|
November 7, 2001
Cockburn/St. Clair
Greens, Airports
and
National ID Cards
Dr. Susan
Block
Ayatollah
Asscroft
Brian J. Foley
Bombing Campaign
Not "Self-Defense" Under International Law
November 6, 2001
Mark Scaramella
Where's
That Red Cross Money Going
C.G. Estabrook
Our Torturers
Sheperd
Bliss
Scott
Nearing on War
Rep. Ron Paul
Underwriting
the Taliban
Tariq
Ali
The
General Who
Came to Dinner
Evan Ravitz
Stop the War
Through
Direct Democracy
Steve
Perry
Hunger
in Afghanistan
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
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
INSIDE
EXCLUSIVE
TO
COUNTERPUNCH
SUBSCRIBERS
Published Oct. 15, 2001
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
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
|
November
7, 2001
Lions and Tigers and Bombs
U.S.
officials tout a near 100 percent chance of additional terror
attacks in the near future. But what kind?
By Steve Perry
A while ago I wrote about the Fourth
Generation Warfare scenarios now contemplated at the
Pentagon and in the highest reaches of the Bush administration.
Basically they envisage a war of mutual terror in which offensives
on both sides are marked by the elements of contingency, surprise,
and the proliferation of civilian targets. This is a quantum
departure from the past. For the first time the U.S. finds itself
waging a kind of war that turns its enormous wealth and power
into a liability rather than an asset. In short, our targets
are fixed and obvious and theirs aren't. The al-Qaida network
is diffuse, inventive and full of people convinced they have
little to lose. Strike at them indiscriminately and you only
create scores of martyrs and thousands of new adherents. Try
to focus your efforts more exactly and-well, note for starters
that they are said to operate in small and largely independent
cells; despite the histrionics of the FBI and CIA, there is probably
no way of capturing most of them on intelligence radar, or assaying
accurately where the next threat lies. Hence all the empty warnings
of late from a government at pains to prove it won't be caught
napping again-even if the public alerts serve no purpose at all
in preventing future disaster.
And so we the people are left to watch,
wait, and speculate. A few notes on the handicapping of future
terrorist threats:
Anthrax:
The least of the potential bioterror threats on the horizon,
because a) it's not contagious and b) the supply of compatible
antibiotics is relatively plentiful and available from multiple
sources. In the wake of anthrax traces discovered in Pakistan,
Germany, and Lithuania this week, the FBI has tilted back toward
the theory that foreign perpetrators are the source of the mailings,
even though it's now clear that the particular strain being employed
originated in U.S. military labs. It's a difficult matter for
investigators because there is no assurance that the various
anthrax mailers are necessarily connected: The historically lax
controls on the acquisition of the bacillus make it impossible
to tell whether the perpetrators in various locales have anything
to do with each other. In any case the anthrax threat seems containable.
Officials were initially worried that the so-far unexplained
infection of New York City hospital worker Kathy Nguyen might
be the harbinger of a new wave of infections, but these few days
later that appears not to be the case.
The airlines: You
have only to consider the story of Subash Gurung, the Nepalese
student who passed through security checkpoints at O'Hare Airport
with seven knives, a canister of mace, and a stun gun in his
bag. This was hardly an isolated incident. On Wednesday MSNBC
reported that since September 11, 30 percent of the weapons taken
through by testers of airport security had passed by without
detection. Now as ever, most security personnel are near-minimum
wage workers, and nationwide their ranks turn over at a mind-boggling
rate-127 percent per year, again according to MSNBC. Numerous
commentators have pointed to the example of United Flight 93
by way of claiming any hijacker would surely be overwhelmed by
other passengers; perhaps it will be harder to turn airplanes
into targeted bombs going forward. But meanwhile there is no
insurance against suicide bombs in the luggage hold. It remains
a simple matter to carry a bomb onboard in checked luggage, so
long as the bomber is willing to die along with the rest.
Terrorist nukes and "dirty"
bombs: Recent reports in the
European press hint that bin Laden and al-Qaida may have obtained
micro-nuclear bombs-the so-called "backpack nukes"-from
the former Soviet Union through a connection in Chechnya for
a sum in the neighborhood of $30 million, but these tales are
uncorroborated. The greater risk is that they may get their hands
on nuclear energy waste materials from any of innumerable sources
around the world. Like the anthrax bacillus, nuclear plant waste
is monitored very poorly, and pound after pound of the stuff
goes missing from various locations each year.
This is significant because a fissionable
nuclear bomb is not an easy thing to manufacture or in most cases
to transport. Concocting a conventional explosive laced with
radioactive waste would be much simpler-and more deadly: The
half-life of the nuclear isotopes used in most fission bombs
is a matter of years or decades; the killing power of radioactive
waste from spent nuclear fuel materials can last for thousands
of years, making any site affected by them permanently uninhabitable.
There has been persistent speculation that the United Airlines
flight that crashed in Pennsylvania on September 11 was bound
not for Washington but for the Three Mile Island nuclear facility.
But it would likely be easier to buy spent fuel than to bomb
it; the salient point is that any terrorist explosive containing
spent nuclear fuel could have a catastrophic effect equivalent
to the actual bombing of a nuclear power plant.
More attacks on symbolic targets:
No matter how hit-and-miss the
character of enhanced security measures, it's going to be harder
to use airplanes as bombs in the future. But there are other
means to the same ends-large truck bombs, for instance. The stepped-up
security in most places is largely a token thing. At Minneapolis's
suburban Mall of America, for instance, guards were posted in
doorways to check bags in the weekends following the 9/11 attacks.
But they covered only about a fifth of the entrances to the mall;
it was a case of motion rather than action, and the potential
for mayhem continues to be enormous.
Smallpox:
The granddaddy of all terror scenarios. Until the early '90s
it was supposed that all remaining stores of the smallpox virus
rested safely at the CDC in Atlanta and a single repository in
Russia. But numerous sources-most prominent among them Ken Alibek,
a former director of the Soviet Biopreparat weapons program now
residing in the U.S.-have attested that the Soviets produced
smallpox in vast quantities for their bio-war program. The scientists
involved in that effort have since been cast to the winds in
the course of Russia's draconian, Western-driven market reforms.
They need jobs and are available to the highest bidders. Alibek
claims that at least 10-12 countries have obtained smallpox samples
since the Soviet breakup, and that does not take into account
any side deals between the weapons formulators and other entities
such as, say, al-Qaida.
Wednesday's Washington Post reported that Health
and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson was preparing to
augment the U.S.'s present order for 54 million doses of smallpox
vaccine by an additional 250 million. But alas, there are stumbling
blocks. Most immediately, the vaccine in question is a new variant
on the old cowpox formula, and it has never been tested on humans;
as such there's no assurance it will provide immunity. There
is also the same legal bottleneck we have seen in the anthrax
scare, generated by a few pharmaceutical companies interested
in protecting their patents at all cost. Acambia PLC, the manufacturer
contracted to supply the initial 54 million doses requisitioned
by the U.S., does not expect to be able to fill the order until
the end of 2002. Former Minnesota state epidemiologist Michael
Osterholm surveyed the smallpox vaccine situation in his pre-9/11
book on biowar, Living Terrors; he wrote that "we
are years away from being remotely ready for the specter of smallpox."
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.
|