From: "Pat Fallon" <pfallon@ptd.net>
> I think it is very important to understand why we were attacked.
> Understanding why someone attacked you may help you avoid a similar
> situation in the future, for one thing.
[snip]
> IMHO, terrorism cannot be understood or effectively dealt with in isolation
> from American foreign policy. Terrorism is a tactic, and it is
> intellectually confusing to declare war on a tactic. You can kill individual
> terrorists, but if the cause of their hatred is our interventionist foreign
> policy, more will just take their place.
> I fear that no amount of federalization of airport security, whiz-bang
> technology, cruise missiles, mile-wide atomic helicopters, offices of
> homeland security or electronic surveillance will stop Americans from being
> attacked if our government continues to generate such hatred abroad. But
> the political leadership of the U.S. does not want to change its
> interventionist foreign policy, instead, it will insist that Americans give
> up their freedoms in exchange for promised security.
[snip]
> How convenient for our leaders that most talking heads on TV use their
> dictionary. Hey, maybe it's just me, but I can't shake the notion that our
> gov/media is pushing the view that when terrorists attack, they're
> terrorizing. When we attack, we're retaliating. When they respond to our
> retaliation with further attacks, they're terrorizing again. When we respond
> with further attacks, we're retaliating again.
>
> Like "collateral damage." I heard it first used by the Pentagon during the
> Gulf War to describe the deaths of innocent Iraqis during the massive
> bombing campaign in 1991 and it seemed like an attempt to obscure and
> rationalize these deaths through Orwellian jargon. "Collateral damage" also
> was invoked to describe the effects of attacks on civilian passenger trains,
> refugee convoys and the headquarters of Radio Television Serbia during the
> war in Kosovo.
Good points. I've been fidgeting about wanting to send a couple of links from The Progressive (for fear of being subjected to The Wrath of the Extropians: "Pummel! Pummel! Pummel!"). Awww, what the hell ...
Here is Bin Laden in an eerily prescient interview of things to come, from a November 1998 issue:
http://www.progressive.org/webex/wxbin102401.html
And here is a recent article from Howard Zinn:
http://www.progressive.org/0901/zinn1101.html
I don't agree with every point Zinn makes, but it was refreshing to read a different perspective than the mainly undistinguishable pablum we are being fed in the dailies and on CNN ("Clone Network News").
Olga
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat May 11 2002 - 17:44:22 MDT