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December 26, 2001
John Chuckman
In
Praise of the Unspeakable
Sam Bahour
2002:
Year of the Twos
December 25, 2001
Jennifer Loewenstein
Israel's
Human Rights Record
December 24, 2001
Sam Bahour
It
Happened One Morning
Yair Khilou
Why I Resisted
Being Drafted into the Israeli Army
Michael
Chisari
War
as Diversionary Tactic
Cockburn/St. Clair
Enron
and the Green Seal
December 21, 2001
Tom Turnipseed
War
Good for Bush
John Chuckman
The
First Victim in the
War on Terror
December 20, 2001
Lawrence
McGuire
Killing
Other People's Children
Miriam Rozen
Foundation
Without Representation?
Kenneth
Roth
A
Letter to Rumsfeld on
Military Tribunals
William Blum
Casualties:
Theirs and Ours
December 19, 2001
Marjorie
Cohn
Don't
Pre-Judge John Walker
Sam Bahour
Palestine
and You
December 18, 2001
Shahid
Alam
Clash
of Civilizations?
Carl Estabrook
Who
Opposes This War?
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
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
Resources:
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About 9/11
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Five
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Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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8-Page Special Issue
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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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
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December 27,
2001
Inviting Future Terrorism:
Rising
Afghan Death Count and US Policy on Mideast
By Aaron G. Lehmer
In early December, another dreadful statistic
-- more than 3,500 dead -- was made public, except this time
the figure did not refer to the appalling mass grave at Ground
Zero. No, this gruesome number described the civilian death toll
so far in Afghanistan from America's so-called "surgical"
air strikes since Operation Enduring Freedom began.
Pulling together multiple accounts from
a wide range of sources, University of New Hampshire Professor
Marc W. Herold determined that these Afghani bystanders died
from U.S. bombing runs, many of which directly hit villages scattered
throughout the countryside. In his research, Herold discovered
only rare or buried accounts of ongoing Afghan civilian deaths
in the U.S. media, even though these appeared prominently and
repeatedly in British, Canadian, French, Asian, Middle Eastern,
and Australian news sources and in United Nations and humanitarian
relief agency reports.
"People have to know that there
is a human cost to war, and that this is a war with thousands
of casualties," says Herold. "These were poor people
to begin with, and, on top of that, they had absolutely nothing
to do with the events of September 11."
This claim not only calls into doubt
the military's ongoing denials about Afghan deaths, it begs the
question of just how many more innocents the Bush Administration
is willing to sacrifice in its seemingly open-ended "war
on terrorism."
It's worth recalling that administration
officials have consistently urged Americans to be outraged at
the mass murder of innocent civilians in New York and Washington
at the hands of a band of merciless killers. But what are we
to make of the thousands of innocents killed in Afghanistan at
the hands of American bombers or the millions driven from their
homes, only to find refuge in disease-ridden, food-scarce camps
bordering Pakistan?
To justify all this, we are told to be
proud of "smoking out" a few presumed terrorists from
the caves of Tora Bora, installing a loose-knit band of anti-Taliban
warlords to power, and making it possible once again for Afghan
men to shave their beards without fear of imprisonment. But our
overwhelming and lethal means of achieving these aims have basically
given the green light to repressive governments the world over
to use whatever violent methods they want against newly labeled
"terrorists" in their midst.
Conveniently, all this war-making has
also shunted aside much-needed reconsideration of America's over-reliance
on oil from the Middle East and Central Asia to fuel our careless
consumption. Similarly forgotten are the widely held grievances
about American foreign policy in the region -- particularly our
country's maintenance of brutal sanctions against the Iraqi people,
our effective bankrolling of Israel's increasingly shameful military
occupation in the Palestinian territories, our ongoing support
of corrupt monarchies and dictatorships, our extensive training
of paramilitaries and death squads, our unmatched weapons sales
to thuggish rulers, and our continued stationing of bases and
troops in Saudi Arabia (from which not only Osama bin Laden originated,
but also 15 of the 19 airplane hijackers).
Since our imposing policies go largely
unreported in the corporate-owned U.S. mass media, Americans
are developing a false sense of innocence about what their government
is doing in their name. In a new book called "9-11,"
world-renowned political theorist Noam Chomsky notes that the
United States is regarded in much of the world as a leading terrorist
state due to its killing of several million civilians during
the past few decades. In addition to the well-known case of Vietnam,
Chomsky also lists Laos, Cambodia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala,
East Timor, Sudan, Iraq, and Yugoslavia as places where the U.S.
government has been implicated. Unfortunately, Chomsky's list
is only the tip of the iceberg.
What's worse is that despite claims to
the contrary, little has changed about U.S. military policy since
September 11. Excited by their high-powered, low-risk victory
over the meager Taliban, a cadre of Pentagon officials and congressional
leaders is hatching plans to attack a host of other impoverished
nations said to be "harboring" terrorists, whether
or not they have any connection to America's worst terrorist
tragedy. At the top of their list is renewed military action
against an already devastated Iraq.
Amazingly, we still ask the question
"Why do they hate us?" with a straight face.
In a recent visit to a hospital treating
Afghan war victims in the Pakistani border town of Quetta, journalist
Robert Fisk encountered a man named Mahmat who had been asleep
in his home when a bomb from an American B-52 fell on his village
of Kazikarez. "The plane flies so high that we cannot hear
them and the mud roof fell on them," Mahmat said, referring
to his wife Rukia and their six children. He told Fisk that Rukia,
who lay in the next room, did not yet know that her children
were dead.
What was particularly disturbing to Fisk
was the vision of desperate rage that he saw in Mahmat's eyes.
"I could see something terrible: he and the angry cousin
beside him and the uncle and the wife's brother in the hospital
attacking Americans for the murders that they had inflicted on
their family..."
We may not want to admit it, but thousands
of Mahmats have been created in Afghanistan -- and among sympathetic
observers throughout the world -- since America's military onslaught
began. With every escalation of this conflict, we're practically
inviting maniacal hatred to be unleashed again against Americans.
And since those so moved will not likely have armies, navies,
or air forces to command, their methods will be covert and their
targets will be civilians.
It's not too late to oppose the vengeful,
militaristic policies of the Bush Administration and the Pentagon.
We still have freedom of speech and assembly -- at least for
the time being. We need to exercise those rights now more than
ever in defense of truly civilized values and to spark democratic
debate -- remember that? -- about where our nation should be
headed.
At a recent national forum on international
relations, Jim Garrison, President of the State of the World
Forum, remarked that "the only solution to hate is to stop
the underlying causes that produce it, working within the community
of nations to achieve goals that benefit the poor as well as
the rich, the south as well as the north, the developing nations
as well as those more advanced. Achieving this, America will
fulfill the deepest yearning of one of its founding fathers,
Benjamin Franklin, who wrote that he believed the real destiny
of America would not be about power; it would be about light."
It is the height of patriotism to labor
for justice as the true path to peace and security, not the quick-fix
catharsis of revenge. That should be our real call to duty as
Americans.
Aaron G. Lehmer
is a writer and activist living in Arcata, California.
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