"independence" for whom?

"Conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism."
--Emma Goldman


On this 4th of July, 2002, it is especially important to take a moment
and reflect on certain things.  No, this is not another pontification
on the "specialness" of "the first 4th of July after 9/11," nor is it
more drivel about how much Americans are appreciative and patriotic and
flag-waving (read: docile and conducive to fascism) on this "special
day."  This is a message to remind you, me and everyone else about what
the country celebrated on July 4 was based on and what it continues to
really be about.  So here it is, a brief message that is, by its size
alone, inadequate to convey the totality of brutality and hypocricy that
is the U.S., but nevertheless, something to contemplate today, and every
day:


"Fellow citizens: Pardon me, and allow me to ask, why am I called upon
to speak here today? What have I or those I represent to do with your
national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom
and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence,
extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble
offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits, and express
devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to
us? 

"What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that
reveals to him more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice
and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration
is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license; your national greatness,
swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your
denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty
and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and
thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him
mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil
to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is
not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody
than are the people of these United States at this very hour. 

"Go and search wherever you will, roam through all the monarchies and
despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out
every abuse and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side
of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that,
for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without
a rival...." 
--Frederick Douglass, 1852, two years after the passage of the "Fugitive
Slave Act," and some 180 years after the founding of the nation "with
liberty and justice for all[?]" 


"Around 1776, certain important people in the English colonies made a
discovery that would prove enormously useful for the next two hundred
years.  They found that by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal unity
called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political
power... In the process, they could hold back a number of potential rebellions
and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, priveleged
leadership...

When the Declaration of Independence was read, with all its flaming radical
language, from the town hall balcony in Boston, it was read by... a member
of the Loyal Nine group, conservatives who had opposed militant action
against the British.  Four days after the reading, the Boston Committee
of Correspondence ordered the townsmen to show up on the Common for a
military draft.  The rich, it turned out, could avoid the draft by paying
for substitutes; the poor had to serve.  This led to rioting, and shouting:
"Tyranny is Tyranny let it come from whom it may."
--Howard Zinn, 'A People's History of the United States.'


"You will do well to inoculate the Indians (with smallpox) by means of
blankets, as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate
this exorable race. I should be very glad your scheme for hunting them
down by dogs could take effect." 
--General Amherst to Colonel Henry Bouquet, July 1763


"During his remarks to the Nuremburg tribunal, Justice Jackson observed
that, in implementing its sentences, the participating powers were morally
and legally binding themselves to adhere forever after to the same standards
of conduct that were being applied to Streicher and the other Nazi leaders.
In the alternative, he said, the victorious allies would have committed
"pure murder' at Nuremberg ­ no different in substance from that carried
out by those they presumed to judge ­ rather than establishing the "permanent
benchmark for justice" which was intended. 

Yet in the United States of Robert Jackson, the indigenous American Indian
population had already been reduced, in a process which is ongoing to
this day, from perhaps 12.5 million in the year 1500 to fewer than 250,000
by the beginning of the 20th century. This was accomplished, according
to official sources, "largely through the cruelty of Euro American settlers,"
and an informal but clear governmental policy which had made it an articulated
goal to "exterminate these red vermin" or at least whole segments of
them. 

Bounties had been placed on the scalps of Indians ­ any Indians ­ in
places as diverse as Georgia, Kentucky, Texas, the Dakotas, Oregon, and
California and had been maintained until resident Indian populations
were decimated or disappeared altogether. Entire peoples such as the
Cherokee had been reduced to half their size through a policy of forced
removal from their homelands east of the Mississippi River to what were
then considered less preferable areas in the West. 

Others, such as the Navajo, suffered the same fate while under military
guard for years on end. The United States Army had also perpetrated a
long series of wholesale massacres of Indians at places like Horseshoe
Bend, Bear River, Sand Creek, the Washita River, the Marias River, Camp
Robinson and Wounded Knee. 

Through it all, hundreds of popular novels - each competing with the
next to make Indians appear more grotesque, menacing, and inhuman - were
sold in the tens of millions of copies in the U.S. Plainly, the Euro
American public was being conditioned to see Indians in such a way so
as to allow their eradication to continue. And continue it did until
the Manifest Destiny of the U.S ­ a direct precursor to what Hitler would
subsequently call Lebensraumpolitik (the politics of living space) was
consummated. 

By 1900, the national project of "clearing" Native Americans from their
land and replacing them with "superior" Anglo American settlers was complete;
the indigenous population had been reduced by as much as 98 percent while
approximately 97.5 percent of their original territory had ''passed''
to the invaders. The survivors had been concentrated, out of sight and
mind of the public, on scattered "reservations," all of them under the
self-assigned "plenary" (full) power of the federal government. There
was, of course, no Nuremberg-style tribunal passing judgment on those
who had fostered such circumstances in North America. No U.S. official
or private citizen was ever imprisoned ­ never mind hanged ­ for implementing
or propagandizing what had been done. Nor had the process of genocide
afflicting Indians been completed. Instead, it merely changed form. 

Between the 1880s and the 1980s, nearly half of all Native American children
were coercively transferred from their own families, communities, and
cultures to those of the conquering society. This was done through compulsory
attendance at remote boarding schools, often hundreds of miles from their
homes, where native children were kept for years on end while being systematically
'"deculturated" (indoctrinated to think and act in the manner of Euro
Americans rather than as Indians). It was also accomplished through a
pervasive foster home and adoption program ­ including - blind adoptions,
where children would be permanently denied information as to who they
were/are and where they'd come from - placing native youths in non-Indian
homes. 

The express purpose of all this was to facilitate a U.S. governmental
policy to bring about the "assimilation" (dissolution) of indigenous
societies. In other words, Indian cultures as such were to be caused
to disappear. Such policy objectives are directly contrary to the United
Nations 1948 Convention on Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of
Genocide, an element of international law arising from the Nuremburg
proceedings. The forced "transfer of the children" of a targeted "racial,
ethnical, or religious group" is explicitly prohibited as a genocidal
activity under the Convention's second article. 

Article II of the Genocide Convention also expressly prohibits involuntary
sterilization as a means of ''preventing births among" a targeted population.
Yet, in 1975, it was conceded by the U.S. government that its Indian
Health Service (IHS) then a subpart of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA),
was even then conducting a secret program of involuntary sterilization
that had affected approximately 40 percent of all Indian women..."
--Ward Churchill, "Crimes Against Humanity"


"Consider certain features of the lives of three men. The first was a
very wealthy man. In l787, many considered him the richest man in all
the thirteen states. His will of l789 revealed that he owned 35,000 acres
in Virginia and 1,119 acres in Maryland. He owned property in Washington
valued (in l799 dollars) at $l9,132, in Alexandria at $4,000, in Winchester
at $400, and in Bath at $800. He also held $6,246 worth of U.S. securities,
$10,666 worth of shares in the James River Company, $6,800 worth of stock
in the Bank of Columbia, and $1,000 worth of stock in the Bank of Alexandria.
His livestock was valued at $15,653. As early as 1773, he had enslaved
216 human beings who were not emancipated until after he and his wife
had both died.2 
The second man was a lawyer. He often expressed his admiration of monarchy
and, correspondingly, his disdain and contempt for common people. His
political attitudes were made clear following an incident which occurred
in Boston on March 5, 1770. On that day, a number of ropemakers got into
an argument with British soldiers whose occupation of Boston had threatened
the ropemakers' jobs. A fight broke out and an angry crowd developed.
The British soldiers responded by firing into the crowd, killing several.
The event has since become known as the Boston Massacre. The soldiers
involved in the shooting were later acquitted thanks, in part, to the
skills of the lawyer we have been describing, who was selected as the
defense attorney for the British. He described the crowd as “a motley
rabble of saucy boys, negroes, and molattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish
jack tarrs.”3 

The life of the third man was more complex, more filled with contradiction
than the other two. He was wealthy. He owned over 10,000 acres and by
1809 he had enslaved 185 human beings. States one biographer, “He lived
with the grace and elegance of many British lords; his house slaves alone
numbered twenty-five.” Yet slavery caused him great anxiety; he seems
to have sincerely desired the abolition of slavery but was utterly incapable
of acting in a way which was consistent with his abolitionist sympathies.
He gave his daughter twenty-five slaves as a wedding present, for example.
And when confronted with his indebtedness of $107,000 at the end of his
life in 1826, he noted that at least his slaves constituted liquid capital.
He had several children by one of his slaves and thus found himself in
the position of having to face public ridicule or keep up the elaborate
pretense that his slave children did not exist. He chose the latter course
and arranged, discreetly, to have them “run away.”4 

Who are these three men? We know them well. They are among our “Founding
Fathers,” or Framers as we shall call them. They are the first three
presidents of the United States, George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas
Jefferson. "
--Jerry Fresia, "Toward an American Revolution: Exposing the Constitution
and other Illusions"


"Throughout the world, on any given day, a man, woman or child is likely
to be displaced,tortured, killed or "disappeared", at the hands of governments
or armed political groups. More often than not, the United States shares
the blame."
--Amnesty International, 1996


"...any number of countries would be justified in issuing a list of Americans
barred from entry because of "war crimes" and "crimes against
humanity".  Such a list might include the following:

William Clinton, president, for his merciless bombing of the
people of Yugoslavia for 78 days and nights, taking the lives of
many hundreds of civilians, and producing one of the greatest
ecological catastrophes in history; for his relentless
continuation of the sanctions and rocket attacks upon the people
of Iraq; and for his illegal and lethal bombings of Somalia,
Bosnia, Sudan, and Afghanistan.

General Wesley Clark, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, for his
direction of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia with an almost
sadistic fanaticism ... "He would rise out of his seat and slap
the table.  'I've got to get the maximum violence out of this
campaign -- now!'"{3}

George Bush, president, for the murder of hundreds of thousands
of innocent Iraqi civilians, including many thousands of
children, the result of his 40 days of bombing and the
institution of draconian sanctions; and for his unconscionable
bombing of Panama, producing widespread death, destruction and
homelessness, for no discernible reason that would stand up in a
court of law.

General Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for
his prominent role in the attacks on Panama and Iraq, the latter
including destruction of nuclear reactors as well as plants
making biological and chemical agents.  It was the first time
ever that live reactors had been bombed, and ran the risk of
setting a dangerous precedent.  Hardly more than a month had
passed since the United Nations, under whose mandate the United
States was supposedly operating in Iraq, had passed a resolution
reaffirming its "prohibition of military attacks on nuclear
facilities" in the Middle East.{4}  In the wake of the
destruction, Powell gloated: "The two operating reactors they had
are both gone, they're down, they're finished."{5}  He was just
as cavalier about the lives of the people of Iraq.  In response
to a question concerning the number of Iraqis killed in the war,
the good general replied: "It's really not a number I'm terribly
interested in."{6}
     And for his part in the cover up of war crimes in Vietnam by
troops of the same brigade that carried out the My Lai
massacre.{7}

General Norman Schwarzkopf, Commander in Chief, U.S. Central
Command, for his military leadership of the Iraqi carnage; for
continuing the carnage two days after the cease-fire; for
continuing it against Iraqis trying to surrender; for burying soldiers
alive, deliberately.

Ronald Reagan, president, for eight years of death, destruction,
torture, and the crushing of hope inflicted upon the people of El
Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Grenada by his policies; and
for his bombings of Lebanon, Libya and Iran.  He's forgotten all
this, but the world shouldn't.

Elliott Abrams, assistant secretary of state under Reagan, for
rewriting history, even as it was happening, by instituting lying
as public policy.  He was indispensable to putting the best
possible face on the atrocities being committed daily by the
Contras in Nicaragua and other Washington allies in Central
America, thus promoting continued support for them; a spinmeister
for the ages, who wrestled facts into ideological submission. 
"When history is written," he declared, "the Contras will be folk
heroes."(8)

Caspar Weinberger, Secretary of Defense for seven years under
Reagan, for his official and actual responsibility for the
numerous crimes against humanity perpetrated by the United States
in Central America and the Caribbean, and for the bombing of
Libya in 1986.  George Bush pardoned him for Iran-Contra, but he
should not be pardoned for his war crimes.  

Lt. Col. Oliver North, assigned to Reagan's National Security
Council, for being a prime mover behind the Contras of Nicaragua,
and for his involvement in the planning of the invasion of
Grenada, which took the lives of hundreds of innocent civilians.

Henry Kissinger (who has successfully combined three careers:
scholar, Nobel peace laureate, and war criminal), National
Security Adviser under Nixon and Secretary of State under Nixon
and Ford, for his Machiavellian, amoral, immoral roles in the US
interventions into Angola, Chile, East Timor, Vietnam, and
Cambodia, which brought unspeakable horror and misery to the
peoples of those lands.      

Gerald Ford, president, for giving his approval to Indonesia to
use American arms to brutally suppress the people of East Timor,
thus setting in motion a quarter-century-long genocide.      

Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under presidents Kennedy
and Johnson, a prime architect of, and major bearer of
responsibility for, the slaughter in Indochina, from its early
days to its extraordinary escalations; and for the violent
suppression of popular movements in Peru.

General William Westmoreland, Army Chief of Staff, for the
numerous war crimes under his command in Vietnam.  In 1971,
Telford Taylor, the chief US prosecutor at the post-World War II
Nuremberg Tribunal, cited the "Yamashita" case as grounds for
indicting Westmoreland.  Following the war, a US Army Commission
had sentenced Japanese General Tomayuki Yamashita to be hanged
for atrocities committed by his troops in the Philippines.  The
Commission held that as the senior commander, Yamashita was
responsible for not stopping the atrocities.  The same ruling
could of course apply to General Powell and General Schwarzkopf. 
Yamashita, in his defense, presented considerable evidence that
he had lacked the communications to adequately control his
troops; yet he was still hanged.  Taylor pointed out that with
helicopters and modern communications, Westmoreland and his
commanders didn't have this problem..."
--William Blum, "Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower"


"The U.S. currently holds the highest incarceration rate per capita of
all western nations. There are over 2 million men and women incarcerated
in the U.S., and over 1,500 more are being added weekly. In 1999 the
Bureau of Justice Statisitcs noted that if we continue to incarcerate
at our current rate, 1 in every 20 Americans born in 1999 will spend
some time in their lives behind bars. 

During the past decade the U.S. prison population has more than tripled...

The U.S. now incarcerates 6 to 10 times as many people as any other industrialized
country in the world. 

In the past two decades, about 1000 new prisons and jails have been built
in the U.S. 

The U.S. criminalizes more acts than any other country in the world.


The U.S. criminalizes acts that in other countries would require community
service or drug treatment or would not be considered a crime at all.


One in every 150 people are locked up on any given day in the U.S. 

If we continue to incarcerate at the current rate, 1 in 20 people born
this year will spend some time behind bars in his or her lifetime. 
 
Billions of dollars flow from the public treasury into private corporations
to design, build, and maintain prisons. This is happening while 14 million
children in the U.S. live in poverty. 

The enormous increase in America's inmate population can be explained
in large part by the sentences given to people who have committed non-violent
crimes. Seventy-one percent of those sentenced to state prison in 1996
were convicted of non-violent crimes (including 30% for drug offenses
and 29% for property offenses). 

Since 1991, the rate of violent crime in the U.S. has fallen by 20%,
while the number of people in prison or jail has nearly doubled. 
Almost 1 out of every 3 black men between the ages of 20 to 29 is in
the criminal justice system (incarcerated, on probation, or on parole).
Black males have a 29% chance of serving time in prison at some point
in their lives; hispanic males, a 16% chance; white males, a 4% chance..."
--http://www.lionheart.org/corrections.html


"Prisons now top higher education as a state spending priority for the
first time, according to a new study. 

Since 1984, California has built 21 new prisons and one university, according
to Dan Macalliar of the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice. 

The prison building binge that California has engaged in has not had
any effect on crime..."
--CNN, November 2, 1996


"The most comprehensive study of racial discrimination and the death
penalty found that killers of whites were eleven times more likely to
be condemned to death than killers of African-Americans.

Prosecutors--90% of whom are white--seek the death penalty more often
if the victim is white.9 For example, in Georgia prosecutors sought the
death penalty in 70% of the cases where the perpetrator was African American
and the victim was white. When there was a white killer and an African-American
victim, the same prosecutors sought the death penalty in only 15% of
the cases..."
--ACLU Report, "Criminal Justice in Black and White"


"The United States’ child poverty rate is substantially higher—often
two-to-three times higher—than that of most other major Western industrialized
nations."
--National Center for Children in Poverty, March 2002


"in more than 100 countries, the per capita income is lower than it was
15 years ago.

In the Third World, there are 1.3 billion poor people. In other words,
one out of every three inhabitants lives in poverty.

More than 820 million people in the world suffer from hunger; and 790
million of them live in the Third World.

More than 840 million adults are still illiterate and the vast majority
live in the Third World.

At the moment of birth, an inhabitant of the Third World can expect to
live 18 years less than another of the industrialized world.

Life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa is barely 48 years. That is 30
years less than in the developed countries.

It is estimated that 654 million people living in countries of the South
today will not live past 40 --almost half my age.

A full 99.5% of all maternal deaths take place in the Third World. The
risk of maternal death in Europe is one death per 1400 births. In Africa
the risk is one in six. I use the word risk because the number of those
who actually die is lower, of course. But the number of mothers who die
in Africa for every 10,000 births is no less than 100 times higher than
the number in Europe.

More than 11 million boys and girls under five years of age die every
year in the Third World from diseases that are largely preventable. That
means more than 30,000 every day, 21 every minute, and almost a thousand
since this rally began, about 45 minutes ago. 

In the Third World, 64 children out of every 1000 born live die before
reaching one year of age. 

Two out of every five children in the Third World suffer from retarded
growth, and one in every three is underweight for their age...

And all of this is happening at a time when, throughout the world, 800
billion dollars are put into military spending, 400 billion are spent
on narcotic drugs, and a trillion dollars are invested in commercial
advertising... barely 1% of the 56 billion dollars invested every year
in medical research is spent on research into pneumonia, diarrheic diseases,
tuberculosis and malaria, four of the primary scourges of the underdeveloped
world...

I have spoken of the Third World’s serious social problems. But there
are serious social problems even in such a rich country as this, the
richest in the world. I want to mention some of them.

Thirty-six million people, 14% of the population, live below the poverty
line, a rate twice as high as that of other developed countries. Double
that of Europe and Japan.

Forty-three million people are not health-insured and another 30 million
have such low medical coverage that it is practically non-existent.

There are 30 million illiterates and another 30 million functional illiterates.
Cuba did not make this up, these are official figures from international
organizations.

Among the black population the rate of poverty is over 29%; the rate
for the whole population is 14%. The poverty rate among the black population
is, therefore, more than twice that of the general population of the
United States. Among black children the figure reaches 40%. In some cities
and rural areas in the United States it is over 50%.

Despite economic expansion, the poverty rates in America are from two
to three times higher than those in Western Europe, and 22% of American
children live in poverty. These are official figures.

Only 45% of all workers in the private sector have social security coverage.
It is estimated that 13% of the total U.S. population will not live beyond
60 years of age.

Women still earn only 73% of what men earn in comparable jobs and make
up 70% of part-time workers, those who have no right to any social benefits.

Between 1981 and 1995, 85% of new workers with more than one job were
women.

The richest 1% of the population, who in 1975 owned 20% of the wealth,
now owns 36%. And the gap keeps widening.

There is not one millionaire, not one person who belongs to the upper
middle class, among the 3600 people sentenced to capital punishment who
are now on death row in U.S. prisons. One might wonder why. You perhaps
have a better answer than I do. I am not accusing anyone, I simply say
what is going on.

Apparently, one needs to reach the category of millionaire to have the
decency and discipline needed to never be targeted for such sentence.

There are more statistics which are a little hard to take, but which
I have to tell you about.

In the whole history of the United States not one single white man has
ever been executed for having raped a black woman. (APPLAUSE)

Nevertheless, and this is an historical fact, during the time that rape
was considered a capital crime, of the 455 people executed for rape,
405 were black: that is to say, 9 out of 10.

In the state of Pennsylvania, for example, where the Declaration of Independence
was proclaimed in 1776, only 9% of the total population are black. Yet,
62% of those sentenced to death, that is, a proportion seven times greater,
are black.

One more thing. More than 90% of the 3600 sentenced to death were victims
of physical or sexual abuse during their childhood.

A recent study by a non-governmental organization indicates that black
men have a 13 times greater chance of being given longer sentences than
white men when it comes to drug-related offenses, although there are
five times as many white men dealing drugs in the United States.

More than 60% of the women in prison in the United States are African-American
or Hispanic..."
--Fidel Castro, speech pronounced in Riverside Church, Harlem, New York,
September 8, 2000


"...the U.S. is the prime supporter of the Israeli military occupation
of Palestinian territory, now in its thirty–fifth year. It’s been harsh
and brutal from the beginning, extremely repressive. Most of this hasn’t
been discussed here, and the U.S. role has been virtually suppressed.
It goes back twenty–five years of blocking diplomatic initiatives.

Even simple facts are not reported. For example, as soon as the current
fighting began last September 30, Israel immediately, the next day, began
using U.S. helicopters (they can’t produce helicopters) to attack civilian
targets. In the next couple of days they killed several dozen people
in apartment complexes and elsewhere. The fighting was all in the occupied
territories, and there was no Palestinian fire. The Palestinians were
using stones. So this is people throwing stones against occupiers in
a military occupation, legitimate resistance by world standards, insofar
as the targets are military. 

On October 3, Clinton made the biggest deal in a decade to send new military
helicopters to Israel. That continued the next couple of months. That
wasn’t even reported, still isn’t reported, as far as I’m aware. But
the people there know it, even if they don’t read the Israeli press (where
it was immediately reported). They look in the sky and see attack helicopters
coming and they know they’re U.S. attack helicopters sent with the understanding
that that is how they will be used. From the very start U.S. officials
made it clear that there were no conditions on their use, which was by
then already well known. A couple of weeks later Israel started using
them for assassinations. The U.S. issued some reprimands but sent more
helicopters, the most advanced in the U.S. arsenal. Meanwhile the settlement
policies, which have taken over substantial parts of the territories
and are designed to make it virtually impossible for a viable independent
state to develop, are supported by the U.S. The U.S. provides the funding,
the diplomatic support. It’s the only country that’s blocked the overwhelming
international consensus on condemning all this under the Geneva conventions.
The victims, and others in the region, know all of this. All along this
has been an extremely harsh military occupation. 

...There’s a lot more. There is the fact that the U.S. has supported
oppressive, authoritarian, harsh regimes, and blocked democratic initiatives.
For example, the one I mentioned in Algeria. Or in Turkey. Or throughout
the Arabian Peninsula. Many of the harsh, brutal, oppressive regimes
are backed by the U.S. That was true of Saddam Hussein, right through
the period of his worst atrocities, including the gassing of the Kurds.
U.S. and British support for the monster continued. He was treated as
a friend and ally, and people there know it. When bin Laden makes that
charge, as he did again in an interview rebroadcast by the BBC, people
know what he is talking about....

Nicaragua in the 1980s was subjected to violent assault by the U.S. Tens
of thousands of people died. The country was substantially destroyed,
it may never recover. The effects on the country are much more severe
even than the tragedies in New York the other day. They didn’t respond
by setting off bombs in Washington. They went to the World Court, which
issued a judgment in their favor condemning the U.S. for what it called
“unlawful use of force,” which means international terrorism, ordering
the U.S. to desist and pay substantial reparations. The U.S. dismissed
the court judgment with contempt, responding with an immediate escalation
of the attack. So Nicaragua then went to the Security Council, which
passed a resolution calling on states to observe international law. The
U.S. vetoed it. They went to the General Assembly, where they got a similar
resolution that passed near–unanimously, which the U.S. and Israel opposed
two years in a row... 

...The U.S. is the only country that was condemned for international
terrorism by the World Court and that rejected a Security Council resolution
calling on states to observe international law. It continues international
terrorism. That example’s (Nicaragua) the least of it. And there are
also what are in comparison, minor examples. Everybody here was quite
properly outraged by the Oklahoma City bombing, and for a couple of days,
the headlines all read, Oklahoma City looks like Beirut. I didn’t see
anybody point out that Beirut also looks like Beirut, and part of the
reason is that the Reagan Administration had set off a terrorist bombing
there in 1985 that was very much like Oklahoma City, a truck bombing
outside a mosque timed to kill the maximum number of people as they left.
It killed eighty and wounded two hundred, aimed at a Muslim cleric whom
they didn’t like and whom they missed. It was not very secret. I don’t
know what name you give to the attack that’s killed maybe a million civilians
in Iraq and maybe a half a million children, which is the price the Secretary
of State says we’re willing to pay. Is there a name for that? Supporting
Israeli atrocities is another one. Supporting Turkey’s crushing of its
own Kurdish population, for which the Clinton Administration gave the
decisive support, 80 percent of the arms, escalating as atrocities increased,
is another. Or take the bombing of the Sudan, one little footnote, so
small that it is casually mentioned in passing in reports on the background
to the Sept. 11 crimes. How would the same commentators react if the
bin Laden network blew up half the pharmaceutical supplies in the U.S.
and the facilities for replenishing them? Or Israel? Or any country where
people “matter”? Although that’s not a fair analogy, because the U.S.
target is a poor country which had few enough drugs and vaccines to begin
with and can’t replenish them. Nobody knows how many thousands or tens
of thousands of deaths resulted from that single atrocity, and bringing
up that death toll is considered scandalous. If somebody did that to
the U.S. or its allies, can you imagine the reaction? In this case we
say, Oh, well, too bad, minor mistake, let’s go on to the next topic.
Other people in the world don’t react like that..."
--Noam Chomsky, interview for 'Monthly Review' magazine, "The United
States is a Leading Terrorist State," November 2001










---
Marc Rodrigues
Voicemail/Fax: 866.206.9067 x4217
SFS: http://qcsfs.tripod.com

"Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation,
understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying
who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives
if you fail to act." -George Jackson