Archived news and commentary: July 15 - 21, 2002

2002/09/23 - 2002/09/29
2002/09/16 - 2002/09/22
2002/09/09 - 2002/09/15
2002/09/02 - 2002/09/08
2002/08/26 - 2002/09/01
2002/08/19 - 2002/08/25
2002/08/12 - 2002/08/18
2002/08/05 - 2002/08/11
2002/07/29 - 2002/08/04
2002/07/22 - 2002/07/28
2002/07/15 - 2002/07/21
2002/07/08 - 2002/07/14
2002/07/01 - 2002/07/07

Sunday, July 21, 2002

News and commentary:

"Afghans defend US air strikes" (BBC News, 2002/07/21)
"Afghanistan has rejected criticism that American military strategy and poor intelligence have led to heavy civilian casualties in the country. A spokesman for Afghan President Hamid Karzai told the BBC that fewer than 500 civilians were believed to have been killed in US air strikes - a low figure considering the size of the military campaign. The statement came after a survey in the New York Times newspaper said more than 800 Afghan civilians had been killed in US air strikes because of poor intelligence and the use of overwhelming force."

"Flaws in U.S. Air War Left Hundreds of Civilians Dead" (Dexter Filkins, The New York Times, 2002/07/21)
"On-site reviews of 11 locations where airstrikes killed as many as 400 civilians suggest that American commanders have sometimes relied on mistaken information from local Afghans. ... The 11 sites visited accounted for many of the principal places where Afghans and human rights groups claim that civilians have been killed. ... Indeed, the extraordinary accuracy of American airstrikes since they began in October has produced few of the types of disasters that plagued past wars, when bombs aimed at one target hit something else instead. ...
Instead, the evidence suggests that many civilians have been killed by airstrikes hitting precisely the target they were aimed at. The civilians died, the evidence suggests, because they were were made targets by mistake, or because in eagerness to kill Qaeda and Taliban fighters, Americans did not carefully differentiate between civilians and military targets. Field workers with Global Exchange, an American organization that has sent survey teams into Afghan villages, say they have compiled a list of 812 Afghan civilians who were killed by American airstrikes. They say they expect that number to grow as their survey teams reach more remote villages."

 

Saturday, July 20, 2002

News and commentary:

"Bush Renews Pledge to Strike First to Counter Terror Threats" (David E. Sanger, The New York Times, 2002/07/20)
"President Bush today used a visit to the troops that battled Al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan to renew his vow that the United States will strike pre-emptively against countries developing weapons of mass destruction, telling 2,000 cheering troops that "America must act against these terrible threats before they're fully formed." As Mr. Bush stood surrounded by the camouflage-clad troops of the 10th Mountain Division, among the first sent to Uzbekistan and Afghanistan last fall, one of the soldiers yelled, "Let's get Saddam!" Mr. Bush, dressed in shirt sleeves, just smiled for a moment as a roar of approval raced through the crowd. He did not mention Iraq but hardly stepped in to quell the cheers."

"The Coming War with Saddam" (Stephen F. Hayes, The Weekly Standard, from the 2002/07/29 issue)
"On November 22, 2001, the Ummat, a Pakistani newspaper with close ties to the Taliban and al Qaeda, published a shocking report. It claimed that Taha Husseyn, a high-ranking Iraqi diplomat, had traveled to Kandahar for a meeting with Mavlana Jalal ud-Din Haqqani, a Taliban representative. According to the paper, Husseyn was dispatched by Saddam Hussein to offer whatever support he could - arms, money, sanctuary - to Osama bin Laden and Mullah Mohammed Omar. ...
Of course, it's nearly impossible to assess the credibility of such reports. (The paper today regularly runs front-page pictures of bin Laden, along with his hateful exhortations to harm Jews and Americans.) Still, if the report of a Saddam-al Qaeda alliance were true, successfully prosecuting the war on terrorism would become even more urgent. Why, skeptics might ask, would Saddam essentially invite the war to Iraq? It's a fair question, but one with an obvious answer: Saddam has long viewed U.S.-led attacks as inevitable."

 

Friday, July 19, 2002

News and commentary:

"Russian nuclear theft alarms US" (Nick Paton Walsh, The Guardian, 2002/07/19)
Thanks to Vitali Fridliand for pointing this one out: "Chechen rebels have stolen radioactive metals, possibly including plutonium, from a Russian nuclear power station in the southern region of Rostov, according to US nuclear officials. The theft, which took place within the last 12 months at the new Volgodonskaya nuclear power station near the city of Rostov-on-Don, has heightened US fears that weapons-grade plutonium may have fallen into the hands of terrorists or countries such as Iraq or Libya. The precise details of the security breach remain unclear, but one US official said there was the "possibility that a significant amount of plutonium was removed", together with other radioactive metals. These included caesium, strontium and low-enriched uranium, which pose a threat to human health if detonated with conventional explosives to create a 'dirty bomb'."

"The September 11 That Never Was" (Marc Cooper, LA Weekly, from the July 19-25 issue)
"Because it seems, nowadays in Europe, that the further you move up on the informational food chain, the more humidly fetid the imagination turns when it comes to Things American. As I prepared to appear on a writers' roundtable on the hoity-toitiest of literature programs on Spanish National Television, the host told me he expected me to lay out the case in favor of a new Continental best-seller: The Frightening Fraud by French author Thierry Meyssan. Its more descriptive title in Spanish - The Plane That Didn't Exist - reveals that the real fraud is the book itself. Indeed, the cranky Parisian daily Libération called the book "The Frightening Confidence Trick ... a tissue of wild and irresponsible allegations, entirely without foundation." ...
In the U.S., fortunately, this sort of dementia is adhered to by only tiny clusters of full-time paranoids who can channel KPFK through their top molars. But here in the Old World, from Rome to Paris to Madrid - and even out here in the provincial boonies near the Portuguese border - this excrement is being lapped up like one big creamy hot-fudge sundae. ... When faced with armed, religious fascists who vow your destruction, you better have something weightier to throw at them than a dog-eared copy of Thierry Meyssan's fantasy screed."

"Stereotyping and the Decline of Common Sense" (Paul Hollander, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/07/19)
"The precipitous decline of common sense in our times, associated with a politically correct solicitousness toward some minorities was also revealed in the recent case of a Muslim woman in Florida who insisted on her right to wear the type of veil (niqab) that covered her entire face except her eyes in the photograph used in her driver's license. The picture, needless to say, is completely useless for the purpose it is supposed to serve, namely the visual identification of the driver. ...
The Florida case makes it clear that multiculturalism carried to its logical, politically correct conclusion is incompatible with the existence of a modern secular society in which the laws apply equally to everybody regardless their religious beliefs. By the same token the pretense that everybody flying, or hanging around nuclear power plants has an equal likelihood of committing terrorism is as absurd as to insist that no differences exist among the many human groups, or that members of particular social, national or ethnic groups have nothing in common. At the root of both of these beliefs we find the type of multiculturalism that harbors relentless hostility toward American society and Western values and extends sympathy to every group that questions or rejects these values."

"Parsley And Pride" (Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post, 2002/07/19)
Krauthammer on "the conflict over Perejil (Spanish for parsley), a god-forsaken rocky island the size of a soccer field a few hundred yards off the Moroccan coast that technically belongs to Spain and that Morocco seized July 11 by force: a dozen soldiers, two tents and a flag": "Europe berates the United States for holding on to primitive notions of sovereignty at a time when the sophisticated Europeans are yielding sovereignty to Brussels, adopting the euro, wallowing in Kyoto and, most recently, genuflecting to the newly established International Criminal Court. Yet here they are lining up in lockstep to defend Spanish sovereignty over a piece of worthless rock that only dubiously belongs to Spain, by supposed attachment to the other dubiously claimed Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, that in turn are little more than colonial anachronisms on the coast of North Africa. This same Europe heaps scorn on the United States for defending an infinitely more serious sovereign claim - to democratic legal jurisdiction over its own citizens and soldiers rather than yielding it to the arbitrariness of the new criminal court."

"Baghdad by Christmas" (Bruce Anderson, The Spectator, from the 2002/07/20 issue)
"Now that they have lost both the appetite and the capacity for power politics, the Europeans are in the grip of a contradiction. They insist that acts of war can only be justified by moral absolutes. They also insist that we live in a world of moral relativities. European governments had a double quarrel with Mr Bush's 'axis of evil' speech. They do not believe in the axis. Nor do they believe in the evil. They prefer to live in a world as depicted by Whistler, in which everything is a subtle symphony of endless grey. From this perspective, Saddam may be a bad man, but he is merely a darker shade of grey than Ariel Sharon. ... With Saddam, there is a difference. A man of such evil intentions cannot be allowed to acquire the capability to use weapons of mass destruction. There will be risks in preventing him; we are about to enter a most dangerous period in world history. But those risks are manageable, and ultimately containable. The risks of allowing him access to terrible weaponry are unmanageable and uncontainable."

"Massacre of the truth" (Douglas Davis, The Spectator, from the 2002/07/20 issue)
"When [Yasser Arafat] appeared before a special session of the UN General Assembly in Geneva in 1988, I was not surprised that the delegates rose to applaud him. You expect that from diplomats. But that evening, arriving three hours late for a press conference in the UN building, I was shocked that all my colleagues gave him a whooping, standing ovation. Here, surely, was a boy band's lead singer meeting the fans, rather than a terrorist leader about to renounce terrorism. ...
Today, his cheerleaders in Europe, having silently acquiesced in his corruption, despotism and brutality, stand on the sidelines, weakly crying foul at the reviled George W. Bush, who has effectively brought down the House of Arafat by demanding that the Palestinians clean up their act and elect new and different leaders whom the Israelis can trust. ...
It was in the rubble of the Jenin refugee camp that Arafat played his final hand, and it was there that Europe was eventually shamed by its condescending acquiescence (a genuine hallmark of racism) towards the Palestinians. This time a global television audience, augmented by the UN Security Council, national governments and human-rights organisations, was on the spot to witness Arafat in full, fantastic flight - and Europe's enthusiastic complicity."

"Arabs 'Encouraged' After Meeting With Bush on Mideast Peace Plans" (Karen DeYoung and Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post, 2002/07/19)
"Arab foreign ministers emerged from a meeting with President Bush yesterday saying they were convinced he agrees with them that real progress toward Middle East peace cannot come without an Israeli troop withdrawal from Palestinian territories, and that he is prepared to use U.S. influence to achieve it. "We couldn't be more encouraged," Jordanian Foreign Minister Marwan Muasher said after he and his counterparts from Saudi Arabia and Egypt left the 30-minute White House meeting. "He couldn't have been more forthcoming." Saudi Foreign Minister Saud Faisal said he was "much impressed" with Bush's commitment to simultaneous movement on the security, political and economic fronts and meeting the three-year deadline the president set last month for full Palestinian statehood."

 

Thursday, July 18, 2002

News and commentary:

"Mr Greenway, please listen..." (Francois Gautier, Rediff, 2002/07/21)
Gautier responds to a column by H.D.S. Greenway i Boston Globe, in which he equated Hindu extremism with Muslim fundamentalism: "You speak of a Hindu genocide on the Muslims in Gujarat, but you forget to mention that the rioting in Gujarat against Muslims was in reaction against the murder of 58 innocent people, 30 of them being women and children, who were burnt alive in a train by a Muslim mob, only because they were Hindus. In fact, Hindus have been for centuries at the receiving hand of Muslim extremism: some historians put at 25 millions the number of Hindus killed during 10 centuries of bloody Muslim invasions in India, a genocide probably unparalleled in world history. Today this persecution goes on: there were 400,000 Hindus in 1947 in the valley of Kashmir and barely a few hundred today. Thousands were killed in the late eighties by Islamic fundamentalists, trained, armed and financed by Pakistan and the rest fled the valley. Today Hindus have become refugees in their own country, a first on this planet." (See also an interview with Francois Gautier: "The Rediff Interview/Francois Gautier" (Rajeev Srinivasan, Rediff, 1999/02/12): "This said, the massacres perpetuated by Muslims in India are unparalleled in history, bigger than the Holocaust of the Jews by the Nazis; or the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks; more extensive even than the slaughter of the South American native populations by the invading Spanish and Portuguese. In the words of another historian, American Will Durant: 'the Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilisation is a precious good, whose delicate complex order and freedom can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without and multiplying within'.")

"Crime is Law, Law is Crime" (Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal, 2002/07/18)
"In early July, young men, most of them Muslim, who live in the bleak public housing projects of Lille, a large northern French city, staged a violent protest against a court decision that reduced the charge against a policeman, Stephane Andolina, from voluntary to involuntary homicide and gave him a suspended sentence of three years. Andolina had shot and killed a youth, Riad Hamlaoui, after stopping him in a stolen car. The policeman argued in his defense that he was tired, frightened, and inexperienced, and that visibility was poor. Lille, reported the leftist newspaper Liberation, responded with "a growl of rage." Youths threw stones and Molotov cocktails, burnt 20 cars, and set fire to a police station. ... It is not only with the state that the youths are at war: they are at war with society itself. ... The rioters were all dependent on the state - for their cell phones and their cars, as well as for their food and lodging - but it is highly unlikely that this combination of dependency and alienation will give the French intellectual elite pause for thought. It has long convinced itself that welfare benefits and compassion are coterminous. Never mind that entire generations are enclosed in a world of radical hopelessness, nihilism, and resentment."

"Accounting and accountability: defining donor requirements for Palestinian reform" (Matthew Levitt, Policy Watch, 2002/07/18)
"Evidence that Arafat has continued to approve funding for Palestinian terrorists, including a June payment of $20,000 to the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades just as the group claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in Jerusalem, persuaded American policymakers of the need to find Palestinian interlocutors other than Arafat. ...
Documents Israel seized in Arafat's compound and elsewhere in the West Bank establish that while condemning terrorist attacks (albeit not as acts of terror per se, but rather as harming the national interests of the PA), Arafat personally authorized the financing of groups and individuals engaged in terror attacks against Israeli citizens. ...
No specific Euro can be traced to the purchase of a specific bullet. For that reason, Chris Patton's insistence that "the EU [has] not seen any hard evidence that the EU funds have been misused to finance terrorism or for any other purpose" misses the real question: has EU funding facilitated Palestinian terrorism? ...
PA funding of terrorism is well documented, both from the seized documents and from the millions spent on arms purchases, such as those discovered on the Karine-A seized by Israel in January 2002. Despite renewed denials from the EU's Office of External Affairs about the misuse of EU funds, the problem remains that there is no complete, publicly available accounting of how the PA spends its money - including the cash it gets from the EU. Before the International Task Force on Palestinian Reform endorses any release of funds to the PA, the issue of public accounting for all PA spending needs to be addressed."

"Moussaoui Attempts to Plead Guilty" (Larry Margasak, AP/Yahoo! News, 2002/07/18)
"Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person charged as a Sept. 11 conspirator, attempted to plead guilty Thursday to new federal charges that could bring him the death penalty. But the judge - in a rare bench ruling - insisted he take a week to think about it. "I am a member of al-Qaida" pledged to Osama bin Laden, Moussaoui told U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, who moments earlier had entered an innocent plea on his behalf to a third indictment. Shortly after that, Moussaoui tried to plead guilty. ... "I want to plead today guilty because I want to save my life," Moussaoui said, adding as he has in numerous motions that he knows who committed the September attacks. He said the guilty plea would allow him to tell what he knows. Brinkema warned him that if she accepted his guilty plea it could not be reversed. She then insisted over his objections that he think about it for a week."

"Calm Before the Crash" (ABC News, 2002/07/18)
"On the morning of Sept. 11, American Airlines ground manager Michael Woodward received a phone call that immediately got his full attention. "Listen, and listen to me very carefully. I'm on Flight 11. The airplane has been hijacked," said the voice on the other end. The caller was Amy Sweeney, a flight attendant on board American Airlines Flight 11, which had just been hijacked on its way from Boston to Los Angeles. ...
Woodward said Sweeney spoke "very, very calmly... in a way which was quick but calm." She gave him the seat numbers for four of the five hijackers, allowing airline staff to pull up their names, phone numbers, addresses - and even credit card numbers - on the reservations computer. One of the names that came up was Mohamed Atta, the man the FBI would later identify as the leader of all 19 of the Sept. 11 hijackers. Sweeney told Woodward the hijackers seemed to be of Middle Eastern descent and said they had gone into the cockpit with a bomb with yellow wires attached. She said they had stabbed the two first-class flight attendants, Barbara Arestegui and Karen Martin, whose station at the front of the plane likely made them the first crew members to confront the hijackers. She said they had also slashed the throat of a business class passenger, who was bleeding severely."

"From Oslo to Ground Zero" (Ruth Wisse, The Jerusalem Post, 2002/07/18)
"On September 2, 1993, I got a call from Richard Bernstein of The New York Times, asking me to comment for an article on the "peace agreement" that was about to be signed by Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister of Israel, and Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestine Liberation Organization. ...
However, I did not believe that Israel could claim my support for putting into power a mob of professional murderers and extortionists. As a non-citizen, I could do nothing to stop the leaders of Israel from carrying out this plan. But as a citizen of the world, I knew that this was the worst possible move they could have made. ...
Israel had been defending itself on the axiomatic premise that peace could only come if the Arabs stopped their aggression against it. It was now about to reverse that sensible policy by rewarding its most virulent enemy. ...
This brings us to the third, and by far the most damaging, consequence of Oslo: the creation in Gaza and the disputed territories of a terrorist polity. President Bill Clinton was not thinking of the danger to America when he hosted Israel's signing of the treaty with Arafat on the White House lawn. But the legitimation of Arafat was a boost to the coalition of all anti-democratic forces ranged against the West. Those forces may have used Israel as the excuse for anti-Western aggression, but Israel was only the most vulnerable target of hostility aimed at democracy entire."

"How the Times wishes history unfolded" (Robert Leiter, Jewish World Review, 2002/07/18)
An example of the insidiousness of the use of moral equivalency, which, while purportedly maintaining that both sides are on the same level, often jumps to the conclusion that the side thus levelled with the other is the truly morally inferior (i.e. if the USA and Afghanistan under the Taliban are morally equivalent, never mind the absurdity of that claim, it leaves the world's only superpower callously bombarding one of world's poorest countries. This logic is at the heart of chomskyite reasoning.):
"An article by John Kifner in the July 10 issue of The New York Times contains the single most alarming and mendacious statement yet to appear in media accounts of the recent warfare in Israel. The piece was about the closing by the Israelis of Dr. Sari Nusseibeh's Jerusalem office. The government's contention is that Nusseibeh, often described as a voice of moderation, was serving as an agent of Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority and using his university office as a base. The troubling sentence came in the third paragraph of the story and referred to the warrant the Israelis used, which we were told was written in Hebrew and said that "the office was operating in violation of the Oslo accords, though the Israeli Army has virtually obliterated the accords in recent weeks by reoccupying seven West Bank cities that were under Palestinian control." ...
Yasser Arafat has not held to any of the agreements he initialed on Sept. 13, 1993, when on the White House lawn and in front of the whole world he vowed to be a partner for peace. ... Even more important is the fact that no actions the Israelis have taken thus far in their efforts to secure the safety of their citizens constitute an infraction of the Oslo accords - except it seems in the eyes of several reporters and editors at The New York Times."

"Still Hung Up on Sept. 11?" (Annie Naseem, Arab News, 2002/07/18)
The all-seeing Best of the Web Today notes the "tasteless headline of an Arab News commentary by one Annie Naseem, an expatriate (from which country, she doesn't say) who's quite content to stay in Saudi Arabia": "It's true that the Western media has filled us with horror-stories about the Middle East - and gone blue in the face doing so - but we who live here can see for ourselves and know what is true and what isn't. We can tell when something has been blown out of proportion. We're still here because we can see for ourselves that the sun still shines in Saudi Arabia - even post-Sept. 11!"

"Their Kampf - Hitler's book in Arab hands" (David Pryce-Jones, National Review, 2002/07/18)
Pryce-Jones on the fact that Adolf Hitler's self-biography "Mein Kampf" "remains an international hit": "As its Arabic translator Luis al-Haj expresses it in his preface, "National Socialism did not die with the death of its herald. Rather, its seeds multiplied under each star." ... Of all the Arabs convinced of Hitler's coming triumph, none was so eager as Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem and leader of the Palestinian Arabs in the Hitler years. ... All sorts of Arab leaders were to follow Haj Amin's example and fall into the racist trap Hitler set for them, including Gamal Abdul Nasser and Anwar Sadat, the Syrian and Iraqi Baathists, and King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. ...
In one Muslim country after another, leaders who may describe themselves either as Islamist or secular call for the State of Israel to disappear from the map, and its people to be annihilated. It does not seem in the least shocking to them to be proposing mass-murder. ... On the contrary: It is only natural in an absolute ruler to seek to kill off his enemies. Ahmad Ragab, a columnist for the Egyptian government paper Al-Akhbar, is only one example among many opinion-makers to "give thanks to Hitler, of blessed memory," and regretting only that Hitler had not extracted revenge for Palestine by murdering every last Jew."

"Two suicide bombers kill 3 in Tel Aviv" (Haaretz, 2002/07/18)
"Two suicide bombers, standing 15 meters apart, blew themselves up at the entrance to the Neve Sha'anan Quarter near Tel Aviv's old central bus station in Tel Aviv last night, killing three and wounding 40. The two bombers were killed in the double attack. ... Unlike the rest of Tel Aviv's nightspots, which were closed for Tisha B'Av, the targeted area was crowded with foreign workers who regularly congregate at outdoor bars and kiosks in the evening. ... The area, which is home to many of the city's foreign workers and includes a red light district and streetwalkers, was the site of a bombing attack on January 27, when 32 people were wounded, but none killed. One streetwalker, identifying herself only as Nomi, said she had offered her services to one of the terrorists, who said, "I'm not here to have fun, I'm here to die," ignoring her offer. Only when she heard the explosion, minutes later, did she realize he was serious, she said."

 

Wednesday, July 17, 2002

News and commentary:

"September 11, 1998" (James Taranto, The Wall Street Journal/Best of the Web Today, 2002/07/17)
Taranto quotes from the summary of the Terrorism and Homeland Security Subcommittee of the House Intelligence Committee report on pre-Sept. 11 intelligence failures: "'Prophetically, IC [intelligence community] leadership concluded at a high-level offsite [meeting] on September 11, 1998 that 'failure to improve operations management, resource allocation, and other key issues ..., including making substantial and sweeping changes in the way the nation collects, analyzes, and produces intelligence, will likely result in a catastrophic systemic intelligence failure.''' (See also PDF version of the summary: "Counterterrorism Intelligence Capabilities and Performance Prior to 9-11 - A Report to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the Minority Leader" (FindLaw, July 2002) and "Intelligence agencies need overhaul, report says" (CNN.com, 2002/07/17): "The devastating terrorist attacks of September 11 underscore the need for major changes in the nation's three main intelligence-gathering agencies, according to a summary of a critical congressional report. While the summary, released Wednesday, does not conclude that last year's attacks could have been prevented, it does fault the CIA for failing to act on information that "proved to be directly relevant to 9-11" and said counterterrorism gaps existed before then.")

"Call It What It Is: a Global Surge of Anti-Semitism" (Yossi Klein Halevi, Los Angeles Times, 2002/07/17)
"The chances of a murderous skinhead wandering around an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood without premeditated intent to kill are about as likely as an armed Muslim fanatic who just happens to open fire at a counter of Israel's national airline. The inability of law enforcement agencies to discern a motive in the July 4 shooting into a crowd of Jews at Los Angeles International Airport by a Muslim extremist who hated Jews and accused Israel of deliberately infecting Arabs with AIDS is hardly an isolated example of stupidity and self-deception. It's part of a worldwide pattern of denial in response to increasingly lethal Jew-hatred. ... Criticizing specific Israeli policies is, of course, legitimate; self-criticism is an Israeli national pastime. But when the United Nations obsessively searches for a nonexistent massacre of Palestinians in Jenin while systematically ignoring massacres of Israelis, when the only country in the corrupt and violent Middle East to be singled out for judgment is Israel, when the context of Israel's war for survival is ignored and only Israel's self-defense is condemned, when the very existence of a Jewish state becomes immoral and the only form of nationalism considered racist is Zionism - then the line is crossed from legitimate criticism to demonization. And the ground is prepared for murder."

"Visas for Suspected Terrorists?" (Joel Mowbray, National Review, 2002/07/17)
"The State Department is fighting a terrorism task force's recommendation that suspected terrorists be denied visas - this is the same department that wants to hold onto the visa-issuance power in a time of war when our enemies want nothing more than entry into the United States. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage responded to the recommendation by writing to the Justice Department that "[believing that] an applicant may pose a threat to national security... is insufficient [grounds] for a consular officer to deny a visa." No, this letter wasn't written before last year's tragedy; it was written on June 10, 2002, one day shy of the nine-month anniversary of 9/11."

"Watch who you call Nazis" (Rod Liddle, The Guardian, 2002/07/17)
"A young British lecturer working at the University of Tel Aviv decided he would like to take a post back home, in the United Kingdom. However, the head of the first university department to which he applied told him, charmingly: "No, we don't accept any applicants from a Nazi state." We can imagine this university factotum very easily, shrouded in self-righteousness and spite, delighted at last to be able to vent a bit of spleen about a situation very far away which he either fails to understand, or perhaps, even, wishes to understand. This is the latest development in the dunderheaded boycott of Jewish - sorry, Israeli - academics. The campaign seems to be spreading, despite intense vilification from almost all normal (ie, non-academic) people. ... If the same campaign had been directed at a real Nazi government, in Germany in about 1936, a Jewish professor wishing to leave a German university for Britain would have been barred from doing so under the terms of the boycott. Obviously, or obviously to most people, the thing manages to be at once morally repugnant, fatuous and self-defeating."

"Gaddafi show baffles the starving" (Michael Dynes and Daniel McGrory, The Times, 2002/07/17)
"Throwing fistfuls of cash from his open-top limousine to puzzled villagers lining the route, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and his flamboyant roadshow rumbled into drought-stricken Malawi yesterday. It is the Libyan leader's latest stop on his charm offensive across southern Africa. Police were brushed aside by Colonel Gaddafi's fearsome female bodyguards in their figure-hugging green uniforms as he made his triumphal appearance at the head of a cavalcade of 70 armoured vehicles. There was little danger of him running out of money to hurl at bystanders on his 218-mile drive from Lilongwe, the government capital, to the commercial centre at Blantyre, because one of the cars in his entourage was reported to be stuffed with $6 million (£3,800,000) in cash."

"Saddam vows to defeat United States" (UPI, 2002/07/17)
"Iraqi President Saddam Hussein on Wednesday vowed to defeat any U.S. attack on Iraq, urging his people to stand fast and fight for the independence and sovereignty of their country. "Fight with eagerness and vitality and patience whenever you are forced to defend yourself. ... Your faith is the source of prosperity, freedom, independence, stability and justice to which you aspire," Saddam said in a speech broadcast on official television on the occasion of the 34th anniversary of the Baath Party's taking power in Iraq in a 1968 military coup. ... "Iraq will be victorious, victorious, victorious. ... All the foreign roaring you are hearing will be withered away by the wind, because the enemy is a greedy oppressor and enemy of God," Saddam said in the 40-minute speech." (See also full transcript: "Speech of His Excellency President Saddam Hussein on the occasion of the Thirty-forth Anniversery of the 17-30 July Revolution" (uruklink.net, 2002/07/17))

"Bush plan to defend America from terror" (Tim Reid, The Times, 2002/07/17)
"President Bush presented his long-awaited strategy to protect America from terrorism yesterday - a 71-page blueprint that includes controversial proposals to let the US Army impose quarantines during a biological attack, and the use of thumbprint and eyeball scanning for foreign visitors. America's first National Homeland Security Strategy, eight months in the making, calls for sweeping new powers for the federal Government, new extradition and secrecy laws, the stockpiling of newly developed vaccines and the creation of federal "red teams" that would dream up ways of attacking US targets to expose the nation's weak points. ... The plan, parts of which face a stormy reception in Congress, relies heavily on science and technology to help to prevent "a new wave of terrorism" in the US, including the "catastrophic threats" of nuclear attack, radiological "dirty" bombs and biological and chemical weapons." (See also PDF version of the National Strategy: "The National Strategy For Homeland Security: Office of Homeland Security" (The White House, 2002/07/16))

"Back to Jenin" (Ze'ev Schiff, Haaretz, 2002/07/17)
"What was the spark that set off the rumors about a massacre in Jenin's refugee camp? ... Toward the end of the fighting, the army sent three large refrigerator trucks into the city. Reservists decided to sleep in them for their air conditioning. Some Palestinians saw dozens of covered bodies lying in the trucks and rumors spread the Jews had filled trucks full of Palestinian bodies. Some Palestinians went to the Civil Administration to ask. When it turned out the rumors of executions were baseless, the myth of the Jenin massacre evaporated on its own. But Palestinian Minister Saeb Erekat continued lying, though he lowered the number of dead from three thousand to five hundred."

"Spain Arrests 3 Suspects; Tapes of U.S. Sites Seized" (Tim Golden, The New York Times, 2002/07/17)
"The Spanish police arrested three men suspected of being operatives of Al Qaeda today, and officials said one of them had five-year-old videotapes with hours of surveillance images of the World Trade Center and other possible terrorist targets in the United States. Officials described the taped images as a possible indication that Al Qaeda's planning for a major terrorist strike at the United States dated back years and involved the careful scouting of such targets as Disneyland and Universal Studios, the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Sears Tower in Chicago."

 

Tuesday, July 16, 2002

News and commentary:

"Palestinians Ambush Israeli Bus in W.Bank, 7 Dead" (Gadi Afriat, Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2002/07/16)
"Palestinians posing as Israeli soldiers ambushed a bus carrying Jewish settlers on Tuesday, setting off a roadside bomb and then spraying gunfire at passengers trying to flee, killing seven. The West Bank attack, claimed by three Palestinian militant groups, was launched hours before top officials from the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia convened in New York for talks on ending Middle East violence. ... Police said seven people were killed and at least 20 wounded in the attack, at the same spot where Palestinian gunmen killed 10 people in a bus ambush last December. Israeli troops launched a manhunt for Tuesday's attackers."

"Palestinian Ad Campaign" (Middle East Realities, 2002/07/16)
Middle East Realities notes "a very artistic ad campaign put out by a Palestinian organization called "Dying to Live" (notice the play on words with dying and suicide bom....well I'm sure you noticed)." The ads shows historical figures including Einstein, Gandhi and Lincoln alongside Palestinian children who aspire to be like them. Most notable is perhaps the morbid use of "dying" as a theme. And, of course, the inverted morality of using "dying children" as a metaphor, when the only ones deliberately killing children are the Palestinians themselves: "Khaled is dying to hope. ... Silently, he is dying to laugh. ... Zaid is dying for his aspirations to be unshackled. ... Amal is dying to be heard. ... Why is Shadi dying for for his own story to have a happy ending? ... Start imagining why Johnny is dying to sing. ... She is dying for a miracle to happen. ... The question would be: why is Samer dying to dream? ... Kareem is dying to believe that the world can listen." (See also: "Palestine. Dying to live." (dying2live.com, Summer 2002))

"Driven by vengeance and a desire to defend the homeland" (Amira Hass, Haaretz, 2002/07/16)
A report from Gaza, with a bizarre defense of the "moral considerations" taken by Hamas: "'I'm not happy to see a Jew killed simply because he is Jewish. But so long as Palestinians are being killed, I long for the killing of a Jew,' says M. Children are not specifically targeted, he said, in a conversation held before the Gilo bus bombing on June 18. "There is nothing easier than putting a bomb in a school or sending a person with an explosives belt into a school, and the fact that Hamas has never done so," he declares, "is evidence that they do take moral considerations into account." The primary targets are is places where adults can be found, "but in Israel, all of the civilians are soldiers, really. That's how we see it. The fact is that Israel called up 45,000 civilians for reserve duty." Based on what M. says, the criticism of the suicide bombings has evidently filtered down to the Hamas rank and file. Because the Koran forbids the murder of civilians in war."

"A bond of hypocrisy" (Evelyn Gordon, The Jerusalem Post, 2002/07/16)
"Yet the EU has been doing precisely the opposite: It has actively encouraged European companies to invest in projects that funnel money to the Iranian government. ... The result is that the EU is now Iran's largest trading partner and most of these deals put money straight into the regime's pockets. ... But the climax came last week, when the Iranian government held its first foreign bond issue since the 1979 Islamic revolution. ... A bond issue does not even offer the pitiful excuse available to the oil deals: that of creating jobs for ordinary Iranians. Thus, if ever there was an event in which nations that claim to care about human rights should refuse to participate, last week's bond issue was it. Instead, the 500 million euro ($497.1 million) issue was underwritten by two major European banks, Germany's Commerzbank AG and France's BNP Paribas SA. And 40% of the issue which was oversubscribed by more than 20% was snapped up by European (primarily German and British) institutional investors (Middle Eastern buyers took most of the rest). European hypocrisy has caused great suffering to Israel, as EU money has played a major role in the PA's terrorist war against this country. But Europe's hypocrisy has arguably caused even greater suffering to millions of Iranians, Palestinians and others all those whose vicious, repressive governments are propped up with European cash."

"Imam at German Mosque Preached Hate to 9/11 Pilots" (Douglas Frantz and Desmond Butler, The New York Times, 2002/07/16)
"The police and intelligence officials said the imam, whom they know only by his surname, al-Fazazi, preached an unusually heated stream of anti-Western and anti-Jewish abuse at the mosque, called Al Quds. Mr. Atta, the presumed organizer of the attacks and pilot of one of the aircraft that hit the World Trade Center, attended the mosque, as did other members of the Hamburg cell. ... Mr. Fazazi said that "Christians and Jews should have their throats slit" and called on followers to "fight the Americans as long as they are keeping Muslims in prison," according to videotaped sermons seized earlier this month in raids by the Hamburg state police on a bookstore two blocks from the mosque, the police said. ... Mr. Fazazi, as an imam, was a public figure, and videotapes of his message were openly on sale until earlier this month. Yet he came to the attention of the German police only after the raids on July 3."

 

Monday, July 15, 2002

News and commentary:

"Spies Like Us" (James Taranto, The Wall Street Journal/Best of the Web Today, 2002/07/15)
"An alarming revelation by one Ritt Goldstein in today's Sydney Morning Herald: "The Bush Administration aims to recruit millions of United States citizens as domestic informants in a program likely to alarm civil liberties groups. The Terrorism Information and Prevention System, or TIPS, means the US will have a higher percentage of citizen informants than the former East Germany through the infamous Stasi secret police." Yikes, we're a police state! But a look at the Citizens Corps Web site shows that Goldstein is simply being hysterical: "Operation TIPS - the Terrorism Information and Prevention System - will be a nationwide program giving millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and others a formal way to report suspicious terrorist activity. ... Every participant in this new program will be given an Operation TIPS information sticker to be affixed to the cab of their vehicle or placed in some other public location so that the toll-free reporting number is readily available." Sounds more like Neighborhood Watch than the Stasi - and indeed, Neighborhood Watch is another program of the Citizens Corps." (See also: "US planning to recruit one in 24 Americans as citizen spies" (Ritt Goldstein, Sydney Morning Herald, 2002/07/15) and "Operation TIPS" (Citizen Corps, Summer 2002))

"'I plead guilty,' Taliban American says" (CNN.com, 2002/07/15)
"The 21-year-old American who fought last year with the Taliban in Afghanistan pleaded guilty Monday to two charges in an agreement with U.S. prosecutors that could keep him in prison for 20 years. In exchange, prosecutors agreed to drop other charges, including conspiracy to murder U.S. citizens, that could have kept John Walker Lindh in prison for life. White House officials said President Bush personally approved the arrangement. The announcement surprised most observers, including District Judge T.S. Ellis, and was made public as court officials were preparing to hear arguments from Walker Lindh's attorneys that statements he made to the FBI, military officials and the news media should be thrown out. Walker Lindh pleaded guilty to serving in the Taliban army and carrying weapons in doing so. Ellis still has to approve the deal; formal sentencing is set for October 4."

"The value of conspiracy theories" (Dr Kai-Alexander Schlevogt, The Jordan Times, 2002/07/15)
While ostensibly a column analysing the significance of conspiracy theories, it turns out that Schlevogt is an adept scholar of conspiracy theorizing himself: "Yet, there is one common valuable feature of the theories that explain the attacks on America: the doubt in the official version. When witnessing the attacks on Sept. 11, I wondered how a government, only minutes after the events, could already attribute them to the "new Hitler", Ben Laden. And how could such a difficult operation be masterminded by one man in a cave, who directed atomised groups of fighters? ... Was it just chance that there were so many perfect shots of the attacks (including the first flight into one of the Twin Towers), reminding us of very similar scenes from Hollywood movies? Why did the reports very quickly shift away from the attacks on the Pentagon, only focusing on the attack on the World Trade Centre? ... The gains from zero hour are very asymmetric, shedding doubt on motifs to undertake such a dangerous mission. The alleged perpetrators have lost greatly, while the "victims" have significantly increased their power. The US president has received dictatorial powers to attack his self-chosen enemies anywhere in the world. ... Even if forces in the US government have not planned the attacks, they are free-riding on their fallout."

"Bin Laden Said to Be Well, Planning More Attacks" (Michael Georgy, Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2002/07/15)
"Osama bin Laden is alive and planning another attack on the United States, an Arab journalist with close ties to the Saudi-born militant's associates said on Monday. Abdel-Bari Atwan, editor of the London based al-Quds al-Arabi magazine, said bin Laden's associates told him that al-Qaeda network has regrouped and was determined to strike the United States. "From what they said it seems they will attack inside the United States because that would mean the most publicity. They have regrouped after the U.S. campaign," he told Reuters. ... Atwan said bin Laden was in good health after being wounded in a U.S.-led attack on his Tora Bora base in Afghanistan in December. "His people said he was wounded in the shoulder by shrapnel. He is in good health now," said Atwan, who interviewed bin Laden in 1996 and keeps in contact with his associates and followers."

"Sontag Award Nominee" (The Daily Dish, 2002/07/15)
Sullivan quotes a column by the British chomskyite John Pilger, combining the usual mix of topsy-turvy moral equivalence and conspiracy theorizing: "Having swept the Palestinians into the arms of the supreme terrorist Ariel Sharon, the Christian Right fundamentalists running the plutocracy in Washington, now replenish their arsenal in preparation for an attack on the 22 million suffering people of Iraq. Should anyone need reminding, Iraq is a nation held hostage to an American-led embargo every bit as barbaric as the dictatorship over which Iraqis have no control. Contrary to propaganda orchestrated from Washington and London, the coming attack has nothing to do with Saddam Hussein's 'weapons of mass destruction', if these exist at all. The reason is that America wants a more compliant thug to run the world's second greatest source of oil." (See also: "The great charade" (John Pilger, The Observer, 2002/07/14))

"Sheikh sounds warning after death sentence for Pearl murder" (Reuters/Haaretz, 2002/07/15)
"A British-born Islamic militant sentenced to death by a Pakistani court for the kidnapping and murder of American reporter Daniel Pearl warned on Monday of a war between Muslims and the rest of the world. In a message given to reporters by his lawyer, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh - better known as Sheikh Omar - also said that anyone who tried to carry out his death sentence faced a similar fate. "I will see whether who wants to kill me will first kill me or get himself killed," his lawyer, Rai Bashir, quoted him as saying. "I have been saying before, this entire (trial) is just waste of time. I fought the case...just to please my father. It is decisive war between Islam and kafir (infidels) and everyone is individually proving on which side he is," he said."

"4 in Pearl Murder Are Found Guilty in Pakistan Court" (Dexter Filkins, The New York Times, 2002/07/15)
"A British-born Islamic militant was convicted and sentenced to death today for the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter. Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh was convicted with three other men, Salman Saqib, Fahad Naseem and Shaikh Adil, who were sentenced to life in prison, said Abdul Waheed Katpar, Mr. Sheikh's lawyer. The verdict was handed down this morning by Judge Ali Ashraf Shah. Mr. Pearl, 38, disappeared Jan. 23 in Karachi while researching Pakistani's Islamic extremist movement. A videotape sent to American diplomats in February confirmed Mr. Pearl's murder, and the police later found remains of a body in Karachi believed to be those of Mr. Pearl."

"Arafat accused of stashing millions" (Abraham Rabinovich, The Washington Times, 2002/07/15)
"Israeli sources say Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat recently transferred $5 million to his wife in Paris and that other leading Palestinians have transferred tens of millions to private bank accounts abroad as fears grow that the Palestinian Authority is near collapse. "We have recently identified the transfer abroad of tremendous sums by Palestinian leaders who are preparing nest eggs for the future," an unnamed senior Israeli political figure was quoted by the Tel Aviv newspaper Yediot Achronot. ... The Israeli source said the second-ranking man in the Palestinian hierarchy, Abu Mazen, recently channeled $70 million in Palestinian Authority funds to European banks through his brother, a wealthy businessman operating in the Gulf states."

See the archive for earlier news and commentary.

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