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MANHATTAN 911


(Pages A, B, C, D, E, F G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S)

Reflections conducive to a nonviolent future,
following the massacre of Sept. 11, 2001.


Page E

  • Lead Paragraph: In ways that defied all the odds, John O'Neill's world regularly drifted into the perverted orbit of Osama bin Laden's. Promoted to lead the FBI's counterterrorism section in early 1995, O'Neill showed up for work the first day--just in time for the arrest of Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first attack on the World Trade Center. Over the years, O'Neill got the ticket on every one of the FBI's bin Laden cases. The attack on the USS Cole, the bombings of
       --Archive (US News 10/1/2001)

  • John P. O'Neill, a 31-year veteran of the agency with a reputation as a top-notch investigator, was attending an FBI conference last year in Tampa when he was paged. Surrounded by FBI employees, O'Neill left the soft-covered case near his chair and went to return the page, sources said. When he returned, the group had broken for lunch and the briefcase was gone.
       --Cheryl W. Thompson (Wash. Post 8/21/2001)

  • "Unfortunately, I cannot predict that no Americans will be injured or killed as a result of a terrorist attack," O'Neill said [in a 1997 speech].

    "And in fact, it will happen as long as violence is seen as the way to move along political or social agendas."
       --Traci Watson (USA Today 9/17/2001)

  • Christopher Isham, who runs the investigative unit of ABC News and spent a weekend with O'Neill in the Hamptons in late August, said O'Neill had become frustrated by investigative hurdles, including privacy laws preventing FBI access to e-mail accounts terrorists used to communicate.
       --AP (Boston Herald 9/25/2001)

  • A selection of articles that have appeared since 1999 on Intelligence Online to shed light on the ambiguous relationship and secret bargaining between the United States and the hosts of Osama Bin Laden.
       --(Intelligence Online Special Report)

  • --The predominantly male delegation at the Afghan peace talks in Bonn yesterday agreed a package securing the rights of women to an education, work and a role in politics. The handful of Afghan women at the talks welcomed the commitment, which will be included in the final communique, even though it fell far short of full rights. (The Guardian)

    --Northern Alliance delegation head Yunis Qanuni said on Thursday his group would drop its objections to peacekeeping forces, which the exile groups represented in Bonn demand, especially in Kabul, to protect a power-sharing government. (Reuters)

    --Within the secretive Taliban hierarchy that ran this country for five years, it was not hard to figure out how Osama bin Laden derived much of his influence. When the Saudi-born heir to a construction fortune called on officials of the Taliban, according to a former minister, he often brought wads of cash and distributed it freely – sometimes taking out $50,000, even $100,000 at a time. (Wash. Post Foreign Service)

    --AMERICA is planning how best to attack the Tora Bora mountain cave complex where Osama bin Laden and al-Qa'eda leaders are believed to be hiding, it emerged yesterday. (The Telegraph)

    --Even as the CIA saluted its slain colleague, the first American fatality in Afghanistan, "American hero" Johnny ‘Mike’ Spann, who died in the prison revolt, British journalists in Mazar-i-Sharif have begun reporting that Spann was less an innocent victim than the one who allegedly provoked the riot. (Times of India)

    --Meanwhile, it will be a long time before the world fully takes in what it all means. When the war in Afghanistan began, we were told the foreign Taliban intended to fight to the death, and many feared a massacre or a bloodbath in Kunduz. But, in the end, bin Laden's warriors staged their last battle in the fortress at Qalai Janghi. If the accounts of the Northern Alliance soldiers are to be believed, 400 defeated men managed to force the United States into taking part in the massacre of prisoners of war. (The Independent)

    --ONCE a fortnight since America launched its war in Afghanistan, President Bush’s secret service agents have left him alone with an Afghan wielding any number of sharp implements. Fortunately Zahira Zahir is one of Mr Bush’s most ardent admirers. She also happens to be his hairdresser. (The Times UK)
       --Afghanistan Online (11/30/2001)

  • ON NOVEMBER 19, Rep. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) suggested that state police should "arrest every Muslim that comes across the state line." Chambliss isn't an isolated bigot in Congress--he chairs the House Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security. His remark exposes the racist nature of the Bush administration's "war against terrorism" at home, which is nothing but a witch-hunt against Arabs and Muslims.
       --Sharon Smith (SW Online 11/30/2001)

  • The president of the Southern Baptist Convention has asked 16 million members to fast and pray Dec. 16 so "that God will miraculously reveal himself through Jesus Christ to Muslims" at the end of Ramadan, Islam's holy month.
       --Carol Eisenberg (Newsday 11/28/2001)

  • Counterterrorism has been preoccupied with military and law- enforcement responses, often with a focus on simple analysis and technical solutions, rather than generating understanding. We have lacked to date the investment in conceptual understanding of terrorism, and the processes that underpin it.

    It is in this sense that comparative studies of terrorist movements would benefit from process approaches, for example comparing the movement into and out of violence, with respect to tactical, strategic and other types of escalation and de-escalation and the types of organisational issues that emerge for the 'followers' as a result. It is only now, for instance, that we are in a position to be able to assess the psychological consequences of disengagement from Irish Republican terrorism and to generate comparative hypotheses accordingly....

    There are many other significant issues to form the basis of a systematic academic research agenda to benefit all concerned, but there are wider issues, as always, at stake here and ones that we need to confront if we are to be truly honest. On 31 October, the Pentagon released a statement to the public calling for 'ideas on combating terrorism'. Has anybody asked about what co-ordinated and devoted academic research might have to offer? The need for this community to provide a forum whereby fundamental conceptual and strategic issues can be discussed is a crucial first step. When researchers and policy-makers agree that long-term research has merit and has deliverable products, then perhaps the perceptions of both bodies might change for the better in thinking about the 'academic' role in understanding terrorism.
       --John Horgan & Max Taylor (Jane's Intelligence 12/1/2001)

  • What is largely missing from the administration's rhetoric is recognition of the scale of the underlying problems that have to be addressed, regardless of how successful we may be in the short run in tracking down the perpetrators of the September 11th terrorist assaults. As Marshall's words so plainly suggest, finding the terrorists should be part of a much more ambitious campaign, one in which the rich countries approach the appalling inequities of the world with the same boldness and determination that the United States brought to bear in Europe under the Marshall Plan.
       --Worldwatch (Democrats.Com 10/9/2001)

  • “We are on the inevitable path to war with Iraq,” said Scott Ritter, a former Marine who fought against Iraq during Desert Storm and was hired on as a weapons inspector in 1991 following the war....

    “It’s a devastated country that hasn’t had a chance to rebuild. They are a threat to no one.”...

    Ritter said that Iraq is an example of how U.S. foreign policy causes hatred of Americans in many Arab and third-world countries. He said this hatred eventually leads to terrorist attacks against U.S. interests.
       --Scott Freeman (Odessa American 11/18/2001)

  • Predicting America's Next Attack Against Terrorism
       Chart (dack.com)

  • The Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) is accepting applications for volunteers to accompany the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, in Colombia¹s northern region of Urabá. San José de Apartadó is one of some 50 communities in Colombia that has taken an extraordinary and nonviolent stand against war, by refusing to support any armed actor involved in Colombia's decades-long conflict. The community has suffered terribly from political violence, mostly by paramilitary groups supported by the Colombian Army, and remains a principle obstacle to the paramilitary¹s expansion of its violent project in the Urabá and Chocó regions. In March 2001, the Peace Community, whose central settlement of San José is already accompanied by volunteers of Peace Brigades International, requested that the Fellowship of Reconciliation work to establish a long-term accompaniment presence in the nearby settlement of La Unión. La Unión is the agricultural center of the Peace Community, and has been victim to repeated paramilitary attacks.
       --Volunteer Job Announcement (FOR Dec. 2001)

  • One of the funds giving financial help to the families of the Sept. 11 victims has quietly gone about its business, performing smoothly and with low administrative costs, according to clear rules. This fund has plenty of practice; it is Social Security.
       --Nancy J. Altman (NYTimes 11/28/2001)

  • Meantime, the first conventional Army troops have entered the war in Afghanistan, senior Defense Department and military officials said today. A "rapid reaction force" drawn from members of the 10th Mountain Division, whose home is Fort Drum, N.Y., moved into Mazar-i-Sharif, the northern town that was the scene of a bloody uprising by captured prisoners. The main mission is to provide security for combat engineers and military liaisons working with relief organizations....

    With the war on terrorism shifting to a new and dangerous phase of rooting out the Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders, General Franks said there was a "50-50" chance he would move his headquarters closer the Persian Gulf region, possibly Qatar.
       --Eric Schmitt & Tom Shanker (NYTimes 11/28/2001)

  • As I stood outside, I saw a pair of shooting stars, twin comets, racing across the sky side by side. Perhaps it was the Twin Towers. I decided to take a walk down the road. I have a praying tree that I go to about a half mile from my house, so I took a pilgrimage there to place my tobacco offering there at the foot of the tree, to pray for guidance, for peace....

    As I was half way down the road, a rooster suddenly crowed right behind me, to my left, and it made me jump. And you know what they say, the rooster crows the sun up. And very quickly, dawn came, and it was the dawn of a brand new day! I was amazed, and kept walking toward the tree. I held the tobacco and closed my eyes for a long time, speaking with the Creator. When I opened them again, everything was much brighter. Sun rises fast this time of year. I made my offering, and watched the last of the shooting stars, then returned home.
       --Evan Pritchard (Thanksgiving Sermon 11/18/2001)

  • Relatives of some of those killed in the September 11 attacks set off from Washington yesterday on an eight-day walk to New York to call for an end to the military action in Afghanistan.
       --Duncan Campbell (Guardian 11/26/2001)

  • We have seen something else in the wake of September 11th, as people have debated and grappled and tried to respond to these events. We have seen that the world's problems at this moment require two different things that often come alone but rarely come together. On the one hand, there has to be compassion, commitment, and rigorous determination. On the other, there has to be careful, hard-headed thought about what works and what does not. We live in a time when the problems the world faces are too serious for compassion alone to be enough if it is not channeled effectively. And if September 11th reminds us of anything, if the statistics that Barry cited remind us of anything, it is that it is not sufficient to be rigorous, hard-headed, and analytical in one's approach -- one has to care, and one has to be committed to the most important things. And what makes this School at Harvard so exciting and important is that the Public Health School is a place of caring, compassion, and commitment -- but not of that alone. It is also a place of rigorous analysis, standards, and hard-headedness. And both are necessary if we are going to meet the world's challenges.
       --Lawrence H. Summers (Harvard President 10/26/2001)

  • I have problems with this "evil" thing. Evil is a really problematic word. I run a writing group in a woman's prison, and most of the women are murderers who are called evil people, and they are not. They have done something terrible, and that's an absolute fact. They are complicated, multifaceted, mind-blowing, unusual, original, disturbing angry people. So is the Taliban. That is my feeling about the Taliban.

    Evil is reductionist. It destroys ambiguity and takes away duality and complexity; it says that they are dark and we are light, they are evil and we are good. That's all a lie. We all have the capacity for great goodness and love, and we all have the capacity for terrible deeds. I've seen the best people behave terribly in the worst situations, and the worst people behave well. Who knows why? There are a lot of things that govern us. But I'm not going to accuse anyone of evil.

    Why aren't we creating hope and goodness in the world [instead of eradicating evil]? There's poverty, inequity and justice: How are we as a country going to rid the world of these? How are we as a country going to be bigger than we've ever been? [We need to] expand our generosity, and see ourselves as people who have responsibilities to those who are poor, or who don't have education or access to opportunities. I have heard no word of that. Instead, [our approach] feels very arbitrary. We have targets, perhaps; we are bombing, and we are working with a completely brainless operation [the Northern Alliance]. And we are banking the future of Afghanistan on this? No -- because we aren't thinking of the future of Afghanistan. I would not be surprised if we were to find Osama bin Laden and then get out of Afghanistan, the way we have time and time and time again. That's what made this problem.
       --Eve Ensler (Salon Interview 11/26/2001)

  • Since the persons to be interviewed are not suspected of involvement in criminal activity, the interviews will be conducted on a consensual basis, and every interview subject ("individual") will be free to decline to answer questions. In approaching the individual, you should announce your name, title and law enforcement agency, clearly explain the purpose of the interview, and ask permission to speak with the individual. As these interviews will not be "custodial interrogations," there is no need to seek a waiver of Miranda rights.

    Unless the individual prefers to conduct the interview away from his home, workplace or neighborhood, you should ordinarily not ask him to accompany you to the police station or the field office. A number of these individuals may have difficulty with the English language and little understanding of our criminal justice system, and we want them and the other members of their communities clearly to understand that they are not being taken into custody and that the interviews are being pursued on a consensual basis....

    The individual should be asked whether he or anybody else he knows has ever participated in an armed conflict. If he answers in the affirmative, you should probe for details of the role that he or the other person or persons played in that conflict.
       --Memo to US Attorneys Re: "Interviewing Project" (Detroit Free Press Guidelines)

  • German authorities on Wednesday said they arrested a Moroccan man in Hamburg with direct links to the hijackers involved in the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the United States....

    In another development Wednesday, authorities in Belgium arrested an Algerian following a series of raids on a suspected false passport ring believed linked to the assassination of Afghan opposition leader Ahmed Shah Massood....

    The raids came after British officials last month arrested an Egyptian activist and charged him in the plot to murder Massood.
       --MSNBC (11/28/2001)

    Campus Links

    Berkeley News updates

    CSAW: California Clearinghous

    Hawaii: University Peace Initiative

    Ohio State: Peace Calendar

    Raleigh-Durham: Peace Calendar

    U Oregon teach-in, 10/2/2001

(Pages A, B, C, D, E, F G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S)


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