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September
15, 2001
More Aftershocks
By Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey
St. Clair
CounterPunch
Vindicated!
We reported Friday on this
site the exile of vice president Dick Cheney to Camp David. The
White House line is that the threat of further terrorist assaults
demand that the President and Vice President never been in same
building. We cited a different interpretation: that the White
House decided that Cheney's commanding presence was undercutting
Bush's already frail stature as the Commander in Chief. Confirmation
of our view came on Saturday with official White House pictures
of Bush and Cheney sitting on the same couch in Camp. Or is the
assumption of the Secret Service that Muslim kamikaze terrorists
take the weekend off?
Alone
of Either Sex!
CounterPunch Salutes US Representative
Barbara Lee, a Democrat from Berkeley, the only one from any
party in the House or Senate who voted against the resolution
authorizing all necessary and appropriate military force.
Russian
Colonel
Remembers Afghanistan:
"Don't Try It!"
The White House huddles with
the Pentagon, reviewing options and scenarios to requite the
attacks of September 11. Top of the publicized options, an attack
on Afghanistan, sanctuary of the supposed mastermind of the September
11 attacks, Osama bin Laden. Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul
Wolfowitz, a seasoned blowhard of the right, has said that the
US response would include "ending" states that support
terrorism. If the US government persists in identifying bin Laden
as the perp, this presumably heralds an attempt to overthrow
the Taliban.
There's a considerably irony
here, since previous US governments did much to install the Taliban,
just as the CIA underwrote bin Laden's first trip to Afghanistan
from Saudi Arabia. It was the CIA and the Pakistani intelligence
organization, ISI, which nourished the Taliban's growth, seeking
to ensure that there would never be a modern-minded, reforming
government in Afghanistan. Though the Taliban has a flouted a
pledge to cut back the opium production that has made Afghanistan
the world's leading supplier of heroin and morphine, the present
Bush administration recently sent the Taliban many millions in
the name of the War on Drugs.
Now, it's one thing to lob
cruise missiles from a safe distance, or to attack water systems.
Such tactics end up mostly killing innocent civilians, just as
the dreadful assaults of September 11 ended up slaughtering thousands
of blameless ordinary people and their would-be rescuers. It's
entirely a different matter to mount a full-scale invasion, particularly
of a remote and geographically forbidding country like Afghanistan.
Across the past 150 years powers such as Great Britain and the
Soviet Union have seen agony and humiliation as the fruit of
invasions in force.
The British disasters came
in the nineteenth century, the Soviet ones in the 1980s. A Russian
who remembers the campaigns vividly is Col. Yuri Shamanov, who
spent five years as a regiment commander in the war again the
CIA-financed Mujahiddeen. "If the Americans go to war,"
he told a Reuters reporter last week, "I pity these boys
and their mothers and sisters and brothers. It will be ten times
worse than Vietnam. Vietnam will be a picnic by comparison. Here
they will get it in the teeth. Oh. They will get it good. Rockets
won't save you: there's nothing out there to shoot at. Blast
away years' worth of ammo. The mountains will survive anything.
The Afghans will be ready to fight, no worse than they fought
against us, and they fought very well against us. What will the
US do there? Unless a narrow mission is set to destroy the camps
and the most odious figures if they do only that then God
bless them. Paratroopers can take the camps. But if you don't
send infantry, there is nothing for tanks and planes to do. If
you don't actually march through the territory, it will come
back to life again. And there will be camps and the same bandits.
You can get rid of bin Laden, then another will grow. You have
to dig out this whole system by its roots."
Bin
Laden as Capitalist?
In the four trading days before
the attack on September 11, the stocks of three of the world's
largest reinsurance companies, AXA in France, Swiss Re and Munich
Re, all lost between 13 and 15 per cent of their value. At the
time, these drops bewildered market analysts who said that the
reinsurance business was booming and that premium payments were
trending upwards. On many a desk on Tuesday morning would undoubtedly
have been copies of that morning's London Financial Times, giving
a glowing assessment of the reinsurance business. The following
morning, amid the ruins of the World Trade Center, an executive
for Swiss Re said that the exposure of the reinsurance business,
which spreads the possible risks in any insurance sector, were
"completely inestimable".
So how to account for the mysterious
drop in value of the reinsurance companies before the planes
struck on Tuesday? One answer is reported in the Corriere della
Sera, one of Italy's biggest newspapers. The paper says that
investigators believe that associates of bin Laden may have been
short- selling their shares in these reinsurance companies, making
a bundle off the knowledge that even if one of the hijacked planes
hit the Trade Center, values of the reinsurance companies would
plummet. CP
CounterPunch's Complete Coverage
of the Attacks on the World Trade Center/Pentagon
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