Bin Laden: The End Is Near
As he gave an official debut to the bombing of Afghanistan with high explosives and food packages (a day's worth of food for 37,000 was dropped on a land of 27 million people, by some estimates seven million of whom are on the verge of starvation) Bush's performance on Sunday was a reversion to his habitual wooden delivery and inappropriate waggles of the hand. Can't his handlers see that like most people W talks better standing up, addressing a live audience, rather than peering into a camera while reading the teleprompter? On Sunday evening a couple of the networks were cross-cutting between Bush and Osama bin Laden, and it has to be said that bin Laden, a scraggy Svengali, offered the more compelling iconic presence, with pithier soundbites.
"America was hit by God in one of its softest spots. America is full of fear from its north to its south, from its west to its east. Thank God for that. This is something, very little, of what we have tasted for decades. Since nearly 80 years we have been tasting this humility.
"I say by God the great, America will never dream, not those who live in America will never taste security and safety unless we feel security and safety in our lands and in Palestine."
It's easy to imagine millions of Muslims and other folk who have been on the receiving end of Uncle Sam's boot thrilling to this kind of stuff. Two Arabists being interviewed by Peter Jennings on ABC couldn't contain their enthusiasm for the potency of bin Laden's message to the Arab "street." But in terms of the actual balance of forces, the bin Laden video of raggedy fellows in a cave looked to me more like a political obituary than a fearsome call to arms. His dark day is done, and it surely won't be long, if the moment hasn't already come, before he's either sitting up there with Allah and the houris, or writhing in the seventh circle of hell, depending on which God you believe in. Included in Dante's seventh circle are those who offer violence against self (the suicide bombers), violence against neighbors, violence against God. The eighth circle was reserved for ordinary fraud and the ninth for complex or treacherous fraud, meaning that Dante got stung in some bad business deals. As a seventh-circle man, bin Laden is scheduled by Dante to be buried in burning sand forever, which, considering he comes from the Hadramut, is his natural habitat anyway.
We're passing from appalling human loss and suffering, live in the front yard of the media capital of the world, to the traditional parameters of imperial retribution. I can't imagine it will be long before the Taliban are chased out and bin Laden chased down. Much has been made of the doom awaiting martial forays into Afghanistan, e.g., the British debacles of the 19th century and the Soviets' in the 1980s. But the British were exceptionally stupid and the Russians didn't suffer unduly. Across 10 years they lost some 13,000 in Afghanistan. A Russian colonel, veteran of the campaign, told my brother Patrick the other day that about 33 percent of these mortalities were due to accidents (tanks falling off roads and so forth), which brings down the number of Russians actually killed by the mujahideen to under 1000 a year. Another numerical perspective is afforded by the fact the Russians killed at least five times as many Chechens in the days of the "liberation" of Grozny (supported by Clinton) as died in the World Trade Center, and here we have Bush arm in arm with his soul-bro, Putin, who knows that in these days of world solidarity against terror he can do what he wants to the Chechens without arousing even the pretense of moral reproof.
The muj, including bin Laden, held out against the Russians and in the end forced their withdrawal because they enjoyed the limitless support of the Pakistani military and of the U.S., in the form of the CIA running the largest covert op in its history, at a cost of $3.5 billion. Who have the Taliban got? A starving, discontented domestic population and external enemies on all sides, wallowing in promises of huge American dispensations. Their original sponsors in the Pakistani military have far larger satisfactions than the temporary loss of a client regime in Kabul before a new one can be cobbled together. Pakistan is now certified as okay to be a member of the nuclear club, with its debts rescheduled. Where has Mullah Omar got to run, except to the next chilly cave along from bin Laden's and a 10-hour hike down the mountain to get olives and bread from the local store?
The globe-spinners talk about bin Laden's dangerous appeal to Muslims around the world chafing at the despotism and corruption of their leaders, the occupation of Jerusalem by the Jews and their U.S. protector, the starving of Iraqi children; but if the Arab world is so much of a tinder box, why didn't bin Laden try to apply the match there?
Terror at Home
I may be confounded by some atrocity in the next 24 hours but all this talk about the 100 percent likelihood of another terror attack on American soil seems overblown, though no doubt explicable as a way of maintaining citizen vigilance and hastening the terror package through Congress. It's true there's been another case of anthrax in Boca Raton. Ken McCarthy, our CounterPunch man in Tallahassee, writes the following thought-provoking note:
"FACTS: 1. The man who died of Anthrax last week was a photo editor at The Sun, a tabloid. 2. A fellow employee there has been recently diagnosed with Anthrax as well. 3. Inhaled Anthrax, the type these men have contracted, is exceedingly rare (only 18 cases in the US in the last 100 years) 4. Anthrax spores have been found in their workplace. The building which houses The Sun, The Globe and The National Enquirer has been closed as a result. 5. American Media Inc., the owner of The Sun etc., has connections to the US Central Intelligence Agency. 5. Boca Raton, the home of The Sun, is also the location of a plant owned by Product Ingredient Technologies, a company with links to the Bush Sr. White House that manufactured chemical warfare agents that were exported to Iraq with US government approval in the late 1980s."
Ken cites as his source Bringing the War Home by William Thomas. Under that same program, 19 containers of anthrax bacteria were supplied to Iraq in 1988 by the American Type Culture Collection company, located near Fort Detrick, MD, the site of the U.S. Army's high-security germ warfare division.
Bioterror has been the media feeding frenzy of the week, as noted above, a scenario pushed by Attorney General John Ashcroft in an attempt to scare up support for his Anti-Terrorism Act. Back in the mid-1950s two Southern towns unwittingly hosted efforts by the U.S. Army to test biowarfare. Savannah, GA, and Avon Park, FL, were the targets of Army biowar experiments in 1956 and 1957. Army CBW researchers released millions of mosquitoes on the two towns to test the ability of insects to carry and deliver yellow fever and dengue fever. Hundreds of residents fell ill, suffering from fevers, respiratory distress, still births and encephalitis. Several deaths were reported.
Biological and chemical weapons don't really pose much of a threat to the United States, except to those people who have the misfortune to live near one of the arsenals that store the Army's disintegrating stockpiles of sarin and VX gas. Of course, chemical warfare is a daily fact of life in much of rural America. American agriculture is the most chemical-dependent in the world, relying on the fumigation of fields and vineyards, aerial spraying and other applications of toxic slush cooked up by Monsanto and DuPont. A recent study by Cornell University estimates that 30,000 deaths in the United States are associated with exposure to chemicals. Indeed, the ban on cropdusting almost certainly prolonged some lives and was one of the few reasons for joy in a bleak month.
Putting grief and horror aside, emergencies are usually political godsends to the regime in power, in this case Bush's. Before Sept. 11 he was derided across the world as the beneficiary of a dubious election, a man out of step with world opinion on the Kyoto treaty and on Star Wars. Domestically his programs were in trouble, and the country was plunging into recession on his watch after eight go-go years. Now he's leader of the planet, with his only vocal foes in hiding in the mountains of Afghanistan. His presidential authenticity is beyond dispute and his stimulus package looking propitious in Congress. Many people have learned to like the guy. Opposition is nervous and fitful, as Ashcroft pushes his dreadful terror package of attacks on the Bill of Rights.
Dante didn't like lawyers, and put them in the eighth circle. What would he have thought of this, in the Senate version of the terror bill: "(d) UNDERCOVER ACTIVITIES?Notwithstanding any provision of State law, including disciplinary rules, statutes, regulations, constitutional provisions, or case law, a Government attorney may, for the purpose of enforcing Federal law, provide legal advice, authorization, concurrence, direction, or supervision on conducting undercover activities, and any attorney employed as an investigator or other law enforcement agent by the Department of Justice who is not authorized to represent the United States in criminal or civil law enforcement litigation or to supervise such proceedings may participate in such activities, even though such activities may require the use of deceit or misrepresentation, where such activities are consistent with Federal law.
"(e) ADMISSIBILITY OF EVIDENCE?No violation of any disciplinary, ethical, or professional conduct rule shall be construed to permit the exclusion of otherwise admissible evidence in any Federal criminal proceedings."
Who else will pay the price? I imagine Ariel Sharon will, though not Israel. He's been having a Bad Emergency, as Bush says for the benefit of the Arab world he's always dreamed of a Palestinian state. Someone asked Shimon Peres if he could remember a time when there had been as tart exchanges as those that occurred when last week Sharon likened Israel's situation to that of Czechoslovakia in 1938, the White House announced that his remarks were entirely "unacceptable" and Sharon publicly apologized. Peres said there had been a time when Menachem Begin had told Jimmy Carter that Israel was not a banana republic. He may have done so, but the truly fraught episode in those years was when Carter got mad at Begin for having lied about withdrawing from Lebanon after the 1978 invasion. Carter sent Deputy U.S. Ambassador Richard Viets to Begin with a letter saying that unless he got out within 24 hours Carter would introduce a resolution in the UN condemning Israel and cut off aid. Viets later recalled to Andrew Cockburn (it pays to have industrious brothers, doesn't it, though the bin Laden family probably wouldn't agree right now) for his 1991 book Dangerous Liaison that Begin "went over to the sideboard and poured two large whiskeys and then said, 'Mr. Viets, you win.'"