Insightful Analysis from ANC Leader; Free Speech in War Time
Michael Eisenscher
The following article causes me to question every presumption of
the current crisis that I have held up to now. I have presumed
the government is whipping up hysteria simply to impose punitive
measures on our population in general, and our immigrant communities
in particular. This article causes me to think that they may be
whipping up hysteria because THEY ARE HYSTERICAL.
Maybe they have actually unleashed one of their most horrible
weapons, something they trained very well and cannot control?
MAYBE THEY KNOW ANOTHER ATTACK IS CERTAIN, based on training they
provided, possibly extending into chemical and biological weapons?
This article, above all others I have read, has me scared. It
comes from ANC TODAY, the online voice of the African National
Congress (V1, #36, 9/28--10/4/2001,
http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/anctoday/2001/at36.htm).
Fighting terrorism
The uses and abuses of anti-communism
The terrorist attacks two weeks ago on New York and Washington have
caused outrage and shock across the world. Speaking on behalf of
the ANC, President Thabo Mbeki said the acts should be condemned
without reservation. Addressing Parliament last week, South African
foreign affairs minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said that South
Africa is opposed to terrorism. She emphasised that during the
course of the armed struggle, the ANC had scrupulously avoided
terrorism as a tactic. All these are absolutely true.
After the terrorist bomb attacks on New York City and Washington,
the government of the USA declared "war on terrorism". President
Bush sounded extremely earnest in his declaration, but a question
arose in my mind: Is the USA in fact opposed to terrorism? Closer
examination of the dramatis personae involved in the September 11th
outrage sheds a rather different light on US pronouncements past
and present.
A United States newspaper reported: "Last week [the US govt] pledged
another $43 million in assistance to Afghanistan, raising total
aid this year to $124 million and making the United States the
largest humanitarian donor to the country." (The Washington Post,
25 May 2001)
This was barely four months ago. Digging deeper into the recent
archives of the United States press one finds yet other reports.
Among the most interesting we find: "The Afghan resistance was
backed by the intelligence services of the United States and Saudi
Arabia with nearly $6 billion worth of weapons. And the territory
targeted last week, a set of six encampments around Khost, where
the Saudi exile Osama bin Laden has financed a kind of 'terrorist
university', in the words of a senior United States intelligence
official, is well known to the Central Intelligence Agency."
"The CIA's military and financial support for the Afghan rebels
indirectly helped build the camps that the United States attacked.
And some of the same warriors who fought the Soviets with the CIA's
help are now fighting under Mr Bin Laden's banner. From those same
camps, the Afghan rebels, known as mujahedeen, or holy warriors,
kept up a decade long siege on the Soviet-supported garrison town
of Khost.
"Thousands of mujahedeen were dug into the mountains around Khost.
Soviet accounts of the siege of Khost during 1988 referred to the
rebel camps as 'the last word in NATO engineering techniques'.
After a decade of fighting during which each side claimed to have
killed thousands of the enemy, the Afghan rebels poured out of
their encampments and took Khost. 'This was the most fiercely
contested piece of real estate in the 10-year Afghan war,' said
Milt Bearden, who ran the CIA's side of the war from 1986 to 1989."
(New York Times. 23 August 1998)
Dig a little deeper to discover further surprises when Steve Coll,
writing in the Washington Post', of 19 July 1992, reveals: "A
specially equipped C-141 Starlifter transport carrying William
Casey touched down at a military air base south of Islamabad in
October 1984 for a secret visit by the CIA director to plan strategy
for the war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
Helicopters lifted Casey to three secret training camps near the
Afghan border, where he watched mujahedeen rebels fire heavy weapons
and learn to make bombs with CIA-supplied plastic explosives and
detonators."
"During the visit, Casey startled his Pakistani hosts by proposing
that they take the Afghan war into enemy territory - into the Soviet
Union itself.
Casey wanted to ship subversive propaganda through Afghanistan to
the Soviet Union's predominantly Muslim southern republics. The
Pakistanis agreed, and the CIA soon supplied thousands of Korans,
as well as books on Soviet atrocities in Uzbekistan and tracts on
historical heroes of Uzbek nationalism, according to Pakistani and
Western officials.
"'We can do a lot of damage to the Soviet Union,' Casey said,
according to Mohammed Yousaf, a Pakistani general who attended the
meeting. Casey's visit was a prelude to a secret Reagan administration
decision in March 1985, reflected in National Security Decision
Directive 166, to sharply escalate US covert action in Afghanistan,
according to Western officials. Abandoning a policy of simple
harassment of Soviet occupiers, the Reagan team decided secretly
to let loose on the Afghan battlefield an array of US high technology
and military expertise in an effort to hit and demoralise Soviet
commanders and soldiers. Casey saw it as a prime opportunity to
strike at an overextended, potentially vulnerable Soviet empire."
The so-called mujahedeen, led by Osama Bin Laden, now accused of
being the chief suspect responsible for the destruction of the
World Trade Centre (WTC) and the attack on the Pentagon, it
transpires, has been an ally of the United States Intelligence
community for well nigh two decades. If the US press is to be
believed, he and his network are in large measure a creation of
the virulently anti-Communist elements in the US establishment,
who not only supported them with funds, but also helped train and
equip them to fight the then Soviet Union. During those years the
CIA, its helpers in Pakistan and the Saudi rulers taught Bin Laden
and his associates a host of skills, including how to move money
to fund their operations from country to country.
As one US commentator writes: "The system is no surprise to the US
government because Washington and its allies have used it, too.
The Bank of Credit and Commerce International was a British-Pakistani
bank that used secret offshore accounts to effect a global
money-laundering fraud that cost victims $8 billion. Before it was
shut down in 1991, it was used to fund the mujahedeen, then fighting
the Soviet-supported government of Afghanistan. The money came from
US and Saudi intelligence. Now many of the formerly US-supported
mujahedeen are members of bin Laden's network. They know all about
how to launder money through the international bank secrecy system."
Yet the alliance among Bin Laden, Taliban, the Saudi monarchy and
the New Right in the United States establishment is not as odd as
it might appear at first sight. There is a remarkable convergence
of views among these allies.
In the USA, the New Right's platform includes a very fundamentalist
reading of the Christian scriptures, (indeed there are states where
pressure from its more extreme supporters has succeeded in having
the theory of evolution banned from the school curriculum). New
Right opposition to women controlling their own fertility in extreme
cases spills over into attacks on doctors and clinics that terminate
unwanted pregnancies. "Family values" is the New Right code for
the restoration of patriarchal relations in the family. Its opposition
to any reforms that will accord equal rights to all US citizens is
as legendary as its xenophobia. The New Right are the most vociferous
proponents of a retributive penal system and the death penalty.
In the Muslim world, but specifically in Afghanistan, the coalition
of forces represented by Bin Laden and Taliban also insists on a
very fundamentalist interpretation of the Q'uran. They are opposed
to women exercising any choice regarding their fertility, and they
enforce strict patriarchal family relations with violence. Women
in the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan of today probably have fewer rights
than chattel slaves in the American South before the civil war. It
should come as no surprise that among the principal grievances
cited by the mujahedeen when they rose in rebellion were attempts
by the then Soviet-backed government to extend equal rights to
women. Like their New Right allies, Taliban employs the most brutal
forms of punishment ranging from public floggings to executions.
The parties to this alliance represent the forces of reaction and
extreme backwardness
It might turn out that the US New Right have sown dragon's teeth
by arming and inspiring what was essentially an anti-modernist
rebellion against a left-wing government. The reality is that Bin
Laden, the Taliban and others of their ilk are today striking out
at what used to be a doting parent. A parent who not only gave them
life but also armed them to wage war on the 'godless Communists'.
But what could have persuaded these reckless offspring to turn
against their parent? On examining the roots of the anti-left
rebellion in Afghanistan one gets to understand today's events
better. The left-wing party that seized power in Afghanistan during
the late 1970s had no intention of introducing socialism to that
country. Afghanistan was an impoverished, semi-feudal society,
barely touched by the modern world. While Babrak Karmal and his
colleagues indeed drew inspiration from and looked to the Soviet
Union for assistance, their immediate aim was to bring their country
abreast of the rest of Asia. That would have entailed mass literacy
by the building of modern schools, the secularisation of the society,
and the construction of modern infrastructure such as roads,
electrification, and telecommunications.
These would have ended Afghanistan's isolation and narrowed the
distance between its people and the modern era. But it would also
have curtailed the power of the Muslim clerics. Intellectual
emancipation would be one outcome of modernisation.
The standard around which the USA, its helpers in the Pakistan
intelligence agencies, the Saudi monarchy and the conservative
religious leaders in Afghanistan mobilised opposition to this
government was rejection, not of socialism, but modernism itself.
They appropriated the banner of Islam for that purpose and advocated
a fundamentalist interpretation of the Q'uran. The CIA, with a
purely instrumentalist approach, recognised that religion would be
a powerful symbol around which to rally opposition to the Soviet-backed
government, but paid little attention to the unplanned-for outcomes
that might produce.
The "bleeding ulcer" of Afghanistan was among the many factors that
sapped the strength of the Soviet Union, leading to its collapse.
What US policy-makers did not realise is that to the radically
anti-modernist mujahedeen, the USA - the land of the skyscrapers,
the home of Hollywood, with hundreds of television channels, millions
educated women and with a strong emphasis on the separation of the
church and state - represented the epitome of the modernism they
had been mobilised to crush. The ideological affinities between
the US New Right and Taliban sealed the alliance. But while the
former necessarily took elements of modernism for granted, the
latter regarded even its most benign expressions as satanic deviance.
Thus the stage was set for the offspring to rise against their
parents.
The history of the last century abounds with numerous examples of
politicians who have sought to harness anti-Communism, in a very
instrumental manner, to their project. In most instances these have
been reactionaries and conservatives defending discredited systems
of oppression and exploitation.
But there have been numerous instances of liberals, nationalists
and ostensibly progressive people being tempted to either play the
anti-Communist card with a view to some immediate political advantage
or to capitulate to it in the hope of gaining some dubious political
advantage. US policy-makers during the liberal Carter administration
of early 1980s probably thought they could ride the tiger of
anti-Communism with impunity. The conservative Reagan and Bush
administrations of the second half of the 1980s and early 1990s ,
as the US media reports indicate, thought they could take that even
further.
Anti-Communism, they are discovering today, is a doubled edged
sword. While its keen blade helped sweep away what President Reagan
once called "the evil empire", on its back-swing it returned as a
guillotine to wreak terrible havoc in the very citadels of US power.
There is a lesson there, somewhere!
But the last word should go to two US foreign policy specialists,
Tom Barry and Martha Honey : "As Americans deliberate an effective
response to this tragedy and crime, we must first reject the call
for war. The gauntlet goading us to militaristic responses that
treat human life as callously as the terrorists treated ours must
be categorically rejected. As with any other crime, the perpetrators
and their accomplices must be brought to justice-in the courts of
law, not according to the fundamentalist 'eye-for-an-eye,
tooth-for-a-tooth' precepts. In recent years, we have made encouraging
progress in establishing and enforcing international norms for
human rights and crimes against humanity. This is an opportunity
to forge a broader international coalition-bringing disparate
nations together in a common determination to fight against such
crimes against humanity. A first principle, then, must be that we
treat this as an international crime, not an act of war, and that
the rule of law should guide international response."
Z. Pallo Jordan is a member of the ANC National Executive Committee.
This article is written in his personal capacity.
[During the 1960s, Pallo Jordan was a student at the University of
Wisconsin in Madison while I was there. He demonstrated all of
the keen analytical skills and insightful political judgment then
that he does now. He returned to Africa to become one of the
architects of the defeat of Apartheid and ascendancy of the ANC.]
======================================
Free Speech in Wartime
The Washington Post
Saturday, September 29, 2001; Page A26
IN A LETTER on this page today, Frederick J. Ryan Jr., president
of the company that owns WJLA-TV, protests that the station was
not engaged in censorship when it decided to "suspend" airing of
Bill Maher's show,
"Politically Incorrect." Legally speaking, he is correct. The
station acted in response to comments Mr. Maher made about the
Sept. 11 attacks; he questioned whether flying a plane into a
building is really cowardly compared with firing a cruise missile
from thousands of miles away. WJLA is certainly entitled to decide
that its viewers should be insulated from such talk. But this isn't
a question of law. The station had long carried the program, whose
very purpose is to be, as its name suggests, brash and confrontational.
The station's decision to keep the show off the air was a capitulation
to pressure to toe a certain line.
That pressure is none too subtle and flows not merely from an
outraged public. The station had actually begun airing the program
again, until White House spokesman Ari Fleischer denounced Mr.
Maher, saying that Americans "need to watch what they say." This
remark was left out of the White House's official account of the
news conference, the result of what the White House termed "a
transcription error." But its message has apparently been heard
loud and clear. The White House has admirably embraced its role of
speaking out for religious or ethnic minorities who find themselves
embattled in the current climate. It's too bad that some officials
there don't seem to understand that free political expression is
an equally vital American value.
Mr. Maher's remark is far from the only case in which institutions
have failed to protect dissenters from retribution. The president
of the University of New Mexico, amid pressure from state legislators,
announced that he would "vigorously pursue" disciplinary action
against a longtime professor who told students that "anyone who
can blow up the Pentagon gets my vote" -- a remark the professor
called, by way of apology, "the worst attempt at an incredibly
stupid joke." The New York Times reports that a columnist for the
Texas City Sun was fired after writing that Mr. Bush, instead of
returning to Washington on the day of attacks, was "flying around
the country like a scared child, seeking refuge in his mother's
bed after having a nightmare." The same happened to a columnist in
Oregon, who accused Mr. Bush of having "skedaddled" in the wake of
the attacks.
Yes, newspapers and universities and television stations have a
right to be spineless. But they will be judged in time by how
robustly they resist a climate of intolerance. It is not a show of
strength to come down hard on dissent, even in times of war. It
is, rather, America's strength to encourage contrarian viewpoints
and tolerate distasteful remarks, especially when political discourse
matters.
2001 The Washington Post Company
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