Advertisement

Clear and Present Danger: Depleted Uranium

Let there be light!” said God, and there was light!
“Let there be blood!” says man, and there’s a sea!
English poet, Lord Byron (1788–1824)

As US and NATO forces continues pounding Afghanistan with cruise missiles and smart bombs, people who be acquainted with aftermaths of two previous wars fought by US around the world, fear after Gulf and Balkan war syndrome another Syndrome the ‘Afghan War Syndrome’. A state of vague aliments and carcinomas, linked with usage of Depleted Uranium as part of missiles, projectiles and bombs in battle field. People of Afghanistan , who had been dying in starvation up till now, are likely to savor a modern form of death; death owing to radioactive materials pulverized over barren mountains and harsh plains in modern world’s war on terrorism. And the fear is that Afghan people will not be alone to go through it. People neighboring Afghans are equally at risk. World has attained globalize outline, now, all crop and spoil are equally shared among people.

What Depleted Uranium Is?

Economic Stimulus = War Profiteering

AUSTIN, Texas -- I don't see how we can call the House "economic stimulus" package anything but war-profiteering. The bill is a disgrace, and the usual suspects from Texas -- Tom Delay and Dick Armey -- hold large responsibility for it.

What happened here, while we were all being exposed to anthrax-scare 24-7, is that corporate hitchhikers, who got left out of the earlier tax-cut package in favor of rich people, moved right in for the kill in the name of patriotism and economic stimulus.

The bill provides big tax cuts for big, profitable corporations -- IBM, General Motors and General Electric get a total of $3.27 billion in immediate tax rebate checks. A total of $25 billion in immediate tax rebates goes to large, profitable corporations, according to Citizens for Tax Justice. That's twice as much instant rebates to profitable corporations as the House, by two votes, decided to give the 37 million low-income families who didn't qualify for the original tax rebate.

Forty-one percent of the new tax cuts go to the richest 1 percent of taxpayers, while the only 7 percent goes to the bottom 60

The World Series in a Time of Crisis

The World Series provided a heck of a photo-op for George W. Bush when he threw out the first pitch one night, aiming at a large TV audience. For the most part, the game that followed was a pleasure to watch -- midway through a week that combined what's best and worst about major league baseball in an era of compulsive media spin.

Baseball may not quite be America's favorite sport anymore, but it still has plenty of emotional resonance. For that reason, politicians and corporations alike are eager to graft themselves onto the climactic games of the post-season.

The 2001 World Series attracted an abundance of the commercial hype that we've come to expect from pro sports, plus a gauntlet of patriotic imagery bordering on jingoism. The play-by-play included a steady flood of brand-name plugs -- "Budweiser, the official beer of Major League Baseball," the John Hancock "In Game Box Score," the "Nextel Call to the Bullpen" -- along with frequent overlays of Old Glory.

This time around, the final games of the baseball season took place in a wartime flag-waving context. The historic media moment was

America's Terrorist Nuclear Threat to Itself

No sane nation hands to a wartime enemy atomic weapons set to go off within its own homeland, and then lights the fuse.

Yet as the bombs and missiles drop on Afghanistan, the certainty of terror retaliation inside America has turned our 103 nuclear power plants into weapons of apocalyptic destruction, just waiting to be used against us.

One or both planes that crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, could have easily obliterated the two atomic reactors now operating at Indian Point, about 40 miles up the Hudson.

The catastrophic devastation would have been unfathomable. But those and a hundred other American reactors are still running. Security has been heightened. But all are vulnerable to another sophisticated terror attack aimed at perpetrating the unthinkable.

Indian Point Unit One was shut long ago by public outcry. But Units 2 & 3 have operated since the 1970s. Back then there was talk of requiring reactor containment domes to be strong enough to withstand a jetliner crash. But the biggest jets were far smaller than the ones that fly today. Nor did those

Mistake After Mistake After Mistake

NEW YORK, N.Y. -- It now looks, with 20-20 hindsight, as though he should have taken a few more deep breaths before smacking that tar-baby that is Afghanistan. We're running out of time for three reasons -- winter, Ramadan and the prospect of millions of people starving to death.

We've run out of time to set up a bridge or coalition government and so, of necessity, are throwing our lot with the Northern Alliance. According to the Afghan women's organization, the Northern Alliance is as bad as the Taliban and, in addition, consists of minority tribes who have always warred with the majority Pushtan.

We seem to have bombed everything bombable, including the Red Cross twice. At this point, it seems to me, we can give it another month and call the war for the season, which is what the Afghans do, and wait 'til next year without any disgrace. What would be worse than disgraceful is causing mass starvation. The humanitarian aid folks are getting frantic about this, and we need to stop and figure out what we can do about it.

The trick to smiting back those who smote us is to first figure

The Left and the 'Just War'

The left is getting itself tied up in knots about the Just War and the propriety of bombing Afghanistan. The respected Princeton professor Richard Falk has outlined in The Nation an intricate guide to "the relevant frameworks of moral, legal and religious restraint" to be applied to the lethal business of attacking Afghans.

War, as the United States has been fighting it in Iraq and Yugoslavia, consists, at least thus far, mostly of bombing, intended to terrify the population and destroy the fabric of tolerable social existence. Remember that bombs mostly miss their targets. Colonel John Warden, who planned the air campaign in Iraq, said afterwards that dropping dumb bombs "is like shooting skeet -- 499 out of 500 pellets may miss the target, but that's irrelevant." There will always be shattered hospitals and wrecked old

Media Mistakes Since September 11

AUSTIN -- Excuse me if my professionocentrism is showing, but I believe the American media deserve a good chunk of all the blame that is going around for Sept. 11 and its aftermath. Here we are trying to figure out "Why Do They Hate Us?" at this late date. One is tempted to reply, "Where have you been?"

The American media, notoriously provincial country to begin with, have been getting noticeably worse in recent years, with the amount of time and space devoted to the rest of the world shrinking to an ever smaller percentage of the total, while we go relentlessly full-bore, for months at a time after Monica Lewinsky, Elian Gonzalez and Gary Condit.

If you spend a few days listening to British Broadcasting or Canadian Broadcasting, you will note the striking difference simply in the amount of information presented. I think provincialism is a universal characteristic -- at least I've never been anywhere it didn't exist -- but it is especially annoying when it comes from a capital. Think of American attitudes toward New York before Sept. 11 -- admiring resentment? resentful

War Needs Good Public Relations

For some people, war is terror, disaster and death. For others, it's a PR problem.

At the Rendon Group, a public-relations firm with offices in Boston and Washington, pleasant news arrived the other day with a $397,000 contract to help the Pentagon look good while bombing Afghanistan. The four-month deal includes an option to renew through most of 2002.

This is a job for savvy PR pros who know how to sound humanistic. "At the Rendon Group, we believe in people," says the company's mission statement, which expresses "our admiration and respect for cultural diversity" and proclaims a commitment to "helping people win in the global marketplace."

A media officer at the Pentagon explained why Rendon got the contract. "We needed a firm that could provide strategic counsel immediately," Lt. Col. Kenneth McClellan said. "We were interested in someone that we knew could come in quickly and help us orient to the challenge of communicating to a wide range of groups around the world."

As a PR outfit, Rendon has moved in some powerful economic

FBI Eyes Torture

"FBI and Justice Department investigators are increasingly frustrated by the silence of jailed suspected associates of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, and some are beginning to that say that traditional civil liberties may have to be cast aside if they are to extract information about the Sept. 11 attacks and terrorist plans."

Thus began a piece by Walter Pincus on page 6 of the Washington Post on Sunday, Oct. 21 -- and if you suspect that this is the overture to an argument for torture, you're right. The FBI interrogators have been getting nowhere with four key suspects in the Sept. 11 terror attacks, now held in New York's Metropolitan Correctional Center. None of these men have talked, and Pincus quotes an FBI man involved in the interrogation as saying, "it could get to that spot where we could go to pressure ... where we won't have a choice, and we are probably getting there."

Some FBI interrogators are thinking longingly of drugs like the so-called "truth serum," sodium pentothal; others, the "pressure tactics," i.e., straightforward tortures, used by Shin Bet in Israel, banned after

Prayer in Schools, Economic Stimulus, and Other Nonsense

AUSTIN -- We had one of those "What was he thinking?" moments with Gov. Rick (Goodhair) Perry the other day. The only governor we've got decided to bring back that old bone of contention: prayer in the schools. Nice timing, guv.

The very first clause in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution establishes freedom of conscience. The majority does not rule anyone's faith. If we wanted the state to coerce faith, we would have voted for the Taliban. Look, as we all know, the religious majority in Texas is hardshell Southern Baptist. Splendid people, the Southern Baptists, but the fact is, if the rest of us had wanted to join their church, we would have done so. Our next biggest faith is Catholicism, and if the governor wants to spend the rest of his term convincing Baptists to say "Hail Mary," that's fine by me. As is obvious to all but those of the most limited intelligence and the governor, by the time you get the Catholics, Jews, Episcopalians, Methodists, Muslims, atheists, agnostics, Church of Christers, Buddhists, Sikhs, New Agers and the County Line Salt of the Earth

Pages

Subscribe to Freepress.org RSS