by James Carroll

IN RECENT DAYS, sage editorial writers, religious leaders, politicians, liberal pundits, and admired columnists have joined in the Donald Rumsfeld-Condoleezza Rice chorus praising the American war in Afghanistan as ''just.''

The Taliban are described as all but defeated. The ''noose'' around bin Laden grows ever tighter. Afghans are seen rejoicing in the streets, and the women among them are liberated. All because the United States turned the full force of its fire power loose on the evil enemy. Anyone still refusing to sign onto this campaign is increasingly regarded as unpatriotic. Next, we will be called ''kooks.''

Not so fast. The broad American consensus that Bush's war is ''just'' represents a shallow assessment of that war, a shallowness that results from three things.

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by Dianne Donovan

At least we know what we're fighting for in this shadow war against terrorism. Imagine living in a country where government agents can break into your home at any time, question you and haul you away from family and friends, deny you the right to a private consultation with a lawyer and then secretly put you on trial and sentence you to prison, perhaps for the rest of your life.

Turns out you don't have to imagine it at all; you're already there. Welcome to the U.S.A. of 2001, even though it sounds more like the Peru of Lori Berenson. She's the New York woman who was accused of revolutionary activity in Peru and sentenced to life without parole in a particularly nasty captivity by a secret military tribunal complete with judges in hoods. Berenson was at worst a criminal terrorist and at best an overzealous dupe. But I always thought she deserved a fair and public trial. So did the United States government, which helped pressure Peruvian officials to retry her publicly in civilian court (where her sentence was reduced to 20 years), as befits a civilized country.

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Bush is looking for the next target and his country is right behind him
by Hugo Young

President Bush's prime purpose now is gearing up America for a wider war. "It's not over. It's not over," he told Newsweek, concerned that the people might think otherwise. "Afghanistan is just the beginning," he roared to an audience of soldiers at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. "America has a message for the nations of the world. If you feed a terrorist or fund a terrorist, you're a terrorist."

In Newsweek, he amplified this with reference to one man. "Saddam is evil," he declared for the first time. It could take years to catch Osama bin Laden, he allowed. But many other targets are now on notice of merciless aggression.

You do not hear a single word of similar intensity from any European leader. Even Tony Blair, while regularly reinvoking the global campaign against terror, seldom talks about the enemy with Bush's slavering passion for specific eliminations. The president is mobilizing an American national will such as we have not recently seen.

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LAHORE, Nov 24: Renowned American scholar Dr Noam Chomsky said on Saturday that the United States did not seek authorization for launching air strikes on Afghanistan from the United Nations because the involvement of the world body could have limited its unilateral power to act.

Delivering a lecture and then answering questions from a packed hall at a hotel as well as an on-line audience in Karachi, he said Russia and China were happy because of their own interests.

Hundreds of people had come to listen to the scholar, many of them without invitation with the result that most of them had to sit on the floor. They gave a standing ovation to Prof Chomsky as he stepped into the hall.

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by Robert Kuttner

THE BIGGEST MENACE to the personal security of Americans may not be terrorism but government's response to it.

The administration has already rammed through an antiterrorism bill that allows normal due process and privacy protections to be waived if a prosecutor thinks some potential suspect has some remote connection to terrorism. Now the president has decided that terrorism suspects can be tried before special military tribunals, which do away with the inconvenience of constitutional niceties.

The CIA, which is not supposed to use third-degree tactics itself, has been collaborating with foreign governments all too willing to use torture, such as Egypt and Albania. The CIA has knowingly turned terrorism suspects over to the agents of such governments to keep its own hands nominally clean.

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