[Nettime-bold] September 11...(6)

[radtimes <resist@best.com>]

"Those who are willing to sacrifice essential liberties for a little order,
will lose both and deserve neither." -- Benjamin Franklin
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[multiple items]
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Explosives Planted In Towers, N.M. Tech Expert Says

http://www.abqjournal.com/aqvan09-11-01.htm

September 11, 2001
By Olivier Uyttebrouck, Journal Staff Writer

     Televised images of the attacks on the World Trade Center suggest that
explosives devices caused the collapse of both towers, a New Mexico Tech
explosion expert said Tuesday.
     The collapse of the buildings appears "too methodical" to be a chance
result of airplanes colliding with the structures, said Van Romero, vice
president for research at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.
     "My opinion is, based on the videotapes, that after the airplanes hit
the World Trade Center there were some explosive devices inside the
buildings that caused the towers to collapse," Romero said.
     Romero is a former director of the Energetic Materials Research and
Testing Center at Tech, which studies explosive materials and the effects
of explosions on buildings, aircraft and other structures.
     Romero said he based his opinion on video aired on national
television broadcasts.
     Romero said the collapse of the structures resembled those of
controlled implosions used to demolish old structures.
     "It would be difficult for something from the plane to trigger an event
like that," Romero said in a phone interview from Washington, D.C.
     Romero said he and another Tech administrator were on a
Washington-area subway when an airplane struck the Pentagon.
     He said he and Denny Peterson, vice president for administration and
finance, were en route to an office building near the Pentagon to discuss
defense-funded research programs at Tech.
     If explosions did cause the towers to collapse, the detonations could
have been caused by a small amount of explosive, he said.
     "It could have been a relatively small amount of explosives placed
in strategic points," Romero said. The explosives likely would have been
put in more than two points in each of the towers, he said.
     The detonation of bombs within the towers is consistent with a
common terrorist strategy, Romero said.
     "One of the things terrorist events are noted for is a diversionary
attack and secondary device," Romero said.
     Attackers detonate an initial, diversionary explosion that attracts
emergency personnel to the scene, then detonate a second explosion, he
said.
     Romero said that if his scenario is correct, the diversionary attack
would have been the collision of the planes into the towers.
     Tech President Dan Lopez said Tuesday that Tech had not been asked
to take part in the investigation into the attacks. Tech often assists in
forensic investigations into terrorist attacks, often by setting off
similar explosions and studying the effects.

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Terrorism, television and the rage for vengeance

By Norman Solomon
September 14, 2001

We stare at TV screens and try to comprehend the suffering in the aftermath 
of terrorism. Much of what we see is ghastly and all too real; terrible 
anguish and sorrow.

At the same time, we're witnessing an onslaught of media deception. "The 
greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing 
something, but by refraining from doing," Aldous Huxley observed long ago. 
"Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is 
silence about truth."

Silence, rigorously selective, pervades the media coverage of recent days. 
For policy-makers in Washington, the practical utility of that silence is 
enormous. In response to the mass murder committed by hijackers, the 
righteousness of U.S. military action is clear-as long as double standards 
go unmentioned.

While rescue crews braved intense smoke and grisly rubble, ABC News analyst 
Vincent Cannistraro helped to put it all in perspective for millions of TV 
viewers. Cannistraro is a former high-ranking official of the Central 
Intelligence Agency who was in charge of the CIA's work with the contras in 
Nicaragua during the early 1980s. After moving to the National Security 
Council in 1984, he became a supervisor of covert aid to Afghan guerrillas.

In other words, Cannistraro has a long history of assisting 
terrorists-first, contra soldiers who routinely killed Nicaraguan 
civilians; then, Mujahedeen rebels in Afghanistan . . . like Osama bin Laden.

How can a longtime associate of terrorists now be credibly denouncing 
"terrorism"? It's easy. All that's required is for media coverage to remain 
in a kind of history-free zone that has no use for any facets of reality 
that are not presently convenient to acknowledge.

In his book "1984," George Orwell described the mental dynamics: "The 
process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient 
precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a 
feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. . . . To tell deliberate lies while 
genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become 
inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back 
from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of 
objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which 
one denies-all this is indispensably necessary."

Secretary of State Colin Powell denounced "people who feel that with the 
destruction of buildings, with the murder of people, they can somehow 
achieve a political purpose." He was describing the terrorists who had 
struck his country hours earlier. But Powell was also aptly describing a 
long line of top officials in Washington.

It would be very unusual to hear a comment about that sort of hypocrisy on 
any major TV network in the United States. Yet surely U.S. policy-makers 
have believed that they could "achieve a political purpose" -with "the 
destruction of buildings, with the murder of people"-when launching 
missiles at Baghdad or Belgrade.

Nor are key national media outlets now doing much to shed light on American 
assaults that were touted as anti-terrorist "retaliation"-such as the 
firing of 13 cruise missiles, one day in August 1998, at the Al Shifa 
pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan. That attack, depriving an 
impoverished country of desperately needed medical drugs, was an atrocity 
committed (in the words of political analyst Noam Chomsky) "with no 
credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and probably 
killing tens of thousands of people."

No one knows the exact number of lives lost due to the severe disruption of 
Sudan's meager drug supply, Chomsky adds, "because the U.S. blocked an 
inquiry at the United Nations and no one cares to pursue it."

Media scrutiny of atrocities committed by the U.S. government is rare. Only 
some cruelties merit the spotlight. Only some victims deserve empathy. Only 
certain crimes against humanity are worth our tears.

"This will be a monumental struggle of good versus evil," President Bush 
proclaimed. The media reactions to such rhetoric have been overwhelmingly 
favorable.

But the heart-wrenching voices now on the USA's airwaves are no less or 
more important than voices that we have never heard. Today, the victims of 
terrorism in America deserve our deep compassion. So do the faraway victims 
of America-human beings whose humanity has gone unrecognized by U.S. media.

Underlying that lack of recognition is a nationalistic arrogance shared by 
press and state. Few eyebrows went up when Time magazine declared in its 
Sept. 10 edition: "The U.S. is at one of those fortunate-and rare -moments 
in history when it can shape the world." That attitude can only bring us a 
succession of disasters.
------------------
Norman Solomon's book "The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media" won the 1999 
George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity 
in Public Language, presented by the National Council of Teachers of English.

Norman Solomon's archived columns may be found at 
<http://www.fair.org/media-beat/index.html>

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Respond to Violence: Teach Peace, Not War

By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

Open the Washington Post to it's editorial pages, and war talk dominates.

Henry Kissinger: Destroy the Network.

Robert Kagan: We Must Fight This War.

Charles Krauthammer: To War, Not to Court.

William S. Cohen: American Holy War.

There is no column by Colman McCarthy talking peace.

 >From 1969 to 1997, McCarthy wrote a column for the Washington Post. He was
let go because the column, he was told, wasn't making enough money for the
company. "The market has spoken," was the way Robert Kaiser, the managing
editor at the Post, put it at the time.

McCarthy is a pacifist. "I'm opposed to any kind of violence -- economic,
political, military, domestic."

But McCarthy is not surprised by the war talk coming from the Post. He has
just completed an analysis of 430 opinion pieces that ran in the
Washington Post in June, July and August 2001.

Of the 430 opinion pieces, 420 were written by right-wingers or centrists.
Only ten were written by columnists one might consider left.

Nor is he surprised by the initial response of the American people to
Tuesday's horrific attacks on innocent civilians.  According to a
Washington Post/ABC News poll, nine of ten people supported taking
military action against the groups or nations responsible for the
attacks "even if it led to war."

"In the flush of emotions, that is the common reaction," McCarthy says.

"But is it a rational and sane reaction?"

So, how should we respond?

"We forgive you. Please forgive us."

Forgive us for what?

"Please forgive us for being the most violent government on earth,"
McCarthy says. "Martin Luther King said this on April 4, 1967 at Riverside
Church in New York. He said 'my government is the world's leading purveyor
of violence.'"

What should Bush do?

"He should say that the United States will no longer be the world's
largest seller of weapons, that we will begin to decrease our
extravagantly wasteful military budget, which runs now at about $9,000 a
second."

What will Bush do?

"Within the week, we will be bombing somebody somewhere," McCarthy says.
"This is what his father did, this is what Clinton did."

"In the past 20 years, we have bombed Libya, Grenada, Panama, Somalia,
Haiti, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, and Yugoslavia. There are two things
about those countries -- all are poor countries, and the majority are
people of dark colored skin."

Are you saying that we should just turn the other cheek?

"No, that's passivity," McCarthy says. "Pacifism is not passivity.
Pacifism is direct action, direct resistance, refusing to cooperate with
violence. That takes a lot of bravery. It takes much more courage than to
use a gun or drop a bomb."

Since leaving the Post, McCarthy has dedicated his life to teaching peace.
He has created the Center for Teaching Peace, which he runs out of his
home in Northwest Washington. He teaches peace and non-violence at six
area universities and at a number of public secondary and high schools.

But he's up against a system that systematically teaches violence -- from
that all pervasive teacher of children -- television -- to the President
of the United States.

"In 1999, the day after the Columbine shootings, Bill Clinton went to a
high school in Alexandria, Virginia and gave a speech to the school's Peer
Mediation Club," McCarthy says. "Clinton said 'we must teach our children
to express their anger and resolve their conflicts with words not
weapons.'"

"It was a great speech, but he went back that same night and ordered up
the most intense bombing of Belgrade since that war began four weeks
before."

Message to children: kid's violence is bad, but America's violence is
good.

McCarthy says we should teach our children forgiveness, not to demonize
people who have a grievance.

"When you hit your child, or beat up the person you are living with, you
are saying -- 'I want you to change the way you think or behave and I'm
going to use physical force to make you change your way or your mind,'" he
says.

"In fact, violence is rarely effective. If violence was effective, we
would have had a peaceful planet eons ago."

How to break the cycle of violence?

"The same way you break the cycle of ignorance -- educate people,"
McCarthy responds.

"Kids walk in the school with no idea that two plus two equals four. They
are ignorant. We repeat over and over -- Billy, two plus two equals four.
And Billy leaves school knowing two plus two equals four. But he doesn't
leave school knowing that an eye for an eye means we all go blind."

"We have about 50 million students in this country," McCarthy says.
"Nearly all of those are going to graduate absolutely unaware of the
philosophy of Gandhi, King, Dorothy Day, Howard Zinn, or A.J. Muste."

When he speaks before college audiences, McCarthy holds up a $100 dollar
bill and says "I'll give this to anybody in the audience who can identify
these next six people -- Who was Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, and Paul
Revere? All hands go up on all three."

"Then I ask -- Who was Jeanette Rankin (first women member of Congress,
voted against World War I and World War II, said 'you can no more win a
war than win an earthquake,' Dorothy Day (co-founder of the Catholic
Worker movement), Ginetta Sagan (founder of Amnesty USA)."

"The last three are women peacemakers. The first three are all male
peacebreakers. The kids know the militarists. They don't know the
peacemakers."

He hasn't lost his $100 bill yet to a student.

Of the 3,100 colleges and universities in the country, only about 70 have
degree programs in peace studies and most are underfunded.

Instead of bombing, we should start teaching peace.

"We are graduating students as peace illiterates who have only heard of
the side of violence," McCarthy laments. "If we don't teach our children
peace, somebody else will teach them violence."

[The Center for Teaching Peace has produced two text books, Solutions to
Violence and Strength Through Peace, both edited by Colman McCarthy. Each
book contains 90 essays by the world's great theorists and practitioners
of non-violence. ($25 each). To contact Colman McCarthy, write to: Center
for Teaching Peace, 4501 Van Ness Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20016
Phone: (202) 537-1372]
-----------------
Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based
Multinational Monitor. They are co-authors of Corporate Predators: The
Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common
Courage Press, 1999).

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The AGRIBUSINESS EXAMINER
Monitoring Corporate Agribusiness From a Public Interest Perspective

September 12, 2001

PRAYERS & THOUGHTS: OPEN LETTER

Dear Friends and Colleagues:

Yesterday, September 11, 2001, a day that began, where I live, under a
bright sunny blue sky, similar to that same one that greeted people arriving
for work in New York City and Washington D.C. , was going to be the day that
I finally after innumerable delays was to be about the business of posting
Issue #125 of THE AGRIBUSINESS EXAMINER.
I was ready to report on the specious changing of the guard at Archer
Daniels Midland; the allegations by a federal official of rape and
intimidation of women workers at a DeCoster Farms of Iowa egg farm being
among "the most horrendous and egregious" that he had ever seen; a sad
farewell to two dedicated friends of the nation's farmworkers --- former
United Farm Worker organizer Rev. Jim Drake and Protestant theologian Robert
McAfee Brown; an unclean ConAgra poultry processing plant being shut down,
and a jury finding DuPont, makers of the fungicide Benlate liable for
racketeering, negligence, fraud and a defective product.
But just as I still see in my mind's eye exactly where I was standing and
who I was with when on those other days of infamy ---- December 7, 1941 and
November 22, 1963  --- so to will I remember my disbelief when first I began
making my check of the several online major daily newspapers that I puruse
each day for relevant news items, and the first paper I examined left me
stunned with the news of the unspeakable terror that had been visited upon
the Big Apple and our nation's capital.
For the next 36 hours, just as I listened to the radio continuously for 24
hours in those dark days of December, 1941 and those four disbelieving days
in November, 1963, I listened and watched the news on TV unfold from lower
Manhattan and the Pentagon.
Watching speechless as those twin 110-story monuments to capitalism imploded
and became the burial grounds for thousands of innocent men and women, I
could not help but think of the time that I worked for the National
Sharecroppers Fund, with offices in lower Manhattan and each morning about
that same time, commuting from Central New Jersey,  I would emerge from the
"tubes" below the Trade Center and transfer to the subway line that would
take me to my office.
And as I continued watching the news and listening to the commentary in the
hours that followed that horrendous event I found myself, maybe even perhaps
as an emotional defense mechanism, becoming more and more of the journalist
than just an idle television viewer, impatient at times with the
incompleteness of the news and the inane comments by many of the nation's
so-called experts on international "terrorism" and military affairs.
The most frustrating aspect, however, of the reporting that I was witnessing
during that time was due to the fact that I still think of myself as an ol'
school journalist ---- principally I still believe any good news stories
should contain the "5W's and H!!!!" --- who? what? when? where? why? and
how?
Throughout the agonizing hours of the "attack on America" most every story
and commentary that I saw fulfilled to varying degrees only four of the five
W's  . . . and, of course, by simply viewing the unbelievable pictures and
film television provided us throughout the day and night the public ---- saw
the how?
The fact though that for the most part TV made little effort to answer that
all-important fifth W --- why? ---- called into serious question in my mind
whether we as a nation were actually learning anything from the events of
September 11, 2001????
For to truly understand what happened on that day it is essential that we
deal with the question --- why? ---  why this carnage took place? For we
need as a nation, as a self-proclaimed "global power," to ask what have we
done to inspire such hatred, .such anger, such contempt, to motivate fellow
human beings to be so cold-blooded and unrepentant killers?
Make no mistake about it, the perpetrators of the World Trade Center and
Pentagon carnage should stand condemned and brought to justice before the
world, but at the same time the words of the Washington Post's outstanding
sports columnist Thomas Boswell rings true. He writes:
"For many Americans, including me, our lives have been conducted in a
society where nearly all forces are benign. Our tragedies, of health or
accident, are the inescapable sort that no society can prevent. The rest of
the world looks at our wealth, our distance from their problems, even our
self-absorption, with a wide range of responses. One of those responses is
hatred.
  . . . Hate begets hate. Killing begets killing. And the totality of the
accumulated pain makes rationality almost impossible. The agony that
Americans feel right now is relatively small compared with the pain and fury
for revenge that entire regions of the world drink by the gallon each day
like mother's milk."
We decry, just as we did yesterday, when hate takes innocent lives. We voice
our collective national puzzlement and condemnation when our fellow human
beings in the world community say that to achieve their own narrow
self-serving interests that taking the lives of innocent civilians is simply
the end justifying the means.
But does by simply waving our K-Mart American flags and lighting candles in
the window, as this out take of a May, 1996 interview with former U.S.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright , somehow give us the right to
consider ourselves the Great Exception in international relations ???
LESLEY STAHL, 60 MINUTES: "We have heard that a half million children have
died [because of sanctions against Iraq]. I mean, that's more children than
died in Hiroshima and you know, is the price worth it?"
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price - we
think the price is worth it."
Television reporters, political and national defense pundits, and newspaper
headline writers have had a field day with the use of the word "terror" and
"terrorism" to describe the events of yesterday, but as my respected
colleague Sam Smith points out in his PROGRESSIVE REVIEW UNDERNEWS:
"The media and politicians call what happened terrorism. This is a
propagandistic rather than a descriptive term and replaces the more useful
traditional phrases, guerilla action or guerilla warfare. The former places
a mythical shroud around the event while the latter depicts its true nature.
Guerillas do not play by the rules of state organization or military
tactics. This does not make them cowardly, as some have suggested, but can
make them fiendishly clever. The essence of guerilla warfare is to attack at
times and places unsuspected and return to places unknown. You can not
invade the land of guerillas, you can not bomb them out of existence, you
can not overwhelm them with your technological wonders.
"This was a lesson we were supposed to have learned in Vietnam but appear to
have forgotten. . . . Our war against `terrorism' has been in many ways a
domestic version of our Vietnam strategy. We keep making the same mistakes
over and over because, until now, we could afford to. One of these has been
to define the problem by its manifestations rather than its causes. This
turns a resolvable political problem into a irresolvable technical problem,
because while, for example, there are clearly solutions to the Middle East
crisis, there are no solutions to the guerilla violence that grows from the
failure to end it," Smith continues.
"In other words, if you define the problem as `a struggle against
`terrorism' you have already admitted defeat because the guerilla will
always have the upper hand against a centralized, technology-dependent
society such as ours.  . . . There is one way to deal with guerilla warfare
and that is to resolve the problems that allow it to thrive. As we have
shown in the Middle East, one need not even reach a final solution as long
as incremental progress is being made. But once that ceases, as happened in
the past year, the case for freelance violence is quickly strengthened and
people simply forget that peace is possible."
If we as a justifiable angry nation now allow ourselves to not learn from
history, realizing that violence only begets violence, then we are destined
to continue to make the same mistakes that leads only to more violence.
The words of novelist Ken Kesey might well provide us with not only
thoughtful commentary on what happened on an unforgettable late summer day
in New York and Washington, D.C. that has left a whole nation and world in
shock, sorrow, and prayer but his words might also give us some context and
a sad but true perspective on the events of that tragic day.
"When God wants to really wake up a nation,
He has to use somebody that counts.
When God wants to get your attention,
He always has to use blood."

A.V. Krebs
Editor\Publisher
THE AGRIBUSINESS EXAMINER

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The End of the "End of History"

by Jean Bricmont

Everything was going smoothly. Serbia, on its knees, had just sold 
Milosevic to the International Criminal Tribune for a fistful of dollars 
(most of which turned out to be earmarked to pay debts going back to Tito's 
time). NATO was expanding eastwards toward a powerless Russia. Saddam 
Hussein could be safely bombed whenever one felt like it. Invaded by UCK, 
Macedonia was obliged to accept the farce of a disarmament of that same UCK 
by the very ones who armed it in the first place. The Palestinian 
territories were under tight control while their leaders were assassinated 
by smart bombs. For the past few years, stockholders had been making record 
profits. The political left had died out and all political parties had 
rallied to neoliberalism and "humanitarian" interventionism. In short, as 
certain commentators put it, we were living in peace.

Then suddenly shock, surprise, horror: the greatest power of all times, the 
only truly universal empire struck in its very heart, at the center of its 
wealth and power. A unique and all-powerful electronic spying network, 
unparalleled security measures, a staggering defense budget -- none of this 
was of any use in preventing the catastrophe.

Let us be perfectly clear. We do not share the attitude expressed by 
Madeleine Albright when she was asked whether pursuing the embargo against 
Iraq was worth the price of half a million Iraqi children who have died: 
"this is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it", she 
replied. The massacre of innocent civilians is never acceptable. But this 
does not mean we should not try to understand the underlying meaning of 
that incredible attack.

The American pacifist A. J. Muste once remarked that the problem in every 
war was posed by the winning side: the victor had learned that violence 
succeeded. The whole of postwar history illustrates the pertinence of that 
observation. In the United States, the War Department was renamed Defense 
Department, precisely when there was no direct danger threatening the 
country, and one government after the other launched campaigns of military 
intervention and political destabilisation in the guise of containing 
communism -- against moderately nationalist governments such as that of 
Goulart in Brazil, Mossadegh in Iran or Arbenz in Guatemala. To limit 
ourselves to the present, let us examine a few questions rarely raised 
concerning Western, especially American, policy.

- The Kyoto protocol: the principal United States objection is not on 
scientific grounds, but merely that "it is bad for our economy". What are 
people who work 12 hours a day for slave wages to make of such a reaction?

- The Durban conference. The West rejects the slightest thought of 
reparations for slavery and colonialism. But isn't it clear that the State 
of Israel functions as a form of reparations for anti-Semitic persecutions, 
except that in this case the price is paid by the Palestinian Arabs for the 
crimes committed by Europeans? And isn't it obvious that this shift of 
responsibility must be felt as a sort of racism by the victims of colonialism?

- Macedonia: here is a country that the West pushed into independence in 
order to weaken Serbia and whose government has always faithfully followed 
Western orders. As a result it has been subjected to attacks by terrorists 
armed by NATO and coming from territory under NATO control. How does this 
look to Slavic Orthodox peoples, especially after the expulsion, as NATO 
looks on, of the Serbian population of Kosovo and the eradication of a 
large part of its cultural heritage?

- Afghanistan: it is too quickly forgotten that Osama Bin Laden was trained 
and armed by the Americans, who openly admit that they were using 
Afghanistan to destabilize the USSR even before the Soviet intervention. 
How many people have died in the game that former President Carter's 
adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, calls "the great chessboard"? And how many 
terrorists, in Asia, in Central America, in the Balkans, or in the Middle 
East, are left to run loose after having been used by the "Free World"?

- Iraq: for ten years the population has been strangled by an embargo that 
has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths -- of civilian victims. All 
because Iraq tried to recover the oil wells that were de facto confiscated 
from them by the British. Let us just compare the treatment given Israel 
for its totally illegal occupation of territories conquered in 1967. Is it 
really likely that the notion, generally accepted in the West, that Saddam 
Hussein is to blame for everything, makes much sense in the Arab-Muslim world?

By pure coincidence, the September 11 attacks took place on the anniversary 
of the overthrow of Allende, which not only marked (a fact easily 
forgotten) the installation of the first neoliberal government, that of 
General Pinochet, but also the start of a broad movement against national 
and independent movements in the Third World which was to lead those 
countries to bow to the dictates of the IMF.

This is why we suspect that in Latin America, in Indonesia, in Iran, in 
ruined and humiliated Russia, in China where nobody is fooled by attempts 
to destabilize this emerging giant, as well as in the Muslim world, the 
September 11 tragedy will cause people to shed little more than crocodile 
tears.

Of course there will be shouts of indignation and messages of sympathy. 
There will be applause for "firm responses" when they occur (will they 
destroy a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan or bomb the civilian population of 
an Arab country?). Large numbers of intellectuals will be found to produce 
clever analyses full of false analogies connecting these attacks to 
whatever it is they are against: Saddam Hussein, Kadhafi, Western pacifists 
and anti-imperialists, the Palestinian liberation movement or even China, 
Russia or North Korea. It will be repeated that such barbarism is totally 
alien to us: after all, we prefer to bomb from high altitude and kill 
gradually by means of embargos. But none of that will solve any basic 
problem. There is no use attacking revolt itself. What must be attacked is 
the suffering that produces revolt.     Those attacks will have at least 
two negative political consequences. For one, the American population, 
already disturbingly nationalist, will "rally r!
ound the flag", as they put it, supporting their government however 
barbaric its policy. Americans will be more than ever determined to 
"protect our way of life" without asking the price to be paid by the rest 
of the planet. The timid movements of dissent that have emerged since 
Seattle will be marginalized if not criminalized.

On the other hand, millions of people who have been defeated, humiliated 
and crushed by the United States and the world it dominates will be tempted 
to see terrorism as the only weapon really capable of striking the Empire. 
This is why a truly political struggle -- not violence -- against the 
cultural, economic and above all military domination by a small minority 
over the vast majority of humanity is more necessary than ever before.

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A message from Granny D

Dear Friends:

In the space of an hour, thousands of Americans had their lives snuffed out 
by acts so cold-blooded that we cannot wrap our imaginations around what 
has happened. I have three grandchildren who, until Tuesday morning, worked 
near the World Trade Center. We held our breath until they found their ways 
to telephones and finally, on foot, to bridges and home. Many of their dear 
friends must be among the less fortunate.

It is a nightmare from which we cannot wake.

As we emerge from our pain, as we begin to accept the dimensions of this 
loss, we will of course resolve as a nation to make our world safer.

Whenever we suffer a tragedy, we ask ourselves, 'how can we prevent this in 
the future?'

In answering this question, all Americans must participate and add what 
they can to the discussion and the plan. It is an opportunity for the 
political left and the political right to respect each otherıs point of 
view and their differing interpretations of history.

Those who see the attack as a military act of war are like the cancer 
surgeon who must find the tumor and kill it. Some minds indeed have become 
cancerous in this world and they threaten our survival. They are just as 
emotionally capable of exploding a home-made nuclear weapon in our cities, 
or of poisoning our air and water with biological, chemical, or nuclear 
toxins. What we saw Tuesday morning, horrific as it was, was essentially 
the loss of several large buildings and thousands of their inhabitants. We 
risk the loss of whole cities --millions of people-- in todayıs charged 
international environment.

While the surgeons will cut, others will look to a deeper question: how can 
such cold-bloodedness arise in the hearts of our fellow men?  As the 
nutritionist examines the lifestyle that may lead to disease, we begin to 
ask: What can we do in the future so that love and respect are nurtured in 
the place of hatred? Surely we cannot kill our way to love and respect, 
where our only true security resides.

The surgeonıs will undoubtedly have their way for a time. The news shows 
--that incidentally are never interested in covering the reasons why so 
many people are angry at American policies-- are now  full of swaggering 
militarists who are looking, please, for someone to kill for peace. They 
will have their way, for the emotions of our nation are running to red.

But those who seek true security must not stand aside in silence. Those who 
know that international justice is the only road to international peace 
must continue to speak their minds.  It is not un-American to do so. It is, 
on the contrary, un-American to fall into a state of fascism, where our 
civil liberties are forsaken and the human needs of Americans and of people 
around the globe are forgotten.

The secretaries and file clerks and young executives in the stricken office 
buildings, and the children and mothers and fathers and sisters and 
brothers aboard those four airplanes would not have been the targets of 
hatred, had we Americans better expressed our highest values throughout the 
world --had our government expressed in all its actions the fairness and 
generosity that characterize our people. That disconnection between our 
people and our government does not excuse the cold mass-murders committed 
by terrorists, but it helps explain it, and we cannot stop it if we do not 
understand it.

There is much we can and must do to regain control of our own government 
and to stop its participation in cruelties around the world. That is our 
best road to long-term security for our own people. There will always be 
breast-beating generals to lead us into further horrors. Let us pray that 
some of our leaders are wiser than that, and can see that the real road to 
security does not lead us to places like Kabul with our mops and brooms, 
but to places like Langly, and to the mammoth political fundraising events 
where our representatives are bought away from us and from our values.

Many media pundits glibly say today that America will be less free from 
this point onward. If they mean that we will have to have our luggage 
examined more closely, we can all agree to that. If they mean that we will 
all have our telephones tapped and be rounded up for criticizing the 
government --that we must be fascist to be free-- then they are talking 
illogically and immaturely.

In my long walk across the US, and in my everyday experiences, I know that 
Americans are kindhearted and do not wish to colonize and exploit any other 
people on earth. Our central question --the question that will determine 
the security of our cities in the future-- is this: can those American 
values be expressed by the American government?  Can we be more a 
government of our people?  Can we get the greedy, short-sighted interests 
out from between us and our elected representatives?

Our struggle for campaign finance reform and other democratic reforms will 
now take a back seat as a season of blood has its day. But until we clean 
up our government, we will all be the targets of rising international rage, 
and our children and grandchildren are not safe.

Doris 'Granny D' Haddock
Box 492
Dublin, NH 03444

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Civil Liberty the Next Casualty?

<http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0%2C1283%2C46784%2C00.html?tw=wn20010913>

By Kristen Philipkoski
Sep. 13, 2001

In the wake of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, scholars fear 
that Americans will sacrifice civil liberties that could be difficult to 
win back.
Many civil liberties watchdogs say freedom in the United States have been 
slowly eroding for the past several decades. But they say Tuesday's attacks 
will redouble efforts by the government to infringe on civil freedoms, and 
now people won't resist.
Internet service providers have reported that they are working with the FBI 
to monitor traffic, something they were reluctant to do before.
Airport security spokespeople say future passengers should expect random 
checks, no curbside check-in and closer scrutiny.
"That's unlikely to deter trained, determined and suicidal terrorists, but 
it will further subject innocent Americans to arbitrary power," said J.D. 
Tucille, a writer and editor in Arizona who focuses on civil liberties.
John Perry Barlow, a Beckman fellow at Harvard Law School and co-founder of 
the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), wrote a mass e-mail on Tuesday 
encouraging Americans to hold on to their freedoms by writing public 
officials, joining the American Civil Liberties Union or the EFF, "to 
prevent the control mania from destroying the dreams that far more have 
died for over the last 225 years than died this morning."
Tucille said planned surveillance over private communications, with only a 
small chance of catching something, is a gamble not worth taking.
"We could start opening people's envelopes on the off-chance that we'll 
find something, because inevitably we will," Tucille said. "But in the 
process of catching something we'll make this country a much less pleasant 
place to live."
He believes the American people should be skeptical of attempts by the FBI 
to come in to save the day.
"Before all of this happened, the FBI was becoming a pariah, and I believe 
for a good reason. There are reasons why these organizations tend to abuse 
power and we should not ask them to protect us. They can't."
Security experts also encouraged American citizens to protect their free 
way of life.
"We live in an open society and it's very difficult to control people and 
control threats and manage risk when you have the openness that we have in 
this country," said Don Ulsch of the Ulsch Group, a security consultancy in 
Lancaster, Massachusetts. "We should not have the knee-jerk reaction of 
suggesting that we live in any other way."
The goal of terrorism, Barlow wrote, is to paralyze the American government 
by encouraging totalitarianism.
"Don't give them the satisfaction," Barlow wrote. "Fear nothing. Live free."
He compared Tuesday's attack to the burning of the Reichstag that led to 
the Nazi takeover of the German government in 1933.
"Nothing could serve those who believe that American 'safety' is more 
important than American liberty better than something like this," Barlow 
wrote.
That's not to say that anyone believes the United States should simply turn 
the other cheek. Instead, Barlow suggested in an interview the government 
organize new teams of anti-terrorists, since our present intelligence 
agencies are "stupefyingly incompetent."
He also suggested equipping airliners with biometric sensors that could 
detect the wrong hands on the yoke, a plainclothes cop on every flight 
armed with a rapid-fire, paralyzing dart gun or making it impossible to 
open cockpit doors from the outside and armor-plating them with Kevlar.
"I think we can be creative about this," Barlow said. "I don't hear anyone 
calling for subtler and nimbler thinking. All I hear are calls for a bigger 
hammer and a readier willingness to use it."
Others condoned retaliation, but emphasized that a guilty party must be 
identified beyond the shadow of a doubt, followed by swift and powerful 
retaliation.
"We need to send the message we are an open and benevolent society, but we 
will defend ourselves," Ulsch said.
They also pointed out that there's a difference between justice and 
revenge. They worry about the rights of those who some may think are 
responsible for the terrorism, or may simply look like the quilty people.
In addition, Barlow and Tucille think the United States should take a long 
hard look at why the country is targeted so often by terrorists.
"We blunder around the world in other peoples' foreign policy," Tucille 
said. "That doesn't mean there's justice in this striking activity. But it 
makes a reason to pick us as a target."

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Consequences Of Our Actions Abroad:

Americans Feeling the Effects of 'Blowback'

by Chalmers Johnson
The Los Angeles Times
May 4, 2000

Our intelligence agencies--the CIA and its rivals in the Pentagon--have a
history of creating neologisms to describe our world that cover up more than
they reveal. There have been lofty coinages like "host-nation support,"
meaning foreign countries pay to base our troops on their soil, and military
jargon like "low-intensity warfare" that repackages the most brutal strife
in antiseptic language.

Every now and then, however, a useful new word emerges from the labyrinth of
our secret services. The American media recently started to use the term
"blowback." Central Intelligence Agency officials coined it for internal use
in the wake of decisions by the Carter and Reagan administrations to plunge
the agency deep into the civil war in Afghanistan. It wasn't long before the
CIA was secretly arming every moujahedeen volunteer in sight, without
considering who they were or what their politics might be--all in the name
of ensuring that the Soviet Union had its own Vietnam-like experience.

Not so many years later, these "freedom fighters" began to turn up in
unexpected places. They bombed the World Trade Center in New York City,
murdered several CIA employees in Virginia and some American businessmen in
Pakistan and gave support to Osama bin Laden, a prime CIA "asset" back when
our national security advisors had no qualms about giving guns to religious
fundamentalists.

In this context, "blowback" came to be shorthand for the unintended
consequences of U.S. policies kept secret from the American people. In fact,
to CIA officials and an increasing number of American pundits, blowback has
become a term of art acknowledging that the unconstrained, often illegal,
secret acts of the United States in other countries can result in
retaliation against innocent American citizens. The dirty tricks agencies
are at pains never to draw the connection between what they do and what
sometimes happens to those who pay their salaries.

So we are supposed to believe that the bombings of American embassies in
East Africa in 1998, the proliferation of sophisticated weapons, not to
mention devices of mass murder, around the world, or the crack cocaine
epidemic in American cities are simply examples of terrorism, the work of
unscrupulous arms dealers, drug lords, ancient hatreds, rogue states;
anything unconnected to America's global policies.

Perhaps the term "blowback" can help us to re-link certain violent acts
against Americans to the policies from which they secretly--as far as most
Americans are concerned--sprang. From refugee flows across our southern
borders from countries where U.S.-supported repression has created hopeless
conditions, to U.S.-supported economic policies that have led to
unimaginable misery, blowback reintroduces us to a world of cause and
effect.

We also might consider widening the word's application to take in the
unintended consequences U.S. policies may have for others. For example, even
if the policies that our government fostered and that produced the economic
collapse of Indonesia in 1997 never blow back to the U.S., the unintended
consequences for Indonesians have been staggering. They include poverty,
serious ethnic violence and perhaps political disintegration. Similarly, our
"dirty hands" in overthrowing President Salvador Allende in Chile and
installing Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who subsequently killed thousands of his
own citizens, are just now coming fully into the open. Even when blowback
from our policies mainly strikes other peoples, it has a corrosive effect on
us, debasing political discourse and making us feel duped when the news
finally emerges.

The United States likes to think of itself as the winner of the Cold War. In
all probability, to those looking back at blowback a century hence, neither
side will appear to have won, particularly if the United States maintains
its present imperial course.
------------
Chalmers Johnson Is President of the Japan Policy Research Institute and
Author of "Blowback: the Costs and Consequences of American Empire"
(Metropolitan Books, 2000)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Some Talking Points on the WTC/Pentagon Attack

(These are talking points designed to help progressives and radicals
get oriented for the difficult work of the next few days and weeks.
To give people more flexibility to adjust the order and relative
emphasis of the points based on your situation, it's not designed as
a flier.)

SOME TALKING POINTS ON THE WTC/PENTAGON ATTACK

September 12, 2001

FIRST, so far nobody knows who did it. Many commentators on TV have
been careful to make this point. That's because some of them were
left with egg on their faces after the Oklahoma City bombing, when
they assured the country that it had been done by Islamic terrorists.

      Seldom have so many been so wrong--so quickly. In the wake of the
      explosion that destroyed the Murrah Federal Office Building, the
      media rushed -- almost en masse -- to the assumption that the bombing
      was the work of Muslim extremists. "The betting here is on Middle
      East terrorists," declared CBS News' Jim Stewart just hours after the
      blast (4/19/95). "The fact that it was such a powerful bomb in
      Oklahoma City immediately drew investigators to consider deadly
      parallels that all have roots in the Middle East," ABC's John McWethy
      proclaimed the same day. (from *The Oklahoma City Bombing: The Jihad
      That Wasn't*, by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting)

SECOND, it is fairly likely that the attack does have its roots
somewhere in the Middle East and if so, the evidence will come out.
Therefore the first point does not mean denying that possibility.

Whether the attack came from there or another part of the globe, one
basic fact stands--the only way to protect people in the U.S. from
attacks like this is for our government to stop doing things that
make so many people in the Middle East and around the world hate us
so passionately.

The President and numerous media mouthpieces have framed this as an
issue of "evil" people who "hate freedom." Nobody sacrifices his or
her life out of an abstract hatred of freedom. This attack is the
direct result of years of US policy and actions. The US government
has committed many crimes around the world which have killed men,
women and children on a scale that dwarfs the toll of Tuesday's
explosion. Most recently, by destroying Iraq's water
supplies--against all the rules of war--and pressuring the UN to
enforce economic sanctions, the U.S. government has caused the deaths
of more than half a million Iraqi children. And the U.S. supplies the
military equipment that the Israeli government has used to uproot,
attack and assassinate Palestinians for 50 years. Why is it a shock
that ordinary Palestinians are not condemning attacks on the U.S.?
They're oppressed and desperate and they know who's supplying the
weapons used against them.

One talking head expert on terrorism called it a high concept,
low-tech attack. It was very low-tech. Reports based on a cell phone
call made from the plane that hit the Pentagon indicate that the
hijackers were armed only with knives and boxcutters. Even in terms
of their own national security logic, the rulers of the U.S. screwed
up. They've been pushing Star Wars and other high tech boons for the
weapons industry that many experts admit do not address the real
sources of threat to the U.S.

THIRD, we have to ready to take a really unpopular stand when the
U.S. military inevitably attacks somebody. The buildup is well
underway, both on military bases and in the battle for public
opinion. Already there are calls by experts and political demagogues
for the military to just go and trash the Taliban rulers of
Afghanistan, since they're probably involved somehow or another.
Rupert Murdoch's Fox TV, in particular, has chosen to demonize the
Palestinians, showing footage of spontaneous anti-US celebrations on
the West Bank over and over again.

Here the faith-based communities are out in front, holding church
meetings and vigils of mourning to call for peace. It is essential to
unite with such forces in standing against the ramp-up to military
attacks.

Exactly how we respond will depend on who Bush chooses to attack, and
how. Will it be massive carpet bombing like that in Serbia or in
Baghdad, which will create more death and destruction than the
explosions in NY and at the Pentagon? And if they start dragging us
into a land war in Afghanistan, we should immediately point out the
Vietnam-style quagmire the USSR faced there in the '80s. We have to
speak out right away so people can start thinking and organizing.

FOURTH, we criticize the attacks, especially the one on the World
Trade Center. Probably thousands of ordinary people have been killed
and thousands injured. The deaths of the airline passengers and
staff, workers in the buildings, bystanders and rescue workers cannot
be justified. People who fight against U.S. imperialism around the
world, even those taking part in protracted armed liberation
struggles, have as a rule refused to descend to the level of
wholesale slaughter that the U.S. and its client states have
repeatedly engaged in over the years. When that high ground is
abandoned, our movement loses.

It's important to recognize the emotional reality we're in. Some of
us lost friends or relatives working in the buildings or the rescue,
or saw people jumping out of windows to their deaths. Even for those
who did not suffer a deep personal loss, the impact of seeing your
city attacked, a major symbol destroyed, realizing your life could be
incinerated in an instant, is traumatic. What is new and shocking for
us here in the U.S. is a level of suffering that many peoples around
the world have experienced for decades at a time, often due to the
actions of U.S. imperialism--Vietnamese watching their children
napalmed, in a war where well over a million civilians died in
Pentagon-decreed free fire zones.

FIFTH, there are already reports on anti-Arab, anti-Muslim racist
acts erupting around the country. For instance, mosques and Islamic
schools in Charlotte and Raleigh, North Carolina have already had to
close down in the face of brutal threats.There is certain to be a big
wave of such attacks, especially once the media drop their
responsible veneer and start howling that someone must be punished.
Progressive people must take a strong, organized, and active stand
against such acts and attacks. We must work hard to educate confused
people about right and wrong around this, and not just fling hate
back at them. In the next few weeks, there will be sentiment in our
unions, mass organizations and churches to express sympathy with
bombing victims and their families and it will be important to win
them to do so without falling into national chauvinism, or
anti-immigrant or anti-Arab racism.

There was a great online report from NYC-DAN, in the first hours
after the WTC explosion:

      Be vigilant against the anti Muslim hysteria that could hit. We
      already ran into a guy who was spray painting "Fuck Islam." After a
      few stern words, and a talk about the Muslims who surely were in the
      World Trade Center when the planes hit, he helped us spray paint over
      his racist tag. White people in particular have a real responsibility
      here to protect our Middle Eastern brothers and sisters from the
      mindless, racist, reasonless attacks and finger pointing that are
      sure to follow this attack.

This could be a model for how to respond to racist acts that don't
directly threaten someone. For acts that do, we must be prepared to
intervene directly to defend the people attacked. Comrades of color
in particular can make the point that oppressed nationality
communities need to stand by Arabs and Muslims when such people are
likely to feel increased levels of hate that Blacks, Latinos and
Asians, and other immigrants have experienced so often themselves.

SIXTH, the consequences promise to be extremely bad in terms of state
repression. Remember that it was the 1993 bombing at the World Trade
Center that gave us the "Effective Death Penalty Act," several new
"counterterrorism" measures, and an increase in repression,
particularly of immigrants with criminal records. The left should do
what we can to preemptively call for freedom-loving members of the
U.S. public to take a stand against further repression in the U.S. as
a result of all this.

In particular, it creates unfavorable conditions for what have
promised to be very strong demonstrations this fall against the
IMF/World Bank and the WTO. The former, in Washington on the last
weekend of September, could be cancelled completely on national
security grounds. Within the AFL-CIO and other sponsoring
organizations, a struggle is underway now. There is a strong move
afoot to shut the rally down or convert it into a national ceremony
of mourning. Others will try and move forward under the new
circumstances, adding a call for Global Peace to the call for Global
Justice. If the planned actions do go on, they face a combination of
increased police repression, somewhat reduced attendance, and more
fear by demonstrators of engaging in militant action.

We will continue to build for these actions and attend them. We
should continue to engage in constructive and patient struggle around
tactics, and be extra careful not to use the situation to allow
further antagonisms to develop toward those forces who tend to act in
an adventurist way.

SEVENTH, progressive forces need to unite more strongly than ever
around a program based on something like the following points:

(1) U.S. hands off the Middle East. The only way to end the terrorist
attacks against this country is to stop interfering in the affairs of
the region.
(2) Stop the drive toward war.
(3) No racist attacks against Arabic people, Middle Easterners, Muslims.
(4) No police state in the USA.
(5) Keep building the global justice movement.

National Executive Committee
Freedom Road Socialist Organization
http://freedomroad.org

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Call to Dialogue

<http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0913-07.htm>

by Rahul Mahajan
Published on Thursday, September 13, 2001

As the calls for war in the mainstream media and the halls of power grow 
louder, with Senator John McCain speaking for many when he said, "God may 
have mercy on them, but we won't," a different kind of response has been 
building as well.
The peace community, from established groups like Peace Action 
(www.peace-action.org) and the Fellowship of Reconciliation 
(www.forusa.org) to grassroots activists across the country, has united in 
a strong, consistent, and deeply heartfelt response. Reading the statements 
being put out, one sees clearly that the entire community joins 
wholeheartedly with the nation in condemning the brutal attack of two days 
ago, and in the fear, grief, and shattering sense of loss it has occasioned.
There is also widespread agreement that there should be no rush to judgment 
and no massive "retaliation" that would target the innocent civilians of 
any country. Noting that international law does not recognize any right of 
retaliation or vengeance (Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, which governs the 
use of force, requires that any action be taken only with the permission, 
and under the auspices of, the Security Council, the only exception being 
self-defense against imminent attack which does not include vengeance for 
past attacks), Peace Action and others are calling clearly for any 
remaining perpetrators to be brought to justice through legal channels, 
with international cooperation.
Very similar sentiments were expressed in a community discussion last 
night, organized by Austin's progressive activist community. Two hundred 
and fifty people came together, to express their emotions and their 
experiences, to share ideas and information, and to plan future actions.
 From the beginning, it was clear that people really needed to talk. There 
was no good way to cope with the flurry of hands that was raised at every 
pause.
One young man tearfully expressed his fear that, with all the talk of 
America going to war, the draft would be reinstated and that he would have 
to kill or die in an effort he opposed.  Several were afraid of the loss of 
our civil liberties. Others shared their fear for friends, relatives, and 
friends of friends who worked near the World Trade Centers, and who had not 
been heard from. Everyone felt grief and anger that so many innocent people 
were killed.
Many, however, expressed strong emotions of a different kind. Deep disquiet 
with their friends and acquaintances caught up in a vortex of fury, often 
racist in tone. Anger at the mainstream media, almost universally perceived 
to be even worse than government officials in their constant calls for 
blood somebody's, anybody's. Guilt, pain, and sorrow on contemplating the 
seemingly inevitable killing of innocent civilians being planned by our 
government.
And, far and away the most common feeling, isolation. Many expressed their 
heartfelt gratitude that the discussion had been organized, because they 
had been feeling, "Nobody else thinks the way I do."
After talking through their feelings, many who had been sunk in despair 
felt newly energized to do what they could to head off war, and the 
discussion ended in a massive organizing meeting.
The lesson is clear. There are many, many people in this country who see 
clearly that one killing of innocents will not be requited by another, that 
a radically different path is needed to assure our security and that of 
people in other parts of the world.
In the days to come, if those people rely only on the television and the 
big daily newspapers, they will feel isolated and beleaguered, deprived of 
their voices and their democratic right to help shape the public dialogue.
That will be a tremendous tragedy. Even though this is an incredibly 
difficult time to speak up, and voices against war will inevitably be 
branded as apologists for terror, this is also a very important time to 
speak up. Americans have seen up close the tangible effects of our foreign 
policy, and they are interested as they have not been since the nuclear 
freeze movement, maybe even since the Vietnam war.
Let us call, then, for communities across the country to have similar 
dialogues, to work through feelings of pain, fear, and grief and begin to 
fashion a coherent response to warmongering before the war is upon us. We 
who favor peace must create our own national dialogue before we can hope to 
influence the larger one.
Austin could have such a large meeting on such short notice because of a 
multi-year sustained effort (www.nowarcollective.com), centering around 
antiwar work, that has built up a very large (4000) e-mail announcement and 
rapid response list. Localities without that kind of infrastructure may 
take a little longer, but the need for timely action is great.
------------
Rahul Mahajan is an antiwar activist, and serves on the Coordinating 
Committee of the National Network to End the War Against Iraq and the Board 
of Directors of Peace Action.
He can be reached at rahul@tao.ca

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Blowback!

By Jeff Sommers

In CIA parlance missions that are "successful" create backlashes. The
CIA aptly calls this "Blowback."

At the end of WW II the US took empire from a weakened Britain and
France. Among the first casualties was East Europe, which was sacrificed
on the mantle of superpower relations.  That same deal between
superpowers saw Greece put down by England and the US, with Soviet
compliance. The Soviets and the West also concluded that the people of
both their respective spheres would be put down if necessary in the
interests of "stability." Democracy on both sides of the Cold War divide
was shelved.

The US maintained order during its tenure of hegemony through use of
both covert and overt operations that helped signal the very blowback we
witnessed on the 11th. In 1953 Allen Dulles, brother of Secretary of
State John Foster Dulles, thought it clever to maintain order in Iran by
overthrowing its democratically elected leader, Mohammed Mossadegh. The
popular Mossadegh "erred" when he decided Iran's oil belonged to Iran
and not the multi-national corporations who held "rights" to it. He
nationalized Iran's oil. Allen Dulles sent in the CIA with suitcases
full of money (the CIA had no oversight and so could spend liberally) to
destabilize the government. They sent their agent Kim Roosevelt to
remove Mossadegh. Kim Roosevelt was the grandson of that famous defender
of the Spanish American War that brought the US no end of blowback.
General H. Norman Schwarzkopf accompanied him—no, not the General we
all know who commanded US forces in the Persian Gulf war, but his
father. Schwarzkopf trained the Shah of Iran's secret police in all
sorts and manners of techniques that brutal dictatorships employ against
their citizens. This bought "stability" and the return of oil to its
"rightful" owners. The US oil companies got 40%, the Brits 40%, the
Dutch 14% and the French 6%. Yet, in overthrowing Mossadegh a
25-year-long period of repression was launched against dissenters in
Iran with significant blowback for all parties concerned. Most
significantly this created a radical Islamic fundamentalist response
that led to the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeni. In part, yesterday's
tragedy is blowback from Washington policies executed 50 years back.

During the 1980s the US found another opportunity for CIA mischief in
the Middle East. In 1978 the Soviet Union frowned upon the more radical
Marxist government that arose on its border in Afghanistan. Given that
the Soviets cynically wielded terms like "Marxism" in the same way the
US has often done with "democracy," the Soviets felt no compunction
about overthrowing a radical Marxist government with democratic
impulses. As a superpower it sought obedience. The Soviets installed a
government in Afghanistan loyal to themselves and would suffer blowback
that in part led to the very dissolution of the USSR.

Coming off its own failed decades long attempt to install and maintain
unpopular governments in Vietnam, the US was bemused by the Soviets
finding themselves in a similar situation in Afghanistan. Among
opponents of the Soviet backed regime in Afghanistan were Islamic
fundamentalists. The CIA fanned the flames of fundamentalist fervor in
order to fuel the ant-Soviet Afghani movement, the Mujahadeen. Yet, here
too there would be blowback. When the Soviet Union collapsed the highly
motivated fundamentalist force the US helped create and train in covert
operations (the stuff of terrorism) they now turned their sights on
their former benefactor. The marriage between Afghani fundamentalists
and the CIA was purely one of convenience. When no longer "convenient"
these highly-trained militants could now turn on that other source of
misery in the Middle East: the US. Again, this was blowback.

This begs the question of why the US was perceived as a source of "evil"
by Islamic extremists? We are all familiar with the reasons.  A decade
of bombing and embargoes have left Iraq's electric, water, and health
infrastructure in tatters. Saddam Hussein remains in power, but millions
live in abject misery, and the United Nations' own data shows over
700,000 children having died as a consequence of these US measures
against Iraq. The Iraqi leadership has been unaffected. Hussein has
punished the Kurds in the north of Iraq with impunity and the Shiite
Muslims of the south treated to Hussein's bloody fist too. Yet, Iraq did
not dissolve into separate nations. This was the goal of US policy. This
has been achieved at a terrible human cost and is another reason for
blowback against the US.

The specter of US policy toward Israel continues to haunt America.
Copious amounts of aid flows liberally to the Israeli government and
spills out into Palestinian communities in the form of state violence.
But, peace between Israel and Egypt is critical to Middle East
stability. The US gets little of its oil from the Middle East, but US
oil companies are present there and more importantly oil must flow
freely and predictably for the smooth functioning of the global economy
over which the US presides. Palestinians homes are routinely bulldozed
and its people live under military occupation. When the Arabic nations
try and address this matter civilly in the United Nations, as they just
tried last week at the Durban conference, they are rebuffed by the US.
Consequently, Palestinian children greet with delight the news of
thousands of innocent people dying in the US on the 11th. This is
blowback.

America will make many choices in the near future regarding how to
engage the US. Let's hope it remembers that actions have consequences.
Jingoistic responses can backfire. Blowback might erupt quickly, or
simmer for decades. When it strikes the consequences are devastating. We
are poised to escalate the violence or begin to plumb the depths of our
history in ways that might reveal how we can end these cascading series
of tragedies. Hopefully, reason will prevail.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Responding to terror with justice, not revenge

<http://www.free-market.net/spotlight/terrorism/>

Sirens shriek, smoke billows and people die in what appears to be the worst 
terrorist attack in history. "Who could have done such a thing?" people ask 
as they watch live video of the utter destruction of the World Trade Center 
and the flaming ruins of one wing of the Pentagon. The obvious answer is 
that homicidal madmen bear responsibility for the attacks. Equally obvious 
is that these homicidal madmen probably acted out of anger at the United 
States.
In a column I wrote in 1998, I suggested that "[t]errorist incidents are 
usually a response to something this country has done or been perceived to 
do, the allies that it's picked, and the fights that it's muscled it's way 
into." At the time, U.S. bombs had just rained on Baghdad, and I feared the 
consequences for the U.S.and the U.S.  response to any violent action.
I wasn't peering into my crystal ball at the time, but looking back into 
the past instead.  Ivan Eland of the Cato Institute had just produced a 
study of 20th Century terrorist attacks against the United States. The 
incidents ranged from the bombing of the Senate reception room in 1915 in 
response to arms sales to France and Britain, through the assassination of 
Robert Kennedy by Palestine-born Sirhan Sirhan, to the embassy bombings in 
Kenya and Tanzania over American involvement in the Middle East.
Said Eland: "All of the examples of terrorist attacks on the United States 
can be explained as retaliation for U.S. intervention abroad."
In pointing to the obvious connection between adventures overseas and 
violent attacks on Americans, we need not take a position on whether or not 
the U.S.  government is on the side of the angels or the devils in the 
conflicts in which it intervenes. No matter which side one takes, the 
losers will hate the intruders, and will likely seek bloody vengeance 
against outside interference. An activist foreign policy has consequences 
that can be measured in human lives.
Which brings us back to the events of September 11, 2001. While the 
identity of the people behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the 
Pentagon remain uncertain, the likeliest suspects make the list because of 
the active role played by the U.S. in the Middle East. By picking sides in 
long-simmering feuds, U.S. officials have made Americans targets for 
murderers who are willing to sacrifice themselves to satisfy their thirst 
for revenge.
So how should the United States react?
Finding the murderers and bringing them to justice is a logical option. 
Once they are positively identified, mass murderers must not be allowed to 
roam free.
But will U.S. officials stop there?
If the past is any guide, the U.S. government may respond to this attack in 
two counter-productive ways. American intervention overseas is likely to be 
stepped up, and the authorities can be expected to impose authoritarian 
curbs on domestic liberties.
Increased interventionism overseas will just feed into the cycle of 
violence that brought us the worst terrorist incident to-date. As Ivan 
Eland concluded after his survey of 20th Century terrorism, "The extensive 
number of incidents of terrorism linked to U.S. foreign policy implies that 
the United States could substantially reduce the chance of catastrophic 
terrorist attacks if it lowered its military profile overseas."
That's a fancy way of saying that we can reduce America's attractiveness as 
a target by minding our own business.
But if intervention overseas breeds terrorist attacks by foreigners against 
Americans, curbing domestic freedom should be seen as terrorism against 
ourselves. If we respond with measures that systematically violate the 
rights of our own people, we only compound injury with more injury. Through 
our own acts, the terrorists will then hurt everyone in the country far 
more deeply than ever they could on their own.
Among other infringements on our liberty, past legislative reactions to 
terrorism have turned airports into virtual prison camps, with travelers 
subject to searches and interrogations. The law now allows the Secretary of 
State to arbitrarily tag private groups as "foreign terrorist" 
organizations and forbid Americans to provide them with support of any 
kind, including food and medicine. The feds have even introduced the use of 
secret evidence against terrorism suspects that leaves people jailed in 
unconvicted limbo for years, with defense attorneys unable to even review 
the evidence against their clients.
While these measures have gnawed away at the American tradition of liberty, 
they did nothing to prevent the horrors of September 11, 2001.
New security precautions may well make it quicker to drive to most 
destinations than to fly. New controls could allow the police to paw 
through your email and investigate your political affiliations at will. And 
the restrictions still won't prevent dedicated and suicidal terrorists from 
doing their worst.
In a warning that sounds as appropriate today as it did when written, 
Reason magazine's Brian Doherty said of the last round of anti-terrorist 
legislation:
More laws can't make us safe from the tragedies that are the inevitable 
result of freedom, and of living around other people. Life is real, life is 
uncertain, life is inevitably unsafe. Measures to make it safe at all costs 
come with dangers of their own.
There's no way to absolutely prevent acts of terror against America, 
especially when the perpetrators are willing to sacrifice their own lives 
in order to murder others. But if we want to reduce the likelihood of such 
incidents, we need to steer clear of other people's conflicts. There's no 
good reason to barge into fights that don't concern us.
Two centuries ago, in his first inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson urged 
Americans to pursue "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all 
nations, --entangling alliances with none."
Today, Jefferson might well be derided as an isolationist. But to ignore 
his advice doesn't just spurn the wisdom of one of one of the nation's 
founders. Entangling alliances, intervention in other people's battles, 
have a price measured in blood.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

FOLKS OUT THERE HAVE A "DISTASTE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
AND CULTURAL VALUES"

by Edward S. Herman

One of the most durable features of the U.S. culture is the inability or
refusal to recognize U.S. crimes. The media have long been calling for
the Japanese and Germans to admit guilt, apologize, and pay reparations.
But the idea that this country has committed huge crimes, and that
current events such as the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks may
be rooted in responses to those crimes, is close to inadmissible.
Editorializing on the recent attacks ("The National Defense," Sept. 12),
the New York Times does give a bit of weight to the end of the Cold War
and consequent "resurgent of ethnic hatreds," but that the United States
and other NATO powers contributed to that resurgence by their own
actions (e.g., helping dismantle the Soviet Union and pressing Russian
"reform"; positively encouraging Slovenian and Croatian exit from
Yugoslavia and the breakup of that state, and without dealing with the
problem of stranded minorities, etc.) is completely unrecognized.

The Times then goes on to blame terrorism on "religious fanaticism...the
anger among those left behind by globalization," and the "distaste of
Western civilization and cultural values" among the global dispossessed.
The blinders and self-deception in such a statement are truly
mind-boggling. As if corporate globalization, pushed by the U.S.
government and its closest allies, with the help of the World Trade
Organization, World Bank and IMF, had not unleashed a tremendous
immiseration process on the Third World, with budget cuts and import
devastation of artisans and small farmers. Many of these hundreds of
millions of losers are quite aware of the role of the United States in
this process. It is the U.S. public who by and large have been kept in
the dark.

Vast numbers have also suffered from U.S. policies of supporting
rightwing rule and state terrorism, in the interest of combating
"nationalistic regimes maintained in large part by appeals to the
masses" and threatening to respond to "an increasing popular demand for
immediate improvement in the low living standards of the masses," as
fearfully expressed in a 1954 National Security Council report, whose
contents were never found to be "news fit to print." In connection with
such policies, in the U.S. sphere of influence a dozen National Security
States came into existence in the 1960s and 1970s, and as Noam Chomsky
and I reported back in 1979, of 35 countries using torture on an
administrative basis in the late 1970s, 26 were clients of the United
States. The idea that many of those torture victims and their families,
and the families of the thousands of "disappeared" in Latin America in
the 1960s through the 1980s, may have harbored some ill-feelings toward
the United States remains unthinkable to U.S. commentators.

During the Vietnam war the United States used its enormous military
power to try to install in South Vietnam a minority government of U.S.
choice, with its military operations based on the knowledge that the
people there were the enemy. This country killed millions and left
Vietnam (and the rest of Indochina) devastated. A Wall Street Journal
report in 1997 estimated that perhaps 500,000 children in Vietnam suffer
from serious birth defects resulting from the U.S. use of chemical
weapons there. Here again there could be a great many people with
well-grounded hostile feelings toward the United States.

The same is true of millions in southern Africa, where the United States
supported Savimbi in Angola and carried out a policy of "constructive
engagement" with apartheid South Africa as it carried out a huge
cross-border terroristic operation against the frontline states in the
1970s and 1980s, with enormous casualties. U.S. support of "our kind of
guy" Suharto as he killed and stole at home and in East Timor, and its
long warm relation with Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, also may
have generated a great deal of hostility toward this country among the
numerous victims.

Iranians may remember that the United States installed the Shah as an
amenable dictator in 1953, trained his secret services in "methods of
interrogation," and lauded him as he ran his regime of torture; and they
surely remember that the United States supported Saddam Hussein all
through the 1980s as he carried out his war with them, and turned a
blind eye to his use of chemical weapons against the enemy state. Their
civilian airliner 655 that was destroyed in 1988, killing 290 people,
was downed by a U.S. warship engaged in helping Saddam Hussein fight his
war with Iran. Many Iranians may know that the commander of that ship
was given a Legion of Merit award in 1990 for his "outstanding service"
(but readers of the New York Times would not know this as the paper has
never mentioned this high level commendation).

The unbending U.S. backing for Israel as that country has carried out a
long-term policy of expropriating Palestinian land in a major ethnic
cleansing process, has produced two intifadas-- uprisings reflecting the
desperation of an oppressed people. But these uprisings and this fight
for elementary rights have had no constructive consequences because the
United States gives the ethnic cleanser arms, diplomatic protection, and
carte blanche as regards policy.

All of these victims may well have a distaste for "Western civilization
and cultural values," but that is because they recognize that these
include the ruthless imposition of a neoliberal regime that serves
Western transnational corporate interests, along with a willingness to
use unlimited force to achieve Western ends. This is genuine
imperialism, sometimes using economic coercion alone, sometimes
supplementing it with violence, but with many millions--perhaps even
billions--of people "unworthy victims." The Times editors do not
recognize this, or at least do not admit it, because they are
spokespersons for an imperialism that is riding high and whose
principals are unprepared to change its policies. This bodes ill for the
future. But it is of great importance right now to stress the fact that
imperial terrorism inevitably produces retail terrorist responses; that
the urgent need is the curbing of the causal force, which is the
rampaging empire._

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Inevitable ring to the unimaginable

By John Pilger
September 13, 2001

If the attacks on America have their source in the Islamic world, who
can really be surprised?

Two days earlier, eight people were killed in southern Iraq when British
and American planes bombed civilian areas. To my knowledge, not a word
appeared in the mainstream media in Britain.

An estimated 200,000 Iraqis, according to the Health Education Trust in
London, died during and in the immediate aftermath of the slaughter
known as the Gulf War.

This was never news that touched public consciousness in the west.

At least a million civilians, half of them children, have since died in
Iraq as a result of a medieval embargo imposed by the United States and
Britain.

In Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Mujadeen, which gave birth to the
fanatical Taliban, was largely the creation of the CIA.

The terrorist training camps where Osama bin Laden, now "America's most
wanted man", allegedly planned his attacks, were built with American
money and backing.

In Palestine, the enduring illegal occupation by Israel would have
collapsed long ago were it not for US backing.

Far from being the terrorists of the world, the Islamic peoples have
been its victims - principally the victims of US fundamentalism, whose
power, in all its forms, military, strategic and economic, is the
greatest source of terrorism on earth.

This fact is censored from the Western media, whose "coverage" at best
minimises the culpability of imperial powers. Richard Falk, professor of
international relations at Princeton, put it this way: "Western foreign
policy is presented almost exclusively through a self-righteous, one-way
legal/moral screen (with) positive images of Western values and
innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted
political violence."

That Tony Blair, whose government sells lethal weapons to Israel and has
sprayed Iraq and Yugoslavia with cluster bombs and depleted uranium and
was the greatest arms supplier to the genocidists in Indonesia, can be
taken seriously when he now speaks about the "shame" of the "new evil of
mass terrorism" says much about the censorship of our collective sense
of how the world is managed.

One of Blair's favourite words - "fatuous" - comes to mind. Alas, it is
no comfort to the families of thousands of ordinary Americans who have
died so terribly that the perpetrators of their suffering may be the
product of Western policies. Did the American establishment believe that
it could bankroll and manipulate events in the Middle East without cost
to itself, or rather its own innocent people?

The attacks on Tuesday come at the end of a long history of betrayal of
the Islamic and Arab peoples: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the
foundation of the state of Israel, four Arab-Israeli wars and 34 years
of Israel's brutal occupation of an Arab nation: all, it seems,
obliterated within hours by Tuesday's acts of awesome cruelty by those
who say they represent the victims of the West's intervention in their
homelands.

"America, which has never known modern war, now has her own terrible
league table: perhaps as many as 20,000 victims."

As Robert Fisk points out, in the Middle East, people will grieve the
loss of innocent life, but they will ask if the newspapers and
television networks of the west ever devoted a fraction of the present
coverage to the half-a-million dead children of Iraq, and the 17,500
civilians killed in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The answer is no.
There are deeper roots to the atrocities in the US, which made them
almost inevitable.

It is not only the rage and grievance in the Middle East and south Asia.
Since the end of the cold war, the US and its sidekicks, principally
Britain, have exercised, flaunted, and abused their wealth and power
while the divisions imposed on human beings by them and their agents
have grown as never before.

An elite group of less than a billion people now take more than 80 per
cent of the world's wealth.

In defence of this power and privilege, known by the euphemisms "free
market" and "free trade", the injustices are legion: from the illegal
blockade of Cuba, to the murderous arms trade, dominated by the US, to
its trashing of basic environmental decencies, to the assault on fragile
economies by institutions such as the World Trade Organisation that are
little more than agents of the US Treasury and the European central
banks, and the demands of the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund in forcing the poorest nations to repay unrepayable debts; to a new
US "Vietnam" in Colombia and the sabotage of peace talks between North
and South Korea (in order to shore up North Korea's "rogue nation"
status).

Western terror is part of the recent history of imperialism, a word that
journalists dare not speak or write.

The expulsion of the population of Diego Darcia in the 1960s by the
Wilson government received almost no press coverage.

Their homeland is now an American nuclear arms dump and base from which
US bombers patrol the Middle East.

In Indonesia, in 1965/6, a million people were killed with the
complicity of the US and British governments: the Americans supplying
General Suharto with assassination lists, then ticking off names as
people were killed.

"Getting British companies and the World Bank back in there was part of
the deal", says Roland Challis, who was the BBC's south east Asia
correspondent.

British behaviour in Malaya was no different from the American record in
Vietnam, for which it proved inspirational: the withholding of food,
villages turned into concentration camps and more than half a million
people forcibly dispossessed.

In Vietnam, the dispossession, maiming and poisoning of an entire nation
was apocalyptic, yet diminished in our memory by Hollywood movies and by
what Edward Said rightly calls cultural imperialism.

In Operation Phoenix, in Vietnam, the CIA arranged the homicide of
around 50,000 people. As official documents now reveal, this was the
model for the terror in Chile that climaxed with the murder of the
democratically elected leader Salvador Allende, and within 10 years, the
crushing of Nicaragua.

All of it was lawless. The list is too long for this piece.

Now imperialism is being rehabilitated. American forces currently
operate with impunity from bases in 50 countries.

"Full spectrum dominance" is Washington's clearly stated aim.

Read the documents of the US Space Command, which leaves us in no doubt.

In this country, the eager Blair government has embarked on four violent
adventures, in pursuit of "British interests" (dressed up as
"peacekeeping"), and which have little or no basis in international law:
a record matched by no other British government for half a century.

What has this to do with this week's atrocities in America? If you
travel among the impoverished majority of humanity, you understand that
it has everything to do with it.

People are neither still, nor stupid. They see their independence
compromised, their resources and land and the lives of their children
taken away, and their accusing fingers increasingly point north: to the
great enclaves of plunder and privilege. Inevitably, terror breeds
terror and more fanaticism.

But how patient the oppressed have been.

It is only a few years ago that the Islamic fundamentalist groups,
willing to blow themselves up in Israel and New York, were formed, and
only after Israel and the US had rejected outright the hope of a
Palestinian state, and justice for a people scarred by imperialism.

Their distant voices of rage are now heard; the daily horrors in faraway
brutalised places have at last come home.
-----------
John Pilger is an award-winning, campaigning journalist.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  They can run and they can hide. Suicide bombers are here to stay

  By Robert Fisk

  13 September 2001

  Not long before the Second World War, Stanley Baldwin, who was Britain's
  Prime Minister, warned that "the bomber will always get through". Today,
we can argue that the suicide bomber will always get through. Maybe not all
of them. We may never know how many other hijackers failed to board domestic
  flights in the United States on Tuesday morning, but enough to produce
  carnage on an awesome, incomprehensive scale. Yet still we have not begun
to address this phenomenon. The suicide bomber is here to stay. It is an
  exclusive weapon that belongs to "them" not us, and no military power
  appears able to deal with this phenomenon.

  Partly because of the suicide bomber, the Israelis fled Lebanon.
  Specifically because of a suicide bomber, the Americans fled Lebanon 17
  years earlier. I still remember Vice-President George Bush, now George
Bush Senior, visibly moved amid the ruins of the US Marine base in Beirut,
where 241 American servicemen had just been slaughtered. "We are not going
to let a bunch of insidious terrorist cowards, shake the foreign policy of the
  United States," he told us. "Foreign policy is not going to be dictated or
  changed by terror." A few months later, the Marines upped sticks and ran
  away from Lebanon, "redeployed" to their ships offshore.

  Not long ago, I was chatting to an Indian soldier, a veteran of Delhi's
  involvement in the Sri Lanka war now serving with the UN in southern
  Lebanon. How did the Tamil suicide bombers compare those of the Lebanese
  Hizbollah I asked him? The soldier raised his eyebrows. "The Hizbollah has
  nothing on those guys," he said. "Just think, they all carry a suicide
  capsule. I told my soldiers to drive at 100 miles an hour on the roads of
  Sri Lanka in case one of them hurled himself into the jeep." The Hizbollah
  may take their inspiration from the martyrdom of the prophet Hussain, and
  the Palestinian suicide bombers may take theirs from the Hizbollah.

  But there is no military answer to this. As long as "our" side will risk
but not give its lives (cost-free war, after all, was partly an American
  invention) the suicide bomber is the other side's nuclear weapon. That
  desperate, pitiful phone call from the passenger on her way to her doom in
  the Boeing 767 crash on the Pentagon told her husband that the hijackers
  held knives and box-cutters. Knives and box-cutters; that's all you need
now to inflict a crashing physical defeat on a superpower. That and a plane
with a heavy fuel load.

  But the suicide bomber does not conform to a set of identical
  characteristics. Many of the callow Palestinian youths blowing themselves
to bits, with, more often than not, the most innocent of Israelis, have
little or no formal education. They have poor knowledge of the Koran but a
powerful sense of fury, despair and self-righteousness to propel them. The
Hizbollah suicide bombers were more deeply versed in the Koran, older, 
often with
  years of imprisonment to steel them in the hours before their immolation.

  Tuesday's suicide bombers created a precedent. If there were at least four
  on each aircraft, this means 16 men decided to kill themselves at the same
  time. Did they all know each other? Unlikely. Or did one of them know all
  the rest? For sure, they were educated. If the Boeing which hit the
Pentagon was being flown by men with knives (presumably, the other three 
aircraft
  were too) then these were suicide bombers with a good working knowledge of
  the fly-by-wire instrument panel of one of the world's most sophisticated 
aircraft.

  I found it oddly revealing when, a few hours later, an American reporter
  quizzed me about my conviction that these men must have made "dummy runs",
  must have travelled the same American Airlines and United Airlines
scheduled flights many times. They would have to do that at least to check
the X-ray security apparatus at airports. How many crew, the average passenger
  manifest, the average delays on departure times. They needed to see if the
  cabin crew locked the flight deck door. In my experience on US domestic
  flights this is rare. Savage, cruel these men were, but also, it seems,
  educated.

  Like so many of our politicians who provide us with the same tired old
  promises about hunting down the guilty and, Mr Blair's contribution
  yesterday, "dismantle the machine of terror". But this misses the point.
If the machinery is composed of knives and box-cutters, Mr Blair is after the
  wrong target. Just as President Ronald Reagan was in the hours before he
  ordered the bombing of Libya in 1986. "He can run, but he can't hide," he
  said of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. But Colonel Gaddafi could hide, and he is
  still with us.

  Instead of searching for more rogue states, President George W Bush's
  reference to those who stand behind the bombers opens the way for more
  cruise missiles aimed at Iraq or Afghanistan, or wherever he thinks the
  "godfathers of terrorism may be". The Americans might do better to find
out who taught these vicious men to fly a Boeing 767.

  Which Middle East airlines train their pilots for this aircraft? Indeed
  which nations are generous in their pilot-training schemes for Third World
  countries? I recall one of Iran's best post-revolutionary helicopter
pilots telling me he was given a full course on the Bell Augusta (the
Vietnam-era gunship) by the Pakistan air force, which itself paid retired 
American
  pilots to teach them.

  And if Osama bin Laden is behind the New York massacre, it's worth
  remembering one of his aims: not just to evict the US from the Middle East
  but to overthrow the Arab regimes loyal to Washington.

  Saudi Arabia was top of the list when I last spoke to him, but President
  Hosni Mubarak's Egypt and Jordan, ruled by King Abdullah II, were among
his other enemies. He would keep talking about how the Muslims of these
nations would rise up against their corrupt rulers. A slaughter by the US in
  retaliation for the New York and Washington bloodbaths might just move the
  Arab masses from stubborn docility to the point of detonation.

  Within the region, the suicide bomber is now admired. Not because he is a
  mass killer but because something invincible, something untouchable,
  something that has always dictated the rules without taking responsibility
  for the results, has now proved vulnerable. It was the same when the first
  suicide bombers struck in Lebanon.

  The Lebanese could scarcely believe that Israeli soldiers could die on
this scale. The Israeli army of song and legend had been brought low. So, too,
  the reaction when the symbols of America's pride and power were struck.
The vile, if small, Palestinian "celebrations" were a symptom of this,
albeit unrepresentative. They matched the "bomb Baghdad into the Dark Ages"
  rhetoric we heard from the American public a decade ago.

  In the Middle East, Arabs now fear America will strike them without
waiting for proof, or act on the most flimsy of evidence. For it is as well to
  remember how the US responded to the 1983 Marine bombings. The battleship
  USS New Jersey fired its automobile-sized shells into the Chouf Mountains,
  killing a couple of Syrian soldiers and erasing half a village. The
arrival of US naval craft off the American East Coast yesterday was a
ghostly replay of this impotent event.

  But to this day, the Americans have never discovered the identity of the
man who drove a truck-load of explosives into the Beirut Marine compound.
That was in another country, in another time. Today's suicide bombers are a
  different breed. Nurtured in whatever despair or misery or perhaps even
  privilege, in 2001, the suicide bomber came of age.


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