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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
December 10, 2001
Robert
Dunham
Race
and the Death Penalty:
Partners in Injustice
Andy Kershaw
Chamber of
Horrors
Near the Garden of Eden
John Touchie
Isaac's
on Chomsky
December 9, 2001
Jo Dillon
Journalist:
The CIA Wanted
Me Killed
John Chuckman
High-Tech
Puritanism
December 8, 2001
Laurence Tribe
Military Tribunals
Undermine the Constitution
Patrick
Cockburn
The
End of a Strange War
December 7, 2001
John Troyer
Blacklist Me!
Sen. Edwards
v. Ashcroft
Military
Tribunals
George Naggiar
Occupation
as Terrorism
Hugo von
Sponek
and Denis Halliday
Iraq
the Hostage Nation
David Vest
The Coen
Brothers'
Minstrel Show
Alexander
Cockburn
Sharon
or Arafat:
Who's the Terrorist?
CounterPunch Wire
Human
Rights Abuses and
Nuke Waste Shipments
Alexander
Cockburn
Harry
Potter and Terrorism
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
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December 20,
2001
Small
News:
Killing Other People's Children
By Lawrence McGuire
The deep craters and pieces of shrapnel
indicate that America's weapon of choice in Kabul was the Mark
82 500lb bomb, which is designed to be guided to its target by
the pilot, a nearby observation plane or a spotter on the ground.
But there was nothing accurate about the 500lb bomb which fell
on Bibi Mahru.
It killed Gul Ahmad, 40, a Hazara
carpet weaver, his second wife Sima, 35, their five daughters
and his son by his first wife. Two children living next door
were also killed.
Children killed because of war or terrorism is
not a subject I like to contemplate. I draw away from it instinctively,
perhaps because the unnecessary death of a child represents the
horror of our society and I can do so little about it. I prefer
to escape this horror by focusing on the enjoyable aspects of
my place in modern life: my warm apartment, the food in my refrigerator,
books, movies, music, hiking, travel, my work, and most importantly,
the personal human relationships which give me love, friendship,
security, and a feeling of belonging.
However, thousands of innocent people
have died in Afghanistan, and are still dying, and every death
is, after all, the death of somebody's child. I know I am in
some way related to their death, because first of all I am another
human being sharing their world, participating in the creation
of that world in my daily life. I'm also connected because I
grew up in the country, the U.S.A., whose political system has
organized the bombing: the bombs that killed were partially
paid by my tax dollars, and the same political system also issued
my passport, which gives me privileges most people in the world
lack. And in a small way I participate in that political system.
So I feel I have some small responsibility to face the fact
of these dead children and to talk about them.
The children who died, and are dying,
in Afghanistan because of U.S. bombing do not merit much attention
in our mass media.
They are small news, other people's children.
Perhaps this is even more of a reason for me to talk about them.
They seem to me to be an important part of the story.
Perhaps the reason that the mass media keep the story small news
is to maintain wide support for this war, and the next one.
That is certainly a possibility.
But for the mass media the deaths of
poor people are usually small news, throughout the year. How
many newspapers put this on the front page?
On Sept. 11, more than 35,000 of the
world's children died of starvation. A similar number have perished
from hunger every day since then in developing countries, according
to figures from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
Another reason for the lack of coverage
is that we don't want to know about U.S. bombs killing other
people's children. It threatens our sense of who we are. We
prefer to cast ourselves as the good guys, and good guys don't
kill children. This can be seen as proof of our humanity. After
all, if we were completely depraved the news of the deaths of
children would not disturb us.
On the other hand, when we so willingly
and easily allow ourselves to be ignorant of the results of U.S.
bombing we are also, perhaps, indicating our level of morality.
I'm not sure about this. Measuring the level of morality is
hard enough, if not impossible, for myself, so how can I hope
to measure the level of my culture's morality? Is morality something
that can be measured? If it cannot be, then how does George
Bush know we are 'good' and they (Osama bin Laden, the Taleban,
etc.,) are 'evil'?
Perhaps my focus on the deaths of children
is a result of morbidity. If so, then at least I share some
respectful company. For example one of my favorite writers,
Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry, also is contemplating the deaths
of other people's children these days:
Here is the other question that I
have been leading toward, one that the predicament of modern
warfare forces upon us: How many deaths of other people's children
by bombing or starvation are we willing to accept in order that
we may be free, affluent, and (supposedly) at peace? To that
question I answer: None. Please, no children. Don't kill any
children for my benefit.
I wonder how many children actually died?
And what were their names? And what has happened to their families?
This brings up another equally horrible fact to contemplate,
what is happening right now to the children who have (so far)
survived? Some are freezing to death, others are starving:
Farough, an 11-year-old boy whose
family of six arrived here from Chaghcharan a month ago, says
he spends his days begging for a piece of bread or a sip of clean
water or standing in line for hours in the cold in hope of getting
a bag of rice.
"My mother is deaf and dumb and my father is very old,"
he explained. A 2-year-old sister died from the cold a few days
ago. "We came because we had nothing to eat at home, but
here sometimes I eat and other times nothing. The ground is my
mattress and the sky is my roof. We are very miserable."
How many are orphans? How many have
wounds that will disfigure and affect them for the rest of their
lives? And, yet another addition to the horror, how many will
die or be disfigured in the years to come from all the unexploded
cluster bombs (the bomblets are yellow, and look very similar
to the food packets that were dropped) which the U.S. left behind?
The harmful effects of the U.S. bombing will last for years,
and we will never know the true human cost to the people of Afghanistan.
In Laos, Cambodia, and Viet Nam people
are still dying from the land mines planted by the U.S. military
30 years ago. (Why did we plant these mines in the first place?
Anybody know?) The U.S. is one of the few countries in the
world to refuse to sign an international treaty to ban land mines.
We do know that as a result of the bombing
a country that was dependent upon international aid for survival
before September 11, has become an even more desperate place:
The U.S. bombing campaign, while helping
to defeat the oppressive Taliban regime, has exacerbated the
humanitarian crisis in two ways.
First, hundreds of thousands of people,
terrified by the bombs, have fled their villages and swelled
the ranks of the refugee population. Second, before the Oct.
7 air attack, millions of Afghans were receiving international
assistance despite the difficulties of working with the Taliban.
But after the bombing began, humanitarian agencies pulled their
staff from the country and closed, or severely curtailed, their
operations.
The U.S. is currently preventing aid
from reaching people by refusing to support an international
peacekeeping force to insure the aid gets to the people in need,
though it's possible this will change soon:
All of the aid groups I talked to
in Afghanistan say that unless an international force is sent
in to secure the roads, Afghanistan will be the scene of a humanitarian
crisis of horrific proportions.
The good news is that England, France,
Turkey, Jordan, Bangladesh and Indonesia have all offered troops
to carry out this mission. The bad news is that the Pentagon
and the Northern Alliance are resisting the introduction of such
a force.
When the American terrorist and Gulf
War hero Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma
City he also blew up a day care center. The death of those children
was big news in the U.S. They were not other people's children,
they were our children. McVeigh called it 'collateral damage',
a phrase he learned from the U.S. officials who used it to describe
the 200,000 civilians killed by the U.S. bombing of Iraq.
Since our bombing of Iraq in 1991 over
a million Iraqis have died because of U.S. imposed trade sanctions.
The man who used to be in charge of this 'program', Hans Von
Sponeck, says this:
"The fact that today, on average,
according to UNICEF, 5,000 children are dying every month because
of sanctions, is a violation of human rights. The Convention
of the Rights of the Child is violated. The Covenant on Political
and Civic Rights is violated. The Hague Convention is violated."
Another UN official who resigned said
this:
"We are in the process of destroying
an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that. It
is illegal and immoral." Denis Halliday, after resigning
as first UN Assistant Secretary General and Humanitarian Coordinator
in Iraq, The Independent, 15 October 1998
In addition many are dying in Iraq from
cancer caused by the depleted uranium in the bombs that were
dropped. The U.S. also dropped depleted uranium bombs on Kosovo
and Serbia. Here is a recent headline about that subject:
US Wins Defeat of Depleted Uranium
Study
McVeigh said he blew up the building
because the Federal Government killed a lot of adults and their
children in Waco, Texas. He was avenging those deaths, he said,
and also he hoped to prevent more deaths in the future, by using
terrorism against the Government. From his point of view it
seemed like a logical thing to do. To me it seems insane. Perhaps
it was insane. But the surviving members of families who lost
children in Afghanistan due to U.S. bombing might feel like doing
the same thing. It's not unlikely:
Rukia, 39, who like many Afghans uses
only one name, lost her family five days ago when she says a
United States bomb hit her Kandahar neighborhood. Wounded in
the stomach and with her left arm shattered, she had to flee
before she could bury her children.
She was nearly bombed again, while
a relative was driving her to a hospital in Pakistan
"They're bombing anything that
moves," she said. "It's not true that they bomb civilians
by accident. They're targeting the innocent people instead of
Osama bin Laden."..
..Rukia covered her face and started
to cry when asked what she wanted to tell the Americans about
the loss of her five children. She thought a while before responding:
"Destroy, finish, terminate America."
Why disturb ourselves with reading articles
about civilian deaths? Isn't it better to console ourselves
with the idea that even though children died, it was worth it
because the bombing prevented more children from dying in the
future?
I think many people feel this way.
That is one reason they support what
they call war and what I call state terrorism. And maybe they
are right. The problem is this: however pleasant the idea that
'bombing is good', there is no evidence that supports it, in
reality. How does bombing defenseless civilians prevent terrorism
or promote peace? The past two months of bombing have not made
our world a safer, more peaceful place to live in. It has helped
certain politicians, certain arms manufacturers, and promoted
the philosophy of 'might makes right'.
But I don't really believe that people
support the bombing because they think it will prevent children's
deaths in the future. I think, instead, that people support
it because they are able to ignore the deaths of other people's
children, and they are afraid.
Perhaps I'm wrong. But there is definitely
a strong correlation between refusing to acknowledge the suffering
our bombing is causing other people, and support for the bombing.
Most people who support the bombing of Afghanistan have no idea
how many civilians were killed by the bombing of Iraq, or the
bombing of Viet Nam. A Viet Nam war memorial showing the names
of every civilian killed by the U.S. in that war would be at
least 40 times longer than the one in Washington. But we don't
want to know that, it's old small news. That makes it easier
for us to support bombing Afghanistan.
There is also an element of moral cowardice.
This is a dangerous subject to broach because maybe it represents
my own version of self-righteousness. It probably does. However
it seems true to me, so I'll say it. I think many people support
the bombing because they are afraid to speak out against it.
I think it takes moral courage to oppose the government during
a war, and to speak out to your friends, family, co-workers,
and daily acquaintances. Instead it is so much easier to identify
with the government leaders, to allow ourselves to be guided
in our opinions by the mass media, and to pretend that we are
being brave by supporting the bombing.
Our culture tells us all our lives that
the heroes are the men who kill for the good cause. But it takes
no heroism to support war, absolutely none. But men in particular
like to think of themselves as possible heroes, that if necessary
they will also have 'the stomach' to kill. It pleases their
self-image to support the war, and to see themselves as 'protecting'
someone by killing others. They can easily dismiss those who
disagree as 'peaceniks' who just do not understand. A real man,
in their view, must not get emotional and worry about the deaths
of other people's children. He must be mature and be willing
to follow the leader and kill, and support killing with pious
logic about 'just war'. This is one way many men conform and
support mass murder and pretend to themselves they are being
brave by doing so.
I think most women who support the bombing
do so because they are able to ignore the deaths it causes, and
because they think 'since politics are controlled by men, it's
their responsibility'. Women seem to be less inclined to heroic
fantasies about the necessity of war, perhaps because women and
children are always the one who suffer the most in modern war.
However I think a lot of people, men
and women, agree with me, but like me have little clue as to
what to do about it. Many people say we should, as citizens,
act to restrain the military capacity of our government.
Our government wants to militarize space
in order to have complete military hegemony over every other
government in the world. That is the plan according to the government
document Vision 2020 published during the Clinton Administration.
On the front cover it says: 'Dominating the Space Dimension
of Military Operations to Protect U.S. Interests and Investment.'
This is the meaning of the Missile Shield plan. This is why
President Bush is going to tear up the Anti-Ballistic Missile
Treaty.
Most governments do not want to militarize
space. They have voted against it in numerous United Nations
resolutions. But the U.S. wants to do it, and probably will.
This brings me back to my question about
measuring the moral level of our culture. If we begin with a
moral rule as old as humanity, common to all cultures and religions,
'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you', we can ask
ourselves to what degree we are following that moral rule.
But how can we follow this rule (supposing
that we even want to) if we refuse to learn just what we are
'doing' unto others? We can first of all ignore the fact that
our bombs are killing other people's children. We can also rationalize
it by repeating what our leaders say, who describe the deaths
as 'unintended consequences' of our bombing. We can also refuse
to name it what it is: state terrorism, mass murder. If we
ignore that we are 'doing death' unto others, we will surely
do nothing to prevent further deaths in the future.
Just how many deaths of other people's
children are we willing to ignore, or to rationalize with words
like 'unintended consequences'? One million? Two million?
If the government tells us it is necessary, and the mass media
makes the deaths small news, could we perhaps ignore the deaths
of ten million children? Why not? It's certainly possible,
given our recent history.
Since WW II the United States has been
regularly dropping bombs on civilians, killing lots of people
and their children, in Japan, Korea, Viet Nam, Cambodia, Panama,
Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan, and many other places. The
U.S. directed and supported Contras killed thousands of other
people's children in Nicaraugua:
In 1989 the US invaded Panama to overthrow
the former CIA agent, General Manuel Noriega - a man who had
now become an enemy; 5,000 civilians were killed by American
forces and buried in mass graves. And in 1982 the US began funding
the Contra war against the Sandinista governm0ent. Corinto harbor
was mined in 1984 and the court of world opinion recognized that
the policy of the United States was that of a war criminal.
Nicaragua, now the second poorest
nation in the western hemisphere, has never recovered from that
war. There were 40,000 Nicaraguan dead, the innocent who were
categorized as "soft targets".
That's part of the Nicaragua story.
The Afghanistan story goes something like this: in 1979 Jimmy
Carter's Secretary of State Zbignew Brezinski authorized the
training of foreign terrorists to fight in Afghanistan, to draw
the Soviet Union into a 'trap'. This was before the Soviet
Union invaded the country. After the invasion the CIA continued
the massive financial aid and training for these Islamic extremists,
most of whom came from Middle East. Among those who answered
the CIA's call was Osama Bin Laden. This CIA operation was the
biggest in its long history of covert operations. The Soviet
Union was successfully driven out of Afghanistan but the country
was devastated and the U.S., goal accomplished, did nothing to
help rebuild the country. Out of this devastation arose the
warlords of the current Northern Alliance and also the Taleban.
The Taleban was supported by U.S. allies Pakistan and Saudi
Arabia, and the U.S. itself. The U.S. oil company Unocal negotiated
with the Taleban, asking them to assist in the building of pipelines
through the country.
However Osama Bin Laden returned, after
being driven from Sudan, and his new battle was directed against
the U.S., apparently because of the U.S. military bases in Saudi
Arabia, his homeland.
So what is the justification for killing
over 3,600 civilians, and putting hundreds of thousands at risk
of starvation? This was the news on December 9:
More than seven million people out
of an estimated population of 22 million are classified by aid
organisations as being at "very high risk".
And from another source, on the same
day:
Every night as the temperature dips
well below zero, as many as 40 people die from cold and starvation.
In the six cemeteries scattered through the camp, many of the
piles of stones marking graves are so tiny that it is clear most
victims are children and babies.
15 out of 19 of the September 11 terrorists
were from Saudi Arabia. Not a single one was from Afghanistan.
Not a single one was a Taleban. The Sept. 11 terrorists have
not even been proven to have visited Afghanistan. The Taleban
had agreed to negotiate an extradition of Bin Laden, but the
U.S. government refused. Perhaps the Taleban were lying, but
we will never know. Certainly they were a terrible government,
but our government helped create them and helped create the foreign
terrorists who were living in Afghanistan, and then it kills
innocent civilians trying to destroy what they created, justifying
this with the 'war on terrorism'. And now there is no real government
in Afghanistan, just a loose assortment of warlords. And the
Taleban are still there, they've just switched sides.
All this death, sadness and suffering.
President Bush says again and again we are 'good'. He is confident
that he knows our level of morality. I'm not so sure.
We are killing other people's children
and ignoring their deaths.
In fact we get upset if people bring
up the subject. We condemn people who call it 'U.S. terrorism'.
For some reason when we kill other people's children it's not
terrorism. It's the 'unintended consequences of a just cause'.
When 'they' do it, it's 'evil'. If we are willing to do this
what is our level of morality? As I said at the beginning, this
is a difficult question to answer, and I think it can be only
answered as individuals, talking to ourselves.
The U.S. government is currently taking
the steps that greatly increase the possibility of nuclear war
in the future. The U.S. government wants to be able to wage
war on any country on the planet without the risk of counterattack,
just like we now can bomb Afghanistan for months with little
risk to our aircraft and almost no risk to our own people and
territory.
It's very possible that the U.S. Government
will soon be able to kill every child on the planet who is not
a U.S. citizen, without any reprisal. Many people in the U.S.
advocated using nuclear weapons in Afghanistan. What is our
level of morality? Are we truly 'good'? How will we use our
military power? If we were willing to ignore the deaths of civilians
in the past, and if we are willing to ignore the deaths of civilians
now, what do you think our behavior will be in the future?
Will civilian deaths in the future also
be small news: other people's children?
Lawrence McGuire lives in France. He can be reached at
blmcguire@hotmail.com
Source of quotes in text:
1 Published on Saturday, December
1, 2001 in the Guardian of London
US Planes Rain Death on the Innocent
'Precision' Raids Kill Residents in Capital City By Rory
McCarthy in Kabul
2
December 10, 2001"A Dossier on Civilian Victims of United
States' Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan: A Comprehensive Accounting"
by Professor Marc W. Herold Ph.D., M.B.A.,
B.Sc.
Study available here: http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mwherold/.
3 Published on Wednesday, November 28, 2001 in the
Christian Science Monitor
Injustice Seen as Fertile Soil for Terrorists
by Peter Ford
4 Published in the Winter 2001/2002
issue of YES! Magazine
The Failure of War by Wendell Berry
5
NEWARK STAR-LEDGER 11/30/01
For many, home is a blanket and the food is weeds
BY FARNAZ FASSIHI
6,7 Published on Sunday, December 16, 2001 in the Milwaukee
Journal Sentinel
Feeding the Hungry May Be the Prime Task of Peacekeepers by
Medea Benjamin
8 December 6, 2001 OPPOSING SANCTIONS ON IRAQ
AN INTERVIEW WITH HANS VON SPONECK By Larry Everest
Published at http://www.zmag.org
9 Published on Friday, November 30, 2001 by Reuters
Going Backwards US Wins Defeat of Depleted Uranium Study
by Irwin Arieff
10 Published
on Saturday, December 8, 2001 in the Sydney Morning Herald
Terminate America: Message From an Afghani Mother in Mourning
by Tasgola Karla Bruner in Quetta, Pakistan
11
Published on Saturday, December 8, 2001 in Guardian of London
Selective Justice: The US Has Been Sponsoring Terror in My
Native Latin America for Decades
by Bianca Jagger
12 The
Independent on Sunday (London) December 9, 2001
Humanitarian crisis: 'anarchy' leaves 1m without food
Conditions are worst in areas firmly under Northern Alliance
control
By Imre Karacs
13
The Sunday Telegraph (U.K.)
December 9, 2001
They call this 'the slaughterhouse'
Christina Lamb
More Quotes:
The river of victims runs through another
war
By Robert Fisk in Chaman
The Independent (London)
04 December 2001
"From all over the countryside, there come stories of villages
crushed by American bombs; an entire hamlet destroyed by B-52s
at Kili Sarnad, 50 dead near Tora Bora, eight civilians killed
in cars bombed by US jets on the road to Kandahar, another 46
in Lashkargah, 12 more in Bibi Mahru."
Published on Monday, December 3, 2001
in the Independent/UK
US Bombs Hit Wrong Target for Second Time in Two Days
by Richard Lloyd Parry in Jalalaba
"The American hunt for Osama bin Laden appeared to have
gone tragically wrong for the second time in two days yesterday,
when US bombers were reported to have killed scores of civilians
in eastern Afghanistan as well as friendly mujahedin fighters
supporting their battle against al-Qa'ida. A senior mujahedin
commander said US strikes killed more than 100 civilians around
Agam, 25 miles south of Jalalabad, on top of at least 70 killed
in air raids on Saturday night."
Published on Sunday, December 2, 2001
by Agence France Presse
15 Killed as US Mistakes Private Jeep for Military Vehicle:
Victim
"Fifteen villagers, including nine children, were killed
in a bombing raid on a hamlet in which US forces appeared to
have mistaken an ageing jeep for a military vehicle, the owner
said. Mohammed Khan, who arrived here from Kandahar for hospital
treatment to his wounded arms and legs, said that five of his
children were killed when the hamlet was attacked on Tuesday.
All five houses which made up the hamlet between Kandahar airport
and the city were demolished in the raid. A neighbor lost four
children in the attack, Khan said."
The Loyal Opposition
DENYING THE DEAD
In Pentagon Reports of Afghan
Dead, Truth is the First Casualty
David Corn is the Washington editor of The Nation.
"But as he [Donald Rumsfeld] was
talking, Washington Post reporter Susan Glasser was filing
a piece based on a visit to Jalalabad's Public Hospital No. 1.
In the previous four days, the hospital had taken in 36 patients
who said they were victims of the U.S. bombing strikes targeting
villages southwest of Jalalabad, in an area where Osama bin Laden
and al Qaeda remnants are thought to be hiding in cave compounds.
The hospital had also received 35 dead. One of the injured was
Noor Mohammed, who had lost both eyes and both arms. Noor, who
is somewhere between 10 and 12 years old, told his uncle he heard
the sound of an airplane overhead, ran from his room, and did
not know what happened next. Asked how he felt, the boy whispered,
"I feel cold and I cannot talk." Glasser found other
wounded children from families who claimed they had been struck
by bombs while in their mud houses."
The Sunday Telegraph (U.K.)
December 9, 2001
They call this 'the slaughterhouse'
Christina Lamb
"A DIRTY grey blanket on the hard
desert ground is all that is home for Bibi Gul and her family
in the new Afghanistan.
"The sky is my roof and the earth
is my floor," she said, gesturing across the dust-swept
plains toward the minarets of the ancient city of Herat. But
the words from her chapped swollen lips are of bitterness rather
than romance.
It is more than a week since she and
her five children had their last meal - a begged bowl of rice
- and on Friday she woke to find her two-year-old son Tahir stiff
and cold, frozen to death in the rain.
While the West celebrates the surrender
of Kandahar and the collapse of the Taliban, here in Maslakh
camp in western Afghanistan there is no celebratory slaughtering
of goats or distribution of sweets, but only weeping and funerals.
It is a place that has been largely ignored
by Western governments and aid agencies; harrowing images of
the starving and dying have not been seen in the world's newspapers
or on television because journalists and camera crews have been
elsewhere in Afghanistan, concentrating on the war. But because
it hasn't been seen in its vivid awfulness doesn't lessen the
terrible suffering that goes on here.
Every night as the temperature dips well
below zero, as many as 40 people die from cold and starvation.
In the six cemeteries scattered through the camp, many of the
piles of stones marking graves are so tiny that it is clear most
victims are children and babies.
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