Many people have written about September 11 and the political/military aftermath.
Among them are the following:
1. Phyllis and Orlando Rodriguez
2. Eve Ensler
3. Howard Zinn
4. Noam Chomsky
5. Tom Morello
6. Tom Burghardt
7. Wil-Dog
8. Katha Pollitt
9. Amber Amundson
10. Edward Said
11. Barbara Kingsolver [1]
12. John Gerassi
13. Crispin Beltran
14. Jose Maria Sison
15. Jennifer K. Harbury
16. Susan Sontag
17. Terry Bisson
18. Ronnie Gilbert
19. BoySetsFire
20. C. Clark Kissinger
21. Jeff Paterson
22. Linn Washington
23. Edward Herman
24. Michael Moore
25. Barbara Lee
26. Bob Greene
27. Chris Floyd
28. Travis Morales
29. Michael Novick
30. Tim Wise
31. John Pilger
32. Nat Hentoff
33. James Ridgeway
34. Tom Tomorrow
35. Barbara Kingsolver [2]
36. Peter Laarman
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Not in Our Son's Name
Our son Greg is among the many missing from the World Trade Center attack. Since we first heard the news, we have shared moments of grief, comfort, hope, despair, fond memories with his wife, the two families, our friends and neighbors, his loving colleagues at Cantor Fitzgerald / ESpeed, and all the grieving families that daily meet at the Pierre Hotel.
We see our hurt and anger reflected among everybody we meet. We cannot pay attention to the daily flow of news about this disaster. But we read enough of the news to sense that our government is heading in the direction of violent revenge, with the prospect of sons, daughters, parents, friends in distant lands dying, suffering, and nursing further grievances against us. It is not the way to go. It will not avenge our son's death. Not in our son's name.
Our son died a victim of an inhuman ideology. Our actions should not serve the same purpose. Let us grieve. Let us reflect and pray. Let us think about a rational response that brings real peace and justice to our world. But let us not as a nation add to the inhumanity of our times. -
Copy of letter to White House:
Dear President Bush:
Our son is one of the victims of Tuesday's attack on the World Trade Center. We read about your response in the last few days and about the resolutions from both Houses, giving you undefined power to respond to the terror attacks.
Your response to this attack does not make us feel better about our son's death. It makes us feel worse. It makes us feel that our government is using our son's memory as a justification to cause suffering for other sons and parents in other lands.
It is not the first time that a person in your position has been given unlimited power and came to regret it. This is not the time for empty gestures to make us feel better. It is not the time to act like bullies.
We urge you to think about how our governement can develop peaceful, rational solutions to terrorism, solutions that do not sink us to the inhuman level of terrorists.
Sincerely,
Phyllis and Orlando Rodriguez
September 18, 2001
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message from Eve Ensler
I have been thinking about violence.
I have been thinking about an airplane full of terrified women and men and children smashing into a tower full of unexpecting women and men who were just sipping their morning coffee. I have been thinking of the burning people jumping from the 100th floor, jumping for their lives. I have been thinking about the hundreds of firemen and policemen who were lost, crushed under a collapsing tower. I have been thinking about a husband waiting in his office for 14 hours for his wife who worked on the 104 floor who had not called who was probably never going to call and yet he was still waiting. I was thinking of the man who called his mother from the hijacked plane to tell her he loved her, to remember he loved her.
I have been thinking about the debris and the dust on new yorkers shoes and how shocked we are here in america, how protected we have been. I have been thinking about all the war torn countries I have been to, Bosnia, Kosova, Afghanistan and the dust on the people's shoes and the debris.
I have been thinking about the people who were driven to hijack airplanes with knives and box cutters and fly them through buildings, who were ready, eager to lose to lives to hurt other people. I have been thinking about why, what would make people want to do that.
I have been thinking about the words retaliation and punishment and act of war. I have been thinking about violence, what it feels like to be nothing to someone else. what it feels like to be a consequence of someone else's disassociated rage, disconnected fury. I have been thinking about the cycle of hurt for hurt, nation against nation, tit for tat.
I have been thinking about how deeply something else is required. I have been thinking about the courage it requires to think about something other than violence has a response to violence. I am thinking about the complexity of this and the loneliness of this and the helplessness and the sorrow that would be felt in the space where violence was once and the grief.
I have been thinking that for those of us who are living on the planet right here, right now, nothing less will do if we are to go on as a species. That we must live in this dangerous space, allowing the helplessness, the grief, the sorrow to create new wisdom that can and will and must free us from this terrible world of violence. I urge you, each one of you - fall into this space, weep, be lost, let go, die into the grief - on the other side it will be revealed.
Stop The Violence. Spread The Word. Join us at www.vday.org
Eve Ensler is a playwright.
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Retaliation
by Howard Zinn
to appear on TomPaine.com
The images on television have been heartbreaking. People on fire leaping to their deaths from a hundred stories up. People in panic and fear racing from the scene in clouds of dust and smoke. We knew that there must be thousands of human beings buried alive, but soon dead under a mountain of debris. We can only imagine the terror among the passengers of the hijacked planes as they contemplated the crash, the fire, the end. Those scenes horrified and sickened me.
Then our political leaders came on television, and I was horrified and sickened again. They spoke of retaliation, of vengeance, of punishment. We are at war they said. And I thought: they have learned nothing, absolutely nothing, from the history of the twentieth century, from a hundred years of retaliation, vengeance, war, a hundred years of terrorism and counter-terrorism, of violence met with violence in an unending cycle of stupidity.
We can all feel a terrible anger at whoever, in their insane idea that this would help their cause, killed thousands of innocent people. But what do we do with that anger? Do we react with panic, strike out violently and blindly just to show how tough we are? "We shall make no distinction", the President proclaimed, between terrorists and countries that harbor terrorists". Will we now bomb Afghanistan, and inevitably kill innocent people, because it is in the nature of bombing to be indiscriminate, to "make no distinction"? Will we then be committing terrorism in order to "send a message" to terrorists?
We have done that before. It is the old way of thinking, the old way of acting. It has never worked. Reagan bombed Libya, and Bush made war on Iraq, and Clinton bombed Afghanistan and also a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan, to "send a message" to terrorists. And then comes this horror in New York and Washington. Isn't it clear by now that sending a message to terrorists through violence doesn't work, only leads to more terrorism?
Haven't we learned anything from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Car bombs planted by Palestinians bring air attacks and tanks by the Israeli government. That has been going on for years. It doesn't work. And innocent people die on both sides.
Yes, it is an old way of thinking, and we need new ways. We need to think about the resentment all over the world felt by people who have been the victims of American military action. In Vietnam, where we carried out terrorizing bombing attacks, using napalm and cluster bombs,on peasant villages. In Latin America, where we supported dictators and death squads in Chile and El Salvador and other countries. In Iraq, where a million people have died as a result of our economic sanctions, And, perhaps most important for understanding the current situation, in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza, where a million and more Palestinians live under a cruel military occupation, while our government supplies Israel with high-tech weapons.
We need to imagine that the awful scenes of death and suffering we are now witnessing on our television screens have been going on in other parts of the world for a long time, and only now can we begin to know what people have gone through, often as a result of our policies. We need to understand how some of those people will go beyond quiet anger to acts of terrorism.
We need new ways of thinking. A $300 billion dollar military budget has not given us security. Military bases all over the world, our warships on every ocean, have not given us security. Land mines, a "missile defense shield", will not give us security. We need to rethink our position in the world. We need to stop sending weapons to countries that oppress other people or their own people. We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children. War is terrorism, magnified a hundred times.
Our security can only come by using our national wealth, not for guns, planes, bombs, but for the health and welfare of our people - for free medical care for everyone, education and housing guaranteed decent wages and a clean environment for all. We can not be secure by limiting our liberties, as some of our political leaders are demanding , but only by expanding them.
We should take our example not from our military and political leaders shouting "retaliate" and "war" but from the doctors and nurses and medical students and firemen and policemen who have been saving lives in the midst of mayhem, whose first thoughts are not violence, but healing, not vengeance but compassion.
Howard Zinn is a historian and playwright
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Note from an email from Noam Chomsky
Today's attacks were major atrocities. In terms of number of victims they do not reach the level of many others, for example, Clinton's bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and probably killing tens of thousands of people (no one knows, because the US blocked an inquiry at the UN and no one cares to pursue it). Not to speak of much worse cases, which easily come to mind. But that this was a horrendous crime is not in doubt. The primary victims, as usual, were working people: janitors, secretaries, firemen, etc. It is likely to prove to be a crushing blow to Palestinians and other poor and oppressed people. It is also likely to lead to harsh security controls, with many possible ramifications for undermining civil liberties and internal freedom.
The events reveal, dramatically, the foolishness of ideas about "missile defense." As has been obvious all along, and pointed out repeatedly by strategic analysts, if anyone wants to cause immense damage in the US, including weapons of mass destruction, they are highly unlikely to launch a missile attack, thus guaranteeing their immediate destruction. There are innumerable easier ways that are basically unstoppable. But today's events will, nonetheless, be used to increase the pressure to develop these systems and put them into place. "Defense" is a thin cover for plans for militarization of space, and with good PR, even the flimsiest arguments will carry some weight among a frightened public. In short, the crime is a gift to the hard jingoist right, those who hope to use force to control their domains. That is even putting aside the likely US actions, and what they will trigger -- possibly more attacks like this one, or worse. The prospects ahead are even more ominous than they appeared to be before the latest atrocities.
Noam Chomsky is a linguist and professor at MIT
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From Tom Morello:
Our deepest sympathy and condolences go out to all the people and their families affected by the attacks on Tuesday. The loss of innocent life is just terrible, and our thoughts go out to all of you who personally may have had friends or family killed or injured in the tragedy. The pain felt across the country demonstrates the lesson of Tuesday's events: that the taking of innocent life is devastating to a society and terribly wrong.
On Tuesday, the victims were American. But the horrible scenes that we've witnessed on TV this week are regular occurrences in other places around the globe. And too often, violence like this has been meted out by our own country and its client states. We should stand together against this type of violence in all its forms, whenever it happens, whether its done in the name of religious fanaticism, or in the names of our own domestic elite.
Our best wishes go out to all of you. Take care of yourselves, and each other.
Peace,
Tom Morello
Tom Morello is a musician and band member of Rage Against The Machine.
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Dogs of War
by Tom Burghardt
Editor, Antifa Info-Bulletin, September 16, 2001
(SAN FRANCISCO)--In the wake of last Tuesday's hideous terrorist attacks in New York and Washington--an atrocity in every sense of the word--Washington is preparing to launch a deadly war that threatens all of humanity with consequences too horrifying to contemplate.
It is impossible to view images of the massacre without a sense of deep sadness for the victims and their families and burning anger against the perpetrators. But let us be clear, particularly now as the dogs of war and their companions--vicious nationalism, racism and xenophobia rear their ugly heads across the United States: the organizers of the September 11 massacre are neither "fanatical" followers of the Islamic religion nor believers in the Koran's words of peace. On the contrary, these grim soldiers of apocalypse are clerical fascists intent on setting the Middle East ablaze in order to impose dictatorial theocratic regimes throughout the region.
As evidence mounts that the perpetrators were connected to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida ("The Base") organization, it is also critical that we expose the deadly roots of this group: the CIA, the corrupt Saudi dynasty and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency. It mattered not a whit to the American ruling class that two million Afghans were killed in the U.S. "jihad" against the Soviet Union. Carter, Reagan, Bush, Brzezinski, Casey...mark these names down...they should be remembered--and cursed--in the coming days. And when remembering the stunning "victory" that led the Red Army to pull out of Afghanistan in 1989 and the stage-managed collapse of the Soviet Union two years later, we should also recall other names, those of leading U.S. "conservatives" such as Paul Weyrich, Gens. John Singlaub and Daniel O. Graham, Senator John McCain and Congressman Gerald Solomon; men who were instrumental in running the Afghan contra propaganda and support networks in the West for their murderous friends, the moujahidin. Like thieves looking over their shoulders fearful their guilt will be exposed, they are now among the loudest voices demanding a bloodbath against the former "freedom fighters" so critical to their bankrupt geopolitical strategies.
Swimming against the tide in the coming days will not be easy; yet there is no other choice. If there is to be a full account of last Tuesday's massacre--and criminal prosecution of the perpetrators--justice cries out for an indictment of the architect's of the Afghan "resistance": the U.S. "intelligence" apparatus, America's own clerical fascists and imperialism itself.
Tom Burghardt is the editor of the ANTIFA Information Bulletin.
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September 14, 2001
Dear friends, family, and all the people affected by the tragic act that took place 9.11. 01,
First of all I hope that everybody's friends and family are safe and unharmed!!!!
When I first woke up from the front lounge of our tour bus I couldn't believe what I was seeing. The TV was already turned on to the news and it repeatedly showed this plane crashing into the World Trade Center. I couldn't believe this was happening. I first thought about all the friends and family I have in NY and immediately started calling them. Since all the cell phones were turned off it took 2 days to get ahold of everybody. In the mean time I was thinking about one particular friend of mine who is a messenger in NY AND WAS VERY worried about him. Then I started thinking "what if I were in that building". I used to work in the mail room in one of the high-rises downtown and I think about all the office workers, secretaries, janitors etc. affected by this and it saddens me. In no way should any innocent people should ever experience anything like this.
I also feel bad for all the people of the Middle East and all the Muslims who live in this country that now have to face even more racist attacks on them. As much as I'm sadden by this I'm not surprised one bit. Cause there's millions of people all over the world that hate the US for doing the exact same thing to them for centuries. Only the US calls it "NATIONAL DEFENSE" not "terrorism". Because of this, now the US can go and blow the fuck out of who ever they want and nobody's gonna say shit about it. Cause now "its our right".
Now I know that I and we(us) must fight that much harder to bring an end to all this. Meanwhile we must envision the world that we all want to live in and what that looks like. What's it gonna take? I LOVE U ALL
EMBRACE THE CHAOS 911 01
WIL-DOG
Wil-Dog is a musician and member of the band Ozomatli
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by Katha Pollitt
The Nation, October 8, 2001
My daughter, who goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the World Trade Center, thinks we should fly an American flag out our window. Definitely not, I say: The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war. She tells me I'm wrong -- the flag means standing together and honoring the dead and saying no to terrorism. In a way we're both right: The Stars and Stripes is the only available symbol right now. In New York City, it decorates taxicabs driven by Indians and Pakistanis, the impromptu memorials of candles and flowers that have sprung up in front of every firehouse, the chi-chi art galleries and boutiques of SoHo. It has to bear a wide range of meanings, from simple, dignified sorrow to the violent anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry that has already resulted in murder, vandalism and arson around the country and harassment on New York City streets and campuses. It seems impossible to explain to a 13-year-old, for whom the war in Vietnam might as well be the War of Jenkins's Ear, the connection between waving the flag and bombing ordinary people half a world away back to the proverbial stone age. I tell her she can buy a flag with her own money and fly it out her bedroom window, because that's hers, but the living room is off-limits.
There are no symbolic representations right now for the things the world really needs -- equality and justice and humanity and solidarity and intelligence. The red flag is too bloodied by history; the peace sign is a retro fashion accessory. In much of the world, including parts of this country, the cross and crescent and Star of David are logos for nationalistic and sectarian hatred. Ann Coulter, fulminating in her syndicated column, called for carpet-bombing of any country where people "smiled" at news of the disaster: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity." What is this, the Crusades? The Rev. Jerry Falwell issued a belated mealy-mouthed apology for his astonishing remarks immediately after the attacks, but does anyone doubt that he meant them? The disaster was God's judgment on secular America, he observed, as famously secular New Yorkers were rushing to volunteer to dig out survivors, to give blood, food, money, anything--it was all the fault of "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians...the ACLU, People for the American Way." That's what the Taliban think too.
As I write, the war talk revolves around Afghanistan, home of the vicious Taliban and hideaway of Osama bin Laden. I've never been one to blame the United States for every bad thing that happens in the Third World, but it is a fact that our government supported militant Islamic fundamentalism in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion in 1979. The mujahedeen were freedom fighters against Communism, backed by more than $3 billion in US aid -- more money and expertise than for any other cause in CIA history -- and hailed as heroes by tag-along journalists from Dan Rather to William T. Vollmann, who saw these lawless fanatics as manly primitives untainted by the West. (There's a story in here about the attraction Afghan hypermasculinity holds for desk-bound modern men. How lovely not to pay lip service to women's equality! It's cowboys and Indians, with harems thrown in.) And if, with the Soviets gone, the vying warlords turned against one another, raped and pillaged and murdered the civilian population and destroyed what still remained of normal Afghan life, who could have predicted that? These people!
The Taliban, who rose out of this period of devastation, were boys, many of them orphans, from the wretched refugee camps of Pakistan, raised in the unnatural womanless hothouses of fundamentalist boarding schools. Even leaving aside their ignorance and provincialism and lack of modern skills, they could no more be expected to lead Afghanistan back to normalcy than an army made up of kids raised from birth in Romanian orphanages. Feminists and human-rights groups have been sounding the alarm about the Taliban since they took over Afghanistan in 1996. That's why interested Americans know that Afghan women are forced to wear the total shroud of the burqa and are banned from work and from leaving their homes unless accompanied by a male relative; that girls are barred from school; and that the Taliban -- far from being their nation's saviors, enforcing civic peace with their terrible swift Kalashnikovs -- are just the latest oppressors of the miserable population. What has been the response of the West to this news? Unless you count the absurd infatuation of European intellectuals with the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance of fundamentalist warlords (here we go again!), not much.
What would happen if the West took seriously the forces in the Muslim world who call for education, social justice, women's rights, democracy, civil liberties and secularism? Why does our foreign policy underwrite the clerical fascist government of Saudi Arabia -- and a host of nondemocratic regimes besides? What is the point of the continuing sanctions on Iraq, which have brought untold misery to ordinary people and awakened the most backward tendencies of Iraqi society while doing nothing to undermine Saddam Hussein? And why on earth are fundamentalist Jews from Brooklyn and Philadelphia allowed to turn Palestinians out of their homes on the West Bank? Because God gave them the land? Does any sane person really believe that?
Bombing Afghanistan to "fight terrorism" is to punish not the Taliban but the victims of the Taliban, the people we should be supporting. At the same time, war would reinforce the worst elements in our own society -- the flag-wavers and bigots and militarists. It's heartening that there have been peace vigils and rallies in many cities, and antiwar actions are planned in Washington, DC, for September 29-30, but look what even the threat of war has already done to Congress, where only a single representative, Barbara Lee, Democrat from California, voted against giving the President virtual carte blanche.
A friend has taken to wearing her rusty old women's Pentagon Action buttons -- at least they have a picture of the globe on them. The globe, not the flag, is the symbol that's wanted now.
Katha Pollitt is a poet and writer.
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A Widow's Plea for Non-Violence
by Amber Amundson
Chicago Tribune September 25, 2001
My husband, Craig Scott Amundson, of the U.S. Army lost his life in the line of duty at the Pentagon on Sept. 11 as the world looked on in horror and disbelief.
Losing my 28-year-old husband and father of our two young children is a terrible and painful experience.
His death is also part of an immense national loss and I am comforted by knowing so many share my grief.
But because I have lost Craig as part of this historic tragedy, my anguish is compounded exponentially by fear that his death will be used to justify new violence against other innocent victims.
I have heard angry rhetoric by some Americans, including many of our nation's leaders, who advise a heavy dose of revenge and punishment. To those leaders, I would like to make clear that my family and I take no comfort in your words of rage. If you choose to respond to this incomprehensible brutality by perpetuating violence against other innocent human beings, you may not do so in the name of justice for my husband. Your words and imminent acts of revenge only amplify our family's suffering, deny us the dignity of remembering our loved one in a way that would have made him proud, and mock his vision of America as a peacemaker in the world community.
Craig enlisted in the Army and was proud to serve his county. He was a patriotic American and a citizen of the world. Craig believed that by working from within the military system he could help to maintain the military focus on peacekeeping and strategic planning--to prevent violence and war. For the last two years Craig drove to his job at the Pentagon with a "visualize world peace" bumper sticker on his car. This was not empty rhetoric or contradictory to him, but part of his dream. He believed his role in the Army could further the cause of peace throughout the world.
Craig would not have wanted a violent response to avenge his death. And I cannot see how good can come out of it. We cannot solve violence with violence. Mohandas Gandhi said, "An eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind." We will no longer be able to see that we hold the light of liberty if we are blinded by vengeance, anger and fear. I ask our nation's leaders not to take the path that leads to more widespread hatreds--that make my husband's death just one more in an unending spiral of killing.
I call on our national leaders to find the courage to respond to this incomprehensible tragedy by breaking the cycle of violence. I call on them to marshal this great nation's skills and resources to lead a worldwide dialogue on freedom from terror and hate.
I do not know how to begin making a better world: I do believe it must be done, and I believe it is our leaders' responsibility to find a way. I urge them to take up this challenge and respond to our nation's and my personal tragedy with a new beginning that gives us hope for a peaceful global community.
Amber Amundson is the wife of the late Craig Scott Amundson, an enlisted specialist in the Army.
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Islam And The West Are Inadequate Banners
by Edward Said
September 16, 2001, The Observer (London)
Spectacular horror of the sort that struck New York (and to a lesser degree Washington) has ushered in a new world of unseen, unknown assailants, terror missions without political message, senseless destruction.
For the residents of this wounded city, the consternation, fear, and sustained sense of outrage and shock will certainly continue for a long time, as will the genuine sorrow and affliction that so much carnage has so cruelly imposed on so many.
New Yorkers have been fortunate that Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a normally rebarbative and unpleasantly combative, even retrograde figure, has rapidly attained Churchillian status. Calmly, unsentimentally, and with extraordinary compassion, he has marshalled the city's heroic police, fire and emergency services to admirable effect and, alas, with huge loss of life. Giuliani's was the first voice of caution against panic and jingoistic attacks on the city's large Arab and Muslim communities, the first to express the commonsense of anguish, the first to press everyone to try to resume life after the shattering blows.
Would that that were all. The national television reporting has of course brought the horror of those dreadful winged juggernauts into every household, unremittingly, insistently, not always edifyingly. Most commentary has stressed, indeed magnified, the expected and the predictable in what most Americans feel: terrible loss, anger, outrage, a sense of violated vulnerability, a desire for vengeance and un-restrained retribution. Beyond formulaic expressions of grief and patriotism, every politician and accredited pundit or expert has dutifully repeated how we shall not be defeated, not be deterred, not stop until terrorism is exterminated. This is a war against terrorism, everyone says, but where, on what fronts, for what concrete ends? No answers are provided, except the vague suggestion that the Middle East and Islam are what 'we' are up against, and that terrorism must be destroyed.
What is most depressing, however, is how little time is spent trying to understand America's role in the world, and its direct involvement in the complex reality beyond the two coasts that have for so long kept the rest of the world extremely distant and virtually out of the average American's mind. You'd think that 'America' was a sleeping giant rather than a superpower almost constantly at war, or in some sort of conflict, all over the Islamic domains. Osama bin Laden's name and face have become so numbingly familiar to Americans as in effect to obliterate any his tory he and his shadowy followers might have had before they became stock symbols of everything loathsome and hateful to the collective imagination. Inevitably, then, collective passions are being funnelled into a drive for war that uncannily resembles Captain Ahab in pursuit of Moby Dick, rather than what is going on, an imperial power injured at home for the first time, pursuing its interests systematically in what has become a suddenly reconfigured geography of conflict, without clear borders, or visible actors. Manichaean symbols and apocalyptic scenarios are bandied about with future consequences and rhetorical restraint thrown to the winds.
Rational understanding of the situation is what is needed now, not more drum-beating. George Bush and his team clearly want the latter, not the former. Yet to most people in the Islamic and Arab worlds the official US is synonymous with arrogant power, known for its sanctimoniously munificent support not only of Israel but of numerous repressive Arab regimes, and its inattentiveness even to the possibility of dialogue with secular movements and people who have real grievances. Anti-Americanism in this context is not based on a hatred of modernity or technology-envy: it is based on a narrative of concrete interventions, specific depredations and, in the cases of the Iraqi people's suffering under US-imposed sanctions and US support for the 34-year-old Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Israel is now cynically exploiting the American catastrophe by intensifying its military occupation and oppression of the Palestinians. Political rhetoric in the US has overridden these things by flinging about words like 'terrorism' and 'freedom' whereas, of course, such large abstractions have mostly hidden sordid material interests, the influence of the oil, defence and Zionist lobbies now consolidating their hold on the entire Middle East, and an age-old religious hostility to (and ignorance of) 'Islam' that takes new forms every day.
Intellectual responsibility, however, requires a still more critical sense of the actuality. There has been terror of course, and nearly every struggling modern movement at some stage has relied on terror. This was as true of Mandela's ANC as it was of all the others, Zionism included. And yet bombing defenceless civilians with F-16s and helicopter gunships has the same structure and effect as more conventional nationalist terror.
What is bad about all terror is when it is attached to religious and political abstractions and reductive myths that keep veering away from history and sense. This is where the secular consciousness has to try to make itself felt, whether in the US or in the Middle East. No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents, most particularly when only a small group of people are in charge of such actions and feel themselves to represent the cause without having a real mandate to do so.
Besides, much as it has been quarrelled over by Muslims, there isn't a single Islam: there are Islams, just as there are Americas. This diversity is true of all traditions, religions or nations even though some of their adherents have futiley tried to draw boundaries around themselves and pin their creeds down neatly. Yet history is far more complex and contradictory than to be represented by demagogues who are much less representative than either their followers or opponents claim. The trouble with religious or moral fundamentalists is that today their primitive ideas of revolution and resistance, including a willingness to kill and be killed, seem all too easily attached to technological sophistication and what appear to be gratifying acts of horrifying retaliation. The New York and Washington suicide bombers seem to have been middle-class, educated men, not poor refugees. Instead of getting a wise leadership that stresses education, mass mobilisation and patient organisation in the service of a cause, the poor and the desperate are often conned into the magical thinking and quick bloody solutions that such appalling models pro vide, wrapped in lying religious claptrap.
On the other hand, immense military and economic power are no guarantee of wisdom or moral vision. Sceptical and humane voices have been largely unheard in the present crisis, as 'America' girds itself for a long war to be fought somewhere out there, along with allies who have been pressed into service on very uncertain grounds and for imprecise ends. We need to step back from the imaginary thresholds that separate people from each other and re-examine the labels, reconsider the limited resources available, decide to share our fates with each other as cultures mostly have done, despite the bellicose cries and creeds.
'Islam' and 'the West' are simply inadequate as banners to follow blindly. Some will run behind them, but for future generations to condemn themselves to prolonged war and suffering without so much as a critical pause, without looking at interdependent histories of injustice and oppression, without trying for common emancipation and mutual enlightenment seems far more wilful than necessary. Demonisation of the Other is not a sufficient basis for any kind of decent politics, certainly not now when the roots of terror in injustice can be addressed, and the terrorists isolated, deterred or put out of business. It takes patience and education, but is more worth the investment than still greater levels of large-scale violence and suffering.
Edward Said is a writer and professor at Columbia University.
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A Pure, High Note of Anguish
by Barbara Kingsolver
September 23, 2001
TUCSON -- I want to do something to help right now. But I can't give blood (my hematocrit always runs too low), and I'm too far way to give anybody shelter or a drink of water. I can only give words. My verbal hemoglobin never seems to wane, so words are what I'll offer up in this time that asks of us the best citizenship we've ever mustered. I don't mean to say I have a cure. Answers to the main questions of the day--Where was that fourth plane headed? How did they get knives through security?--I don't know any of that. I have some answers, but only to the questions nobody is asking right now but my 5-year old. Why did all those people die when they didn't do anything wrong? Will it happen to me? Is this the worst thing that's ever happened? Who were those children cheering that they showed for just a minute, and why were they glad? Please, will this ever, ever happen to me?
There are so many answers, and none: It is desperately painful to see people die without having done anything to deserve it, and yet this is how lives end nearly always. We get old or we don't, we get cancer, we starve, we are battered, we get on a plane thinking we're going home but never make it. There are blessings and wonders and horrific bad luck and no guarantees. We like to pretend life is different from that, more like a game we can actually win with the right strategy, but it isn't. And, yes, it's the worst thing that's happened, but only this week. Two years ago, an earthquake in Turkey killed 17,000 people in a day, babies and mothers and businessmen, and not one of them did a thing to cause it. The November before that, a hurricane hit Honduras and Nicaragua and killed even more, buried whole villages and erased family lines and even now, people wake up there empty-handed. Which end of the world shall we talk about? Sixty years ago, Japanese airplanes bombed Navy boys who were sleeping on ships in gentle Pacific waters. Three and a half years later, American planes bombed a plaza in Japan where men and women were going to work, where schoolchildren were playing, and more humans died at once than anyone thought possible. Seventy thousand in a minute. Imagine. Then twice that many more, slowly, from the inside.
There are no worst days, it seems. Ten years ago, early on a January morning, bombs rained down from the sky and caused great buildings in the city of Baghdad to fall down--hotels, hospitals, palaces, buildings with mothers and soldiers inside--and here in the place I want to love best, I had to watch people cheering about it. In Baghdad, survivors shook their fists at the sky and said the word "evil." When many lives are lost all at once, people gather together and say words like "heinous" and "honor" and "revenge," presuming to make this awful moment stand apart somehow from the ways people die a little each day from sickness or hunger. They raise up their compatriots' lives to a sacred place--we do this, all of us who are human--thinking our own citizens to be more worthy of grief and less willingly risked than lives on other soil. But broken hearts are not mended in this ceremony, because, really, every life that ends is utterly its own event--and also in some way it's the same as all others, a light going out that ached to burn longer. Even if you never had the chance to love the light that's gone, you miss it. You should. You bear this world and everything that's wrong with it by holding life still precious, each time, and starting over.
And those children dancing in the street? That is the hardest question. We would rather discuss trails of evidence and whom to stamp out, even the size and shape of the cage we might put ourselves in to stay safe, than to mention the fact that our nation is not universally beloved; we are also despised. And not just by "The Terrorist," that lone, deranged non-man in a bad photograph whose opinion we can clearly dismiss, but by ordinary people in many lands. Even by little boys--whole towns full of them it looked like--jumping for joy in school shoes and pilled woolen sweaters.
There are a hundred ways to be a good citizen, and one of them is to look finally at the things we don't want to see. In a week of terrifying events, here is one awful, true thing that hasn't much been mentioned: Some people believe our country needed to learn how to hurt in this new way. This is such a large lesson, so hatefully, wrongfully taught, but many people before us have learned honest truths from wrongful deaths. It still may be within our capacity of mercy to say this much is true: We didn't really understand how it felt when citizens were buried alive in Turkey or Nicaragua or Hiroshima. Or that night in Baghdad. And we haven't cared enough for the particular brothers and mothers taken down a limb or a life at a time, for such a span of years that those little, briefly jubilant boys have grown up with twisted hearts. How could we keep raining down bombs and selling weapons, if we had? How can our president still use that word "attack" so casually, like a move in a checker game, now that we have awakened to see that word in our own newspapers, used like this: Attack on America.
Surely, the whole world grieves for us right now. And surely it also hopes we might have learned, from the taste of our own blood, that every war is both won and lost, and that loss is a pure, high note of anguish like a mother singing to any empty bed. The mortal citizens of a planet are praying right now that we will bear in mind, better than ever before, that no kind of bomb ever built will extinguish hatred.
"Will this happen to me?" is the wrong question, I'm sad to say. It always was.
Barbara Kingsolver is a writer and novelist.
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Will Tears Ever Stop?
by John Gerassi
September 22, 2001
I can't help crying. As soon as I see a person on TV telling the heart-rendering story of the tragic fate of their loved-one in the World Trade Center disaster, I can't control my tears.
But then I wonder why didn't I cry when our troops wiped out some 5,000 poor people in Panama's El Chorillo neighborhood on the excuse of looking for Noriega. Our leaders knew he was hiding elsewhere but we destroyed El Chorillo because the folks living there were nationalists who wanted the U.S. out of Panama completely.
Worse still, why didn't I cry when we killed two million Vietnamese, mostly innocent peasants, in a war which its main architect, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, knew we could not win? When I went to give blood the other day, I spotted a Cambodian doing the same, three up in the line, and that reminded me: Why didn't I cry when we helped Pol Pot butcher another million by giving him arms and money, because he was opposed to "our enemy" (who eventually stopped the killing fields)? To stay up but not cry that evening, I decided to go to a movie. I chose Lumumba, at the Film Forum, and again I realized that I hadn't cried when our government arranged for the murder of the Congo's only decent leader, to be replaced by General Mobutu, a greedy, vicious, murdering dictator. Nor did I cry when the CIA arranged for the overthrow of Indonesia's Sukarno, who had fought the Japanese World War II invaders and established a free independent country, and then replaced him by another General, Suharto, who had collaborated with the Japanese and who proceeded to execute at least half a million "Marxists" (in a country where, if folks had ever heard of Marx, it was at best Groucho)?
I watched TV again last night and cried again at the picture of that wonderful now-missing father playing with his two-month old child. Yet when I remembered the slaughter of thousands of Salvadorans, so graphically described in the Times by Ray Bonner, or the rape and murder of those American nuns and lay sisters there, all perpetrated by CIA trained and paid agents, I never shed a tear. I even cried when I heard how brave had been Barbara Olson, wife of the Solicitor General, whose political views I detested. But I didn't cry when the US invaded that wonderful tiny Caribbean nation of Grenada and killed innocent citizens who hoped to get a better life by building a tourist airfield, which my government called proof of a Russian base, but then finished building once the island was secure in the US camp again.
Why didn't I cry when Ariel Sharon, today Israel's prime minister, planned, then ordered, the massacre of two thousand poor Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, the same Sharon who, with such other Irgun and Stern Gang terrorists become prime ministers as Begin and Shamir, killed the wives and children of British officers by blowing up the King David hotel where they were billeted?
I guess one only cries only for one's own. But is that a reason to demand vengeance on anyone who might disagree with us? That's what Americans seem to want. Certainly our government does, and so too most of our media. Do we really believe that we have a right to exploit the poor folk of the world for our benefit, because we claim we are free and they are not? So now we're going to go to war. We are certainly entitled to go after those who killed so many of our innocent brothers and sisters. And we'll win, of course. Against Bin Laden. Against Taliban. Against Iraq. Against whoever and whatever. In the process we'll kill a few innocent children again. Children who have no clothes for the coming winter. No houses to shelter them. And no schools to learn why they are guilty, at two or four or six years old. Maybe Evangelists Falwell and Robertson will claim their death is good because they weren't Christians, and maybe some State Department spokesperson will tell the world that they were so poor that they're now better off.
And then what? Will we now be able to run the world the way we want to? With all the new legislation establishing massive surveillance of you and me, our CEOs will certainly be pleased that the folks demonstrating against globalization will now be cowed for ever. No more riots in Seattle, Quebec or Genoa. Peace at last. Until next time. Who will it be then? A child grown-up who survived our massacre of his innocent parents in El Chorillo? A Nicaraguan girl who learned that her doctor mother and father were murdered by a bunch of gangsters we called democratic contras who read in the CIA handbook that the best way to destroy the only government which was trying to give the country's poor a better lot was to kill its teachers, health personnel and government farm workers? Or maybe it will be a bitter Chilean who is convinced that his whole family was wiped out on order of Nixon's Secretary of State Henry Kissinger who could never tell the difference between a communist and a democratic socialist or even a nationalist.
When will we Americans learn that as long as we keep trying to run the world for the sake of the bottom line, we will suffer someone's revenge? No war will ever stop terrorism as long as we use terror to have our way.
So I stopped crying because I stopped watching TV. I went for a walk. Just four houses from mine. There, a crowd had congregated to lay flowers and lit candles in front of our local firehouse. It was closed. It had been closed since Tuesday because the firemen, a wonderful bunch of friendly guys who always greeted neighborhood folks with smiles and good cheer, had rushed so fast to save the victims of the first tower that they perished with them when it collapsed. And I cried again.
So I said to myself when I wrote this, don't send it; some of your students, colleagues, neighbors will hate you, maybe even harm you. But then I put on the TV again, and there was Secretary of State Powell telling me that it will be okay to go to war against these children, these poor folks, these US-haters, because we are civilized and they are not. So I decided to risk it. Maybe, reading this, one more person will ask: Why are so many people in the world ready to die to give us a taste of what we give them?
John Gerassi is a professor of political science at Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY
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America's Rulers Do Not Have Clean Hands
by Crispin Beltran
September 15, 2001
The International League of Peoples' Struggle condoles with the families of the civilian victims in the New York and Pentagon attacks by a yet unidentified extremist group but condemns the US government and its high officials for using the tragedy to hide their own responsibility, whip up a reactionary type of patriotism and further intensify their oppression and aggression against other peoples and nations.
US Pres. George W. Bush has embarked on a dangerous course of stirring up war hysteria and of fueling anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiments among the American people. He has asked for special powers in his so-called war against terrorism. His loyal subalterns are calling for the intensification of domestic surveillance that can be used against suspected terrorists as much as against those who are opposed to government economic and social policies.
The US rulers cannot pretend to have clean hands. They have a long history of installing in power and propping up dictators who sowed terror on their own people. The CIA and the US military services have given special training to torturers and death squads in El Salvador, the Philippines, Peru, Guatemala, and others. The US has been responsible for the death, maiming and dislocation of millions of people in its wars of aggression in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Yugoslavia, and others.
The US has arrogated unto itself the power to act as the "world's policeman." In the interest of the world's peoples? No, in the interest of its own giant monopoly corporations and banks. It uses its overwhelming superiority in political and military power to open up markets and gobble up the world's resources. Those who stand up against it receive their "just" punishments -- from economic blackmail and blockade, withdrawal and withholding of "aid" to outright military intervention, aggression and occupation.
In this time of national mourning, we call on the American people to contemplate on why their government's policies and actions stir up so much hostility, deep anger and resistance. We call on them to reject the jingoism that is being fomented and the war preparations that are being carried out by the Bush administration. Only then can something good come out of this national tragedy.
Crispin Beltran is Chairperson of the International League of Peoples' Struggle
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Sympathy for The Victims at WTC and Condemnation of Terrorism
by Jose Maria Sison
September 18, 2001
I wish to express the deepest sympathy for the thousands of civilian victims, including a considerable number of Filipinos and Filipino-Americans, in the deadly terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on 11 September 2001.
I extend sincerest condolences to the families and friends of those who died in the tragic event. I am sad that ordinary civilians take the main brunt of terrorist acts done in obvious retaliation against the long history and current acts of terrorism of US imperialism.
Customary laws and international conventions set the standard for the conduct of war in a civilized world in contrast with a barbaric one. Such a standard prohibits acts of terrorism against the civilian population, condemns crimes against humanity and requires respect for human rights and humanitarian conduct towards the civilian population and hors de combat.
Terrorism may be defined as the willful and malicious infliction and threat of death and other physical harm on innocent civilians. The US no less has been a notorious perpetrator of terrorism on a scale far larger than what is now being alleged against the private group of Osama bin Laden. But the people in the US should not be targeted for mass slaughter for the terrorist crimes of the US imperialists.
In recent times, the US officialdom and mass media have dished up as acts of humanitarianism and as audio-visual entertainment the mass destruction of human lives in Iraq and Yugoslavia through the use of US high-tech air power and cruise missiles on the civilian population and their social infrastructure.
The US and Israel have practically converted Palestine into a slaughterhouse for the Palestinian people. With overweening arrogance, US President Bush has encouraged the Sharon regime to destroy Palestinian lives and property at will.
The US has a long record of terrorism. It is responsible for the massacre of hundreds of thousands or nearly 10 percent of the Filipino people in the course of the Filipino-American war. It is also responsible for the massacre of more than a hundred thousand Japanese civilians in a matter of seconds in the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is further responsible for the massacre of millions of civilians in Korea, Indonesia, Indochina and elsewhere in the course of the Cold War.
The US has practiced the evil of terrorism for so long and this is now recoiling upon the US itself. The imperialist hyperpower is now reaping the whirlwind of terrorism that it has sown all over the world. Some of the adversaries of the US now consider as fair game the killing of American and other civilians in the same malignant spirit that the US does not wince at wreaking direct or collateral damage at the expense of civilian populations abroad.
In one more sense, the US is responsible for generating terrorism as its own Frankenstein. Even Osama bin Laden, the main suspect of the US in the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, is a former protegé of the US in fighting the Soviet armed forces in Afghanistan in the course of the Cold War.
At any rate, the perpetration of terrorism by the US imperialists cannot be used by any avowed anti-US force to justify terrorism against the American people. Justice must be rendered to the victims at the WTC just as it must be rendered to the millions of victims of US imperialist terrorism.
It is now clear that the US is vulnerable to acts of terrorism arising from the contradictions within the American Right, between the US and its puppets-turned-enemies and among the imperialist powers. Such contradictions are intensifying under conditions of the worsening crisis of the world capitalist system.
The US monopoly bourgeoisie and policy-makers are increasingly self-conscious about the vulnerability of the US but they are callously using this to rationalize the suppression of the democratic rights of the people in the US and abroad. They are becoming even more hell-bent on oppressing and exploiting the people of the world.
Since the 1950s, it has become clear that the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans can no longer protect the US from nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles. Now, it is also becoming clear that a national missile defense system cannot protect the US from "luggage bombs" (miniaturized nuclear weapons in suitcases) and from hijacked jumbo jets or explosive-laden trucks.
As a consequence of the attack on the WTC towers and the Pentagon, the US as a whole (the Bush regime with bipartisan support) is trying to push its own colossal kind of terrorism under the pretext of fighting terrorism. Bush has received from the US Congress war-making powers similar to those given to Lyndon B. Johnson after the US-fabricated Tonkin Gulf incident and has received an initial funding of 40 billion USD.
The US has already identified the band of Osama bin Laden as the main suspect in the 11 September incident. And yet, US State Secretary Colin Powell has declared that the US will make a "global assault" on "terrorism in general" throughout the world. US vice president Cheney and other high officials have called for the most unbridled kind of dirty tricks, such as the unlimited hiring of human rights violator and other unsavory characters and the lifting of the ban on assassination of leaders opposed to US imperialism.
The US is now using the incident as a pretext for expanding extraterritorial powers for the benefit of its military forces abroad and for launching all sorts of terrorism against the peoples that wage revolution, nations that fight for liberation and states that assert their independence. We can therefore expect more US acts of aggression, intervention and other acts of terrorism from the US and from its most servile allies and puppets.
In abject servility to the US, the Macapagal-Arroyo regime in the Philippines has volunteered the use of the Philippines again as a base for US aggression and intervention as in the past in connection with the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War and other armed conflicts. The Filipino people must resist such scheme of the US and the puppet regime.
The people of the world, including progressive American forces, should forewarn the American people not to be carried away by jingoism, war hysteria and the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim drumbeat. The US imperialists should not be allowed to run berserk with their own brand of terrorism and to obscure their responsibility for the worsening socioeconomic crisis, the reemergence of fascism and the growing danger of war.
By unleashing acts of terrorism in the world, the US can only generate hatred for US imperialism and rouse the just revolutionary resistance of the people of the world. At the same time, it will continue to provoke such terrorists as those responsible for the attacks on the WTC to give the US a dose of its own medicine.
Terrorism from any quarter is reprehensible and must be combated and eradicated. The people will ultimately defeat US imperialism as it increasingly uses terrorism. The few avowedly anti-US elements that use terrorism will only destroy themselves on the road of nihilism.
Only the revolutionary mass movement can defeat US imperialism and the local reactionaries and sweep away terrorism from any direction. As the crisis of the world capitalist system worsens and deepens, the revolutionary mass movement of the proletariat and the people in general is rising and carrying forward the anti-imperialist and socialist cause.
Jose Maria Sison is Founding Chairman & General Consultant, International League of Peoples' Struggle (ILPS) & Chairman, International Network for Philippine Studies (INPS)
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"Attack On America": Intelligence Gathering And Human Rights Restrictions
by Jennifer K. Harbury
September 18, 2001
In the wake of the tragedy and horror which occurred last week in both New York City and Washington D.C., I find myself compelled to write and comment upon the reaction of certain government officials. There can be no doubt that an enormous lapse in our national intelligence efforts has occurred, resulting in the simultaneous hijacking of four separate passenger jets,the destruction of the World Trade Towers, an outright attack on the Pentagon, and unimaginable human suffering. In response to public criticism, some officials have decried certain human rights restrictions which they claim have impeded the ability to taken action and to obtain needed information from "unsavory persons". Specifically, they are referring to U.S. legal prohibitions against assassinations, and the more recent requirements that before our CIA agents may hire a known human rights violator as an informant, they must notify and obtain clearance from their superiors. The last restriction was imposed after my husband, a Mayan resistance leader, was secretly detained and tortured for two years, then executed without trial, by Guatemalan military officers on CIA payroll.
I wish to begin my response by expressing my own deep shock and sadness overlast week's savage actions against the civilians of New York and Washington. As an attorney born and raised in the northeast, I had many friends in offices all too near to the World Trade Center, and have agonized over their safety for many days now. More searing still for me have been the stories of those who are still missing, and the pain of their desperate friends and families. My heart goes out to each and every one of them, for I remember such pain all too well. It took me three long years and several dangerous hunger strikes to learn what had become of my own husband. By then, of course, it was too late to save his life.
I most certainly understand and share the rage we must all feel over this national tragedy. However, revenge is indeed best served cold; and we should take care not to worsen the security of our own citizenry by lashing out blindly instead of thinking clearly. As I have stated in the past, I certainly agree that under emergency circumstances involving the imminent loss of human life, such as a possible bombing or hijacking, greater flexibility should be permitted to our intelligence gathering personnel. However, precisely such flexibility is built into the current rules. Our CIA agents are not prohibited from purchasing information from unsavory characters. They are simply required to inform their superiors, who in turn will ascertain that such connections are justified. In cases involving international terrorism, there is little question that such justification exists. It is thus difficult to see how our intelligence was hampered in this context; and indeed, CIA spokespersons themselves say that they have continued to use such operatives without difficulties.
The complained of human rights restrictions are not designed to obstruct government efforts to protect us from terrorist actions. To the contrary, they are designed to prevent our own agencies from themselves aiding and abetting and collaborating in terrorist-like actions against the citizens of other countries. Sadly, there is no shortage of well documented examples to illustrate this need. In 1973 the people of Chile watched in horror similar to our own, as their capitol building was bombed, their elected President assassinated, and their friends and family herded into the National Stadium and other detention centers, then battered and killed by the thousands. U.S.Agency files more than establish the deep involvement and responsibility ofthe CIA for the Pinochet coup and its violent aftermath. The CIA is also responsible for the bloody 1954 coup in Guatemala, and the frightening repression which followed. The United Nations Truth Commission report of1999 severely criticized our intelligence community for its close collaboration with and support for the Guatemalan military throughout its counter-insurgency campaign. The army was found responsible for some 93% ofthe war crimes, which included the torture, murder and "disappearance" of some 200,000 civilians and the massacre of some 660 Mayan villages. The U.N. also ruled that the army was guilty of genocide; the same army the CIA had chosen as its close friend and partner. These actions were not taken to protect American lives from terrorists, but rather, to coldly guard our cashflow. This is hardly a record of which we, the citizens of this nation, can be proud. Nor is our own security increased by fomenting such hatred against us abroad. It is because of excess and abuses of this nature that the human rights restrictions in question, flimsy though they may be, are now inplace. They are in place to protect the sanctity of human life, ours as well as our friends' and neighbors'.
I worry greatly that as our intelligence and military agencies sow, so shall we the citizens reap. Let us not, as we plunge towards war, toss aside the human rights protections so hard won during the last hundred years, whether the Geneva Conventions or the ban upon torture. I speak from experience. My husband was detained in complete isolation for two years. He was battered,drugged, injected with toxins, and held in a full body cast to prevent his escape, then either flung from a helicopter or dismembered. His body has yet to be returned to me. Who among us could ever accept such a fate for any ofthe young men and women in our armed forces, should they fall captive? The answer , of course, is no one. For this very reason we had best hold firm to our most basic human rights restrictions. Let us not inflict what we would not wish to suffer.
Jennifer K. Harbury is a lawyer and political activist.
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Susan Sontag
The New Yorker, September 24, 2001
The disconnect between last Tuesday's monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world" but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word "cowardly" is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards.
Our leaders are bent on convincing us that everything is O.K. America is not afraid. Our spirit is unbroken, although this was a day that will live in infamy and America is now at war. But everything is not O.K. And this was not Pearl Harbor. We have a robotic President who assures us that America still stands tall. A wide spectrum of public figures, in and out of office, who are strongly opposed to the policies being pursued abroad by this Administration apparently feel free to say nothing more than that they stand united behind President Bush. A lot of thinking needs to be done, and perhaps is being done in Washington and elsewhere, about the ineptitude of American intelligence and counter-intelligence, about options available to American foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, and about what constitutes a smart program of military defense.
But the public is not being asked to bear much of the burden of reality. The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy. Those in public office have let us know that they consider their task to be a manipulative one: confidence-building and grief management. Politics, the politics of a democracy -- which entails disagreement, which promotes candor -- has been replaced by psychotherapy. Let's by all means grieve together. But let's not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen. "Our country is strong," we are told again and again. I for one don't find this entirely consoling. Who doubts that America is strong? But that's not all America has to be.
Susan Sontag is an essayist and novelist.
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Untitled
by Terry Bisson
On Sept. 11, 2001, along with millions of others, I saw an airliner deliberately flown into a skyscraper. The Boeing 767, the familiar image of peace, travel, mobility, access and modernity -- as beautiful as a clipper ship -- turned into a bomb. A bomb filled with people hurled into thousands more. I cried out. I'm still crying.
If this is one world -- and it is -- the Sept. 11 attack was a self-inflicted wound. The Islamic suicide bombers must have shut the cockpit door and ignored the cries of terror ("Oh my God! Oh my God!") in the cabin behind them. Just as we have shut the door here and ignored the cries of the Palestinians and the millions who suffer from our actions in the Middle East and around the world.
I am for globalism and world trade (if not the World Trade Organization). But in a transparent world where everyone can go everywhere and know everything, there must be at least a rough justice. Israel must close down the settlements. The United States must stop bombing Iraq and get out of Saudi Arabia. The Arab and Islamic peoples must deal with the cancer of reactionary Islamic fanaticism. We, here in the United States, can help only by sharing the world's resources more equitably; by restraining our own fanatics; by getting out of the way; by pulling out, not by going in.
War is an old answer to a new question. It's true that fanatical religious fundamentalism must be stopped, but it is not -- it cannot be -- the task of the U.S. military and the Green Berets. Ask the Vietnamese. Hell, ask the Russians. If we in the United States insist on becoming the avengers who punish the perpetrators, we make suicide bombers of ourselves and our children. This is one world. Sept. 11 was a self-inflicted wound. Do we mutilate ourselves again, and again, or take on the work of healing? I say this not as a pacifist but as a realist interested in the history of humankind, which stretches far further into the future than into the past. Further than we have yet dreamed. We have learned to speak and to fly; we have created a global society. One world. It's time to deal with what that means.
Terry Bisson is a science-fiction writer
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FBI investigation of Women in Black
by Ronnie Gilbert
October 5, 2001
For the second time in my life - at least - a group that I belong to is being investigated by the FBI. The first was the Weavers. The Weavers were a recording industry phenomenon. In 1950 we recorded a couple of songs from our American/World fok music repertoire, Leadbelly's "Goodnight Irene" and (ironically) the Israeli "Tzena, Tzena, Tzena" and sold millions of records for the almost-defunct record label. Folk music entered the mainstream, and the Weavers were stars.
By 1952 it was over. The record company dropped us, eager television producers stopped knocking on our door. The Weavers were on a private yet well-publicized roster of suspected entertainment industry reds. The FBI came a-calling.
This week, I just found out that Women in Black, another group of peace activists I belong to, is the subject of an FBI investigation. Women in Black is a loosely knit international network of women who vigil against violence, often silently, each group autonomous, each group focused on the particular problems of personal and state violence in its part of the world.
Because my group is composed mostly of Jewish women, we focus on the Middle East, protesting the cycle of violence and revenge in Israel and the Palestinian Territories.
The FBI is threatening my group with a Grand Jury investigation. Of what? That we publicly call the Israeli military's occupation of the mandated Palestine lands illegal? So does the World Court and the United Nations.
That destroying hundreds of thousands of the Palestinians' olive and fruit trees, blocking roads and demolishing homes promotes hatred and terrorism in the Middle East? Even President Bush and Colin Powell have gotten around to saying so. So what is to investigate? That some of us are in contact with activist Palestinian peace groups? This is bad?
The Jewish Women in Black of Jerusalem have stood vigil every Friday for 13 years in protest against the Occupation; Muslim women from Palestinian peace groups stand with them at every opportunity. We praise and honor them, these Jewish and Arab women who endure hatred and frequent abuse from extremists on both sides for what they do. We are not alone in our admiration. Jerusalem Women in Black is a nominee for the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize, along with the Bosnia Women in Black, now ten years old.
If the FBI cannot or will not distinguish between groups who collude in hatred and terrorism, and peace activists who struggle in the full light of day against all forms of terrorism, we are in serious trouble.
I have seen such trouble before in my lifetime. It was called McCarthyism. In the hysterical atmosphere of the early Cold War, anyone who had signed a peace petition, who had joined an organization opposing violence or racism or had tried to raise money for the refugee children of the Spanish Civil War, in other words who had openly advocated what was not popular at the time, was fair game.
In my case, the FBI visited The Weavers' booking agent, the recording company, my neighbors, my dentist husband's patients, my friends. In the waning of our career, the Weavers were followed down the street, accosted onstage by drunken "patriots", warned by friendly hotel employees to keep the door open if we rehearsed in anyone's room so as not to become targets for the vice squad. It was nasty. Every two-bit local wannabe G-man joined the dragnet searching out and identifying "communist spies."
In all those self-debasing years how many spies were pulled in by that dragnet? Nary a one. Instead it pulled down thousands of teachers, union members, scientists, journalists, actors, entertainers like us, who saw our lives disrupted, our jobs, careers go down the drain, our standing in the community lost, even our children harrassed. A scared population soon shut their mouths up tight.
Thus came the silence of the 1950s and early 60s, when no notable voice of reason was heard to say, "Hey, wait a minute. Look what we're doing to ourselves, to the land of the free and the home of the brave," when not one dissenting intelligence was allowed a public voice to warn against zealous foreign policies we'd later come to regret, would be regretting now, if our leaders were honest.
Today, in the wake of the worst hate crime of the millenium, a dragnet is out for "terroriststs" and we are told that certain civil liberties may have to be curtailed for our own security. Which ones? I'm curious to know. The First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech or of the press? The right of people peaceably to assemble? Suddenly, deja vu - haven't I been here before? Hysterical neo-McCarthyism does not equal security, never will.
The bitter lesson September 11's horrific tragedy should have taught us and our government is that only an honest re-evaluation of our foreign policies and careful, focused and intelligent intelligence work can hope to combat operations like the one that robbed all of us and their families of 6,000 decent working people. We owe the dead that, at least. As for Women in Black, we intend to keep on keeping on.
Ronnie Gilbert performed with the folk music band The Weavers in the early 1950s and today an activist in the Bay Area.
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BOY SETS FIRE's response to the tragic events of September 11th.
by BOYSETSFIRE
September 19, 2001
In response to last weeks devastating attacks the United States faced in NYC, Washington DC, and Somerset, PA, we would like to express our deepest condolences to the people and families involved in these horrific incidences. We do not support any violent actions, which lead to the loss of innocent life regardless of where in the world it takes place and whomever may be the offender. Our thoughts and hearts are with the victims of this tragedy.
We now must come to terms with this monumental event, but let us not forget the struggle we face everyday in search for a better life. We as US citizens are now confronted with what thousands of people around the world face everyday. From the bombing of schools in Iraq, to the slaughter of men, women and children in South America, to the massive lay-offs now occurring within the airline industry, we all must look further than we have looked before for a solution which will ultimately end the road of destruction we are traveling. It is now proven that the biggest military budgets, and the most technologically advanced military weapons and missile defense systems are not going to protect nor serve as devices to discourage death and destruction or impose fear to those willing to act out.
As reports show that Osama Bin Laden is perhaps responsible for this atrocity, many of us are unaware that he was in fact on the CIA's payroll during the Reagan years. Joining the likes of Nazi Gestapo chiefs after WWII and Manuel Noriega in the 60's, 70's and 80's. The United States had funneled over $5 billion dollars in cash and weapons into Afghanistan to dozens of guerilla groups who fought against the Soviets. Another attempt by the US to smash the threat of Communism around the world. The CIA transferred sensitive weapons technology to fanatical Muslim extremists and now, our own tools and weapons are or could be used against us if a conflict occurs. As President Bush has stated that we will now fight against every terrorist group worldwide, we will be fighting against those that we have directly trained! It has obviously been shown that even down to our own planes and technology can be used against us on our own soil.
It is now the time where we must all acknowledge the fact that indeed, true change and peace comes from within. True revolution starts with the advancement of ones mind and soul, which shall lead to policies and practices that are meant to benefit people, not destroy them. This goes for not only the offenders of this attack, but for our own domestic and foreign policies. Those who committed this horrible crime did not do so because they are jealous of our so called "freedom". They did this due to the policies our elected officials approve and execute which in turn jeopardize the livelihood of those around the world. We must all pay attention to the current events in order to protect our rights and not let elected (or selected) officials carry out their planned massive witch hunt against any of those accused of radical thought, as has been recently discussed in the capitol. We can quite simply lose our rights of speech and expression through neglected bureaucratic reasoning. These presentations can lead to law, which can quite possibly lead to a total police state if we as the people don't stand up and protect as well as represent our rights against such foolish ideas. Justice must be served, but justice must not stop with the accusation of just one criminal. The criminals who exist within our own government must too be brought to justice. Only a real solution will be met when we root up all of which causes such evil to occur, and live in a country and a world that is for the people and by the people. No Justice, No Peace.
BoySetsFire is a hardcore music band from Delaware.
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Statement Of Representative Barbara Lee (D-Ca) In Opposition To S.J.Res. 23, Authorizing The Use Of Military Force
I rise today with a heavy heart, one that is filled with sorrow for the families and loved ones who were killed and injured this week. Only the most foolish or the most callous would not understand the grief that has gripped our people and millions across the world. This unspeakable attack on the United States has forced me to rely on my moral compass, my conscience, and my God for direction.
September 11 changed the world. Our deepest fears now haunt us. Yet I am convinced that military action will not prevent further acts of international terrorism against the United States.
This resolution will pass although we all know that the President can wage a war even without it. However difficult this vote may be, some of us must urge the use of restraint. Our country is in a state of mourning. Some of us must say, let's step back for a moment and think through the implications of our action today so that it does not spiral out of control.
I have agonized over this vote. But I came to grips with opposing this resolution during the very painful memorial service today. As a member of the clergy so eloquently said, "As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore."
http://www.house.gov/lee/Floor_Statement.htm
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Why I Opposed the Resolution to Authorize Force
by Barbara Lee
September 23, 2001
ON SEPT. 11, terrorists attacked the United States in an unprecedented and brutal manner, killing thousands of innocent people, including the passengers and crews of four aircraft.
Like everyone throughout our country, I am repulsed and angered by these attacks and believe all appropriate steps must be taken to bring the perpetrators to justice.
We must prevent any future such attacks. That is the highest obligation of our federal, state and local governments. On this, we are united as a nation. Any nation, group or individual that fails to comprehend this or believes that we will tolerate such illegal and uncivilized attacks is grossly mistaken.
Last week, filled with grief and sorrow for those killed and injured and with anger at those who had done this, I confronted the solemn responsibility of voting to authorize the nation to go to war. Some believe this resolution was only symbolic, designed to show national resolve. But I could not ignore that it provided explicit authority, under the War Powers Resolution and the Constitution, to go to war.
It was a blank check to the president to attack anyone involved in the Sept. 11 events -- anywhere, in any country, without regard to our nation's long- term foreign policy, economic and national security interests, and without time limit. In granting these overly broad powers, the Congress failed its responsibility to understand the dimensions of its declaration. I could not support such a grant of war-making authority to the president; I believe it would put more innocent lives at risk.
The president has the constitutional authority to protect the nation from further attack and he has mobilized the armed forces to do just that. The Congress should have waited for the facts to be presented and then acted with fuller knowledge of the consequences of our action.
I have heard from thousands of my constituents in the wake of this vote. Many -- a majority -- have counseled restraint and caution, demanding that we ascertain the facts and ensure that violence does not beget violence. They understand the boundless consequences of proceeding hastily to war, and I thank them for their support.
Others believe that I should have voted for the resolution -- either for symbolic or geopolitical reasons, or because they truly believe a military option is unavoidable. However, I am not convinced that voting for the resolution preserves and protects U.S. interests. We must develop our intelligence and bring those who did this to justice. We must mobilize and maintain an international coalition against terrorism. Finally, we have a chance to demonstrate to the world that great powers can choose to fight on the fronts of their choosing, and that we can choose to avoid needless military action when other avenues to redress our rightful grievances and to protect our nation are available to us.
We must respond, but the character of that response will determine for us and for our children the world that they will inherit. I do not dispute the president's intent to rid the world of terrorism -- but we have many means to reach that goal, and measures that spawn further acts of terror or that do not address the sources of hatred do not increase our security.
Secretary of State Colin Powell himself eloquently pointed out the many ways to get at the root of this problem -- economic, diplomatic, legal and political, as well as military. A rush to launch precipitous military counterattacks runs too great a risk that more innocent men, women, children will be killed. I could not vote for a resolution that I believe could lead to such an outcome.
Rep. Barbara Lee represents the 9th Congressional District, which includes Oakland, Berkeley and Alameda.
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[updated 11/27/01]
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