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February
28, 2002
James
T. Phillips
Baghdad,
Spring 1992
Gideon
Samet
Sharon
Must Go
Rep. Ron
Paul
Before
We Bomb Iraq
M. Shahid
Alam
Samuel
Huntington:
Peddling Civilizational Wars
St. Clair
/ Cockburn
Rumble
from the Jungle:
Ecaudorian Farmers Fight
DynCorp's ChemWar
February
27, 2002
Eric Hobsbawm
The
Future of War and Peace
John Troyer
About
that WTC Memorial
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Wired
for Democracy
or Business?
Alexander
Cockburn
Daniel
Pearl: Should His
Editors Have Sent Him There?
February
26, 2002
Jonathan
Steele
Kabul's
Loss
Vasily
Streltsov
The
Pentagon in
the Transcaucusas
CounterPunch
Wire
How
Corporations Use Shadowy "527" Groups to Influence
Politicians
Lt. Col.
Robert Bowman
ABM
Treaty: Alive or Dead?
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
A
Prayer for America
February
25, 2002
John Clarke
Interrogated
at US Border
Blankfort,
Poirier, Zeltzer
ADL
Blinks, Settles Spying Case
Alex Lynch
Naked
from Sin:
The Ordeal of Nahla
and Sami Al-Arian
John Chuckman
Ashcroft
Speaks in Tongues
February
24, 2002
David
Vest
Skate
Date
February
23, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Axis
of Evil and
Media Monopolies
Bahour/Dahan
Cracks
in the Occupation
February
22, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
Axel
of Evil: Sex Crimes
and the Constitution
February
21, 2002
Gary Leupp
The
Philippines: Second Front in US's Global War
David
Vest
Reagan
Clone Project?
Mokhiber
and Weissman
Chicago
School and Corporate America: Rotten to the Core
February
20, 2002
Bernard
Weiner
The
Shallow Throat Document
Kay Lee
The
Prison Guard Who Never Owned Up to His Crimes
February
19, 2002
David
Orr
Waylon
Jennings, the Duke,
and the Navajo
John Chuckman
The
Devil and Georgie Bush
Prudence
Crowther
Giblet
Gravitas
Ramzi
Kysia
Caught
in the Iraq DMZ
February
18, 2002
Ron Jacobs
The
US and Iran
George
Lewandowski
Empire
in Declline
Lenni
Brenner
Life
and Death of a Folk Hero
February
17, 2002
Robert
Fisk
Lost
in a Pit of Desperation
February
16, 2002
Phillip
Cryan
Colombia
in War Time
February
15, 2002
C.G. Estabrook
From
New York to Porto Alegre
Robert
O'Brien
The
View from Porto Alegre
Mokhiber/Weissman
Resisting
the Assassins
February
14, 2002
Levy and
Easton
Ante
Pavelic
Real Butcher of the Balkans
Joan Claybrook
Dear
Jeb Bush,
About You and Enron
John Chuckman
Time
for a Woman Prez
Alexander
Cockburn
Banning
the Koran
February
13, 2002
Sen. Russ
Feingold
War
Powers and
the War on Terror
Tom Turnipseed
Bush's
Folly
George
Monbiot
American
Imperialism
February
12, 2002
Uri Avnery
The
Great Game:
Oil, Sharon and Iran
Tommy
Ates
Black
Land Loss
February
11, 2002
Walt Brasch
The
Synergizing of America
John Troyer
Enron's
Deep Throat?
February
9, 2002
John Blair
Criticize
Cheney, Go to Jail
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
Resources:
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CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
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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:
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Press
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Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
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
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March 1, 2002
An Actor Speaks
Out
What's Wrong With Black
Hawk Down
By Brendan Sexton III
When I first read the script to Black Hawk Down,
I didn't think it was the greatest thing in the world--far from
it. But I thought the script at least raised some very important
questions that are missing from the final product. I was misled
to think that the release of the film would allow for forums
like this one--where some of these questions could be answered.
In certain scenes, U.S. soldiers--before they even entered the
now-infamous firefights in Mogadishu--were asking whether the
U.S. should be there, how effective the U.S. military presence
was, and why the U.S. was targeting one specific warlord in
Somalia, Gen. Mohammed Farah Aidid.
As we moved closer to actually filming
the script, the script moved further and further away from the
little that existed of its questioning character.
In February of last year, another actor
and I flew down together to Georgia for our "Ranger Orientation
Training" at a place many of you might know--Fort Benning
in Columbus, Georgia.
In Atlanta, we caught a shuttle plane
to Columbus, and on our flight, there were a bunch of guys with
Marine haircuts speaking Spanish. It took us a few moments to
realize these guys were "students" of the School of
the Americas, the U.S. Army's own terrorist training camp for
Latin America, which is stationed at Fort Benning. That started
to put things into perspective.
For the next five days, we received a
crash course in military training at Fort Benning, and I learned
a lot. The U.S. Army Rangers, who we were portraying in the
film, are an elite group of soldiers that only number 1,500
or so. Their average age is 19. They're not Special Forces,
but they carry out "Special Ops"--or Special Operations.
While they trace their history back to
wars that helped to ethnically cleanse Native Americans and
to their exploits in the Civil War fighting for the South, the
modern-day Rangers were created to help rejuvenate a defeated
and demoralized U.S. imperialism after the war in Vietnam. Since
then, they've been used in all sorts of interventions--from
Lebanon to Grenada to Panama, and, of course, Somalia.
The Rangers--whose motto is "Rangers
lead the way"--are supposed to be the shining example of
the Army. Their extreme training, tan berets and ugly haircuts
are supposed to separate them from the hundreds of thousands
of other soldiers.
Before you go to Rangers school, you
go through the Rangers' own version of boot camp--which is called
RIP, or the "Ranger Indoctrination Program." RIP is
only about three weeks. In Rangers school, you get one meal
a day and two hours sleep for about 10 weeks.
This is all meant to simulate the harsh
conditions of war. But no matter how much you train and no matter
how much you complete mock missions in life-sized mock cities
at Fort Benning, it can't prepare you for actual combat, when
the bullets are ripping past your head.
During the Cold War, Somalia was a client
state of the former USSR, with the U.S. supporting the regime
of King Haile Selassie in rival Ethiopia. When Haile Selassie
was overthrown, the alliances switched, and the U.S. then backed
the dictator Siad Barre in Somalia.
From the late 1970s onward, the U.S.
sent about $50 million a year in arms to Barre's regime to help
him keep a tight grip on the country. When repression wasn't
enough, Barre exploited divisions among the different clans
in Somalia. When Barre was overthrown, these clan rivalries
exploded.
The civil war that followed caused a
horrible famine that took 300,000 lives, as the warring factions
took over the farms of rival clans and burned their crops.
Had the U.S. given Somalia constructive
aid--like money for agriculture and infrastructure, instead
of military aid--the famine most likely never would have happened.
U.S. intervention was supposedly to stop this famine, but the
reality is completely different.
The film Black Hawk Down paints the Somali
people as wild savages. Elvis Mitchell, who reviewed the film
for the New York Times when it opened in December, wrote: "The
lack of characterization converts the Somalis into a pack of
snarling dark-skinned beasts--intended or not, it reeks of
glumly staged racism."
I think that's an accurate description.
The Somalis are portrayed as if they don't know what's going
on, as if they're trying to kill the Americans because they--like
all other "evildoers"--will do anything to bite the
hand that feeds them.
But the Somalis aren't a stupid people.
In fact, many were upset because the U.S. military presence
propped up people tied to the old, corrupt Barre regime. The
United Nations wasn't too favored either--because the UN was
run at the time by Boutros Boutros-Ghali, a former Egyptian
official who also supported Barre's regime.
The Somalis had plenty of reason to be
upset with the U.S. presence, especially when the U.S. objective
changed from "food distribution" to basically kidnapping
Gen. Aidid. Aidid had climbed the ranks of Barre's regime, later
helped to depose him and then became the U.S. government's "Public
Enemy Number One."
There was nothing much different about
Aidid from the other warlords vying for power. The main difference
was that he wasn't yet ready to cut a deal with the U.S.
Warlords, dictators and terrorists are
normally okay with the U.S., as long as they do the bidding
of U.S. corporate interests. In fact, the U.S. promoted Aidid
for a time. He belongs on that long list of former U.S. allies
who commit atrocities with impunity, but once they step out
of line are denounced as the "new Hitler"--a list
that includes the likes of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and
Slobodan Milosevic.
What the U.S. tried to accomplish in
Somalia was nearly unprecedented. The goal was to travel thousands
of miles to a different continent and literally kidnap someone
who was surrounded by armed men.
The first few attempts to capture Aidid
and his top lieutenants were disasters. First, U.S. troops attacked
the wrong house, which turned out to be the office for the UN
Development Program. Later, they attacked the offices of the
charities World Concern and Doctors Without Borders.
Unfortunately, there's little information
out there on Somalia. What happened in 1993 is probably the
most under-researched U.S. intervention of the past 50 years.
This is unfortunate because there's much
to learn from Somalia. For example, many people who were horrified
by the destruction caused by U.S. bombs in Afghanistan called
on the U.S. to use ground troops to minimize the killing.
Let's not forget that U.S. ground troops
caused much more devastation in Mogadishu--killing close to
10,000 people in a matter of just a few weeks. Let's not forget
that U.S. ground troops turned whole neighborhoods of Panama
City to rubble in 1989, while killing thousands of people.
We can't just question the tactics used
by the U.S. military. We have to question the U.S. government's
claim that it has the moral high ground to intervene anywhere,
at any time, in any way it so chooses.
Somalia, in certain ways, represents
a recurring theme with U.S. interventions abroad. It's one of
the poorest countries in the world, coming face to face with
the world's richest and most powerful--much like Afghanistan.
One of the true tragedies of the war
in Somalia was the support that it received from liberals and
even radicals.
When the world's biggest military attacked
a struggle for national liberation in Vietnam, it was met with
dissent at home. This created what was called the "Vietnam
syndrome"--the reluctance of the U.S. to commit ground
troops abroad.
The Vietnam syndrome was a good thing.
It meant that the U.S. had to pull out of Indochina, and it
meant that the world's biggest bully couldn't as easily go wherever
it wanted, thus saving millions of lives.
The 1980s saw the restoration of U.S.
imperialism--baby step by baby step--with covert and overt operations
in Grenada, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Panama.
But the rehabilitation really took place
in the 1990s, with the reinvention of U.S. imperialism through
what became known as "humanitarian intervention"--operations
like "Operation Restore Hope" in Somalia, "Operation
Restore Democracy" in Haiti in 1994, and interventions
in the former Yugoslavia in 1995 and 1999.
When the U.S. was attacking genuine national
liberation movements, it was much clearer why U.S. intervention
had to be opposed. But when the U.S. went up against the "evil
dictators" in the interest of "helping people,"
it became more confusing.
U.S. officials used the cover of "humanitarian
intervention" for missions abroad that actually worsened
people's lives in those countries.
Afghanistan--bombing an already war-torn
country, leaving more than 3,700 dead and hundreds of thousands
more on the brink of starvation. Kosovo--2,000 dead in the 1999
bombing campaign, the war worsened the refugee crisis, and
generations to come will grow up with high levels of cancer
because of the U.S. use of depleted uranium. This is the "humanity"
of U.S. humanitarian interventions.
This should teach us that, at best, the
U.S. can only create a more violent, unstable world when it
intervenes abroad.
Many people say that those of us who
are against the war have no answers to the world's problems.
They say that we advocate doing nothing. But hindering the U.S.'s
ability to intervene is actually doing something--it's saving
lives.
Plus, our movement can take up slogans
and demands like "Money for jobs, not for war" and
"U.S. out of the Middle East"--which, if won, could
actually better millions of people's lives.
That's a project worth fighting for,
and, if you're not involved with that fight already, I encourage
you to get involved.
Brendan Sexton III, who has acted in Welcome to the Dollhouse and
Boys Don't Cry, played the role of "Alphabet" in Black
Hawk Down. This is the text of a February 11 speech he gave at
a Columbia University forum on the war.
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