Taliban troops are continuing to melt under the bombing and the advance of the Northern Alliance and US and British Special Forces. It is reported that hundreds or thousands of graves line the roadsides on the way to Kabul, and since the Taliban retreat with their dead it is unclear who is buried in the graves. Miles of devastation - ruined towns, razed orchards and burnt vineyards mark the approach to the city, and another form of death is rising as reports come out of atrocities being perpetrated in Mazar-e Sharif. 600 people have been killed or executed by the Northern Alliance over 48 hours.

   Now that Kabul is taken the Northern Alliance holds 40 percent of Afghanistan, effectively splitting it in half. Bombing by the US will continue against the Taliban as they move south, so one thing both sides will have in common is the legacy of death left by depleted uranium tipping the bombs. The radiation will insure that the entire nation is cursed by a future of cancer and birth defects.

   George Bush knows that his favoured Northern Alliance can't form a viable government. Yet they are in Kabul now and the atrocities have begun. Northern Alliance soldiers roam the city in taxis, trucks and cars, seeking out Arabs, Pakistanis, Chechens and others who had come to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban. Looting has broken out and some Arabs have been summarily shot and left dead in the parks. A BBC camera crew has been attacked and the US bombed the Kabul office of Qatar-based al-Jazeera television during the night to prevent reports of the killing getting out to the world at large.

   The United States and United Nations are desperately trying to patch together an interim government to take control in Kabul. One they say would gain support from an international peacekeeping force. Russia, and six nations bordering Afghanistan have agreed to the idea of a broad-based Afghan administration … and aides to Afghanistan's exiled former king, Mohammad Zahir Shah, are working to arrange the surrender of Taliban members who want to defect and form part of that government.

   The last political solution the US imposed on Afghanistan was the Taliban. Now they seem to want to impose a new order that includes the same Taliban they are supposed to be routing. And in more ways than one. Many Taliban have already shaved their beards to return to Pakistan, others have defected to the Northern Alliance. So if the Taliban are falling from power they are not disappearing. They'll be in Pakistan and elsewhere stirring up deadly trouble.

   The West's solution in Afghanistan is an optimistic and foolish one. The Taliban could fall or they could hang on for a mean and long civil war. If they fall the imposed solution will likely fail as the warlords will return to battling one another. The idea of peacekeeping troops seems ridiculous. They'd be little more than targets and they'd be exposed to minefields and the radiation from the bomb shrapnel. A King and the Northern Alliance sure won't be much of an offer to women's or democratic rights. Meaning we'll see another bad situation soon as more open warfare begins.

   None of this has much to do with killing or capturing bin Laden. The West has forgotten the millions of starving refugees, too. Along with the fact that the people of Afghanistan should create their own political solutions.

   In North America it is hard for citizens to assess what is happening. Reporters are saying that the news in Pakistan, a dictatorship, is more honest than what we see here. Our papers outright lie to us. On Monday they had bin Laden confessing to the Sept 11th attacks. Yet the US State Department is saying that bin Laden didn't actually confess. Not so long ago it was the media that exposed the propaganda of the State Department. Now it's the opposite with the media telling the biggest lies.

   There's also the feeling that no one is listening. Many voices have called for a change in US foreign policy. And what they are getting is Charlotte Beers and US movie producers formed into a new propaganda ministry that will convince the world to love America. Plus the bombing of media in Afghanistan.

   I guess they're saying that if we believe in America the Beautiful and in the new Ameri-Afghanistan, then our problems will fade away.

   If you don't believe in simple things like that, you might know that the Northern Alliance has been in Kabul for massacres before … so maybe tonight or tomorrow night, the wolves will really be loose again.

   Then there is Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir who says that Osama bin Laden recently suggested a retreat from Kabul as a trap to draw Western soldiers in.
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Afghanistan Dazed and Confused – Dec.8.2001
(Where did Osama and Omar go?)
notes by Gary Morton

   The BBC's Katty Kay in Washington reported that the US would prefer Mullah Omar and Osama Bin Laden to be killed by opposition forces on the ground, eliminating the political risks of putting either on trial.

    With that end in mind, the hunt for them in Afghanistan is not one where the US wants to see them captured alive. It's more of an assassin's mission, and it shows the world that the American administration has sunk to the bottom, embracing the policies of rogue nations and the terrorists.

   US officials say they don't want a trial because it would become a circus attracting militant action. But another reason may be that they don't have the evidence. British evidence posted online amounts to little more than a conspiracy theory charging bin Laden with the Sept.11th WTC attack. If it is an example, it means they don't know for sure that Osama bin Laden is guilty. They might have the wrong man.

   It is also a question as to what Mullah Omar would be charged with … he tried to defend his country against an attack by rebels and US air power. In court he would state that he wouldn't hand over bin Laden because the US refused to present him the evidence. Put simply, his trial would reveal America as an invading nation that killed and wound Afghanis by the thousands.

   So where is Osama? Since the US offered a 25 million dollar reward bin Laden has been seen beardless and wearing a Western-style suit, hiding under a burqa, tanning himself on a beach in Goa … afghan fighters say they may have spotted him on horseback visiting front-line troops at Tora Bora.
 

   The anti Taliban fighters also said they captured cave complexes in the mountains of Tora Bora Friday, but that proved to be untrue. They were pushed back after meeting stiff resistance. Explosions and weapons fire continues Saturday as U.S. and Eastern Alliance forces continue their assault on Tora Bora. U.S. Special Forces are there attempting to direct the assassination of Osama bin Laden.

   Their efforts may fail as Alliance officials say that air strikes will not be enough to weed out and defeat the Taliban fighters holed up in the mountain network of caves and tunnels. The Alliance has moved 5,000 fighters into the area. They are shooting it out with the warriors in the caves, and they include women and other family members that are taking stand to defend Tora Bora.

   My guess is that Osama bin Laden in not there. He would have fled Afghanistan some time ago. To consolidate his finances and world wide network against the war on terrorism, he would have to be in a safe area with good communications and contacts. Afghanistan does not fit that description, so don't expect that he will be killed there.

Where is Omar?
   Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar "definitely" left Kandahar following the militia's surrender of its former bastion, a Taliban official in Pakistan told AFP Saturday.

   The US and the warlords say they know Omar is in Kandahar and they will capture him. A hunt is on but the hunt seems mainly to be an excuse to bomb and kill as many pockets of Taliban as possible. The hunt for Omar and bin Laden may in the end be nothing other than an excuse to keep a state of war on so the Americans and the warlords can pursue power and territorial objectives in Afghanistan.

   Western papers would have us believe that the Taliban are gone and a state of near peace is in place. In the Toronto Sun Peter Worthington praised the American victory and suggested that it's time for Canadians to become Americans. Many writers are claiming that America won this war and that the critics were wrong.

   A more objective view would be that the Americans didn't fight a war. They just bombed and maimed while Afghanis fought Afghanis … and Afghanis are still fighting Afghanis right now as the new government can't control the situation. Justice is administered by the many warlords back in power and it includes shelling, killing, looting, rape and so forth.

   Armed Taliban are still roaming the streets of Kandahar Saturday and no one is in control of the city. There are thought to be as many as 15,000 dead bodies from the bombing. It looks more like a scene from hell than a postcard of peace.

   The victory is a hideous triumph, and if it is the forces of light that have won, I would hate to see what the forces of darkness look like.
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Conspiracy Theory on Terror – Dec.05.2001
By Gary Morton for http://CitizensontheWeb.com

   A 2,000 pound US satellite-guided (JDAM) Joint Direct Attack Munition landed among friendly forces today outside of Kandahar. Three soldiers were killed, many others wounded and Hamid Karzai, who has just been named head of the provisional government in Afghanistan, got injured.

   Some small news web sites that cover the war … the ones that think every thing is a conspiracy, will see this only one way. They'll think the US just tried to kill Hamid Karzai but failed.

   US military sources (the media calls them that) say the wrong coordinates were typed in and the bomb went astray. If some people don't believe that I won't be surprised. They may think that perhaps the coordinates were really only off by a few yards and the intended target, Hamid Karzai, got missed.

   Would the US have a reason to kill Karzai? I can't say, but he was a surprise choice, and he is pashtun. He certainly isn't the person the US had in mind, and he is saying that he wants his first accomplishment to be a peaceful negotiated handover of Kandahar.

   War watchers may have noticed that the US has generally favoured killing all of the Taliban. Peaceful surrenders and taking prisoners has not been a US policy. Only yesterday US Special Forces were attempting to convince a Northern Alliance commander to bombard an historic town to kill off the Taliban there. Then there is Mazar-i-Sharif, plus Kunduz and other places where the Americans are tied to mass killing.

   I haven't had time to read up on many of the conspiracy theories, and my writing has been in opposition to the war while assuming it came about due to a terrorist attack directed by Osama bin Laden. General logic says the simplest answer is usually the right one.

   Conspiracy is a more complex answer that becomes the simplest answer when too many holes appear in the bin Laden case. If it is all a conspiracy it would have been so from the beginning. Meaning that the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center wasn't run by bin Laden. In a more sinister view, that attack would have been arranged by a powerful group with a lot to gain, and that also wanted bin Laden out of the way.

   The militancy of Osama bin Laden did threaten to ignite a revolution in the Islamic world and those that would fear it most would be wealthy Saudis, Israel and the powerful US oil companies generally represented in foreign policy by the CIA. Those that would gain from a war on Afghanistan and across the region would be oil giants interested in the Caspian basin, the US war machine and global corporations interested in profiting from the redevelopment of Afghanistan.

   The war on terror has financial benefits for many of the wealthiest people on the planet, and the war itself is being run by chaps in the Bush administration with heavy ties to the arms corporations that profit from war. To create a war through conspiracy, a wise plan would be to gain control of some existing al-Qaida terrorist cells and use them for one huge attack. Even the terrorists wouldn't know that someone other than al-Qaida directed them.

   Terrorist attacks are hard to pull off, so there would be only one and then no more. There haven't been any more terrorist attacks since the WTC. Unless you count the Israeli/Palestinian thing, which I view as unrelated. There I would say that Arafat and Sharon are two old terrorist farts out for a last a waltz before they fade away. They want to take turns blowing up school kids and maybe get in a last shot at getting WW3 started. The anthrax scare started at media outlets, and it is known that the FBI/CIA have plants in the media that could easily stage a controlled outbreak there. Those scares and nearly all warnings of new terrorist attacks came at times when anti terrorist legislation was being considered in various nations, as though the real purpose of the warnings was to speed through that legislation.

   If Osama is not guilty of the WTC attack, (and not still working for the CIA) he would know that someone else did it and maybe who … so the conspirators would want him dead at all costs. Any new terrorist attack by Osama would be an attempt to kill off the people that framed him … and he certainly wasn't framed by innocent civilians so he wouldn't go after them.

   A conspiracy would explain why our civil rights were removed quickly in the West. They aren't afraid that civilians will get killed, they're afraid that Osama might somehow get to them ... and notice how so many nations acted like franchise operations, passing the same anti-terrorist legislation. It almost looks like a powerful lobby was already in place, telling the politicians what to do.

   Probably the number one reason for believing it might be a conspiracy is the way the whole thing looks like a poor quality movie or cartoon … with Osama the star bad guy in a hidden mountain lair, and the James Bond war-on-terror heroes out to get him. If Bush hired movie people to help with propaganda, maybe he also hired them to script the whole thing. Including the parts where he keeps finding new excuses for war and no reasons for peace.

   If there are failed parts of the script that really stand out, I would say they are in the evidence … like the maps and so on that appeared almost like magic in luggage and cars. Script writers also failed to create a solid Rambo for this thing. So far the only American hero is a guy who fought for the Taliban and managed to survive a fight to the death and a prison massacre.

    A key goal is to silence bin Laden by any means possible … an entire system has been put in place to make sure Osama never talks. There's the 25 million bounty, the wanted dead or alive but preferably dead media, and the military tribunal to make sure he'll be whisked off into silence in case he does somehow miraculously survive.

   In any proper script with an Osama that's guilty as sin, the CIA would want him alive to pull every last bit of information on al-Qaida from his brain, and a public trial would serve to vilify him. Silencing him means they're covering up for someone or for themselves.

   So maybe it's a big conspiracy or partly a conspiracy, and maybe it isn't … and we'll never know for sure, will we? Because one way or another, Osama is going to vanish and we'll get left in the darkness cast by a rising tide of war and anti-terrorist measures.
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Warlords, not Democracy will Rule in Afghanistan – Nov.14.2001

   The war for control of Afghanistan has seen civilians and soldiers treated as something less than human. Recently hundreds of people were summarily executed or killed by bombs. Soldiers were shot and left on the street without burial. In some areas the US bombed every structure, every tree and burned every blade of grass. Civilians and children are still collateral damage, people that get blown up if they are in the way between the forces of the West and Osama bin Laden.

   There has been no basic respect for fundamental human rights or the conventions of war at all. The Nazis almost look good in comparison.

   Now former Northern Alliance President Burhanuddin Rabbani is returning to rule again, and President George W. Bush is saying there needs to be "a balanced, broad-based" government installed in Kabul. And it must be a government, he added, that "must export neither terror nor drugs, and ... must respect fundamental human rights."

   If this seems strange to some people it might be because the West has systematically used intelligence agencies like the CIA to destroy every peoples democratic government and movement in the Middle East this century. We have been the enemies of democracy there. The Taliban as a movement never had an honest political base. They were the creation of intelligence agencies.

   In reality any new government will be much like the Taliban or even worse when internal war develops. Past governments, including the Taliban, have survived with the support of the warlords that flourish across Afghanistan. They are the bases of power and these warlords have a vested interest in smuggling drugs and weapons.

    In spite of what George Bush says, he has invested in them. Supporting the exiled northern warlords in the battles that led to the fall of Kabul. They are the foundation of any new society being constructed and that means the Afghan government will remain corrupt.

    Bush and Blair would have us believe that a new government will create civil society and some rights for women. But that is unrealistic when the real powers are the same warlords that are showing no respect for human life. We in the West have acted in the same way – with fighter planes we've told the Afghanis they have the right to go along with us or be shot and bombed into the nearest ditch.

    The foundation of civil society is respect for human life. All other rights rise from that. Our world powers and the West don't have that respect any more. So don't expect to see it in the governments they create.
--------
Gary Morton

   Slobodan Milosevic is on trial for genocide at an odd time. The West's support for killers and killing right now makes him seem a possible ally. The Northern Alliance that the US-led anti Terror Coalition supports in Afghanistan has not been respecting the rights of prisoners of war, summarily executing them by the hundreds. This week in the USA, Rumsfield has been saying that he would prefer to see thousands of the Taliban foreign legion killed in a siege of Kunduz. Some of these troops were already blowing themselves up … and their stated reason wasn't a religious one but rather that they knew they'd be tortured and executed if they surrendered.

   As I write this a report just came in that hundreds more prisoners have been killed. These were Pakistanis, Chechens and Arabs that surrendered Saturday. It's only a day later and they're dead. Western news reports claim they seized weapons from the guards and 300 fighters took part in a prison riot. U.S. air strikes on the prison were used to kill the 700 prisoners. Footage from a German television crew inside the compound showed guards atop walls firing down into crowds of prisoners below.

   A bit of common sense reveals this as a massacre of prisoners of war. US air strikes have never been used to quell a prison riot before and we have to ask how conditions could be so horrible that they couldn't stand even one day of them.

   Then there are the deaths of who knows how many Afghani civilians in the bombing and resulting contamination by depleted uranium. Since the West calls itself a liberator, perhaps there isn't much difference between a liberator and an agent of genocide.

   Rumours are that Osama bin Laden is hiding in caves near Jalalabad. Since the Alliance advance Haji Abdul Qadir, who gave shelter to bin Laden in 1996, has declared himself governor of Jalalabad again. So it looks like bin Laden may be fasting easily there in conquered territory while the flames of war burn toward the south.

   Events have left bin Laden little more than a small man with kidney disease, running for his life. George Bush and the US may have undertaken an adventure to catch him, but they got blinded by the oil and other riches the corporate powers of globalization can gain from a conquered Afghanistan. Bush's main fear now seems to be that bin Laden might be captured alive and then sing like a canary, exposing USA/CIA corruption. To counter that he has granted himself Hitler-like powers to prosecute and execute just about anyone in secret military tribunals.

   Against this backdrop of totally unethical war, talks on a new government start Tuesday in Bonn. The Northern Alliance has stated that it is running the government and says it will be in Bonn under duress. Former Afghan president Berhanuddin Rabbani has dismissed the conference as merely symbolic. Alliance Warlords hold power in all of their former enclaves and a grand assembly of tribal leaders may eventually appoint a ruler.

   The stated Bonn goal is to recognize ethnic, tribal and religious differences. 30 delegates from four major Afghan factions sit down with United Nations mediators to select 20 representatives of a broad-based, multiethnic transitional government

   The Alliance is unhappy with two of the groups the U.N. has insisted on including: the Pashtun leaders, and the exiled intellectuals. It's supports only the delegates of former king Mohammed Zahir Shah.

   Hotels in Bonn will be teaming with representatives of the USA, Britain and other forces of the New World Order and Multinational Corporations. The U.N. is running the negotiations. Powerful outsiders will be creating strategy, sending in messages, threats and economic offers that amount to bribes. The delegates will likely be overwhelmed by the bullying of international and corporate interests.

    These international interests don't see a need for elections in Afghanistan any time soon. They want to empower a weak federation government so they can play all sides against each another. They claim that outside entities will have to oversee the running of Afghanistan for the foreseeable future. And the outside entities are really THE WORLD BANK.

   With each warlord and tribal leader holding his own army in Afghanistan there is sure to be infighting and little respect for any central government. This will create a convenient distraction and the US can follow a local belt of fire strategy, with arms corporations profiting from fighting warlords while making sure that none get too powerful. Fighting against the Taliban will also continue and could last for months or years.

   As fighting continues, the World Bank will sink the nation into deep debt through its loans. All development from oil pipelines to public services will be by multinational corporations using the bank loans as a form of corporate welfare. In this scenario Afghanistan will gain a brief appearance of some development and prosperity, but it will vanish as global corporations siphon off all of its resources and natural wealth.

   In the long run Afghanistan will likely be another nation that exports food while many of its own people starve. All of its new services from health care to water and sanitation will be corporate run services that will be affordable to a small consumer class of wealthier Afghanis. If women gain rights, for most of them it will be the right to share poverty with their husbands.

   Our media is presenting us with news of a victory for freedom and democracy, as though a battle against terrorism has been won. If the World Bank devours Afghanistan that won't be so … war will continue, especially guerilla war, and some years down the road its people will unite and rise against the West again.

   Decency has suffered a great defeat as we now know that the economic powers of the West have embraced the pursuit of greed as their religion. Civil liberties and every form of human rights, even those small rights for prisoners of war have been tossed out. They'll bomb and kill anyone that gets in their way.
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New Statesman
November 26, 2001

The truths they never tell us

Behind the jargon about failed states and humanitarian interventions lie thousands of dead
John Pilger
 

Polite society's bombers may not have to wait long for round two. The US vice-president, Dick Cheney, warned last week that America could take action against '40 to 50 countries'. Somalia, allegedly a 'haven' for al-Qaeda, joins Iraq at the top of a list of potential targets. Cheered by having replaced Afghanistan's bad terrorists with America's good terrorists, the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has asked the Pentagon to 'think the unthinkable', having rejected its 'post-Afghanistan options' as 'not radical enough'.

An American attack on Somalia, wrote the Guardian's man at the Foreign Office, 'would offer an opportunity to settle an old score: 18 US soldiers were brutally killed there in 1993 . . .' He neglected to mention that the US Marines left between 7,000 and 10,000 Somali dead, according to the CIA. Eighteen American lives are worthy of score-settling; thousands of Somali lives are not.

Somalia will provide an ideal practice run for the final destruction of Iraq. However, as the Wall Street Journal reports, Iraq presents a 'dilemma', because 'few targets remain'. 'We're down to the last outhouse,' said a US official, referring to the almost daily bombing of Iraq that is not news. Having survived the 1991 Gulf war, Saddam Hussein's grip on Iraq has since been reinforced by one of the most ruthless blockades in modern times, policed by his former amours and arms suppliers in Washington and London. Safe in his British-built bunkers, Saddam will survive a renewed blitz - unlike the Iraqi people, held hostage to the compliance of their dictator to America's ever-shifting demands.

In this country, veiled propaganda will play its usual leading role. As so much of the Anglo-American media is in the hands of various guardians of approved truths, the fate of both the Iraqi and Somali peoples will be reported and debated on the strict premise that the US and British governments are against terrorism. Like the attack on Afghanistan, the issue will be how 'we' can best deal with the problem of 'uncivilised' societies.

The most salient truth will remain taboo. This is that the longevity of America as both a terrorist state and a haven for terrorists surpasses all. That the US is the only state on record to have been condemned by the World Court for international terrorism and has vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling on governments to observe international law is unmentionable. Recently, Denis Halliday, the former assistant secretary general of the UN who resigned rather than administer what he described as a 'genocidal sanctions policy' on Iraq, incurred the indignation of the BBC's Michael Buerk. 'You can't possibly draw a moral equivalence between Saddam Hussein and George Bush Senior , can you?' said Buerk. Halliday was taking part in one of the moral choice programmes that Buerk comperes, and had referred to the needless slaughter of tens of thousands of Iraqis, mostly civilians, by the Americans during the Gulf war. He pointed out that many were buried alive, and that depleted uranium was used widely, almost certainly the cause of an epidemic of cancer in southern Iraq.

That the recent history of the west's true crimes makes Saddam Hussein 'an amateur', as Halliday put it, is the unmentionable; and because there is no rational rebuttal of such a truth, those who mention it are abused as 'anti-American'. Richard Falk, professor of international politics at Princeton, has explained this. Western foreign policy, he says, is propagated in the media 'through a self-righteous, one-way moral/legal screen with positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted political violence'.

The ascendancy of Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and associates Richard Perle and Elliot Abrams means that much of the world is now threatened openly by a geopolitical fascism, which has been developing since 1945 and has accelerated since 11 September.

The present Washington gang are authentic American fundamentalists. They are the heirs of John Foster Dulles and Alan Dulles, the Baptist fanatics who, in the 1950s, ran the State Department and the CIA respectively, smashing reforming governments in country after country - Iran, Iraq, Guatemala - tearing up international agreements, such as the 1954 Geneva accords on Indochina, whose sabotage by John Foster Dulles led directly to the Vietnam war and five million dead. Declassified files now tell us the United States twice came within an ace of using nuclear weapons.

The parallels are there in Cheney's threat to '40 to 50' countries, and of war 'that may not end in our lifetimes'. The vocabulary of justification for this militarism has long been provided on both sides of the Atlantic by those factory 'scholars' who have taken the humanity out of the study of nations and congealed it with a jargon that serves the dominant power. Poor countries are 'failed states'; those that oppose America are 'rogue states'; an attack by the west is a 'humanitarian intervention'. (One of the most enthusiastic bombers, Michael Ignatieff, is now 'professor of human rights' at Harvard). And as in Dulles's time, the United Nations is reduced to a role of clearing up the debris of bombing and providing colonial 'protectorates'.

The twin towers attacks provided Bush's Washington with both a trigger and a remarkable coincidence. Pakistan's former foreign minister Niaz Naik has revealed that he was told by senior American officials in mid-July that military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October. The US secretary of state, Colin Powell, was then travelling in central Asia, already gathering support for an anti-Afghanistan war 'coalition'. For Washington, the real problem with the Taliban was not human rights; these were irrelevant. The Taliban regime simply did not have total control of Afghanistan: a fact that deterred investors from financing oil and gas pipelines from the Caspian Sea, whose strategic position in relation to Russia and China and whose largely untapped fossil fuels are of crucial interest to the Americans. In 1998, Dick Cheney told oil industry executives: 'I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian.'

Indeed, when the Taliban came to power in 1996, not only were they welcomed by Washington, their leaders were flown to Texas, then governed by George W Bush, and entertained by executives of the Unocal oil company. They were offered a cut of the profits from the pipelines; 15 per cent was mentioned. A US official observed that, with the Caspian's oil and gas flowing, Afghanistan would become 'like Saudi Arabia', an oil colony with no democracy and the legal persecution of women. 'We can live with that,' he said. The deal fell through when two American embassies in east Africa were bombed and al-Qaeda was blamed.

The Taliban duly moved to the top of the media's league table of demons, where the normal exemptions apply. For example, Vladimir Putin's regime in Moscow, the killers of at least 20,000 people in Chechnya, is exempt. Last week, Putin was entertained by his new 'close friend', George W Bush, at Bush's Texas ranch.

Bush and Blair are permanently exempt - even though more Iraqi children die every month, mostly as a result of the Anglo-American embargo, than the total number of dead in the twin towers, a truth that is not allowed to enter public consciousness. The killing of Iraqi infants, like the killing of Chechens, like the killing of Afghan civilians, is rated less morally abhorrent than the killing of Americans.

As one who has seen a great deal of bombing, I have been struck by the capacity of those calling themselves 'liberals' and 'progressives' wilfully to tolerate the suffering of innocents in Afghanistan. What do these self-regarding commentators, who witness virtually nothing of the struggles of the outside world, have to say to the families of refugees bombed to death in the dusty town of Gardez the other day, long after it fell to anti-Taliban forces? What do they say to the parents of dead children whose bodies lay in the streets of Kunduz last Sunday? 'Forty people were killed,' said Zumeray, a refugee. '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.' What does the Guardian's Polly Toynbee say to him: 'Can't you see that bombing works?' Will she call him anti-American? What do 'humanitarian interventionists' say to people who will die or be maimed by the 70,000 American cluster bomblets left unexploded?

For several weeks, the Observer, a liberal newspaper, has published unsubstantiated reports that have sought to link Iraq with 11 September and the anthrax scare. 'Whitehall sources' and 'intelligence sources' are the main tellers of this story. 'The evidence is mounting . . .' said one of the pieces. The sum of the 'evidence' is zero, merely grist for the likes of Wolfowitz and Perle and probably Blair, who can be expected to go along with the attack. In his essay 'The Banality of Evil', the great American dissident Edward Herman described the division of labour among those who design and produce weapons like cluster bombs and daisy cutters and those who take the political decisions to use them and those who create the illusions that justify their use. 'It is the function of the experts, and the mainstream media,' he wrote, 'to normalise the unthinkable for the general public.' It is time journalists reflected upon this, and took the risk of telling the truth about an unconscionable threat to much of humanity that comes not from faraway places, but close to home.

Near the Kandahar airport Dec.1.2001
   "People think it's just like doomsday. They're in a terrible situation," said refugee, Mohebullah.

   US aircraft are hitting the southern Afghan city of Kandahar with the fiercest bombing of the war. 152 air raids hit the city Thursday and raid numbers increase each day. About 1,200 US Marines are now in place at a desert airfield near the city and they are working to increase the intensity of the attacks. In the city Taleban soldiers run from house to house, and civilians are blown up when the bombs follow them.

   Air raids continue during the holy month of Ramadan because George Bush announced that the Devil doesn't sleep on holy days. The attacks must continue.

   Bush's knowledge of the Devil has proved truthful. Beelzebub hasn't slept. His distorted face has been rising like a beast in the thundering blasts, billowing ash, searing flames, magma of burning flesh and streets full of the maimed and wounded. He even appeared in humanitarian aid, when a US food drop crushed a house, killing a mother and child.  And he certainly appeared today when 250 civilian villagers were blasted into a hail of body parts in an air attack near the mountains of Tora Bora. Sometimes his face looks a lot like Bush, and other times it resembles Osama bin Laden, grinning through clouds from his secret mountain hideout … his cold skin taut against his skull as he contemplates how easy it is to get the Americans to destroy the world and themselves.

   From Mazar-i-Sharif to Kunduz civilians and prisoners of war have been slaughtered in some of the cruelest warfare in history. Radioactive dust from the uranium tipped bombs sails in Hiroshima-tinted winds over the bodies and graves of forgotten children. The stomach-turning stench of death rises from the green and rotting corpses of hundreds of bombed and machine-gunned prisoners in Qala-i-Jhangi. If there is hope perhaps it is in rescue scenes, like today when 80 mutilated and starving prisoners were freed from a bombed dungeon and a battle with corpse-eating rats.

   Now the Devil has come to Kandahar and few tears are shed for the doomed. The world remains nearly blinded to sickening events that have
seen the Geneva Accords and the foundations of civilization itself tossed away by men transformed into vengeful demons. It is illegal to order soldiers to fight to the death, yet Mullah Omar is doing that in Kandahar. In the end when anti-Taleban forces close in on the city thousands of Taleban troops will fight to the death in gruesome street battles. If it happens like it did in Kunduz, wounded Taleban soldiers will be dragged into the streets, mutilated and forced to eat their genitals before being shot in target practice by roaming conquerors.

   Northern Alliance troops have not been taking prisoners and the Taleban know that surrender likely means certain death … and again the Geneva Accords are violated by commanders ordering the murder of prisoners of war and the sacking of cities and towns. We'd rather see them dead than alive was the message from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the Americans in regards to Taleban troops trapped in Kunduz, and they're certainly dead now after the CIA directed planes in to bomb them after they surrendered.

   In the faltering talks for a new Afghan government, it is said that the Devil is in the details. But I think they are wrong. The Devil has leaped out of the details and walks openly in Afghanistan with Taleban, Northern Alliance and American forces that should be taken to international courts for War Crimes … and maybe to some other court for the bombing and mutilation of horses in battle.

   Think about Kandahar and you'll see that a corpse-withering Devil is there. The American military strategy doesn't have any allowance for taking prisoners. It aims for victory through massive bombing and then using the Northern Alliance or defecting Pashtun tribes to kill off the Taleban. In Kandahar they don't have enough troops, and they don't want to battle a Taleban army that will fight to the death. It means that Kandahar and the people of that city are going to burn in waves of bombing. They might as well be standing with Lucifer in the eruptions of Hades … or the fires of Dresden … or on a cold day in Auschwitz watching black smoke begin to rise from the chimneys near the gas ovens.

   In the West government and media calls this humanitarian intervention, and in Canada we really have to wonder why our government is getting us heavily involved in such a wicked war. Sallmah Valiani has pointed out that over the last couple decades exports to the USA have become the largest part of our economy. The liberal government in Ottawa simply goes along with the US war policy because they don't want to jeopardize trade. With anti terrorist legislation the liberals are pleasing the US with harsh laws on travel and immigration while leaving the border soft for exports. The market fundamentalists in Chretien's cabinet see the rights of Canadians and others as unimportant in comparison to trade deals, and have sacrificed them. The market is now our morality.

   War against terrorism has made Canada an outlaw nation as this is not a legal war. Yet Ottawa doesn't dare question Bush on that. Nor will they question the fact that Bush has discarded the United Nations, the Geneva Accords and human decency. Michael Mandel say Bush has appointed himself One Boss, One Law and One Judge. The US now bombs any place it feels like bombing and in military tribunals, plans to judge and execute anyone it feels like judging and executing.

   The Devil has come to Kandahar, and his cape is streaming back in the wind to darken the rest of the planet with the fury, panic and fear that rises from destruction and terror. Perhaps by New Year he'll be coming home to get down to business with any suspected terrorists loitering here in the land that was once free … and bringing demons with bombs as a new wave of terrorists arrive out of the flames of our mad foreign policy.

   This isn't a war on terrorism, it's a war to prolong terrorism, and to bring about the end of  ……………………….
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