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October 25, 2001
N.D.
Jayaprakash
From
Hiroshima to NYC
Evan
Schultz
Memo
to Ashcroft:
Read Marbury
The
Sunshine Project
Assault
on the BioWeapons
Convention
Sarah
Turner
Cashing
In on Patriotism
Latin American Colloquium
on Systemology
The Meridia Manifesto
Noam
Chomsky
The
New War on Terror
October 24, 2001
Michael Colby
Radioactive
Mail?
Lori
Allen
Life
in an Occupied Land
During Wartime
Peter
Swire
New
Anti-Terrorism Bill
Poses Old Risks
Irina
Malenko
A
Non-Western Voice
David
Vest
Welcome
to Web Hell
Patrick Cockburn
Battle
of Mazar Gets Nasty
October 23, 2001
Steve
Perry
Anthrax,
Cipro and the Bailout of Bayer
Carl
Estabrook
Just War
or
The Rule of Lawlessness?
Patrick
Cockburn
Errant
Bombs at Bagram
George
Monbiot
War
and Oil
Robert
Jensen
Crushing
Academic Dissent
October 22, 2001
Hamit
Dardagan
The
New Newspeak
Tom
Turnipseed
War
on the Poor
Patrick Cockburn
Killing
Mullah Omar's Child
David
Vest
The
War on Women
Shepherd
Bliss
Advice
from a Vietnam Vet
Hani
Shukrallah
Capital
Strikes Back
October 21, 2001
Donald
Rumsfeld
The
al-Jazeera Interview
Mark
Scaramella
Nuclear
Anxiety
October 19, 2001
Mohammed
Sid-Ahmed
Bush's
Palestinian State
Michael
Colby
A
Mailroom Manifesto
October 18, 2001
Mahajan
and Jensen
Avoiding
a New Cold War
Patrick
Cockburn
US
Planes Pound Taliban
Jamey Hecht
Gerald Ford
and the CIA
Mokhiber
and Weisman
3
Arguments
Against This War
October 17, 2001
Ballinger
and Marsh
Music
and War Resistance
Steve
Perry
The
Anthrax Chronicles
Chris
Kromm
Operation
Infinite Disaster
Susan
Block
Sex
Not Bombs
David Vest
Osama Speaks
Resources:
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Ridge Long Groomed
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Those CIA Killing
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Mayor Giuliani
Crop Duster
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Will Save Lives
Madeleine Albright's
Deadly Legacy
How the Bin
Laden Women
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by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
Responses to 9/11:
Chomsky, Russell Banks,
Zinn, and Alice Walker
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October 25,
2001
Terrible Images of a "Just"
War
By Richard Lloyd Parry
in
Quetta, Pakistan
The
Independent
Sami Ullah was asleep when it happened, and so
his friends and neighbours had to tell him about the bomb that
struck his house and what it did to him and his family. How
the American planes, which had been over earlier in the evening,
had returned after everyone went to bed and how, instead of the
Taliban base two miles away, they dropped their bombs on a residential
area of the town of Tarin Kot.
Mr Ullah's injuries are obvious enough
even now deep cuts caused by the collapsing house and
the fragment of something in his belly that might be bomb shrapnel.
One of his cousins was also pulled alive from the rubble but
no one else was. In the 11 hours between the explosion and the
moment when he finally regained consciousness, the bodies of
Mr Ullah's wife, his four children, his parents, and five of
his brothers and sisters had been lifted from the rubble of
their home and buried.
What do you say to a stranger who tells
you he has just lost every member of his immediate family? All
you can decently do is ask questions.
When did it happen? On Friday night
or early Saturday morning. Where? In a suburb of Tarin Kot,
capital of the Afghan province of Oruzgan. And why? But Mr Ullah,
who is not familiar with the phrase "collateral damage"
or "just war" does not have an answer.
In the 19 days of the bombing campaign,
many terrible things have been reported but the scenes at the
Al-Khidmat Al-Hajeri hospital, where Mr Ullah lay last night,
are the most pathetic I have seen. In one ward lay a woman named
Dery Gul, about 30 years old, with her 10-year-old daughter,
Najimu, and a baby named Hameed Ullah. The little girls have
bruised and cut faces; the cheek of the baby is cut neatly in
a T shape, as if by a knife. But to understand how lucky they
were you only have to look at their mother.
Her face is half-covered with bandages,
her arm wrapped in plaster. "The bomb burned her eyes,"
says the doctor. "The whole right side of her body is burned."
The reason Ms Gul is so battered and her daughters so lightly
injured, they say, is because she cradled them.
From the Pakistani city of Quetta, where
the injured people were carried late on Tuesday, the town of
Tarin Kot is just a dot in the middle of the map of Afghanistan,
traversed by a single road, surrounded by contour lines. But
even if it amounts to no more than a few thousand mud houses
with a handful of administrative buildings, it is a provincial
capital an Afghan York or Norwich. Yes, the people in
the hospital yesterday said, of course there were Taliban there;
but, no, they were miles away from Sami Ullah, Dery Gul, the
little girls and their dead relatives.
There had been bombing earlier in the
evening, Sami Ullah said, and the military camp had been hit.
"There were four bombs that hit the Taliban," he said,
"but many more bombs fell on the houses."
While some of the villagers were pulling
their neighbours out of the rubble, more bombs had fallen, and
more people had been hurt "about 10 people were injured,
and 20 were killed". But the danger appeared to have passed
by the time the family went to sleep. If the planes roared overhead,
they did not wake them and perhaps those who died 12 in
Sami Ullah's house, eight in the home of the mother and her
girls did not even know what had happened to them.
What then went wrong? The Pentagon has
already admitted this week bombing an old people's home in Herat
with a simple targeting error. Two weeks ago, bombs killed dozens
in the village of Karam where, according to the local people,
there had once been an Osama bin Laden camp which had moved
years before. Other stories like it suggest that in some cases
American intelligence is simply out of date.
But there is a third possibility
that the Taliban are deliberately moving military personnel
and equipment close to civilian areas, turning their oblivious
inhabitants into de facto human shields.
In another hospital in Quetta yesterday,
a nurse told of how nine days ago the Taliban had turned up
at her family's house and ordered them to leave. "They
said it was for our own safety, because there was a barracks
a few hundred metres away," she said.
"But after we had left they moved
Taliban soldiers in and stayed there themselves. Afterwards
the bombs did fall, and my house was destroyed and the civilian
people who stayed behind were hurt too."
"We heard the bombs falling often,"
said Mr Ullah, as I start to run out of questions, "but
we didn't feel afraid because everyone said that American bombs
were accurate, and that they would bomb the Talibs, but not the
innocent people."
The American broadcasters have a phrase
which they repeat in reporting civilian casualties in Afghanistan:
"The claims cannot be independently confirmed". And,
of course, there is no way to check on anything that the people
at the Al-Khidmat Al-Hajeri hospital say.
But if this is all a hoax perpetrated
by the Taliban, why does Mr Ullah speak of them with such disdain?
And would even the Taliban mutilate a baby to win a political
point? I believe that Sami Ullah and Dery Gul and her girls are
what they appear innocent victims of an increasingly cack-handed
war, and that there will be many, many more of them before it
is close to being over.
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