The following is an update from
Suzanne Taylor and TheConversation.org Making
Sense of These Times Website. Thank
you for your interest. If you wish to be removed from this list at any time,
just let us know.
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Column from Geov Parrish:
Wanna Know a Secret? Bush's Troubling Security Shell Game -- March 12,
2002
Suzanne's
comment: This column gives a good
snapshot of the government by fiat, stripped of its checks and balances, that we
are living under. "...the Bush Administration is facing no meaningful
accountability for its policy decisions, foreign or domestic, good or bad...in
arguably the most important and far-reaching network of policy initiatives
undertaken by the federal government since the New Deal -- set in motion by a
single catastrophic event -- Bush is not only refusing to answer critics, but is
refusing to give out enough details to allow informed criticism."
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Additions
to our Quotes section:
One fundamentalist band cannot be fought by siding with
and supporting another. In its war on the Taliban and the al-Qaeda, the US has
taken the "Northern Alliance" into service through wooing and arming certain
infamous warlords. By so doing, the US is in fact abetting the worst enemies of
our people and is continuing the same tyrannical policy against the people and
the destiny of Afghanistan which successive US administrations adopted during
the past two decades.
Let Us Struggle Against War and
Fundamentalism -- and for Peace and Democracy!
RAWA Statement on
International Women's Day, March 8, 2002
http://rawa.fancymarketing.net/mar8-02en.htm
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Five Star Piece: US Morality Distorted by September
11, Robert
Fisk -- March 13,
2002
Suzanne's comments: If this plea to Europe to
step in to take over from an America that has lost its moral compass were not
written by Robert Fisk, I would think it was Arab propaganda -- but Fisk is the
eminent English journalist who was badly beaten in Afghanistan awhile back. When
he excoriates America more bitingly and universally than I have read from any
Western journalist, best the world listen. "When Washington’s top military men
are so dishonest, is it any surprise that Israeli tanks can open fire on refugee
camps without any serious response from the US or blast cars carrying children
because they want to kill their father?...I’m beginning to suspect that Sept. 11
is turning into a curse far greater than the original bloodbath of that day,
that America’s absorption with that terrible event is in danger of distorting
our morality. Is the anarchy of Afghanistan and the continuing slaughter in the
Middle East really to be the memorial for the thousands who died on Sept. 11?"
In Afghan fields, the poppies blow.
Yes, even as the Americans are moving deeper into the Afghan trap, the warlords
and gangsters running much of the Western-supported Afghan government are
ensuring a bumper new crop of heroin for the world’s markets.
The UN has
warned of this, of course, but nothing is being done. The “war against terror”
comes first. The broken roads and highways of Afghanistan are now
ribbons of anarchy and brigandage and murder across the country. The pathetic
little force of peacekeepers in Kabul cannot control all of the capital, let
alone the rest of the country. The interim leader, Hamid Karzai, can scarcely
control the street outside his office. But the “war against terror” comes first.
Locked into their “war against terror” — and now discovering
that their enemies want to fight them — the Americans remain equally
indolent when confronted by the infinitely more dangerous conflict 2,000 miles
to the west of Kabul, in the streets of Jerusalem, Ramallah, Tel Aviv, Nablus,
Jenin and Gaza. When the Israeli Army goes on a shooting spree in the
refugee camps and kills 16 Palestinians, among them two children, the US calls
for “restraint”. When a Palestinian bomber murders a crowd of Israelis in
Jerusalem, including two babies and a 10-year old, the US boldly blames Yasser
Arafat for not “stopping terrorism” by locking up the bad guys. And Ariel
Sharon? Why, he’s busy destroying the police stations and prisons to make sure
Arafat can’t do what he’s been ordered to do.
And when Sharon actually
announces that Israel must “inflict greater losses” — in other words, kill more
Palestinians — Washington is silent. Maybe it’s not indolence. Maybe the
Bush administration actually believes that the man held “personally responsible”
by an Israeli commission of inquiry for the murder of 1,700 Palestinian
civilians in Beirut in 1982 really is fighting America’s “war on terror”. Maybe
America’s moral compass has become so skewed by the crimes against humanity on
Sept. 11 that President Bush simply no longer cares what Sharon does.
It’s as if all the lessons of history — in Afghanistan as well
as the Middle East — have been tossed into a bin. Take ex-President Clinton. He
arrives in Israel and what does he do? He blames Arafat. And what does his
preposterous wife say when she does the same thing? “Yasser Arafat bears the
responsibility for the violence that has occurred; it rests on his shoulders
...” She says that her role as a US senator is “to support the Israeli people”.
Really? What’s wrong with supporting innocent Palestinians as well? Wrong
religion? Back-to-front writing? Wrong eye color?
So a war against
colonial occupation has been transformed into an offshoot of the “war on
terror”, the language of this war ever more infantile. We now have to learn by
rote the following words: Tit-for-tat, cycle-of-violence, axis of evil,
bunker-buster, daisy-cutter ... Is there no end to this childishness? No, there
is not. For the latest little killer is the word “transfer” or “resettlement”.
As in “the simple answer... would be to create a vast separation from Israel,
resettling the Palestinians in Jordan, where 80 percent of the population is
Palestinian.” This comes from an article published in USA Today. In Israel
itself, an opinion poll asks Israelis how many of them would support “transfer”
— of Arabs out of their homes, of course, not Jewish settlers off Arab land — as
a solution to the war.
This is incredible. “Transfer” is ethnic
cleansing and ethnic cleansing is a war crime. If American newspapers are
prepared to print such an option and if Israelis are asked to give their opinion
on it, what is Milosevic doing in The Hague? The moral collapse is already under
way. Take the watering down of the US government’s latest report on
human rights. In 2000, it said that Egypt’s hopelessly unfair military courts
“do not ensure civilian defendants due process before an independent tribunal”.
In the 2001 report, however, that sentence has been censored out. It has to be,
of course, because Bush is now setting up his own military courts to try his
prisoners at Guantanamo Bay without due process.
And while the Americans
are distorting the nature of the war between Israel and the Palestinians, they
are lying about Afghanistan. Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of the US
Central Command, refers in the following words to the mistaken killing of 16
innocent Afghans at Hazar Qadam: “I will not characterize it as a failure of any
type.” Sorry? Either Gen. Franks — who on Tuesday managed to refer to his newly
killed soldiers as dying “in Vietnam” — didn’t read the facts or he is a very
disreputable man.
His boss, Donald Rumsfeld, refuses to use the word
“mistake” or even “investigation” after thousands of innocent Afghans died under
US bombs because the word “sometimes has the implication of more formality or a
disciplinary action”. When Washington’s top military men are so
dishonest, is it any surprise that Israeli tanks can open fire on refugee camps
without any serious response from the US or blast cars carrying children because
they want to kill their father?
It is surely time that Europe
became involved. It is surely time that the EU held a summit about these
terrible conflicts and involved itself directly. We should be expanding the
peace force in Kabul to remove the weapons of Afghanistan and let America move
into the swamp of semi-occupation and guerrilla warfare if that is what it
wishes. We should be asking Israel to repay the 17.29 million euro of European
taxpayers’ money that has been destroyed by the Israeli Army in its
vandalization of EU-funded Palestinian infrastructure. Since the Americans won’t
talk to Yasser Arafat, we should take over from them. If Washington is
too slovenly to halt this terrible war between Arabs and Israelis, we must try
to do so. We’re asked to fund America’s bankrupt policies with our euros. So now
it’s time to demand that we have a say in them. Instead of that,
Downing Street, which over Christmas castigated those journalists who predicted
chaos and blood in Afghanistan — myself included, I’m glad to say — feeds Bush’s
fantasies by supporting yet another war with Iraq. I’m beginning to
suspect that Sept. 11 is turning into a curse far greater than the original
bloodbath of that day, that America’s absorption with that terrible event is in
danger of distorting our morality. Is the anarchy of Afghanistan and the
continuing slaughter in the Middle East really to be the memorial for the
thousands who died on Sept. 11?
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