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June 21, 2002
James T. Phillips
Serbian
Reservations:
Kosovo 2002
June 20, 2002
Chris Kromm
The South
at War: a Tour of the US Military/Industrial Complex
Jacob Levich
The War
on Terror is
Not a Suicide Pact
Mark Weisbrot
What
are They Doing to Argentina?
Jeffrey St. Clair
and Alexander Cockburn
Fire
Walk With Me:
Terry Lynn Barton and the Flames of Colorado
June 19, 2002
Gary Leupp
Red Targets in Terror War
Lenni Brenner
The Road
Forward for the
Palestinian Movement
Bernard Weiner
Inside
Cheney's Diary:
Cakewalking Through Minefields
Alexander Cockburn
The
Incredible Shrinking President
June 18, 2002
David Vest
Raise the
White Flag in Terror War?
Ben White
Is It Possible
to "Understand" the Rise in "Anti-Semitism"?
Edward Said
Palestinian
Elections Now
June 17, 2002
Jack McCarthy
Watergate
and All That
Philip Farruggio
A Maximum
Wage Law
Ron Sullivan
Law
and Orders:
The Assault on Trial by Jury
Rev. Charles Booker-Hirsch
Taking
on the School
of the Americas
Joan Smith
G.W. Bush:
The Man is Stupid
Dave Marsh
Corporate
Buy Outs and the Decline of Teen Jive
Robert Jensen
Rhetoric
Distorts Realities
June 15 / 16, 2002
Tanweer Akram
A Review
of Noam Chomsky's 9-11
Daniel Wolff
The Day
They Shot a Wolf in the Ghetto and What It Meant
Ralph Nader
A Corporate
Crime State
David Vest
Have You
Been Serviced?
Karl Kraus
A Minor
Detail
Alexander Cockburn
The
Terrorism of Everyday Life
June 14, 2002
Mark Weisbrot
US Trade
Policy:
"Do as We Say, Not as We Did"
Starhawk
The Boy Who Kissed the Soldier
David Krieger
Farewell
to the ABM Treaty
Tom Turnipseed
The Fear Factor to Promote
War and Trample Truth
Steve Perry
How the
Bush Adminstration Buried Coleen Rowley
June 13, 2002
Linda Belanger
Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict:
The Story Behind the Headlines
Amira Hass
Indefinite
Siege
Mokhiber / Weissman
Time to Put Lives Over Patents
Robert Fisk
Bush's Weird
War
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
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
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Five
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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
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Reviews of Gore:
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June 21,
2002
Of
Lies and Oil
From coups
in Venezuela to civilian deaths in Afghanistan, Rahul Mahajan
says the U.S. media turns a blind eye to what George W. Bush
is really doing.
by David Martin
Long-time political activist Rahul Mahajan has
had a busy year. He completed his Ph.D. in physics at the University
of Texas at Austin, wrote over 20 articles on the war on terrorism,
authored a widely acclaimed book, The
New Crusade: America's War on Terrorism, and entered the
Texas gubernatorial race as the Green Party candidate.
Famed media scholar Robert McChesney
called his book "mandatory reading for anyone who wants
to get a handle on the war on terrorism." After years of
working to end the sanctions against Iraq, Mahajan has emerged
as a leading voice of dissent in these conformist times. He has
critiqued the mainstream media's coverage of the so-called "war
on terrorism" in an article for the media watch group Fairness
and Accuracy in Reporting, and even more extensively in his new
book. With the recent barrage of news stories about what happened
before 9-11 and the new warnings of future attacks, the Current
interviewed Mahajan to see if he could clarify some of the realities
behind the mainstream media myths.
DM: What do you think about the mainstream
media's coverage of America's "war on terrorism"? Has
the media helped the American public understand what has been
happening?
RM: Media coverage of U.S. foreign policy,
especially when talking about war, is atrocious at every level.
For example, when there were finally a couple of little reports
about civilian casualties in Afghanistan, you had Brit Hume on
Fox News saying, "Well, in a war you expect there to be
casualties, so that is not really news, is it?" There has
been a systematic bias in extreme form, shown by almost the entire
American mainstream media.
The media has also not helped at all
to understand the full story. The transmission of the statements
by [National Security Adviser] Condoleeza Rice basically said,
"Well, yes, we had some warnings about a hijacking, but
no one could have imagined passenger planes would be used as
weapons." This is as close to an out and out falsehood as
you can come. It was being reported simultaneously that there
was a CIA report from 1999 which openly speculated about exactly
that -- using passenger planes to crash into the Pentagon or
the CIA headquarters in Langley. Rice's claim still passed without
criticism. That is the standard way that the media operates.
There is a consistent pattern of subservience to power and of
not asking the difficult questions.
DM: What do you think of the media's
coverage of new documents that have been released or the new
information about what happened before 9-11?
RM: The new information that has been
released is not new information. The difference is that right
now, these documents, which were known of long before, are being
widely reported in the U.S. media. The reason is that Congress
is finally saying something about them: For example, that the
war in Afghanistan was being planned well before 9-11. This has
now come out, and the Administration has admitted it.
You could have found this story in the
British media last summer. The media is playing the disgraceful
role of not revealing these things when they come out, or at
least reprinting those things when they see them, and now pretending
that these things are all new when they're finally reported.
DM: What's behind this systematic negligence?
The French and British media have been reporting for a while
now that John O'Neill, the FBI agent in charge of investigating
Bin Laden/Al Qaida network, resigned from his post last year
out of frustration that his investigation was thwarted by U.S.
corporate interests in Saudi oil. Was it U.S. oil interests in
the region that led to this systematic negligence?
RM: If you look at the larger picture
in both the Bush and the Clinton administrations, including,
of course, past U.S. history as well, you see a systematic pattern
of privileging corporate interest and corporate profits more
than any questions of real security. When U.S. officials talk
about national security, it is usually a code word for protecting
corporate profits and U.S. military dominance abroad.
Once again, with Afghanistan, it is very
clear that a lot of balls were dropped in the investigation of
Al-Qaida, in part because they were more focused on getting the
Taliban to agree to establish stability in the country so Unocal
could have its pipeline (which they are now again moving forward
with) and getting a foothold on the immense potential oil and
natural gas reserves of all Central Asia, not just Afghanistan.
There is a consistent story here. U.S.
officials are much more interested in their dealings with corporations
and shilling for them than they are in the safety of the average
American.
DM: One of the things I have noticed
is the media's framing of the issue as the U.S. vs. Islamic fundamentalism.
What historically has been the U.S. relationship to radical Islam?
RM: The U.S. has been the biggest single
force in promoting the rise of radical Islamist movements throughout
the Middle East and in Central Asia. The Afghan jihad, which
is the first international jihad in history, was created and
funded by the U.S. There is widespread speculation among students
of Iran that the United States helped Khomeini against the Iranian
left during the revolution (afterward, the CIA definitely helped
the Khomeini government eliminate leftists).
There is also evidence pointing to a
U.S. role in helping to foster the Islamic jihad in Egypt and
Hamas in Palestine, although, in the latter case, it was more
Israel than the United States. There is a consistent pattern
of deliberate U.S. support of Islamic movements as a counterforce
to the left, which they saw as a bigger threat to their own perceived
interests.
DM: You mentioned that the U.S. government
was planning a war in Afghanistan months before 9-11. Why did
the U.S. plan to go to war against Afghanistan last summer?
RM: The pretext for any war against Afghanistan
was the harboring of Osama Bin Laden. For example, U.N. resolutions
imposed sanctions on Afghanistan (in 1998). A lot of people thought
those U.N. sanctions were imposed because of the Taliban's treatment
of women. This is not true and you can see it in the documents.
The sanctions were actually imposed because of the harboring
of Osama bin Laden -- which is to say that because one man was
living in a country, the entire country was subject to international
sanctions. This was quite an amazing form of collective punishment.
We only have to look at what the U.S.
has done since the war to see what the real reason for the war
planned last summer would have been. One is to establish a foothold
in Afghanistan, and build this pipeline from Turkmenistan through
Afghanistan for natural gas. But the much bigger objective is
that the U.S. military wanted a foothold in a part of the world
where they had never managed to have one before. That includes
Turkmenistan, which has the third largest natural gas reserves
in the world, and Kazakhstan, which has tremendous untapped and
unexplored oil reserves. So this is the first major U.S. foothold
on the Caspian basin oil from the east. It is also a U.S. military
wedge between Russia and China. This is part of their larger
imperial interests in the region and that would have been the
reason for the war even before 9-11. It goes with out saying
that this imperial expansion, not only doesn't benefit us, but
puts Americans both in those countries and in the rest of the
world more at risk, not less.
DM: What did you make of the Administration's
attempt to turn Cuba's pharmaceutical research into a threat
to the United States? Was it just an attempt to undermine Carter's
trip and his message to lift the embargo on Cuba?
RM: Carter's trip was the proximate cause.
But, essentially, everything the Bush Administration has done
since 9-11 has been a tremendous power play and in everything
they've done, fighting terrorism has been the excuse for the
steps they took, not the reason. They actually want not to just
avoid lifting the embargo -- they want to tighten it. They want
to strangle Cuba more, so they trump up these absolutely insane
charges. There is not even the slightest evidence that Cuba is
involved in making biological weapons, and the only evidence
that they have provided is that Cuba does its own medical research,
instead of relying on the noted beneficence of American pharmaceutical
corporations. If you're not going to rely on American pharmaceuticals,
you must be actively producing biological weapons.
DM: What is their concern in Iraq?
RM: Well, if you just list some of the
countries that they've been targeting right now, you see a pattern.
Let me just list some for you: Colombia, Venezuela, Kazakhstan,
Turkmenistan, and Iraq. What's the common thread? Oil. What they
really want in Iraq is not a democratic regime, but a <U.S.-friendly>
dictator in place of Saddam Hussein. The sanctions on Iraq, which
have continued now for over 10 years, have killed over 1 million
innocent Iraqi civilians. But what the sanctions have also done
is help break Iraqi control over Iraqi oil -- right now Iraq
has to get permission to sell its oil. The money from that oil
has to go to a <U.N.-administered> account, which really
means a <U.S.-administered> account. If the U.N. lifts
the sanctions, which have become a political albatross for the
Administration, Saddam Hussein will make his deals with French
and Russian oil companies, not with the U.S. To change that fact,
we need to have a <U.S.-friendly> dictator, instead of
Saddam, and then US oil companies get the first cut.
DM: Do you think the U.S. will go to
war with Iraq again? If so, when?
RM: I think a war against Iraq is almost
certain, unless there is massive opposition in the United States.
The current indications that it will be late next spring seem
more like a feint than a revelation.
There is a history of selective leaks
of disinformation in order to control opposition. I could imagine
seeing a war as early as November. But they could only go into
a war before the election if they were sure they had the end
game all planned out and a nice, easy, containable operation.
If they're not absolutely certain about that, I think they'll
hold off until after the election, sometime between November
and February. Again, it's really hard to predict.
Simultaneously, and this is also not
being talked about in the media, there is a tremendous increase
in domestic militarization. The Bush Administration doesn't just
have other countries in their target sights. They have American
people in their target sights. In other words, they have American
democracy in their target sights and this is something that ought
to be concerning people a lot more than it seems to.
DM: Just last week, Attorney General
Ashcroft announced the lifting of restrictions placed on domestic
surveillance established in the 1970s. These limits came from
the exposure of COINTELPRO operations, the FBI's covert operation
to "neutralize" progressive social movements. In some
cases, COINTELPRO targets were murdered, such as Black Panther
leader Fred Hampton. What do you think about the lifting of these
restrictions?
RM: John Ashcroft has made a number of
decisions by fiat. One day we had attorney-client privilege,
then the next day Ashcroft tells us that this was a figment of
our imaginations. The Administration is not even obeying the
dictates of the USA PATRIOT Act, as bad as it is. It says that,
for example, you can hold non-citizens for seven days incommunicado
in detention, if it has the slightest thing to do with terrorism.
Seven days is bad enough; I mean, 24 hours is a civilized standard,
but they have held some prisoners for months and months and months,
much more than seven days. They are simply ignoring that when
they wish to.
We must remember that this is one of
the most anti-democratic administrations in U.S. history. Bush
came into office showing open contempt for democracy. He came
into office, not just through the butterfly ballot and the "Jews
for Buchanan" phenomenon, but by having his brother selectively
disenfranchise large numbers of African Americans -- a reinstitution
of Jim Crow in Florida-- that's how he got into office.
I really think people should be much
more scared than they are. Bush's assault on democracy, sometimes
creeping, sometimes hurtling, is every day taking a little bit
more of our basic democratic freedoms, and people have got to
wake up before it's too late.
Rahul Mahajan
is the Green Party candidate for Governor of Texas and author
of "The
New Crusade: America's War on Terrorism," (Monthly Review
Press, April 2002). He serves on the National Board of Peace
Action and is a founding member of the Nowar
Collective.
Today's
Features
James T. Phillips
Serbian
Reservations: Kosovo 2002
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