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Hezbollah's Rise, Israel's Fall |
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Today's Stories September 11, 2006 Jean Bricmont September 9/10,
2006 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St.
Clair Greg Grandin Peter
Stone Brown Ralph
Nader Brian
Cloughley Col.
Chet Richards David
Model Dave
Himmelstein Ron
Jacobs Fred
Gardner Mike
Whitney Josh
Gryniewicz Daniel
Gross / Joe
Bageant Nicole
Colson Alexander
Billet Poets'
Basement
September 8, 2006 Uri
Avnery Paul
Craig Roberts Bill
Quigley Robert
Jensen Norman
Solomon Keith
Bolin
September 8, 2006 Uri
Avnery Paul
Craig Roberts Bill
Quigley Robert
Jensen Norman
Solomon Keith
Bolin Kristin
S. Schafer Jeffrey
St. Clair Patrick
Cockburn Website
of the Day
Marjorie
Cohn Sharon
Smith René
Drucker Colín Michael
Donnelly John
Borowski Lucinda
Marshall Charles
Sullivan Jeffrey
St. Clair Jonathan
Cook Website
of the Day
September 6, 2006 Stephen
Soldz Dave
Zirin Ramzy
Baroud Noel
Ignatiev Dave
Lindorff Norman
Solomon Binoy
Kampmark Jeffrey
St. Clair John
Ross Website
of the Day
September 5, 2006 Jonathan Cook Patrick Cockburn Mike Whitney
Roland Sheppard James Petras Alexander Cockburn
September 4, 2006 Clancy Sigal Jeffrey St.
Clair Anthony Alessandrini Dennis Perrin
Daniel Cassidy
Paul Craig
Roberts
September 2 / 3, 2006 Uri Avnery Jeffrey St.
Clair Ralph Nader Noam Chomsky Allan Lichtman Stanley Heller Rana el-Khatib Peter Montague Laura Carlsen Dr. Susan Block Joe Bageant Scott Stedjan / Matt Schaaf Gary Leupp Stephen Fleischman Paul Balles Ingmar Lee Jane Stillwater Ron Jacobs St. Clair /
Bossert Poets' Basement Website of
the Weekend
September 1, 2006 Uri Avnery Paul Craig
Roberts Bill Ayers Kevin Zeese Xochitl Bervera Norman Solomon Alexander Cockburn Richard Neville Website of the Day
August 31, 2006 David MacMichael John Ross Edward Said Amira Hass Missy Comley
Beattie Lee Sustar Jonathan Cook Website of the Day
August 30, 2006 Paul Craig
Roberts George Salzman Dave Lindorff Leigh Davis Alan Maass Mike Whitney Eliza Ernshire Website of
the Day
Saul Landau Jeffrey Buchanan Dave Lindorff James Brooks John F. Burnett Walter A. Davis Rich Gibson Amira Hass Paul Craig
Roberts
August 28, 2006 John Walsh Sibel Edmonds
/ William Weaver Ramzy Kysia Ron Jacobs Gideon Levy Missy Beattie Virginia Tilley
Uri Avnery Alexander Cockburn Jordan Green Azmi Bishara Ray Close Gary Leupp Ralph Nader Joe Allen Fred Gardner Dave Lindorff David Krieger Stephen Fleischman Mary Turck Walter Brasch Jim Scharplaz Israel Shamir Alexander Cockburn Charles Henderson Jeffrey St. Clair Poets' Basement
August 25, 2006 Elena Everett Juan Cole Chris Moore James Marc Leas Salah Obeid Claudio Albertani Tom Barry Website of
the Day
CounterPunch
News Service Uri Avnery Nermeen al-Mufti Norman Solomon Megan Wiles Laura Santina Mike Whitney Seth Sandronsky Christopher
Brauchli
August 23, 2006 Dr. Trudy Bond Ramzy Baroud Ron Jacobs Heather Gray Amira Hass Mavis Anderson Ingmar Lee Francis Boyle John Ross
Gilad Atzmon Jack Heyman Eamon McCann Sharon Smith Edward S. Herman Ramzi Kysia Bill Quigley August 21, 2006 Jonathan Cook Paul Craig
Roberts Kathy Kelly Mike Roselle Lenni Brenner Maher Osseiran
August 19 /
20, 2006 Uri Avnery Eliza Ernshire Virginia Tilley Kathy Kelly Marc Levy Stephen Bradberry / Barbara Rose
Johnston William Blum Stephen Fleischman Ralph Nader Dave Lindorff Fred Gardner David Krieger Dan La Botz Poets' Basement
August 18, 2006 Brian M. Downing John Blair Alan Hart Craig Murray Chris Dols Emily Kirksey Joaquín Bustelo William S.
Lind Podcast of the Day Website of
the Day
August 17, 2006 CounterPunch
News Service Barucha Peller Ramzy Baroud Rothem Shtarkman Craig Murray Samar Assad Mike Ferner Arnold Kohen Kevin Zeese Missy Comley Beattie Uri Avnery Video of the Day Website of
the Day
August 16, 2006 Merav Yudilovitch Robert Fisk Mark Williams John Ross Christopher
Brauchli John Walsh Ron Jacobs Rachard Itani Felice Pace Niranjan Ramakrishnan Frank, Sharma
and Peterson Jonathan Cook Website of
the Day
August 15, 2006 Andrew Ford
Lyons Binoy Kampmark Robert Fisk Ralph Nader Todd Chretien Chris Floyd Mark Engler George Galloway Laray Polk Trish Schuh Website of the Day
Uri Avnery Karim Makdisi Kathy Kelly Robert Fisk Norman Solomon Sunsara Taylor Robert Jensen Mike Whitney P. Sainath Goretti Horgan Christopher
Reed
August 12 /
13, 2006 Jean Bricmont Norman Finkelstein Robert Fisk Adrian Grima Barucha Peller Omar Barghouti Adam Engel Conn Hallinan John Stauber Rev. William
Alberts Fred Gardner Lucinda Marshall Ron Jacobs CounterPunch
News Service Poets' Basement
Col. Dan Smith John Ross Michael Donnelly William S.
Lind Linda Milazzo Rep. Cynthia
McKinney Azmi Bishara Henri Picciotto CounterPunch News Wire Dave Lindorff Jonathan Cook
Uri Avnery Dave Marsh Gabriel Kolko Arthur Versluis Jennifer Loewenstein
Linda Schade Jackie Mason Jonathan Cook Gilad Atzmon
Charles Hirschkind
Tom Barry Cockburn &
St. Clair
August 8, 2006 Patrick Cockburn Paul Larudee Joan Roelofs Dimi Reider John A. Murphy Tim Llewellyn Website of the Day
August 7, 2006 Uri Avnery Karim Makdisi Nadia Hijab Sharon Smith Magan Wiles George Beres Rachard Itani Norman Solomon Stan Cox Mickey Z. Jonathan Cook Website of
the Day
August 5 / 6, 2006 Virginia Tilley Uri Avnery Patrick Cockburn Sgt. Martin Smith Gary Leupp Neve Gordon Ralph Nader Peter Bouckaert Peter Montague David Krieger Michael Donnelly Fred Gardner Catherine Norris Imraan Siddiqi Missy Comley
Beattie Ira Kay Dave Lindorff Pratyush Chandra Ron Jacobs St. Clair / Donnelly Poets' Basement Website of the Day Video of the
Weekend
August 4, 2006 Ralph Nader Brian Cloughley Eliza Ernshire Roger Assaf George Bisharat Remi Kanazi Laura Carlsen Niranjan Ramakrishnan Derrick O'Keefe Mickey Z. Col. Dan Smith Website of the Day
Jonathan Cook Uri Avnery Saree Makdisi Robert Fisk Farrah Hassen Nicola Nasser Ron Jacobs Mitchel Cohen Seth Sandronsky Bruce K. Gagnon Alexander Cockburn
John Ross Chip Mitchell Saul Landau Naseer Aruri Winslow T.
Wheeler Matthias Gebauer Joshua Frank Bill Quigley Manuel Yang Shamai Leibowitz David Himmelstein Lara Marlowe Website of
the Day
August 1, 2006 Michael Neumann Robert Fisk Omar Barghouti Marc Levy Diana Barahona / Jeb Sprague Claud Cockburn Ross Eisenbrey Dave Lindorff John Chuckman Francis Boyle Phil Doe Stephen Soldz Website of the Day
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September 11, 2006 Time to Join the Rest of the WorldForgetting September 11By ANTHONY ALESSANDRINI September 11, 2006 marks the fifth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. If you are living in the United States, there is no way that you could have escaped from reading or hearing the sentence above, or something like it, over the past few weeks. One might think that it would be unnecessary to have to write or utter such a sentence, but nevertheless there isn't a mass media organ anywhere in the country that does not seem to feel the need to remind us, lest we forget, that September 11 is the anniversary of September 11. Every day, residents of New York City still encounter bumper stickers and signs and other public markers exhorting us to "never forget" that date. But how could it be possible to do so? September 11, we have continually been told, was perhaps the most historic day in the history of the United States, the day when "our" lives-indeed, the entire world-changed forever. It would be hard to imagine the possibility of forgetting, even if you tried. In his book Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson suggests that one of the most important developments in the history of nationalism was the daily newspaper. Every morning, people within a bounded geographical region read essentially the same news in the same language, with a few minor variations. The general point of similarity, from the perspective of those reading the newspaper, is that all the news contained in it is somehow relevant to "us." This "us" is usually contained within national borders. If a plane crashes in Germany and five Americans are injured, this latter fact is taken to be news of a particular kind. Anderson is interested in the way this conveyance of news actually creates the "us" of national identification as an emotional connection: after all, the chances are that I, the average reader, have never met any of the five people on that plane; they might live thousands of miles away and have nothing in common with me. And yet, they are part of a larger "us" that we are constantly called upon to recognize; they make up that large group referred to by U.S. presidents as "my fellow Americans." It is in this specific context that I propose a certain kind of remembering, and a certain kind of forgetting. Certainly, do not forget those who died on September 11, 2001. But remember them in the larger context of the millions of people throughout the world who have faced the consequences wrought by the U.S. government and its allies in retaliation. Don't forget the events that happened on September 11, 2001 and their aftermath; forget "September 11" as a glib phrase that has obfuscated this larger context and has been instead used by the U.S. government to wreak havoc throughout the world in the name of a principle that has not yet been actively rejected by people in the United States: the principle that American lives are somehow worth more than the lives of others. In this context, it becomes necessary to try to imagine the five years since September 11, 2001 from the perspective of people in Afghanistan, who bore the first brunt of the U.S. government's revenge. The initial U.S.-led attack alone, mostly in the form of an air campaign, killed an estimated 3,400 people. Thousands more have died due the subsequent violence that has marked the continuing U.S.-led occupation of the country. Lest we forget, the establishment of a pattern of collective punishment and slaughter perpetrated against a larger population that had nothing to do with a given an act of aggression-which we have seen repeated in recent months by the Israeli government against populations in Gaza and Lebanon-was firmly set in place by the U.S. attack on and occupation of Afghanistan in retaliation for the attacks of September 11. While the attack on Afghanistan was being carried out, people in the United States were introduced to two innovations in governance: the Patriot Act, part of an unprecedented attack on civil liberties whose effects are only now beginning to make themselves known through revelations such as those involving the National Security Agency; and the unveiling of the term "enemy combatants," as part of the U.S government's equally unprecedented attack on the guiding principles of international law and, in practice, as part of the larger process that has led to the detention, imprisonment, and torture of thousands of people throughout the world in a global prison system the full extent and horrors of which still remain unknown to us. The anniversary of September 11, 2001 has to be viewed from the perspective of people in Iraq, who-as we now know-were always seen by the Bush Administration as the primary target of its manipulation of "September 11." Two years ago, estimates of the number of Iraqis killed as a result of the U.S.-led invasion and occupation stood at 100,000; according to recent reports, more than 10,000 have been killed in the last four months alone. But one does not have to engage in this calculus of horror to understand the scale of the destruction unleashed by the U.S. government wielding a sword labeled "September 11." If we can allow ourselves to forget this "September 11," we might be able to remember that five years ago marked the beginning of a specific pattern of targeting communities in the United States that continues today. In the first year following September 11, 2001, three thousand Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians were detained in the United States without criminal charges. Thousands more have faced detention and deportation since then. Today U.S. politicians from both parties actively embrace racial profiling measures at airports and other public places-for "our" safety, of course. If it were not for the cloud of fear that has been caused by the constant invocation of "September 11," these proposals-essentially a set of differential and discriminatory laws, policies, and procedures directed at a particular group of citizens and residents based on their race, ethnicity, and/or religion-would be instantly identifiable for what they are: a recipe for apartheid. In short, if people in the United States can forget the official version of "September 11," we stand a chance of remembering what these five years have meant to all the people of the world: in Palestine, as Ariel Sharon and the Israeli government instantly picked up the rhetoric of the U.S. government and began to intensify the brutality of its acts of repression and ethnic cleansing in the name of the global "war on terror"; in Haiti, as Haitians had to withstand yet another all-too-familiar intervention and occupation by U.S. and French troops; in Iran and Syria, which have lived under the threat of a U.S. attack since the inception of the war in Iraq; in Colombia, the first target of the Bush Administration's re-positioning of the "war on drugs" within the terms of the "war on terror," as Alvaro Uribe used his financial and military backing from the U.S. to consolidate power and repress dissent; in the Philippines, another "front" of the U.S.-backed "war on terror," where Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo's government has similarly used the rhetoric that has arisen since "September 11" in order to repress democratic dissent. In fact, if people in the United States can manage to momentarily forget "our" September 11, we might even be able to remember, against the forgetting pushed upon us, that the world did not begin on September 11, 2001. As a particular pneumonic device, there is the memory of what Ariel Dorfman and others have called "the other September 11": September 11, 2006 marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of the U.S.-sponsored coup in Chile that overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. This can help us remember the struggle of people throughout the Americas against U.S. imperialism that has been going on for decades and that continues today. This particular form of historical remembering also means remembering-or, for many people, learning for the first time-that none of what has been listed above as the aftermath of "September 11" in fact began on that day. Afghanistan had been a site of U.S.-sponsored violence since the Cold War days of the 1980s; Iraq has been under attack at the hands of the U.S. and its allies in the form of sanctions and air strikes since 1991; in the other instances, the "war on terror" has led to the intensification of already-existing forms of repression and violence, generally with U.S. funding and military support, over the past five years. In the U.S. itself, all of the necessary laws and mechanisms necessary for the Patriot Act and the state of siege imposed against particular immigrant communities since September 11, 2001 had already been put in place under the Clinton Administration throughout the 1990s. This is not to mention the many communities in the United States, foremost among them the African American community, who have not had a moment of respite from "racial profiling" and a state of lived apartheid since the establishment of the nation. All this remembering needs to begin immediately. For among the many ways that the left in the United States failed after September 11, 2001, this is one of the most important: the failure to fight to make people in the United States see their own place in the world. In the days immediately following the attacks, Slavoj Zizek wrote of the experience of walking the streets of lower Manhattan, still filled with rubble and clouded with smoke, and of another scene that came to mind: "If one adds to the situation in New York rapist gangs and a dozen or so snipers blindly targeting people who walk along the streets, one gets an idea about what Sarajevo was a decade ago." For this, he was roundly criticized, including by those on the left, for "insensitivity." Apparently, "our" pain was incomparable to the pain of the rest of the world. But this point is more crucial
today than ever before. People in New York are far from the only
ones who have had to watch the bodies of loved ones brought out
from the rubble of a destroyed building. (If you can forget "September
11," you might remember Lebanon.) This was true before September
11, 2001; and, thanks largely to the military efforts of the
U.S. government, it has certainly been true over the past five
years. The unspoken consensus among people in the United States
that American lives are worth more than others must be addressed
and dispelled once and for all, and this effort must become a
major part of the fight against the Bush administration's "war
on terror." But another thing has happened during those five years whose anniversary we are being told to commemorate. Around the world, people's movements have constantly resisted the U.S. government's attempts to impose its own vision of the world through the use of "September 11." In place of this "September 11," I offer another date to remember: February 15, 2003, when more than eleven million people across the world stood together, not just against the imminent U.S. attack on Iraq, but against the larger imposition of U.S. hegemony across the globe. The spirit of resistance that came together on February 15 still exists; it manifests itself, for example, in the protests that erupt every time a U.S. official sets foot anywhere in the world today. But the millions who stood, and who continue to stand, against the actions of the U.S. government are also watching us today, and wondering-as they should-about the relative lack of resistance on the part of people here in the United States against their own government's acts of terror since September 11, 2001. It is past time for people in the United States to forget the official version of "September 11" and to join this new world that was glimpsed on February 15. For the corollary of Zizek's point, in comparing New York and Sarajevo, was that only by accepting such a connection can Americans begin to make what he called "the long-overdue move from 'A thing like this should not happen HERE!' to 'A thing like this should not happen ANYWHERE!'" Forgetting "September 11" is an important step towards a very different kind of remembering of the events of that day within a larger history and a larger context, one that extends beyond national borders and imagines a different kind of world. It would mean, for people in the United States, at long last trying to find a way, with due humility, to join the rest of the world. Anthony Alessandrini is an Assistant Professor of English
at Kingsborough Community College/CUNY in Brooklyn, and an organizer
with the Action Wednesdays Against War collective. He can be
reached at tonyalessandrini@yahoo.com.
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from CounterPunch Books! The Case Against Israel By Michael Neumann  Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror by Jeffrey St. Clair          Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid? CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues, as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.                     |
