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Rahul Mahajan
In the run-up to Gulf War I, government officials put forth a bewildering array of reasons for the war, culminating with James Baker’s fatuous claim that “it’s about jobs.” In this coming war, perhaps the earliest and most consistently telegraphed since Cato the Elder’s repeated calls for the destruction of Carthage, similar confusion reigns. The same reflexively secretive administration that didn’t want to disclose which companies it met with, and for how long, when formulating its energy policy, has released at least four different plans for achieving “regime change”. People are beginning to seriously wonder what’s going on.
A Jihad Unspun Guest Article
Mentally ill, the USA locked Abdul Razaq, a schizophrenic, away in Camp X-Ray, for five long and damaging months.
Haim Weiss
Haim Weiss, was once glad to serve in the Israeli army. Like hundreds of other Israeli soldiers, he has become a conscientious objector to the war in the Occupied Territories. Here he tells his government’s Defence Secretary why he will not go to the West Bank.
Edward Said
Despite effort to restrict coverage of its destructive invasion of the West Bank’s Palestinian towns and refugee camps, information and images have nevertheless seeped through. The Internet has provided hundreds of verbal as well as pictorial eyewitness reports, as have Arab and European TV coverage, most of it unavailable or blocked or spun out of existence from the mainstream USA media. That evidence provides stunning proof of what Israel’s campaign has actually - has always - been about: the irreversible conquest of Palestinian land and society.
David Barsamian
When the US marches to war, the media march with it. And within the media the generals generally are heavily armed with microphones. The din of collateral language is rising to cacophonous levels. The mobilization and ubiquity of present and past brass on the airwaves is an essential component of manufacturing consent for war. Perhaps we need no-air zones for them. That’s unlikely to happen when ABC/TV and NPR’s Cokie Roberts gushes, “I am, I will just confess to you, a total sucker for the guys who stand up with all the ribbons on and stuff and they say it’s true and I’m ready to believe it.”
Joseph R. Stromberg
The dogs referred to above are, of course, the dogs of war. More to the point, they are the dogs of unlimited state “sovereignty,” a topic on which we lately touched from the standpoint of John Taylor of Caroline. Without the notion of sovereignty, as understood in Europe anyway, it might have been harder to get the average fool to sacrifice himself for emergent nation-states in their rather endless wars.
Rachel Coen
On October 26th, 2001, George Bush signed into law “anti-terrorism” legislation that seriously eroded civil liberties in the United States. Law enforcement?s power to conduct surveillance and secret searches has been vastly increased, legal immigrants may now be indefinitely detained, and the CIA has been authorized to resume spying on Americans. In true Orwellian style, the bill is called the “Usa Patriot Act of 2001 - for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism”.
George Monbiot
"If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents,” George Bush announced on the day he began bombing Afghanistan, “they have become outlaws and murderers themselves. And they will take that lonely path at their own peril.” I’m glad he said “any government”, as there’s one which, though it has yet to be identified as a sponsor of terrorism, requires his urgent attention.
Nigel Parry
The dilemma in which the Palestinians find themselves is like that of a man who, falsely imprisoned for most of his life and demonised by society, finds himself in a dark room being raped by a highly-decorated prison guard, when… he suddenly notices a rocket launcher lying within his reach. Most of us wouldn’t be quoting Gandhi or Martin Luther King to the prison guard in this situation. We would be grabbing the rocket launcher and making him pay, like 99 percent of the other human beings on this planet.
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