My original complaint that the US media served to manufacture consent for war is now outdated. As the war took its course, the media became less interested in advocating it - which happens with all wars - and that is precisely why Pentagon knows that it has to keep its wars SHORT.
Now, there are not only anti-war protests around the world, there are protests around the US as well, and those protests are televised. It is not that US citizens are against US fighting terrorism. On the contrary - just about everybody here wants to see those responsible for the 9-11 attacks brought to justice.
It is that the method seems questionable. Every day the Pentagon announces the heaviest bombing of targets in Afghanistan so far. And nobody knows just what targets there may be left any more. And than the reports come of Red Cross warehouses being hit accidentally TWICE. And of civilian casualties in other places.
But when Special Forces reached Kandahar, they were still met with heavy Taliban resistance - so where did all those bombs fell, one would prudently have to ask?
In yesterday's anti-war protests in New York city there was reportedly a group carrying a banner - 'Yugoslavs against US bombing' - this met a curious negative response from Belgrade, where people privately in general approve of the US bombing of the former KLA and Bosnian Army ally Osama Bin Laden.
While refugees are comming in droves from Afghanistan to Pakistan, young Pakistanis are fleeing in opposite direction - to help Taliban fight Americans:
By Riaz Khan, Associated Press Writer, 27 October 2001
"More than 5,000 people rolled out of a north-eastern Pakistan village today in buses and trucks, pickups and vans, bound for the Afghan frontier and vowing to fight a holy war against the United States."
In the new media atmosphere, where quietly the restrictions discussed in the beginning of the war were dropped, the K-Rock radio in New York (which increasingly sounds like Radio 101 in Zagreb did during the war in Croatia - in respect of the vocabulary used to describe the perceived enemy) commented this particular piece of news with: "great, there will be more of them for us to kill."
K-Rock, mindful of the Muslim diet restrictions, also suggested dropping pork meat in lieu of the food drops. In the matter of fact, maybe they should contact Heifer International - the organizations that specializes in donating livestock to the poor third world village families - to drop some piglets over to the Taliban.
During the recent attack on Duke Energy's Catawba Nuclear Power Plant at York, SC, local population could think that the war really came to the US. But it was just a training operation of the US special forces - regrettably unanounced to the local authorities. Luckily, local Sheriff did not open fire on spec-op troops.
The US government got Bayer to halve its price of anthrax treating Cipro medicine by threatening foreign imports of emergency supply (foreign producers of generic Cipro sell it for 1/30 of Bayer's price). I didn't hear anybody opposing this unique evidence of how corporate greed became itself a victim of this recent war.
Meanwhile, former president Clinton got salmonella in the mail, instead of anthrax. What an embarassment. He isn't worthy of anthrax any more, I guess, now that he is out of power.
And the most disturbing recent news are that the anthrax might have come from the domestic right-wing sources - remember Larry Wayne Harris case? - so what's next? bombing Idaho?
Yet, the present US response is still mainly two prong: overwhelming military force threat against Arab states and the police threat mainly aimed on Arab immigrants within the US borders:
FBI CONSIDERING TORTURE
The Washington Post reported Oct. 22 that FBI officials are "beginning to say that traditional civil liberties may have to be cast aside" in the case of suspects held at New York's Metropolitan Correctional Center in connection with the 9-11 attacks. The four suspects are Zacarias Moussaoui, a French Moroccan "detained in August in Minnesota after he sought lessons on how to fly commercial jetliners but not how to take off or land them"; Mohammed Jaweed Azmath and Ayub Ali Khan, "Indians traveling with false passports who were detained the day after the [9-11] attacks with box cutters, hair dye and $5,000 in cash"; and Nabil Almarabh, "a former Boston cabdriver with alleged links to al-Qaeda." The four have all rejected offers of lighter sentences, money, jobs and new identities in exchange for testimony. Noting US legal strictures against torture, authorities are considering extraditing the suspects to "allied countries where security services employ threats to family members or torture."
The Sad State of American Jurisprudence
(BarnacleBob)
Oct 27, 07:45
When they took the 4th Amendment away
I was quiet because I didn't deal in drugs...
When they took the 6th Amendment away
I was quiet because I had never been arrested...
When they took the 2nd Amendment away
I was quiet because I didn't own a gun...
Now they have taken the 1st Amendment away
and all I can do is be quiet...
ivo
------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
War on Terrorism: Observer special
Ed Vulliamy in New York
Sunday October 28, 2001
The Observer
Neo-Nazi extremists within the US are behind the deadly wave of anthrax
attacks against America, according to latest briefings from the security
services and Justice Department.
Experts on 'survivalist' groups and extreme-right 'Aryan' militants have
been drafted into the investigation as the focus shifts away from possible
links with the 11 September terrorists or even possible state backers such
as Iraq.
'We've been zeroing in on a number of hate groups, especially one on the
West Coast,' a source at the Justice Department told The Observer yesterday.
'We've certainly not discounted the possibility that they may be involved.'
The anthrax crisis, which grew last week, had by Friday night spread to
mailrooms at CIA headquarters, the Supreme Court and a hospital, and
yesterday three traces were found in an office building serving the US
Capitol.
'There are a number of strong leads, and some people we know well that we
are looking at,' the Justice Department said. 'These are groups organised
into militia and "survivalist" movements - which pull out of society and
take to the hills to make war on the government, and who will support anyone
else making war on the government.'
Investigators are examining threatening letters sent to media
organisations - some dated before the 11 September attacks - which did not
contain anthrax but contained similar messages and handwriting style as
those which later did. The theory is that the anthrax attacks were planned -
and the killer germ was obtained and treated - long before the carnage of 11
September.
Speaking to The Observer yesterday, the Justice Department official said:
'We have to see the right wing as much better coordinated than its apparent
disorganisation suggests. And we have to presume that their opposition to
government is just as virulent as that of the Islamic terrorists, if not as
accomplished.
'But that is, in its way, one of the most compelling possible leads in the
anthrax trail - that it is not really al-Qaeda's style, but rather that of
others who sympathise with its war against the American government and
media.'
The official said the investigation had, in the past week, drafted in
special teams from the Civil Rights division of the department to reinforce
the international terrorism teams. The American neo-Nazi Right is motivated
above all by its loathing of the federal government, which it believes is
selling out the homeland to a 'New World Order' run by masons and Jews.
Its insane politics have propelled numerous attacks and armed stand-offs
over the past eight years, culminating in the carnage at Oklahoma. Now the
anthrax investigation is zooming in on possible connections between these
neo-Nazis and Arab extremists, united by their mutual anti-Semitism and
hatred of Israel. Such alliances have been common among neo-Nazis in Europe,
but have played a lesser role in the US. However, monitoring of the hate
groups shows they are now embracing al-Qaeda's terrorism as commendable
attacks on the federal government.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal centre in Los Angeles said that
at a meeting in Lebanon this year, US neo-Nazis were represented alongside
Islamic militants. 'There's a great solidarity with the point of view of the
bin Ladens of the world,' said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law
Centre, which monitors the far right. 'These people wouldn't let their
daughters near an Arab, but they are certainly making common cause on an
ideological level. They see the same enemy: American culture and
multiculturalism.'
Neo-Nazi websites, including the largest umbrella organisation, the National
Alliance, show support for al-Qaeda. Billy Roper, the alliance's membership
coordinator posted a message within hours of the 11 September attacks,
reading: 'Anyone who is willing to drive a plane into a building to kill
Jews is all right by me. I wish our members had half as much testicular
fortitude.' Another group, Aryan Action, praised the attacks of 11
September, saying: 'Either you're fighting with the Jews against al-Qaeda or
you support al-Qaeda fighting against the Jews.' Others outwardly support
the anthrax mailing.
One message, entitled 'No Sympathy for the Devil', was posted in several
chat rooms by right-winger Grant Bruer, whose racist writings are circulated
among supremacist groups. It reads: 'Is there not a single person who has
received these anthrax letters that isn't an avowed enemy of the white race?
Tom Brokaw, Tom Daschle and the gossip rag offices have all been 100 per
cent legitimate targets. Who among us has the slightest bit of sympathy for
these pukes?'
Right-wing groups have had an interest in anthrax and other biological
agents. A member of the Aryan Nation group once bragged he had a stash of
anthrax from digging up a field where cows had died of the disease in the
1950s. Larry Wayne Harris was arrested after trying to obtain three vials of
bubonic plague from a mail-order science company.
The trail leading investigators to groups from the domestic ultra-right -
rather than the al-Qaeda terror network - comes as a dramatic twist in the
confused crisis. Last week, parallel evidence appeared to be linking the now
rampant anthrax attacks to another trail: leading from Iraq and through the
Czech Republic, with al-Qaeda militants as the likely couriers.
The shift in the investigation echoes that which followed America's other
infamous terrorist attack: the destruction of the federal government
building in Oklahoma City in 1995. The bombing was initially thought to be
the work of Arab extremists, but turned out to be the work of the Aryan
supremacists.
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