4) Pentagon terror in Afghanistan
by WW
5) Belfast is Little Rock revisited
by WW
6) Who will disarm Pentagon?
by WW
-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Nov. 29, 2001
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------
Pentagon terror in Afghanistan
NO LETUP IN BRUTAL BOMBING
By Leslie Feinberg
Seen through the tightly focused lens of U.S. media
censorship, the Pentagon-led war against Afghanistan is
being treated as yesterday's news.
The big brass take center stage in news corps briefings.
Their message? "The Northern Alliance, with a backbone of
U.S. command and firepower, is militarily routing the
Taliban to the south. It's almost over. The next countries
to be targeted in the crosshairs of Operation Enduring
Warfare? No news yet. Stay tuned."
But the war looks different below the B-52 bombers in
Afghanistan. It's merciless and bloody and terrifying. And
it's not over. The facts are painful and grim. It's
important not to turn away from the reality of the toll this
war is taking on the women, men and children at ground zero
in Afghanistan.
These are people who have done nothing to anyone in the
United States. They have no defense against the powerful
aircraft ruling their skies. They are being killed wantonly,
in the same arrogant and racist tradition that has led to so
many millions of other Third World deaths at the hands of
colonial and imperialist armies.
Carpet bombing by U.S. Air Force warplanes killed some 150
unarmed Afghan civilians in Khanabad on Nov. 18, reported
The Independent in England. As terrified residents fled the
town--located a few miles from Kunduz--they described how B-
52 bombers had pounded their civilian neighborhoods with
tons of bombs on a daily basis for four days.
Refugees said all but a handful of the town's population of
40,000 had fled, many without food, medicine, warm clothing
or shoes. Above the stream of homeless Afghanis, B-52s
circled nearby, dropping bombs from their bays on nearby
hills. Smoke billowed from the echoing detonations.
"There are a lot of dead people there," said Farhod, who was
displaced from Khanabad along with his parents, sisters and
brothers.
"I saw 20 dead children on the streets," recalled refugee
Zumeray. "Forty people were killed yesterday alone. I saw it
with my own eyes. Some of them were burned by the bombs,
others were crushed by the walls and roofs of their houses
when they collapsed from the blast. When the bombs hit,
there was fire everywhere." While the dead remain nameless
and faceless in U.S. media reports, Zumeray recalled that
the first house hit by the exploding bombs belonged to a man
named Agha Padar.
TERROR: MADE IN THE USA
More than 1,000 people were killed during intense U.S.
bombing strikes around the city of Kunduz over the weekend
of Nov. 17-18, according to reports in the Hindustan Times.
The newspaper quoted Mulla Fazil, a military commander of
the Pentagon-backed militia.
Fazil told the daily Dawn via satellite phone that the
bombing runs had killed some 800 people in Kunduz and 250 in
the nearby district of Khanabad.
More U.S. air strikes took nearly 140 lives--mostly
civilians--near Kandahar on Nov. 16-18, the Pakistan-based
Afghan Islamic Press reported.
Some 42 people died during the aerial pounding of the
Maywand district. "Most of the victims were tribal nomads,"
the AIP observed. The article added that another 93 people
were killed in heavy raids on the eastern provinces of Khost
and Nangarhar.
Some U.S. media accounts did note in passing that the
Pentagon had "damaged" a mosque during a Nov. 16 bombing
run. In actuality, the 500-pound laser-guided bomb plowed
into a madrassa--an Islamic seminary--killing 62 students
during evening prayers.
The following day U.S. bombs claimed the lives of 28 people,
including 19 members of one family, in the village of Zani
Kehl--six miles west of Khost.
And one day later, another 30 Afghanis were killed during
pre-dawn air strikes on the town of Shamshad, five miles
from the border with Pakistan. AIP quoted witnesses who
explained that the U.S. jets streaked back for a second
attack later when people from adjacent villages were trying
to rescue survivors.
"I don't know how many people died but it is likely there
are many casualties," stated Imtiaz Hussain, administrator
of the Edhi Hospital on the Pakistan border.
Now that the generals feel that the air war is ruling the
skies over much of Afghanistan, more elite U.S. troops are
being sent inside to impose control on the ground.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld laughed as he held up
pictures of Pentagon troops on horseback for the media
cameras. The Pentagon already has hundreds of "special
operations" troops inside the country.
Rumsfeld added that these elite commandos are shooting to
death those it thinks are Taliban and Al-Qaeda members. This
is another sinister violation of international norms of
conduct. And he said that Pentagon forces will interrogate
Taliban and Al-Qaeda leaders being held by the U.S.-backed
Northern Alliance.
- END -
(Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to
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From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> (WW)
Date: sunnuntai 25. marraskuu 2001 19:53
Subject: [WW] Belfast is Little Rock revisited
-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Nov. 29, 2001
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------
Report from northern Ireland
BELFAST IS LITTLE ROCK REVISITED
By Richard Becker
Belfast, northern Ireland
The picture on the office wall is from Little Rock,
Arkansas. It's 1957. A young African American woman is
surrounded by young whites, their faces contorted with
hatred as they scream racist insults at her.
The office is not in the U.S. It's in North Belfast,
northern Ireland. This is the office of the Right to
Education Group, whose members are all white. But they
compare their struggle to that in Little Rock. And with good
reason.
For 11 weeks, their small children have been subjected to
attack and harassment by a howling and often violent mob.
Aged three to 11, the kids attend Holy Cross Primary School
for Girls on the Ardoyne Road. Bigots scream the most vile
obscenities at the girls and their parents, who must
accompany the students to and from school every day.
The bigots are Loyalists, the mainly Protestant shrinking
majority in northern Ireland. Also known as Unionists, their
loyalty is to Britain.
The girls' parents are Nationalists, mainly Catholic, who
have fought for decades against anti-Catholic discrimination
and for unification with the Republic of Ireland.
"Ardoyne Road is an interface between the Nationalist and
Loyalist communities," said Margaret McLenaghan, a member of
the Sinn Fein party who represents this neighborhood in the
Belfast City Council.
You can see it in the flags. On one side of the street every
street light flies a tattered British Union Jack, as well as
banners of fascist Loyalist groups like the Ulster Defense
Association (UDA) and Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). On the
other side are the tri-color flags of the Irish Republic.
"Violent attacks are common here," said McLenaghan. "If a
Catholic is walking alone on this side of Ardoyne Road, it
is common for 10 or 15 Loyalists to run across the street,
throw some punches or kicks, and sometimes try to drag the
person back with them."
Brendan Mailey, an organizer with the parents' committee,
told us that even the infamously anti-Nationalist Royal
Ulster Constabulary (RUC) has stated that 92 percent of all
ethnic/religious attacks in the area are carried out by
Loyalists against Nationalists.
The attacks on the Holy Cross students began on Sept. 3,
2001, when school reconvened.
The protests were an initiative of the UDA and other fascist
organizations, which mobilized hundreds of vicious bigots on
the day school started to line the quarter-mile or so of
Ardoyne Road that passes through a Loyalist area.
For a week before Sept. 11, the Holy Cross struggle was in
the world news. The violence of the fascist bigots was an
embarrassment to the British occupiers and their
"respectable" Loyalist allies. The RUC and elements of the
British occupation army had to be called out to create a
path through which the girls and their parents could pass. A
bomb was even detonated.
Like so many other struggles around the world, Holy Cross
school disappeared from the U.S. media after Sept. 11.
"On Sept. 12," McLenaghan told Workers World, "we had a
minute of silence on the way to school in memory of those
who had died in the September 11 attacks. The silence was
disrupted, however, by the bigots screaming, 'Your friends
in America won't be sending you any more money, you Fenian
bastards.' " There is fund-raising for their cause among
Irish Americans.
Out of the world media spotlight, the British government and
the local Unionist authorities allowed the bigots to
continue terrorizing the children.
"What's going on here is child abuse," said Mailey. "These
demonstrations against children shouldn't be allowed at all.
But what the government is trying to do is make them
acceptable."
PROTESTS ARE 'LEGITIMIZED'
BY POLICE
On the previous day, Nov. 6, Mailey pointed out, the police
had met with Jim Potts of the UDA and others and agreed that
if the protests were slightly modified, the RUC officers
would stop wearing riot gear. "They (RUC) didn't discuss
this with us at all,"said Mailey. "We are opposed to
anything that legitimizes these bigoted protests, when
instead they should be ended altogether."
Walking up to the school and back with the parents and
children was an instant education, even though the bigots
were acting in a restrained manner on Nov. 7. South African
Archbishop Desmond Tutu had visited the school that morning
and some of the international media were with him.
Both sides of Ardoyne Road were lined with more than 50 gray
RUC vehicles, "jeeps" as they're called locally. They look
somewhat like small armored personnel carriers. There were
also several Saracens--wheeled tanks. This gauntlet is
staffed with more than 100 RUC police and dozens of British
troops, wearing camouflage and wielding various automatic
weapons.
Most telling, all of the RUC and British soldiers faced
inward, toward the children and parents, their machine gun
barrels parallel to the ground.
The spirit of resistance of the Nationalist community was
evident in the quiet but steely determination of the
parents' committee and other community activists. And it was
evident in the girls, as well.
As we walked back down the hill after school, some of the
older girls started defiantly singing a call-and-response
school song.
Everywhere we go, people want to know
Who we are, where do we come from
And so we tell them, we're from Holy Cross
And if you can't hear us, we'll shout a little louder.
They shouted a lot louder.
- END -
(Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to
copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but
changing it is not allowed. For more information contact
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail:
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From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> (WW)
Date: sunnuntai 25. marraskuu 2001 19:54
Subject: [WW] Who will disarm Pentagon?
-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Nov. 29, 2001
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------
EDITORIAL
Who will disarm Pentagon?
U.S. President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir
Putin publicly agreed on Nov. 13 to cut their country's
nuclear arsenals by roughly two-thirds over the next 10
years. By an admittedly dubious system of counting, the
Pentagon estimates the U.S. will be left with about 1,700 to
2,200 warheads. Does this mean that the peoples of the world
can sigh with relief?
Does it mean that Bush, the commander-in-chief of the only
country to have ever exploded atomic warheads in combat, is
now ready to forge weapons into plowshares? Is the Pentagon
really ready to usher in that "peace" that it claimed would
follow a defeat of the Soviet Union in the anti-communist
Cold War?
Ask the women, men and children of Afghanistan living under
the horrifying rain of "conventional" weaponry. Or the
mothers and fathers of Iraq who are burying 5,000 of their
children a month due to the economic strangulation of U.S.-
led sanctions.
Ask the residents of Vieques whose tiny island is bombarded
by U.S. Navy practice test runs. Or the people of North
Korea who live in the shadow of still-deployed U.S. nuclear
warheads. Or the population of the Balkans now facing a
radioactive future because the Pentagon forces used depleted
uranium weaponry in their war against what was left of
socialist Yugoslavia.
Reducing the total number of warheads doesn't lessen the
danger that the imperial U.S. colossus poses to the peoples
of this planet. The obsolescence factor means that many
warheads would automatically have to be scrapped anyway. But
how many nukes do the generals and admirals need to menace a
country that tries to stand up in defense of its national
sovereignty or self-interests? Even one would instill
widespread fear--especially if the United States could
achieve being the only country that had one.
When the Soviet Union and later China developed the bomb,
and the socialist camp was strong, this acted as a brake on
attempts by U.S. imperialism to dominate the globe. But with
the overturning of the socialist camp came the rise of U.S.
wars of conquest for economic, military and strategic
hegemony in Iraq, Somalia and the Balkans. And now Bush has
announced a limitless, expanding war that begins against
Afghanistan.
Although U.S. rulers have frequently threatened to use
nuclear warheads against socialist Vietnam and Korea, for
example, they know that the use of such weapons would
detonate an explosion of outcry around the world.
So the Pentagon war hawks have turned to other strategies to
project their military power--like the so-called Star Wars
program of space-based warfare. Putin may have agreed to
nuclear weapons reductions, but he refused to go along with
this U.S. militarization of space called the National
Missile Defense program. The NMD threat would destabilize
any arms control constructed over the last three decades.
But the high-tech warmongers in the military-industrial
complex have dollar signs in their eyes when they look
upward at outer space.
There are many other weapons, too, in the Pentagon's
arsenal. The brass didn't use nuclear devices to kill 1.5
million Iraqis. Economic blockades can be just as lethal
over time. Cuba, because of its socialist economy, has
survived more than 40 years of blockade, but has suffered
great shortages while also having to deal with a U.S.
campaign of terror that included bombings of public places
and biological warfare.
And now the 15,000-pound fuel-air explosion Daisy Cutter
bombs being dropped from the bays of C-130s warplanes are
creating widespread destruction and terror in Afghanistan.
Add to this depleted uranium weapons, aircraft carrier-led
battle groups, submarines and destroyers, Buck Rogers
fighter planes, troops stationed throughout the world and a
massively funded police spying apparatus.
It is the Pentagon military machine and the U.S. imperialist
economic system it militarily protects that are the greatest
obstacles to peace--not one class of weapons or another.
Capitalism as a profit-driven system must expand its markets
or die and that is what drives bankers, industrialists and
war profiteers to send in their troops wherever their global
interests are threatened.
It is the working class and oppressed here in the citadel of
U.S. imperialism who are being asked to fight and die for
capitalist globalization. And those who do not pay for this
predatory war with their blood will pay for it with their
retirement funds and wage deductions.
At the same time, every victory for imperialist corporations
in their struggle to dominate and oppress workers abroad
comes back home as lower wages and vanished benefits. This
process will demolish the class peace at home so needed for
imperialist adventure and ultimately bring about a
revolutionary struggle by the workers and oppressed to
disarm the Pentagon and make a just peace with all around
the world who have suffered from its long, nightmarish
siege.
- END -
(Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to
copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but
changing it is not allowed. For more information contact
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail:
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