would-be
Chicago "dirty" bomber--another little secret he didn't
tell the American people about for a month. Until, of course,
it served a purpose. We shall hear more about this strange episode--and
I'll hazard a guess the story will change in the next few days
and weeks. But what could be more titanic than the new and ominously
named "Department for Homeland Security", with its
170,000 future employees and its $37.5bn (lbs26.6bn) budget?
It will not, mark you, incorporate the rival CIA and FBI--already
at each other's throats over the failure to prevent the crimes
against humanity of 11 September--and will thus ensure that the
intelligence battle will be triangular: between the CIA, the
FBI and the boys from "Homeland Security". This, I
suspect, will be the real titanic war.
Because the intelligence men of the United
States are not going to beat their real enemies like this. Theirs
is a mission impossible, because they will not be allowed to
do what any crime-fighting organization does to ensures success--to
search for a motive for the crime. They are not going to be allowed
to ask the "why" question. Only the "who"
and "how".
Because if this is a war against evil,
against "people who hate democracy", then any attempt
to discover the real reasons for this hatred of America--the
deaths of tens of thousands of children in Iraq, perhaps, or
the Israeli-Palestinian bloodbath, or the presence of thousands
of US troops in Saudi Arabia--will touch far too sensitively
upon US foreign policy, indeed upon the very relationships that
bind America to the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, and
to a raft of Arab dictators.
Here's just one example of what I mean.
New American "security" rules will force hundreds of
thousands of Arabs and Muslims from certain countries to be fingerprinted,
photographed and interrogated when they enter the US. This will
apply, according to the US Attorney General, John Ashcroft, to
nearly all visitors from Iran, Iraq, Syria and Sudan, most of
whom will not get visas at all. The list is not surprising. Iran
and Iraq are part of Mr Bush's infantile "axis of evil".
Syria is on the list, presumably because it supports Hamas' war
against Israel.
It is a political list, constructed around
the Bush policy of good-versus-evil. But not a single citizen
from Iran, Iraq, Syria or Sudan has been accused of plotting
the atrocities of 11 September. The suicide-hijackers came principally
from Saudi Arabia, with one from Egypt and another from Lebanon.
The men whom the Moroccans have arrested--all supposedly linked
to al-Qa'ida--are all Saudis.
Yet Saudis--who comprised the vast majority
of the September killers--are going to have no problems entering
the US under the new security rules. In other words, men and
women from the one country whose citizens the Americans have
every reason to fear will be exempt from any fingerprinting,
or photographing, or interrogation, when they arrive at JFK.
Because, of course, Saudi Arabia is one of the good guys, a "friend
of America", the land with the greatest oil reserves on
earth. Egypt, too, will be exempt, since President Hosni Mubarak
is a supporter of the "peace process".
Thus America's new security rules are
already being framed around Mr Bush's political fantasies rather
than the reality of international crime. If this is a war between
"the innocent and the guilty"--another Bush bon mot
last week--then the land that bred the guilty will have no problems
with the lads from the Department of Homeland Security or the
US Department of Immigration.
But why, for that matter, should any
Arabs take Mr Bush seriously right now? The man who vowed to
fight a "war without end" against "terror"
told Israel to halt its West Bank operations in April--and then
sat back while Mr Sharon continued those same operations for
another month. On 4 April, Mr Bush demanded that Mr Sharon take
"immediate action" to ease the Israeli siege of Palestinian
towns; but, two months later, Mr Sharon--a "man of peace",
according to Mr Bush--is still tightening those sieges.
If Mr Sharon is not frightened of Mr
Bush, why should Osama bin Laden be concerned? Last week's appeal
by President Mubarak for a calendar for a Palestinian state produced,
even by Mr Bush's absurd standards, an extraordinary illogicality.
No doubt aware that he would be meeting Mr Sharon two days later,
he replied: "We are not ready to lay down a specific calendar
except for the fact that we've got to get started quickly, soon,
so we can seize the moment."
The Bush line therefore goes like this:
this matter is so important that we've got to act urgently and
with all haste--but not so important that we need bother about
when to act. Mr Sharon, of course, doesn't want any such "calendar".
Mr Sharon doesn't want a Palestinian state. So Mr Bush--at the
one moment that he should have been showing resolve to his friends
as well as his enemies--flunked again. After Mr Sharon turned
up at the White House, Mr Bush derided the Palestinian leader
Yasser Arafat, went along with Mr Sharon's refusal to talk to
him and virtually dismissed the Middle East summit that the Palestinians
and the world wants this summer but which Mr Sharon, of course,
does not.
In the meantime, as well as Mr Sharon,
all of the men who claim to be fighting terror are using this
lunatic "war" for their own purposes. The Egyptians,
who allegedly warned the CIA about an attack in America before
11 September, have been busy passing a new law that will so restrict
the work of non-governmental organizations that it will be almost
impossible for human rights groups to work in Egypt. So no more
reports of police torture. The Algerian military, widely believed
to have had a hand in the dirty war mass killings of the past
10 years, have just been exercising with NATO ships in the Mediterranean.
We'll be seeing more of this.
It was almost inevitable, of course,
that someone in America would be found to explain the difference
between "good terrorists"--the ones we don't bomb,
like the IRA, ETA or the old African National Congress--and those
we should bomb. Sure enough, Michael Elliott turned up in Time
magazine last week to tell us that "not all terrorists are
alike". There are, he claimed, "political terrorists"
who have "an identifiable goal" and "millenarian
terrorists" who have no "political agenda", who
"owe their allegiance to a higher authority in heaven".
So there you have it. If they'll talk to the Americans, terrorists
are OK. If they won't, well then it's everlasting war.
So with this twisted morality, who really
believes that "Homeland Security" is going to catch
the bad guys before they strike again? My guess is that the "Titanic
War on Terror" will follow its unsinkable namesake. And
we all know what happened to that.
Today's
Features
Stanton / Madsen
Democracy
in Crisis:
What is to be Done?
Roldan Tomasz Suárez
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Five Facts
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