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  The War in Context
     war on Iraq :: war on terrorism :: Middle East conflict :: critical perspectives
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MEMORIAL DAY FOOTNOTE - A SALUTE TO AMERICA'S CHICKENHAWKS!

Last week everyone had a chance to reflect on the sacrifices made by the thousands of Americans who in times past and present have travelled overseas to defend this country, so this week it only seems fitting that we pause again to reflect on the many warmongers inside and outside the current administration who couldn't find time for any military service of their own. They have appropriately been dubbed the Chickenhawks:

President George W Bush
Vice-President Dick Cheney
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz
Chairman of the Defense Policy Board Richard Perle
Attorney General John Ashcroft
National Security Council Member Elliot Abrams
White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card
White House Senior Advisor Karl Rove
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham
Solicitor General Ted Olson
Congressman Dick Armey
Congressman Tom DeLay
Senator Trent Lott
Senator Phil Gramm
Congressman Dennis Hastert

Together with a whole chicken farm with coops of honor for Bill Bennet, Britt Hume, William Kristol, Newt Gingrich, George Will, Frank Gaffney, Gary Bauer, Charleton Heston, and Geraldo Rivera, to name just a few.
[The complete Chickenhawk database]

Misplaced suspicions in our 'crooked' looks
Derrick Z. Jackson, Boston Globe, May 31, 2002

Our Muslim brothers and sisters, or people suspected of being Muslim, cannot go to a store, school, or give a graduation speech without seismic paranoia erupting around them.
[The complete article]

Post-9/11 Surge in public support of government reverses course
Brookings Institutution, May, 2002

Trust in government has been eroding since the 1960s. In the aftermath of September 11, however, this long-term trend was sharply reversed, with 57 percent of Americans saying that they trusted the federal government to do what is right just about always or most of the time. By May, this number had dropped 17 percentage points, to 40 percent.
[The complete article]

ISRAEL'S COLONIZATION OF THE WEST BANK CONTINUES UNABATED

Settlements expanding under Sharon

Daniel Williams, Washington Post, May 31, 2002

The government of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has steadily continued the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank during the 20-month-old conflict with the Palestinians, in which control of the land is a main point of contention.

In the past few months, Israeli settlement agencies and settler organizations have set up the nuclei of three dozen new settlements, according to two Israeli groups that monitor construction and oppose the program. A Western diplomat estimated the number at 40. The rolling West Bank landscape is dotted with more water towers, more electrical generators and more mobile homes inhabited by small clusters of armed Jewish settlers under Israeli army guard, the groups reported.

The continued colonization builds on a 30-year-old national project that has progressed without letup since Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan and the Gaza Strip from Egypt in the 1967 Middle East war. Land confiscations and construction have continued no matter who ruled the country -- coalitions of the left or right, cabinets in favor of or against peace talks.
[The complete article]

An erosion of civil liberties
Editorial, New York Times, May 31, 2002

Attorney General John Ashcroft has a gift for making the most draconian policy changes sound seductively innocuous. He was at it again yesterday, describing new domestic spying powers for the Federal Bureau of Investigation as nothing more than the authority to surf the Internet or attend a public gathering. That is profoundly misleading. In reality Mr. Ashcroft, in the name of fighting terrorism, was giving F.B.I. agents nearly unbridled power to poke into the affairs of anyone in the United States, even when there is no evidence of illegal activity.
[The complete article - registration required]

Beware of Bolton
Ian Williams, AlterNet, May 30, 2002

John Bolton, the Under Secretary of State for Disarmament Affairs and International Security, can get a lot done in one day. On May 6, in a speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation, he added Cuba, Syria and Libya to the administration's "axis of evil" hit list. That same day, Bolton sent a letter to the United Nations reversing President Clinton's decision to back the founding of the International Criminal Court.
[The complete article]

Washington's secrecy battles – from 9/11 to Enron
Daniel Schorr, Christian Science Monitor, May 31, 2002

The letter of Coleen Rowley, FBI agent in Minneapolis, bitterly complaining of the roadblocks that hampered the investigation of a leading terrorist suspect, is not only a severe embarrassment to the FBI. It also reopens the perennial issue of how much liberty to sacrifice in the interest of security.
[The complete article]

The September 11 X-Files
David Corn, The Nation, May 30, 2002

Out there--beyond newspaper conference rooms and Congressional offices--alternative scenarios and conspiracy theories have been zapping across the Internet for months. George W. Bush did it. The Mossad did it. The CIA did it. Or they purposely did not thwart the assault--either to have an excuse for war, to increase the military budget or to replace the Taliban with a government sympathetic to the West and the oil industry. The theories claim that secret agendas either caused the attacks or drove the post-9/11 response, and these dark accounts have found an audience of passionate devotees.
[The complete article]

This isn't posturing - we're on the brink of a nuclear war
Ahmed Rashid, The Telegraph, May 31, 2002

The 55-year dispute over Kashmir, a legacy of the partition of British India in 1947, has led to two wars, many crises, military mobilisations, threats and counter-threats, which have lulled the international community into believing that this is an oft-repeated shadow dance. In fact, never has the situation been so fraught with danger as it is now.
[The complete article]

Security assistance after September 11
Tamar Gabelnick, Federation of American Scientists, May, 2002

Among the countless repercussions from September 11 is a new rationale for doling out security assistance: the war on terrorism. Not since anticommunism was used to excuse the arming and training of repressive governments during the cold war has there been such a broad, fail-safe rationale to provide military aid and arms to disreputable foreign militaries. Already the largest weapons supplier in the world, the U.S. government is now providing arms and military training to an even wider group of states in the name of “homeland security.”
[The complete article]

Afghan warlord urges war vs. U.S.
Kathy Gannon, Associated Press, May 30, 2002

An Afghan warlord with links to Iran and Pakistan's powerful spy agency has called for a holy war against the United States and Britain and vowed to rally like-minded radicals, such as al-Qaida, under one banner to do battle.
[The complete article]

The most dangerous place in the world
Salman Rushdie, New York Times, May 30, 2002

Would a war between India and Pakistan, if it came, go nuclear?

Pakistan, with its suggestively timed missile tests, its refusal to adopt a policy of not being the first to use nuclear arms and its hawkish talk, is trying to give the impression that it would have no compunction about using its nuclear arsenal. India's military leadership has said that if attacked with nuclear bombs it would respond with maximum force and that in such a conflict India would sustain heavy damage but survive, whereas Pakistan would be destroyed utterly.

Is it really likely, however, that Pakistan would, so to speak, strap a nuclear weapon to its belly, walk into the crowded bazaar that is India and turn itself into the biggest suicide bomber in history?

Mr. Musharraf doesn't look like martyr material. Ah, but if he were losing a conventional war? If India's overwhelming numerical superiority on land, at sea and in the air won the day and Pakistan lost its prized Kashmiri land, would reason be swept aside? Worst of all, if Pakistani fury at a military defeat by India were to result in Mr. Musharraf's overthrow by Islamist hard-liners, Pakistan's nuclear warheads could fall into the hands of people for whom martyrdom is a higher goal than peace, people who value death more highly than life.
[The complete article - registration required]

To fight terror, FBI eases rules on domestic spying
Don Van Natta Jr., The New York Times (via IHT), May 30, 2002

‘‘These new guidelines say to the American people that you no longer have to be doing something wrong in order to get that FBI knock at your door,’’ Laura Murphy, director of the Washington national office of the ACLU, said Wednesday night. ‘‘The government is rewarding failure. It seems when the FBI fails, the response by the Bush administration is to give the bureau new powers, as opposed to seriously look at why the intelligence and law enforcement failures occurred.’’
Under the old surveillance guidelines, agents needed probable cause of a crime — or an informant’s information of a crime — to begin counterterrorism investigations. Under the new guidelines, agents will be free to search for leads or clues to terrorist activities in public databases or on the Internet.
[The complete article]

The confusion deepens over U.S. foreign policy
William Pfaff, International Herald Tribune, May 30, 2002

Bush's inability to control his own protégés in the war on terrorism undermines the administration's credibility. It lends weight to the accusation that U.S. policy in practice disrupts international order.
[The complete article]

Pakistan cannot expect the support of India's Muslims
M.J. Akbar, The Independent, May 30, 2002

A revealing but rarely revealed fact is that Muslims in the rest of India give no support whatsoever to the separatist insurgency in the Muslim-majority valley of Kashmir, that charming bit of paradise that could yet trigger off history's first nuclear war. At this moment, according to reliable reports, there could be as many as 3,000 armed and trained jihadis ready to combat the Indian army – but not one of them is a Muslim from elsewhere in India.
[The complete article]

Fresh memories of war
Kandea Mosley, Ithica Journal, May 25, 2002

In an April interview with The Ithaca Journal at his family's Cayuga Heights home, Guckenheimer, 22, shared his experiences during Operation Anaconda. He was sent on March 6 in a company of more than 100 soldiers to participate in the largest U.S.-led ground engagement in Eastern Afghanistan. "We were told there were no friendly forces," said Guckenheimer, an assistant gunner with the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum. "If there was anybody there, they were the enemy. We were told specifically that if there were women and children to kill them."
[The complete article]

Nightmares of reason
Sorting fact from fiction in 9/11 conspiracy theories

Salim Muwakkil, In These Times, May 24, 2002

Has Rep. Cynthia McKinney been vindicated? On a Berkeley radio station in March, the Georgia Democrat called for a congressional investigation of the Bush administration, asking, “What did this administration know, and when did it know it?”

“What do they have do hide?” she asked KPFA’s Dennis Bernstein in that March 25 interview. “We know there were numerous warnings of the events to come on September 11.” The congresswoman was widely vilified in the national media for such statements. But in light of information that the White House had been repeatedly warned of terrorist threats before 9/11, McKinney’s questions have become among the most asked questions in the nation.
[The complete article]

Journalism should never yield to ‘patriotism’
Robert Jensen, Newsday, May 29, 2002

What if a war violates international law or is prosecuted using immoral tactics? Nations - including ours - are not benevolent institutions, and U.S. history is replete with inhumane acts. If patriotism requires we support such acts, then patriotism becomes inhumane. An alternative, kinder-and-gentler patriotism is offered by others, especially war opponents: patriotism not as reflexive support for a policy or leader, but allegiance to American ideals of freedom and democracy.
[The complete article]

Wake-up call
Henry Porter, The Guardian, May 29, 2002

Since September 11 the world has changed dramatically and in ways that we have so far yet to understand. If India and Pakistan had come to this pass last summer there would have been a far greater diplomatic effort to bring the nations to their senses. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan would have been shuttling between Islamabad and Delhi or standing on the border in Kashmir (which incidentally is where I believe he should be now), and America would have been galvanised by the crisis, putting its full might into making sure that these two countries understood that the nuclear option is unacceptable to the whole of humanity.

But since 9/11 the processes of conflict resolution have been diminished and the norms of international behaviour have been degraded. Al-Qaida's attacks not only terrorised the west, they also coarsened us and narrowed our ability to engage in a pro bono diplomacy. While Pakistan and India were mobilising these past few days, the Bush administration has been completely diverted by the president's tour of Russia and Europe and the continuing agenda of how to respond to the threat of al-Qaida.

Every emergency and every event is now passed through a new and dangerously egotistical filter that was erected by the Americans last autumn and is designed to see events exclusively in the context of American security and peace of mind.
[The complete article]

Patriot Act's supposed justification is gone
Peter Erlinder, Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, May 22, 2002

The storm of questions and criticism following revelations that the Bush administration had numerous warnings of an impending hijacking before the Sept. 11 tragedy have focused primarily on the Nixon-era mantra, "What did he know, and when did he know it?" But even if a congressional investigation agrees with Bush administration protestations that the warnings weren't specific enough to know what to do, administration policy after Sept. 11 is going to require some explaining, too.
[The complete article]

WHO HAS THE POWER TO PREVENT TERRORISM?

COMMENT -- As suicide bombers continue slaughtering innocent civilians, the US-Israeli line continues to be that the Palestinian Authority bears responsibility. No one cares to explain, however, how it is that the Palestinian Authority, with its infrastructure in ruins, should be more effective in preventing terrorism than the vastly more powerful Israeli Defense Force. When will the failure be seen for what it is - a failure in Israel's security policy?

Palestinian Authority engaged in campaign against suicide attacks
Danny Rubinstein, Ha'aretz, May 29, 2002

It is difficult to accept the claims of many in Israel that Arafat and his men are following a two-faced policy and are actually encouraging suicide attacks. It is more reasonable to assume that the Palestinian leadership does not actually have the power to stop these murderous acts as the man in the street does not heed the PA's calls anyway.
[The complete article]

An open letter to Senate Majority Leader, Tom Daschle
May 28, 2002

Dear Senator Daschle,

When Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act on October 25th, the American people were told that law enforcement and the intelligence agencies were being given new surveillance powers that would be indispensable in the fight against terrorism.

It now appears that prior to September 11th, the FBI, even though they lacked these new powers, had successfully gathered information that could have played a critical role in averting the attacks. In light of this, it is important that an inquiry examining intelligence failures prior to September 11th also has the scope to investigate the actions of the Justice Department while they helped draft the USA PATRIOT Act.

It is possible that the Attorney General or other officials in the Justice Department purposely withheld information relating to pre-9-11 FBI inquiries, specifically in order to reinforce the argument that law enforcement and the intelligence agencies had thus far lacked adequate surveillance powers for combating terrorism. If this is the case, Congress and the public were seriously mislead.

I encourage you and fellow members of Congress to support all efforts for a comprehensive and thorough inquiry.

Yours sincerely,
Paul Woodward

Pakistan's stark warning
Rory McCarthy, Luke Harding and John Hooper, The Guardian, May 28, 2002

Pakistan's president, General Pervez Musharraf, last night defied intense international pressure to defuse the crisis in Kashmir when he used a nationwide speech to champion the cause of Islamic militants and warn that his army would "shed the last drop of blood" to defend his nation.
[The complete article]

Amnesty Internernational criticizes U.S. on detainee policy
Karen DeYoung, Washington Post, May 28, 2002

U.S. moral authority to criticize human rights abuses abroad has been undermined by the Bush administration's failure to guarantee the rights of foreigners detained in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and its "selective adherence" to international law, Amnesty International charged in a report to be released today.
[The complete article]

No trade off between human rights and security
[Summary of Amnesty's Report]

A raid enrages Afghan villagers
Carlotta Gall, New York Times, May 27, 2002

An airborne assault on this village by United States-led troops three nights ago has raised anti-American fury among villagers, who say soldiers shot several people, killed the headman of the village and caused a 3-year-old girl to flee and fall to her death down a well. About 50 men were arrested and taken away in helicopters, they said. The anger and shock were evident today in the village. Women and children wailed as two journalists visited with local district officials. The grandfather of the dead girl lunged at the visitors, tearing at his clothes and throwing himself on the ground in distress. "They took my sons and they took my money. Only my wife and I are left in the house. We are crying all day," the man, Abdul Ali, 60, said. "It was dark, the little girl didn't know where she was running," he said of his granddaughter. As with two other recent raids aimed at suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda hideouts in southern Afghanistan, this one apparently failed to net any senior figures.
[The complete article - registration required]

Old foes India and Pakistan inch ever closer to nuclear war
Eric Margolis, Toronto Sun, May 26, 2002

The world is now facing the most dangerous nuclear confrontation since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Yet in the West [i.e. North America - Europe is paying more attention] there is little media attention to this enormous threat, and almost no public interest or concern. The crisis over Kashmir might as well be on Jupiter. The discovery of the body of a long-missing female intern in Washington has totally eclipsed news of a possible nuclear war in South Asia that could kill tens of millions and contaminate the entire globe with clouds of radioactive dust.
[The complete article]

Missed messages
Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker, May 27, 2002

What the President knew and when he knew it may not be the relevant question... No one in Washington seriously contends that the President or any of his senior advisers had any reason to suspect that terrorists were about to fly hijacked airplanes into buildings. A more useful question concerns the degree to which Al Qaeda owed its success to the weakness of the F.B.I. and the agency's chronic inability to synthesize intelligence reports, draw conclusions, and work with other agencies. These failings, it turns out, were evident long before George Bush took office. Neither the F.B.I. nor America's other intelligence agencies have effectively addressed what may be the most important challenge of September 11th: How does an open society deal with warnings of future terrorism? The Al Qaeda terrorists were there to be seen, but there was no system for seeing them.
[The complete article]

Thanks for the heads-up
Frank Rich, New York Times, May 25, 2002

Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ridge, Mueller. Is there anyone who has not warned us of Armageddon over the past week? As far as I can tell, the only slacker in this White House game of Wag the Dog is Spot.

You don't have to be a cynic to believe that the point of the warnings is not to save lives so much as political hides. After all, we can't go about our daily business much differently just because of these dire pronouncements. Nor have they budged the Homeland Security Office's color-coded "threat level" from its weaselly yellow. What this orchestrated chorus of Cassandras can do is guarantee that we duly credit the Bush administration for giving us a heads-up should disaster strike between now and Election Day 2004. Not so incidentally, the new warnings also help facilitate our amnesia about the fracas over how low a priority Al Qaeda was for the White House before Sept. 11.
[The complete article - registration required]

CIVIL LIBERTIES

COMMENT -- As it becomes increasingly clear that the FBI's failure to avert the September 11 attacks did not result from a lack of investigative powers, it's worth paying close attention to all those additional powers that, post 9-11, Ashcroft and his cohorts argued would be indispenisable in the fight against terrorism.

The FBI's Magic Lantern
Ashcroft can be in your computer

Nat Hentoff, Village Voice, May 24, 2002

Beware of "The Magic Lantern." Under the "sneak and peek" provision of the USA Patriot Act, pushed through Congress by John Ashcroft, the FBI, with a warrant, can break into your home and office when you're not there and, on the first trip, look around. They can examine your hard drive, snatch files, and plant the Magic Lantern on your computer. It's also known as the "sniffer keystroke logger."
[The complete article]

Militants in Pakistan have roots in military
Howard W. French, New York Times, May 27, 2002

For more than 20 years, the Pakistani government has used Islamic radicals as an instrument of both domestic and foreign policy. Now, many Pakistani security experts said they doubt the government has the will or the means to neutralize what has become a huge network of violence.
[The complete article]

Coleen Rowley's memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller
Time, May 21, 2002

I have deep concerns that a delicate and subtle shading/skewing of facts by you and others at the highest levels of FBI management has occurred and is occurring.
[The memo - edited]

Between India and Pakistan, a changing role for the U.S.
Steve Coll, Washington Post, May 26, 2002

September 11 and its aftermath have altered South Asia as profoundly as did the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Among other things, the U.S.-led war on terror provides the dominant language of Indo-Pakistani rivalry. American power -- on display in the thousands of U.S. troops now spread across Central and South Asia -- has become the pivotal factor in war-or-peace decisions in New Delhi and Islamabad. The role of American mediation also has been recast; Washington's massive new investments in the region have made the United States not just a broker, but a principal.
[The complete article]

The scariest show on earth
Peter Popham, The Independent, May 26, 2002

There are two reasons why the present stand-off is more dangerous than previous crises between the feuding neighbours [India and Pakistan]. One is the growing sophistication of the nuclear potential on both sides: yesterday, Pakistan embarked upon a series of missile tests, firing its medium-range Ghauri missile, which can carry either a nuclear or a conventional warhead. It flew 900 miles and, the Pakistani authorities claimed, accurately hit its allotted target. Its nuclear-capable Shaheen-II missile has a range of nearly 1,600 miles that would enable it to hit almost any Indian city. The other reason is the process of disaffection of Islamic hardliners in Pakistan from President Musharraf, which began soon after he seized power in 1999 and accelerated when he threw his weight behind President Bush's war on terror. It has reached the point where the hardliners would be happy to see Musharraf embroiled in a disastrous war.
[The complete article]

America can persuade Israel to make a just peace
Jimmy Carter, SojoNet, May 23, 2002

In January 1996, with full support from Israel and responding to the invitation of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the Carter Center helped to monitor a democratic election in the West Bank and Gaza, which was well organized, open, and fair. In that election, 88 members were elected to the Palestinian National Authority, with Yasir Arafat as president. Legally and practically, the Palestinian people were encouraged to form their own government, with the expectation that they would soon have full sovereignty as a state.

When the election was over, I made a strong effort to persuade the leaders of Hamas to accept the election results, with Mr. Arafat as their leader. I relayed a message offering them full participation in the process of developing a permanent constitutional framework for the new political entity, but they refused to accept this proposal. Despite this rejection, it was a time of peace and hope, and there was no threat of violence or even peaceful demonstrations. The legal status of the Palestinian people has not changed since then, but their plight has grown desperate.

Ariel Sharon is a strong and forceful man and has never equivocated in his public declarations nor deviated from his ultimate purpose. His rejection of all peace agreements that included Israeli withdrawal from Arab lands, his invasion of Lebanon, his provocative visit to the Temple Mount, the destruction of villages and homes, the arrests of thousands of Palestinians, and his open defiance of President George W. Bush's demand that he comply with international law have all been orchestrated to accomplish his ultimate goals: to establish Israeli settlements as widely as possible throughout occupied territories and to deny Palestinians a cohesive political existence.

There is adequate blame on the other side. Even when he was free and enjoying the full trappings of political power, Yasir Arafat never exerted control over Hamas and other radical Palestinians who reject the concept of a peaceful Israeli existence and adopt any means to accomplish their goal. Mr. Arafat's all-too-rare denunciations of violence have been spasmodic, often expressed only in English and likely insincere. He may well see the suicide attacks as one of the few ways to retaliate against his tormentors, to dramatize the suffering of his people, or as a means for him, vicariously, to be a martyr....

[But] with the ready and potentially unanimous backing of the international community, the United States government can bring about a solution to the existing imbroglio. Demands on both sides should be so patently fair and balanced that at least a majority of citizens in the affected area will respond with approval, and an international force can monitor compliance with agreed peace terms, as was approved for the Sinai region in 1979 following Israel's withdrawal from Egyptian territory.

There are two existing factors that offer success to United States persuasion. One is the legal requirement that American weapons are to be used by Israel only for defensive purposes, a premise certainly being violated in the recent destruction of Jenin and other villages. Richard Nixon imposed this requirement to stop Ariel Sharon and Israel's military advance into Egypt in the 1973 war, and I used the same demand to deter Israeli attacks on Lebanon in 1979. (A full invasion was launched by Ariel Sharon after I left office). The other persuasive factor is approximately $10 million daily in American aid to Israel. President George Bush Sr. threatened this assistance in 1992 to prevent the building of Israeli settlements between Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

I understand the extreme political sensitivity in America of using persuasion on the Israelis, but it is important to remember that none of the actions toward peace would involve an encroachment on the sovereign territory of Israel. They all involve lands of the Egyptians, Lebanese, and Palestinians, as recognized by international law.

The existing situation is tragic and likely to get worse. Normal diplomatic efforts have failed. It is time for the United States, as the sole recognized intermediary, to consider more forceful action for peace. The rest of the world will welcome this leadership.

Will the circle be unbroken?
Gideon Levy, Ha'aretz, May 26, 2002

It is difficult to believe that the Israelis, who are renowned for their resourcefulness and ability to improvise, their initiative and creativity, are stunned into inaction in the face of the greatest threat ever posed to their routine way of life. The use of force has been completely exhausted - Israel will not be able to increase significantly the scale of the force it has already utilized - and nothing has been accomplished, yet no one asks, in the face of the terrorism that is constantly intensifying its murderous methods, whether the entire course of action is not fundamentally flawed.

There is no magic cure for terrorism, and nothing will bring about its instant cessation. However, there are measures that spur it and others that can weaken it. Israel's current policy is bringing about the exacerbation of terrorism and is not giving the Palestinians much reason to put a stop to it.
[The complete article]

The tinderbox called Kashmir
Adil Najam, Boston Globe, May 25, 2002

[India's] hawks see this as a moment of opportunity when they can sneak behind the cover of the global war on terrorism. Their belief is that as long as Delhi can disguise the dispute as a threat of ''Islamic terrorism,'' the United States will have to look the other way. The problem is that the choice to keep the war ''limited'' is not India's alone. Since Sept. 11, General Pervez Musharraf's attempts to cleanse the military and intelligence establishments of religious zealots have won him many friends but have also created many enemies. Given the public's mood, the military's patience, and his own disposition, he cannot be seen as weak on Kashmir. To do so would be to validate all that the religious extremists have been saying. War histrionics from India provide the Islamic extremist fringe the ammunition they need: a rallying cry to help them regroup, recruit, and retaliate. Doing so would undermine the measures Musharraf has been taking and also the larger global war on terrorism. In short, domestic conditions in both India and Pakistan are ripe for escalation. For the sake of its own sanity, the rest of the world must not allow things to spiral out of control.
[The complete article]

FBI culture blamed for missteps on Moussaoui
Agent says 'climate of fear' hurt probe

Bill Miller and Dan Eggen, Washington Post, May 25, 2002

Rowley asserted in her letter [to FBI Director, Robert Mueller] that Minneapolis field agents could have obtained a search warrant for Moussaoui's computer if headquarters had told them about the Phoenix memo. But FBI staff there resisted trying to obtain search warrants and scolded agents for seeking last-minute help from the CIA, she alleged, according to sources. She wrote that resistance to requests from Minneapolis was so fierce that agents there joked that Osama bin Laden must have infiltrated FBI headquarters.
[The complete article]

The training-wheel President
Robert Parry, Consortiumnews, May 20, 2002

Bush has rarely been treated like a national leader who should be held to account for mistakes and misdeeds. It's as if major news outlets are set on treating Bush like a toddler wobbling off on a two-wheel bike kept aright by training wheels, with an adult hand at his back and only upbeat words of encouragement in his ears.
[The complete article]

There is a firestorm coming, and it is being provoked by Mr Bush
Robert Fisk, The Independent, May 25, 2002

So now Osama bin Laden is Hitler. And Saddam Hussein is Hitler. And George Bush is fighting the Nazis. Not since Menachem Begin fantasised to President Reagan that he felt he was attacking Hitler in Berlin – his Israeli army was actually besieging Beirut, killing thousands of civilians, "Hitler" being the pathetic Arafat – have we had to listen to claptrap like this.
[The complete article]

Here in the age of fanaticism
H.D.S. Greenway, Boston Globe, May 24, 2002

The age of religious fanaticism is destined to cast its shadow deep into the 21st century.
[The complete article]

Terror trail leads from Kabul to Kashmir
Navnita Chadha Behera, Asia Times, May 24, 2002

What the Bush team appears not to have understood is that Kashmir and Kabul are closely knitted together, partly through the tangled web of terrorist networks in the region and partly due to Pakistan's - its frontline ally - vital national interests at stake in Kashmir, which it seeks to protect precisely through the instrument of jihadi groups. Washington's al-Qaeda-first policy overlooks the ground reality that al-Qaeda thrives on a vast, deeply entrenched and integrated jihadi infrastructure that straddles the Afghanistan and Pakistan borders. This network includes more than 50 Pakistan-based radical groups who share deep bonds of an Islamic ideology, common political targets - the United States, India and Israel - training facilities and resources. These groups, unlike states, operate from a radically different frame of reference and are not predisposed to making rational calculations of the kind the West understands. They are unlikely to emulate the Musharraf regime and abandon al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
[The complete article]

Axing the tough questions
Brendan Nyhan, Spinsanity, May 21, 2002

Since the story broke Thursday that President Bush received a general warning before Sept. 11 of possible hijackings, Democrats have been asking tough but fair questions about information the government had prior to the attack. Many Republicans and conservative pundits, however, have claimed such questions amount to suggesting that Bush had knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks and failed to prevent them. This is only the latest example of GOP officials and their supporters in the media using bombastic, anti-democratic rhetoric to shut down debate on any issue related to the war. Whenever serious questions have been raised, this Republican-pundit alliance has launched a massive and aggressive counteroffensive to silence critics -- with grave implications for open debate about the war on terrorism.
[The complete article]

The Israel lobby
Michael Massing, The Nation, June 10, 2002

On May 2 the Senate, in a vote of 94 to 2, and the House, 352 to 21, expressed unqualified support for Israel in its recent military actions against the Palestinians. The resolutions were so strong that the Bush Administration--hardly a slouch when it comes to supporting Israel--attempted to soften its language so as to have more room in getting peace talks going. But its pleas were rejected, and members of Congress from Joe Lieberman to Tom DeLay competed to heap praise on Ariel Sharon and disdain on Yasir Arafat. Reporting on the vote, the New York Times noted that one of the few dissenters, Senator Ernest Hollings of South Carolina, "suggested that many senators were after campaign contributions." Aside from that brief reference, however, the Times made no mention of the role that money, or lobbying in general, may have played in the lopsided vote.
[The complete article]

Was Barak telling the truth?
Yoav Peled, The Guardian, May 24, 2002

Astute observers of Israeli politics have been wondering, ever since Ehud Barak was elected prime minister in 1999, whether his "peace offensive" was a real effort to achieve peace with Israel's neighbours or only an attempt to "expose" the Arabs' intention of destroying Israel
[The complete article]

Arafat didn't negotiate - he just kept saying no
[The Barak interview]

Kashmir and terrorism aren't the problem, it's the bomb
Martin Woollacott, The Guardian, May 24, 2002

Four years ago this month, nuclear explosions in the Rajasthan desert and in the Baluchistan mountains ended the long period in which India and Pakistan had unwisely acquired nuclear military capacity but had nevertheless been wise enough to refrain from translating it into actual weapons. The blasts at Pokharan and Chagai changed the terms of war and peace in the subcontinent, and in the world.
[The complete article]

IS THE FIGHT AGAINST TERRORISM ABOUT TO GO NUCLEAR?

COMMENT -- Donald Rumsfeld says we should expect terrorists to try and use nuclear weapons, but the most immediate risk of a nuclear strike against civilians is posed by two governments both of which are US allies in the war on terror.

When George Bush launched his war on terrorism he also armed every bellicose leader around the world with rhetoric that would later be used to disarm American criticism. As India and Pakistan each make competing claims to be fighting against terrorism, Western diplomats have the unenviable task of counselling restraint on the sub-continent while US hawks simultaneously push for war against Iraq. The Indians are likely to say, "If you don't show restraint, why should we?"

Looking into the nuclear abyss
Sultan Shahin, Asia Times, May 24, 2002

How should one interpret Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee telling a group of his soldiers in Kupwara, Kashmir from a million-strong battle-ready army amassed at the borders of Pakistan at a time when every possible logistical preparation has been made for war: “Get ready for making supreme sacrifices in a decisive war. We are going to achieve a historic victory”? The real strongman of his party, Home Minister Lal Krishan Advani, had said a day earlier, “We are going to win a decisive victory as in 1971.”

Former premier Inder Kumar Gujral dismisses Vajpayee’s speech made on Wednesday just 25 kilometers from the Line of Control that separates the Indian and Pakistan-administered sections of Kashmir as political rhetoric. He thinks it should not be taken seriously. He is a politician; he should know.

Vice-Admiral K K Nayar, a member of the national security advisory board says, "No prime minister uses rhetoric while talking to his soldiers. Vajpayee’s statement should be taken very seriously.” He is a soldier; he should know.

The question is significant for the billion-plus frightened citizens of the South Asian sub-continent. The military rulers of Pakistan, too, will be trying to interpret this statement. Being soldiers, they would probably think like soldiers and opt for a soldier’s interpretation.

And the Pakistani response did not take long. A senior minister and former Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) chief, Javed Asharaf Qazi, said on Wednesday that his country would exercise the nuclear option if its survival was put at stake. Echoing what his boss, President General Pervez Musharraf has said before, he commented, "If it ever comes to annihilation of Pakistan, then what is this nuclear option for? We will use it against the enemy."
[The complete article]

Indian Prime Minister urges troops into battle
Luke Harding, The Guardian, May 23, 2002

India's prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee yesterday gave his strongest hint yet that a war with Pakistan is imminent when he told an audience of Indian soldiers during a tour of the Kashmir frontline that the time for a "decisive battle" against Islamic militants had arrived. In an ominous departure from his normally cautious language, Mr Vajpayee told 600 troops sitting cross-legged in a field that they should be ready for sacrifice. "Your goal should be victory. It's time to fight a decisive battle," he said, during a trip to frontline positions in Kupwara, northern Kashmir.
[The complete article]

George W. Bush should learn the lessons of history
Jonathan Alter, MSNBC, May 18, 2002

The terrorist attacks aren’t the “fault” of anyone except the terrorists. But that hardly excuses what until now has been an astonishing lack of interest in who was asleep at the switch. By contrast, the last sneak attack stirred immediate interest in that question. On the evening of Dec. 7, 1941, Navy Secretary Frank Knox called President Franklin Roosevelt to ask permission to go to Pearl Harbor to begin learning “why the Japanese had caught U.S. forces unprepared.” By Dec. 15—with the nation now fighting both Japan and Germany—Knox returned to report that the United States was “not on the alert.”
[The complete article]

State Dept. report: Weakening of Palestinian Authority increased attacks on Israel
Nathan Guttman, Ha'aretz, May 23, 2002

The U.S. State Department on Tuesday said that Israel had made Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority less effective by destroying its security infrastructure, and it absolved Arafat and his senior associates of responsibility for attacks on Israelis in 2001.
[The complete article]

Phoenix FBI agent's report in July "was very specific. It named names"
Eric Lichtblau and Josh Meyer, Los Angeles Times, May 23, 2002

A Phoenix FBI agent who wrote a memo last year warning about suspicious Middle Easterners at flight schools had developed detailed information before Sept. 11 linking Arizona students to Osama bin Laden and to a radical British Islamic group, and he shared some of his concerns with the CIA, law enforcement sources said Wednesday.
[The complete article]

Doubts on Iraq plan kept quiet
Alex Johnson and Jim Miklaszewski, NBC, May 22, 2002

Senior military officials have serious doubts about the wisdom of a U.S. invasion of Iraq, but their concerns have not been passed on to civilian leaders because of the Bush administration’s determination to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
[The complete article]

Ever bigger FBI flails at the enemy within
James Ridgeway, Village Voice, May 22, 2002

With Vice President Dick Cheney proclaiming the certainty of a new attack of some sort, somewhere, at some time, we are once again at the mercy of President Bush's main terror-busters in the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The modern FBI was built by J. Edgar Hoover not on a record of solving crimes but with the steady accretion of a bureaucracy designed to combat Hoover's favorite adversary, the enemy within—one secretive criminal conspiracy after another. As such, it's no match for a sophisticated, well-financed network of highly trained international terrorists.
[The complete article]

Probe deep, and fairly
Senator John McCain, Washington Post, May 22, 2002

The government of the United States, which [President Bush and Vice-President Cheney] now have the privilege of leading, failed the American people in the weeks, months and years leading up to Sept. 11. The Sept. 11 attacks were incredibly depraved but not, as it turns out, unimaginable.
[The complete article]

Hekmatyar loyalists on the warpath
Supporters of the Afghan warlord say they are ready to launch a holy war against the Americans

Fazal Malik, IWPR, May 20, 2002

In the sprawling Shamshatoo refugee camp on the outskirts of the Pakistani city of Peshawar, the supporters of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar remember when US aid flowed to the militant Islamic leader to fuel his 1980s battle with the Soviet invaders of Afghanistan. Now, despite the distrust many Afghans have felt since Hekmatyar helped reduce the Afghan capital to rubble during a 1992-96 power- struggle between the mujahedin factions, his backers are furious with the US, as they believe it wants him dead.
[The complete article]

Unnoticed Nablus may have taken West Bank's worst hit
Edward Cody, Washington Post, May 21, 2002

In the tight little alleys of central Nablus, a maze of hole-in-the-wall shops and ancient homes cloistered behind stone walls, a deadly, destructive but largely unheralded battle took place last month. As the city starts to dig out and assess the damage to families, homes and archaeological sites, Palestinian officials, human rights investigators and aid groups have begun to conclude that Nablus was the hardest-hit of all the West Bank cities attacked by Israeli forces during Operation Protective Shield.
[The complete article]

Too little, too late
Kashmir could become the world's most dangerous region - and the west's lack of interest is partly to blame

Luke Harding, The Guardian, May 22, 2002

Since last autumn, the US and Britain have struck up a shamelessly expedient friendship with Pakistan's suave military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf, their ally in the battle against al-Qaida. They have chosen to overlook the fact that Gen Musharraf has continued to allow Pakistan-based militants to creep across the border into Indian Kashmir, despite his promises of tough action against "terrorists".

The west's disengagement from Kashmir and, as India sees it, its double standards on terrorism have brought the region to the brink of crisis. India claims Gen Musharraf has "suckered" the international community, by promising to rein in the jihadis while privately encouraging them. It has a point. In January Gen Musharraf locked up several thousand Islamist extremists. The following month he let most of them go.
[The complete article]

Get real and get your own house in order!

An investigation into who knew what and when did they know it, might satisfy those of us who already suspect that America is being run by a bunch of incompetent opportunists. But let's face it, it'll be months before some damning 5000-page report comes out. In the meantime, another war will have been launched against Iraq, the average American will have lost interest in the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Afghanistan will have been forgotten, and if terrorists have struck on US soil yet again, the country will firmly be back in its united-we-stand mode. The best thing we can do while much of the American media and public have just rediscovered the power of skepticism, is to question the whole rationale for a war on terrorism.

Last week, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer attempted to paint a picture of a pre-9/11 government and its intelligence organizations in hot pursuit of al Qaeda, yet thwarted in their valiant efforts by a lack of clear leads. To assure us that there weren't any slackers in the White House, Fleischer referred to the "national security presidential directive", finalized on September 10th. This "was a comprehensive, multifront plan to dismantle the al Qaeda. It involved a direction to the Pentagon to develop military options for the dismantling of al Qaeda. It involved action on the financial front to dry up their resources. And it also involved working with [...] the Northern Alliance, in an attempt to dismantle the al Qaeda." The CIA, the Department of Defense, the Department of State, and the National Security Council were the authors of this plan. The Los Angeles Times reported that the price tag on this operation was a modest $200 million. Ten days later, when President Bush presented to Congress his plan for a war on terror, its expanded goal was that "every terrorist group of global reach [must be] found, stopped and defeated." Al Qaeda, however, remained the primary target. The price for this expanded operation had leapt two hundredfold to $40 billion, and that was just a down payment.

Here we are eight months later, $17 billion already spent on a war in Afghanistan, the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and most of the leading members of al Qaeda still unknown, the threat of terrorist attacks in the US ever present, India and Pakistan, embroiled in their own version of a war on terror, poised at the edge of a nuclear abyss and post-Taliban Afghanistan drifting back towards pre-Taliban warlordism.

Now although none of the key players in Washington are willing to engage in "what if" speculations, for the rest of us some speculation may not only satisfy a natural impulse, but it may also serve as a reality check that exposes the flaws in current policy.

Suppose the now famous "Phoenix memo" from FBI agent Kenneth Williams had promptly filtered up the appropriate channels of the FBI and Justice Department and that the subsequent arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui had then resulted in the unraveling of the whole hijacking conspiracy. It's really easy to imagine this having happened. News reports on this counter-terrorism success might have cited parallels to Ramzi Yousef's 1995 plan to blow up eleven U.S. commercial aircraft in a one-day terrorist blitzkrieg. FBI director Robert Mueller would have applauded his agents and told the public that we had again received a salutary lesson about the continued threat posed by al Qaeda. By mid-September, without fanfare, the national security presidential directive would have been signed and the CIA would have launched its covert operation to dismantle al Qaeda. In this scenario, the al Qaeda that might have been dismantled through a $200 million covert operation is the very same al Qaeda that (with 19 fewer members) after September 11th could only be thwarted through a $40 billion "war on terrorism."

If we consider this wholly plausible scenario and ask why it didn't happen this way, the answer clearly has nothing to do with FBI or CIA analysts lacking a capacity to imagine evil being perpetrated on a grand scale. After all, before Kenneth Williams speculated about an al Qaeda attack on New York, Ramzi Yousef had already described in chilling detail his objectives in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. His stated intention had been to send the city's tallest tower crashing onto its twin, amid a cloud of cyanide gas, killing tens of thousands of Americans in the process. In a similarly dramatic scenario Algerian terrorists had talked about flying a passenger jet into the Eiffel Tower. A 1994 report for the Pentagon had described the risk of terrorists flying an explosive-filled plane into the Pentagon or the White House.

The failures in August and September sprang not from the limits of imagination but from the operations of dysfunctional and competitive intelligence organizations whose problems were sustained and exacerbated by government officials and political leaders plagued by a chronic fear of assigning blame or accepting responsibility. After September 11th, instead of being provided with an explanation about how the attacks had been allowed to happen, the American people were sold a solution, a so-called "war on terrorism" that was nothing more than a $40 billion smokescreen. Its proponents believed that patriotism and sustained fear would short-circuit every criticism and silence all appeals to understand the failure of US intelligence.

As we move through the ninth month of the campaign against terrorism, the Vice-President having risen from his bunker to make emergency talk show appearances, warns everyone that more attacks are a near certainty. At the same time, the Director of Homeland Security keeps the nation on "yellow alert" with periodic vague warnings, the Director of the FBI warns of the inevitability of suicide bombings, who knows where, who knows when, and the Secretary of Defense warns that terrorist states will engage in nuclear blackmail. There's a name for what they are doing and it's not called "fighting the war on terrorism." It's called fear-mongering and covering your ass.

President Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and their cohorts might presently want to hang their fortunes on the argument that the government and its agencies are no more powerful than their imaginations, but if this is really what they believe, the effectiveness of their "war on terrorism" should not now be our only concern. How many other, perhaps even greater failures can we expect to be excused because our leaders claim that they or their staff "couldn't imagine"? The idea of a missile defense shield captured Ronald Reagan's fanciful imagination. If it now gets built and some day fails, will its vulnerabilities then be attributed to another even greater failure of the imagination?

When those who already failed to prevent the worst ever act of terrorism still claim that they can lead a campaign to eradicate terrorism, it's time for their paymasters, the American taxpayers, to stand up and shout, get real and get your own house in order!

© Paul Woodward, 2002 -- contact paulswo@yahoo.com

America the fearful
James Carroll, Boston Globe, May 21, 2002

The ''war on terrorism'' has strengthened the hand of those who hate America. The US example of ''overwhelming force'' has pushed the Middle East into the abyss and has dragged India-Pakistan to its edge. The only real protections against cross-border terrorism are international structures of criminal justice like the recently established International Criminal Court, yet an ''unsigning'' United States slaps the court down with contempt.
[The complete article]

The U.S. ignored foreign warnings, too
John Cooley, International Herald Tribune, May 21, 2002

When the hubbub about what the White House did or didn't know before Sept. 11 dies down, Congressional or other investigators should consider the specific warnings that friendly Arab intelligence services sent to Washington in the summer of 2001.
[The complete article]

Bush's little secret
David Corn, The Nation, May 20, 2002

By the way, we, uh, forgot to mention, that in August of 2001, while the President was taking a long vacation at his ranch in Crawford, the CIA told him that, uh, Osama bin Laden might be planning to hijack an airliner as part of some, who-knows-what terrorist action against the United States.
[The complete article]

What went wrong
Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff, Newsweek, May 27, 2002

Because Bush has long insisted he had no inkling of the attacks, the disclosures touched off a media stampede in a capital long deprived of scandal. The fact that the nation’s popular war president might have been warned a little over a month before September 11—and that the supposedly straight-talking Bushies hadn’t told anyone about it—opened up a serious credibility gap for the first time in the war on terror.

There were, in fact, failures at every level that summer: from the shortcomings in the law-enforcement trenches—the FBI’s poor record at domestic surveillance, the CIA’s poor record at infiltrating Islamic groups and the lack of cooperation between the two agencies—to the fixed strategic mind-set of the Bush administration. Between the claims by the FBI and CIA that they didn’t get enough information and the White House’s insistence that it didn’t receive any reports—”He doesn’t recall seeing anything,” Rice said when asked if Bush had read the Phoenix memo—the buck seems to be stopping nowhere. “If I were an average citizen, I’d be pissed at the whole American government,” says a senior official who has worked on counterterrorism.
[The complete article]

Bush's selective distaste for dictators
Laocoön, TomPaine.com, May 16,2002

Demand freedom in Malaysia and you're likely to wind up in prison and, no, George W. Bush won't be standing with you. He's standing instead with Dr. Mahathir, a repressive bigot who is another of our new best friends in the War on Terrorism.
[The complete article]

Ashcroft drawn into row over September 11
Julian Borger, The Guardian, May 21, 2002

The row about whether the September 11 attacks could have been averted has begun to focus on the US attorney general, who is accused of playing down the terrorist threat in the first months of the Bush administration. Since the attacks on New York and Washington, John Ashcroft has been criticised for rounding up more than 1,000 people on suspicion of being connected to al-Qaida. Many were held for months, despite a alack of credible evidence. He has accused his critics of undermining the fight against terrorism. But it is becoming clear that before September 11 he had little interest in counter-terrorism, and diverted resources from measures to prevent terrorism towards those aimed at more traditional targets, such as drugs and child pornography. In the late 90s the threat of a terrorist attack on US soil became a near obsession in the Clinton administration, particularly in the justice department under Janet Reno. But her successor had other ideas. On September 10 last year, the last day of what is now seen as a bygone age of innocence, Mr Ashcroft sent a request for budget increases to the White House. It covered 68 programmes, none of them related to counter-terrorism. He also sent a memorandum to his heads of departments, stating his seven priorities. Counter-terrorism was not on the list. He turned down an FBI request for hundreds more agents to be assigned to tracking terrorist threats.
[The complete article]

BUSH WON'T LISTEN TO HIS FOES, BUT WILL HE IGNORE HIS FRIENDS?

The Weekly Standard's neocon editors are arch supporters (even co-authors) of the war on terrorism. When Kristol and Kagan say it's time for an investigation, George Bush and Dick Cheney better believe it - this is advice coming from their closest buddies.

Weekly Standard tells Bush: time for an investigation
William Kristol and Robert Kagan, Weekly Standard, May 17, 2002

If President Bush knows what's good for the country -- and we think he does -- he will immediately appoint an independent, blue-ribbon commission to investigate the government's failure to anticipate and adequately prepare for the terrorist attacks of September 11. Make George Shultz and Sam Nunn co-chairmen. Give the commission full and unfettered access to all intelligence from the CIA and FBI and to all relevant internal administration documents. Instruct the commission to produce a public report in six months that can stand as the definitive judgment of what went wrong and why.
[The complete article]

Forgotten victims: 20,000 dead Afghans
Jonathan Steele, The Guardian, May 20, 2002

The direct victims of American bombs and missiles have commanded most political and media attention, though no one is certain how many even of these there were.

A Guardian report in February estimated these casualties at between 1,300 and 8,000 deaths. A Guardian investigation into the "indirect victims" now confirms the belief of many aid agencies that they exceeded the number who died of direct hits.

As many as 20,000 Afghans may have lost their lives as an indirect consequence of the US intervention. They too belong in any tally of the dead.
[The complete article]

Ismail Khan: warlord, profiteer, ideologue, chief
Ahmed Rashid, Far Eastern Economic Review, May 23, 2002

In western Afghanistan, the United States is facing off against Iranians of all stripes -- and charismatic warlord Ismail Khan is skilfully playing all sides to his own advantage. Welcome to Herat, the new front line in the U.S. battle against the 'axis of evil.'
[The complete article]

A bad call?
Ed Vulliamy, The Observer, May 19, 2002

For eight months now, Bush and his presidency have ridden on the political crest of the wave of 11 September, legitimised by its professed defence of America from the global terrorist menace. But now its bluff is called, as layer after layer of the warnings it received that al-Qaeda would strike at America's heart is unpeeled. Now Bush and his aides are having to explain to the people, the press and even to themselves why and how they either misread or failed to read the clear warning signs that al-Qaeda would strike in exactly the way it did.
[The complete article]

Events, ol' buddy, events
Can Bush survive the speculation about what he knew, and when?

Mark Lawson, The Guardian, May 18, 2002

Pictures may be worth a thousand words but the weakness of photography is that the meaning of an image shifts depending on the context. The now-famous snap in which George Bush's eyes pop as an aide whispers the events of September 11 into his ear had always seemed to represent complete astonishment. It's now possible that his expression can be read as horrified confirmation. Bush's political future may depend on whether this rewritten caption becomes fixed in print.

Most discussion of the events of September 11 has worked from the assumption that Osama bin Laden out-imagined the American security forces by creating an event so immense that no functioning democracy could have had precautions in place against it.

The revelations in Washington that the FBI and White House had at least three strong hints that the plot was in progress - in specific warnings of terrorists training at American flying schools for future hijacks - removes the White House's consistent use of the Pearl Harbor parallel: unpredicted surprise attack. If a fourth newspaper story is confirmed - that one warning mentioned planes hitting the World Trade Centre - then the president really will be choking on his pretzels.
[The complete article]

What if?
A.R. Torres, Salon, May 17, 2002

I am angry when I go to the city office to reclaim Eddie's three I.D. cards and get a World Trade Center urn. The city worker there presents me with the urn and a large flag, a tight triangle folded so that the stars and stripes are all showing. I grit my teeth and ask: "What would Eddie's family in Colombia want with that?" I have been steeped in the day's news about how the government may have blundered and could have, should have, stopped the tragedy of 9/11 before it happened. The sight of Old Glory, meant to be a comfort, a talisman for protection, feels like a slap in the face.
[The complete article]

US asks a disturbing question: What did the President know?
Rupert Cornwell, The Independent, May 17, 2002

At last the dam has broken. For eight months America has tiptoed around the most disturbing questions of all surrounding 11 September. Did the Bush administration fail to act on the evidence it had in hand, and prevent the worst terrorist attack in modern history? From time to time the issue would crop up, only for it to be deflected by the feeling that the moment was still too close, and the argument that a post mortem which was bound to be painful for the country's security and intelligence services might interfere with the war against terrorism those agencies were helping to wage. But all these considerations have been swept away by the disclosure that President George Bush was warned by the CIA in the first week of August that al-Qa'ida might be planning to hijack aircraft.
[The complete article]

US ALLIES IN THE WAR ON TERRORISM

Uzbekistan: classics turned into toilet paper

Artur Samari, IWPR, May 17, 2002

Half a million volumes a year are pulped. The books are bought for 2 US cents per kilogram, taken to a recycling warehouse and then to the Angren paper factory, which turns them into cardboard for egg cartons or toilet paper. The destruction of books has been accelerated by a ministerial decree in 1998. This ordered the withdrawal of all titles that failed to comply with Uzbekistan's "national ideology". For the most part, this affected those of an ideological nature published during the Soviet, as well as school textbooks brought out before the mid-1990s. An instruction in the Samarkand province ordered libraries to withdraw more than half a million ideologically "outdated" books for pulping. The libraries were forbidden from handing them to other libraries or private individuals.
[The complete article]

US media cowed by patriotic fever, says Dan Rather
Matthew Engel, The Guardian, May 17, 2002

Dan Rather, the star news anchor for the US television network CBS, said last night that "patriotism run amok" was in danger of trampling the freedom of American journalists to ask tough questions. And he admitted that he had shrunk from taking on the Bush administration over the war on terrorism. [...]

The White House was to blame for its failure to provide adequate information about the war, Rather said. "There has never been an American war, small or large, in which access has been so limited as this one.

"Limiting access, limiting information to cover the backsides of those who are in charge of the war, is extremely dangerous and cannot and should not be accepted. And I am sorry to say that, up to and including the moment of this interview, that overwhelmingly it has been accepted by the American people. And the current administration revels in that, they relish that, and they take refuge in that."
[The complete article]

Saying Grace
United States House of Representatives, May 16, 2002

COMMENT -- This week, with The White House now under scrutiny concerning their foreknowledge of the possibility of a major terrorist attack, some members of Congress have started showing a new willingness to exercise critical judgement and are shedding their fear of asking difficult questions. The following remarks by Jim McDermott reflect this new spirit of inquiry.

Representative Jim McDermott: Mr. Speaker, people often have the opportunity to do things which bring attention to themselves that they did not really expect, and one such person is a woman named Barbara Kingsolver, one of the most eminent authors in this country.

During the days after 9/11, she wrote a number of essays about what was happening in the United States and was, in some instances, very poorly received by people, and I think that, having met her and listened to her at the Physicians for Social Responsibility 2 weeks ago, I thought it would be good for the House to have an opportunity to think about Ms. Kingsolver's words.

The speech she gave there was entitled "Saying Grace,'' and it goes this way.

"I never knew what 'grand' really was until I saw the canyon. It's a perspective that pulls the busy human engine of desires to a quiet halt. Taking the long view across that vermilion abyss attenuates humanity to quiet internal rhythms, the spirit of ice ages, and we look, we gasp, and it seems there is a chance we might be small enough not to matter. That the things we want are not the end of the world. I have needed this view lately.

"I've come to the Grand Canyon several times in my life, most lately without really understanding the necessity. As the holidays approached I couldn't name the reason for my uneasiness. We thought about the cross-country trip we had usually taken to join our extended families' Thanksgiving celebration, but we did not make the airplane reservations. Barely a month before, terrorists attacks had distorted commercial air travel to a horrifying new agenda, one that left everybody jittery. We understood, rationally, that it was as safe to fly as ever, and so it wasn't precisely nervousness that made us think twice about flying across the country for a long weekend. Rather, we were moved by a sense that this was wartime, and the prospect of such personal luxury felt somehow false.

"I called my mother with our regrets and began making plans for a more modest family trip. On the days our daughters were out of school we would wander north from Tucson to visit some of the haunts I have come to love in my 20 years as a desert dweller, transplanted from the verdant Southeast. We would kick through the leaves in Oak Creek Canyon, bask like lizards in the last late-afternoon sun on Sedona's red rocks, puzzle out the secrets of the labyrinthine ruins at Wupatki, and finally stand on the rim of the remarkable canyon.

"I felt a little sorry for myself at first, missing the reassuring tradition of sitting down to face a huge upside-down bird and counting my blessings in the grand joyful circle of my kin. And then I felt shame enough to ask myself, how greedy can one person be to want more than the Grand Canyon? How much more could one earth offer me than to lay herself bare, presenting me with the whole of her bedrock history in one miraculous view? What feast could satisfy a mother more deeply than to walk along a creek through a particolored carpet of leaves, watching my children pick up the fine-toothed gifts of this scarlet maple, that yellow aspen, piecing together the picture puzzle of a biological homeplace? We could listen for several days to the songs of living birds instead of making short work of one big dead one, and we would feel lighter afterward too.

"These are relevant questions to ask in this moment when our country demands that we dedicate ourselves and our resources, again and again, to what we call the defense of our way of life: How greedy can one person be? How much do we need to feel blessed, sated and permanently safe? What is safety in this world, and on what broad stones is that house built?

"Imagine that you came from a large family in which one brother ended up with a whole lot more than the rest of you. Sometimes it happens that way, the luck falling to one guy who didn't do that much to deserve it. Imagine his gorgeous house on a huge tract of forest, rolling hills and fertile fields. Your other relatives have decent places with smaller yards, but yours is mostly dust. Your lucky brother eats well, he has meat every day--in fact, let's face it, he is corpulent, and so are his kids. At your house, meanwhile, things are bad. Your kids cry themselves to sleep on empty stomachs. Your brother must not be able to hear them from the veranda where he dines, because he throws away all the food he can't finish. He will do you this favor: He'll make a TV program of himself eating. If you want, you can watch it from your house. But you can't have his food, his house, or the car he drives around in to view his unspoiled forests and majestic purple mountains. The rest of the family has noticed that all his driving is kicking up dust, wrecking not only the edges of his property, but also their less pristine backyards and even yours, which was dust to begin with. He has dammed the rivers to irrigate his fields, so that only a trickle reaches your place, and it's nasty. You are beginning to see that these problems are deep and deadly, and you will be the first to starve and the others will follow. The family takes a vote and agrees to do a handful of obvious things that will keep down the dust and clear the water. All except Fat Brother. He walks away from the table. He says God gave him good land and the right to be greedy.

"The ancient Greeks adored tragic plays about families like this, and their special world for the fat brother was 'hubris.' In the town where I grew up, we called it 'getting all high and mighty,' and the sentence that came next usually included the words 'getting knocked down to size.' For most of my life, I have felt embarrassed by a facet of our national character that I would have to call prideful wastefulness. What other name can there be for our noisy, celebratory appetite for unnecessary things, and our vast carelessness regarding their manufacture and disposal? In the autumn of 2001 we faced the crisis of taking a very hard knock from the outside, and in its aftermath, as our Nation grieved, every time I saw that wastefulness rear its head I felt even more ashamed. Some retailers rushed to convince us in ads printed across waving flags that it was our duty, even in wartime, especially in wartime, to go out and buy those cars and shoes. We were asked not to think very much about the other side of the world, where, night after night, we were waging a costly war in a land whose people could not dream of owning cars or in some cases even shoes. For some, 'wartime' becomes a matter of waving our pride above the waste, with slogans that didn't make sense to me: 'Buy for your country' struck me as an exhortation to 'erase from your mind what has just happened.' And the real meaning of this I can't even guess at: 'Our enemies hate us because we are free.'

"I'm sorry, but I have eyes from which to see, and friends in many places. In Canada, for instance, I know people who are wicked cold in winter but otherwise in every way as free as you and me. And nobody hates Canada.

"Hubris isn't just about luck or wealth, it's about throwing away food while hungry people watch. Canadians were born lucky, too, in a global sense, but they seem more modest about it and more deeply appreciative of their land; it's impossible to imagine Canada blighting its precious wilderness areas with 'mock third-world villages' for bombing practice, as our Air Force has done in Arizona's Cabeza Prieta Range. I know how countries bereft of any wild lands at all view our planks for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the world's last immense and untouched wilderness, as we stake out our right to its plunder as we deem necessary. We must surely appear to the world as exactly what we are: A nation that organizes its economy around consuming twice as much oil as it produces and around the profligate wastefulness of the wars and campaigns required to defend such consumption. In recent years we have defined our national interests largely in terms of the oil fields and pipelines we need to procure fuel.
"In our country, we seldom question our right to burn this fuel in heavy passenger vehicles and to lead all nations in the race to pollute our planet beyond habitability; some of us in fact become belligerent towards anyone who dares to raise the issue. We are disinclined as a nation to assign any moral value at all to our habits of consumption. But the circle of our family is large, larger than just one nation, and as we arrive at the ends of our frontiers, we can't possibly be surprised that the rest of the family would have us live within our means. Safety resides, I think, on the far side of endless hunger. Imagine how it would feel to fly a flag with a leaf on it, or a bird, something living. How remarkably generous we could have appeared to the world by being the first to limit fossil fuel emissions by ratifying the Kyoto Agreements, rather than walking away from the table, as we did last summer in Bonn, leaving 178 other signatory nations to do their best for the world without any help from the world's biggest contributor to global warming. I find it simply appalling that we could have done this. I know for a fact that many, many Americans were stunned, like me, by the selfishness of that act, and can hardly bear their own complicity in it. Given our societal devotion to taking in more energy than we put out, it is ironic that our culture is so cruelly intolerant of overweight individuals. As a nation we're not just overweight, a predicament that deserves sympathy; I fear we are also, as we live and breathe, possessed of the Fat Brother's mindset.

"I would like to have a chance to live with reordered expectations. I would rather that my country be seen as a rich, beloved brother than the rich and piggish one. If there is a heart beating in the United States that really disagrees, I have yet to meet it. We are by nature a generous people. Just about every American I know who has traveled abroad and taken the time to have genuine conversations with citizens of other countries has encountered the question, as I have, 'Why isn't your country as nice as you are?' I wish I knew. Maybe we're distracted by our attachment to convenience.

"Maybe we believe the ads that tell us the material things are the key to happiness, or maybe we are too frightened to question those who routinely define our national interests for us in terms of corporate profits. Then too, millions of Americans are so strapped by the task of keeping their kids fed and a roof over their heads that it is impossible for them to consider much of anything beyond that. But ultimately, the answer must be that as a Nation, we just have not yet demanded generosity of ourselves.

"But we could, and we know it. Our country possesses the resources to bring solar technology, energy independence, and sustainable living to our planet. Even in the simple realm of humanitarian assistance, the United Nations estimates that $13 billion above current levels of aid would provide everyone in the world, including the hungry within our own borders, with basic health and nutrition. Collectively, Americans and Europeans spend $17 billion a year on pet food. We could do much more than just feed the family of mankind, as well as our cats and dogs. We could assist that family in acquiring the basic skills and tools it needs to feed itself, while maintaining the natural resources on which all life depends. Real generosity involves not only making a gift, but also giving up something, and on both scores, we are well situated to be the most generous Nation on earth.

"We like to say we already are, and it's true that American people give of their own minute proportion of the country's wealth to help victims of disasters far and wide. Our children collect pennies to buy rain forests one cubic inch at a time, but this is a widow's might, not a national tithe. Our government's spending on foreign aid has plummeted over the last 20 years to levels that are, to put it bluntly, the stingiest among all of the developed nations. In the year 2000, according to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States allocated just .1 percent of its Gross National Product to foreign aid, or about one dime for every $100 in its Treasury, whereas Canada, Japan, Australia, Austria, and Germany each contributed 2 to 3 times that much. Other countries gave even more, some as much as 10 times the amount we do; they view this as a contribution to the world's stability and their own peace. But our country takes a different approach to generosity. Our tradition is to forgive debt in exchange for a strategic military base, an indentured economy, or mineral rights. We offer the hungry our magic seeds, genetically altered so the recipients must also buy our pesticides, while their sturdy native seed banks die out. At Fat Brother's house the domestic help might now and then slip out the back door with a plate of food for a neighbor, but for the record the household gives virtually nothing away. Even now, in what may be the most critical moment of our history, I fear that we may seem to be telling the world we are not merciful as much as we are mighty.

"In our darkest hours we may find comfort in the age-old slogan from the resistance movement, declaring that we shall not be moved. But we need to finish that sentence. Moved from where? Are we anchoring to the best of what we've believed in throughout our history, or merely to an angry new mode of self preservation? The American moral high ground cannot possibly be an isolated mountaintop from which we refuse to learn anything at all to protect ourselves from monstrous losses. It is critical to distinguish here between innocence and naivete: The innocent do not deserve to be violated, but only the naive refuse to think about the origins of violence. A nation that seems to believe so powerfully in retaliation cannot flatly refuse to look at the world in terms of cause and effect. The rage and fury of this world have not notably lashed out at Canada, the Nation that takes best care of its citizens, or Finland, the most literate, or Brazil, or Costa Rica, among the most biodiverse. Neither have they tried to strike down our redwood forests or our fields of waving grain. Striving to cut us most deeply, they felled the towers that seemed to claim we buy and sell the world.

"We do not own the world, as it turns out. Flight attendants and bankers, mothers and sons were ripped from us as proof, and thousands of families must now spend whole lifetimes reassembling themselves after shattering loss. The rest of us have lowered our flags in grief on their behalf. I believe we could do the same for the 35,600 of the world's children who also died on September 11 from conditions of starvation and extend their hearts to the mothers and fathers who lost them.

"This seems a reasonable time to search our souls for some corner where humility resides. Our Nation believes in some ways that bring joy to the world, and in others that make people angry. Not all of those people are heartless enough to kill us for it or fanatical enough to die in the effort, but some inevitably will be, more and more, as desperation spreads. Wars of endless retaliation kill not only people, but also the systems that grow food, deliver clean water, and heal the sick. They destroy the beauty, they extinguish the species, they increase desperation.

"I wish our National Anthem were not the one about bombs bursting in air, but the one about the purple mountain majesties and amber waves of grain. It's easier to sing and closer to the heart of what we really have to sing about. A land as broad and as green as ours demands of us thanksgiving and a certain breadth of spirit. It invites us to invest our hearts most deeply in invulnerable majesties that can never be brought down in a stroke of anger. If we can agree on anything in difficult times, it must be that we have the resources to behave more generously than we do, and that we are brave enough to rise from the ashes of loss as better citizens of the world than we have ever been. We've inherited the grace of the Grand Canyon, the mystery of the Everglades, the fertility of an Iowa plain; we could crown this good with brotherhood. What a vast inheritance for our children that would be, if we were to become a nation humble before our rich birthright, whose graciousness makes us beloved.''
Mr. Speaker, I hope all Members take the time to read this.

Lawmakers push for hearings on warning given to Bush
David E. Sanger and Sherri Day, New York Times, May 16, 2002

A day after the White House revealed that the Bush administration knew prior to Sept. 11 that Osama bin Laden was seeking to hijack aircraft, lawmakers called for a deeper investigation into why American intelligence agencies had failed to put together individual pieces of evidence that, in retrospect, now seem to suggest what was coming.
[The complete article - registration required]

U.S. Jews opposing Israel are increasingly vocal
Nathan Guttman, Ha'aretz, May 16, 2002

On the fringes of the pro-Israel solidarity marches, the fund-raising events in support of Israel's military efforts, and American Jews' solidarity missions to Israel, several U.S.-Jewish groups have started to make their voices heard. Far from echoing the line that America's Jewish communities have been espousing, these new voices are critical of Israeli operations in the territories, and are calling for an end to the occupation and the respecting of Palestinians' rights.
[The complete article]

U.S. foreign military training: global reach, global power, and oversight issues
Lora Lumpe, Foreign Policy in Focus Special Report, May, 2002

Over the past decade one of the principal means by which the U.S. has interacted with almost all governments in the world is by training their military forces. In recent years U.S. forces have been training approximately 100,000 foreign soldiers annually. This training takes place in at least 150 institutions within the U.S. and in 180 countries around the world.
[Note - pages on the FPIF web site do not always load correctly. If the text does not appear, trying hitting the refresh button.]
[The complete 64 page report in HTML and PDF formats]

A summary of the findings in this report is provided by Jim Lobe from OneWorld.net

Too much is never enough: Bush's military spending spree
Michelle Ciarrocca, Foreign Policy in Focus, May 10, 2002

President Bush has recently submitted a $27 billion emergency supplemental request to Congress. The Pentagon will receive almost half of the emergency request--$14 billion. Out of that amount, $130 million will be spent on unspecified foreign countries or "indigenous forces." What is most alarming is that more than $1 billion of that request has been tagged with the clause "notwithstanding any other provision of law"--meaning that the few laws in place to keep military aid and weapons out the hands of human rights abusers are no longer relevant.
[The complete article]

Palestinian stock market triumphs by staying alive
Peter Hermann, Baltimore Sun, May 16, 2002

The Palestinian Securities Exchange will never be confused with Wall Street. Lacking frenzied traders and banks of computer screens, the Palestinian version of a stock market resembles an insurance office on a sleepy day. It survives in a city where Israeli army blockades have cut off direct contacts with other towns. The central marketplace is in ruins, few municipal buildings are standing, and some neighborhoods are controlled by militants challenging the Palestinian Authority. The triumph of the Palestinian stock market is that, seven years after its establishment, it exists.
[The complete article]

Settlements in the West Bank - the authoritative map
Eyal Weizman, Open Democracy, May 14, 2002

This high-detail, colour-coded map with case studies shows the fragmentation of West Bank territory and the Jewish settlements in painstaking detail. For the first time, it reveals the potential settlement expansion provided for in masterplans.
It shows:

· the location, size and form of existing Israeli settlements;
· for the first time, the scope of potential settlement expansion;
· the different jurisdictions;
· the locations of Palestinian settlements;
· the areas under Palestinian limited sovereignty according to Oslo.
[The complete article and map]

Israeli repression and the language of liars
Tim Wise, AlterNet, May 8, 2002

Ariel Sharon once said, “A lie should be tried in a place where it will attract the attention of the world.” And so it has been: throughout the media and the U.S. political scene, on CNN in the personage of Benjamin Netanyahu, and in the pages of the New York Times.

And in my Hebrew School, where we were taught that Jews were to be “a light unto the nations,” instead of this dim bulb, this flickering nightlight, this barely visible spark whose radiance is only sufficient to make visible the death-rattle of the more noble aspects of the Jewish tradition. Unless we who are Jews insist on a return to honest language, and an end to the hijacking of our culture and faith by madmen, racists and liars, I fear that the light may be extinguished forever.
[The complete article]

The lurking shadow of expulsion
Oren Yiftachel and Neve Gordon, Alternative Information Center, May 14th, 2002

The State of Israel has reached an important crossroad. For some months now the nationalist camp, aided by the media, has been trickling into the public discourse the idea of expulsion -- branded in Israel as “transfer” -- despite the fact that it is antithetical to both international norms and human rights covenants. There are, of course, various formulations for how the transfer of the Palestinian population should be carried out, ranging from the aggressive version proposed by ex-minister Avigdor Lieberman, through the 'soft' version of “voluntary transfer” according to the right wing party "Moledet," and all the way to the idea of abrogating the political rights of the Palestinians and transferring them from their land and homes “only at a time of need,” as suggested by Minister and inner Cabinet Member Efi Eitam.
[The complete article]

Bush’s war - the fall-out on women and families
Yifat Susskind, MADRE, May, 2002

As the atrocities of Sept. 11 become part of our collective past, their repercussions shape our present and future. The legacy of these attacks embodies an ugly truth: namely, that the Bush Administration has exploited Sept. 11 to advance a pre-existing agenda.
[The complete article]

DOES THE LEADER OF THE WORLD'S ONLY SUPERPOWER NEED TO BE SMART?

COMMENT -- What foreigners so often fail to appreciate is that a sharp mind has never been regarded as a job requirement for an American president. George Bush may not be well-read or well-travelled and when he deviates from his script, he's prone to putting his foot in his mouth, but isn't that all exactly what makes him a man of the people?

George Bush? He's nice but dim, says crown prince
Matthew Engel, The Guardian, May 15, 2002

In the most regal possible manner, Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia skewered President George Bush yesterday as a man so ignorant about the Middle East, and specifically about the suffering of the Palestinians, that he needed several hours of personal tuition to bring him up to speed.
[The complete article]

The axis of nonsense
Andrew Murray, The Guardian, May 15, 2002

Washington's war is going à la carte. Each passing week is placing both new targets and new justifications for attack on the menu for military action. There is now not the slightest pretence that the scope of the US's regime-change wishlist is in any way tethered to the attacks of September 11. Instead, the world is witnessing the rapid emergence of a plan to dispose of any government hateful to the sight of US ultra-conservatism.
[The complete article]

Thousands who backed wrong side held in Afghan 'Auschwitz'
Mark Baker, Sydney Morning Herald, May 14 2002

The European Union's special envoy to Afghanistan has called for urgent action by Afghan authorities to end the plight of more than 2000 starving Taliban supporters being held prisoner in conditions he compared to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.
[The complete article]

THE THREAT OF JEWISH TERRORISM

COMMENT -- While some people will argue that many of the actions of the Israeli Defense Force amount to a form of "state-sponsored terrorism," as the promise of Palestinian statehood moves closer to becoming a political reality, the threat of Jewish terrorism - terrorism in the form of bombings and suicide attacks on innocent civilians - will steadily increase.

Only a few days ago, a plot to bomb an Arab girls school in East Jerusalem was prevented as the bomb was being moved into position. Noam Federman was arrested Monday on suspicion of being involved in the plot and was quoted as saying that "I think the government should put bombs in [Palestinian] hospitals, but unfortunately the government doesn't do it, so it is up to the people to do those things."

Federman is part of the Kahanist movement (followers of Kach leader, Meir Kahane) which has branches in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Florida, and Milwaukee. In "Voice of Hebron", a feature on the New Kach (Kahanist) Movement web site, the columnist, Gary M. Cooperberg (who is both a US and Israeli citizen) suggested that following the IDF's incursion into the West Bank, "Had Ramallah been leveled and all of its inhabitants, men women and children, summarily executed, followed by a warning to all other would be terrorists to leave or else, there is no doubt that most would have fled and many lives, both Jew and Arab would have been saved as a result."

While forms of extremism such as this are rarely highlighted in the mainstream media, they are unfortunately views that are not limited to a few isolated individuals. One of the most infamous (and celebrated) Jewish terrorists of recent years was Baruch Goldstein, an American doctor in the Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba. In 1994 on Purim, Goldstein stormed a mosque and fired on praying Muslims in the Hebron's Tomb of the Patriarchs - a shrine sacred to both Muslims and Jews. Twenty-nine people died in the attack, and the angry crowd lynched Goldstein in retaliation. Since the massacre, Kach supporters visit Goldstein's grave annually and hold a celebration. It is reported that by March 2000, 10,000 people had visited his grave.

In 1997, an Israeli settler and soldier Noam Friedman, claiming that he was avenging the death of Baruch Goldstein, walked into the Hebron market and opened fire on Palestinian shoppers, wounding eight but, fortunately, killing no one. Two months later Friedman was "discharged from the army and committed to a mental institution after a military court accepted recommendations from a team of IDF-appointed psychiatrists that he was mentally unstable and could not stand trial." A few weeks later, a Health ministry spokeman said that "Friedman has begun a process of rehabilitation in which he goes out twice a week to study and at weekends is on vacation at his home." Is this the implementation of justice for attempted mass murder?

Another man inspired by Goldstein was Yigal Amir, the assasin of Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin. Amir described his fascination with Goldstein by saying, "I was very intrigued by how a man like that could get up and sacrifice his life.... This was a man who left a family and martyred himself." Amir is now serving a life sentence.

Kach and Kahane Chai have been outlawed in Israel since 1994 after they declared support for Baruch Goldstein, but they, along with the Jewish Defense League (JDL - founded in the US by Meir Kahane) still receive active support in the United States. Since September 11, the only charges that have been made against anyone attempting a new act of terrorism inside the U.S., were Federal charges against top officials of the Jewish Defense League, Irv Rubin and Earl Krugel, who are accused of plotting to blow up a Los Angeles area mosque.

U.S. arms transfers and security assistance to Israel
Frida Berrigan and William Hartung, Foreign Policy in Focus, May 8, 2002

U.S. press coverage of Israeli attacks on the Palestinian Authority and Palestinian towns on the West Bank often treat the U.S. government as either an innocent bystander or an honest broker in the current conflict, often without giving a full sense of the importance of the U.S. role as a supplier of arms, aid, and military technology to Israel. In its role as Israel's primary arms supplier, the United States could exert significant potential leverage over Israeli behavior in the conflict, if it would choose to do so.
[The complete article]

Poll points toward peace
Jim Lobe, AlterNet, May 13, 2002

An in-depth poll conducted by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Initiatives (PIPA) found that a majority of Americans do not agree with the views advocated by pro-Israeli hawks in the White House and Congress.
[The complete article]

Book reviews
Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, by Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia by Ahmed Rashid, What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response by Bernard Lewis, reviewed by Laura Miller, Salon, May 13, 2002

What "Jihad" illustrates (and what often gets lost or glossed over in other books on the subject) is how foolish it is to generalize about Islam. Beyond the familiar schism between the Sunnis and the Shiites, the faith is spectacularly diverse, from the mystical brotherhoods of the Sufis, to the puritanical Wahabbites, to (what remains of) the relatively secularized cosmopolitan elites of more developed countries like Egypt. It makes as much sense to draw conclusions about all Muslims on the basis of the beliefs of the Taliban or bin Laden as it does to expect a Quaker to light candles to Santa Barbara or a Unitarian minister to plant bombs in abortion clinics simply because other people who call themselves Christians do so.
[The complete article]

Why does John Malkovich want to kill me?
Robert Fisk, The Independent, May 14, 2002

In 26 years in the Middle East, I have never read so many vile and intimidating messages addressed to me. Many now demand my death. And last week, the Hollywood actor John Malkovich did just that, telling the Cambridge Union that he would like to shoot me.

How, I ask myself, did it come to this? Slowly but surely, the hate has turned to incitement, the incitement into death threats, the walls of propriety and legality gradually pulled down so that a reporter can be abused, his family defamed, his beating at the hands of an angry crowd greeted with laughter and insults in the pages of an American newspaper, his life cheapened and made vulnerable by an actor who – without even saying why – says he wants to kill me.
[The complete article]

RACISIM IN THE NAME OF SECURITY

Gov't approves freeze on reunification of Arab families

Mazal Mualem and Moshe Reinfeld, Ha'aretz, May 13, 2002

The Israeli government yesterday retroactively approved Interior Minister Eli Yishai's April 1 freeze on all family reunifications between Israeli Arabs and West Bankers and Gazans, to prevent Palestinians from the territories gaining Israeli citizenship. [...] The Association for Civil Rights in Israel went to the High Court with a petition against the decision yesterday, claiming it was "racist, discriminatory, and gravely harms the basic right to family life by Israeli citizens who married Arabs."
[The complete article]

CREATING FACTS ON THE GROUND

Settlers strategically split East Jerusalem

Ben Lynfield, Christian Science Monitor, May 13, 2002

On the eve of Israel's Jerusalem Day holiday, marked last Thursday, Jewish settlers moved into a vacant, dilapidated building in an Arab area of East Jerusalem and began studying sacred texts. Their inspiration was religious, but the far-right politicians who encouraged them have a not-so-hidden agenda: making the city less Palestinian.
The move comes two weeks after 43 Palestinians were evicted in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood after they lost a legal battle against settlers.

In Jerusalem, what may sound like microgeography has far-reaching implications: New settlements in Sheikh Jarrah can, say settler leaders, cut off the Palestinian core in the Old City from the populous northern Palestinian neighborhoods of Shuafat and Beit Hanana. Severing this link – and thereby breaking the continuity of Palestinian East Jerusalem – would make it even more difficult to enact a peace plan that includes a hand over of East Jerusalem to the Palestinians.
[The complete article]

THE STORY THAT REFUSES TO GO AWAY

COMMENT -- It isn't a conspiracy theory, though it has spawned many, and even if it has officially been described as an urban legend, it is backed up by detailed documentation. It is of course the story of an alleged spy-ring made up of Israelis posing as art students. All of the "students" had military backgrounds - and so does every other Israeli apart from those who manage to dodge military service. They were working illegally - and the INS isn't blind to the fact that many a young foreign traveller is willing to become an "undocumented worker" if it helps them fund an extended trip around the States.

But was it bravado, ignorance, or entrepreneurial zeal that led some of these hungry artists to sneak into Federal buildings in pursuit of a quick sale? And what were the odds that by sheer chance several of them would rent an apartment just a few blocks down the street from the one in Hollywood, Florida, where lead hijacker, Mohammad Atta, lived for several months? And how come several of them were carrying cell phones purchased by an Israeli vice consul in the United States?

This story raises these and many other questions. Unless a few straightforward explanations soon come to light, it seems likely that the story will continue to circulate.

Suspicious activities involving Israeli art students at DEA facilities
60-page report from the DEA reprinted by Cryptome.org

Spies, or students?
Nathan Guttman, Ha'aretz, May 13, 2002

The Israeli "art student" mystery
Christopher Ketcham, Salon, May 7, 2002

Urban myth, my ass!
John Sugg, Creative Loafing, March 27, 2002

The spies who came in from the art sale
John Sugg, Creative Loafing, March 20, 2002

Intelligence agents or art students?
Paul M. Rodriguez, Insight, March 11, 2002

B'Tselem report: settlers control 41.9% of West Bank
Nadav Shragai, Ha'aretz, May 13, 2002

B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, published a report Monday on settlement policies in the West Bank, which revealed that although only 1.7 percent of settlement territory in the West Bank is built upon, settlers in fact control 41.9 percent of the West Bank.
[The complete article]
B'Tselem's report - Land Grab: Israel's Settlement Policy

U.S. pays PR guru to make its points
Stephen J. Hedges. Chicago Tribune, May 12, 2002

When U.S. troops go into a war zone, John Rendon is rarely far behind. He was in Panama in 1989 for the brief invasion that toppled strongman Manuel Noriega. He was in Kuwait when allied forces took it back from Saddam Hussein in 1991, making sure that citizens had little American flags to wave for the conquering troops and television cameras. He has worked in Haiti and in the Balkans, and is now fully engaged in the war against terrorism. But John Rendon is not a military officer, government adviser, diplomat, spy or journalist. He is, to use his own words, "an information warrior and a perception manager." Rendon makes images, manipulates scenes and manages news. He advises politicians and spreads propaganda. Rendon and his public-relations firm, The Rendon Group, have many clients, but none bigger--or more loyal--than the U.S. government.
[The complete article]

The road to The Hague
Gideon Levy, Ha'aretz, May 12, 2002

The feeling that prevails today is that there are virtually no restrictions on killing Palestinians because the IDF will back up its soldiers in every case. The soldiers no longer need to have a "lawyer at their side," as they complained with exaggeration during the first intifada; Yitzhak Rabin's dream of a war "without the High Court of Justice and without B'Tselem" has become a reality. Is it not the case that the soldiers' knowledge that no harm will befall them prompts them to open fire too easily? [...] [But] In the international community, the killing of a woman and her two children, the killing of five children on their way to school, the blocking of medical treatment for the wounded and the refusal to allow women in labor or seriously-ill individuals to pass through roadblocks are crimes and the perpetrators must be punished.
[The complete article]

Why I refuse to fight for Sharon's settlements
David Zonsheine, Washington Post, May 11, 2002

My parents instilled in me the notion that I must do everything for the state. In Israel, serving in the army is a central expression of that ethos. When I was a high school student, it was not only obvious to me that I would go to the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), but it was also vital that I become a paratrooper and serve in a special unit. It was also clear to me that my service to the state and my patriotism would require that I participate in an officer's course and serve an extra year.

Now that I have done several tours of duty in the West Bank as a reserve officer, this axiom that the army and the state are one and the same, and my belief that the army serves the vital security interests of the state have been eroded. There was no single development that made me an objector; rather it was a succession of small incidents. It became increasingly clear to me that the little orders that I was issued, and then the orders I gave my soldiers to carry out, had precious little to do with protecting the state. They had everything to do with protecting a group of zealots and their settlements, and maintaining a Kafkaesque system that spelled misery for ordinary Palestinians.

After two years of deliberation and many sleepless nights, I came to the inescapable conclusion that Zionism is not what the zealots have made it. Zionism is not about occupation and territories; it is about obtaining a secure and internationally recognized home for the Jewish people. While some in Israel view refusal as betrayal, I refuse to betray the basic values and goals of Zionism. The continuing occupation imperils the future of the Jewish state. We must choose between land and legitimacy and between occupation and democracy.
[The complete article]

Israelis rally for pullout from West Bank, Gaza
Reuters, May 11, 2002

Tens of thousands of left-wing Israelis rallied on Saturday night to call for an Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian territories in what organizers said was the biggest peace demonstration for 20 years. The protest was organized by the Peace Now movement, which has been marginalized of late by public outrage over Palestinian suicide bombings which have killed scores of Israelis in an uprising against occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Police estimated the crowd at about 50,000. Peace Now put the figure at above 100,000, calling it the biggest peace rally since some 200,000 people turned out in 1982 to call for an Israeli military pullout from Lebanon.

Opposition politicians and artists addressed a throng waving a sea of banners saying "Leave the territories for the sake of Israel" and "Two states for two peoples."
[The complete article]

CONGRESSIONAL TREASON?

"We are all members of Likud now"
Our Vichy Congress

"George Sutherland," Counterpunch, May 10, 2002

In March, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma took the Senate floor and said the September 11 attacks were punishment by God in response to U.S. policy toward Israel. Asserting that Israel is "entitled" to the West Bank, he also criticized his fellow citizens who counselled the Israelis to use restraint, in effect blaming them for the terrorist attacks of September 11: "One of the reasons I believe the spiritual door was opened for an attack against the United States of America is that the policy of our government has been to ask the Israelis, and demand it with pressure, not to retaliate in a significant way against the terrorist strikes that have been launched against them."

According to this Tornado-Belt St. Augustine, God in effect allowed airliners to be flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon because U.S. actions towards Israel offended the Almighty. In other words, the United States was punished because the Bush administration had been insufficiently worshipful towards Israel (the $3 billion annually that Congress squeezes out of the taxpayer as tribute to the Jewish State is apparently not sufficient in the opinion of this self-styled "fiscal conservative"--and in the opinion of the Almighty Himself, Whose inscrutable will Inhofe claims to be able to interpret).
[The complete article]

The solution is the problem
Noam Chomsky, The Guardian, May 11, 2002

A year ago, the Hebrew University sociologist Baruch Kimmerling observed that "what we feared has come true - War appears an unavoidable fate", an "evil colonial" war. His colleague Ze'ev Sternhell noted that the Israeli leadership was now engaged in "colonial policing, which recalls the takeover by the white police of the poor neighbourhoods of the blacks in South Africa during the apartheid era". Both stress the obvious: there is no symmetry between the "ethno-national groups" in this conflict, which is centred in territories that have been under harsh military occupation for 35 years.
[The complete article]

RICHARD PERLE: PRINCE OF DARKNESS

The Prince of Darkness explains Iraq

David Corn, AlterNet, May 10, 2002

"I think Perle is smoking dope, just like the majority of these guys who've held high level positions but never served a stitch of time in combat. It's a lot hotter on the battlefield than it is in the halls of the Pentagon, and the margin of error is much slimmer."
[The complete article]

US action on Iraq slowed by rift over whom to support
Michaek R. Gordon, New York Times, May 10

Despite repeated vows by President Bush to force Saddam Hussein from power, Bush administration officials are still at odds over which Iraqi opposition groups the United States should support, American officials and Iraqi opposition leaders say.
[The complete article]

A voice in the wilderness
David Bonior, U.S. House of Representatives, May 2, 2002

Comment -- There have been very few members of Congress willing to appeal for justice for Palestinians. One such congressman is David Bonior and these are his remarks when he spoke in opposition to the resolution expressing support for Israel, passed in the House on May 2:

Congressman Bonior: Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to this resolution. This resolution blindly supports Israel's actions against the Palestinians and wholly denies the generations of suffering of the Palestinian people. This would be wrong at any time, but in light of what has happened at Jenin and Bethlehem, Ramallah, Haifa, Jerusalem, and Netanya, and what continues to happen today, this resolution is dangerous.

Like most Americans, I support Israel. However, just like most Americans, I do not support and will not support all of Israel's policies. Generations of Palestinians and Israelis have suffered in the region, but the violence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be examined or addressed in isolation of decades of occupation of millions of Palestinians.

Israeli suffering is something that this body understands and discusses. But what of the suffering of the Palestinian people? What of the history of land confiscation, water rights, torture, settlements, collective punishments, home demolitions, curfews, administrative detentions, expulsions, child labor? Where is the language about the 1,000-plus Palestinians killed in the last 19 months, bodies found under rubble? Where is the language about the thousands made homeless by the bulldozers in Jenin alone? Where is the language about the relief agencies denied access to treat the sick and wounded? We know that relief agencies, including the International Committee of the Red Cross, were prevented from reaching and evacuating and treating the sick and wounded throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip, resulting in untold deaths, from the mother who bled to death from a normally nonfatal wound in front of her children, to the couple buried alive under rubble for 8 days. The stories coming to light are horrific.
Rarely on this floor is there discussion of the nearly 420 Palestinian villages destroyed at the time of Israel's founding in 1948, or the 3.8 million refugees registered by the United Nations or the estimated 2 million others not registered. Palestinians live in 59 different recognized refugees camps in misery, in poverty, with no hope of a better future for the next generations that are born into those camps.

Can we know today what 38 percent employment in the West Bank or 75 percent unemployment in Gaza can do to a population? While we cling to the hope of peace that Oslo would bring, Palestinians saw a remarkable growth in settlements. As of February, Peace Now estimates the settlers' population at 230,000, having approximately doubled in the last 10 years under Oslo.

Mr. Speaker, this is not a good resolution. I encourage Members to vote against it.

Militarism's lethal logic
It's better to make more friends than name more enemies

James P. Pinkerton, Los Angeles Times, May 10, 2002

Americans might like to think of themselves as unique, but history suggests a pattern of behavior into which superpowers can stumble. Here's what the late economist Joseph Schumpeter wrote about the Roman Republic, the predecessor to the Roman Empire: "There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were of Rome's allies; and if Rome had no allies, the allies would be invented. When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest, why then it was national honor that had been insulted." At all times, Schumpeter noted, Roman leaders maintained "an aura of legality"; that is, they declared themselves to be on the side of truth and justice, dealing decisively with rogues. But the result was a Rome constantly at war. Soon, as a matter of military necessity, democracy was supplanted by dictatorship, and eventually the Romans could no longer beat back all the enemies they had made.
[The complete article]

The politics of verticality
Eyal Weizman, Open Democracy, May 2002

Israeli architect, Eyal Weizman, argues that none of us have a coherent mental map of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We're missing verticality. In this series of articles and photo-essays published by Open Democracy, he paints the extraordinary, three-dimensional battle over the West Bank: from settlements to sewage, archaeology to Apaches.

Introduction - The experience of territory in the West Bank explodes simple political boundaries and "crashes three-dimensional space into six dimensions - three Jewish and three Arab."

Maps - Two-dimensional maps, fundamental to the understanding of political borders, have been drawn again and again for the West Bank. Each time they have failed to capture its vertical divisions.

Hills and Valleys of the West Bank - Mountains play a special part in Zionist holiness. The settlers' surge into the folded terrain of the West Bank and up to its summits combines imperatives of politics and spirituality.

West Bank Settlements - Many different types of settlements perch atop the hills of the West Bank, providing islands of biblical identity that are also strategic vantage points.

From Water to Shit - The aquifers deep below the West Bank are a battleground, just as much as the rivers of sewage split through its valleys by both Israeli and Palestinian settlements.

Excavating Sacredness - In a quest for biblical archaeology, Israel has attempted to resurrect the subterreanean fragments of ancient civilization to testify for its present-day rights above ground.

Jerusalem - From the struggles over Haram al-Sharif (the Temple Mount) to the historic stone with which all Greater Jerusalem is now clad, Jerusalem is an intense case study of the politics of verticality.

Roads: Over and Under - A bewildering network of bypass roads weave over and under one another, attempting to separate the Israeli and Palestinian communities. And the future could be wilder - a 48-kilometre viaduct between Gaza and the West Bank.

Control in the Air - Now and in the final settlement proposals, Israel holds control of the airspace over the West Bank. It uses its domination of the airspace and electromagnetic spectrum to drop a net of surveillance and pinpoint executions over the territory.

The complete Politics of Verticality including 13 photo-essays as a PDF document

Palestinians want reforms, too, but not on US and Israeli terms
Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian, May 10, 2002

There can hardly be a Palestinian in the West Bank or Gaza who is not desperate for an overhaul of Yasser Arafat's corrupt and paralysed administration. But they want no part of the reforms being preached by President George Bush and Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon.
[The complete article]

Support for Refuseniks
Neve Gordon, The Nation, May 9, 2002

The refusenik community has grown dramatically in the past months, and now comprises more than 1,000 conscientious objectors, twenty-nine of whom are currently serving time in military prison. About half of these belong to the new movement "Courage to Refuse", while the rest are either members of Yesh Gvul ("There Is a Limit," ) or 18-year-olds who have completed high school and are unwilling to be conscripted. Considering that the average sentence of a reserve soldier is twenty-eight days, the number of refuseniks who have been in prison since the outbreak of the second intifada is about 100 and not merely the twenty-nine who are currently incarcerated.
[The complete article]

After Jenin
Yitzhak Laor, London Review of Books, April 22, 2002

What has the war between us and the Palestinians been about? About the Israeli attempt to slice what's left of Palestine into four cantons, by building 'separation roads', new settlements and checkpoints. The rest is killing, terror, curfew, house demolitions and propaganda. Palestinian children live in fear and despair, their parents humiliated in front of them. Palestinian society is being dismantled, and public opinion in the West blames it on the victims - always the easiest way to face the horror. I know: my father was a German Jew.
[The complete article]

PUBLIC ARE AHEAD OF POLITICIANS IN ISRAEL AND U.S.

Poll: 59% say W. Bank, Gaza exit would renew peace process
Associated Press, May 9, 2002

More than half of Israelis believe withdrawing troops from Palestinian territories and dismantling most Jewish settlements there will help put the peace process back on track, according to an opinion poll. [...] In the poll, 59 percent of those questioned said they believed a unilateral withdrawal of troops and settlers from the West Bank and Gaza Strip would lead to the renewal of the peace process while 72 percent felt it would improve the country's international standing.
[The complete article]

Bush approach on Mideast conflict "out of step" with U.S. public, poll shows
Jim Lobe, OneWorld, May 9, 2002

The United States public may not be nearly as supportive of the Israeli government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as recent actions by Congress and the Bush administration suggest, according to a surprising new poll released in Washington Wednesday.
[The complete article]

LACK OF LEADERSHIP SPANS FROM EAST TO WEST

Comment -- A president who lacks both vision and a strong intellect cannot be expected to coral a team of policymakers that is split into factions, each pushing their own conflicting agendas. GWB thought he could wing it and rely on others to make up for his own deficits, but having dispersed his power he now faces the challenge of trying to reclaim power from individuals who neither want to relinquish it, nor believe in the competance of a president who can't figure out where he's going.

Policy changes and splits inside administration add to confusion
Julian Borger, The Guardian, May 9, 2002

Although the White House moved yesterday to deny Israel's claims that it had US backing for the removal of Yasser Arafat, the denials did little to clarify President Bush's policy in the Middle East, adrift among disagreements within the administration and a general reluctance to get more deeply involved. A White House official insisted that the line remained unchanged - that Arafat was a constant source of disappointment but he was after all, the Palestinian leader. But the official added that he would call back if that policy changed in the next few hours. Policy changes have come thick and fast from an administration that - before it was forced to come to grips with the Middle East - liked to characterise itself as a granite embodiment of moral and strategic resolve.
[The complete article]


U.S. arms sales to Israel end up in China, Iraq
Jonathan Reingold, Common Dreams, May 9, 2002

From 1990 to 2000 U.S. military aid to Israel totaled over $18 billion. No other nation in the world has such a close relationship with the U.S. military and arms industry. The UN, Amnesty International and other groups have raised questions about the extent the to which U.S. military aid is abetting human rights abuses by Israeli forces operating in the West Bank. These debates will no doubt continue for some time. In the mean time, however, there is another aspect of the American-Israeli relationship that may have an even greater impact on U.S. and Israeli security in the long run: the ongoing transfer of American arms technology from Israel to potential U.S. (and Israeli) adversaries around the globe.
[The complete article]

This slur of anti-semitism is used to defend repression
Seumas Milne, The Guardian, May 9, 2002

Since the French revolution, the fates of the Jewish people and the left have been closely intertwined. The left's appeal to social justice and universal rights created a natural bond with a people long persecuted and excluded by the Christian European establishment.
[The complete article]

Israel's black propaganda bid falters as documents reveal an impotent leader not a terrorist mastermind
Robert Fisk, The Independent, May 9, 2002

Israel's so-called Book of Terror – designed to prove that Yasser Arafat is a master of terror involved in suicide attacks on Israel – is riddled with errors, omissions and deliberate misinformation. The dossier, which was presented to President George Bush by the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, characterises Mr Arafat as an evil, scheming warlord funded by Iran and Saudi Arabia. But in some cases, translations of Palestinian documents allegedly seized by Israeli troops in the West Bank have been doctored to "prove" Arafat's responsibility for anti-Israeli attacks. At least one "translation" of a Palestinian document posted on the Israeli army's website is a palpable falsehood.
[The complete article]

End the occupation
Helena Cobban, Christian Science Monitor, May 9, 2002

Amid the hoopla surrounding this week's visits to the White House by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Jordan's King Abdullah, Americans should remember that the 3.5 million Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza have lived under one version or another of foreign military occupation for nearly 35 years.
[The complete article]

A willing witness, a painful price
Brooke A. Masters, Washington Post, May 5, 2002

Alrababah, 29, says his experiences since Sept. 11 also should serve as a cautionary tale. Since he came forward voluntarily [to provide the FBI with information about the hijackers], Alrababah has spent seven months in federal custody -- almost entirely in solitary -- first as a material witness and then charged and convicted in an unrelated identification fraud case. Now, a man who is engaged to a U.S.-born citizen and who once hoped to make his life here is facing deportation as soon as he gets out of prison.
[The complete article]

SHARON KEEPS CONGRESS IN HIS POCKET

Visiting congressmen advise Israel to resist US administration pressure
Arieh O'Sullivan, Jerusalem Post, May 6, 2002

A visiting delegation of US congressmen believes that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon should rebuff attempts by the Bush administration for him to deal with Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat. [...] "Our message to the people of Israel is we stand behind you and behind your action. You need to defend yourselves and do
what it takes.”
[The complete article]

The war on what?
Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, May 8, 2002

There is a broad feeling among Indonesian elites that while some of their more authoritarian neighbors, like Malaysia or Pakistan, have suddenly become the new darlings of Washington as a result of the war on terrorism, Indonesia is being orphaned because it is a messy, but real, democracy. "We sometimes fear that America's democratization agenda also got blown up with the World Trade Center," says the Indonesian writer Andreas Harsono. "Since Sept. 11 there have been so many free riders on this American antiterrorism campaign, countries that want to use it to suppress their media and press freedom and turn back the clock. Indonesia, instead of being seen as a weak democracy that needs support, gets looked at as a weak country that protects terrorists, and Malaysia is seen as superior because it arrests more terrorists than we do."
[The complete article - registration required]

There is a solution to this filthy war - foreign occupation
Robert Fisk, The Independent, May 8, 2002

Sharon himself has now taken to blaming not just Arafat and his corrupt henchmen for the wicked suicide bombing of Israeli civilians. He now blames the Palestinians as a people. Only last month, in the Knesset, he was referring to "the murderous insanity that has taken hold of our Palestinian neighbours". If Palestinians as a people are now possessed of "murderous insanity", Mr Sharon is not going to make peace with them. And if the Palestinians have to go on watching the Jewish settlements surrounding them on their land, they are not going to make peace with Israel. And contrary to song, myth and legend, the Israeli army has been behaving more like a militia than a disciplined military force. The reports of mass looting by Israeli troops in Ramallah, especially of jewellery and cash, have reached epic proportions. Israel may publicly claim that this is Palestinian propaganda, but the Israeli army's high command knows the stories are true – one officer referred to it as "the wide-scale, ugly phenomenon of vandalism".
[The complete article]

Indecision reigns in the White House
Julian Borger, The Guardian, May 8, 2002

The rolling disaster that is this administration's Middle East policy was set in motion well over a year ago when Bush put his team together. It was clear at the outset that Powell, with his belief in multilateral solutions to global problems, was the odd man out among the likes of Rumsfeld, Cheney and Rice - who all believe that the US should embrace the leadership history has placed in its lap, and begin acting like a real superpower. Its true friends would follow. Challenged over these inherent conflicts, Bush laughed them off. The administration would be all the richer for some constructive debate, he said. That is true as long as there is someone willing to make a decision once the debate is over. That, of course, is the task of the president. That is why they give him the big office and the impressive title. But over the Middle East, the president has floundered.
[The complete article]

Israeli soldiers who moved into West Bank cities left behind destruction and degradation
Amira Hass, Ha'aretz, May 8, 2002

In the department for the encouragement of children's art [at Palestinian Ministry of Culture], the soldiers had dirtied all the walls with gouache paints they found there and destroyed the children's paintings that hung there. In every room of the various departments - literature, film, culture for children and youth books, discs, pamphlets and documents were piled up, soiled with urine and excrement. There are two toilets on every floor, but the soldiers urinated and defecated everywhere else in the building, in several rooms of which they had lived for about a month. They did their business on the floors, in emptied flowerpots, even in drawers they had pulled out of desks.
[The complete article]

Giving up the settlements is cheaper than you think
Akiva Eldar, Ha'aretz, May 8, 2002

In the second half of 2000, at the height of the negotiations between the Barak government and the Palestinians over a final settlement, economics professor Haim Ben-Shahar prepared a document called "A home in Israel for every settler (working title)." In his introduction, Ben-Shahar calls the document "a feasibility study for returning the settlers to the State of Israel, as they will be determined in a permanent settlement." Ben-Shahar has long been a behind-the-scenes economic adviser to Labor Party leaders, and in the past was the party's candidate for finance minister. The intifada, which came instead of a permanent settlement, convinced Ben-Shahar that fall 2000 wasn't the right time to bother Barak with a plan to evacuate the settlements. Lately, as the campaign by the Council for Peace and Security for unilateral withdrawal gathers steam, Ben-Shahar updated his plan and agreed to let it be known in public.
[The complete article]

Clash of the uncivilized -- extremism mars world stage
Yu Bin, Pacific News Service, May 6, 2002

Sept. 11 seems to have unleashed the most uncivilized part of every major religion in the world. Extremists from every part of the world -- be they Islamic fundamentalists, Hindu revivalists, Palestinian "kamikazes," Jewish hard-liners or Christian right-wingers -- are plunging themselves into holy wars of their own definition and making. The West's reaction to these clashes has been disappointing at best. The Bush team, which effectively destroyed the Taliban with a "with-us-or-against-us" policy, has yet to demonstrate its willingness and ability to reconstruct a global village of tolerance and coexistence for all.
[The complete article]

Congress attacks human rights
Stephen Zunes, AlterNet, May 3, 2002

On Thursday, both the House of Representative and the U.S. Senate overwhelmingly passed resolutions defending the policies of right-wing Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon in the occupied territories. Human rights activists are alarmed, both at the strong Congressional support for a repressive military occupation as well as the fact that the resolutions are being widely interpreted as an attack on the credibility of Amnesty International and other human rights groups.
[The complete article]

US reneges on deal for war crimes world court
David Rennie, The Telegraph, May 7, 2002

America yesterday repudiated a treaty founding the world's first permanent war crimes tribunal, claiming that the court could be used to launch politically motivated prosecutions of US servicemen or officials. [...]
US ambassadors around the world were reportedly sent cables on Sunday night, instructing them to seek written promises from their host governments never to aid the court in any action against an American citizen. Allies who refused to issue blanket exemptions for US nationals could face penalties such as the withholding of US military aid, officials said.
[The complete article]

War on terror may extend to Cuba
Julian Borger, The Guardian, May 7, 2002

The US threatened to extend its war on terror to Cuba yesterday, accusing Fidel Castro's regime of developing biological weapons and sharing its expertise with Washington's enemies. In a speech called Beyond the Axis of Evil, the undersecretary of state John Bolton presented no evidence for his claims, pointing only to Cuba's advanced biomedical industry and Mr Castro's visits last year to three "rogue states" accused by the the US state department of sponsoring terrorism: Iraq, Syria and Libya. "States that renounce terror and abandon WMD [weapons of mass destruction] can become part of our effort," Mr Bolton said. "But those that do not can expect to become our targets."
[The complete article]

War on civil liberties
Edward Helmore, The Guardian, May 7, 2002

As the US war on terrorism meanders on, legal questions surrounding alleged terrorists and their associates have taken on all the complexity of the war itself. Despite George Bush's and US attorney general John Ashcroft's binary world view of friend or foe, many post-September 11 detainees live in a shadow world, denied the full measure of US constitutional rights, and held in custody under a system that will neither release nor charge them.
[The complete article]

Afghan victims deserve U.S. support
Medea Benjamin and Jason Mark, The Nation, May 6, 2002

When Congress contemplates the upcoming 2002 Supplemental Appropriations bill, there's a small item that should be added to the budget: $20 million to help the Afghan people who were mistakenly hurt during the US military campaign.

The Pentagon has not released any figures regarding the number of civilian casualties. But it appears that hundreds of Afghans--perhaps thousands--were killed by errant bombs, while others were wounded and/or had their property destroyed. There's a growing chorus both in the United States and Afghanistan calling on the US government to help these families, just as the government so compassionately helped the families who lost loved ones on September 11. By helping the Afghan civilian victims of the recent military campaign, we'll provide badly needed assistance to people living in desperate conditions, improve our image internationally and move closer toward lasting peace and security.
[The complete article]

89 Harvard and MIT faculty urge divestment in Israel
Jenna Russell, Boston Globe, May 6, 2002

A teach-in on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology today is the latest development in an ongoing protest of Israeli policy by some MIT and Harvard University professors. About 90 faculty members at the two institutions have signed an online petition asking the schools to divest from companies doing business in Israel until its forces withdraw from occupied territories, among other conditions.
[The complete article]

Harvard or MIT faculty, students, and staff who wish to sign the petition should email harvardmitdivest@yahoo.com with the following information: name, email address, university affiliation, department or college (if applicable,) and graduation year (if applicable, otherwise, status -- staff, etc.) Please include the word "petition" in the subject line. If you are a professor, please also include the word "faculty" in the subject line.

Gaza City: Sharon's war on the future
An eyewitness recounts Israel's military action

Benjamin Dov Granby, TomPaine.com, May 2, 2002

The recent Israeli re-occupation of Ramallah took a devastating toll not just among the upper echelon. The very institutions of the intellectual class were utterly ransacked. Christina Storm, director of Lawyers Without Borders, commented that it seemed as if the Israeli government sought to embitter any and all future peacemakers in the legal arena of educated Palestinian society.
[The complete article]

US threat to wreck treaty system
David Teather, The Guardian, May 6, 2002

The US will today threaten to undermine the entire system of international treaties when it withdraws from plans for a court that will act as the world's first permanent war crimes tribunal. The decision is likely to provoke anger from the international community, and provide further evidence for what many see as the Bush administration's increasing unilateralism.
[The complete article]

A mission too far
Haim Weiss, The Guardian, May 6, 2002

A captain in the Israeli Defense Force tank corps, who was once glad to serve in the Israeli army, tells his defence secretary why he will not go to the West Bank.
[The complete article]

A U.S. cabal pulling America to war
Conn Hallinan, Foreign Policy in Focus, May 3, 2002

Sometime this fall, probably before the mid-term elections, the U.S. will probably be at war with Iraq. But why are we headed to war in the Mideast? Not because Iraq is engaged in terrorism. According to the CIA, it isn't. Not because Iraqi arms threaten our security. According to most arms inspectors, Iraq is essentially disarmed. No, it will happen because more than a decade ago a small cabal of political heavyweights in the administration of George Bush the First, who now also run the foreign and defense policy of George Bush II, sat down and drew up a blueprint to rule the world.
[The complete article]

The new comeback kid
After years on the outside, Sharon shines brightly in Bush's Washington

Geoffrey Aronson, Los Angeles Times, May 5, 2002

Recollection of the problems that Sharon has created for Washington over the years is absent from both the institutional and personal memories of those who rule, and those who advise them. Bush has given every indication that he is content to see Sharon mold the agenda of the post-Oslo era according to his preferences, just as Clinton deferred to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's vision at Oslo in 1993. Even after Sharon deployed 75,000 soldiers in the West Bank, an action resulting in unprecedented ruin there, the utterly improbable word from Bush was: "I do believe Ariel Sharon is a man of peace."
[The complete article]

THE OCCUPATION: HOW ISRAEL HAS INSTITUTIONALIZED ITS DISREGARD FOR PALESTINIAN LIVES

A bridge too far

Gideon Levy, Ha'aretz, May 5, 2002

The Palestinians are imprisoned in their towns and villages in such a way as to render movement from one place to another, even to save lives, impossible. In such a manner, Israel is again managing their lives and deaths. The semblance of Palestinian sovereignty has vanished and the few civil spheres that had been transferred to the Palestinians' control have been taken back.
[The complete article]

Sharon the merciless and Arafat the corrupt have nothing meaningful to offer each other
Robert Fisk, The Independent, May 4, 2002

Self-delusion has crossed the Atlantic. George Bush is having visions again – just as he did before the most recent bloodbath in Israel and Palestine – and Colin Powell, whose latest Middle East mission was a wholesale disaster, wants to devise "a set of principles" for an Arab-Israeli peace. And, as usual, it is the occupied, not the occupier, who is warned this is the "last chance" for peace.
[The complete article]

Give Palestinians international protection
Mohammad Tarbush, International Herald Tribune, May 3, 2002

Israel, we are constantly told, is a democratic state. It is certainly that for its Jewish population. To the Palestinians suffering under occupation, the Israeli state and its apparatus represent the worst type of military dictatorship. In its control over their daily lives, Israel has been ruthless. Israel's afflictions on the Palestinian people are too harsh to bear, too long to detail, too flagrant to ignore.
[The complete article]

Senior Republican calls on Israel to expel West Bank Arabs
Matthew Engel, The Guardian, May 4, 2002

The most senior Republican in the House of Representatives has called for Palestinians to be expelled from the West Bank, which should be annexed in its entirety by the state of Israel. Dick Armey, majority leader in the House, shocked a primetime television audience when he said in a chat-show interview, that East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza - all occupied by the Israeli army since the 1967 war - should be considered a part of Israel proper. He was "content to have a Palestinian state", but argued that such an entity could be set up inside other Arab countries. [...]

Mr Armey's views have been scarcely reported in America. The only mention was a passing reference in the deepest recesses of yesterday's New York Times and Washington Post. The Council on American-Islamic Relations called Mr Armey's views "beyond belief". Spokesman Jason Erb said that "even the most extreme Israelis are reluctant to publicly advocate such an insane policy". When Ari Fleischer, Mr Bush's spokesman, was asked for the president's view on what appeared to be an argument for ethnic cleansing, he changed the subject. However, Mr Armey's views were not far out of line with on Thursday night's debate in the House, which overwhelmingly passed a 920-word resolution entirely in favour of Israel, save for a call to pursue peace and a reference to the "humanitarian needs of the Palestinian people" - tacked on at the White House's request.
[The complete article]

The war on terrorism's gravy train
Cheney's former company wins Afghanistan war contracts

Pratap Chatterjee, CorpWatch, May 2, 2002

The U.S. military has always relied on private contractors to provide some basic services such as construction, dating back as far as the Civil War. But today as much as 10% of the emergency U.S. army operations overseas are contracted out to private companies run by former government and military officials. These private companies operate with no public oversight despite the fact that these contractors work just behind the battle lines. The companies are allowed to make up to nine percent in profit out of these war support efforts. And experience so far has shown that the companies are not above skimming more profits off the top if they can.
[The complete article]

How Middle East peace process was killed
H.D.S. Greenway, Boston Globe, May 3, 2002

Books are being written about what went wrong with the Oslo peace process in the Middle East, and there will be as many theories as there are authors. But one of the most persistent myths is that Yasser Arafat turned down the most generous offer any Israeli leader had ever made and decided to return to armed struggle. It is true that Arafat didn't accept Israel's offer at Camp David, but the Palestinians didn't stop negotiating. The fact is that negotiations went on at the Red Sea resort of Taba after Camp David, bringing the two positions even closer, even after riots had broken out following Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount. That round of negotiations ended when Israel's Ehud Barak closed them down in order to begin his election campaign. When Oslo's archenemy, Sharon, came to power, Oslo died.
[The complete article]

"The truth about America is that it is at once deeply democratic and instinctively imperialist"

This description of America by Ramachandra Guha, along with extracts from thirteen other essays on "What we think of America," comes from the latest issue of the literary journal, Granta:

The September 11 attacks on the US provoked shock and pity in the rest of the world, but mingled with the sympathy was something harsher: anti-Americanism. It wasn't confined to the West Bank or Kabul. It could be heard in English country pubs, in the bars of Paris and Rome, the tea stalls of New Delhi. 'Hubris' was the general idea: in one opinion poll, two-thirds of the respondents outside the US agreed to the proposition that it was 'good that Americans now know what it's like to be vulnerable'.

Is the US really so disliked? If so, why? In this issue twenty-four writers drawn from many countries describe the part America has played in their lives—for better or worse—and deliver their estimate of the good and the bad it has done as the world's supreme political, military, economic and cultural power.
[The essays]

United States Senate backs Israel, "a frontline state in the war against terrorism," and declines to call for an end to the occupation, or the establishment of a Palestinian state

The following ammendment, by Sen. Joe Lieberman, was passed by the Senate with 94 in favor and 2 against. Following the text of the ammendment is Sen. Byrd's expression of dissent - dissent that he was not even allowed to make before the vote was actually taken. Is this what democracy looks like?

Lieberman Amdt. No. 3389: EXPRESSING SOLIDARITY WITH ISRAEL IN ITS FIGHT AGAINST TERRORISM.

(a) FINDINGS.--Congress makes the following findings:

(1) The United States and Israel are now engaged in a common struggle against terrorism and are on the frontlines of a conflict thrust upon them against their will.

(2) President George W. Bush declared on November 21, 2001, ``We fight the terrorists and we fight all of those who give them aid. America has a message for the nations of the world: If you harbor terrorists, you are terrorists. If you train or arm a terrorist, you are a terrorist. If you feed a terrorist or fund a terrorist, you are a terrorist, and you will be held accountable by the United States and our friends.''.

(3) The United States has committed to provide resources to states on the frontline in the war against terrorism.

(b) SENSE OF CONGRESS.--The Congress--

(1) stands in solidarity with Israel, a frontline state in the war against terrorism, as it takes necessary steps to provide security to its people by dismantling the terrorist infrastructure in the Palestinian areas;

(2) remains committed to Israel's right to self-defense;

(3) will continue to assist Israel in strengthening its homeland defenses;

(4) condemns Palestinian suicide bombings;

(5) demands that the Palestinian Authority fulfill its commitment to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure in the Palestinian areas;

(6) urges all Arab states, particularly the United States allies, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, to declare their unqualified opposition to all forms of terrorism, particularly suicide bombing, and to act in concert with the United States to stop the violence; and

(7) urges all parties in the region to pursue vigorously efforts to establish a just, lasting, and comprehensive peace in the Middle East.


This is not a time for chest-thumping rhetoric
Senator Robert Byrd, May 2, 2002

This is not a time for chest-thumping rhetoric. This is a time for quiet diplomacy, measured speech, and clear direction. This is not the moment for Congress to stir the Mideast pot. Unfortunately, that is just what the resolution before us does.

I am sure it is a well-intentioned resolution. I know there are many Members of this body who feel passionately about the devastating suicide bombers who have caused so much chaos and heartbreak in Israel . I recognize that there are many Senators who are aching to express in some tangible way their support for Israel . I understand their anguish, and I sympathize with their frustration. But this is not the time to express that frustration. It is not the time.

According to the news reports I have read, the White House has strongly urged Congress not to inflame passions by staging a vote on Israel . The fear is that even a symbolic vote by Congress in favor of Israel would jeopardize the already precarious role of the United States in the Middle East peace negotiations and could even backfire by aggravating tensions and possibly provoking more violence in the Middle East.

Does anyone actually believe--does anyone, anyone, anywhere actually believe--that the U.S. Senate needs to manufacture a vote to demonstrate its support of Israel ? Do we not have an unblemished record of support stretching back to the founding of the State of Israel in 1948?

According to the Congressional Research Service, since 1976 Israel has been the largest--the largest--annual recipient of United States foreign assistance and is the largest cumulative recipient since World War II. Since 1985, we have provided about $3 billion a year to Israel in foreign assistance. If Israel does not know by now the depth of United States support and solidarity, it never will.

I object not only to the timing of this resolution--and I believe the timing is fraught with peril--I also object to the slant of the resolution.

Yes. The United States Senate supports the State of Israel and abhors the violence that has been perpetrated against its citizens by Palestinian suicide bombers. The United States Senate also supports peace in the Middle East. And peace in the Middle East is a two-way street. Nowhere in this resolution--nowhere in this resolution--is Israel called upon to fulfill its role in working for peace in the Middle East.

Why was this resolution written so hurriedly? Why was it incumbent upon this Senate to vote today?

This resolution condemns Palestinian suicide bombing, demands that the Palestinian Authority dismantle the terrorist infrastructure in Palestinian areas, and urges all Arab States to act in concert with the United States to stop the violence.

Where are the demands that Israel withdraw from Palestinian lands and cooperate in establishment of a Palestinian State?

Where is the denunciation of the destruction of homes and water lines and roads and basic infrastructure in Jenin and Nablus and elsewhere in the West Bank? Where is the expression of support for humanitarian and reconstruction aid to the innocent Palestinian victims of Israel's incursions into the West Bank? Where?

If the Senate is serious about promoting peace in the Middle East--and I believe to the depths of my soul that the Senate is serious--then we should leave the grandstanding to others. We should support the real work of peacekeeping. For better or worse, the United States has been cast in the role of honest broker in the Middle East. But resolutions like this one do not enhance our ability to perform that role. The Middle East today is balanced on the head of a pin. This is not the time for the U.S. Senate to wade into the fray, waving an ill-timed, ill-advised, and one-sided resolution.

I voted against it.

HAVE NO DOUBT - THE U.S. CONGRESS (WHICH DUTIFULLY TRANSFERS 3 BILLION TAX DOLLARS INTO THE ISRAELI TREASURY EVERY YEAR - THAT IS 20% OF ALL U.S. FOREIGN AID) REALLY IS "ISRAELI OCCUPIED TERRITORY"!

Rep. Dick Armey calls for ethnic cleansing of Palestinians
Transcript of MSNBC Hardball interview with House Republican Leader, Rep. Dick Armey, Counterpunch, May 2, 2002

Rep. Armey: I'm content to have Israel grab the entire West Bank. I'm also content to have the Palestinians have a homeland and even for that to be somewhere near Israel, but I'm not content to see Israel give up land for the purpose of peace to the Palestinians who will not accept it and would not honor it. [...] There are many Arab nations that have many hundreds of thousands of acres of land and - and soil and property and opportunity to create a Palestinian state.
[The complete article]

Sharon's plan is to drive Palestinians across the Jordan
The leading Israeli historian predicts that a US attack on Iraq or a terrorist strike at home could trigger a massive mobilisation to clear the occupied territories of their two million Arabs

Martin van Creveld, The Telegraph, April 28, 2002

The expulsion of the Palestinians would require only a few brigades. They would not drag people out of their houses but use heavy artillery to drive them out; the damage caused to Jenin would look like a pinprick in comparison. [...]

Some believe that the international community will not permit such an ethnic cleansing. I would not count on it. If Mr Sharon decides to go ahead, the only country that can stop him is the United States.

The US, however, regards itself as being at war with parts of the Muslim world that have supported Osama bin Laden. America will not necessarily object to that world being taught a lesson - particularly if it could be as swift and brutal as the 1967 campaign; and also particularly if it does not disrupt the flow of oil for too long.
[The complete article]

Israeli Defense Forces admit 'ugly vandalism' against Palestinian property
Amos Harel, Ha'aretz, May 2, 2002

Israel Defense Forces sources have admitted that Palestinian claims of the systematic destruction of property, particularly computers, during the recent military operations in Ramallah are, for the most part, true. "There were indeed wide-scale, ugly phenomena of vandalism," a senior military sources told Ha'aretz yesterday.
[The complete article]

Israelis held hostage by settlements
Tom Ackerman, Baltimore Sun, May 2, 2002

For all their outer stoicism and a broad consensus that backs a fierce response to the suicide bombers, an unsparing realization has struck a majority of those Israelis who don't put their faith in divine destiny or messianic ideology. They are struggling to cope with an emerging awareness of the true price of Israel's 35-year hold on the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
[The complete article]

The other war in Afghanistan
Rory Carroll, The Guardian, May 2, 2002

There are two wars in Afghanistan. The American-led campaign against Islamist guerrillas proceeds in the mountains and deserts bordering Pakistan, chasing up a rocket attack here, gunfire there. Taliban and al-Qaida fighters have yet to show they can inflict serious damage.

News from the second war is not so good for the US and its allies because there is not supposed to be a second war. Waged mostly in the north and east, it turns bloodier by the week. Several days ago more than 300 rockets rained into the town of Gardez, killing and wounding more than 100 civilians. Yesterday shooting and shelling continued near the towns of Shulgara and Sare Pul where fighting has left 12 dead and wounded.

Despite the body count this second conflict receives less attention because it is an internal affair: rival Afghan warlords battling each other for territory and influence. Usually the combatants swear loyalty to the Americans and offer to help hunt for the Islamists.

In fact the two conflicts threaten to spill into each other in a way potentially dangerous way for the US and British mission. The more mayhem the warlords spread, the more political and military conditions will improve for the guerrillas. Western diplomats in Kabul fret that it was factional fighting which paved the way for the Taliban's rise in 1995.
[The complete article]

Fighting words
The Bush administration builds up its pretext for attacking Iraq

Roger Trilling, Village Voice, May 1, 2002

Last month, the administration's effort to garner public support for its go-it-alone posture got a boost from an unlikely source. In its March 25 issue, The New Yorker ran an 18,000-word piece by Jeffrey Goldberg about Halabja, a Kurdish town where, on March 16, 1988, Saddam is accused of massacring his own citizens with poison gas. [...]

Though he says it wasn't meant that way, Goldberg's piece—entitled "The Great Terror"—provided an eloquent set of images for the Bush administration's Iraq policy. "It's a devastating article," Cheney said on Meet the Press. "Specifically, its description of what happened in 1988 when Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against the Kurds in northern Iraq, against some of his own people. It demonstrates conclusively what a lot of us have said: that this is a man who is a great danger to that region of the world—especially if he's able to acquire nuclear weapons."

The president agreed. A few days earlier, he had invoked the story during his trip to Mexico. "It details about his [Saddam's] barbaric behavior toward his own people," Bush said. "And this is a man who refuses to allow us to determine whether or not he still has weapons of mass destruction—which leads me to believe he does."

Ever since September 11, the administration has been trying to hook Iraq into the "war on terror." Initially, a claim was advanced that suicide pilot Mohammed Atta had met with Iraqi operatives in Prague. Then Iraq was floated as a source of the anthrax attacks. Finally, the "axis of evil" speech accused Saddam of stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. Although few doubt that Saddam has such armaments, none of these charges was ever substantiated. But by repeatedly citing the New Yorker article, Bush and Cheney were saying that they didn't need to prove a thing. What Saddam did in Halabja is reason enough to oust him.

It's quite a stretch to predicate a threat of war on an incident that took place 14 years ago—especially if there's a possibility that it didn't happen the way Goldberg described it.
[The complete article]

Corporate America and the Israeli occupation of Palestine
Sam Bahour, Counterpunch, May 1, 2002

Earlier this month [April], Microsoft Israel put company executives in Redmond, Seattle in an awkward position when they sponsored two large billboards on a main Israeli highway saluting Israel's armed forces at the same time the Israeli military was indiscriminately bombing the Jenin refugee camp into what is rapidly amounting to war crimes. Only days after a grassroots letter writing campaign, partly led by the Israeli peace group Gush-Shalom, Microsoft executives announced that Microsoft Israel had acted alone and was instructed to take down the billboards, which they promptly did. Israel is the largest research and development site for Microsoft outside of the U.S. Bill Gates would serve world peace well by continuing his involvement and requesting Israel to end the occupation in order to qualify for continued commercial opportunities. The same can be said for Intel Corporation, which has the largest production facilities outside of the U.S. located in Israel.

Divesting in countries that are in blatant violation of international and humanitarian law is not new. The divestment campaign that targeted apartheid in South Africa is a case in point. When South African business leaders saw that apartheid was jeopardizing their own business interests they played an important role in convincing their government to fall in line with international law, which led to the ending of apartheid. One might argue that no grassroots commercial divestment in Israel can be large enough to convince the Israeli government to change paths. This is debatable. However, it is clear that such a campaign would send the right signals that the time has come for Israel to join the world community by ending its oppression of Palestinians.
[The complete article]

Inside Gaza
Kristen Schurr, Counterpunch, May 1, 2002

In Gaza City a Palestinian father, Amjad Shawa of the PNGO, tells me that his son's first word was tahk, not baba. Tahk is shooting, baba is dad. He is devastated when he says that he cannot protect his children.

The Gaza Strip, effectively a prison with 1,250,000 Palestinians who have not been allowed to enter or exit for the past month, is divided into three parts by Israeli soldiers. The 43 km trip from the north end to the south, can sometimes take two days. Thousands of Palestinians and I were lucky yesterday and made it through a checkpoint in only five hours. It is forbidden by the Israeli soldiers for a Palestinian to walk through the checkpoint.
[The complete article]

Jewish peace activists galvanized by Sharon's hard line
Alan Zibel, Pacific News Service, April 30, 2002

Pro-Palestinian Jews in America face criticism from family in the United States and Israel, and their grass-roots organizations are dwarfed by pro-Israel groups. But for some who saw firsthand Palestinians suffering at the hands of Israelis, there's no turning back in the struggle for justice. While conventional wisdom holds that Palestinian terrorism has hardened Jews' support of the Israeli government, Jewish peace activists say Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's hard-line stance toward the Palestinians has provided their movement with renewed energy.
[The complete article]

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