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World War III Report, #12

Bill Weinberg, Dec. 15, 2001

THE AFGHANISTAN FRONT

1. US Bombing Casualties Equal WTC Victims

2. Secret US Casualties?

3. More Acknowledged US Casualties--And a Near Miss

4. US Pressure Behind Bonn Accords

5. Orwellian Lies of the Bonn Accords

6. US Embroiled in Northern Alliance Faction Fight

7. Kandahar Faction Fight Simmers

8. Taliban POWs Face Cattle Cars and Desert Camps

9. US Bombs Critical Surviving Forest

10. Has Bin Laden Escaped?

11. Arab Skeptics: Video, Schmideo

12. Al-Qaeda Pledges Long, Bitter Resistance

13. Starvation Watch: Is Uzbek Border Really Open?

14. Last Two Jews in Kabul Kvetch at Chanukah Service

15. Media Have Field Day Using Taliban Dupe for Hippie-Bashing



THE MIDDLE EAST

1. Congress to OK Massive Air Attacks on Iraq?

2. Israel Bombs Quakers



THE WAR AT HOME

1. France to US: Don't Execute Our National!

2. JDL Busted in Terror Plot

3. Hundreds of Detainees Face Kafkaesque Nightmare

4. US Silent on Evidence in Raids of Muslim Charities



GLIMMERS OF HOPE

1. UK Anti-Terror Law Stalled



WHO IS OSAMA BIN LADEN?

1. Bush & Bin Laden: All in the Family

2. Osama's Friends Have Friends in High Places


GLOBALIZING JUSTICE

A Call for a National Student Mobilization Against the WEF

From Thursday, January 31st to Sunday, February 3rd 2002
at Columbia University in New York City

URL - http://www.studentsforglobaljustice.org

Mailing List - Globalizejustice-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

1. BACKGROUND ON THE WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM (WEF)

What is the WEF?

Every year, 1,000 top business leaders, come together to shape the global
agenda, while political elites and media luminaries gaze on admiringly. The
World Economic Forum (WEF) will hold its annual meeting at the Waldorf
Astoria Hotel in New York City from January 31st to February 4th 2002. By
its own description, the WEF is a special club of elite business leaders,
whose annual meeting is the world's global business summit.

What is the WEF's agenda?

At the New York WEF summit, the world's richest CEOs will collaborate with
the world's most powerful politicians to set the global economic agenda.
Meanwhile, in the halls of Congress, the world's most powerful politicians
are collaborating with the world's richest CEOs to expand the "war on
terrorism".

YellowTimes.ORG writes: "
By Christopher Reilly

YellowTimes.ORG Journalist


(YellowTimes.ORG) – The Bush administration has been completely hypocritical in its attempts to stop terror groups. The US president announced to CNN that he would be cracking down on financiers of the radical Palestinian group Hamas; however, he completely failed to mention Saudi Arabia and other “moderate” gulf states as being financial and verbal supporters of the Palestinian terror group.


CNN reported yesterday that the president “froze the U.S. assets of a Texas-based Islamic foundation…alleging that the organization acts as a front to finance the militant wing of the Palestinian group Hamas.”

Daybreak Newspaper writes: From Daybreak Newspaper #1. a midwestern anti-authoritarian newspaper. It's available for 2$ from PO Box 14007 Minneapolis MN 55414


==============================

During the summer of 1942, the United States Army's Western Defense Command displaced 110, 000 people of Japanese descent from their homes near the pacific coast. Both American born and alien Japanese residents were forcibly moved into the ten internment camps between the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the Mississippi River. These camps were "to serve as wartime homes for those evacuees who might be unable or unfit to relocate in ordinary American communities."


This situation is witnessed again today, as over 1,100 people have been detained in connection with the September 11th attacks. Eerily similar to past internments, detainees are being held in undisclosed locations while authorities release little or no information about exactly who has been arrested or why they are being held. The American Civil Liberties Union and other human rights organizations urged the government to release basic information about those arrested but received no reply. "We have been deeply disappointed with the government's refusal to release information that would assure the American public that this crucial investigation is being conducted with the basic protections guaranteed by our laws," Gregory Nojeim said. Attorney General John Ashcroft claims they are not required to release information as the government's actions are "consistent with the framework of law that we operate under."

msherrard@hampshire.edu writes: "December 6, 2001


Hampshire College Condemns
War in All-Community Vote

CounterPunch Wire


AMHERST, MA -- The students, faculty, and staff of Hampshire College have voted to condemn the "War on Terrorism" and propose alternative solutions. The vote, which was won by a margin of 693-121 (with 11 abstaining or ambiguous votes), is believed to the first such decision by a college community in the United States. (A majority of the students, faculty, and staff participated in the vote.)


"Our community has spoken," said Michael Sherrard, an organizer with Hampshire Students for a Peaceful Response, which sponsored the vote and authored the anti-war resolution. "We refuse to fall into silent support for an unjust war that kills innocents overseas, and threatens our safety and civil liberties at home."

World War III Report #11 --
Dec. 8, 2001

Bill Weinberg

This issue's Contents:

THE AFGHANISTAN FRONT

1. Peace Deal Shaky; Osama and Omar Still on the Loose
2. Afghan Women Get a Voice in Bonn--Barely;
3. Regional Powers Groom Proxy Forces;
4. First US Combat Deaths;
5. Marines Chase Camels;
6. US Still Bombing Defenseless Villages; Pentagon Denies Facts;
7. Kandahar Refugees Have Nowhere to Go;
8. Rebels Cut Off Noses...;
9. ...But Powell Says No US Peacekeepers;
10. Mazar Destabilized; France into the Breach;
11. US Backs Drug Lord--Again!;
12. The Politics of Starvation;
13. NY Post: Pro-Taliban Hippie "Rat"; Bungling CIA Mole "Hero";
14. Pentagon Appeases Saudi Fundamentalists;
15. Is Bush's War Illegal?


WHO'S NEXT?

1. Yemen?;
2. Sudan?;
3. Somalia?;
4. Iraq?;
5. Palestine?;
6. Kashmir?;


NEW YORK CITY

1. Bush to City: Drop Dead!;
2. Ground Zero Toxic Threat Update;
3. Toxic Mess Fuels Landlord-Tenant Disputes;
4. WTC Death Toll Still Shrinking;
5. Where Are the Missing Homeless?;
6. Terror Blitz Big Bux for Bechtel;
7. Community Garden for Ground Zero?


THE WAR AT HOME

1. Dissent Over Military Tribunals;
2. Is Terror Sweep "Fishing Expedition"?;
3. 548 Anonymous Detainees Still Languish;
4. Detainee on Hunger Strike;
5. Propagandists Make Hay


GLIMMERS OF HOPE

1. Portland Says No to FBI Witch-Hunt

WATCHING THE SHADOWS

1. Did Osama Profit from 9-11 Inside-Trading Scam?;
2. Was Pakistani Intelligence in on 9-11?;
3. Taliban's Unlikely US Liaison

In this exclusive interview, Noam Chomsky speaks to V.K. Ramachandran about
the 'new war against terrorism', imperialism, the media and the role of
intellectuals.

November 15, 2001: there is a break in the North East monsoon, and it is a
clear, cool day in Thekkady. Noam Chomsky is on the second day of his first
holiday in many years, a five-day break from public appearances that takes
Carol Chomsky and himself to the coast, the hills and the coastal backwaters
of Kerala. Both of them have spent much of the morning reading and replying
to e-mails - the torrent that does not recognise time or place - and looking
at the Internet. She is now at the ayurveda clinic nearby, and Professor
Chomsky sits in a wicker chair outside his cottage, reading the newspapers
and preparing for a lengthy interview, exclusive to Frontline, with V.K.
Ramachandran. This is the most recent of many interviews that he has given
Frontline; the first was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, more than a decade
ago, during the Gulf War. The interview, interspersed with conversation,
goes on for more than an hour and a half, and covers many fields: terrorism
and the attack on Afghanistan, imperialism and war, the media, and a theme
on which Chomsky first wrote in the mid-1960s, the role of intellectuals in
society.

V. K. Ramachandran: Noam, what do you see to be the strategic significance
of the new military situation in Afghanistan?

Noam Chomsky: I assume that the U.S. will more or less take control over
Afghanistan. U.S. military force is so overwhelming that it can't fail to
subdue a basically defenceless country. This is quite different from the
Soviet invasion. The Soviets were facing a major mercenary military force,
backed by the United States and other powers. They also had additional
constraints: they never bombed cities or destroyed them, and they never used
what amount to weapons of mass destruction, like carpet bombs or
daisy-cutters. Assuming that this offensive subdues the country mostly, the
United States will probably delegate authority to reconstitute the country
to some other hands, maybe the United Nations or maybe its local allies.
Then comes a very uncertain situation.

The strategic consequences will be particularly significant for Pakistan.
For the rest of the region, it is hard to predict; it depends how local
populations will respond to what has happened. For example, will the
population of Saudi Arabia remain more or less quiescent while observing the
destruction of an Islamic country nearby? Nobody really knows. Experienced
correspondents in Saudi Arabia have been comparing the situation there to
Iran in the late 1970s, where events were completely unpredicted by
Intelligence services or anyone else. These are very volatile, unpredictable
situations, in which no one can tell when a popular explosion will take
place. And if such an event occurs in the Gulf region, it will be of
extraordinary strategic importance.

Ramachandran: Do you think the current military situation will encourage
right-wing triumphalism and serve as justification for military action, here
and elsewhere?

Chomsky: In the United States, undoubtedly. You can predict that any
military triumph of a great power will lead to a mood of triumphalism, which
is very bad news for the world. It frees options for further resort to
military power on the grounds that such power has been seen to succeed. When
violence succeeds on its own terms, it increases the likelihood of further
resort to violence.

Here the question is really how the U.S. population will react and how the
powerful allies will react. Will they be supportive of further unilateral
application of U.S. power in this fashion? If that is tolerated, it is very
bad news for the world.

Ramachandran: What is your assessment of the potential of the Northern
Alliance as a force with political legitimacy in the country and as a force
capable of governing?

Chomsky: The so-called Northern Alliance is not much of an alliance. Its
members are warlords who have been in bitter conflict with one another. In
fact, the massive destruction that they carried out ten years ago when they
were in control was mostly from fighting each other. Some of them have a
very ugly record. General Dostum, who is the 'conqueror' of Mazar-e-Sharif,
was a General in the Soviet Army who was part of the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan until the end. After the Soviets withdrew, he retained control
of his region.

The U.S. will certainly try to forge them into a more or less obedient group
that listens to central orders, which ultimately will come from Washington.
However, whether they can impose discipline on these groups is impossible to
guess. These groups are non-Pashtun; they are Tadjik-Uzbek with ties to the
Central Asian countries and are, for many Afghans, a sort of foreign force.
The United States has, of course, been trying to bring in Pashtun Afghans to
represent somehow the roughly 40 per cent of the population that is Pashtun.
Whether there are any credible figures among the biggest sector of the
population who can join a U.S.-run coalition is just unclear at the moment.

Ramachandran: What are the present and potential humanitarian consequences
of this war?

Chomsky: For obvious reasons, the Western media and doctrinal system are
trying very hard to suppress that question. First, the threat of bombing and
the bombing itself have already caused a humanitarian catastrophe. Even
before September 11, Afghanistan was in a dire predicament from a
humanitarian point of view. Many millions of people - the United Nations
says 6 to 7 million - were surviving, and barely that, from international
aid. With the threat of bombing, international aid workers were withdrawn
and food deliveries were cut. A few days after September 11, the U.S.
demanded that Pakistan cut off food deliveries. International aid agencies
were extremely bitter about this and condemned quite harshly the threats
that were terminating the delivery of badly needed humanitarian aid (in the
United States, these reports were either suppressed or barely mentioned). As
of now, food deliveries are well below what were considered necessary to
help the people just to survive.

It is not simply food; people need shelter and blankets. Huge numbers of
people have been driven from their homes and have fled into the countryside.
There is at least some hope of giving a degree of sustenance to those who
fled across the border, to Iran or Pakistan. But apparently many millions
have fled into the countryside, and it is impossible to reach them. For
example, a couple of weeks ago, Western reporters estimated that about 70
per cent of the population of Kandahar had fled. It may well be that
Kandahar, where the U.S. destroyed electricity and water supplies (which
amounts to biological warfare), is almost unlivable. Where did these people
go? They are off to the countryside, into regions that, first of all, lack
access to food, except in an extremely limited fashion. These areas are also
probably the most heavily mined in the world. The United Nations had been
carrying out limited mine-clearing operations but those were terminated when
all international workers were withdrawn. Now the people have an additional
problem: the area is probably littered with cluster bombs. Cluster bombs are
much more dangerous than mines. They are vicious anti-personnel weapons that
send out flechettes that tear people to shreds. They just sit there and if a
child picks one up, or a farmer hits one with a hoe, it explodes.

Ramachandran: What does a bomb of this sort look like?

Chomsky: It is a little thing that a child would pick up thinking it is a
toy. In fact, they apparently look pretty much like the food drops, except
that they are smaller.

The same is happening in many places. The estimates are that in northern
Laos there are probably thousands of deaths a year, 30 years after the
bombing. In Laos the Pentagon would not even provide instructions on how to
defuse them to a volunteer British de-mining group that was working there.
In Kosovo as well, the U.S. refused to remove cluster bombs.

In Afghanistan nobody is going to clear these things. So in addition to the
mines, there will be cluster bombs unexploded and very little ability to
bring in food or blankets or to provide shelter. Many people will disappear
and no one will even know what happened to them. No one is going to do a
careful census of Afghanistan to find out what the effects were of the
bombing and of the threat of bombing.

There may be another problem looming. Before the bombing began, the Food and
Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations warned that there was a grave
humanitarian crisis taking place. A few days later, after the bombing began,
they announced that by their estimate about 80 per cent of the planting of
grain, which apparently takes place around then, had been disrupted.

A very graphic illustration of the investigation of casualties comes from
the two major atrocities that ended the millennium, Serbian in Kosovo, and
Indonesian in East Timor.

These are two major atrocities, but they are quite different. The Serbian
atrocities in Kosovo occurred after the NATO bombing began. Western
ideologues tried to suppress this fact, naturally, but we have extensive
documentation on it from the West.

The British, who were the hawkish element in the alliance, have now released
their internal records. Up until late January, the British literally
regarded the KLA as being the main source of killing. Although, just given
the proportion of force, it seems hard to believe, that is their estimate,
and that is what Robin Cook and Lord Robertson were saying in late January.

After the bombing, substantial atrocities began. That is when the population
was driven out of the country and truckloads of bodies were tossed into the
rivers. Although it is necessary to conceal these facts, they are apparent
from the Milosevic indictment, which includes virtually nothing before the
bombing. It all started after the bombing. Not a great surprise: if you
start bombing a country, they don't just sit there and throw flowers at you.
And the atrocities constituted real war crimes, no question about that.

After the war, Kosovo was flooded with forensic experts who tried to find
any possible trace they could of Serbian atrocities and these were
calculated down to the last detail. That is interesting, because since the
bombing was not a result of the atrocities but rather a factor in them, the
greater the atrocities the greater the guilt of the West.

In East Timor, the background is much worse. In the late 1970s, within a few
years of its invasion of East Timor, the Indonesian Army had killed a couple
of hundred thousand people, maybe a third of the population. This was done
decisively with U.S. military and diplomatic support. When the atrocities
peaked and really became genocidal, the British wanted to take part, so
since 1978 they have been probably Indonesia's major military supplier.

Tenants are needed for the first day in court in the lawsuit challenging
Governor Pataki's recent changes to the Rent Stabilization Code. The
judge must see that this issue is important to tenants. Although the suit
is being launched in Brooklyn, if we prevail, the anti-tenant changes
could be stopped statewide. Come to court!

Monday, Dec. 10, 2001

Brooklyn Criminal Court Building*

120 Schermerhorn St.(near Adams)

PICKET

9:30 - 10:30 a.m., in front of court house

COME TO COURT

10:30 a.m. - 1 p.m., Room 308

Ethel Rosenberg Betrayed, Her Brother Now Admits

Philip Delves Broughton

The Daily Telegraph

NEW YORK - The brother of Ethel Rosenberg, the only woman executed in the
United States for espionage, has admitted he lied under oath to protect
himself and effectively sent his sister to the electric chair in 1953.


David Greenglass, now 79, said he feels no remorse over his actions in the
Rosenberg case, which remains one of the most controversial events of the
Cold War. ''As a spy who turned in his family ... I don't care,'' he said.
''I sleep very well.''

World War III Report #10

by Bill Weinberg

Dec. 1, 2001

THE AFGHANISTAN FRONT


DID CIA SPARK MAZAR PRISON MASSACRE?

The bloody siege of Kala-i Janghi, the ancient fortress near Mazar-i Sharif, ended Nov. 27 with an estimated 500 dead, three days after Taliban POWs being held there launched a desperate uprising. It took assaults by US Special Forces and British SAS troops backing up Northern Alliance fighters, plus repeated US airstrikes on the prison-fortress from warplanes and helicopter gunships. Both the UN and human rights groups are calling for an investigation into the bloodbath.

On Nov. 28, Oliver August, Mazar correspondent for the London Times, wrote that Johnny (codename 'Mike') Spann, the CIA agent killed in the uprising, "triggered" the violence with an unsubtle interrogation of Taliban "foreign legion" volunteers, the most fanatical Taliban troops. Spann and a CIA colleague, "Dave," were dressed in Afghan robes, spoke Persian and had grown beards, but apparently failed to fool the captives. When Spann asked one, "Why did you come to Afghanistan?", the captive responded, "We are here to kill you," and jumped at Spann. Spann and "Dave" both pulled their guns, shooting three prisoners dead before losing control over the situation. Spann was "kicked, beaten and bitten to death," while "Dave" fled.

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