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[Note: The following news and opinions primarily came from email sent by our friends. Thank you Sirius and all the others who have forwarded these messages to us. Due to the large volume of email we are receiving, we can only post a sampling here, but we thank everyone for sending stories like this. We read them all and post what we can as time permits.]

On the brink of chaos, a dangerous battle for American support (The Guardian, December 4, 2001)
“Ariel Sharon's address to Israelis yesterday showed him apparently confident that he enjoys a new level of American support even as he condemned Yasser Arafat in terms so extreme they could prefigure the full-scale attack on the Palestinian Authority that Israel has always so far avoided. . . . The risks, in other words, may not be as great as they may appear in a first reading of Mr Sharon's speech, but they are real enough nevertheless. Chaos and a complete loss of control have never been nearer in the Middle East. . . . One of the reasons for this is that the policy of the United States after September 11 has produced a contest for American support, or, more accurately, a struggle between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority to push the other party into a position where it would bear the brunt of American pressure and displeasure, which has been literally lethal. . . . It may well be that Hamas would have staged suicide operations, at this time or later, whether or not a leader had been killed by the Israelis. But there must be a suspicion that some Israelis wanted General Zinni to have a first hand view of terrorism, which might then shift the view of Mr Arafat in Washington. . . . Whatever it feels it has to say in public, the United States must make it clear in private that it sees through the kind of deadly theatre we have seen over the last few days.”

A vigil - and the day after (Gush Shalom)
“Five hand-written first names: Sultan - Muhammad - Anis - Amer - Akram. They all had the same  family name, El-Astal, the five children from Khan Yunes Refugee Camp blown  up last week by an explosive device which Israeli Army sappers had set up at  night. A booby-trap set up on a path which is used by Palestinian fighters but  also by children on their way to school. . . . ‘Why don't you mourn the Jewish children?’ he asked out of the open car window. How can you answer that, while sounding neither exasperated nor apologetic? How to reiterate calmly and insistantly that a child is a child, and that mourning a Palestinian child is not and cannot be in contradiction to mourning an Israeli one? . . . But none of the footage was shown on the evening news, two hours later. ‘The five children? That's old news. It happened four days ago!’ a news editor told us.That was about twenty-four hours ago. The intervening time did produce a new hot item: two young Palestinians ran through the streets of Afula shooting at random civilians, killing two young Israelis who happened to be there, before being themselves shot down. A retribution it was claimed to be; a retribution certain to bring counter-retribution and counter-counter-retribution, further steps in the long and weary cycle which has already gone on for so long. And General Zini, the new US mediator, is beginning his mission here.Could Zini act as a credible Peace maker, even while his country is waging brutal war in Afganistan? Could he grasp what should have been an obvious truth - that only when there is created again some hope will the populations of both sides force their leaders to stop the cycle of bloodshed? Hope that we can disentangle from this deadly embrace which is called occupation.”

The Militarization Of Earth (Diane Harvey, merak@sedona.net)
“At any normal time sane people would resolutely balk at that which they are begging for right now. While suffering human beings are still in a highly convenient state of shock, the military is avidly and methodically seizing the day. They very naturally have no trouble whatsoever using their present surge of sincere anger and patriotism (and everyone else's) to justify this great leap forward toward their ultimate goal. . . . Before anyone rejoices overmuch at how American military technology and power will inevitable destroy opposing hostile forces in the world, it would be best to think through what the world will look like when they do succeed. . . . Whatever the military would like to do, whatever dangerous and deadly technologies it would like to employ, it is now perfectly free to do so, in what we are told will be years of war ahead. . . . Down the road someday, when all the coming spying, snooping, tagging, marking, tracking and identifying business suddenly is being glaringly misused in obviously totalitarian ways, for purposes which have nothing to do with protecting anyone from anything, it will be far too late to complain about it. Technological systems in place are seldom dismantled, but simply change hands, for a price.”

Allies justify mass killing of Taliban prisoners in fort (Nicholas Watt, Richard Norton-Taylor, and Luke Harding, The Guardian, November 29, 2001)
“Britain and the US were facing growing international pressure last night to explain their role in the deaths of up to 400 Taliban prisoners who were killed by US warplanes and Northern Alliance fighters at a fortress outside the northern Afghan town of Mazar-i-Sharif. . . . ‘We executed around 160 Taliban that were captured. They were made to stand in a long line and five or six of our fighters used light machine guns on them.’ . . . In an unrelated incident, earlier today the Pentagon announced that during the drop of humanitarian aid on Afghanistan, a woman and a child had been killed when a load landed on their house. . . . ‘If this is a war, and the US says it is, then rules of engagement should apply. It does not sound like the [US bombing] was a proportionate response. Many of the Taliban were tied up.’ . . . The criticism of the bombing comes amid growing British disquiet at the tough language adopted by the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who said America was ‘not inclined to negotiate surrenders’ and that he hoped al-Qaida forces would ‘either be killed or taken prisoner’.”

A hollow victory - The Afghan war has increased hunger and banditry but will not reduce the terror threat. (Seumas Milne, The Guardian, November 22, 2001)
“Aid agencies confirm that six weeks of US bombing - which even the British government concedes has killed hundreds of civilians - has sharply exacerbated what was already a dire situation and Oxfam warned yesterday they were ‘operating on a precipice’. More than 100,000 people are now living in tents in the Kandahar area alone and the charity has been asked by Pakistan to gear up camps across the border to receive similar numbers in the next few days. . . . The effect of US and British intervention in Afghanistan has been to breathe new life into the embers of a 20-year-old civil war and hand the country back to the same bandits who left 50,000 dead in Kabul when they last lorded it over the capital. What has been hailed in the west as a liberation for women from the Taliban's grotesque oppression is being treated very differently by Afghan women's organisations. The widely praised Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, for example, described the return of the alliance as ‘dreadful and shocking’ and said many refugees leaving Afghanistan have been even more terrified of their ‘raping and looting’ than of US bombing. . . . But then by supporting the alliance so decisively, they are indirectly complicit in what are unquestionably war crimes. That complicity moved a stage further on Monday, when US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced he was determined to prevent thousands of Arab, Pakistani and Chechen fighters in Kunduz from escaping as part of any surrender agreement. He hoped, he said, they would be ‘killed or taken prisoner’, but added that US forces were ‘not in a position’ to take prisoners. Since Northern Alliance commanders have repeatedly made clear that they will not take foreign volunteers prisoner - and are reported already to have killed hundreds they have captured - the implication of Rumsfeld's remarks was pretty unmistakable.”

Global Totalitarianism And The Death Of Nature - Part I & II (Diane Harvey, merak@sedona.net)
“We must ask ourselves if those powerful and secretive men at the helm of this sinking ship, and therefore ultimately responsible for the massive poisoning of an entire planet, have therefore genuinely lost their minds. . . . The global corporate power structures, inextricably combined with their wholly-owned subsidiary governments, militaries, and educational systems, have minutely worked-out plans for the future of the human race. . . . Corporations have already stated their plans to widely patent human genetic material. Obviously they have in mind to own all of our genetic material, and therefore our very bodily existences, preferably before birth. . . . The powers of global totalitarianism are wholly dependent on the eventual eradication of the human heart, as the last and most dangerous obstacle to their achievements. It is the life of the heart that connects us to the energy of reality, and allows us to be human at all. . . . Because whatever it is going to take for human beings to develop the implacable collective will to insist on a sane, responsible, respectful, and humane society must come to pass. The choice is either this: or nothing. We will become intelligently loving and wise as a species, fulfilling our inherent purpose, or we will become extinct.”

The Dire Straits Diaries - Part Two The Belief Wars: Divide and Conquer (Diane Harvey, merak@sedona.net)
“These interminable human belief wars are deliberately created and sustained, dutifully serving a very dark purpose for those who wish to control this planet and keep stupefied all who live here. So long as we are easily diverted into religious wars, and endless struggles for other types of internecine belief-supremacy, we will not be noticing who is causing and fomenting all this behind the scenes of our earthly institutions. We won t be observing who benefits from all this directed hate and mayhem. We won t be tearing the veil away to take note of what groups and what forces are promoting and encouraging human divisiveness. While we are busy, nicely distracted into loathing one another wholesale, in the name of God and of all our other basic beliefs, the forces of global totalitarianism sit back and smile. They believe in nothing at all, except the single goal of our standardization, degradation, and enslavement. They are undivided. They have no other aim except the domination of the human species, and to quench all sparks of individual freedom once and for all. And their genius is in using religious differences, economic differences, political differences, and social, cultural, and national differences for their own ends. Their technique is to strike these discordant notes whenever possible, and to amplify each sour chord until hapless humans mechanically dance in mass step to their orchestrated tunes. They are experts at slyly manipulating and encouraging us to hate each other, in every possible way, while they are quietly, secretly and openly, dismembering the human race and feasting on the twitching remains.”

There is no excuse for this savagery (Isabel Hilton, The Guardian, November 29, 2001)
“We know how it ended, the prisoners' revolt in Abdul Rashid Dostam's Qala-i-Jhangi fort. Yesterday journalists were allowed in close enough to see the grotesque litter of dismembered bodies. But there were other things Dostam did not want them to inspect: a field, for instance, in which the bodies of some 50 Taliban fighters lay, their hands tied behind their backs. . . . There has been a deafening official silence following the massacre, a silence in which Amnesty International has called for an investigation into how this "prisoners' revolt" began. The Taliban's foreign fighters are not innocent civilians. But how you treat a captive enemy divides the warrior from the war criminal. . . . It is time to remember what this war was supposed to be about: a crusade against terror, a defence of the right to live in peace, a defence of the superior values of a civilised society against the immorality of the terrorist. . . . Surely the point about civilisation is that it does not descend lightly into terror and barbarism? Already a US congressman has dismissed the call for an investigation as unnecessary. He could not be more wrong.”

The Dire Straits Diaries ― Part Three: A Fearful Master (Diane Harvey)
“The majority of our fellow citizens are far too anxiously submissive these days to look into the actual meaning of their own political foundations. We are free to publicly worship at the tomb of the mummified remains, but any talk of resurrection is taken for outright insurrection. Only the most naοve would fail to miss the fact that understanding the meaning of our Constitution is now counted as directly subversive activity. At this rate it won't be long before the intellectual history of our country becomes classified information, available only on a need-to-know basis. . . . The United States of America came into being, based on the previously nearly unthinkable ideal of a national power structure owned and operated by the people themselves, on behalf of the welfare of the many rather than the few. . . . Retaining the courtesy title of citizens , participating in mock elections, we have in reality become meaningless ciphers in an Empire of Armed Secrecy, entirely ruled from on high downwards. And lo and behold, this fake, illegally secretive, and greed-ridden government military corporation is now what is left standing between physical danger and ourselves. . . . . It is like finding oneself protected by a well-organized and extremely sophisticated Mafia family from being killed outright by a rampaging murderous street gang.”

Confounding Carnivore: How to Protect Your Online Privacy (Omar J. Pahati, Alternet.org, November 29, 2001)
“Congress has been quite willing to trade some privacy for security, and the Bush Administration -- especially Attorney General John Ashcroft -- has been no defender of online privacy. With Constitutional protections being chipped away, what can civil liberties-minded citizens do to maintain their privacy online? . . . Cyber-libertarians determined to maintain anonymity have already found ways to circumvent Carnivore's watchful eyes. Most of the methods were developed by hackers to cover their tracks when engaging in questionable, sometimes illegal activity. But these techniques work just as well for the law-abiding citizen who wishes to uphold the right to privacy. And thankfully, you don't have to be a hacker to use these tools effectively. . . . Your ISP, your ISP's ISP, and every Web site has a record of where Web traffic comes from and where it goes. Even if Carnivore is not watching you, federal agents can subpoena ISP logs to track you down. Whether you're merely looking at NYTimes.com or AlterNet.org or one of Osama bin Laden's alleged porn-fronted Al Qaeda Web sites, you are being watched. . . . For the less tech-experienced activist, PGP and proxies may not be the best way to fight Carnivore. Organizations like StopCarnivore, ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation are good places to start for finding a grassroots solution to a digital problem. . . . Privacy activists say that as a matter of patriotism and democracy, everyone must fight to protect privacy. As Zimmerman says, ‘If we do nothing, new technologies will give the government new automatic surveillance capabilities that Stalin could never have dreamed of.’ ”

We are the war criminals now (Robert Fisk, The Independent, 29 November 2001)
“We are becoming war criminals in Afghanistan. The US Air Force bombs Mazar-i-Sharif for the Northern Alliance, and our heroic Afghan allies – who slaughtered 50,000 people in Kabul between 1992 and 1996 – move into the city and execute up to 300 Taliban fighters. . . . The Afghans have a ‘tradition’ of revenge. So, with the strategic assistance of the USAF, a war crime is committed. . . . Most television journalists, to their shame, have shown little or no interest in these disgraceful crimes. Cosying up to the Northern Alliance, chatting to the American troops, most have done little more than mention the war crimes against prisoners in the midst of their reports. What on earth has gone wrong with our moral compass since 11 September? . . . We bombed Afghan villages into rubble, along with their inhabitants – blaming the insane Taliban and Osama bin Laden for our slaughter – and now we have allowed our gruesome militia allies to execute their prisoners. President George Bush has signed into law a set of secret military courts to try and then liquidate anyone believed to be a ‘terrorist murderer’ in the eyes of America's awesomely inefficient intelligence services. . . . But I have a problem with all this. George Bush says that ‘you are either for us or against us’ in the war for civilisation against evil. Well, I'm sure not for bin Laden. But I'm not for Bush. I'm actively against the brutal, cynical, lying ‘war of civilisation’ that he has begun so mendaciously in our name and which has now cost as many lives as the World Trade Centre mass murder.”

Mossad Agents Arrested In Attempt To Bomb Mexican Congress
“As reported in La Vox De Aztlan, two men, one of them a former Israeli Colonel and Mossad agent, were arrested INSIDE the Mexican congress carrying 9mm pistols and dynamite, but were released following intense pressure from the Israeli Embassy. . . . La Voz de Aztlan has also learned that the Israeli Embassy used heavy handed measures to have the two Israelis released. Very high level emergency meetings took place between Mexican Secretary of Foreign Relations Jorge Gutman, General Macedo de la Concha and a top Ariel Sharon envoy who flew to Mexico City specially for that purpose. . . . The initial arrests of the two Israelis inside the Palacio Legislativo de San Lázaro made top news on Mexico City television and radio on the evening of October 10. TV Azteca had extensive coverage on the first night and on the following day. . . . No U.S. media has made any mention, that we know, except one by USAJewish.com this Sunday at: Pravda of Moscow has a note of the initial La Voz de Aztlan article. . . . What were the Israelis up to? We think we know.”

The truths they never tell us (John Pilger, New Statesman, November 26, 2001)
“The US vice-president, Dick Cheney, warned last week that America could take action against ‘40 to 50 countries’. Somalia, allegedly a ‘haven’ for al-Qaeda, joins Iraq at the top of a list of potential targets. Cheered by having replaced Afghanistan’s bad terrorists with America’s good terrorists, the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has asked the Pentagon to ‘think the unthinkable’, having rejected its ‘post-Afghanistan options’ as ‘not radical enough’. . . . Somalia will provide an ideal practice run for the final destruction of Iraq. However, as the Wall Street Journal reports, Iraq presents a ‘dilemma’, because ‘few targets remain’. . . . Richard Falk, professor of international politics at Princeton, has explained this. Western foreign policy, he says, is propagated in the media ‘through a self-righteous, one-way moral/legal screen with positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted political violence’. . . . The ascendancy of Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and associates Richard Perle and Elliot Abrams means that much of the world is now threatened openly by a geopolitical fascism, which has been developing since 1945 and has accelerated since 11 September. . . . Indeed, when the Taliban came to power in 1996, not only were they welcomed by Washington, their leaders were flown to Texas, then governed by George W Bush, and entertained by executives of the Unocal oil company. . . . A US official observed that, with the Caspian’s oil and gas flowing, Afghanistan would become ‘like Saudi Arabia’, an oil colony with no democracy and the legal persecution of women. ‘We can live with that,’ he said.”

Palestinian terrorists are desperate, not cowardly (Peter Preston, The Guardian, December 3, 2001)
“No one can quite afford to tell the truth - that it is weakness, not strength, that drives on the killing. That Arafat, though he would dearly like to contrive a halt, is too weak fully to control the forces of desperation within his territories. That Sharon is too weak (and too blinkered) to make the political concessions that might at last start to bring closer that Likud chimera, ‘peace with security’. And that America is weak as well - as weak as Colin Powell's last big policy speech, long on sympathy for ‘Palestinian frustration’, pitifully short on specific pressure to relieve such boiling anger. . . . Ben Yehuda Street is a wake-up call for both sides of that divide. Does ‘democracy’ guarantee peace? No: the intractabilities of democracy brought Israel a prime minister called Sharon. Can heavy artillery win the day? No: heavy artillery is part of the problem, not the solution. Does the west have enough clout - and resolution - to impose a settlement? No: it merely mixes passionate adjectives with irresolution. Is there any prospect, apart from the lull of exhaustion, of draining the blood from this bath? Dream on. The nightmare of Israel gives us a glimpse of other nightmares of desperation in waiting. And it is cowardly to pretend otherwise.”

FBI Admits Existence Of ‘Magic Lantern’ (Shawna McAlearney)
“The FBI last week admitted to developing ‘Magic Lantern,’ a worm/Trojan combination capable of infecting a suspect's machine to obtain encryption keys. . . . Though details of how the program will work aren't available, AV experts speculate that it installs keylogging software on a suspect's machine after infecting it with a worm. By capturing keystrokes, critical encryption key information can be gathered and transmitted back to the FBI. . . . ‘What if the French intelligence service, or even the Greeks, created a Trojan horse program for this purpose? Should we ignore those too?’ ”

Starvation and Death in Afghanistan (Farnaz Fassihi, Star-Ledger Staff, November 30, 2001)
“A man named Abdulaziz, clutching a notebook and a blue pen, walked around the refugee camp, recording the dead. . . . By 11 a.m. yesterday, he had gathered the names of 42 refugees who had died from cold and hunger in the past 24 hours. . . . Hygiene is a major problem. There are no toilets or baths. Refuse is everywhere, and the stench is unbearable. . . . ‘My mother is deaf and dumb and my father is very old,’ he explained. A 2-year-old sister died from the cold a few days ago. ‘We came because we had nothing to eat at home, but here sometimes I eat and other times nothing. The ground is my mattress and the sky is my roof. We are very miserable.’ Farough doesn't remember the last time he had a warm meal, and he says he has never played with a toy. He is illiterate. If he could have one wish, he said, it would be to read a book. . . . The governor of the province of Herat, Esmaeel Khan, says 100,000 more refugees are on their way to the camps and unless international aid arrives quickly, the human catastrophe here will reach biblical proportions. . . . And since Sept. 11 and the ensuing war against terrorism in Afghanistan, 6 million more people have been on the move, aid agencies say.”

The Gambler (Uri Avnery, MediaMonitors Network, December 1, 2001)
“A great many settlers - perhaps the majority – would undoubtedly be more than willing to return to Israel now. . . . But to whom to sell a villa with red tiles and a nice garden, which can be hit at any moment by a mortar shell? Only the government can buy, and the government does not want to. . . . Sharon must take account of his extreme right-wing partners, also of the fanatical settlers’ lobby. But this does not explain the fierceness of his opposition. So what’s it all about? . . . It would be worthwhile for General Zinni (as for his predecessors and successors) to study some Zionist history. They would discover that the settlements are part of the genetic code of the movement from the day it was born, 104 years ago. . . . This genetic code tells the movement to settle all parts of the country, to turn all of it into a Zionist homestead. . . . Sharon is the son of settlers, he grew up in a settlement, settlements are the very essence of his life. Throughout his checkered career, whatever his job was at any particular time, he devoted his energies first and foremost to the setting up of settlements. . . . Classic literature knows the character of the compulsive gambler. He has a successful day, he wins and wins, an immense heap of chips is stacked in front of him. He could get up at any moment, exchange his chips for real money and live on it happily ever after. . . . He could, but he is not able to. The compulsion does not let him. He goes on gambling, loses and loses, until the last chip is collected by the croupier.”

Now we can see clearly the awful complexity of declaring war on terrorism (The Independent, 04 December 2001)
“But the horrific, presumably synchronised, suicide bombings in Jerusalem and Haifa have forced Mr Bush's hand. The intensity of public feeling not only in Israel but also in the US has made it politically impossible for him to ask Ariel Sharon to turn the other cheek. This tacit green light to the Israeli government to deal with the Palestinian terrorists as it sees fit may have been unavoidable, but it illustrates the problems that will arise with the promised Phase Two of Mr Bush's own struggle against terrorism once the Afghan problem has been dealt with. . . . But no one can deny that radical Islam's grievances are multiplied by what it sees as America's permanent bias in favour of the Jewish state. . . . Such is one complication of America's new ‘war against terror’, and its entanglement with the long-standing Middle East conflict. Others will emerge if Phase Two leads where the hawks would wish, to Iraq, Iran, and beyond.”

War without end (Rupert Cornwell and Michael Byers, The Independent, 02 December 2001)
“Washington is now turning its attention to phase two of its struggle against terrorism, and it's feeling pretty good about the prospect. . . . Last week George Bush suggested that the possession of weapons of mass destruction by Saddam would be enough to justify US military action. . . . Until 11 September, the right to self-defence was limited to armed attacks by other states. It did not extend to terrorist acts, even when those acts were directly supported by a state. In 1996, a terrorist bomb in a Berlin nightclub killed a number of American soldiers. The US responded by bombing Tripoli, claiming self-defence. But this claim – and claims of self-defence in similar situations – have been widely rejected by other countries, and have thus failed to become part of customary international law. . . . The US is now claiming a right to pre-emptive action against terrorist threats. Iraqi efforts to develop chemical, biological and nuclear weapons are of particular concern. There is little evidence for a right of pre-emptive action in present-day international law. In the past, states simply have not claimed a right of anticipatory self-defence.”

Village air raid: error or an act of terror? Scores killed by B-52s (Richard Lloyd Parry, The Independent, 02 December 2001)
“ ‘There were 30 houses in that village, more than 200 people. From a family of 40, only this boy and his grandmother are alive.’ . . . From here to Osama bin Laden's suspected hideout in the White Mountains is a day's journey overland – but perhaps from the cockpit of a B-52 it seems like no distance at all. How else to explain why the bombs were unloaded on Kama Ado? ‘I have never seen any Taliban in that village,'' said Mr Gul. ‘The Arabs of Osama are far away. We are poor people – if we had any money we would have escaped before now to Pakistan.’ . . . In two villages in the Mairajuddin district, 50 people are confirmed dead, according to Hazrat Ali, head of security in Jalalabad. ‘It's possible that the total is more than 100,’ he said last night. . . . Was the bombing of Kama Ado entirely a mistake or was there a ruthless logic to it? Al-Qa'ida members holed up in the Tora Bora area have networks in the surrounding villages, and are paying local people to give them food. ‘This is the fault of our own people,’ said Commander Ali. ‘They are working with the US, giving false reports that there are al-Qa'ida camps, but they are not there,’ he said. The Northern Alliance's foreign minister, Abdullah Abdullah, said in Kabul yesterday that he did not believe Mr bin Laden was in the Tora Bora area, but in the south.”

How to Identify a Terrorist (FBI Brochure)

Here are a few of the groups and people the FBI plans on locking up.

     Right-wing Extremists:

  • Defenders of the U.S. Constitution against federal government and the U.N. (Super Patriots)
  • Groups of individuals engaged in para-military training

     Hate Groups:

  • Skinheads, Nazis, Neo Nazis (usually recognized by tattoos)
  • Black separatists
  • KKK
  • Christian Identity
  • White Nationalists

     Left-wing terrorists (political motivation is usually Marxists/Leninist philosophy)

     Single Issue Terrorists

  • Animal rights
  • Eco-terrorism
  • Violent anti-abortion extremism
  • Cyber penetration
  • Doomsday/Cult-type group
  • Lone Individuals

Doublespeaking of terrorism (Brian Whitaker, The Guardian, December 3, 2001)
“Terrorists, he [Bush] said recently, include those who ‘develop weapons of mass destruction that will be used to terrorise nations’. . . . Applying the Bush definition logically would place Pakistan and Israel - two key American allies - in the terrorist category, along with numerous other countries. But President Bush was not talking about Pakistan or Israel; he was talking about Iraq. . . . Meanwhile, there are many who question the wisdom of trying to extend the ‘war on terrorism’ to include weapons of mass destruction and thereby to justify an attack on Iraq. In the view of some, that would be the quickest way of destroying the international consensus against terrorism.  ‘You can't build an international coalition on the basis of one thing and then ask it to do something else,’ Professor Victor Bulmer-Thomas of the Royal Institute of International Affairs said last week. ‘No one has yet found any concrete evidence linking Saddam Hussein with the events of September 11,’ he continued. ‘Therefore, if the objective of the military campaign in Afghanistan is to defeat terrorism, one would not have a justification for moving against Iraq.’ . . . In the most frequently mentioned scenario, American air power would be used to support uprisings by the Kurds in northern Iraq and possibly the Shi'a in the south. The US might even establish a military base in northern Iraq to relieve its dependence on cooperation from nervous neighbours such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia.”

This terrible conflict is the last colonial war (Robert Fisk, The Independent, 04 December 2001)
“Can Ariel Sharon control his own people? Can he control his army? Can he stop them from killing children, leaving booby traps in orchards or firing tank shells into refugee camps? Can Sharon stop his rabble of an army from destroying hundreds of Palestinian refugee homes in Gaza? Can Sharon ‘crack down’ on Jewish settlers and prevent them from stealing more land from Palestinians? Can he stop his secret-service killers from murdering their Palestinian enemies – or carrying out ‘ targeted killings’, as the BBC was still gutlessly calling these executions yesterday in its effort to avoid Israeli criticism. It is, of course, forbidden to ask these questions. . . . The reality is that the Palestinian/Israeli conflict is the last colonial war. The French thought that they were fighting the last battle of this kind. They had long ago conquered Algeria. They set up their farms and settlements in the most beautiful land in North Africa. And when the Algerians demanded independence, they called them ‘terrorists’ and they shot down their demonstrators and they tortured their guerrilla enemies and they murdered – in ‘targeted killings’ – their antagonists. . . . Can the United States stop bombing villages? Can Washington persuade its special forces to protect prisoners? Can the Americans control their own people?”

Arafat risks civil war by ordering dozens of arrests (Phil Reeves, The Independent, 04 December 2001)
“Yasser Arafat pushed ahead with a sweeping crack-down against Palestinian militants as he tried to fend off the most serious challenge to his rule since the signing of the Oslo accords eight years ago. . . . It failed to convince Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister, who last night announced he would be launching a new ‘war on terrorism’, modelled on the American campaign in the aftermath of 11 September, in which Israel ‘would use every single means they use’. . . . There is a widespread belief in the Arab world, shared by some western analysts, that elements in Israel's security establishment have tried to foment civil strife inside the occupied territories to pressure Mr Arafat, or even topple him. . . . Israel's armed forces are blamed by many for provoking Hamas into renewing murderous attacks against civilians by assassinating one of their senior military leaders, Mahmoud Abu Hanoud, last month when the group had suspended suicide bombings in Israel. . . . Yesterday, a Hamas spokes-man in Bethlehem, Sheikh Abdul Majid Atta, was freely wandering the streets of the camp, airing his view that the Palestinian Authority's latest round of arrests were a joke. ‘What is the point of arresting us? I am not the one who is carrying out these attacks. They are already inside Israel. And not the CIA, the Palestinian Authority, America or Israel can stop them.’ . . . The roundup followed Mr Arafat's declaration of a state of emergency, outlawing all extremist forces, including elements of his own Fatah movement, and particularly those which have committed attacks on Israeli civilians. Yesterday that was followed by an order from the Palestinian Authority banning people from carrying weapons, holding demonstrations without a permit, or using mosques or loud-speakers to disseminate political propaganda. . . . Yesterday, its spokesmen were eager to point out that Mr Arafat now faces a choice between tackling the ‘terrorists’ – breaking up Hamas and Islamic Jihad – or facing political annihilation. This fails to take into account the depth of anti-Israeli sentiment in the occupied territories, or Mr Arafat's status as the figurehead of Palestinian nationalism. He succeeded in bottling up Hamas with a similar wave of arrests in 1996; but that was before the intifada, which has cost 800 Palestinian lives, and a new generation of radicalised activists. There is no guarantee that jailing militants en masse would stop the attacks on Israelis.”

US forces behind war crimes at Mazar-i-Sharif: Media covers up (Stephen Gowans, MediaMonitors Network, December 1, 2001)
“Cowed by letters and phone calls from jingoistic mouth-beraters branding even the mildest criticism a sign of sedition, anxious to avoid charges of being a fifth column, the US media hews to an uncritically patriotic line, which means leaving atrocities committed by ‘our side’ unmentioned or under-reported. . . . Remember what happened? Foreign Taliban troops -- Pakistanis, Chechens and Arabs mostly, are being held at the ancient Qaila Jangi fortress outside Mazar-i-Sharif. They had negotiated a surrender with Northern Alliance General Rashid Dostum, who says they’ll be allowed passage to Pakistan. Afghan Taliban troops have already be allowed to return to their home villages or have been integrated into Northern Alliance units. A skirmish erupts inside the fortress walls. Why, is unclear. The official story, to be developed later into the bizarre pseudo-dichotomy that ‘this wasn’t a massacre, it was a battle’ (it was both) is that some Taliban have smuggled arms into the prison. The story stinks. Why would fighters lay down their arms, allow themselves to herded into a fortress, surrounded on all sides by Northern Alliance troops and US and British special forces, and then, when they’re at their weakest and most vulnerable, without weapons except those they can scrounge, dozens of them with their hands bound behind their backs, resume the battle? . . . US forces were in control at Qaila Jangi, indeed in control of the Northern Alliance, and much of the country, a point that may have suddenly and shockingly have occurred to the prisoners inside the fortress walls. They weren’t going to Pakistan. Indeed, they probably weren’t going to live. Did they realize they had been double crossed, that there was nothing left to lose, but to fight? . . . Whatever the case, once the uprising had begun, the Taliban’s jailers had two options. Kill everyone, or bring the riot under control. They chose to hand Rumsfeld his wish. . . . So now you have US air strikes killing most of the prisoners and acknowledgement that US and British special forces participated in the massacre. . . . Instead, the air strikes and the role of US and British troops gets swept under the rug and we’re left with ‘hundreds of pro-Taliban Afghans and foreigners killed this week in a prison uprising... were ruthlessly butchered by their Northern Alliance foes,’ and ‘US forces may have been guilty of failing to intervene to prevent atrocities.’ Not only are US forces exonerated of any direct involvement, their indirect culpability is downgraded to a matter of speculation: they ‘may’ have been guilty. . . . Huh? What happened to the ruthless butchering of Taliban prisoners by US air strikes? What happened to the ruthless butchering done by US and British special forces?”

Beyond Osama: The Pentagon’s Battle With Powell Heats Up (Jason Vest,
Village Voice, November 20, 2001)
“At the other pole is Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, increasingly seen by some as an asylum where a coterie of vengeful Cold War unilateralist relics plot a return to a forceful, Reaganesque Pax Americana, broadening the war to encompass military action against Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon—essentially fusing Israel's national security agenda with that of the United States. No fans of multilateralism or diplomatic initiatives, this crew—despite its majority's lack of uniform service or time spent in combat zones—is particularly bellicose, and contemptuous of Powell and his belief in conflict limitation. ‘Powell's such a product of Vietnam—he tries to prevent conflict, rather than realizing it's inevitable,’ sneers a Pentagon official who, despite never having heard a shot fired in anger, is spoiling for a larger war. ‘When conflict is inevitable, we should be the ones who decide the outcome. It's not about schmoozing and sucking up.’ . . . In their view, September 11 is nothing short of a mandate to do what they feel the U.S. should have done over a decade ago—take the fight to Baghdad and destroy Saddam, coalition partners and world opinion be damned. . . . Others interviewed by the Voice report that there have been ‘epic shouting matches’ in White House meetings over the issue of war expansion, and personnel at both Foggy Bottom and Langley have found their patience increasingly tried by the Wolfowitz Cabal. Indeed, despite the CIA's cowboy image, the Agency's old Afghan and Middle East hands marvel at what they consider lunacy. ‘The Agency as an institution would never offer up a view of these people, but if you ask individuals, they think these guys are more than a little nuts,’ says a veteran of the CIA's Directorate of Operations. . . . ‘And going after Hamas or Hezbollah would be a terrible mistake—neither has broad-based support in Palestine, neither is an exclusively terrorist organization, neither is attacking Americans, and if we do go after them, they'll start targeting Americans. Attack those places and there will be consequences that we simply will not be able to deal with. But Perle and Wolfowitz are absolutists, and they're stupid.’ ”

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