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November 5, 2001
Patrick Cockburn
Living
in the Minefields
David Price
Terror
and Indigenous People
November 3, 2001
Declan McCullagh
Nancy Oden Interview
Daniel
Wolff
The
Memphis Blues Again
Mark Weisbrot
War on Civilians
Dave Marsh
How
the RIAA (and the FBI)
Cheat Musicians
Robert Jensen
Speaking
Out Against
War on Campus
November 2, 2001
CounterPunch
Wire
Green
Party Leader Detained at Maine Airport; Prevented from Boarding
Any Plane
Alexander Cockburn
FBI Eyes
Torture
November 1, 2001
Dean Baker
Dying
for Patents
Sami Amarah
US Attempts
to Recruit
Russian Vets of Afghan War
Molly Secours
Where
Are the Voices of Reason? Let the Women
Be Heard
William Blum
Unleashing the
CIA
October 31, 2001
Tom Turnipseed
Terrorize
the Poor,
Subsidize the Rich
Chris Clarke
Thank God
for Berkeley
Steve
Perry
The
Silent Genocide
October 30, 2001
Rep. Ron Paul
War on Terror
Bad as War on Drugs
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Flying
Blind:
The Predator's Problem
Ali Abunimah
Dear Colin
Powell
St. Clair/Cockburn
Atomic
Trains Grounded
Maud Hurd
We Need a Real
Stimulus Package
Dr. Susan
Block
We're
All Afghans Now
Tariq Ali
Busted in Munich
Francis
Beer
Toward
the Terrorist
Anti-World
October 29, 2001
Alexander Cockburn
The Left
and the Just War
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
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Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
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Photos by Allan Sekula
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8-Page Special
Issue
War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a
History of Torture in US Prisons
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: Nuke 'Em
Search
CounterPunch
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
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:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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Reviews of Gore:
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November
5, 2001
The Winter of Our Disarray
Notes
from home and abroad
on the U.S.'s stalled-out war.
By Steve Perry
What's a few
(hundred) thousand Afghans?
I was a little taken aback to find that my recent
column on the food situation in Afghanistan generated an unprecedented
volume of hate mail. Interestingly enough no one contested the
notion that countless Afghan civilians will starve thanks to
the disruption of food aid wrought by the bombing campaign; the
point, claimed one outraged correspondent after another, is that
this is beside the point. "I read one of your editorials
on how sorry we should be that we made bin Laden hurt us,"
sneered one. Another wrote, "You have been raised and protected
by a country that you now betray in thought and deed. It is because
of the blood of many Americans that came before you that you
can make your treasonous statements."
Blah blah blah. In the last refuge of
scoundrels, freedom of speech is a cherished thing until you
use it. Meantime there's a lesson here. For as much as we skeptics
of the newly minted Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld perma-war against terrorism
may want to believe that many Americans distrust the aims of
empire on and off the battlefield, the majority clearly still
lusts for blood and does not much care in the end whose it is,
as long as it is not ours. Fly those flags high.
The October 29 issue of Britain's The
Economist contained a
useful dispatch on the specifics of food aid, along with
a map detailing the regions most affected by hunger, which is
duly reproduced here. As I noted before, there is little problem
in those regions of the north controlled by opposition forces.
But most of the needy populace is elsewhere, and as you can see
they are both far removed from the refugee camps of Iran and
Pakistan and at the mercy of encroaching winter, which will shut
off ground routes for aid delivery-which includes not only food
but such staples as blankets and medicine-and complicate any
air deliveries so long as the bombing campaign continues.
The UN Children's Fund estimates that
300,000 Afghan children die needless deaths in an average winter,
and that as many as 100,000 more will perish this winter thanks
to the war for freedom. If the war carries on past that point,
as seems likely, the hunger casualties will only multiply.
Drug companies:
Patriotism for the many, profits for the few
Sunday's New York Times featured an
interesting overview of the pharmaceutical giants' role
in responding to anthrax and any future bioterror threats. Their
line, from Cipro-maker Bayer AG on down, has been remarkably
consistent. Proclaim any national policy you like, but tread
on our patents and we'll sue. Canada's national health service
learned as much when they dared to order generic Cipro substitutes
from an Indian manufacturer. Bayer threatened a full frontal
assault, and Canada blinked. The U.S., meanwhile, has tried a
diplomatic end-around. In addition to negotiating a lower but
still larcenous price from Bayer for Cipro, the government instructed
the Centers for Disease Control to switch its drug of choice
for treating anthrax exposure from Cipro to doxycycline, an antibiotic
that is already outside patent protection. But the government
steadfastly avoids invoking its statutory right to summarily
override drug makers' patents. That precedent would cause enormous
troubles for pharmaceutical companies vis a vis the explosion
of AIDS in Africa and Asia.
Concerning anthrax, the drug companies
trumpet their willingness to do their patriotic duty, but at
a substantial price that includes the override of normal FDA
approval procedures for numerous medications. "Drug company
executives have offered to send scores of industry scientists
now on their payrolls," notes the Times, "to work in
government agencies in what the industry calls a gift to the
nation, but critics say it is both a conflict of interest and
a way for the industry to get a toehold in government."
Even prior to September 11, the pharmaceutical monolith held
a privileged place at the public trough. It currently has 625
registered lobbyists in Washington, where it spent $177 million
in 1999 and 2000-according to the Times, "a good $50 million
more than its nearest rivals, the insurance and telecommunications
industries." Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld is a former
CEO of G.D. Searle; White House budget director Mitchell E. Daniels
Jr. is an Eli Lilly alum.
Leave the last word to Jack Calfee of
the conservative American Enterprise Institute. "When you've
got this access to high places, it will encourage these guys
to coordinate instead of compete," he said. "It's more
likely to forestall getting good products than to encourage it."
Arabs in America:
internment by degrees
Caught up short by the September 11 attacks,
the American intelligence apparatus is using every legal trick
in the book to make up for lost time. The result is a program
of domestic internment that differs from the World War II round-up
of Japanese mainly in its scale. The FBI has cast the widest
of nets here at home, so far detaining some 1,200 or more Arab
and Islamic immigrants on mostly indeterminate grounds. As
the Sunday Washington Post demonstrates, any pretext
for jailing Arabs indefinitely is good enough for the courts.
Defense attorneys are routinely prohibited from viewing potentially
exculpatory documents outside the courtroom. And the maximum
seven-day holding period mandated in the new anti-terror bill
is a chimera: A good many of these men have been held now for
nearly two months without charges.
The paltry reality of the situation is
obscured by all the attention devoted to a few men such as Zacarias
Moussouai, the Moroccan man holding a French passport who was
held in Minnesota after seeking flight lessons at a suburban
training school. He appears an apt suspect in the 9/11 attacks
and beyond. And the rest? Only nine of the thousand-plus detainees
bear any direct or circumstantial connection to the September
11 bombers. The vast majority of the others were simply in the
wrong place at the wrong time. Some found themselves the victims
of their own public-spiritedness. Mustafa Abujdai, a Palestianian
living in Emory, Texas, has been jailed indefinitely since going
to the authorities to volunteer that he had made the brief acquaintance
of one of the hijackers.
Most of the Arabs presently jailed are
being held on immigration-related technicalities that strain
even the expansive parameters of the new anti-terror bill. Osama
Elfar, an Egyptian mechanic for the tiny carrier Trans State
Airlines, was detained in Missouri for staying longer than his
visa allowed. Elfar told investigators he had no sympathy for
bin Laden or his ilk and voluntarily agreed to a search of his
apartment and computer and an inspection of his phone bills.
He subsequently passed a polygraph test as well, and passed,
but government lawyers have blocked his efforts at obtaining
bail on the grounds that the FBI "has been unable to rule
out the possibility that [Elfar] is somehow linked to, or possesses
knowledge of, the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon."
If you're Arabic in descent or an adherent
of Islam, guilty until proven innocent is the new watchword in
American courts. Under that rubric you can expect to see the
number of de facto internments multiply in the weeks and months
to come. CP
Steve Perry
writes frequently for CounterPunch and is a contributor to the
excellent cursor.org
website, which offers incisive coverage of the current crisis.
He lives in Minneapolis, MN.
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