 [ 12 ] [ 13 ] [ 14 ] [ 15 ] [ 16 ] [ 17 ] [ 18 ] [ 19 ] [ 20 ] [ 21 ] [ 22 ] [ 23 ] [ 24 ] [ 25 ] [ 26 ] [ 29 ] [ 30 ] [ Home ] |
November 30, 2001
Global Eye -- A Thirsty Evil
By Chris Floyd
Are you a terrorist? If you don't know, you'd better find out fast. Because Uncle Sam's made a list and he's checking it twice -- "40 to 50 countries" targeted for possible "U.S. action," according to America's securely-located vice president, Dick "Chicken Hawk" Cheney. As the man says, a hard rain's a-gonna fall.
So here's a simple test to check your moral worthiness and see if you can escape God's -- sorry, Bush's -- all-devouring wrath. Have you ever gone out for a beer and bought a Stella Artois instead of a Bud? Then you, my friend, have engaged in a conspiracy to cause "adverse effects" to the economy of the United States. And that makes you one of the evildoers. Full Article
Emergencies, Military Tribunals, and the Constitution
by Jacob G. Hornberger
President Bush has ordered that people he suspects of being "terrorists" will be tried before military tribunals rather than indicted and prosecuted in the customary judicial manner. Judges and juries (which will consist of the same people) will be appointed by the secretary of defense, trials will be held in secret, and convictions will be permitted on a two-thirds vote of the judges. Punishment will be swift, as the president's order denies the accused the right to appeal the conviction to either the federal courts of appeals or the Supreme Court. (The president failed to announce whether he would permit the federal courts to determine the constitutionality of the order itself.)
The president's edict, which is being implemented without congressional approval, applies not only to prisoners captured in the Afghan War who are suspected of being terrorists but also to any foreign citizen arrested in the United States on suspicion of having committed a terrorist act here. Full Article
Rebuilding Afghanistan?
by William Blum
"U.S. Meeting Envisions Rebuilding Afghanistan" read the headline in the Washington Post of November 21. After a one-day meeting in Washington of leaders from two dozen nations and international organizations, US and Japanese officials said they had developed an "action program" for the long-term rebuilding of the war-ravaged country.
This should throw another log on the feel-good-about-America fire that's been warming the frazzled citizenry since September 11. But like much of that fuel, there's likely a lot more propaganda here than substance. Full Article
British Svengali Behind Clash Of Civilizations
by Scott Thompson and Jeffrey Steinberg
On Nov. 19, octogenarian British Orientalist spook Bernard Lewis wrote an elaborate apologia for Osama bin Laden, a fervent pitch for the inevitability of the "Clash of Civilizations," in the pages of New Yorker magazine. Under the headline "The Revolt of Islam," Lewis lied that the emergence of "Islamic terrorism" in the recent decades, is completely consistent with mainstream Islam, which is committed to the subjugation of the infidels to Islamic law. He went through 14 pages of a fractured fairy-tale history of Islam, quoting bin Laden's Oct. 7, 2001 videotape, where the Saudi expatriate spoke of Islam's "humiliation and disgrace ... for more than 80 years"—a reference to the crushing of the Ottoman Empire by Britain and France in 1918. Lewis invented a tradition of jihad, "bequeathed to Muslims by the Prophet": Full Article
It is still America against the world, war or no war
by Martin Woollacott
On issue after issue, whether it was missile defence, global warming, the international criminal court, biological weapons verification, the comprehensive test-ban treaty, the ban on landmines or money laundering, the US took the position that it either got its way or it went on its way. In the past, that would have halted progress. But, Mathews wrote: "The US has profoundly misjudged the world's new willingness to adopt international agreements - despite US opposition - when those agreements have vigorous backing from the EU." Full Article
The Terrorist Who Started World War I
by Keith Edgerton
Can responses to past terrorist acts provide any sort of guidance to the United States as it moves toward the brink of war?
Despite the belief of nations that they can limit the scope of armed conflict, events historically have often spun out of control and led to catastrophic consequences. In light of the rising national outrage, Americans might well take a deep collective breath and reflect on the sobering chain of events leading to World War I, a particularly horrifying mess of a modern war that Americans naively believed was fought to end all wars. Full Article
