The Spirit of the Internet Weekly

Click here for opinions from prior weeks.

[Note: The following news and opinions primarily came from email sent by our friends. Thank you Sirius and all the others who have forwarded these messages to us. Due to the large volume of email we are receiving, we can only post a sampling here, but we thank everyone for sending stories like this. We read them all and post what we can as time permits.]

The Silence on Terrorism (Michelle Chihara, Alternet.org, December 26, 2001)
‘In Sacramento, California, a speaker is booed off the stage at a graduation ceremony because she urged citizens to protect their rights to free speech and a fair trial. In Modesto, California, the city withdraws its funding for a speech by Danny Glover because of comments he made against the death penalty and criticizing Bush. In Austin, Texas, the president of the university responds to comments from one of his faculty by calling the professor ‘a fountain of undiluted foolishness on issues of public policy’ in the Houston Chronicle. In Washington, D.C., the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, an organization founded by second lady Lynne Cheney, publishes a report calling professors the ‘weak link’ in America's response to the terrorist attacks because their positions are ‘distinctly equivocal and divided.’ . . . ‘You can't have a healthy democracy if you don't have ongoing and spirited public dialogue,’ Jensen continues. ‘What passes for public dialogue -- TV talk-shows and radio shows -- that isn't dialogue, it's show biz.’ . . . Of course, not everyone will agree with Danny Glover, or with Janis Besler Heaphy, or Professor Sami Al-Arian. But calling someone ‘un-American,’ or firing him, is the semantic equivalent of booing him off the stage. It does not constitute debate. It certainly does not constitute that debate which we so desperately need, a debate that includes all voices.’

INTERNET FREE SPEECH UNDER ATTACK
Brave New Web (Michael Connor, Austin Chronicle, December 26, 2001)
‘In the post-WTC world, utopistic hopes for a democracy of information have been supplanted by fears of the power of this tool to cause harm. As a result, trends toward regulating the Internet have accelerated, and advocates of freedom in cyberspace have been pushed to the margins. It's a new World Wide Web out there. . . . Since September 11, the U.S. government is facing a new public mandate: Prevent terrorism before it happens. With good reason, the American people expect officials to make the country less vulnerable to attack, and to make arrests before the crimes are committed. But in order to do so, government agencies have deemed fitting a return to J. Edgar Hoover-style intelligence gathering and surveillance on the basis of suspicion rather than evidence. . . . The law [USA PATRIOT Act] institutes harsher and broader penalties for hacking into a protected computer -- even if no damage is done. This clause criminalizes less serious forms of computer cracking that have been overlooked in the past. . . . Another controversial provision of the USA-PATRIOT Act allows increased use of Carnivore, a wiretapping software for the Internet. Carnivore is installed on an Internet Service Provider (ISP), such as AOL, in order to monitor the e-mail and Web-browsing habits of a suspect under surveillance. Civil libertarians have long contended that this tool could be easily used to conduct unlawful surveillance of ordinary citizens. Now, the USA-PATRIOT Act allows for the implementation of the Carnivore system without a warrant in some cases. . . . Critics charge that the government is guilty of political opportunism, using a time of crisis to push an old agenda of greater regulation and increased federal power. In more peaceful times, the American people would not stomach such infringements on their civil rights. Now, it seems, Americans will stomach pretty much anything. ‘I am convinced that the government is using [the terrorist attacks] as an excuse to accomplish the same goals that it has stated for years,’ says McCullough. ‘Many of the new provisions don't relate to what we perceive of as terrorism. They're incredibly broad about what terrorism is.’ These provisions relate to minor criminals and people whose First Amendment activities might be deemed a threat to national security -- such as hackers. . . . When it comes to the Internet, the potential dangers suddenly seem to outweigh the benefits. McCullough forecasts grim consequences of this current trend. ‘I think the so-called 'controllers of wealth and power' have decided that this plaything [the Internet] is a sharp instrument that children shouldn't be allowed to run and play with. The most positive aspect of it will be taken away. We will once again be relegated to the role of passive consumer instead of active citizen.’ . . . True, if there was ever a time for rigorous national security, this is it. On the other hand, if there were ever a time for a free exchange of ideas, this is it.’ ”

Who Opposes the War? (C.G. Estabrook, Counterpunch, December 17, 2001)
“Hasn't the success of the US attack on Afghanistan silenced all objections to it? Won't the anti-war movement now go away? . . . Well, no . . . Opponents of the war will not go away, even as the media salivate over which country will be the next beneficiary of America's cleansing blood-letting. Somalia? Iraq? The Philippines? Iran? Terrorists are everywhere, it seems: there is opposition around the globe to the US and the business culture it spreads. The media is avid to ferret them out, hanging on every word from Pentagon press releases, but they don't seem to be able to see anti-war actions and demonstrations, at home or abroad. . . . We now have as much innocent blood on our hands as Osama bin Laden may have on his. . . . Domestically, the anti-war movement has had to oppose the administration's invasion of civil liberties. The excesses of Ashcroft's Department of Justice (as ill-named these days as Rumsfeld's Department of Defense) bear comparison to the ‘Red scares’ that followed both World Wars. . . . They were ‘rectification campaigns,’ the real enemies of which were not the suspected radicals and terrorists whom they were ostensibly directed against, but the general populace of the US, amongst whom dangerous ideas of social reform and the restraint of corporations had gotten loose before, during, and after the war years. . . . predicted by the Irish socialist James Connolly, whom the British executed in 1916. ‘One great source of the strength of the ruling class,’ he wrote, ‘has ever been their willingness to kill in defense of their power and privileges. Let their power be once attacked either by foreign foes or by domestic revolutionaries, and at once we see the rulers prepared to kill and kill and kill. The readiness of the ruling class to order killing, the small value the ruling class has ever set upon human life, is in marked contrast to the reluctance of all revolutionaries to shed blood.’ . . . The crimes of that day are being more than equaled by US crimes now in progress -- to say nothing of the long train of abuses stretching back literally centuries. The only way that they can be lessened is for a vigorous and honest US anti-war movement to call the country's vicious and vapid leaders to a halt -- as it has before.’ ”

U.S. keeps its place as global leader - in international arms sales (Holger Jensen, Denver Rocky Mountain News, August 25, 2001)
“It was the eighth straight year that U.S. companies topped the chart in global arms sales, ranging from combat aircraft, warships, tanks and missiles to parts and ammunition for older weapons systems sold years ago. Not surprisingly, the bulk of these weapons are heavily concentrated in conflict zones. . . . Since the Gulf War, the Middle East has been by far the largest arms recipient, accounting for $106 billion worth of arms purchases. Saudi Arabia, Israel, Iraq and Iran are among the biggest spenders but the United Arab Emirates bumped the Saudis out of first place last year by purchasing 80 American F-16 fighters for $6.4 billion. . . . Arms sales account for only 5 percent of global military spending, which bottomed out in 1998 and is rising again. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which monitors the defense budgets of all the world's nations, said they amounted to $798 billion last year -- an $18 billion increase over 1999. . . . The United States alone accounted for 37 percent of the global total, and this will rise significantly as we get deeper into missile defense. . . . So much for the ‘peace dividend.’ ”

Channel Surfing
Guerrilla News

[EDITOR’S NOTE: The good people at Guerrilla News Network have put together a video presentation that is an absolute must-see. It is a compilation of sound bites about the War of Terror that they have pieced together from news shows on most of the major networks.]

“So, in the face of our media's shameless propaganda campaign, we have taken it upon ourselves to intuit what the intentions and goals of this war truly are. In what is surely a departure from our traditional NewsVideo format, GNN presents S-11 Redux: (Channel) Surfing the Apocalypse. Culled from over 20 hours of television footage recorded over a one month period and across 13 networks, S-11 Redux is a sound-bite blitzkrieg that challenges the messages we have been fed from our mainstream media and the government it serves. Be warned - this video moves quickly and will require at least two viewings to digest its full impact. You may never be able to look at the coverage of S-11 and its post-impact coverage the same way, ever again.”

Orwell's 1984: The Future Is Here (David Goodman, Insight on the News, December 7, 2001)
“This is a totalitarian state under a benevolent leader in which citizens are detained and arrested on the merest suspicion of espionage. But the benevolent leader is seen only on television; he never appears in public. Personal surveillance is unceasing and relentless: TV cameras that receive and transmit simultaneously are everywhere. The political-correctness police listen in on every conversation to match speakers to the profile of a potential saboteur. Ordinary citizens live in constant fear of arrest and imprisonment for terrorist activities. . . . No, this is not the implementation of the antiterrorist USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, which Congress just passed in the throes of the anthrax attacks without even reading it (see "Police State," Dec. 3), and whose very name evokes the memory of the late George Orwell's sci-fi masterpiece, 1984. It is the scenario of Orwell's book itself, written in 1948 and published in 1949. It is ironic that the character he calls Big Brother was not meant as a symbol for a U.S. administration but likely for the future of Britain under progressive socialism. What gives pause is that the book clearly satirizes the consequences of Fabian socialism exactly 100 years after its birth in the salons of London.”

Buying a gladiatorial myth: Both Bin Laden and US cold war nostalgics pine for epic narratives (Naomi Klein, The Guardian, January 2, 2002)
“It's an idea we've heard from many quarters since September 11, a return of the great narrative: chosen men, evil empires, master plans, and great battles. All are ferociously back in style. The Bible, the Koran, ‘the clash of civilisations’, Lord of the Rings - all of them suddenly playing out ‘in these days, in our times’. . . . This grand redemption narrative is our most persistent myth, and it has a dangerous flip side. When a few men decide to live their myths, to be larger than life, it can't help but have an impact on all the lives that unfold in regular sizes. People suddenly look insignificant by comparison, easy to sacrifice in the name of some greater purpose. . . . What is becoming clear post-September 11, however, is that history's end also turned out to be a hollow victory for the United States' cold warriors. It seems that since 1989, many of them have missed their epic narrative as if it were a lost limb. Without ideology, shopping was... just shopping. . . . During the cold war, consumption in the US wasn't only about personal gratification . . . In this narrative, our malls stood for freedom and democracy, while their empty shelves were metaphors for control and repression. . . . But when the cold war ended and this ideological backdrop was yanked away, the grander meaning behind the shopping evaporated. . . . But post-September 11, history is back with a capital H. Shoppers are once again foot soldiers in a battle between good and evil, wearing new stars-and-stripes bras by Elita and popping special edition red, white and blue M&Ms. . . . When US politicians urge their citizens to fight terrorism by shopping, it is about more than feeding an ailing economy. It's about once again wrapping the day-to-day in the mythic.”

The War in Afghanistan: Excerpted from Lakdawala lecture, New Delhi (Noam Chomsky, ZNET, December 30, 2001)
“A detailed year-end review found that the U.S. war ‘has returned to power nearly all the same warlords who had misruled the country in the days before the Taliban’; some Afghans see the resulting situation as even ‘worse than it was before the Taliban came to power.’ . . . The return of warlordism is a dangerous sign, as was the announcement by the new Justice Minister that the basic structure of sharia law as instituted by the Taliban would remain in force, though ‘there will be some changes from the time of the Taliban. For example, the Taliban used to hang the victim's body in public for four days. We will only hang the body for a short time, say 15 minutes.’ Judge Ahamat Ullha Zarif added that some new location would be found for the regular public executions, not the Sports Stadium. ‘Adulterers, both male and female, would still be stoned to death, Zarif said, `but we will use only small stones',’ so that those who confess might be able to run away; others will be ‘stoned to death,’ as before. . . . As the year ended, desperate peasants, mostly women, were returning to the miserable labor of growing opium poppies so that their families can survive, reversing the Taliban ban. The UN had reported in October that poppy production had already ‘increased threefold in areas controlled by the Northern Alliance,’ whose warlords ‘have long been reputed to control much of the processing and smuggling of opium’ to Russia and the West, an estimated 75% of the world's heroin. . . . U.S. and British intellectual opinion, across the political spectrum, assured us that only radical extremists can doubt that ‘this is basically a just war.’ Those who disagree can therefore be dismissed, among them, for example, the 1000 Afghan leaders who met in Peshawar in late October in a U.S.-backed effort to lay the groundwork for a post-Taliban regime led by the exiled King. They bitterly condemned the U.S. war, which is ‘beating the donkey rather than the rider,’ one speaker said to unanimous agreement. . . . The U.S., [Afghan opposition leader] Abdul Haq said, ‘is trying to show its muscle, score a victory and scare everyone in the world. They don't care about the suffering of the Afghans or how many people we will lose. And we don't like that. Because Afghans are now being made to suffer for these Arab fanatics, but we all know who brought these Arabs to Afghanistan in the 1980s, armed them and gave them a base. It was the Americans and the CIA. And the Americans who did this all got medals and good careers, while all these years Afghans suffered from these Arabs and their allies. Now, when America is attacked, instead of punishing the Americans who did this, it punishes the Afghans.’”

US bombing raid kills 40 villagers, claim tribal chiefs (Kim Sengupta, The Independent, 28 December 2001)
“United States warplanes killed at least 40 people and injured 60 others in bombings carried out on villages in eastern Afghanistan, tribal sources claimed last night. . . . The reports of the attacks in Paktika come just a week after 20 people died and 40 were wounded in the neighbouring province of Paktia when US jets bombed a convoy. . . . Many of those killed in the latest raid were said to be asleep when US planes allegedly destroyed up to 25 houses. . . . But local people insisted the victims were civilians on their way to the inauguration of the new interim administration of Hamid Karzai in Kabul. . . . Mr Karzai is under increasing pressure about the deaths. Tribal elders claimed yesterday that Mr Karzai has promised to ask the US to stop air raids on Paktika and Paktia. . . . However, the interim Afghan leader and his ministers have been reluctant to publicly criticise the Americans, without whose military might they would not be sitting in Kabul.”

The Real Story Behind America’s War (John Pilger, ZNET)
“By spreading ‘fear and respect’, as a Washington Post reporter put it, America intends to see off challenges to its uncertain ability to control and manage the ‘global economy’, the euphemism for the progressive seizure of markets and resources by the G8 rich nations. . . . This, not the hunt for a man in a cave in Afghanistan, is the aim behind US Vice-President Dick Cheney’s threats to ‘40 to 50 countries’. It has little to do with terrorism and much to do with maintaining the divisions that underpin ‘globalisation’. . . . Last month’s World Trade Organisation meeting in Doha in the Gulf state of Quatar, was disastrous for the majority of humanity. The rich nations demanded and got a new ‘round’ of ‘trade liberalisation’, which is the power to intervene in the economies of poor countries, to demand privatisation and the destruction of public services. . . . ‘If I speak out too strongly for the rights of my people,’ says an African delegate, ‘the US will phone my minister. They will say that I am embarrassing the United States. My government will not even ask, ‘What did he say?’ They will just send me a ticket tomorrow…so I don’t speak for fear of upsetting the master.’ . . . India’s minister for commerce and industry, Murasoli Maran, said angrily, ‘The whole process is a mere formality and we are being coerced against our will…the WTO is not a world government and should not attempt to appropriate to itself what legitimately falls in the domain of national governments and parliaments.’ . . . Little is said these days about the ‘trickle down’ that ‘creates wealth’ for the poor, because it is transparently false. Even the World Bank, of which Short is a governor, has admitted that the poorest countries are worse off, under its tutelage, than ten years ago: that the number of poor had increased, that people are dying younger.”

Image and Reality: The Role of the U.S. in the Middle East (Hanan Ashrawi, Media Monitor’s Network)
“At no time in history have the short sightedness and narrow self-interest of American policy makers had such a devastating impact on the realities of the Arab world and the Middle East, and by necessity on American national interests and standing. . . . The most glaring fault lies first and foremost in the total subjugation of American decision making to the priorities and policies of the Israeli government-a government that happens to be the most extremist, ideological, hard line, militaristic, and irresponsible since the creation of the state of Israel . . . The only America expression of regret, sorrow, or outrage over loss of life came when the victims were Israeli, while thousands of Palestinians were killed or assassinated by the Israeli occupation with full impunity and total human disregard. . . . Instead of adopting the ‘terrorist’ label and repeating the ‘stop the violence’ mantra, the US, more than ever, is called upon to demonstrate its own distinctiveness and to carry out a parallel ‘separation’ from the language, policies, brutality, extremism, and violations of the Israeli occupation. . . . As a major liability, Israel has done the most to discredit the US and undermine its standing, not only in the region, but throughout the world. . . . A courageous distancing (as well as a critical distance) is essential if the US is seeking to address the causes of conflict and terrorism by adopting a responsible and long-term strategy. . . . Pounding the Palestinians into submission, or delegitimizing their leadership as well as their human reality, will succeed only in fanning the flames and discrediting the US even further.”

An unhappy new year of war, terror and pestilence (Fergal Keane, The Independent, 29 December 2001)
“As for the wider war, I suspect the Americans will launch some form of military action against Iraq later in the new year, but not before some proxy Iraqi force has been established to take advantage of American bombing raids. The war will be about getting rid of Saddam. The US ultimatum on weapons inspectors – ‘let them in or face the consequences’ – has been rebuffed by the Iraqi dictator but he has a few tricks up his sleeve. He will prevaricate and concede a little and then prevaricate again. This time however he will find America unwilling to tolerate his brinkmanship. An attack on Iraq will shatter what remains of the coalition against terror but the US will be willing to live with that. . . . Moving to the Middle East takes us into what appears like the zone of eternal gloom. Can it get worse? That very much depends on Arafat's success in limiting the actions of the suicide bombers and Sharon's willingness to begin serious negotiations. . . . The biggest story of our generation will continue to get worse, but because it is happening to poor people in poor places don't expect to see many headlines. The Aids pandemic will kill hundreds of thousands of people next year and leave millions of children – mainly in Africa and Asia – orphaned and without any means of support.”

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