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June 12, 2002
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
June 7, 2002
Michael Colby
Bush to the Nation:
You're All Cops Now
Tanweer Akram
Howard
Zinn's "Terrorism
and War": a review
David Krieger
New Security Challenges
Sam Bahour
The Palestinian
Intifada:
A Very American Struggle
Tom Turnipseed
A Crisis of Confidence
in US Leadership
June 6, 2002
Michael Colby
White House
vs. EPA:
Political Hot Air and
Global Warming
Ron Jacobs
The Indo-Pakistan Conflict:
It's Just a Shot Away
Francis Boyle
Take Sharon
to The Hague:
Prosecute Israeli War Crimes
at Jenin
CounterPunch Bulletin
60 Minutes and President Chavez's
Censored F-Word
Mark Weisbrot
Spying
and Lying:
The FBI's Shameful Past
June 5, 2002
Robert Fisk
Berlusconi the Censor
Danielle Brian
Nuclear
Plants and Terrorism
Ardeshir Cowasjee
For What Do We Fight?
George Monbiot
Kashmir
on the Brink
Michael Neumann
What is Antisemitism?
June 4, 2002
Dave Marsh
Bono the Useful Idiot
William Evan / Francis
Boyle
Kashmir:
Invoking Intl. Law to Avoid Nuclear War
Cockburn / St. Clair
The Future Wellstone Deserves
June 3, 2002
Ramdas / Makhijani
India,
Pakistan and Nukes:
A Road Map to Peace
Fran Shor
Meanwhile, Back in Afghanistan
Neve Gordon
The Caterpillar
Effect
June 2, 2002
Fidel Castro
From FDR to Mister "W.":
Cuba, the US and Democracy
Arundhati Roy
Under the
Nuclear Shadow
Bernard Weiner
Bush 9/11 Scandal for Dummies
June 1, 2002
Norman Madarasz
The
Strange Math of Roberto Carlos: Brazil v. Turkey
Gavin Keeney
Bush and Mies van der Rohe:
Architecture and Ideology
Jeff Halper
Sharon's
Post-Incursion Plan:
Incarceration or Transfer?
Walt Brasch
Crumpling the Constitution
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
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Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
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Photos by Allan Sekula
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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:
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Reviews of Gore:
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June 12,
2002
Dirty Bombs, Blowback
and Imperial Projections
by Fran Shor
In an effort to maintain its media blitz to scare
US citizens into accepting a developing police state and to
bury all the emerging evidence of its own criminal negligence
in 9/11, the Bush Administration has unveiled an alleged al-Qaeda
agent who plotted to unleash a "dirty bomb" on US
soil. Although arrested on May 8 on his return to Chicago from
Pakistan, an American citizen, Jose Padilla, aka Abdullah al-Mujahir,
is now languishing as an "enemy combatant" in a military
prison in South Carolina. While the allegations about Padilla/al-Mujahir's
connections to al-Qaeda and the "dirty bomb" plot
are yet to be proved, the timing and story about the plot and
the plotter raise important questions about the present motivations
of the Bush Administration and US government's policies in the
past and future.
This is not the first time that the Bush
Administration has made allegations about al-Qaeda's dirty bombs.
All during the campaign in Afghanistan, there were periodic
announcements about finding plans and materials stored away
in al-Qaeda caves that could be preparations for radiological
weapons. Of course, at the same time that the US military was
making its subterranean searches, it was launching its own radiological
weapons against these underground bunkers. In turn, the Bush
Administration was pushing ahead with plans to develop low-yield
nuclear "bunker busters."
To better locate the actual deployment
of such dirty radiological weapons, one should go back to the
first Bush Administration (the elected one). During the Gulf
War, the Pentagon unleashed massive amounts of depleted uranium
(DU). According to Professor Doug Rokke, ex-director of the
Pentagon's Depleted-Uranium Project, "numerous US Department
of Defense reports have stated that the consequences of DU
were unknown. That is a lie. They were told. They were warned."
Furthermore, Rokke's assessment of the consequences of DU, consequences
that are part of the astronomical increase in varieties of cancers
among Iraqi children, provides chilling evidence of the lethal
impact of depleted uranium: "DU is the stuff of nightmares.
It is toxic, radioactive and pollutes for 4500 million years.
It causes lymphoma, neuro-psychotic disorders and short-term
memory damage. In semen, it causes birth defects and trashes
the immune system."
Now, against this dire diagnosis of the
effects of real radiological weapons used time and again by
the Pentagon, we have the fantasies of a possible plot of maybe
one "dirty bomb" in one US city. If this fantastic
and paranoid projection of an al-Qaeda bomb plot doesn't sound
like John Ashcroft's attempt to capitalize on the cinematic
success of another paranoid projection - "The Sum of All
Fears" - then we're not paying attention to how life imitates
art. Or, in this case, how imperial policies produce imperial
projections and paranoia.
Just as there has been a concerted effort
to cover-up the use and effects of the Pentagon's radiological
"dirty bombs," so there is a denial of the "blowback"
of US imperial policies, from the early CIA support of bin Laden
to the continuing tragedies visited upon the Afghani people.
It is such continuing tragedies involving civilians deaths
that were reported in a recent story in the Los Angeles Times.
One Afghani who had lost his wife, mother, and seven children
in a US bombing run of his village, lamented: "I put a
curse on the Americans who did this. I pray they will have the
tragedy in their lives that I have had in mine." What more
poignant and bitter reminder that blowback is, in the words
of Chalmers Johnson, author of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences
of American Empire, "another way of saying that a nation
reaps what it sows. Although people usually know what they have
sown, our national experience of blowback is seldom imagined
in such terms because so much of what the managers of the American
empire have sown has been kept secret (17)."
Of course, keeping secrets is what is
essential to the Bush Administration in its prosecution of unending
war and rampant repression. Undoubtedly, the management of the
American empire under the Bush Administration has taken on a
more sinister tone and global arrogance and unilateralism than
preceding Administrations. On the other hand, there has been
an imperial thread throughout the history of the nation. One
can cite evidence for this imperial operation from the 19th
century Mexican-American war to US intervention in the Philippines
at the turn of the century through all of the CIA interventions
in the cold war period from Iran to Guatemala. It is no coincidence
that in the proposal for the creation of a Homeland Security
Department Bush would recall the passage of the National Security
Act of 1947 and the establishment of the CIA.
Just as the CIA's task was to preempt
through dirty tricks and political machinations any possible
"threat" to the economic and political hegemony of
the US empire, so now the Bush Administration is seeking ways
to launch a renewed lethal CIA and military for preemptive strikes
against the shadowy traces of al-Qaeda and any projection fostered
by blowback. The deliberate creation, thus, of fear and insecurity
is as central to this Administration as it was during the McCarthy
era. As incisively noted by Mansour Farhang in his book on US
Imperialism: From the Spanish-American War to the Iranian Revolution:
"It seems to be in the nature of imperialism to fear everything
that is not subject to its influence. This fear, which has always
been present in the imperialist countries, has a functional
value for the state. Without continuing insecurity and fear
in the public, imperialism as a form of government cannot be
maintained and rationalized (69)."
So, we return to the threats of an al-Qaeda
"dirty bomb," produced by a former Latino gang member
converted to Islamic fundamentalism in prison. Is this not a
form of domestic blowback: the neglect and continuing disrespect
of the poor in America's inner cities, especially among people
of color? Are they not a time bomb waiting to explode after
further deprivations and outrages, whether in the form of police
brutality or "benign neglect"?
And what of all scare tactics surrounding
the launching of a possible dirty bomb in a US city? Again,
in the face of the real devastation of the Pentagon's use of
radiological weapons, we have the paranoid projections of the
"dirty bomb." While not beyond the murderous intent
of al-Qaeda operatives, the whole operation is blown way out
of proportion. Even the potential massive damage of such an
al-Qaeda dirty bomb is dismissed by Gary Milhollin, director
of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control: "I think
the risk of a radiological bomb (ala al-Qaeda) is vastly overestimated.
It's a problem of physics and you have to work back from the
condition you are trying to produce, which is to contaminate
a substantial area with high radioactive doses."
What is evident from the fallout of the
dirty bomb plot is that the Bush Administration's own self-serving
imperial projections are continuing to contaminate the landscape
at home and abroad. As the Bush managers of the US empire plot
to use more of their own dirty bombs in Iraq and any number
of 60 countries that are now part of potential hit list, they
need to raise the fear and paranoia level to match their own
grandiose schemes. We need to be alert to such political and
psychological manipulation from such a sick mindset. Perhaps
it is best to remember the diagnosis by psychologist Joel Kovel
in his book, Against the State of Nuclear Terror: "Paranoia
creates enemies out of inner need. Its suspiciousness provides
an omnipresent climate of vulnerability. Sensing hatred everywhere,
it sees the world as a constant threat. At the same time, grandiosity
reaches into the world, sure of its invulnerability, and materializes
the threat in order to destroy it. This is not true defense
against a real aggressor. It is paranoid defense against an
aggressor once must create, because responsibility for history
cannot be faced (82-3)."
Fran Shor teaches
at Wayne State University. He is an anti-war activist and member
of the Michigan Coalition for Human Rights. His e-mail address
is: f.shor@wayne.edu.
Today's
Features
Dave Marsh
Shelley
Stewart, Radio and the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement
Chris Floyd
Murder, Inc.
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