March 15, 2002
Media compilation #55: Some Stories Worth Covering
Dear journalist
Here are some other articles that caught my attention and which may also be of interest to you.
Jean Hudon
Earth Rainbow Network Coordinator
http://www.cybernaute.com/earthconcert2000
CONTENTS:
1. Death of a true terrorist Africa's leading terrorist killed — no thanks to the War on Terrorism
2. HIGH-RISE EVACUATION EXPERT QUESTIONS 9.11 DEATH TOLL
3. A Lonely Lawmaker Cries Out for Peace
4. Bush Does Not Measure Up to Own Standards
5. War on Terror Masks Bush's Grand Strategy
6. What It Means To Be Rich
SEE ALSO:
Independent Flight 77 - Pentagon Event Investigation (Very Comprehensive - Most interesting!)
http://www.humanunderground.com/11september/pent.html
So where is the plane?
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=26777
Enron's Shadow Government
http://www.thedailyenron.com/documents/20020312063231-70155.pdf
Enron's alliances, connections and entanglements with the Bush Administration run wide and deep. A new report from The Daily Enron (http://www.thedailyenron.com/), a site by journalist Stephen Pizzo dedicated solely to unraveling the scandal, has a new report detailing just how wide and how deep. Never in modern times has a single private entity been as successful as Enron in penetrating and ultimately compromising U.S. political and regulatory institutions. In its short sixteen-year life span Enron and its operatives burrowed their way deeply into energy and securities regulatory agencies, Congress and finally the Oval Office. Is a Special Counsel necessary?
MORE ENRON-GATE NEWS AT http://www.alternet.org/issues/index.html?IssueAreaID=30
DEPLETED URANIUM IN BUNKER BOMBS; America's big dirty secret
http://MondeDiplo.com/2002/03/03uranium
The United States loudly and proudly boasted this month of its new bomb currently being used against al-Qaida hold-outs in Afghanistan; it sucks the air from underground installations, suffocating those within. The US has also admitted that it has used depleted uranium weaponry over the last decade against bunkers in Iraq, Kosovo, and now Afghanistan.
Thousands at Defense Dept. on 'Shopping Spree'
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-000018836mar14.story
WASHINGTON -- More than 700 military officers are among 46,000 Defense Department employees who have walked away from $62 million in debt against their government-issued credit cards, and one civilian employee who charged thousands in personal expenses has been promoted to the office that oversees Army finances. CLIP
Bush Flatly Refuses to Hand Over Energy Papers
http://www.truthout.com/docs_02/03.15A.Bush.Refuses.htm
West plans simulated anthrax attack (15 March 2002)
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=274657
Western nations are to simulate an anthrax attack to gauge how governments and the emergency services would cope with a biological, chemical or nuclear terrorist incident. CLIP An American expert claimed last night the anthrax attacks on the US might have been the result of CIA "field trial" that went disastrously wrong or was abused by an expert. Barbara Rosenberg, the director of the Federation of American Scientists' Chemical and Biological Weapons Programme, raised the possibility on the BBC programme Newsnight, by saying: "The result might have been a project gone awry".
1.
From: http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemId=12873
Geov Parrish
WorkingForChange
02.26.02
Death of a true terrorist Africa's leading terrorist killed — no thanks to the War on Terrorism
Quietly, the Pentagon and CIA are now admitting that far from being dismantled by America's attacks on the Taliban, Al-Qaeda is regrouping, under the apparent leadership of a high-ranking Palestinian named Abu Zubaydah.
Zubaydah is one of thousands of Al-Qaeda members living in Afghanistan who successfully escaped to Pakistan during the U.S. attack, and he is using Osama bin Laden's absence (and possible death) to assume leadership of the group. The development confirms the well-known idiocy of the U.S. fixation on Bin Laden (and, for that matter, Al-Qaeda itself) as being the primary focus of anti-American terrorism.
In point of fact, there are scores of terrorist groups (not all of them Islamic), and scores of possible leaders within Al-Qaeda, with the capacity to inflict tremendous damage on the United States. The effort hardly needs Osama bin Laden, or any individual. But now the demonization of Zubaydah has begun: he is, by the reckoning of one unnamed U.S. official, "as dangerous as anyone we are looking for, including Bin Laden." Expect the propaganda linking Abu Zubaydah to Satan and Evil Incarnate to ramp up at any time.
Meantime, the selectiveness of the U.S. "War on Terrorism" was grimly demonstrated this past week by the long-overdue death of one of the world's most notorious terrorists: 67-year-old Jonas Savimbi, a man almost single-handedly responsible for plunging Angola into 27 years of civil war that has cost at least 1.5 million lives. By comparison, the World Trade Center death toll is barely noticeable. Savimbi and his UNITA armies operated in the style of true terrorist guerrillas: randomly attacking and massacring, holding civilian lives (and deaths) hostage to their political demands, showing levels of barbarism meant to terrify others (and, one suspects, titillate themselves and their patrons).
But Savimbi has never been called a terrorist by American media, because for much of his career, he was our guy. The Angolan conflict became mired in the politics of the Cold War; first the apartheid government of South Africa, and then the United States itself, started sending weapons and money early on to help Savimbi's fledgling UNITA effort become a genuine threat. The left-leaning Angola government responded by importing Cuban soldiers (Cuba, culturally, because of its large black population, identifies far more with sub-Saharan Africa than the United States ever has). The Castro experiment in exporting worldwide commie revolution had the predictable enemy-of-my-enemy effect. By 1976, Savimbi became a statesman, much beloved by the United States even as his troops ventured from their jungle hideaways to carry out massacre after massacre. In recent years, following battlefield setbacks, UNITA has concentrated on ambushes and on peppering the countryside with land mines. A freedom fighter, in other words.
Of course, Savimbi was smart enough (and, after a couple decades at it, experienced enough) not to depend on the political vagaries of U.S. support. He took his weapons where he could get them. Originally trained in Maoist China, he went on to fight the quasi-Marxist MPLA (the Angolan government) as a self-styled "African nationalist" while accepting the patronage of apartheid South Africa. Savimbi, like all pathological mass murderers, justified his terrorist war crimes as being for "the people."
Particularly after the end of the Cold War, Savimbi tapped into the same source of black market cash that has fueled the near-genocidal civil war recently in the Congo: the diamond trade. By seizing lucrative diamond mines in rural Angola (one of the few things left to fight for in the now desperately impoverished country), Savimbi had been able to exploit what became the drug and arms merchants' money-laundering scheme of choice in the '90s: European diamond merchants who pay cash on the barrel, no questions asked. (Antwerp dealers, against much industry opposition, have been making slow headway recently in adopting a code of ethics that would put a stop to diamond-financed bloodshed throughout the Third World.)
At least three times in the '90s, Savimbi torpedoed peace talks aimed at ending the endless war, a war that, beyond all the death, has displaced millions more and ravaged the country's economy. His death (from a stray bullet in battle) is the best thing to happen in decades to the long-suffering country's prospects for peace.
But because Savimbi never (to our knowledge) conspired to topple a Manhattan skyscraper, and because U.S. media seem almost pathologically convinced that Africans don't value life as much as we "civilized" people, news accounts of his death haven't even mentioned the "t" word, and have carefully downplayed the U.S. role in his rise to glory.
Savimbi was famously quoted as saying that UNITA began as a movement of "12 people with knives." Those people, and the others that followed, somehow graduated from knives to modern warfare, and the United States (along with its racist partners in Pretoria) made it possible. Savimbi is the first confirmed death of a world-class terrorist during the so-called "War on Terrorism." Too bad we weren't aiming for him.
Read other recent articles by Geov Parrish at http://www.workingforchange.com/column_lst.cfm?AuthrId=25
including...
The empire strikes forward (03.04.02)
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=12906
America is trying to take over the world, and no one can stop us except us.
2.
HIGH-RISE EVACUATION EXPERT QUESTIONS 9.11 DEATH TOLL
by William Thomas
From: http://www3.bc.sympatico.ca/Willthomas/Evac%20Expert/evac.htm
Saddened that so many families lost loved ones in the destruction of the World Trade Center, a Canadian expert in evacuating high-rise buildings nevertheless questions why there were not many more casualties from the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
In his capacity as government consultant on fire safety and physical security in government buildings faced with fire or bomb threats, Eamonn O'Brien journeyed to San Paulo, Brazil in 1972 to examine the aftermath of the largest high-rise fire in the world up to that time. In at least one stairwell O'Brien reports, "people were getting crushed." Initial televised reports from Manhattan estimated early casualty figures from the two aircraft strikes on the Twin Towers at 22,000 dead. In the week's following attacks that stunned the world, the World Trade Center death toll was steadily revised downward to a final official figure around 3,300 fatalities.
O'Brien says the number of exits and the volume of people, including disabled, per floor would determine the maximum number of evacuees in a given amount of time.
"Remember," says O'Brien, " at the first alarm, the automatic elevators would have been shut down." Looking at official occupancy figures, O'Brien says there should have been 38,500 people in both Trade Towers by 8:30 that morning. That early, he adds, there would have been at least 10 percent additional visitors in those buildings for a total occupancy he estimates around 41,000 people. This figure does not include the thousands of tourists and New Yorkers exposed to flying glass on the streets directly below.
In Ottawa, O'Brien was in charge of evacuation procedures for a five-building government complex. Occupied by 27,500 people, the tallest building in Place du Portage is less than 25 stories tall. One Wednesday afternoon in the late 1970s, O'Brien pulled the fire alarm to all five buildings without prior warning.
Though he had permission from his superiors to conduct a snap drill, O'Brien did not inform them in advance of the test. Instead, he quietly notified all disabled persons to clear the buildings 20 minutes before he pulled the alarm. They did so without attracting attention.
"We didn't even notify the fire department," O'Brien says. "When we want to test the system we don't tell anybody." Instead, fire safety staff members inconspicuously placed on every floor monitored the drill, which O'Brien directed from a nearby security personnel control center.
"With no smoke, no fire," O'Brien recounts, "it took 48 minutes to evacuate buildings one-third the size with one-third the number of stairwells available as the World Trade Center."
Struck by a jumbo jet at 9:06 am with an impact explosion estimated to be the equivalent of 480,000 pounds of TNT, the south tower of the WTC collapsed within 40 minutes. Though the north tower had been hit 20 minutes before, evacuation of its "twin" adjacent tower was delayed by a security message urging everyone to return to their desks. There was also a natural reluctance to run out into streets exposed to a blizzard of broken glass. "The walls of those buildings were glass," O'Brien recounts. "A penny falling from 50 stories can kill. A large pane of glass can cut a car in half."
A Morgan Stanley executive was in the foyer on the 44th floor near the express elevator of the South Tower (Two) when Security came over the loudspeaker. "Remain calm, damage is in Tower One. We appear to be okay." Everyone was joking, he recalls, repeating the word, "appear" when the second plane hit his building.
"We heard the engines of the plane and felt the shock after it hit. But there was no urgency, even though the building continued to shake for five minutes afterwards," Dr. Alan Sokotow remembers. "I only first started to get nervous when we could begin to smell jet fuel in the air conditioning ducts."
Based on his findings in San Paulo and his experience in Ottawa, O'Brien says of the Manhattan terror attacks, "There should have been eleven-and-a-half to 16,000 dead for that occupancy, the size of the towers, the damage incurred, and the response."
He should know. O'Brien worked on a committee responsible for drafting the procedures currently in place for evacuating high-rise buildings across Canada. He says that on the morning of the attacks, the World Trade Center must have been "less than 30 percent occupied." Yet those buildings housed global financial trade centers. There is no way, O'Brien says, those buildings happened to be largely unoccupied by a" slow day" at work. He pauses. "Those sons of bitches knew."
Somebody knew of the attacks in advance. In 1974, after the first FBI-assisted bombing of the World Trade Center, the head of the FBI's Anti-Terror Division promised Congress that corporations would be notified if any terror threats to their employees or buildings were received by the FBI.
On Aug. 28, the FAA sent a warning to airlines and airports that passengers with links to terror networks intended to fly on U.S. airlines. Also that week, a Pakistani student at Brooklyn's New Utrecht High School pointed at the Twin Towers during a heated political argument and declared, "Look at those two buildings. They won't be here next week."
Several days before the attack, a Jersey City student of Middle Eastern origins also warned classmates not to travel into lower Manhattan on the morning of Sept. 11. Members of a Bronx mosque were also warned to stay out of lower Manhattan on Sept. 11.
Corporations and U.S. federal departments were also tipped by a "worldwide warning" issued by the State Department. A copy of the Sept. 7 memo received by former Secretary of State George Schultz at his San Francisco office warned that Americans "may be the target of a terrorist threat [from] extremist groups with links to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization". An even more timely bulletin reached airports, where at least one prestigious passenger was warned off. When San Francisco's mayor called on Sept.10 to check the status of a flight he was planning to take into New York the following day, a return call from a person Willie Brown described as an "airport security man", told him to be "extra cautious about air travel" on Sept. 11. In Tokyo the day before Sept. 11, the giant Goldman Sachs investment firm circulated a memo advising employees to avoid government buildings because of a possible terrorist attack. Goldman Sachs was the second biggest tenant in the World Trade Center, occupying some 22 floors. On Sept. 11, a Goldman Sachs vice-president decided to take the day off to go surfing. The firm suffered only 17 casualties.
Morgan Stanley, the World Trade Center's biggest tenant, reportedly lost none of its 3,500 employees spread over some 50 floors. Neither did Oppenheimer Funds. SEC officials are still probing why Morgan Stanley, with a daily average of 27 "put" contracts betting on the movement of its share prices, saw 2,157 "put" options purchased three days before "Black Tuesday". These financial futures contracts bet the company's stock would fall by October. Benefiting from advance knowledge of the WTC attacks, their purchasers stood to make at least $1.2 million.
If thousands of employees were sent to seminars or on spurious errands, or asked to stay home – why have no survivors spoken up? "If you and I were friends, and you died and I didn't, it would be difficult for me to come forward," O'Brien observes.
Photographs taken in the stairwells during evacuation of the World Trade Center show stunned office workers exiting in an orderly single-file, leaving room for firefighters hauling bulky equipment past them up the stairs. At least 350 firefighters and emergency response personnel died in the sudden collapse of the Twin Trade Towers. Each of New York city's tallest office buildings came down in 15 seconds.
Eamonn O'Brien shakes his head. "There is no way only 3,300 people died if those buildings have been fully occupied," he says.
The former security expert is haunted by a scene in the movie "Independence Day", which shows an alien spacecraft blowing up a big building. A huge dustball rushes down the street as panicked people run toward the camera. "It's the same street," says O'Brien. "The same street as the WTC."
---
Excerpted from All Fall Down: The Politics of Terror and Mass Persuasion, and interviews with Eamonn O'Brien.
A veteran investigative journalist with 32 years experience reporting "under-reported" events, William Thomas is the author of Bringing The War Home, Chemtrails Confirmed and All Fall Down: The Politics of Terror and Mass Persuasion.
http://www.lifeboatnew.com willthomas@telus.net
http://www3.bc.sympatico.ca/Willthomas/will/will.htm
Investigative Journalist, Author, Videographer
3.
From: http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0311-03.htm
Published on Monday, March 11, 2002 in the Baltimore Sun
A Lonely Lawmaker Cries Out for Peace
by Jules Witcover
WASHINGTON - While key Democrats in Congress such as Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert C. Byrd chip cautiously at the edges of President Bush's pursuit of the war on terrorism, an obscure back-bencher in the House is making a frontal attack.
Because Democratic Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio is not in a leadership position in his party or in the House, his protest of what he sees as an unauthorized and unwarranted extension of aims in Mr. Bush's war policy constitutes a trickle of dissent in Congress and in the country so far.
But a speech that the 55-year-old congressman and former mayor of Cleveland gave a couple of weeks ago to the liberal Americans for Democratic Action chapter in Los Angeles has triggered thousands of e-mails to him in support of challenging the Bush policy. The speech was put on the Web site of The Nation magazine.
Mr. Kucinich took issue with the so-called Patriot Act, the post-Sept. 11 homeland security legislation that he charges violates five of the 10 original constitutional amendments that make up the Bill of Rights.
Under fire, he said, are free speech, protection against unreasonable search and seizure, protection against cruel and unusual punishment and due process of law, including the right to prompt and public trial.
Mr. Kucinich voted for a military response to the Sept. 11 attacks but argues now that the president has gone beyond that authorization.
"We licensed a response to those who helped bring the terror of Sept. 11," he said in his speech. "But we the people and our elected representatives must reserve the right to measure the response, to proportion the response, to challenge the response and to correct the response."
Now he argues: "Congress did not give the president a blank check. By now the administration has had ample opportunity to develop and carry out a strategy to deal with the challenges of Sept. 11. It's not adequate to hear from the administration that we may be at war for the rest of our lifetimes."
The bulk of Mr. Kucinich's speech was devoid of specific partisanship, but it did spill over at one point into an indictment of the election of Mr. Bush and his running mate, Dick Cheney.
"The trappings of a state of siege trap us in a state of fear," he charged, "ill-equipped to deal with the patriot games, the mind games and the war games of an unelected president and his undetected vice president."
He says now his comment was not intended to challenge the legality of their election but as a reminder that, in his view, they are acting regarding the war policy without a clear "consent of the governed."
Mr. Kucinich, in his third two-year term, has long been a voice in the wilderness on the issue of war and peace. He is the chief sponsor of legislation creating a Department of Peace that would deal in conflict resolution. It has 43 co-sponsors but doesn't appear to be going anywhere, and Mr. Kucinich lacks the stature so far to ignite a brushfire.
While other Democrats, such as Mr. Daschle and Mr. Byrd, have pressed Mr. Bush to provide more information to Congress about the goals of the war on terrorism while supporting its conduct to date, Mr. Kucinich is wielding a much wider brush. He accused Congress of giving in to fear in the evacuations on Capitol Hill during the anthrax scare.
"[Fear] remains present in the cordoning off of the Capitol," he said in his ADA speech. "It is present in the camouflaged armed national guardsmen who greet members of Congress each day we enter the Capitol campus. It is present in the labyrinth of concrete barriers through which we must pass each time we go to vote."
The speech asks for prayer "that our country will stop this war." It is prayer that is not being heard from many others in Congress or in the country as long as we are told that the prime terrorists and their followers are still at large, but it is still early in the war.
For now anyway, the most the Democrats are likely to achieve in stirring public protest is in the limited calls of leaders such as Mr. Daschle and Mr. Byrd to be brought more into the loop on the war's strategy and objectives.
Jules Witcover writes from The Sun's Washington bureau.
See also:
Shays-Kucinich | On Bush's "Theological Fascination With Missile Defense,"
http://www.truthout.com/docs_02/03.13D.Shays.Kucinich.htm
4.
From: http://www.thedailyenron.com/documents/20020307061926-97282.asp
Bush Does Not Measure Up to Own Standards
As part of its ongoing strategy to paint Enron as simply a business scandal, the White House
leaked news yesterday of President Bush's plans to release a new set of standards for
executives and accountants. It's a move not without risk for Bush since it invites journalists to
compare Bush's own actions as a Texas oil company executive against his freshly minted
standards.
As apparently weak as Bush's new rules are, a comparison will show that oil executive George
W. Bush would not have passed muster himself.
Back in 1986 Bush's oil company, Spectrum, was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. As
tends to happen in the Bush clan, a group of businessmen close to his father absorbed
Spectrum into their company, Harken Energy. George W. Bush was facing bankruptcy one day
and the next day he had $600,000 worth of Harken stock in hand, a $80,000-a-year salary and
a stock option arrangement that allowed him to buy Harken stock at 40% below market value.
In all, the deal put well over $1 million in his pocket over the next few years -- even though
Harken itself lost millions.
CLIP
In June 1990 Bush pulled a Skilling. Claiming ignorance of the Harken's financial difficulties or
the Smith Barney report, he sold his 212,140 shares of Harken Energy banking $848,560.00.
Even though the sale fell squarely under the SEC's insider stock sale rule requiring almost
immediate formal notice, Bush did not report the sale until seven months later - after US
troops had finished fighting Desert Storm. At the time the SEC was headed by George H. Bush
appointee, Richard Breeden and no action was taken against the President's son for his
tardiness in reporting his insider trades.
Of course, reporting such a sale at the time it occurred could have been both revealing and
embarrassing. Bush sold his Harken stock less than thirty days after his father's National
Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft sent the President a secret memo warning that hostilities
between Iraq and Kuwait were likely. Did dad share this information with his son? If so, W.
Bush traded on "non-public" information of an extraordinary nature indeed.
Less than two months after Bush sold his shares hostilities broke out in Gulf and Harken's stock
dropped like a stone. The shares lost 25% of their value alone on the day Iraq invaded Kuwait.
Had Bush held his shares until then he would have lost nearly a quarter of million dollars.
Harken's stock fell to as low as .25 a share. Today it trades under a dollar.
So, as President W. Bush unveils his new business executive's ethical standards, journalist
might want to ask him to try them on himself.
5.
From: http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0310-02.htm
Published on Sunday, March 10, 2002 in the Toronto Sun
War on Terror Masks Bush's Grand Strategy
by Eric Margolis
I enlisted in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam conflict because I believed the war was just and it was the duty of male citizens of democracies to perform military service in wartime.
Thirty-five years later, White House tape recordings revealed that by 1967 Democratic president Lyndon Johnson knew the war was lost, yet kept sending tens of thousands of American soldiers to their deaths because he had no better plan and feared the domestic political consequences of a pullout. Johnson and Robert McNamara, his secretary of defence, persistently lied to and deceived Americans.
This bitter experience, and two decades as a journalist, left me with deep cynicism and a profound distrust of most politicians. The present war in Afghanistan fills me with unease. Once again, the White House is not telling the full truth to its citizens, and is risking the lives of soldiers in a war whose aims are constantly shifting, nebulous and overreaching. What began as a limited operation to kill the elusive Osama bin Laden has ballooned into a campaign to invade Iraq and dominate South/Central Asia.
Afghanistan, as last week's bloody fighting showed, was not the cakewalk predicted by hawks and instant experts. Far from "mopping up isolated al-Qaida remnants," U.S. forces and their auxiliaries battled heavily armed forces that included hundreds of new volunteers.
The Pentagon and unquestioning U.S. media always refer to Afghans fighting on the U.S. side as "anti-Taliban Afghan forces." In fact, almost all are U.S.-paid mercenaries. Their lack of martial ardour is why U.S. troops were used in last week's attacks.
President George Bush's claim the U.S. invaded Afghanistan to "defend democracy" and/or "stamp out terrorism" is certainly not the whole story. The Pentagon had drawn up plans to invade Afghanistan, and U.S. Special Forces were operating in Kyrgyzstan, well before 9/11. Over the past five months, the U.S. has established permanent military bases in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and facilities in Kazakstan. In short, a constellation of air and army bases designed for long-term strategic control of the region, under the command of the newly activated U.S. 3rd Army, whose HQ was recently moved from the Southern U.S. to Kuwait.
Oil Reserves
The so-called "war on terrorism" is being used to mask a far grander imperial design: the overthrow of Saddam Hussein that will allow the U.S. to gain control of Iraq's huge oil reserves, which are second only to Saudi Arabia's, and secure American control of the giant Caspian Oil Basin. The new U.S. bases just happen to follow the route of the planned American pipelines that will bring Central Asia's oil and gas riches - the "new Silk Road" - south through Pakistan. Each day, the U.S. is plunging deeper and deeper into South and Central Asia - which I call the Mideast East. American soldiers could end up fighting there 50 years hence. In fact, the Bush administration seems to be emulating the old British Empire.
What was known in Vietnam as "mission creep" is already at work. A brief U.S. incursion into Afghanistan is now growing into permanent commitment and the very "nation-building" that Bush vowed to avoid. The client regime of U.S.-appointed Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai, is kept in power in Kabul by British and U.S. bayonets - just as former Afghan communist regimes were maintained by the Soviet Red Army. The affable Karzai has become the darling of the U.S. media, which gushes over him and his green cloak with the same misplaced rapture it showed for another CIA "asset," Egypt's late leader, Anwar Sadat, who was adored in New York but hated in Cairo.
The U.S. relied on the Russian-controlled Northern Alliance, run by the reinvigorated Afghan Communist party, to overthrow the Taliban. Russia sent $4 billion worth of arms to the Alliance, the real power behind Karzai's let's pretend regime. The Alliance is bankrolled by the drug trade, which it restored after the Taliban was overthrown. Because Pashtun mercenaries hired by the U.S. are unreliable, the U.S. now plans to build an 80,000-man Afghan national army, trained by American "advisers" (shades of Vietnam). The Soviets did exactly the same thing after they invaded Afghanistan in 1979. The Afghan communist Army proved as poor and disloyal as most of South Vietnam's Army.
Old Afghan hands, this writer included, have repeatedly warned the U.S. not to get involved in Afghan tribal and ethnic politics, not to set up permanent bases, not to drive north into Central Asia, and not to force Pakistan into becoming another obedient U.S. client state, like Egypt or Turkey. To get in and then out of Afghanistan as fast as possible. But Bush administration crusaders, gripped by a lust for blood and oil, are charging forward. In a truly shameful act, the administration is even sending troops to Georgia to battle Chechen independence fighters in the Caucasus mountains.
America has been scourged by terrorist attacks because of its often heavy-handed interventions abroad, not because Muslims hate democracy or McDonald's. The Saudis who staged kamikaze attacks on the U.S. did so because of the agony of Palestine and Iraq, and American domination of Saudi Arabia. Deeper U.S. involvement in Asia will likely mean more, not less, risk of terrorist attacks.
6.
Sent by Taansen <earthlanding@satyuga.org>
Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2002
What It Means To Be Rich
One day a father of a very wealthy family took his son on a trip to the country with the firm purpose of showing his son how poor people can be.
They spent a couple of days and nights on the farm of what would be considered a very poor family.
On their return from their trip, the father asked his son, "How was the trip?"
"It was great, Dad." "Did you see how poor people can be?" the father asked. "Oh Yeah", said the son. "So what did you learn from the trip?" asked the father.
The son answered, "I saw that we have one dog and they had four. We have a pool that reaches to the middle of our garden and they have a creek that has no end. We have imported lanterns in our garden and they have the stars at night. Our patio reaches to the front yard and they have the whole horizon. We have a small piece of land to live on and they have fields that go beyond our sight. We have servants who serve us, but they serve others. We buy our food, but they grow theirs. We have walls around our property to protect us, they have friends to protect them."
With this the boy's father was speechless. Then his son added, "Thanks dad for showing me how poor we are."
Too many times we forget what we have and concentrate on what we don't have. What is one person's worthless object is another's prize possession. It is all based on one's perspective. Makes you wonder what would happen if we all gave thanks for all the bounty we have, instead of worrying about wanting more.
Take joy in all you have, especially your family and friends. They are our treasures!
