Zone/911 - 27 October 2001

[Doug Millison]

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Zone/911 - Pynchonian Echoes in the Current Situation - 27 October 2001

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"[...] With this contest, Americans can roll up their sleeves and plunge
right into the war effort. I already have several preliminary brainstorms
for the Defense Department.

Instead of offering $5 million as bounty for Osama bin Laden, make it $1
billion. That's a fraction of the cost of Operation Enduring Freedom and
perhaps enough to interest even the Taliban. In a similar vein, the Bush
Administration could vow to spend $40 billion -- the amount of the
emergency package Congress passed -- to rebuild Afghanistan, in an attempt
to convince Afghanistan civilians that the United States really is bombing
their country to help them. It could issue direct payments to Afghan
citizens. That would come to about $1,500 a person -- a significant sum for
many Afghans. Or, why not dump millions of dollars with the food being
dropped by U.S. military aircraft? The United States does not seem to be
winning hearts and minds with its bombing campaign. Perhaps it ought to try
buying them.

Build a time machine and send operatives back to 1953 to convince President
Eisenhower and the CIA not to overthrow the democratically elected
government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran. Then, the Shah of Iran would not
gain the throne and rule dictatorially for three decades (with the support
of Washington and the help of savage secret police). He would not breed
anger in Iran and elsewhere, and so not establish the conditions for the
1979 revolution and the rise to power of fundamentalists in Iran. These
operatives could next visit CIA headquarters in the 1980s and tell
officials there to stop encouraging fundamentalist Arabs -- like Osama bin
Laden -- to head to Afghanistan to join the holy war against the Soviets.

Put together a coalition of Western European and Middle Eastern nations to
lean on -- really lean on -- Israel and the Palestinian Authority to
resolve their conflict. You don't need 12 pages to detail the idea.

This is a start. In the meantime, citizens can continue to stay involved in
the war by watching television. For the moment, there still is something to
see on our screens. (Bombing raids are difficult to hide.) But if the war
ever progresses to a post-Afghanistan phase, we may no longer be able to
serve our country as couch warriors. "
http://www.tompaine.com/opinion/2001/10/26/index.html

*  *  *

"[...] This business of trying to define a just war against Afghanistan is
what C. Wright Mills used to call crackpot realism. War, as the United
States has been fighting it in Iraq and Yugoslavia, consists mostly of
bombing, intended to terrify the population and destroy the fabric of
tolerable social existence. [...]  Colonel John Warden, who planned the air
campaign in Iraq said afterwards that dropping dumb bombs "is like shooting
skeet. 499 out of 500 pellets may miss the target, but that's irrelevant."
There will always be shattered hospitals and wrecked old folks' homes, just
as there will always be Defense Department flacks saying that the
destruction "cannot be independently verified" or that the hospital or old
folks' home were actually sanctuaries for enemy forces, for "command and
control." [...]  What's unusual about the latest onslaught is that it is
being leveled at a country where, on numerous estimates from reputable
organizations, around 7.5 million people were, before September 11, at risk
of starving to death. On September 16 the New York Times' Islamabad
correspondent, John Burns, reported that the United States "demanded
elimination of truck convoys that provide much of the food and other
supplies to Afghanistan's civilian population." In early October the UN's
World Food Program was able to resume shipments at a lower level, then the
bombing began and everything stopped once more, amid fierce outcry from
relief agencies that the United States was placing millions at risk, with
winter just around the corner. [...] "
Alexander Cockburn, http://www.counterpunch.org/


" [...] 19 members of Shabbir's family were killed. Many of the survivors,
who escaped to Pakistan in recent days with the help of family or
international relief agencies, said that initially they may have supported
the United States over the Taliban but now have turned against America and
plan to fight if the U.S. or allies deploy ground troops. [...] Zana Shah,
20, lay on a bed. He couldn't feel anything in his lower extremities. A
bomb hit the roof of his house Thursday night, burying him. His two nephews
were killed during earlier attacks on Kandahar, he said. "I wasn't against
America," he said. "Now that my nephews have died, and I'm in this
condition, when I get better I'll be the first to fight America. It wasn't
my fault, it wasn't my nephews' fault. What did we do?"
Copyright © 2001, Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/printedition/chi-0110270161oct27.story?coll=c
hi%2Dprintnews%2Dhed

*  *  *

"Genocide scholar Adam Jones claims he has been "silenced" on H-Genocide,
an academic mailing list for the genocide-studies community, after
attempting to post materials and commentary on the U.S.-led military
campaign against Afghanistan. [...]  Jones cited testimony from
humanitarian organizations and United Nations staffers to the effect that
the bombing campaign against Afghanistan was the major impediment to the
delivery of desperately-needed food aid to the Afghan civilian population.
In the first post (12 October 2001), Jones asked: "If coalition leaders are
aware of the present situation, as most of the major humanitarian agencies
and international media appear to be, and choose to continue the bombing in
coming weeks ... could any resulting largescale mortality legitimately be
termed genocidal?" [...] The visceral response of the H-Genocide editors to
posts perceived as "anti-American" was amply on display in the invective
they directed against Jones. In excerpted comments from their decisions,
forwarded to Jones at his request on 24 October 2001, editorial board
members referred to him as "a loose cannon" whose writings were "libelous
and disgraceful" and evoked "anger and revulsion"; and who taught at "a
hot-bed of anti-American and anti-Western thought."
http://www.counterpunch.org/jones.html


"[...] Crafted in Attorney General John Ashcroft's little shop of legal
horrors from the remnants of past assaults on the Constitution, the "USA
PATRIOT ACT" is a legislative Frankenstein's monster. "This bill goes light
years beyond what is necessary to combat terrorism," argues Laura Murphy,
Director of the ACLU Washington National Office. "Included in the bill are
provisions that would allow for the mistreatment of immigrants, the
suppression of dissent and the investigation and surveillance of wholly
innocent Americans." [...] --Creates a broad new definition of "domestic
terrorism" that could target people who engage in acts of political protest
and subject them to wiretapping and enhanced penalties."
http://www.thenation.com/thebeat/

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Zone/911 is an occasional enewsletter published by
www.Online-Journalist.com. It seeks shards of  the shattered geopolitical
crystal palace loosely linked by tangential threads that lead, eventually
and sometimes in very roundabout ways, to the works of Thomas Ruggles
Pynchon. Article excerpts appear without prior authorization of their
originating publications under established "fair use" principles. The
Editor encourages readers to click on the enclosed urls and read excerpted
articles in their entirety, monitor a broad spectrum of information
sources, and use their brains to integrate their own understanding of the
post-911 Situation. Feedback:  bozo at online-journalist.com.

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