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.

• The agency's anti-terrorism task force's efforts have revealed to the public what many in the intelligence community had long suspected: London has become a breeding ground for terrorist sympathizers, if not terrorists themselves.
     --Andrew Morse (ABC 10/22/2001).
  
  
• [Germany Interior Minister Otto] Schily believes right-wing websites, increasingly based in the United States, foment this violence. Last December, Germany's Supreme Court ruled that German law could be applied to material placed on the Internet and available in Germany, raising the possibility of German legal action against Americans sponsoring such sites.
     --Wired (4/9/2001).
  
  
• Women’s integration into the U.S. military has been a quiet success story. Since Desert Storm, the proportion of women in the armed forces has grown from 12 to 16 percent. Today women compose about 15 percent of the Army, 13 percent of the Navy, 19 percent of the Air Force and 6 percent of the Marines. And the proportion of jobs open to them ranges from 91 percent in the Army to 99 percent in the high-tech Air Force. “Their inclusion in the military has been quite seamless,” says Carolyn Becraft, who served as a deputy assistant secretary of Defense under Clinton. “There have been ups and downs, but they now are a larger percentage of the military and they have higher ranks, and, by all accounts, they’re performing very well.”
     --Susan H. Greenberg (Newsweek 10/29/2001).
  
  
• “Women will be part of the future government, and part of the permanent government,” he said.
     --Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, Northern Alliance (NBC 10/23/2001).
  
  
• But the United States is now presented with vexing questions. The Northern Alliance says it will keep its fighters outside the city but expects Pakistan-supported groups within Afghanistan to do the same. But if the Northern Alliance does not occupy Kabul, which security force will bring order to the city? Afghanistan's neighbors — Pakistan, Iran, Indian and Russia — all have competing agendas and sympathies. Arab states may be reluctant to contribute troops for an Islamic security force because that might be seen as an endorsement for the American military campaign.
     --Michael R. Gordon (NYTimes 10/23/2001).
  
  
• Pakistan, already home to more than two million Afghans who fled their country since 1978, says it is unable to take more, a position that runs contrary to UN wishes for new refugee camps to be established where emergency aid could be provided.
     --Reuters (Globe & Mail 10/23/2001).
  
  
• The concerns here among the Pakistani population is that this just isn't in the radical elements only [protesting the war]. This is in the general population. The pictures they are seeing from Afghanistan are pictures of innocent civilians being hurt. The articles being written in the newspapers here are indicating that the targeting is not just after the al Qaeda organization but after the Taliban regime, and that is giving some of the residents of Pakistan real cause for concern.
     --Nic Robertson (CNN 10/23/2001).
  
  
• ''The United States is punishing the Afghan people for something they have nothing to do with just as the terrorists punished American and other civilians for things they had no hand in,'' [Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein] Fadlallah said.
     --Donna Abu-Nasr (AP 10/23/2001).
  
  
• The good news: The buildup in defense spending we now foresee — a 13 percent increase in 2002 — would raise the share of the economy devoted to the military only to 4.4 percent from 3.9 percent, minimally affecting productivity. The bad news: The war has just begun, and the risk for significantly faster growth in defense outlays over a longer period is very real.
     --Richard Berner (NYTimes 10/23/2001).
  
  
• The just response to this terrible event should be to go immediately to the world community, the United Nations. The rule of international law should be marshaled, but it's probably too late because the United States has never done that; it's always gone it alone. To say that we're going to end countries or eradicate terrorism, and that it's a long war over many years, with many different instruments, suggests a much more complex and drawn-out conflict for which, I think, most Americans aren't prepared.There isn't a clear goal in sight. Osama bin Laden's organization has spun out from him and is now probably independent of him. There will be others who will appear and reappear. This is why we need a much more precise, a much more defined, a much more patiently constructed campaign, as well as one that surveys not just the terrorists' presence but the root causes of terrorism, which are ascertainable.
     --Edward Said (The Progressive Nov. 2001).
  
  
• But history mitigates this image. It was the US, that in its desperation to stamp out communism from the world supplanted or eliminated popular communist movements against oppressive regimes. While the US 'took care of the commies', the local dictator took care of all other political protest, and between the two, any liberal movement was crushed. Iran was the first such battle ground, where the communist movement against the Shah's regime was methodically suppressed, leaving the mosque and the clergy as the only channel of protest for the ordinary Irani. And then came Khomeini. Similarly in Egypt and Sudan, people are left with only the mosque and Islam as the medium of protest.
     --Mohommad Adil (Economic Times of India 10/23/2001).
  
  
• To some, the war terminology so quickly assumed by President Bush and Congress does not quite fit all this. In the tradition of the ``wars'' on drugs and crime and poverty, the war on terrorism targets an amorphous enemy.
     --AP (Free Press 10/22/2001).
  
  
• The Predator tracked the convoy to a building where Omar, accompanied by a hundred or so guards and soldiers, took cover. The precise sequence of events could not be fully learned, but intelligence officials told me that there was an immediate request for a full-scale assault by fighter bombers. At that point, however, word came from General Tommy R. Franks, the CENTCOM commander, saying, as the officials put it, "My JAG" -- Judge Advocate General, a legal officer -- "doesn't like this, so we're not going to fire." Instead, the Predator was authorized to fire a missile in front of the building -- "bounce it off the front door," one officer said, "and see who comes out, and take a picture. CENTCOM suggested that the Predator then continue to follow Omar. The Hellfire, however, could not target the area in front of the building -- in military parlance, it could not "get a signature" on the dirt there -- and it was then agreed that the missile would attack a group of cars parked in front, presumably those which had carried Omar and his retinue. The missile was fired, and it "obliterated the cars," an official said. "But no one came out."
     --Seymour M. Hersh (New Yorker 10/22/2001).
  
  
• India wants the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan wrapped up as quickly as possible after the coalition's political goals are achieved.
     --Atul Aneja (The Hindu 10/22/2001).
  
  
• Officials said today that two Washington postal workers had died under ``highly suspicious'' circumstances, and while they did not immediately attribute the deaths to anthrax, they left no doubt that they thought it was the cause.
     --(NYTimes 10/22/2001).
  
  
• But American officials in Pakistan have grown impatient. According to Pakistani and American officials, Pakistan has been prodding an array of Afghan groups to come up with a formula for a new government with the Northern Alliance, which represents Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara minorities in Afghanistan. The groups have included allegedly moderate elements of the Taliban, representatives of the exiled former Afghan king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, and Pashtun tribal chiefs from southern and eastern Afghanistan.
     --(NYTimes 10/22/2001).
  
  
• Does this web of eavesdropped-upon communication provide proof positive of Saddam's participation in the Sept. 11 attack? No indisputable smoking gun may ever be found, but it is absurd to claim — in the face of what we already know — that Iraq is not an active collaborator with, harborer of, and source of sophisticated training and unconventional weaponry for bin Laden's world terror network.
     --William Saffire (NYTimes 10/22/2001).
  
  
• The Afghans are now falling in behind the Taliban. The strikes are swiftly radicalising what was an essentially moderate country. That is not only tragic but dangerous. A few days before the 1998 strikes, I asked a guard outside the foreign ministry in Kabul about bin Laden. He did not know who I was talking about. Nor did the men in Guldara. Two years ago, few Afghan fighters I spoke to could point to their own country on a globe, let alone discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Now, of course, they all can talk about the 'Amriki' and its zulm or 'tyranny' against Muslims.
     --Jason Burke (The Observer 10/21/2001).
  
  
• And, finally, you can expect us to act with honor - to be aggressive, but always in keeping with American laws and values.
     --CIA Director George Tenet, Pearl Harbor Day Address, Town Hall Los Angeles (Vital Speeches 12/7/2000).
  
  
• Defence Minister George Fernandes [of India] today said Pakistan was "indirectly" involved in the September 11 attack on the United States and the present fight against terrorism could not be termed as global if the international community overlooked what Pakistan was doing vis-a- vis India.
  
  Fernandes said Pakistan had created and nurtured the Taliban which harboured terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden and his Al- Qaeda network seen behind the September 11 strikes.
     --AFP (Times of India 10/22/2001).
  
  
• The United States promised on Sunday to help Pakistan, crippled by a $37 billion debt, get international money - a reward for its cooperation in the US war on terrorism being waged next door in Afghanistan.
     --AP (Times of India 10/22/2001).
  
  
• Imagine if Aug. 19, 1953, had come and gone, uneventfully. Imagine if Operation Ajax, coordinated by the British MI6 and the American CIA, which toppled the flourishing democracy in Iran of Mohammed Mossadeq, had never left the drawing board. Imagine if the Western-educated Mossadeq, a charismatic leader who was massively backed in Iran by a burgeoning middle class, had been allowed to peacefully lead his country to become the first truly Muslim democracy in the Middle East. And imagine if his government had been allowed to assume its obligations and responsibilities, as stipulated by the 1906 constitution, and if the shah had been allowed to reign but not rule, as again stipulated by the Iranian constitution, and imagine if Britain and the U.S. had not been egged on by oil companies livid over Mossadeq's nationalization of oil interests in Iran but instead had stayed out of Iran's business and not intervened. Imagine what would have likely happened.
     --Ahmed Bouzid (LATimes 10/21/2001).
  
  
• The following materials (items 1-15) help support the claim that Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, conceptual guru of Bush's "New War" theory and "Homeland Defense",["Homeland Security"] has extensive CIA background in Asian matters, and was perhaps instrumental in the transfer of opium tactics from Indo-China to Afghanistan very early on....
  
  The following materials (items 16-31) support the claim that the Bush family has enjoyed a special relationship to the CIA for nearly forty years, with current director George Tenet enjoying a specially warm relationship with the Bushes.
     --gmoses (NVUSA email 10/21/2001).
  
  
• "We gathered some intelligence, which we're evaluating," he said. "We gathered up some intelligence, some items, and we're going to evaluate that."
     --Chairman Gen. Richard Myers (CNN 10/21/2001).
  
  
• Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak says he does not believe the U.S.-led war on terrorism will spread to targets in the Middle East. In an interview with the widely respected weekly Egyptian magazine al Mussawar, Mr. Mubarak says Washington will not transfer the war in Afghanistan to the Middle East. He adds that, Libya, Syria and Lebanon will not be punished by the United States, for allegedly providing safe havens for terrorist organizations. The Egyptian president says no punishment will reach these countries as a result of the September 11 attacks in the United States.
     --Greg LaMotte (VOA 10/21/2001).
  
  
• The Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) said in a statement sent to Reuters in Cairo that the premises of a number of oil companies had been destroyed in its raid on Bentiu. It said it had also attacked the town of Rabkona and an army garrison at Tonak.
     --Reuters (News24.com 10/21/2001).
  
  
• An Israeli expert said that based on the intelligence he had seen, both before and since Sept. 11, he expected that Mr. bin Laden would now turn to chemical and biological weapons, and that American interests in Western Europe were the likely targets.
     --Raymond Bonner & John Tagliabue (NYTimes 10/21/2001).
  
  
• "The gloves are off," one senior official said. "The president has given the agency the green light to do whatever is necessary. Lethal operations that were unthinkable pre-September 11 are now underway."
     --Bob Woodward (Washington Post 10/21/2001).
  
  
• Since Sept. 11, senior officials said, Attorney General John Ashcroft and the [FBI] bureau's director, Robert S. Mueller III, have agreed that the emphasis on counterterrorism will be permanent, and that other major changes are inevitable. They have said repeatedly in recent days that the bureau's 28,000 employees will have one overriding responsibility: to prevent further terrorist attacks against Americans.
     --Philip Shenon & David Johnston (NYTimes 10/21/2001).
  
  
• The fourth passenger jet to crash on September 11 in America might have been intended to use it to bomb a nuclear power station to cause a Chernobyl-type disaster, media reports here [London] said today.
     --PTI (The Hindu 10/21/2001).
  
  
• Pakistan closed its main border crossing to Afghanistan on Sunday, a day after letting in a record 5,000 refugees to escape US air strikes, an AFP correspondent and witnesses said.
     --AFP (Times of India 10/22/2001).
  
  
• Interfax quoting defence ministry sources in Tajikistan said the US special force's ground attack did not yield any results, nor did it influence the general military-political situation in Afghanistan.
     --PTI (Times of India 10/22/2001).
  
  
• Yemeni authorities partly shut down the southern port of Aden to commercial vessels Sunday in a pre-emptive step aimed at preventing Muslims from leaving to Afghanistan, a security official said....
  
  Around the Muslim world, the U.S. campaign has prompted calls for a holy war against American forces in Afghanistan. There have been recent reports of Pakistani border guards turning back Arab fighters trying to cross into Afghanistan to fight.
     --AP (CNN 10/21/2001).
  
  
• The European Union today asked Israel to withdraw from Palestinian Authority areas.
     --(Jerusalem Post 10/21/2001).
  
  
• Nothing can excuse or justify an act of terrorism, whether it is committed by religious fundamentalists, private militia, people’s resistance movements — or whether it’s dressed up as a war of retribution by a recognized government. The bombing of Afghanistan is not revenge for New York and Washington. It is yet another act of terror against the people of the world. Each innocent person that is killed must be added to, not set off against, the grisly toll of civilians who died in New York and Washington.
     --Arundhati Roy (MSNBC 10/20/2001).
  
  
• Let it be, America!
     --Paul McCartney (Madison Square Garden 10/21/2001).
  
  
• The current military strikes against Afghanistan were planned long before the terrorist assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. As early as December last year, Frederick Starr, Chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at Johns Hopkins’s Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, reported that:
  
  "[T]he United States has quietly begun to align itself with those in the Russian government calling for military action against Afghanistan and has toyed with the idea of a new raid to wipe out Osama bin Laden. Until it backed off under local pressure, it went so far as to explore whether a Central Asian country would permit the use of its territory for such a purpose."
     --Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed (10/9/2001).
  
  
• Only in Israel and the US do a majority of citizens agree that a military attack is the preferred option - in all other countries, extradition of the terrorists to stand trial is favoured. If an attack does happen, then majorities in all countries including Israel and the US, believe military targets only should be attacked, although it should be said that there are significant minorities in Israel and the US who support an attack which might include civilian targets.
     --Gallup International (Sept. 2001).
  
  
• We are not alone in thinking the massive aerial bombardment of this rubble-strewn country is not a very effective tactic. Polls indicate that half of Britain now shares our scepticism.
     --Voice of the Mirror (10/19/2001).
  
  
• Christian Aid today received a report that 600 people have died in northern Afghanistan due to starvation, malnutrition and related diseases, including cholera.
     --Press Release (Christian Aid 10/18/2001).
  
  
• Perhaps someone with a more subtle mind than mine can clarify it for me. But assuming one has the above information at hand, to me it all seems to boil down to this. If we bomb (or even just threaten to bomb), they are more likely to starve. If we don’t bomb (or threaten to bomb), they are less likely to starve. If we choose bombing, we are telling the innocent civilians who may starve--not thousands but millions of them--you just don’t count. Compared to Washington’s agenda, you are nothing. And what is Washington’s agenda? Remarkably the stated aim is to get bin Laden and to try him or perhaps just execute him ourselves. We could stop the bombing and have him tried in a third country, the Taliban has noted, but that’s not acceptable. So for this minuscule gradation of difference, we are told that Washington is willing to risk 7 million people. Behind the rhetoric, to me the real goals appear to be to delegitimate international law, to establish that Washington will get its way regardless of impediments and that we can and will act unilaterally whenever it suits us – the technical term for which is to be “credible” --and to propel a long-term war on terrorism to entrench the most reactionary policies and notions in the U.S. and around the globe, and, along with all that, to terminate bin Laden and others. Risking seven million people’s lives for these aims is worse than doing it only for the minuscule gradation of trying bin Laden ourselves rather than having a third country do it, because the additional reasons are all grotesquely negative, supposing such calculus is even manageable by a sane mind.
     --Michael Albert (ZNET 10/19/2001).
  
  
• In one of Israel's biggest incursions into Palestinian territory, the army sent tanks into biblical Bethlehem on Friday, commandeering two hotels for its troops as it stepped up pressure on the Palestinians following the assassination of an Israeli Cabinet minister.
     --AP (NYTimes 10/19/2001).
  
  
• Turkey warned Britain and the United States yesterday that support for air strikes on Afghanistan could start to unravel unless the Northern Alliance soon captured ground from the Taliban and showed that the western military campaign was bringing results.
     --Jonathan Steele (Guardian 10/19/2001).
  
  
• Mr. Bush came here seeking China's approval, or at least acquiescence, for his war on terrorism, and he received much of what he sought. At the news conference, Mr. Jiang said, "I've made clear we are opposed to terrorism in all forms." But he glided past a question about whether he would specifically endorse the American military acts in Afghanistan, saying that he hoped any such action would have "clearly defined targets," would be "aimed accurately, with few civilian casualties" and would be guided by the United Nations....
  
  But in this case, the military strikes against the Taliban in Afghanistan work to China's advantage. China shares a short border with Afghanistan, and Muslim Uighur separatists in that region have been a continuing problem for Mr. Jiang. Under the banner of fighting terrorism, he hopes to win implicit endorsement for Beijing's continuing efforts to beat back any moves toward independence in Xinjiang.
     --(NYTimes 10/19/2001).
  
  

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