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.

• We will see, over time, what price the United States will have to pay to hold its alliance together. To retain support against anti-American terrorists, the United States must also oppose the terrorist enemies of China, India and Russia. The first list of proscribed organizations issued by the United States already includes groups fighting in Kashmir that might be considered freedom fighters by other lights. Nor will America find it easy to continue its criticism of Russia's war in Chechnya, where Moscow is fighting an Islamist threat as well as a national independence movement.
     --Edward N. Luttwak (NYTimes 10/2/2001).
  
  
• Robertson said the allies have determined that the attack "was directed from abroad" and therefore covered by NATO's Article 5, which says that an attack on one member is an attack on all.
     --Quote from NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson (NYTimes 10/2/2001).
  
  
• President Bush has approved a secret effort to strengthen a diverse array of groups opposing the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, administration officials said today.
  
  The alliance struck a deal today with the former king of Afghanistan, Mohammed Zahir Shah, 86, designed to oust the Taliban and set up a moderate government in Kabul, the capital.
  
  But European allies and Arab nations warned Washington that the deaths of Afghan civilians, whether by bombs or starvation, would weaken popular support for the anti-terror effort.
     --(NYTimes 10/1/2001).
  
  
• ...Ambassador Robert Oakley, dispatched to Somalia as a sort of proconsul by Bush during the famine and then on hand later for a clean-up operation under Clinton, knew from his Vietnam experience that ''nation-building imposed in the third world at gunpoint'' made no sense. Halberstam agrees. The main proponent for the democracy project in Somalia was Madeleine K. Albright, then the United States representative at the United Nations and one of the senior officials without Vietnam experience.
     --Review of David Halberstam's War in a Time of Peace(NYTimes 9/30/2001).
  
  
• In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, Congress is considering anti-terrorism legislation that could seriously weaken civil liberties in the U.S. Yet the three major networks' nightly news shows have done little reporting on the issue.
     --(FAIR 9/27/2001).
  
  
• This page is dedicated to the plight of the Afghan Woman. Currently, there are thousands of widows in the capital of Afghanistan. Women are forced to cover themselves from head to toe, denied access to education & proper health care, forbidden to work in order to support their families, and face brutal beatings if they do not comply with the rules set forth for them by their oppressors. The world needs to know about this tragedy; our hope is that this page will become a good source of recent news and information pertaining to the current struggle women in Afghanistan are facing. The current oppression of women in Afghanistan is due to politics and ignorance, not Islam!
     --Afghanistan Online (Women).
  
  
• The American Civil Liberties Union today urged Senators to follow the lead of the House of Representatives and slow down consideration of the Administration's proposed anti-terrorism legislation so that its full impact on both security and civil liberties can be understood.
     --(ACLU 9/25/2001).
  
  
• A seasoned Republican military strategist said: "Afghanistan is obviously the initial target, but it isn't easy to decide exactly what to do. There is always the danger of going off half-cocked. It's crucial that we make the first attack an effective one, and I suspect that we don't have enough reliable intelligence yet to make key decisions."
     --(NYTimes 9/27/2001).
  
  
• Since the Sept. 11 attacks, Washington has been calling bin Laden a prime suspect. But Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz did not name a specific perpetrator Wednesday, and much remains unknown about those who orchestrated the attacks, a senior U.S. defense official said on condition of anonymity.
     --(NYTimes 9/26/2001).
  
  
• America's behavior, by expecting help but not earning the respect of other nations, was ``disgusting,'' Khamenei said, adding that Iran did not consider the United States ``competent and sincere (enough) to lead any global campaign against terrorism.'' He did not elaborate.
     --(NYTimes 9/26/2001).
  
  
• Suppressing terrorism is very different from a military campaign. It requires continuous, patient, undramatic civilian work and close cooperation with other countries. And it requires coordination within our government.
     --Dean Joseph S. Nye, Harvard Kennedy School (NYTimes 9/25/2001).
  
  
• Messrs Blair and Bush are right in stressing that this will be a long, hard slog. They are wrong in seeming to place so much emphasis on a single name and a single place. I suspect that our real difficulty will not be how we deal with bin Laden if we can find him, but how we deal with the subversive network operating from a newsagent’s in Ealing. Our battleground will be as much about winning the hearts and minds of disaffected Muslim youth in Bradford as about establishing military bases in the Hindu Kush. If we really want to stem the supply of suicide bombers for the future, we need look no farther than the conditions of the 1.9 million Arabs who have been trapped, hopeless, in Palestinian refugees camps for half a century now.
     --Paddy Ashdown ( 9/20/2001).
  
  
• "The mission is to rout terrorists, to find them and bring them to justice, or as I explained to the prime minister in Western terms, to smoke them out of their caves, to get them running so we can get them," Mr. Bush said. "And the best way to do that, and one way to do that, is to ask for the cooperation of citizens within Afghanistan who may be tired of having the Taliban in place or tired of having Osama bin Laden."
     --Pres. Bush (NYTimes 9/25/2001).
  
  
• The images on television horrified and sickened me. Then our political leaders came on television, and I was horrified and sickened again. They spoke of retaliation, of vengeance, of punishment. I thought: they have learned nothing, absolutely nothing, from the history of the 20th century, from a hundred years of retaliation, vengeance, war, a hundred years of terrorism and counter-terrorism, of violence met with violence in an unending cycle of stupidity. Will we now bomb Afghanistan, and inevitably kill innocent people, because it is in the nature of bombing to be indiscriminate? Will we then be committing terrorism in order to 'send a message' to terrorists? Yes, it is an old way of thinking, and we need new ways. A $300 billion military budget has not given us security. Military bases all over the world, our warships on every ocean, have not given us security. Land mines, a 'missile defense,' will not give us security. We need to imagine that the awful scenes of death and suffering we are witnessing have been going on in other parts of the world for a long time, and only now can we begin to know what people have gone through, often as a result of our policies. We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children. War is terrorism, magnified a hundred times.
     --Howard Zinn, Historian and WWII veteran.
  
  
• At Women Make Movies we have chosen to contribute to this effort by providing FREE rentals on a selected group of titles on the Middle East and Arab culture through December 31, 2001. Also included in this offer are two documentaries on the US Japanese internment camps of WWII, entitled Whose Going to Pay for These Donuts, Anyway? and History and Memory. We've added these titles in order to provide a historical reference to an episode in US history when prejudice and fear dictated behavior and policy in this country.
     --Women Make Movies (wmm.com).
  
  
• What of those who harbor the terrorists? It was a mistake for President George W. Bush to proclaim: "We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them." A distinction must be made. Attacking Afghanistan, Iran and/or Iraq would have seriously adverse consequences.
     --Nicholas Berry (Center for Defense Information Terrorism Project).
  
  
• This is going to be a trying time for those who promote human rights, and for those who advocate humanitarian intervention. That decent 1990's impulse to do good in Bosnia and Kosovo, even at the price of alienating Russia and China, was already, before Sept. 11, giving way to a foreign policy based on an unsentimental notion of our national interest. Now the calculations will be even colder.
     --Bill Keller (NYTimes 10/6/2001).
  
  
• The covert effort, which has not been previously disclosed, was based on an attempt to work with Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was then the military leader of the largest anti- Taliban group in the northern mountains of Afghanistan, and to have his forces go after Mr. bin Laden. Mr. Massoud was himself killed, C.I.A. officials say, only two days before the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, and the C.I.A. believes he was assassinated by members of Mr. bin Laden's organization.
     --(NYTimes 9/29/2001).
  
  
• Those who have followed the warming of relations between the Bush administration and Kabul are asking why the Bush administration wasn't alerted to an impending attack through Taliban back-channels. According to sources close to the Taliban and Pakistan's Jamiaat-i-Islami Party--the Pakistani fundamentalist movement that nurtured and trained the Taliban--a senior Jamiaat official, Qazi Husein Ahmad, recently traveled to both London and Washington. While in Washington, he reportedly re-established ties with the Taliban's old CIA contacts from the Reagan and first Bush administrations.
     -- Wayne Madsen (In These Times 10/15/2001).
  
  
• Seventeen years later than expected, 1984 has arrived. In his address to Congress Thursday, George Bush effectively declared permanent war -- war without temporal or geographic limits; war without clear goals; war against a vaguely defined and constantly shifting enemy. Today it's Al-Qaida; tomorrow it may be Afghanistan; next year, it could be Iraq or Cuba or Chechnya.
     --Jacob Levich (Common Dreams 9/22/2001).
  
  
• Actually, we would enlist the drug cartels. They have the three attributes we need: They know how to operate as a covert network and how to root out a competing network, such as Mr. bin Laden's. They can be bought and know how to buy others. And they understand that when we say we want someone "dead or alive" we mean "dead or dead."
     --Thomas L. Friedman (NYTimes 9/28/2001).
  
  
• Oversimplified, the CIA's primary global foreign policy method is to gain influence and control by whatever means necessary. To be a bit more clear, let's compare civilian police against covert operatives. In police work, law enforcement dealings with underworld elements are always difficult and wraught with ethical problems, but civilian police are subject to rules and oversight. Conversely, the CIA is comparatively unencumbered by the rules that govern civilian police corps, and suffers little Congressional oversight. The result of this extreme freedom in executing policy, is that the CIA's official and unofficial operatives involved in its covert operations division are free to pursue military objectives with whatever means they see fit.
  
  These operatives are covert warriors, they are key in expanding the US sphere of influence. In order for covert actions to be effective politically and militarily, the CIA employs parts of the underworld as its operatives (like the thousand foreign agents mentioned above). After all, who knows the political and social terrain better than the local mob? But, once employed by the CIA, these criminal enterprises naturally expect some kind of quid-pro-quo, and in order to concentrate power via its foriegn underworld proxies, the CIA has to find ways to reward and empower its criminal proxies. If the CIA really wants to gain influence and control in countries and economies via alliances with underground criminal enterprises, and if these alliances entail protecting drug piplines, well, the end justifies the means.
     --CIA & Drugs: An Introduction (ciadrugs.homestead.com). Also: Bibliography of Covert Operations in Afghanistan 1992-1996.
  
  
• Mr. President, we hope that you and Mrs. Bush will always come home to visit us at CIA. We consider it an honor to have our complex named after you, and we will do all that we can to make you and our wonderful country proud of us....
  
  The unbiased assessment of our Directorate of Intelligence is that throughout your long years of public service you have been among their most dedicated, enthusiastic and discriminating customers. You have always understood how vitally important it is for our national leaders to be able to make their decisions based on the most complete information and the best analysis possible. As DCI, as Vice President and as President you read every single Daily Brief that the Intelligence Directorate produced. Even if they doubted that anybody else in the government was reading their stuff, they could always count on you! As you know, our analysts pride themselves on the accuracy of their predictions. They will always be among your biggest fans, even though, Mr. President, you didn’t always call it right. And we found one such instance. After President Ford asked you to take the CIA job, and you answered the call of duty, you wrote the following to your good friend, Congressman Bill Steiger: “I honestly feel my political future is behind me – but hell, I’m 51, and this new one gives me a chance to really contribute.”
     --Georg Tenet to Bush Sr. upon the dedication of the Bush CIA Building (CIA Website 4/26/1999).
  
  
• Tenet is the first CIA director in 28 years to remain in office after the White House switched occupants.
     --Dept. of State (1/16/2001).
  
  
• Explosive growth in Afghan opium production is being driven by the shared interests of traditional traffickers and the Taliban. And as with so many of these cross-national issues, Mr. Chairman, what concerns me most is the way the threats become intertwined. In this case, there is ample evidence that Islamic extremists such as Usama Bin Ladin use profits from the drug trade to support their terror campaign.
     --George Tenet (2/2/2000).
  
  
• [Afghanistan]: world's largest illicit opium producer, surpassing Burma (potential production in 1999 - 1,670 metric tons; cultivation in 1999 - 51,500 hectares, a 23% increase over 1998); a major source of hashish; increasing number of heroin-processing laboratories being set up in the country; major political factions in the country profit from drug trade
     --CIA Factbook ( Afghanistan).
  
  
• It is only fitting that on December 7th, I quote Harry Truman - the President who created the CIA as a hedge against a new Pearl Harbor. Truman once said: "We must help people improve the conditions of life, to create a world in which democracy and freedom can flourish."
     --George Tenet (Vital Speeches 12/7/2000).
  
  
• Conveniently ignored in all of the press coverage since the tragic events of Sept. 11 is the fact that on May 17 Secretary of State Colin Powell announced a gift of $43 million to the Taliban as a purported reward for its eradication of Afghanistan's opium crop this February. That, in effect, made the U.S. the Taliban's largest financial benefactor according to syndicated columnist Robert Scheer writing in The Los Angeles times on May 22. But -- as we described in FTW's March 2001 issue -- the Taliban's destruction of that crop was apparently the single most important act of economic warfare against U.S. economic interests that the Taliban had ever committed. So why the gift?
     --Michael C. Ruppert ( copvcia.org 9/18/2001).
  
  
• The BBC's correspondent Kate Clark says that the Taleban's ban on opium cultivation last year is likely to be another topic of discussion at the meeting.
  
  Before the ban it was estimated that Afghanistan produced three quarters of the world's supply, and farmers have now lost their major industry.
  
  Afghan poppy farmers have lost four fifths of their income by switching to other crops. Many have been left indebted - some have had to sell land.
     --Media Awareness Project (6/8/2001).
  
  
• Shock waves from a dramatic drop in Afghanistan's opium production are beginning to reverberate throughout Central Asia's drug trafficking networks. Street prices for heroin in Eurasian and European markets have remained stable, indicating that the cutback in opium supplies still has not hit drug consumers. But specialists in drug trafficking say that Afghanistan's ban on poppy cultivation can be expected to result in a drop in opium supplies and, consequently, to send prices for opium-based drugs skyrocketing in the year ahead. Central Asian drug traffickers are already reportedly engaged in what Russian Mafia bosses describe as a major "razborka"-- a weeding out of suppliers, transporters, and marketers in new, much fiercer market conditions....
  
  Afghanistan has emerged as the world’s top source of opium. Initially, poppy cultivation was concentrated in Kandahar and Helmand regions in central and southern Afghanistan, areas under the control of the Taliban. But by the late 1990s poppy cultivation spread to northern regions, in territory dominated by the Taliban's chief opponents, the Northern Alliance. This change in cultivation patterns led the UN's Drug Control and Crime Prevention office to warn that Central Asia was becoming a preferred "transit zone for opium and heroin trafficking."
     --EurasiaNet.org (5/29/2001).
  
  
• The Golden Crescent that encompasses the poppy producing areas of Southwest Asia is one of the world's main sources of illicit opiates. Afghanistan and Pakistan are both opium-producing countries. Following the 1979 revolution, Iran's opium poppy crop was largely eradicated though some minor residual amounts may be grown on a non-commercial scale....
  
  Processing and trafficking problems affect the region and the wider world beyond. Most processing takes place in small, mobile laboratories in the Afghan-Pakistan border areas although increasing instances of processing on the Afghan border with the Central Asian Republics have been reported. The subregion itself has become a major consumer market for opiates produced. Opiate processing on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghan border has created a trafficking and, importantly in the case of Pakistan, a drug abuse problem especially since the early 1980s.
     --UN Office of Drug Control & Crime Prevention (Overview 9/27/2001).
  
  
• Before the drug heroin was finally forbidden in 1971, heroin had already been in use for over 70 years as a drug in medications. What only few know: the pharmaceutical company BAYER developed the dangerous addictive drug.
  
  The company trademarked the name of the substance in 1898. The opiate with the medical name "diacetylmorphine" was known as heroin from then on. The English chemist C.R. Wright discovered it, but BAYER was the first company to mass produce the substance (a mixture of morphine and acetic acid). BAYER began an advertising campaign in 1900; ads praised the medication across the globe in 12 languages. BAYER sent thousands of free samples to doctors. BAYER advertised heroin as a cough medicine for children saying the medicine was harmless, does not create dependency, and even helped cure colic in children. Heroin soon became a best seller. Heroin was no longer available on the market beginning in 1958 (much to BAYER's chagrin). An illegal drug scene developed soon after and the first victims of illegal heroin use were reported. By the way, MERCK and HOECHST unscrupulously sell the raw material acetanhydrid, which initially enables the production of black market heroin.
     --Keycode Bayer (KCB #11).
  
  
• It has previously been common policy of German companies to not recognize individual recompensation claims of former forced labor workers from concentration camps. Instead, the federal government was supposed to atone for the past with payments for the "soiled" profits of German companies. VW has now broken ranks from this "alliance of denial" and has announced that it is prepared to accept the claims. This has caused increased political pressure on the other companies. However, while DAIMLER, CONTINENTAL and HOECHST can at least show the press donations to individuals or money transfers to the "Jewish Conference on Claims against Germany", BAYER is digging in their heels. They claim they are not the legal successors of IG FARBEN and therefore do not feel that they need to make recompensation payments to former forced labor workers, insists a speaker for the company.
     --Keycode Bayer (KCB #12).