of the Afghan campaign, was destroyed
by a U.S. missile just hours before the Northern Alliance entered
the Afghan capital on Nov. 13.November 5, 2001
November 12, 2001
November 19, 2001
November 26, 2001
There are glaring holes in the so-called "official evidence" implicating 19 Arab individuals in the Sept. 11 suicide attacks on New York and Washington. Washington has done little to address them. Are investigators afraid of what they might find out?
By Christopher J. Petherick
The final desperate words of a flight attendant on one of the airliners which crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 captured in a telephone conversation with an air-traffic controller contradict official evidence that has been released on the men suspected of hijacking that jetliner, reports the British press.
On Sept. 21, the BBC reported that the transcript of a phone call made by Madeline Amy Sweeney aboard American Airlines Flight 11 to Boston air traffic control reveals that the flight attendant identified the hijackers and their seat numbers.
However, according to the BBC, the seat numbers were not the seats of the men who the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) says were responsible for the hijacking.
In addition, the BBC reports that Sweeney identified only four hijackers, whereas FBI officials have released the names of five men they suspect were involved in the terror attack.
The FBI names the suspected terrorists as Waleed M. Alshehri, Wail Alshehri, Mohamed Atta, Abdulaziz Alomari and Satam Al Suqami.
At least three of the men-Waleed M. Alshehri, Wail Alshehri and Abdulaziz Alomari-accused of flying the suicide mission are still alive, according to Mideast and western media. The father of Mohamed Atta, who is believed to have been the ring leader, claims that his son was kidnaped and is still alive.
For more details on the FBI's list of suspected terrorist hijackers, see American Free Press's story on page one of the Oct. 22 issue.
This report-combined with the findings that at least six, possibly even seven, of the purported terrorists are still alive and had nothing to do with the attacks-could cast doubt on the supposedly open-and-shut case that members of a particular radical Islamic group carried out the heinous terrorist assaults on Sept. 11.
The report also raises the question as to whether, as pointed
out by Seymour Hersh in a recent issue of The New Yorker, false
evidence was planted.
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Why is the United States, home to some of the largest drug companies in the world, endangering the health of its military personnel with an anthrax vaccine produced by a foreign and privately-owned company that has repeatedly failed to make the grade?
Every one of the 2.5 million Americans serving in the armed forces is required to receive a six-shot anthrax vaccination made by a small foreign-owned company, which has been plagued with troubles for years and repeatedly failed to pass government inspection.
The vaccine is manufactured by one company, the BioPort Corporation, formerly known as the Michigan Biologic Products Institute (MBPI). The U.S. military is BioPort's on ly customer, although production problems have stalled production of the vaccine required to vaccinate all 2.4 million active and reserve troops.
On Oct. 19, BioPort was hit with a private multimillion-dollar lawsuit alleging negligence in its manufacturing procedures. The suit against BioPort was filed in federal district court in Washington and is thought to be the first action on behalf of soldiers allegedly harmed by vaccine shots they were required to take.
The lawsuit, filed on behalf of one deceased and one in jured soldier, notes that most of the vaccine produced by BioPort was administered to about 150,000 U.S. military personnel. The complaint alleges that the efficacy of the vaccine in the mass immunization program was never sufficiently tested nor were adverse reactions accurately assessed.
Since 1970, the sole U.S. supplier of anthrax vaccine has been the MBPI laboratory in Lansing formerly owned by the state of Michigan. In the mid-1990s, the state put the facility up for sale, but there was scant interest from major pharmaceutical firms.
In early 1997, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a notice that it planned to revoke the lab's license after a failed inspection. Since 1998, BioPort Corp. has been unable to ship the vaccine because of failure to pass FDA regulations.
Before BioPort was formed, an anthrax vaccine was forced upon the U.S. military during the Persian Gulf War. This "vaccine" did not have FDA approval when given and is, at least in part, reported to be responsible for the "Gulf War Syndrome."
MBPI was under fire from the FDA for sloppy record keeping after an inspection report raised questions about the anthrax vaccine's potency and sterility. The FDA even threatened to revoke the facility's license. Just a few months later, BioPort emerged as a leading bidder to take over the troubled company and purchased MBPI for $25 million after the Pentagon promised to ante up $15 million to renovate the plant, according to an ABC News report.
Fuad El-Hibri, a German national of Lebanese descent, who had previously been a director of a British maker of bio-defense vaccines for anthrax, Porton Products International, formed BioPort to bid for the lab. He also brought in on the deal a powerful ally, retired Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., a former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff who served as U.S. ambassador to Britain under President Clinton. El-Hibri is married to an American woman and is now a U.S. citizen.
Crowe was appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by President Reagan and named as chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board by President Clinton. From 1994-97, Crowe served as the U.S. Ambas sador to Britain. In 1998, he chaired the Account ability Review Boards, established to investigate the bombings of the American embassies in Africa.
Crowe's involvement raised eyebrows in Congress. The admiral clearly had high-level contacts in the Pentagon, and had been one of the few prominent former military leaders backing Clinton's election bid in 1992. In addition, congressional staffers familiar with the situation say Crowe paid only a token amount for his 22.5 percent original stake in a holding company that controls BioPort.
"Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. William J. Crowe Jr. was part of the crew that sold Saddam Hussein the deadly means to wage war with anthrax germs. That's when the United States wanted the 'Butcher of Baghdad' to use anthrax on Iran," according to Maj. Glenn MacDonald, USAR (Ret), author of Greed and Guinea Pigs: Risking the Health of the U.S. Military.
"Not only does Crowe and his mysterious pal Faud El-Hibri get an exclusive multi-million dollar contract to produce anthrax vaccine, but the government agrees to pay triple the original cost in the contract, from $3.50 a dose, to over 10 dollars," MacDonald says.
Crowe "was used as the man in the window" by BioPort, says Lawrence Halloran, staff director of the subcommittee on national security of the House Committee on Government Reform, which held numerous hearings on the vaccine.
Jay Coupe, a longtime aide to Adm. Crowe who acts as his spokesman, said the admiral "didn't pay anything" for his stake in BioPort, which he said was the equivalent of about 12 percent or 13 percent of the company.
"As is the case with a lot of former government officials, one of the incentives to bring him on board was a piece of the action. Unfortunately, the action has been nonexistent," he said.
BioPort won the auction for the Michigan lab with a bid of about $24.8 million, and closed the deal in September 1998. Within the month, BioPort was awarded an exclusive contract with a reported value between $29 million and $45 million with the Department of Defense to "manufacture, test, bottle and store the anthrax vaccine."
According to former Central Intelligence Agency military analyst Patrick Eddington, the estimated $60 million worth of anthrax vaccine BioPort is expected to produce for the Defense Department over the next five years could just be the beginning, ABC News reported.
"The Pentagon has a $322 million, 10-year program to develop at least three, and perhaps as many as a dozen additional biological warfare vaccines," Eddington told ABC. "These have never really been tested."
The relationship between BioPort and the U.S. military raises troubling questions: How did Fuad El-Hibri come to have so much control over the West's supply of anthrax vaccine? Why has Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, who has worked for decades as chief executive officer of American pharmaceutical companies such as G.D. Searle & Co. and Gilead Sciences Inc. not turned to larger, established, and publicly-held drug companies to produce the vaccine? How could the government let BioPort remain the sole maker of the vaccine after it failed repeatedly to gain FDA approval for its renovated facility?
James Turner, spokesperson for the secretary of defense on health matters, told AFP that BioPort was the only facility in the United States licensed to produce the vaccine, and had obtained the contract with the military "many years ago."
When asked why, given the urgency and the national security interest, the Pentagon couldn't simply order the vaccine from a large American drug company, Turner said, "You'll have to ask the FDA."
Anthrax vaccine shipments from BioPort have reportedly been suspended by the FDA since 1998 because of questions about the facility's quality control, forcing the Pentagon to dramatically reduce its program to vaccinate all 2.4 million soldiers and reservists against anthrax.
Turner could not answer AFP's question as to whether or not BioPort had passed the latest FDA inspection.
The owners of BioPort could make a fortune, as El-Hibri reportedly did while working with the British seller of anthrax vaccine, Porton Products International, during the Gulf War a decade ago, but only if the FDA approves the company's renovated plant.
Lenore Gelb, spokesperson for the FDA on biological issues, told AFP on Oct. 25 that BioPort has not yet received FDA approval.
Sherman Skolnick, a Chicago-based investigative reporter has written that investment firms tied to former President George H.W. Bush, such as the Carlyle Group, located six blocks from the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, and the bin Laden family have invested in BioPort. The Michigan National Guard has been ordered to provide security at the BioPort plant and company officials have been unavailable to answer questions.
"This is consistent with what the Department of Defense is doing nationwide with some of its key contractors," said Maj. James McCrone, spokesman for the Michigan National Guard. Rumsfeld is a multi-millionaire with years of experience working in biotech industries. Rumsfeld was chief executive officer of G. D. Searle & Company, a pharmaceutical business, from 1977 to 1985.
Since 1997, Rumsfeld has been chairman of Gilead Sciences Inc.,
a biopharmaceutical firm in Foster City, Calif. He has also served
as a director for Amylin Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and has millions
of dollars worth of stock in both Amylin and Gilead, according
to published reports, including some 68,200 vested shares in Gilead
worth from $1 million to $5 million.
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Although the mainstream media in America seems to have forgotten the notion of obtaining justice through law. International legal experts say that the Bush administration has yet to present evidence to substantiate its claim that the events of Sept. 11 constituted and act of war rather than a crime against humanity.
"Even if the Bush administration were to publicly provide clear and convincing evidence that Mr. bin Laden and his organization were somehow behind the terrorist bombing in New York and Washington, the U.S. government would still have no valid justification or excuse for committing acts of war against Afghanistan," says Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois.
International law requires a court hearing to determine the guilt or innocence of an individual accused of terrorist acts, such as Osama bin Laden, Boyle says.
Boyle criticized Congress for not creating a panel with subpoena powers to fully investigate the Sept. 11 attacks.
"We are not going to get that investigation," he said. "Yet we are waging a war on Afghanistan based on evidence that secretary of State Colin Powell said was not even circumstantial.
"Even the British government admitted the case against bin Laden and Al Qaeda would not stand up in court and as a matter of fact it was routinely derided in the British press. There was nothing there," Boyle says. "Now I don't know myself who was behind the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11. And it appears we are never going to find out.
"Why? Because Congress in its wisdom has decided not to empanel a joint committee in Congress with subpoena power giving them access to whatever documents they want throughout any agency of the United states government including FBI, CIA, NSA, DAS. And to put these people under oath and testify as to what happened under penalty of perjury," he says.
Boyle, who helped resolve the dispute between the United States, the UK and Libya over the handling of the Libyan suspects in the Lockerbie bombing case, says that the 1971 Montreal Sabotage Convention is directly relevant in the current crisis. This convention, he says, "provides a comprehensive framework for dealing with the current dispute between Afghanistan and the United States.
The Bush administration decided to ignore the fact that the hijacking of civilian aircraft is dealt with under international treaties that deal with terrorism. "They rejected the entire approach and called it an act of war," Boyle said. "The invoked the rhetoric deliberately of Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941.
There was "a conscious decision to escalate the states," Boyle said. "An act of war has a formal meaning. It means an attack by one state against another state. Which, of course, is what happened on Dec. 7, 1941; but not on Sept. 11, 2001.
The military assault against Afghanistan was not prompted by the terrorist attacks against the United states on Sept. 11 according to Boyle. Muslim and non-Muslim countries around the world are condemning U.S. military actions because they are not justified under international law, Boyle said.
In issue no. 7, AFP reported that a major impetus behind the military strikes against Afghanistan is to obtain extended access to oil and natural gas deposits in Central Asia.
"The actions of the United States in Afghanistan constitute armed aggression and are illegal," Boyle said. "Clearly, what is going on in Afghanistan is not self-defense."
Boyle appeared on the Fox News Channel with bill O'Reilly on sept. 13 and argued for presentation of evidence, authorization from the Security Council, and adherence to the rule of law. Since the O'Reilly show, Boyle has not been invited to speak on any prime-time news programs.
He said that attacks by the United states against Afghanistan will result in a "human catastrophe" and predicted that tens of thousands of people will die unless American citizens demand that the war end.
Boyle said that statements by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz discussing the option of "ending states" is a form of genocidal hate-speech.
"I could take that statement of the World Court and file
it and prove it as genocidal intent by the United states government,"
he says. "So the longer we let this go on the more we are
going to see our own civil rights and civil liberties taken away
from us."
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THE WAR MAY NEVER END is the wisdom from on high. This is what Vice President Dick Cheney said on Oct 19 speaking from the White House.
This reminds us of the little moron who kept hitting himself on the head with a hammer to cure his headache.
A manifestation of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.
Which is exactly what we've been pointing out. Our internationalist foreign policy is literally insane because it cannot work.
Too bad that Dick doesn't realize that our internationalist cannot work for the reason that the theory of internationalism is itself flawed.
As the great populist theoretician, Lawrence Dennis pointed out scores of years ago, there is simply NO WAY America can solve the problems of the world.
And every time we try, we only make the problems worse. The idea that our politicians and the pressure groups and bankers prodding them are divinely inspired and can solve the problems of others by ignoring America's domestic problems is a real knee-slapper.
It's been said by someone who is a lot wiser than all of the heads put together in the Bush administration and the media that war is the coward's solution for the problems of peace.
Shall we enumerate the problems inside America that must be put on hold while we go after terrorism? We don't have enough pages in this newspaper for that.
And terrorism itself is a domestic problem caused by our politicians' bad habit of placing international pressures ahead of domestic ones!
Every war the politicians have propelled us into since 1917 has been disastrous for our country.
War is the cause of socialism, big spending, high taxes, harmful basic policy changes.
Of course, it's been super-profitable for the bankers and other war profiteers and war has given pols like Cheney a lot of power and enhanced their self-image as indispensable persons of consequence.
What Cheney doesn't imagine is that there indeed is a war going on. It is a war that has been going on for many years between patriots who would place America's interests firs and opportunists who place their own personal interests ahead of their country's.
The opportunists are the super rich mattoidal gangsters whoe yearning for super profits is untroubled by any human concerns.
Those of us who would place America's interests first are led
by the greatest statesmen of our history starting with George
Washington. Unfortunately, we are reporting that THE WAR MAY
NEVER END.
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Police accusations, not hard evidence, can create "hate crimes" of verbal intimidation.
The scene is ugly. The police have arrived at an apartment house where three homosexual men loudly, even tearfully allege that a Christian has "intimidated" them. They claim he called them "perverts" and say he has friends in church who are going to "knock some sense into them."
The police question the Christian. He admits to quoting Lev. 18:22 that sodomy is an "abomination," but truthfully denies any hint of physical threat.
Whom shall the police believe?
Under our traditional justice system, this case should go to court where a judge or perhaps a jury can hear both sides. Since the dispute does not involve physical evidence, a "guilty" verdict in court is essential to determine if a "speech crime" even exist.
Is that what will happen? Maybe. But for the present, here is what will probably take place.
The police may find the homosexuals' detailed, impassioned testimony very convincing. They may doubt the Christian's testimony.
Why? The police have probably undergone "anti-hate sensitivity training" sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith.
Through ADL-written police "anti-hate training manuals, the ADL teaches police in America that certain groups, such as Christians, with long-standing animosities toward other groups, such as homosexuals, are likely to act out of motives which are "biased," i.e., "hateful."
In short, the police file a report that a "hate crime" of "intimidation" has occurred and the Christian is the suspect. The report, with the Christian's name and details of the "hate crime," are then sent to the FBI, which publishes it as a "hate statistic" in their annual Uniform Crime Report - not as a suspected bias crime, but as an actual "hate crime."
Meanwhile, the Christian has suffered an indignity and a grave injustice.
Possessing no material evidence, the police have accused him of a "hate crime" merely upon allegations of complainants and investigating officers - without due process of law.
The police and the FBI, also, have a file on him as the primary suspect in a "hate crime." If not proven innocent, his "record" can prejudice the authorities against him for the rest of his life.
What kind of government encourages accusers and police to determine what is criminal?
It's called a police state.
The above is made even more ominous because "anti-hate" bill, S. 625, titled the Local Law enforcement Enhancement Act of 2001 now before Congress, will increase funding for federal and state "anti-hate" law enforcement, creating an "anti-hate" bureaucracy similar to such as exists in socialist countries such as Canada and Sweden. There is also complimentary legislation, H.R. 1343, pending in the House.
The only criteria of whether a hate crime exist is whether the feelings of members of an "identifiable group" such as homosexuals have been hurt.
There is still time for you to protest S. 625 and H.R. 1342 to your two senators and congressman.
"Anti-hate" forces in the senate have enough votes to pass this bill and are nearing halfway in the House. Yet, if enough concerned Americans protest, now, we can hold back this un-American nightmare.
Rev. Ted Pike has produced a new 80-minute video titled, Hate
Laws: Making Criminals of Christians. It is available for
$24.90 postpaid from National Prayer Network, P.O. Box 828, Clackamas,
Oreg. 97015
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The Bush family is getting financially fat off the "war on terrorism."
War has always been a profitable money machine for shrewd investors with foresight, but the extremely close connections of the Carlyle Group, a Washington-based private equity investment firm and major war profiteer, to the Bush and bin Laden families-and the current occupant of the White House-raise unavoidable questions of waging war for profit.
Established in 1987 the Carlyle Group was founded by David Rubenstein, a former staff member in the Jimmy Carter White House, and his two partners, Dan D'Aniello and Bill Conway. Today there are 18 partners in the firm and one outside investor. The Washington Post has described Carlyle as a "merchant banking firm" set up "to serve corporations and wealthy families." From the beginning the founders of Carlyle have recruited former politicians as consultants: former President George H. W. Bush is among them-along with a host of other Bush family cronies.
The Bush connection to the Carlyle Group is nothing short of a scandal, according to Larry Klayman, a notable government watchdog best known for pursuing the scandals of former President Bill Clinton.
Now that the United States is bombing Afghanistan and allocating huge sums of money for defense, including $40 billion for the "war on terrorism" and more than $200 billion [1994 dollars] for the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), the conflict of interest is "direct," Klayman says. "President Bush should not ask but demand that his father pull out of the Carlyle Group." Carlyle owns many of the companies that will share in the $200 billion JSF deal.
"Carlyle is as deeply wired into the current administration as they can possibly be," Charles Lewis, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, said. "George Bush is getting money from private interests that have business before the government, while his son is president. And, in a really peculiar way, George W. Bush could, some day, benefit financially from his own administration's decisions, through his father's investments. The average American doesn't know that. To me, that's a jaw-dropper."
The Carlyle Group, which claims to be the largest U.S. private-equity fund with some $14 billion in assets, makes money by investing in undervalued companies and reselling them at a profit, employing a host of former top-level government officials from the Bush and Reagan administrations, including former President Bush, in a global "money machine." The Washington Business Journal said in May that the Carlyle Group "seems to play by a different set of rules."
Carlyle is a high-end business open only to the very rich. The Carlyle empire has investments around the world, owns numerous defense related companies outright, and has considerable business with the U.S. government. It owns so many companies that it is now one of the biggest U.S. defense contractors-and a major force in global telecommunications. Carlyle also serves as financial adviser to the Saudi government.
Carlyle's directory reads like a Who's Who of high-profile Republicans going back to the Reagan administration. The chairman is Ronald Reagan's former defense secretary, Frank Carlucci. Former Secretary of State James Baker III, former Budget Director Richard Darman, and Arthur Levitt, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission through most of the Clinton administration, are all senior advisers to the firm.
"Nothing in recent history, however, seems to approach the success this group has had in the wholesale conversion of former high government rank to gigantic profits," Dan K. Thomasson, former editor of Scripps Howard News Service wrote in March 2001. "To use that influence at the highest levels to garner such enormous wealth and power presents an undeniably unsavory appearance.
"One of the underlying themes of the last election, rarely spoken but always present, was the need to restore dignity to the presidency. Now we discover that at the same time he was being held up as an example of how to be presidential, Bush senior was using his stature and entree everywhere to push the interests of himself and his cronies," Thomasson wrote.
The success of the relatively young Carlyle Group is hardly surprising given that it primarily buys companies that are regulated by government. Nearly two-thirds of its investments are in defense and telecommunications companies, which are affected by shifts in government spending and policy. Financial experts say the Carlyle Group's most profitable niche is buying military and aerospace supplies at discount prices and selling them for a lot more.
With Carlucci as chairman, it's no surprise that Carlyle is drawn to defense firms. Carlyle owns numerous defense and aerospace firms such as United Defense Industries, which makes tanks, guided missiles, space vehicles, and weapons delivery systems. United States Marine Repair (USMR) is America's largest non-nuclear ship repair, modernization and conversion company and is another Carlyle company.
Carlucci's knowledge of the Pentagon's inner workings gives Carlyle an advantage when buying defense companies that have fallen in market value. "Because they have a good sense of the defense and aerospace business, they have an ability to project future earnings so they can calculate the true value," Philip Finnegan, a senior analyst with the Teal Group said.
Carlucci, who is seen as largely responsible for Carlyle's success, said he met in February with his old college classmate, Donald Rumsfeld, the new secretary of defense. He also met with Vice President Dick Cheney, himself a defense secretary under former President Bush, to talk about military matters-at a time when Carlyle has several billion-dollar defense projects under consideration.
Defense-related companies make up about 30 percent of the firm's portfolio, which also includes information technology, Internet companies, health care, real estate, and bottling companies. The French newspaper, Le Figaro, is another Carlyle asset.
"Carlyle has averaged annual gross returns of 34 percent since inception, par for the course among similar buyout firms. By comparison, funds offered by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. returned 30 percent. By the end of 2000 Carlyle had raised a total of $12.5 billion, which made it the fifth-largest private buyout firm in the U.S.," Bloomberg reported.
PUBLIC MONEY-PRIVATE EQUITY
Although the Carlyle Group is a "private equity fund" it has enriched itself using public and state pension funds from California, Texas and Connecticut. The California Public Employees' Retirement System (CALPERS) has invested hundreds of millions with Carlyle and has at least a 5 percent stake in the firm.
The Texas teachers' pension fund-whose board was appointed when George W. Bush was governor-gave Carlyle $100 million to invest. In Connecticut, a scandal resulted when Wayne Berman, a Washington consultant and fund-raiser for George W. Bush's presidential campaign, received "a kickback" of more than $900,000 after the state treasurer, Paul J. Silvester, steered tens of millions of state pension fund dollars into a Carlyle Group investment fund.
BIN LADEN CUTS CARLYLE TIES
On Oct. 26, it was reported that Osama bin Laden's family was cutting its financial ties with the Carlyle Group. The bin Laden family reportedly sold its investment worth $2.02 million because of criticism in Saudi Arabia that the bin Laden family, whose construction company is one of the largest in the Middle East, would profit from increased military spending in the U.S.-led war against terrorism.
The fact that President Bush's father and his former secretary of state, James Baker, serve as senior advisers to the company has raised red flags in Washington. Bush the Elder and Baker reportedly use their extensive government contacts to further their business interests as Carlyle Group representatives. From Carlyle's point of view, the involvement of Baker and the former president is invaluable.
"It punches up the brand awareness for us globally," said Carlyle partner Dan D'Aniello. "We are greatly assisted by Baker and Bush. It shows that we are associated with people of the highest ethical standards."
Baker's stake was estimated to be worth more than $180 million when the fund was valued at $3.5 billion; today it is worth much more.
Unlike Baker, Bush the Elder has no ownership stake in Carlyle. As an adviser and an investor, however, Bush is allowed to put the money he earns giving speeches, between $80,000 and $100,000 per speech, into Carlyle's investment funds.
In July 2000, Carlyle Group bought Northrop Grumman's aerostructures business group in a deal valued at $1.2 billion. The business was renamed Vought Aircraft Industries and remains based in Dallas. On Aug. 20, Vought announced that it had been selected by Northrop Grumman to manufacture the wing for the Global Hawk unmanned reconnaissance system's air vehicle.
The corporate overlap between Carlyle and leading defense contractors can be seen in B. Edward Ewing, managing director and CEO of Dallas-based Carlyle Management Group (CMG). Ewing is also chairman and CEO of The Aerostructures Corporation (TAC), a leading worldwide designer and manufacturer of major components for commercial and military aircraft, and is CEO of USMR. Prior to joining Carlyle and leading USMR, Ewing served five years as vice president of operations for Lockheed Martin, the leading company on the JSF project.
The current White House occupant was himself director of a Carlyle company, Caterair.
From the beginning the founders have recruited former politicians as consultants. George Bush the Elder visited Saudi Arabia, home of the bin Laden family, to open doors for Carlyle's fund-raisers. Carlyle won't disclose how much senior advisers like Bush earn but industry experts estimate their fees average about $1 million per year.
"Mr. Bush gives us no advice on what do with the federal government. We've gone over backwards to make sure that we do no lobbying," Carlyle senior partner David Rubenstein said. "President Bush is not asking anybody for money. He speaks at lunches, dinners, and events on non-Carlyle matters and expresses his views on world events."
Rubenstein, who attended Barbara Bush's surprise 75th birthday party last summer in Kennebunkport, Me., says: "We don't do lobbying. We don't give to any politicians. We don't have a PAC [political action committee]. We try to be cleaner than Caesar's wife."
Rubenstein may not know it, but Caesar's wife was not "above
suspicion," either. He divorced her over allegations of infidelity.
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Under the guise of fighting terrorism, Congress is stripping Americans of precious constitutional protections.
Terrorists are already accomplishing a major goal: under the banner of America's new "war," Congress is sending Big Brother into your home, your workplace and even into your personal life.
The Senate gave final approval of the anti-terrorism measure Oct. 25 with a lone dissent by Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) a day after the House approved it 357-66. President Bush signed it the following day.
Dissenting lawmakers said the legislation is so broad and vague that federal agents could prosecute Americans for protesting NAFTA or the World Trade Organization-an obvious prostrating of the First Amend ment's free speech protections.
There was one significant victory that makes bad law just a little less bad: a provision to include the Internal Revenue Service into new "information-sharing" provisions was struck from the bill, Sen. Feingold's office said.
This means, Feingold's spokesman said, the IRS can provide no information to the FBI, CIA or other federal agencies. Nor can the IRS obtain information from other agencies, the spokesman said.
"There is no doubt that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorists," Feingold said in fighting the bill on the Senate floor.
"If we lived in a country that allowed the police to search your home at any time for any reason, that allowed the government to open your mail, eavesdrop on your phone conversations, or intercept your email communications…that allowed the government to hold people in jail indefinitely based on what they write or think, or based on mere suspicion that they are up to no good, then the government would no doubt discover and arrest more terrorists," Feingold said.
"But that probably would not be a country in which we would want to live," Feingold said. "And that would not be a country for which we could, in good conscience, ask our young people to fight and die for. In short, that would not be America."
The new law contains significant changes in criminal procedure that will apply to every federal criminal investigation, not just those involving terrorism.
The law greatly expands the circumstances in which law enforcement agencies can search homes and offices without first notifying the owner.
"The longstanding practice under the Fourth Amendment of serving a warrant prior to executing a search could easily be avoided in virtually every case, because the government would simply have to show that it has 'reasonable cause to believe' that providing notice 'may' 'seriously jeopardize an investigation," Feingold said.
Notice is a key Fourth Amendment protection because it allows a person to point out mistakes and to make sure the search is limited to the terms of the warrant. There are cases when lawmen have the wrong address on a warrant, for example.
"If you're not at home, and police have permission to do a 'sneak and peek' search, they may come to your house, look around and leave and may never have to tell you," Feingold said.In an effort to fight computer crime, the law allows lawmen to monitor a computer with the permission of its owner or operator. That's fine insofar as helping to catch computer hackers or "trespassers."
But a person at a school or library who stumbles onto a gambling or pornographic site in violation of the policies of the library or school "might also be subjected to government surveillance-without any probable cause and without any time limit," Feingold said. Also, if law enforcement suspects a purported terrorist is using a computer in a public place such as a library to access emails or the Internet, investigators can get permission to monitor that computer regardless of who is using it.
CLOAK & DAGGER COURT
There is subtle mischief in a portion of the law that amends the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. When passed in 1978, it granted government the power to conduct surveillance in foreign intelligence in ves ti gations without meeting the Fourth Amend ment's probable cause standard.
The threshold was lowered because the government was not investigating a crime but investigating foreign intelligence activities. The law, in embracing a lower standard than required for criminal investigations, required that the primary purpose be intelligence gathering.
The new law changes that standard. The government now will only have to show that intelligence is a "significant purpose" of the investigation. Thus, even if the primary purpose is a criminal investigation, the Fourth Amendment standard is dumped by calling intelligence gathering "significant."
The law permits the government to compel the production of records from any business regarding any person under the flimsiest pretense of terrorist hunting. The government can compel the disclosure of personal records of anyone who, by chance, lived near, worked with, attended school with or sat on a plane with a terrorist suspect.
FISA already gave the FBI authority to get airline, train, hotel, car rental and other records of suspects. Under the new legislation, all business records can be compelled, including sensitive information like medical records from hospitals or physicians, education records or records of books an individual has checked out of a library.
"This is an enormous expansion of authority, under a law that provides only minimal judicial supervision," Feingold said of the provisions. "The government can apparently go on a fishing expedition and collect information on virtually anyone."
Another provision "allows the detention and deportation of people engaging in innocent associational activity," Feingold said.
Victims could be people who provide lawful assistance to groups not designated by the secretary of state as terrorist organizations but have engaged in some vaguely defined "terrorist activity" in the past.
"Groups that might fit this definition could include Operation Rescue, Greenpeace and even the Northern Alliance fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan," Feingold said. "This provision amounts to 'guilt by association,' which I believe violates the First Amendment."
Feingold saw another First Amendment problem:
"A lawful permanent resident who makes a controversial speech that the government deems to be supportive of terrorism might be barred from returning to his or her family after taking a trip abroad."
Left-wing populist Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-Ver.) shared Feingold's concerns:
"The bill has a definition of 'domestic terrorism' that is so broad that it could allow the federal government to prosecute political protesters who disagree with the WTO, NAFTA, etc."
Sanders said that when lawmen tap a public phone used by a suspected terrorist they could continue to eavesdrop on conversations of subsequent callers.
A small victory came when the House forced a "sunset" provision in the legislation. Many of these provisions expire in four years unless Congress approves them again.
The administration wanted all provisions to be permanent.
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Among the hundreds of suspects being held in connection with the terror attacks of Sept. 11 are a number of Israelis who were seen rejoicing while photographing the burning World Trade Center.
Five Israelis, suspected of being co-conspirators in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, arrested in New Jersey with box-cutters, multiple passports, and $4,000 cash on Sept. 11, remain in detention and may be held for another 90 days as the criminal investigation continues. They are among the more than 1,000 suspects who are being held in connection with the attacks whose detention is shrouded in secrecy.
The five men were on the roof of a moving company and the rooftop of their moving van, taking pictures of the burning buildings, some with themselves in the foreground smiling. In each location, according to The Jerusalem Post, the men, described in press reports as rugged and Middle Eastern-looking, had been reported "cheering" and shouting in "cries of mockery," which evoked the ire of neighbors, who called the police to report suspicious activity.
The Israelis: Sivan Kurzberg, his brother Paul Kurzberg, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner and Omer Gavriel Marmari, suspected of being intelligence agents with prior knowledge of the attacks, are all in their 20s and employees of an Israeli-owned moving company, Urban Moving Systems, based in New Jersey.
A spokesman for the Israeli consulate in New York told AFP that "there have been more" Israelis detained in connection with the terror attacks, confirming press reports that numerous Israelis had been arrested, although he would not say how many. The spokesman said the five above-mentioned Israelis are being held in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn among the general population, although all had been held in solitary confinement until last week, according to The Jerusalem Post.
The mother of one of the detainees told the Israeli press that the suspects had been "tortured" during interrogation. However, the consular spokes man denied this, saying, "They haven't been tortured."
The Immigration and Naturalization Service has signed deportation orders for the five Israelis, but they can still be held for 90 days while the criminal investigation continues. The Israeli consul general in New York, Alon Pinkas, has visited the detainees several times, seeing them as recently as Oct. 29.
Katie Shmuel, the mother of Yaron, told the Israeli press, "He was allowed to talk to them only in English, and only from behind a glass partition. The consul told me that the boys are in a bad state and that they are being held under difficult conditions."
The mother says that the original reports that they had been arrested while boisterously watching the disaster from a rooftop "are totally fabricated."
"For the first few days, the boys were held in an FBI
dungeon, tied up, with no clothes and no food," she said.
"The Americans are using them as pawns to pressure the Israeli
government."
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Even the education establishment acknowledges the growth in home schooling despite efforts to minimize it.
The trend toward home schooling continues, to the dismay of education bureaucrats, as parents rescue their children from a life of illiteracy that is the common product of public schools. There are many reasons today's parents choose home schooling. Two of these are:
* On average, home-schooled kids are at least two years ahead, by all measurements, of their counterparts in public schools. In recent years, they have been winning national spelling bees and other competitions.
* Students are taught character and moral values at home while they "unlearn" them in public schools.
Initially, the Department of Education - which wants intimate control from Washington over all local schools - tried to portray home schooling as a refuge of ignorant parents afraid of exposure to Charles Darwin. But the Education department's own National Center for Education statistics found that these parents are far more educated than parents of public school children.
A large majority - 80.4 percent - of home-schooled families have two parents in the home, compared to 65.8 percent of all families. Children born out of wedlock and reared by a "single parent" are far more prevalent in public schools.
But the Education Department's estimate that 850,000 children - or 1.7 percent of all school-aged children - were home-schooled in 1999 is too low for two reasons, according to the Home School Legal Defense Association:
* Many parents had to fight the government for the right to teach their children at home. Many refused to respond to the center's survey because of a reluctance to give the government information that might lead to restricting that right.
* Many home schools identified themselves as private schools because in almost a quarter of states - 12 out of 50 - state law considers many home schools to be private schools.
Previous estimates of the home-schooled population have been higher than the Education Department's official figures.
In 1997, Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute, estimated the number to be about 1.1 million for the 1996-97 school year and predicted it would increase to at least 1.3 million by 1999-2000.
The Education department's own researcher, Patricia Lines, estimated that the number of home-schooled children might reach 1 million by 1997-98.
In the surveys, students were considered home-schooled if their
parents reported them being educated at home and not in a public
or private facility and if they were not being temporarily schooled
at home because of an illness or injury.
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Are legislators deliberately ignoring the big banks that have been accused of money laundering in the past and instead going after small-time Muslim exchange networks and "shell" banks, trying to give the impression of diligently searching for terrorist money?
As part of the anti-terrorism legislation passed by Congress in late October and signed into law by President Bush, legislators paved the way for toughening rules for banks in regard to money laundering.
The Patriot Bill of 2001 now bars financial organizations from dealing with so-called shady foreign "shell" banks which have no permanent address and requires that banks maintain better records on their clients and account holders.
However, federal regulators had the opportunity two years ago to punish some of the biggest facilitators of international cash washes but shied away when investigators uncovered a network of mega-money laundering that reached the highest levels of some of the most respectable banks in the world.
In a series of groundbreaking reports, the late Spotlight diplomatic correspondent Andrew St. George exposed trillions of dollars of dirty money dealings involving the world's largest financial organizations, including David Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan Bank, Citibank and the Bank of New York.
St. George reported that the Senate Permanent Sub committee on Investigations headed by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) quietly probed the underbelly of illicit financial transactions in two brief committee hearings in November 1999 but quickly dropped the issue when it was learned just what they had unearthed.
"Wall Street's private banks are estimated to hide an eye-popping $21.5 trillion in such deviously deodorized deposits, according to an unpublished estimate by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development," St. George wrote under the pseudonym, Martin Mann, in the Dec. 6, 1999, issue of The Spotlight.
However, St. George wrote, "the Senate's money-laundering hearings shied away from exploring such potentially explosive issues."
Despite the bad publicity, banks fervently resisted legislation that sought to close the loopholes which allow trillions of dollars of illicit money made off of drugs and arms smuggling to be sanitized through "reputable" banks in countries with loose banking regulations such as Israel, Belize and the Cayman Islands.
In addition, the Federal Reserve, the official watchdog of the U.S. banking system, has taken lightly existing initiatives intended to clamp down on suspect transactions that would cut off a steady supply of cash from questionable sources, banking experts have complained.But the Fed has a history of overlooking massive corrup tion, according to St. George.
When the top Mexican financial institutions were teetering on the verge of insolvency in 1994, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan "rushed some $30 billion from the Fed's own closely held slush fund to save Mexico's banks from going belly up," St. George wrote in The Spot light's April 10, 2000, issue. "A year-and-half after this bold bailout . . . the three largest Mexican money centers the Fed had rescued were indicted in the United States on drug-money laundering charges."
Legislators, rather than going after the billionaire banksters, are targeting an informal financial system in the Middle East and Asia that exists outside the established banking system known as hawala or "transferring of debt."
More or less based on the honor system, hawala refers to a principle in which a debtor can "transfer" his debt to a third party who agrees to take on the first person's financial burden. Often it takes place within the confines of families and the deal is usually based on a verbal agreement that is binding under tradition.
Because there is no written record of the transaction, it is impossible to track these kinds of deals. And that is what is upsetting to lawmakers.
According to the Koran, it is illegal to charge usury. But
rather than target the largest purveyors of money laundering,
the international banking system, federal investigators working
with the private banking cartel, the Federal Reserve, and the
Securities and Exchange Commission are going after small potatoes
money exchange networks such as those under hawala.
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Despite the best efforts of understaffed, overworked law enforcement, more illegals than ever are trying to sneak across both the southern and northern borders.
Stepped up patrols on the U.S. border are proving successful at nabbing illegal aliens who try to sneak into the United states. But, officials concede that they are merely scratching the surface as they discover no longer is it just Mexicans and Central Americans who are pouring across America's southern and northern borders.
So far this year, a total of 158,782 illegals have been caught by immigration officials. However, in spite of the dramatic increase in arrests, the Border Patrol admits that it only catches about one in five illegals and estimates that more than 800,000 have crossed into America.
But even that estimate is low, say ranchers along the border who have been watching the illegal traffic for generations. They believe that the estimate for this year of illegals crossing into the Tucson, Ariz., sector alone is approximately 1.5 million and that law enforcement is likely to catch only one in 10.
The Bush administration continues, as did other administrations, to ignore the call by former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan to use the military to seal the boarder.
"What nation can defend itself in wartime when it leaves its borders wide open?" Buchanan asks.
Fox Network News analyst Bill O'Reilly is the only voice in the national news media, other than the American Free Press, that consistently warns of grave border crisis facing America.
O'Reilly, who like Buchanan has visited the sensitive border areas, harps regularly about the need of using the military to close the border.
"We are experiencing a tremendous increase in OTAs [other than Americans]," said one Border Patrol official in Arizona.
The agent said that today about "one in every 10 we catch is from a country like Yemen or Egypt."
Border Patrol officials, who are fearful to talk about the subject due to the threat of losing their jobs, indicate that hundreds of thousands of dollars are changing hands, with Asians and Middle eastern illegals paying as much as $50,000 to gain access to America.
They are coming, the Border Patrol says, from virtually all over the world, including the Middle East, Asia which includes Red China, and even the former Soviet Union.
In may 2000, the General Accounting Office warned: "Alien
smuggling is a significant and growing problem. Some are smuggled
as part of a criminal or terrorist enterprise that can pose a
serious threat to U.S. national security."
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In response to the terrorist attacks, Congress' easy-going attitude toward protecting America's borders has undergone a dramatic transformation.
Before Sept. 11, congressmen who called for protecting America's borders were shrugged off as "extremists." Now welcome aboard the immigration reform train, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and the rest of his left-wing entourage!
A flood of immigration reform legislation designed to meet the terrorist threat is being prepared in Congress and action is likely early next year. Law makers say they are afraid of "voter bite" if they fail to act.
Proposals to greatly increase patrols on both the North and South borders, to put new limits on who can enter the country to closely track those who are here are now being prepared or are already pending in Congress.
Legislation is also designed to better coordinate immigrant-tracking among the State Department, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the FBI and other agencies involved in counter-terrorism policy.
While patriots are concerned about national identification cards and other "Big Brother" roles by the federal government, the tracking plans apply only to immigrants—not American citizens. Entering this country is a privilege granted by the United States, not a "right."
"One of the issues today is that the CIA does not share [information] with the INS and FBI," said Kennedy, a new convert to protecting America. He is chairman of the Senate Judiciary immigration subcommittee. Kennedy introduced immigration reform legislation on Nov. 1. Sens. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz,) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.)—another late-life convert—plan similar proposals.
In the House, Rep. George Gekas (R-Pa.), chairman of the House Judiciary immigration subcommittee, is preparing legislation to reorganize the INS.
"There is a certain angst out there among politicians that this issue could bite them in the behind in November," said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates stronger border protections.
The Senate legislation would have the CIA provide information on potential terrorists to border authorities. The State Department, INS and CIA would establish a common database for tracking foreign nationals. Several of the Sept. 11 hijackers entered this country legally but illegally remained after their visas expired.
Already there is a new law that could require immigrants to carry identification cards with digitized fingerprints. It was quietly tucked into the anti-terrorism bill rushed through Congress and quickly signed by President Bush. As with much of the legislation, most lawmakers were unaware they had voted for this provision.
Just three months ago, it appeared to immigration experts as though the Bush administration and Mexican President Vicente Fox were well on their way to dissolving the border between Mexico and the United States. Democrats and Republicans were in a heated battle to secure the votes of the fastest growing segment of the U.S. population, Latinos.
Security along America's southern front was nonexistent, as millions of immigrants risked the often deadly journey to sneak into the United States or swim the polluted New River.
No congressman or senator dared assail the Bush-Fox plan for fear of being labeled a "racist" or a "hater."
Since the terror attack on Sept. 11, immigration reform groups note, congressmen have been tripping over themselves to propose legislation that at one time would have been totally forbidden in today's politically-correct climate.
Unfortunately, none of the proposals incorporate the sensible
principle of having the United States Army enforce border security
instead of the liberal bureaucrats of the Immigration and Naturalization
Service (INS). Proponents argue that the only legitimate use of
the army is to protect our borders, not the borders of a hundred
other countries around the globe.
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Is America's war on terror a cover for who will control the natural resources in the Caspian region?
As more details surface, it becomes obvious that this savage incursion into Afghan territory has less to do with accused terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden and more to do with Washington's plans for oil and political hegemony in the Caspian region.
In addition to the plutocratic dream of an oil pipeline stretching westward through Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia into Turkey and to the West, thus skirting both Russia and Iran, is another scenario:
As reported in the Oct. 12 issue of Mideast Inter national, by Bill Hayton, with the Russian economy in shambles, the Central Asian Republics have all joined NATO's Partnership for Peace program.
Hayton notes: From 1996 onwards, the United States has trained and molded a combined Central Asian Battalion, made up of troops from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.In 1997, in a high-profile demonstration of U.S. capabilities, part of the 82nd Airborne Division flew 8,000 miles non-stop from its base in South Carolina to parachute directly into Kazakhstan, reports Hayton.
After watching the troops land, Hayton wrote, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Katherine Kelleher said: "The U.S. interest in Central Asia has much to do with the vast oil and natural gas fields that, by 2010, will make the region the world's third largest producer of petroleum products."
In 1998, troops from the U.S. Mountain Division undertook similar exercises in neighboring Kyrgyzstan.
Since oil fields in Central Asia are a long way from Europe, and South and East Asia including a modernizing China will be the next big customers for petroleum products, a pipeline running south from the Turkmen istan oilfields through Afghanistan to Gwadar, a seaport on the Arabian Sea, would seem the route to an eastern market.
Bill Hayton reports that Union Oil of California (UNOCAL) and Saudi Arabia's Delta Oil backed the Afghanistan route, hoping that with the ongoing support from the United States, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, plus UN aid organizations, the Taliban would stabilize their country.
After Aug. 7, 1998, when U.S. embassies were bombed in Africa, and Bill Clinton fired missiles into Afghanistan and then into Sudan, the "appetite for UN O CAL's investment in the pipeline disappeared."
The company later announced it would only reconsider its investment "when and if Afghanistan achieves the peace and stability necessary to obtain financing from international lending agencies . . . and an established government is recognized by the United Nations and the United States."
Afghanistan has a long and tragic experience with European military violence. In a recent book by Sven Lindqvist, The Race to Bomb, the author notes that the first time airplanes were used in bombing missions, Europeans were bombing Arabs.
"Between 1915 and 1920 the British bombed Arab towns in Egypt, Transjordan, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan," Lindqvist writes. "In reality, it meant that where in the past soldiers died to protect women and children, now women and children would die to protect soldiers."Afghanis experienced nine years of bombing under the Soviet occupation which delivered them almost back to the Stone Age.
Establishing a stable and cooperative government in Afghanistan
using military violence again, no matter what the excuse, may
not be an effective endgame. The centuries-old tribal nature of
the country's inhabitants, their multicultural, multireligious
and multilingual differences, and their strong ties to the regime
in neighboring Pakistan, which is fighting India for Kashmir,
will complicate any future political settlement.
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On Nov. 3, Qatari-based satellite television channel, Al Jazeera, broadcast Osama bin Laden's latest statement. The date and location were not given. However, bin Laden's remarks indicate it was recorded after America's bombing campaign commenced.
Though the U.S. press has refused to run bin Laden's words, the importance of his message should not be discounted by Americans as it illustrates the fact that the world is diverse and that forcing homogenization and subordination–as advocated by one worlders–only leads to enmity, hatred and violence. Until Americans learn tolerance for other viewpoints, perpetual war inevitable.
The following is the complete text of the broadcast.
We praise God, seek His help, and ask for His forgiveness.
We seek refuge in God from the evils of our souls and our bad deeds.
A person who is guided by God will never be misguided by anyone and a person who is misguided by God can never be guided by anyone.
I bear witness that there is no God but Allah alone, Who has no partner.
ATTACKS DIVIDE WORLD
Amid the huge developments and in the wake of the great strikes that hit the United States in its most important locations in New York and Washington, a huge media clamor has been raised.
This clamor is unprecedented. It conveyed the opinions of people on these events. People were divided into two parts. The first part supported these strikes against U.S. tyranny, while the second denounced them.
Afterward, when the United States launched the unjust campaign against the Islamic Emirate in Afghanistan, people also split into two parties.
The first supported these campaigns, while the second denounced and rejected them. These tremendous incidents, which have split people into two parties, are of great interest to the Muslims, since many of the rulings pertain to them.
BIN LADEN ON SEPT. 11 ATTACKS
These rulings are closely related to Islam and the acts that corrupt a person's Islam. Therefore, the Muslims must understand the nature and truth of this conflict so that it will be easy for them to determine where they stand.
While talking about the truth of the conflict, opinion polls in the world have shown that a little more than 80 percent of Westerners, of Christians in the United States and elsewhere, have been saddened by the strikes that hit the United States.
The polls showed that the vast majority of the sons of the Islamic world were happy about these strikes because they believe that the strikes were in reaction to the huge criminality practiced by Israel and the United States against Palestine and other Muslim countries. After the strikes on Afghanistan began, these groups changed positions.
Those who were happy about striking the United States felt sad when Afghanistan was hit, and those who felt sad when the United States was hit were happy when Afghanistan was hit. These groups comprise millions of people.
"BARBARIC" WEST
The entire West, with the exception of a few countries, supports this unfair, barbaric campaign, although there is no evidence of the involvement of the people of Afghanistan in what happened in America.
The people of Afghanistan had nothing to do with this matter. The campaign, however, continues to unjustly annihilate the villagers and civilians, children, women, and innocent people.
BIN LADEN ON THE WEST
The positions of the two sides are very clear. Mass demonstrations have spread from the farthest point in the eastern part of the Islamic world to the farthest point in the western part of the Islamic world, and from Indonesia, Philippines, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan to the Arab world and Nigeria and Mauritania.
This clearly indicates the nature of this war. This war is fundamentally religious. The people of the East are Muslims. They sympathized with Muslims against the people of the West, who are the crusaders.
Those who try to cover this crystal clear fact, which the entire world has admitted, are deceiving the Islamic nation.
They are trying to deflect the attention of the Islamic nation from the truth of this conflict. This fact is proven in the book of God Almighty and in the teachings of our messenger, may God's peace and blessings be upon him.
Under no circumstances should we forget this enmity between us and the infidels. For the enmity is based on creed.
We must be loyal to the believers and those who believe that there is no God but Allah. We should also renounce the atheists and infidels. It suffices me to seek God's help against them.
God says: "Never will the Jews or the Christians be satisfied with thee unless thou follow their form of religion."
It is a question of faith, not a war against terrorism, as Bush and Blair try to depict it.
Many thieves belonging to this nation were captured in the past. But, nobody moved.
The masses which moved in the East and West have not done so for the sake of Osama. Rather, they moved for the sake of their religion. This is because they know that they are right and that they resist the most ferocious, serious, and violent Crusade campaign against Islam ever since the message was revealed to Muhammad, may God's peace and blessings be upon.
After this has become clear, the Muslim must know and learn where he is standing vis-a-vis this war.
After the U.S. politicians spoke and after the U.S. newspapers and television channels became full of clear crusading hatred in this campaign that aims at mobilizing the West against Islam and Muslims, Bush left no room for doubts or the opinions of journalists, but he openly and clearly said that this war is a crusader war. He said this before the whole world to emphasize this fact.
What can those who allege that this is a war against terrorism say? What terrorism are they speaking about at a time when the Islamic nation has been slaughtered for tens of years without hearing their voices and without seeing any action by them?
But when the victim starts to take revenge for those innocent children in Palestine, Iraq, southern Sudan, Somalia, Kashmir and the Philippines, the rulers' ulema [Islamic leaders] and the hypocrites come to defend the clear blasphemy. It suffices me to seek God's help against them.
The common people have understood the issue, but there are those who continue to flatter those who colluded with the unbelievers to anesthetize the Islamic nation to prevent it from carrying out the duty of jihad so that the word of God will triumph.
The unequivocal truth is that Bush has carried the cross and raised its banner high and stood at the front of the line.
Anyone who lines up behind Bush in this campaign has committed one of the 10 actions that sully Islam.
Muslim scholars are unanimous that allegiance to the infidels and support for them against the believers is one of the major acts that sully Islam.
There is no power but in God. Let us investigate whether this war against Afghanistan that broke out is a single and unique one or if it is a link to a long series of crusader wars against the Islamic world.
Following World War I, which ended more than 83 years ago, the whole Islamic world fell under the crusader banner–under the British, French, and Italian governments.
They divided the whole world, and Palestine was occupied by the British.
Since then, and for more than 83 years, our brothers, sons and sisters in Palestine have been badly tortured.
Hundreds of thousands of them have been killed, and hundreds of thousands of them have been imprisoned or maimed.
"CRUSADE" AGAINST CHECHENS
Let us examine the recent developments. Take for example the Chechens.
They are a Muslim people who have been attacked by the Russian bear which embraces the Christian Orthodox faith.
Russians have annihilated the Chechen people and forced them to flee to the mountains where they were assaulted by snow and poverty and diseases.
Nonetheless, nobody moved to support them. There is no strength but in God.
"CRUSADE" AGAINST BOSNIA
This was followed by a war of genocide in Bosnia in sight and hearing of the entire world in the heart of Europe.
For several years our brothers have been killed, our women have been raped, and our children have been massacred in the safe havens of the United Nations and with its knowledge and cooperation.
Those who refer our tragedies today to the United Nations so that they can be resolved are hypocrites who deceive God, His Prophet and the believers.
UN "COLLUSION"
Are not our tragedies but caused by the United Nations? Who issued the Partition Resolution on Palestine in 1947 and surrendered the land of Muslims to the Jews? It was the United Nations in its resolution in 1947.
Those who claim that they are the leaders of the Arabs and continue to appeal to the United Nations have disavowed what was revealed to Prophet Muhammad, God's peace and blessings be upon him.
Those who refer things to the international legitimacy have disavowed the legitimacy of the Holy Book and the tradition of Prophet Muhammad, God's peace and blessings be upon him.
This is the United Nations from which we have suffered greatly. Under no circumstances should any Muslim or sane person resort to the United Nations. The United Nations is nothing but a tool of crime. We are being massacred every day, while the United Nations continues to sit idly by.
KASHMIR AND CHECHENS
Our brothers in Kashmir have been subjected to the worst forms of torture for over 50 years. They have been massacred, killed, and raped. Their blood has been shed and their houses have been trespassed upon.
Still, the United Nations continues to sit idly by.
Today, and without any evidence, the United Nations passes resolutions supporting unjust and tyrannical America, which oppresses these helpless people who have emerged from a merciless war at the hands of the Soviet Union.
Let us look at the second war in Chechnya, which is still underway. The entire Chechen people are being embattled once again by this Russian bear.
The humanitarian agencies, even the US ones, demanded that President Clinton should stop supporting Russia.
However, Clinton said that stopping support for Russia did not serve US interests. A year ago, Putin demanded that the cross and the Jews should stand by him. He told them: You must support us and thank us because we are waging a war against Muslim fundamentalism.
The enemies are speaking very clearly. While this is taking place, the leaders of the region hide and are ashamed to support their brothers.
Let us examine the stand of the West and the United Nations in the developments in Indonesia when they moved to divide the largest country in the Islamic world in terms of population.
BIN LADEN ON "CRUSADE"
This criminal, Kofi Annan, was speaking publicly and putting pressure on the Indonesian government, telling it: You have 24 hours to divide and separate East Timor from Indonesia. Otherwise, we will be forced to send in military forces to separate it by force.
The crusader Australian forces were on Indonesian shores, and in fact they landed to separate East Timor, which is part of the Islamic world.
Therefore, we should view events not as separate links, but as links in a long series of conspiracies, a war of annihilation in the true sense of the word.
In Somalia, on the excuse of restoring hope, 13,000 of our brothers were killed. In southern Sudan, hundreds of thousands were killed.
But when we move to Palestine and Iraq, there can be no bounds to what can be said. Over one million children have been killed in Iraq. The killing is continuing.
As for what is taking place in Palestine these days, I can only say we have no one but God to appeal to.
What is taking place cannot be tolerated by any nation. I do not say from the nations of the human race, but from other creatures, from the animals. They would not tolerate what is taking place.
A confidant of mine told me that he saw a butcher slaughtering a camel in front of another camel.
The other camel got agitated while seeing the blood coming out of the other camel. Thus, it burst out with rage and bit the hand of the man and broke it.
How can the weak mothers in Palestine endure the killing of their children in front of their eyes by the Jewish executioners with U.S. support and with U.S. aircraft and tanks?
ISRAEL AND U.S. "ARE ONE"
Those who distinguish between America and Israel are the real enemies of the nation. They are traitors who betrayed God and His prophet, and who betrayed their nation and the trust placed in them. They anesthetize the nation.
These battles cannot be viewed in any case whatsoever as isolated battles, but rather, as part of a chain of the long, fierce, and ugly crusader war.
Every Muslim must stand under the banner of There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is God's Prophet.
I remind you of what our Prophet, may God's peace and blessings upon him, told Ibn Abbas, may God be pleased with him.
He told him: Boy, I am going to teach you a few words. Obey God, He will protect you. Obey Him, you will find Him on your side. If you ask for something, ask God. If you seek help, seek the help of God.
You should know that if all people come together to help you, they will only help you with something that God has already preordained for you.
And if they assemble to harm you, they will only harm you with something that God has already preordained for you. God wrote man's fate and it will never change.
I tell the Muslims who did their utmost during these weeks: You must continue along the same march.
Your support for us will make us stronger and will further support your brothers in Afghanistan.
Exert more efforts in combating this unprecedented war crime.
Fear God, O Muslims and rise to support your religion. Islam is calling on you: O Muslims, O Muslims, O Muslims.
God bear witness that I have conveyed the message. God bear witness that I have conveyed the message. God bear witness that I have conveyed the message.
God's peace and blessings be upon you.
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An independent television station broadcasting from Afghanistan was a problem in winning "the propaganda war," so before "America's allies" overran Kabul, an American bomb silenced it.
The Kabul office of the independent Arabic news channel al-Jazeera,
which the U.S. government had criticized for its coverage of the Afghan campaign, was destroyed
by a U.S. missile just hours before the Northern Alliance entered
the Afghan capital on Nov. 13.
An American missile obliterated al-Jazeera's office and effectively shut down what had been the only independent source of information from the Afghan capital as it fell to fighters from the anti-Taliban coalition, who reportedly celebrated their conquest with looting and summary executions.
Al-Jazeera has a reputation for outspoken, independent reporting and its reporting had been an obstacle to winning the propaganda war against the Taliban since the start of the U.S.-led military action in Afghanistan. American officials criticized al-Jazeera's coverage of the bombing campaign as inflammatory propaganda.
The Qatar-based Arabic language network, being the only media outlet with access to Taliban-held territory, broadcast video pictures of Afghan demonstrators attacking and setting fire to the U.S. embassy in Kabul on Sept. 26.
Al-Jazeera was criticized by the U.S. government for being a mouthpiece for al Qaeda after it broadcast two videotapes of Osama bin Laden, Washington's prime suspect in the September attacks. In the video, bin Laden denounced the American government and urged Muslims to rise up in a holy war—as U.S. bombers pounded Taliban targets in Afghanistan.
These broadcasts aroused the ire of the Bush administration. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said al-Jazeera was giving too much time to "vitriolic, irresponsible kinds of statements."
The U.S. government said the channel was being used by the al-Qaeda network to pass on coded messages to supporters around the world.
But al-Jazeera refused to be silenced.
"We are in the business of news. Our policy is to air all shades of opinion. The attention of the world is riveted on Afghanistan. If we don't show it, who will?" asked Ibrahim Hilal, al-Jazeera's chief editor. "We put every word, every move of President Bush on the air. Arabs accuse us of being pro-American, even pro-Israeli. The Americans say we're pro-Taliban. We must be doing something right."
Although al-Jazeera had achieved global stature with its exclusive access to bin Laden, and was known and respected as the only credible source of information and video footage from Taliban controlled areas of Afghanistan, the U.S. bombing of its office was not widely reported in the United States.
The American-Israeli columnist Zev Chafets, writing in the New York Daily News had recently called al Jazeera "an Arab propaganda outfit" and "one of the most potent weapons in the Islamic Axis arsenal." Chafets proposed that the U.S. military "shut it down."
Chafets said, "the free press is a symbol of what America's enemies hate about this country" and then went on to say that the U.S. should bomb the only independent television network in Afghanistan—and the Middle East.
"Dealing with al-Jazeera is a job for the military. Shutting it down should be an immediate priority be cause, left alone, it has the power to poison the air more efficiently and lethally than anthrax ever could," Chafets said.
An American bomb hit the network's office in Kabul at 3 a.m. on Nov. 13, destroying the building. Al-Jazeera's managing director, Mohammed Jasem al-Ali estimated the loss at $800,000.
Al-Ali did not speculate as to whether the offices were deliberately targeted, but he said the location of the bureau was widely known by everyone, including the U.S. military.
"The office sits in a residential area. We cannot say for sure that it was deliberately targeted, but the Americans know exactly where the office is. I can see no other reason why a bomb would land in that section of Kabul," al-Ali said.
Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. David Lapan (USMC) told AFP that the building had been intentionally targeted because it was a "command and control facility" for bin Laden's al Qaeda group. Lapan said that the military "had no information that it was the al-Jazeera office."
Al-Ali had previously denied that al-Jazeera was anti-American, saying Western media begrudged the station its successful coverage of world events and its coterie of professional, mostly BBC-trained, correspondents, anchors and editors.
"Al-Jazeera wants to ensure balanced coverage by getting out the other side of the story, just like CNN did during the Gulf War," said Mahmoud Tarabay, a professor of journalism and media studies at the American University in Lebanon.
Missiles also damaged the offices of the Associated Press and the British Broadcasting Corp. in Kabul. Half an hour earlier, a huge American bomb badly damaged a house used by the BBC just a block away, striking while William Reeve, a reporter, was broadcasting. Reeve dived to the floor in mid-sentence and the BBC team left the building shortly afterwards, crossing the city to the safety of a hotel.
After being destroyed by American bombs, al-Jazeera was prevented from sending televised images of the atrocities being committed by the alliance fighters as they occupied the cities and towns of northern Afghanistan.
Al-Jazeera, which has contractual relations with the American broadcaster, CNN, was forced to broadcast CNN's footage of events in Kabul to its 35 million Arabic speaking viewers around the world.
Prior to al-Jazeera's emergence, Arab TV audiences had to rely on CNN and other sources from the Western media, which are generally regarded by the Arab world as being strongly biased in Israel's favor.
Kabul fell into chaos late in the day on Monday, Nov. 12, as the ruling Taliban forces abandoned the capital hours ahead of the advancing tanks of the Northern Alliance. The U.S.-backed opposition arrived in the city early Tuesday.
The Northern Alliance is primarily comprised of three minority (non-Pashtun) ethnic groups—Tajiks, Uzbeks and the Hazaras.
The Uzbek and Hazara people are of Mongol descent.
Alliance fighters looted three banks and several houses in Kabul after taking over the city, Taliban sources in Islamabad said on Nov. 13.
The people in the villages were ethnic Pashtuns and not Taliban members, the sources said, adding that the raids had killed a large number of people.
As the Northern Alliance advanced through previously held Taliban territory on the way to Kabul looting was widespread as the ethnic Uzbek and Tajik rebels celebrated by executing Pashtun Afghans, Arabs and Pakistanis.
The Pashtun comprise the majority of the population of Afghanistan and bore the exclusive name of Afghan before that name came to denote any native of the present country of Afghanistan.
Al-Jazeera's reporter in Kabul, Tayseer Allouni, had been told by the Northern Alliance that if they captured him he would be killed. The bearded Allouni, who usually wore a khaki vest, had become familiar to Arab viewers around the world, providing live reports from Taliban-controlled areas barred to most Western reporters. He had often described U.S. missiles hitting civilian areas and killing women and children.
After the bombing, Allouni was missing for more than a day. In a phone interview broadcast Nov. 14, he said that he and the rest of the Kabul staff had fled the city shortly before his office was bombed and witnessed "scenes that, I'm sorry, I couldn't describe to anybody."
Allouni and his team left their offices minutes before it was bombed by U.S. aircraft. Allouni was assaulted as he fled the Afghan capital amid the Taliban retreat, the station reported on Nov. 14.
Allouni would not say who beat and mugged him and the rest of the Kabul office staff of al-Jazeera. They were saved by Afghan tribesmen who also retrieved their equipment, he said.
Allouni told al-Jazeera that he and the team were now safe, but he was "in deep psychological shock.'" Allouni, who is Syrian born and carries a Spanish passport, is leaving Afghanistan to receive medical treatment for a slipped disc.
ATROCITIES
When Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked by reporters on Nov. 13 about media reports of atrocities coming from areas overrun by the Northern Alliance, he responded, "Who's making these reports?"
Stephanie Bunker, UN spokeswoman in Islamabad, told a press conference: "we've had sources that have corroborated that over 100 Taliban troops who were young recruits who were hiding in a school [in Mazar-e-Sharif] were killed by Northern Alliance forces on Saturday."
Because the Taliban retreat had occurred the day before, and according to Bunker's account, the young recruits were killed more than 24 hours later, it appeared they had been executed and did not die in battle. The Northern Alliance's representative in neighboring Uzbekistan denied the reports.
Hundreds of people had been killed and tons of aid supplies were looted in Mazar-e-Sharif, according to the International Red Cross, who said its workers were helping bury the dead.
"It is in the hundreds," said spokeswoman Antonella Notari. It was unclear how many of the victims were civilians and how many were Taliban fighters.
"According to reports, in Mazar there is a lot of pillaging
and civilian kidnappings, armed men out of control and fighting
in the streets," said Christiane Berthiaume, spokeswoman
for the World Food Program.
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It is easier to understand "terrorism" if you look through the eyes of people in the Middle East.
People in the West opposed to immigration of those from other civilizations may think it appropriate to support the Bush administration's war against Muslim "extremists." But Muslim "extremists" resent Western interference in the Middle East. In their place, Americans would too.
Mass immigration into the West from non-western countries is the aim of Western multiculturalists.
President Bush and the collective oligarchy that the United States represents are not opposed to mass immigration into Western countries. They are globalists who have been working on the phasing out of frontiers. Now that they are threatened by Muslim fundamentalists who oppose the Western-based New World Order, they are temporarily defending national boundaries.
The movements represented by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah are responses to Western intrusion, occupation, and sometimes oppression.
Consider the response if Western countries were subjected to the equivalent occupation by Arabs of the huge American military base in Saudi Arabia, the starvation of a Western equivalent of Iraq by Arab blockade, its territory overflown by Arab aircraft, and an Arab fleet in the Gulf of Mexico. Substitute the dispossession and oppression of Jews by Palestinians. Imagine Western cultures threatened by rich, seductive Arabic propaganda.
British soldiers were marching from Kabul to Kandahar over a century ago. But mainly since the end of the Ottoman Empire, the West, and especially Britain and the United States, have exploited the people of the Near and Middle East, and interfered in their internal affairs.
The International Council for Human Ecology and Ethnology (ICHEE)
calls for the withdrawal of all foreign forces from the Near and
Middle East. ICHEE policy is consistent with the United Nations
1998 proclamation of 2001 as the Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations
(resolution 53/22).
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On Nov. 4, the following news report appeared in the Pakistani News Service.
A Saudi newspaper charged Saturday that the Israeli secret service Mossad was behind the Sept. 11 terror attacks on New York and Washington that killed thousands of people.
The mass-circulation Okaz said in an editorial that an attack on such a scale could not have been carried out with such accuracy and precision without the help of parties inside the United States or with strong links in Washington.
"Six Israelis suspected of involvement in the attacks on New York and Washington were arrested in the United States, to be later released. This confirms our strong suspicions about the involvement of Israel's Mossad in the ugly crime," Okaz said.
"If we look carefully into this matter, we can find no more influential sides in the United States than the Israeli Mossad agents, who have the ability to penetrate and the capability to execute with high efficiency," the daily said.
The paper said there was not sufficient evidence that Arabs and Muslims were behind the attacks, but it did not rule out the possibility that Mossad may have recruited some Muslims to carry out the atrocities.
"The main purpose of the conspiracy is to undermine ties between Arabs and Muslims, especially moderate states, on the one hand and the U.S. on the other, and to turn the Muslim and Christian civilizations against each other and incite hatred between their adherents," it said.
The positive change in Washington's policy on Middle East peace and its support for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state confirms that the United States has laid its hands on important leads indicating a direct role by the Mossad in the attacks, the paper asserted.
"We don't think we will wait too long before (the United
States) reaches this result. This crime should not pass without
knowing its actual masterminds, instead of focusing on ‘stupid'
tools," Okaz said.
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How do most Muslims feel about the U.S. bombing campaign in Afghanistan?
The recent U.S. military strikes in Afghanistan have been poorly thought-out and unjustified. We are told that the U.S. military action is part of a larger "war on Terrorism"; a war that is supposedly being waged to diminish the threat of international terrorism. Yet, the strategic objectives are less than clear.
The declared primary objective is to disrupt and fetter al Qaeda's terrorist operations and thus diminish the threat posed by that organization. However, rather than diminish the threat of international terrorism, the U.S. Military action in Afghanistan is likely to exacerbate it.
Al Qaeda is an international terrorist network. It can recruit and operate throughout the world. Therefore, it is not dependent upon Afghanistan or the Taliban. It is dependent upon enraged Muslims flocking to bin Laden's call for jihad.
In the eyes of many Muslims, the U.S. bombing campaign in Afghanistan is itself an act of terrorism. While condemned in the United states as a terrorist bin Laden is a Muslim icon to some. If bin Laden is killed, he will likely pose an even greater threat to U.S. security as a Islamic martyr.
The secondary strategic objective - to bring about the demise of the Taliban - appears to be achievable, but is also ill thought-out.
In the ensuing power vacuum, U.S. officials have no plan to establish an alternative government in Afghanistan. President Bush has already declared that the United States has no intention of getting involved in "nation-building."
It is hard to see how the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan is anything more than a show of force, a means to redress the impotence of U.S. policies vis-à-vis the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
NEEDS OF THE PUBLIC
The United States needs to reassure the American public that it can retaliate, if not against the culprits, against their brethren. If the United states did not retaliate, the American public would not only feel vulnerable to further terrorist attacks but powerless to deter them. If thousands of Afghanis die to fulfill that need, so be it. And it may not end there. The United states has not ruled out further attacks against other Islamic nations.
While Bush talks of a war on international terrorism, it is "Islamic terrorists" who are the focus of this war.
The United states remains unwilling to debate what groups should be considered "terrorist." The international world is expected to accept the classification, which includes legitimate resistance movements to the Israeli occupation, recognized as such by the United Nationsl.
Conversely, the United States will not condemn Israeli state-sponsored terrorism perpetrated against the Palestinian people.
Mr. Amin's article appeared in the November issue of The
Palestine Times. The Times can be found on-line at
www.ptimes.org.
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If you believe the press, America's public enemy number one, Osama bin Laden, just appeared out of nowwhere.
In the olden days there used to be a TV show called The Man from Shenandoah. He was a Civil War veteran. He just couldn't remember anything else. So he wandered aimlessly from town to town.
Now, U.S. Intelligence is similar to the man from Shenandoah in the case of America's most wanted terrorist, Osama bin Laden.
According to a CNN interview with former head of the National security, Sandy Burger, no one knows really what's going on with bin Laden at the highest levels in the U.S. government.
These revelations came specifically in response to bin Laden's presumed reference to possessing nuclear weapons.
Of course, this raises several obvious questions.
If the United States doesn't know about bin Laden's nuclear capabilities, what about the basic facts surrounding his alleged links to the WTC terrorist gangs?
Almost like Biblical references to a false Christ, eery day, the press informs Americans that terrorist enclaves are "here." Then, reporters claim: They are "there." Today they say they are everywhere.
At least with Waco, for better or worse, Americans were right on top of the source.
With the war on terror, a whole nation is being systematically destroyed on evidence as substantial as a telephoned rumor.
If we can't substantiate anything concerning these terrorist attacks and if we can't substantiate bin Laden's nuclear capability, even as someone else here is terrorizing America with anthrax, how can we expect to stop terrorism?
The intelligence community is apparently as much a tall tale as the National Security Agency's pet name for its base in Ft. Meade, Md., the "Puzzle Palace."
Told repeatedly that potential terrorists can strike anywhere, when it comes time to produce something tangible, nothing is found.
Like with most large, unwieldy politburos, here, too, we are apparently dealing with people more concerned with public relations than their own credibility.
Meanwhile, troops are deployed, allies are sought, ships are moved, the Air Force drops bombs, billions are appropriated for the "war."
Even in Hollywood, Walt Disney knew not to write a Mickey Mouse
cartoon script without advance knowledge of where he was going
and what was going to be the ending.
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Legislation to expand NATO leads America down the interventionist road and will cost taxpayers billions.
America's Founding Fathers, having survived a violent and protracted
struggle to break away from 
England,
shared a belief that their fledgling nation should be free from
foreign entanglements.
Thomas Jefferson's well-known quote - "Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations - entangling alliances with none" - encapsulates perfectly their view of the wisest foreign policy for America.
Yet our modern lawmakers reject the non-interventionist principles of our founders, choosing instead to involve America in conflicts around the globe.
Consider our participation in NATO, which commits American military forces to conflicts that serve no national interest. Congress voted last week to expand NATO and increase the number of countries we are obligated to defend, even while our own military forces are stretched far too thin around the globe.
Department of Defense figures show that 250,000 American troops are deployed on six continents and in 141 nations. When we suffered the Sept. 11 attack on our own shores, we were forced to call on foreign nations to supply AWACS planes and defend our domestic airspace.
Our military entanglements, especially NATO, have left us relying on foreigners to defend us - and this is exactly what the globalist want. They want us to lose our sense of National sovereignty, so that America's national defense becomes a matter of international consensus.
Only by removing ourselves from NATO and the UN can we reassert our fundamental right to defend our borders without the approval or participation of any international coalition.
NATO is an organization that has outlived its usefulness. It was formed as a defensive military alliance, designed to protect Western Europe against the Soviet threat.
With the Soviet collapse in 1991, however, NATO bureaucrats (and the governments backing them) were forced to reinvent the alliance and justify its continued existence. So the "new NATO" began to occupy itself with issues totally unrelated to defense, such as economic development, human rights, territorial disputes, religious conflicts and ethnic rivalries. In other words, "nation building." The new game was interventionism, not national defense.
The new approach manifested itself in Yugoslavia in the late 1990s. The defensive alliance became a military aggressor, in direct violation of its own charter. When NATO bombed Yugoslavia, a country that had neither attacked nor threatened a NATO member state, it turned its back on its stated purpose and lost any credibility it once had.
Predictably, the NATO strikes failed to produce peace or stability in the former Yugoslavia, and UN occupation forces likely will remain in the Balkans indefinitely.
Now Congress has endorsed the expansion of this purposeless alliance, of course taking the opportunity to grant 55 million of your tax dollars to the former Soviet bloc countries that want to join. This expansion may be profitable for weapons manufactures and bureaucrats, but it represents another example of U.S. taxpayers subsidizing foreign governments and big corporations. It is time for the Europeans to take responsibility for their own military defense.
As the world's foremost military power, it always seems that our money, our weapons and our troops play the primary role in any NATO military action.
It's time for America to recognize that the interests NATO serves are not our own.
Rep. Ron Paul (R) represents the 14th district of Texas.
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