The Attorney General is going for broke in his fight against civil liberty
by Molly Ivins

AUSTIN -- With all due respect, of course, and God Bless America too, has anyone considered the possibility that the attorney general is becoming unhinged?

Poor John Ashcroft is under a lot of strain here. Is it possible his mind has started to give under the weight of responsibility, what with having to stop terrorism between innings against doctors trying to help the dying in Oregon and California? Why not take a Valium, sir, and go track down some nice domestic nut with access to anthrax, OK?

Not content with the noxious USA PATRIOT bill (for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act -- urp), which was bad enough, Ashcroft has steadily moved from bad to worse. Now he wants to bring back FBI surveillance of domestic religious and political groups.

( Read More... | 4307 bytes in body | Features )

by Sean Gonsalves

Over the next few days you will be bombarded with comparative analyses between the first "day of infamy" - the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 60 years ago - and the new day of infamy, 9-11.

For me, December 7 is especially important. It's my mother's birthday! She came into this world exactly 10 years after Japanese pilots unleashed a deadly surprise over the Hawaiian islands.

( Read More... | 4721 bytes in body )

by David Aaronovitch

Give us a Mandela: a Palestinian Mandela; an Israeli Mandela; a Mandela to cut the knot. Vote no confidence in Sharon and elect a Mandela; retire Yasser to a Tunisian villa and appoint a Mandela. Send all the acid-brained spokesmen and hardline Zionist journalists and Jew-hating high-school principals and prating mullahs off to Antarctica to wage war on penguins and each other amid the ice.

On Sunday Maher Habashi, a 21-year-old plumber from Nablus acting under the instructions of the Hamas organization, got on a bus in Haifa and blew himself and 15 others – Jews and Arabs – to pieces. It was quite something to kill so many in a place where – by and large – the different faiths had managed to coexist. Quite an achievement. Celebratory shots were fired outside Habashi's home and – if they follow the pattern of others – his family will even now be sitting down in front of the telly to watch his last tape. According to recent polls (though how these are conducted, I really cannot imagine) up to 70 per cent of those living on the West Bank and Gaza support such attacks.

( Read More... | 5959 bytes in body )

by Ryan Amundson

Since Sept. 11, many have tried to speak on behalf of the victims’ families. When some question the response of the U.S., supporters of violent retaliation sometimes shout, “Try to tell that to the families of the victims!”

It is assumed that those most personally affected by the Sept. 11 attacks take comfort in whatever actions our political leaders deem necessary. Questioning these actions is taken as a sign of anti-Americanism, or at best, insensitivity to those who are suffering the loss of friends or family members.

This assumption is not true. My family is proof. Craig Scott Amundson, my brother, died inside the Pentagon on that dark day. We take no comfort in revenge. In fact, the prospect of more killing in the name of justice is horrifying. Peace will bring comfort. Only justice will bring peace.

( Read More... | 3801 bytes in body )

by Robert Fisk

Can Ariel Sharon control his own people? Can he control his army? Can he stop them from killing children, leaving booby traps in orchards or firing tank shells into refugee camps? Can Sharon stop his rabble of an army from destroying hundreds of Palestinian refugee homes in Gaza? Can Sharon "crack down" on Jewish settlers and prevent them from stealing more land from Palestinians? Can he stop his secret-service killers from murdering their Palestinian enemies – or carrying out " targeted killings", as the BBC was still gutlessly calling these executions yesterday in its effort to avoid Israeli criticism.

It is, of course, forbidden to ask these questions. So let's "legalize" them. The Palestinian suicide bombings in Jerusalem and Haifa are disgusting, evil, revolting, unforgivable. I saw the immediate aftermath of the Pizzeria suicide bombing in Jerusalem last August: Israeli women and children, ripped apart by explosives that had nails packed around them – designed to ensure that those who survived were scarred for life.

( Read More... | 5062 bytes in body )

by Arianna Huffington

The opponents of campaign finance reform keep trying to convince us that it's a non-issue: a matter of inside-the-Beltway baseball that no one cares about except a few money-hating policy wonks.

Rep. Dick Armey derided it as "the lowest thing on the American radar screen" while Sen. Mitch "Money Is Free Speech" McConnell took time out from his busy fund-raising schedule to chastise the editors of The New York Times for "continuing to obsess" about an issue that has completely "dropped off the list" of the public's priorities. In other words, "No one cares, why should we?"

The answer is simple. So simple, in fact, it can be summed up in one word: Enron. Its chairman, Kenneth Lay, is the former 800-pound gorilla of Washington power brokers who is looking more and more like the spiritual offspring of Charles Ponzi.

( Read More... | 3761 bytes in body )

by Hussein Ibish

This weekend's scenes of horror and devastation in Jerusalem and Haifa caused by three Palestinian suicide bombers screamed out to a world distracted by other events that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is continuing to intensify.

These attacks came in response to a less-well-reported but extraordinary wave of killings of Palestinians by Israel, including the blowing up of five children in their Gaza refugee camp and the assassination of a leading Hamas figure.

Suicide bombing is a reprehensible tactic. These murderous acts involve not only political shortsightedness but an unwillingness to set limits on what is permissible in the pursuit of freedom. Yet just as the occupation does not justify suicide bombing, neither does resistance justify the occupation, which imposes a structure of routine violence on the daily lives of the 3 million Palestinians who live under abusive Israeli army rule.

( Read More... | 3798 bytes in body )

by Salim Muwakkil

Much of the U.S. media are awash in triumphant words and images heralding our "victory" in Afghanistan. America's military is said to have performed heroically and, we are told, the Taliban enemies have been routed with surprising efficiency.

Let's stop for a minute and soberly survey exactly what so far has been accomplished: Through the overwhelming power of sophisticated weapons, the world's mightiest military apparently has forced a shaky regime of religious idealists to abandon their leadership experiment.

The Taliban assumed power in 1996 to bring order to a nation that had spiraled into anarchy following the 1992 defeat of the Soviet-backed regime of President Najibullah. The so-called Northern Alliance, that same group of folks we now hail as the nation's saviors, also held sway during this time of anarchy. "The Northern Alliance's Islamic state of Afghanistan was less a government than a state of institutionalized chaos," wrote Ted Rall in a Nov. 28 dispatch from Afghanistan published on the AlterNet Web site (www.alternet.org).

( Read More... | 3878 bytes in body )