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March
6, 2002
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
The
Politics of Afghan Opium
David
Vest
Billy
Graham and Nixon:
Tangled Up in Tape
Patrick
Cockburn
The
Bombings That
Made Putin a Hero
CounterPunch
Wire
Berezovsky
Fingers Putin
in Bombings
Edward
Said
Thoughts
About America
March
5, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
Ann
Coulter At It Again:
Race-Baiting Norm Mineta
Bill Christison
A
Former CIA Officer
Explains Why the War
on Terror Won't Work
Delkhasteh and Wright
What
Should We be Fighting For? An Open Letter
to Pro-War Academics
Mariya
Tsvekova
Putin's
Georgian Gambit
March
4, 2002
Ralph
Nader
Dick
Cheney: A Dinosaur
in the Age of Mammals
Uri Avnery
How
Israel Will Torpedo
the Saudi Peace Plan
Southern
/ Kubrick
Stangelove
Scenario
for Shadow Govt. Bunker
David
Vest
Grammy's
of Constant Sorrow
March
3, 2002
Bernard
Weiner
War
on Terrorism for Dummies
Paul Cox
Boycott
Mel Gibson's
"We Were Soldiers"
Frederick
Hudson
Toward
a Nonviolent Africa:
Bill Sutherland's Quest
Eric Schaeffer
Dear
Christie Whitman:
Take This Job and Shove It
John Chuckman
Why
the Rest of Planet is Unnerved by America
March
2, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
Sweat,
Sex, Feet and
the Working Class
March
1, 2002
Brendan
Sexton III
What's
Wrong With Black Hawk Down: an Actor Speaks Out
Terry
Diggs
Why
Twain's Pudd'nhead
Wilson Still Matters
David
Krieger
Nuclear
Terrorism
and US Nuclear Policy
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:
Ecuadorian 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?
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
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
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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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:
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Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
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
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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March 6, 2002
War Is Wrong
By Tom Turnipseed
I knew war was terribly wrong when I saw pictures
of children like myself desperately attempting to flee the flames
of bombed German cities in newspapers and on the newsreels during
World War II. As an eight year old, I identified with the children
of war-torn Europe and worried and wondered why they were being
killed when everyone on the home front was waving flags and hyping
the wonderful war effort against the evil axis powers. I was
sure that Hitler and the Nazis were evil but I wondered what
the dying children had to do with it. Now, as a sixty-five year
old who looks into the beautiful eyes of my toddling granddaughters
and reads and sees accounts of children their age being killed
in Afghanistan, the West Bank and Iraq, by weapons I pay for
with my tax dollars, I am absolutely certain that war itself
is human-kind's ultimate evil.
I am a financial accomplice in the deaths
of Afghan children considered "collateral damage" by
U.S. bombing, in lethal attacks by U.S.-armed Israeli forces
on Palestinian babies in refugee camps, and in killing thousands
of Iraqi children with cancer caused by depleted uranium bombs
dropped during the Persian Gulf War. Do the citizen-taxpayers
of the United States understand their complicity and responsibility
for the deaths of innocent children as they wave their flags
in the war against "evil"?
Anthropologists who look for common threads
among the historical cultures of the world agree that the greatest
taboo in all human cultures is killing another human being. All
cultures agree that murder is wrong but in the collective passion
of paranoiac patriotism, the mass murder of war and mortal combat
is an honored tradition. The terrorist attacks of September 11,
2001 gave militarists an exceptional opportunity to rally frightened
Americans into a flag-waving frenzy to fight a global war against
terrorism and evil everywhere. The romanticization and glorification
of war by a violence-peddling media and entertainment industry,
corporate war profiteers and their political pawns has numbed
and dumbed down our humanity to the level of an us-against-them,
kill-or-be-killed madness.
Violence sells. It makes money and draws
viewers and readers to war and adventure movies and television
shows, murder mysteries, video games, and to the front pages
and the continuous television news. Violence is a formidable
force in America. With increasingly fat profits and political
pork abounding in the defense industry, it becomes un-American
to oppose a war against those ubiquitous evil-doing terrorists
around the world whether or not they had anything to do with
the September 11 attack. If you do not join our cheerleader-in-chief,
George W. Bush, in supporting a global war-without-end, you just
may not be a good American. The world's sole super power is viewed
by many as the role model for mindless, endless, retaliatory
killing and the spiraling cycle of violence throughout the world.
Our European allies have criticized our
spending great amounts on military might and actions while investing
little in economic aid for poor nations that might alleviate
the causes of the hatred behind the September 11 attacks. European
leaders are also skeptical of our go-it-alone threats against
Iraq and the other "axis-of-evil" countries and our
leave-it-alone policy toward the ever-escalating violence and
killing in the Middle East. The depth of resentment toward the
United States in 9 Islamic countries was revealed in a Gallup
poll in which only 11% of the people liked President Bush and
58% disliked him, and only 9% thought the U.S. action in Afghanistan
is morally justifiable and 77% thought it was not.
The most frightening aspect of the global
scene these days is the out-of-control surge in the savagery
of war and violence. Colombia has been declared as part of the
war on terrorism even though no one there was connected with
the 9/11 attack on America and the escalating violence has now
taken the life of a Colombian Senator who ventured into rebel
territory to seek the release of another Senator who had been
kid-napped. The war against drugs in Colombia has also become
a war against leftist guerrillas with oil pipelines at stake
and an increasingly independent and <U.S.-wary> regime
of Hugo Chavez in neighboring oil-rich Venezuela to be reckoned
with.
With the Bush administration unwilling
to take the necessary initiatives for peace that only the U.
S. can make, the tit-for-tat, retaliatory killing of innocent
people is spinning out-of-control in the incendiary Middle East.
As more men, women, and children and the unborn are killed each
day, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said, "The president
continues to think that it's very hard to have peace negotiated
in an atmosphere of daily killings and violence."
In the Gujarat state of western India,
at least 544 people have died due to Hindu-Muslim mob violence
after 58 Hindus were immolated on a train last week. Gujarat
borders on southeastern Pakistan. Tensions between nuclear-armed
India and Pakistan were already at a fever pitch and the Hindu-Muslim
conflict has always been at the core of the hostility. Nine percent
of Pakistan's people have a favorable opinion of the U. S. and
only four percent think our military action against Afghanistan
is justified according to the Gallup poll. The western neighbor
of our "ally" Pakistan is Afghanistan where our high-tech,
American dream victory of low-or-no U.S. casualties could be
turning into the same sort of grinding guerilla nightmare that
drove out the Russians twenty years ago.
On the deadliest day yet for U.S. troops
in Afghanistan, with at least eight killed and over forty wounded
, U.S. commanding General Tommy Franks made a Freudian slip as
he offered prayers for the families of those killed "in
our ongoing operations in Vietnam." The Afghani fighters
have a long tradition of being dangerous, deadly and resilient
foes. The Soviets were able to take over the cities of Afghanistan
very easily with the help of some internal friends but were chopped
up by guerilla tactics of Afghani fighters who ambushed them
from the crevices and caves in the mountains. As the killing
news kilters out-of-control how many innocent people will die
before we realize that war is wrong?.
Tom Turnipseed
is an attorney, writer and civil rights activist in Columbia,
South Carolina. http://www.turnipseed.net
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