The Spirit of the Internet Weekly

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[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 "Real" Deal about Nuclear, Bio, and Chem. Attacks (by SFC Red Thomas (Ret))

Bill Moyers Speaks Out
“It didn't take long for the war time opportunists -- the mercenaries of Washington, the lobbyists, lawyers and political fundraisers -- to crawl out of their offices on K street determined to grab what they can for their clients. While in New York we are still attending memorial services, while everywhere Americans' cheeks are still stained with tears, while the President calls for patriotism, prayers and piety, the predators of Washington are up to their old tricks in the pursuit of private plunder at public expense ... This is their game: they are counting on your patriotism to distract you from their plunder. They are counting on you to be standing at attention with your hand over your heart, pledging allegiance to the flag, while they pick your pocket. If, in the name of the war on terrorism, President Bush hands the state over to the energy industry, it's every patriot's duty to join the loyal opposition. . . . Your adversaries will call you unpatriotic for speaking the truth when conformity reigns. Ideologues will smear you for challenging the official view of reality. Mainstream media will ignore you, and those gasbags on cable TV and the radio talk shows will ridicule and vilify you.”

Bush’s war at home: a creeping coup d’état (WSWS Editorial Board, 7 November 2001)
“In the period since the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the United States has undergone a radical transformation in the structure of the government, in the relationship between the people and the police and armed forces, and in the legal and constitutional framework. . . . The White House has assumed vast new powers for internal repression, establishing by executive order an Office of Homeland Security that is not subject to either congressional oversight or any vote on the personnel appointed to run it. . . . Government spokesmen urge the population to get used to measures like random police searches and roadblocks as a permanent feature of life. . . . The right to privacy has been all but abolished for the entire population, with government intelligence agencies given the green light to plant bugs and wiretaps, monitor financial transactions, and conduct other forms of spying, virtually at will. . . . In other words, America is going on a war footing, not for the duration of a specific conflict in Afghanistan, but indefinitely. Consequently, the domestic police measures being taken now by the government must also be accepted as a permanent state of affairs. . . . The government’s actions in the period since September 11 constitute the most serious and sustained attack on civil liberties in US history. No one should believe that this is merely a reaction to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Such measures have long been sought by the most right-wing sections of the ruling elite, who have seized on the tragic events of September 11 to realize their political agenda at home, just as they are using them to launch a US military intervention in oil-rich Central Asia. . . . A government that takes power by methods of fraud and conspiracy must rule through the same methods. . . . The Bush administration expresses the contempt for democracy that pervades powerful sections of the American corporate and financial oligarchy, as well as their fascistic allies in the Christian right, the gun lobby and the militia movement. They are determined to go as far as they can in establishing an authoritarian regime.”

Israel Is a Very Costly Ally (Charley Reese)
“Israel is the most expensive ally in the history of the human race. Depending on whose numbers you use, American aid to Israel has totaled $81 billion to $90 billion. . . . Let's suppose we could build a new public school for $1 million. With the money that has gone to Israel, we could have built 90,000 brand-new public schools or restored 90,000 public waterworks or bridges or any number of other infrastructure needs. . . . There is nothing in the Constitution that authorizes Congress to tax the labor of the American people and hand over the proceeds to a foreign government, any foreign government, much less one that has blown up our diplomatic facilities in Egypt and attacked one of our Navy ships in international waters. . . . Finally, our support of Israel's aggression and cruel treatment of the Palestinians is alienating not only the Arab world but the entire Muslim world. This hatred will eventually be expressed in the form of terrorism directed at Americans and at American interests. . . . America's blind support of Israel's gross violations of human rights and international law will not only cost billions of tax dollars but eventually American lives as well. . . . It's time to start asking Americans, including our elected officials: Which country are you loyal to?”

US shows video of man being blown apart (Andrew Buncombe, The Independent, 09 November 2001)
“The General called it a ‘rather unique’ view of the bombing – the video clip he played showed a man being blown into a thousand pieces by a US satellite-guided missile. . . . No one expected the Anglo-American military campaign launched inside Afghanistan to be a pretty thing. No one doubted there would be innocent civilian victims – the so-called ‘collateral damage’. But this week, five weeks into the war, the Pentagon revealed the result of its handiwork with footage that was as gruesome as it was mesmerising. . . . Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said that he saw reports detailing Taliban losses twice a day; sometimes were six victims, sometimes 20. . . . despite the bombing effort, most of the Taliban's 50,000 or so fighters remain in the field, still countering efforts by the Northern Alliance to advance on key cities such as Mazar-i-Sharif, which was captured by the Taliban in 1998.”

One year on, Israel persists with death squads (Phil Reeves, The Independent 09 November 2001)
“They have blown up cars and kitchens. They have fired missiles from combat helicopters hovering several miles away. They have picked off their victims from afar with high-powered snipers' rifles. There are even plausible claims that they – or their collaborators – have planted explosive devices in telephone receivers and car headrests that blow off a man's head in an instant. . . . Israel's death squads have not lacked ingenuity in the manner in which they have pursued their government's policy of assassinating suspects in the 14-month war with the Palestinians. . . . The exact numbers of the victims vary – the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, who personally approves all such killings, admitted to 20 to 30 in a recent Newsweek interview. But he has stated in the past that Israel will sometimes deny its undercover operations, and refuse to comment on others. . . . There is little doubt the figure is larger. Statistics collated by the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group (PHRMG) show that at least 59 Palestinians have been assassinated in the past year, including 21 passers-by. Even this may be an underestimate.”

Terror, Love, And The State Of The World (John Robbins)
“But at such times, when our hearts are filled with outrage and our eyes look everywhere for revenge, it is extraordinarily important that we remember the awesome truth behind Gandhi's prophetic statement: ‘An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.’ . . . Approximately 6,000 people perished in the September 11th attacks. Our nation reels from that despicable brutality. But those who died from the attacks on that tragic day were not alone. On September 11th, 35,000 children worldwide died of hunger. A similar number of children died on September 12th, and again on the 13th, and on every single day since then. Meanwhile, we in the U.S. feed 80% of our grain harvest to livestock so that a people whose cholesterol levels are too high can have cheap meat. . . . There is an enormous disconnect taking place between the will of the American people and the foreign policy of our government. The American people are for the most part honest, decent, and compassionate. But few U.S. citizens are aware of how much U.S. foreign policies have betrayed our caring and our humanity. How many Americans know that we are far and away the world's leading arms merchant? . . . We'll know we've begun when we break our addiction to oil, and develop an economy based instead on hydrogen, wind power, solar power, and other non-polluting, safe and renewable sources of energy.”

The Coming Apocalypse (Geov Parrish, found on Znet.com)
“Does anybody in this country get it? . . . Does anybody understand what the United States is on the verge of doing? . . . Seven and a half million people at risk of dying in a matter of months. That's three times the number of people Pol Pot took years to kill. Thirty-five times the number that died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, combined. If 5,000 died on September 11 (a number that reports are now suggesting is vastly inflated), we're talking the equivalent number of deaths to ten World Trade Centers, every day, for 150 days. Slow, painful deaths. Entirely avoidable deaths. Deaths whose sole cause is not the United States, but most of which can still be prevented -- except that the United States is refusing to allow them to be prevented. . . . I suspect a lot of Americans don't care. They'd rather see the United States ‘get’ Osama bin Laden (though there's no actual evidence that we're any closer to that today than we were two months ago, and probably the task is harder as he becomes more popular and protected). A lot of people in this country do not care that a staggering number of innocent people are on the verge of being condemned to death, or that most of the world will blame the United States. Correctly. . . . That's today. What will happen if millions of Afghans die this winter? How much future terrorism will the dunderheads of the Bush Administration have inspired then? If several million Islamic sisters and brothers starve to death, innocent civilians trapped between winter and the rage of America, how many of Islam's 1.2 billion adherents -- or the five billion other people on earth -- are going to take George Bush's proclamations about eradicating ‘terrorists’ and ‘evildoers’ to heart, and label him, and us, as the prime examples?”

What’s Different, What’s the Same, What Do We Do? (Michael Albert, Znet)
“The point is, even for U.S. activists who have no other priority than to stop the war, the current situation calls not for ignoring all other issues and speaking only of war, and certainly not for toning down dissent, but for as many people as possible to be as visibly active and energetic at they are able to be, developing as broad a set of linkages between war opposition and other oppositions as they can possibly generate. . . . The current situation doesn’t entreat that those who are anti-corporate, or anti-racist, or anti-globalization or anti-death penalty, or anti-tax rip offs, or anti-undemocratic elections, shelve such focuses and become only anti-war. Quite the contrary, it entreats that anti-corporate folks, anti-globalization folks, anti-racist folks, and others with prior progressive commitments be more aggressively anti-corporate and all the rest, even as we also increase our effort to oppose the war. And it entreats for them to try to respectfully bring as many as people as possible who are becoming anti-war, anti-starvation, anti-foreign policy debacle, anti-what have you, into also becoming anti-corporate, etc., and vice versa, since attaining that kind of mutuality is precisely the trajectory of growing solidarity and diversifying focus that will most effectively compel a change in war and in other policies as well. . . . In other words, this is a time for fighting against this war to save innumerable lives as well as prevent catastrophes of even greater proportion beyond Afghanistan. But it is also a time for reasserting our existing focuses and struggles. We should not be running from our earlier progressive priorities nor even just pausing them. We need to enlarge our on-going efforts and to link them to the anti-war effort. That's what will enhance all our prospects, anti-war and all others as well. . . .This is a time to fight war by whatever channels we can work through while creating a multi-issue, multi-tactic, popular and mass movement that sets aside squabbles for solidarity and that dispenses with doctrinaire ideology for plain talking, well thought out vision, program, and strategy.”

Shadow On The Free Press (Achin Vanaik, The Telegraph of India, November 8 2001)
“These are strange times. Wrong becomes right and evil becomes virtue. September 11 is, of course, terrorism, but killing people in Afghanistan who have no responsibility for what happened then, is not terrorism, just ‘unfortunate’ deaths in pursuit of a just cause. . . . Whatever happened to that elementary principle of justice whereby it is not permissible to endanger or kill innocents in pursuit of those who are guilty, let alone those simply suspected of being guilty? Political terrorism is, at the very minimum, the pursuit of political interests through actions that threaten to kill or actually kill civilians and therefore describes the behaviour of the US state as well as of al Qaida. . . . Even if evidence about links between certain taliban leaders and the culprits behind the September 11 attacks were provided, it would still not justify these attacks on a sovereign country. But even this evidence hasn't been provided and still nobody is raising any embarrassing queries about the illegality or arbitrariness of the US reaction.”

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