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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cosmicforce who wrote (29424)	9/25/2001 10:00:56 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

That bit about the soldiers painting happy Ramadan on the missiles is so...well...like dancing Palestinians, or a happy Osama Bin Laden. How sad. And I had no idea we were giving so much aid to Israel. Can those figures be correct?

To: cosmicforce who wrote (29424)	9/25/2001 10:19:41 PM
From: bonnuss_in_austin	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 82486

Also excellent. Thx, cosmic. There was a writer... ...interviewed about an hour ago on 'Hardball with Chris Mathews' ... anybody catch it? Spend several months in Northern Afghanistan with the rather ragtag, appears, rebel army trying to overthrow the Taliban. Wrote a book ... darn. I should have written it down and can't find the show schedule. He was good. That show is excellent, IMO, in general. There was mention that his work over there will appear on National Geographic special sometime SOON, I would think. CNN's special over the weekend "Behind the Veil" was brutally revealing to me ... and hopefully, hundreds of thousands of others like me here. About life in Afghanistan. ... hearing right now that 1.5 million are trying to flee but the borders are sealed...food aid deliveries incoming have been cut off by Taliban ... This is horrible. Those people don't deserve to suffer. BTW: Is the fundamentalistic 'romancing' of the copy of Bush's daily speeches bothering anyone else? This 'Good vs Evil' positioning ... it's still there ... U.S. Bible Belt BS colors practically everything he says ... along with the 'John Wayne/Forrest Gump' (credit to kholt ... I love that one) on-camera demeanor when he's forced to ad-lib. I just don't see how, really, anyone, can't draw the stark conclusion that the the religions of the West are just as foolish when taken to a level of zealotry and mix with governments that these are the results. Bush needs to completely strip all references to 'God,' to 'good vs evil,' to the 'Scriptures' ... to 'crusades' (that was righ) ... it's got to go. It's INFLAMMATORY. Comments?

To: cosmicforce who wrote (29424)	9/25/2001 10:35:38 PM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

From the Toensing piece: After watching unjust US policies continue for years without apology, after hearing of incidents of racist anti-Arab backlash following the execrable crimes of Sept. 11, perhaps he also senses great tragedy in that the hijackers spoke to Americans in a language the US government speaks all too well abroad. Christopher responded to that outrageously unjust (imo) refrain very well in the piece i posted. <<<First the actions. The central plan was to maximize civilian casualties in a very dense area of downtown Manhattan. We know that the killers had studied the physics and ecology of the buildings and the neighborhood, and we know that they were limited only by the flight schedules and bookings of civil aviation. They must therefore have been quite prepared to convert fully-loaded planes into missiles, instead of the mercifully unpopulated aircraft that were actually commandeered, and they could have hoped by a combination of luck and tactics to have at least doubled the kill-rate on the ground that they actually achieved. They spent some time in the company of the families they had kidnapped for the purpose of mass homicide. It was clearly meant to be much, much worse than it was. And it was designed and incubated long before the mutual-masturbation of the Clinton-Arafat-Barak "process." The Talibanis have in any case not distinguished themselves very much by an interest in the Palestinian plight. They have been busier trying to bring their own societies under the reign of the most inflexible and pitiless declension of shari'a law. This is known to anyone with the least acquaintance with the subject. The ancillary plan was to hit the Department of Defense and (on the best evidence we have available) either the Capitol Dome or the White House. The Pentagon, for all its symbolism, is actually more the civil-service bit of the American "war-machine," and is set in a crowded Virginia neighborhood. You could certainly call it a military target if you were that way inclined, though the Bid-Ladenists did not attempt anything against a guarded airbase or a nuclear power-station in Pennsylvania (and even if they had, we would now doubtless be reading that the glow from Three Mile Island was a revenge for globalization). The Capitol is where the voters send their elected representatives--poor things, to be sure, but our own. The White House is where the elected President and his family and staff are to be found. It survived the attempt of British imperialism to burn it down, and the attempt of the Confederacy to take Washington, DC, and this has hallowed even its most mediocre occupants. I might, from where I am sitting, be a short walk from a gutted Capitol or a shattered White House. I am quite certain that Husseini and his rabble of sympathizers would still be telling me that my chickens were coming home to roost. (The image of Bin-Laden's men "stuffing envelopes" is the perfected essence of such brainless rhetoric.) Only the stoicism of men like Jeremy Glick and Thomas Burnett prevented some such outcome; only those who chose who die fighting rather than allow such a profanity, and such a further toll in lives, stood between us and the fourth death squad. One iota of such innate fortitude is worth all the writings of Noam Chomsky, who coldly compared the plan of September 11 to a stupid and cruel and cynical raid by Bill Clinton on Khartoum in August 1998. I speak with some feeling about that latter event, because I wrote three Nation columns about it at the time, pointing out (with evidence that goes unrebutted to this day) that it was a war crime, and a war crime opposed by the majority of the military and intelligence establishment. The crime was directly and sordidly linked to the effort by a crooked President to avoid impeachment (a conclusion sedulously avoided by the Chomskys and Husseinis of the time). The Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant was well-known to be a civilian target, and its "selection" was opposed by most of the Joint Chiefs and many CIA personnel for just this reason. (See, for additional corroboration, Seymour Hersh's New Yorker essay "The Missiles of August"). To mention this banana-republic degradation of the United States in the same breath as a plan, deliberated for months, to inflict maximum horror upon the innocent is to abandon every standard that makes intellectual and moral discrimination possible. To put it at its very lowest, and most elementary, at least the missiles launched by Clinton were not full of passengers....>>>

To: cosmicforce who wrote (29424)	9/25/2001 10:45:04 PM
From: E	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

Just for balance, I'd like to present this report so that people can understand why some Muslims are not that surprised about the attacks: I have the feeling that "not that surprised" seems to imply something like "chickens coming home to roost," or like we "had it coming," but I could be mistaken. One thing that gets left out when US international actions toward Muslims in Muslim countries is what the US has done in defense of Muslims in Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo. The situation in Iraq is horrifying, the painting of the missiles is disgusting. The situation that developed in Iraq was caused by direct aggression of one Muslim country against another. Our attempt to redress that unjust act, which of course we did for our own purposes, as per usual with nations, has had some horrible sequelae, since we left Saddam Hussein in power and since the coalition that we had assembled had no appetite for further war action, we were in a dilemma. This compromise of pressure has caused great suffering. It was the best people could think of at the time. Nobody in the US set out to create a system of pressure on SH that would take innocent lives over the years. I'd be interested in reading what solutions posters have for the problem of Iraq and the threat it poses to innocent people everywhere.

To: cosmicforce who wrote (29424)	9/26/2001 8:31:58 AM
From: Poet	Respond to of 82486

My gosh, cosmic, I had no idea our soldiers had painted "Happy Ramadan" on missles. That's despicable. As for this: Numerous United Nations resolutions clearly define Israel's occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem as illegal. Yet Israel receives 40 percent of all US foreign aid, more than $3.5 billion annually in recent years, roughly $500 per Israeli citizen. (The average Egyptian will earn $656 this year.) Israel uses all of this aid to build new settlements on Palestinian land and to buy US-made warplanes and helicopter gunships. I'm not surprised at the amount of aid that Israel receives, but I'm leery of the statement that all the aid is spent on new settlements on Palestinian land and US-made arms. Does anyone have data to back this up?

To: cosmicforce who wrote (29424)	9/26/2001 10:36:50 AM
From: thames_sider	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

and another fascinating article. No justification, but some explanation. Remember, though, that what apparently motivates bin Laden into his psychotic hatred is/was not the US support of or actions for Israel, as such, but the pollution of Arab soil by the infidel (i.e., US bases in Saudi at/since the Gulf War). I suspect he's delighted, in a sick way, by anything the US does to worsen its image in Muslim/Arab eyes. Interesting points raised. , I explained that although the United States is a democracy, we Americans do not choose our government's allies, nor do we select its adversaries. We do not vote on the annual foreign aid budget. There are no referenda on the ballot asking whether the United States should send abundant aid to Israel, or whether the United States should press the UN Security Council into maintaining sanctions against Iraq, or whether the Fifth Fleet should prowl the Persian Gulf to protect our oil supply. What votes would the first and third of those attract, I wonder? And if the US government had to choose between Israel and oil, which would win...? [Note: by 2020 about 55% of world oil reserves will be in the ME/Gulf area, more if consumption increases notably from today].

To: cosmicforce who wrote (29424)	9/26/2001 10:59:50 AM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

There is an article in the October Harper's called "A Gaza Diary", by Chris Hedges, an ex-NYT type apparently. Viewing Israel vs. Palestinians as a black-and-white, good versus evil, is always popular. Others see some moral ambiguity in the situation. A little bit, apologies for the messy text conversion. Warning: Adult language. Sunday afternoon, June 17, the dunes I sit in the shade of a palm-roofed hut on the ledge of the dunes, momentarily defeated by ~ the heat, the grit, the jostling crowds, the Stench of the open sewcrs and n)tting garbage. A friend of Azmi’s brings me, on a tray, a cold glass of tart, red carcade juice. Barefoot boys, clutching kites made out of scraps of paper and ragged soccer balls, squat a few feet away under scrub trees. Men in flowing white or gray galabias~homespun robes-smoke cigarettes in the shade of slim eaves. Two emaciated donkeys, their ribs protruding, are tethered to wooden carts with rubber wheels. lt is still. The camp waits, as if holding its breath. And then, out of the dry furnace air, a disembodied voice crackles over a loudspeaker. “Come on, dogs,” the voice booms in Arabic. “Where are all the dogs of Khan Younis? Come?. ComeT.” I stand up. I walk outside the hut. The invective continues to spew: “Son of a bitch.?” “Son of a whore!” “Your mother’s cunt!” The boys dart in small packs up the sloping dunes to the electric fence that separates the camp from the Jewish settlement. They lob rocks to-ward two armored jeeps parked on top of the dune and mounted with loudspeakers. Three ambulances line the road below the dunes in anticipation of what is to come. A percussion grenade explodes. The boys, most no more than ten or eleven years old, scatter, running clumsily across the heavy sand. They descend out of sight behind a sandbank in front of me. There are no sounds of gunfire. The soldiers shoot with silencers. The bullets from the M- 16 rifles tumble end over end through the children’s slight bodies. Later, in the hospital, I will see the destruction: the stomachs ripped out, the gaping holes in limbs and torsos. Yesterday at this spot the Israelis shot eight young men, six of whom were under the age of eighteen. Crie was twelve. This afternoon they kill an eleven-year-old boy, Ah Murad, and seriously wound four more, three of whom are under eighteen. Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavernent in Sarajevo-but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport. We approach a Palestinian police post behind a sand hill. The police, in green uniforms, are making tea. They say that they have given up on trying to hold the children back. “When we tell the boys not to go to the dunes they taunt us as collaborators,” Lt. Ayrnan Glaann~ says. “When we approach the fence with our weapons to try and clear the area the Israelis fire on us. We just sit here now and wait for the war.