DAY EIGHTY-EIGHT:Dec. 7:
At the Brooklyn Academy of Music tonight a wonderful cast performed Charlie Mee's new play, "Big Love". In the middle of the hilarity an American macho male character, explaining to his would-be Greek fiancee why there is no point in her resisting his marriage proposal, shouted, "Do you watch television? Don't you see what happens when you piss off an American?" The audience exploded in laughter, everybody clearly thinking about Osama bin Laden.
There is a hint of triumph in the air here in New York. Kandahar has fallen, the leadership of the Taliban has either surrendered or shortly will and the streets of Kabul are returning to normal, pre-Taliban life. Mullah Mohammad Omar, the leader of the Taliban, was missing when last I checked the news.
Pamela Constable, of the Washington Post reported today from Kabul that, "few people here in the capital mourned the demise of the radical Islamic movement whose five-year rule brought them little but poverty, isolation and fear. Instead, a moderate Islamic cleric delivered a fiery, sarcastic eulogy to the Taliban era as several thousand worshipers overflowed his mosque. Mullah Abdul Rauf blasted Taliban rule as oppressive and narrow-minded, saying it had humiliated people and dwelled on the ritual of Islam rather than its spirit.
"'In the Taliban days, there was a leader of the faithful who sat in Kandahar, not having the faintest idea about people who were in poverty, who were killed, whose houses were burned, whose children died of hunger,'" Rauf declared. "'And still he claimed to be a leader of Islam and a leader of his country.'" The United Nations and other agencies estimate that there are more than 4 million Afghan refugees in other countries, 1.4 million people internally displaced and 1.4 million dependent on foreign food aid. Since 1996, tens of thousands of men have been killed in fighting between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, which now controls most of the country."
Today is the 60th anniversary of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. President Bush rushed to draw parallels between that event and the World Trade Center and he vowed to defeat Sept. 11's "heirs to fascism." Bush delivered these remarks from the deck of the USS Enterprise:
"The terrorists are the heirs to fascism. Like all fascists, the terrorists cannot be appeased. They must be defeated. This struggle will not end in a truce or a treaty. It will end in victory for the United States, our friends and for the cause of freedom.... They celebrate death, making a mission of murder and a sacrament of suicide. Yet for some reason only young followers are ushered down this deadly path to paradise while terrorist leaders run into caves to save their own hides," Bush said, as hundreds of sailors burst into hoots and shouts.
This patriotic fervor comes at the same time as Attorney General John Ashcoft insists that the President has legal authority and "the moral right" to oversee military tribunals of terrorist suspects, bypassing basic Constitutional rights. Newsday columnist Ellis Hennican today likened Ashcroft's Christian-based stance to the Taliban's Islamic rationalizations, saying both positions represented religiously motivated extremism.
http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-nyhen072499767dec07.column?coll=ny%2Dnews%2Dcolumnists
It is interesting that the Bush Administration claims to be using every imaginable tool to track down terrorists and thwart their activities, yet for ideological reasons is refusing to exploit some obvious strategies. Ashcroft, for example, told the Senate yesterday that he would not use gun control laws that are already on the books to identify illegal weapons stockpiles in the US. Why? Because Ahscroft is part of the Republican constituency that ardently opposes all domestic gun control legislation.
Similarly, the Administration today walked out of a Geneva international conference on bioweapons control, once again refusing to put teeth into the Bioweapons Convention. Why? Because the only way to have teeth is to have verification. And the only way to have verification is to allow inspection. Of all potential bioweapons production sites, which includes pharmaceutical plants. Because the pharmaceutical industry doesn't want outsiders tromping through its laboratories, and the GOP draws much of its financial support from that industry, inspection was a deal-breaker today. So the drama in Geneva unfolded: the U.S. said no to inspections, the EU denounced the U.S. and called for multilateralism, and the U.S. retorted with a laundry list of accusations, naming countries the U.S. delegations claim have bioweapons.
This leaves the U.S. isolated, and, according to the British delegation, puts the entire international bioweapons process so far backwards that it may fall apart entirely.
I encountered a similar ideological roadblock to anti-terrorist action today when the Undersecretary of Agriculture dropped by Newsday to convince us that the Bush Administration has the food supply fully protected. For about an hour the Undersecretary rattled off a list of grand schemes of protection, which boiled down to exactly nothing more than what the USDA was doing prior to September 11. When asked directly whether the USDA would confront agricultural industry refusals to allow increased inspection and testing of American foods the Undersecretary insisted that government is a "partner with industry". In other words, no antiterrorist actions will be taken by the regulatory agency if said actions are offensive to industry.
Over at the Department of Health and Human Services food and drug inspectors are under the same constraints. Rather than focus on ways to tighten up regulation of industries, the Administration is looking for government technological fixes. Sec. Thompson unveiled today a long list of research initiatives, for example, that aim at putting the National Institutes of Health in the drivers seat of a high speed race to invent microbe detecting devices and treatments for potential biological warfare agents. The multimillion-dollar proposal includes a package of deals meant to make it cheap and easy for private industry to capitalize on NIH inventions.
Down at Ground Zero today another body was recovered, and the firefighters lined up for a full salute and sober parade as they carried the American flag-wrapped deceased out of the area. Official estimates of the numbers of dead who perished inside the buildings on September 11 were once again downgraded, now to about 3,000. Officials said today that the loss of life would have been many times higher if not for three pieces of god luck: the timing of the attack (which was before more workers had entered the buildings); improved emergency-evacuation procedures that were prompted by the 1993 terrorist bombing of the trade center; and the urgent reaction of World Trade Center security workers. It's estimated that on September 11 some 18,000 people evacuated the two 110-story towers in less than two hours.
While the numbers of dead in that catastrophe have, happily, come down, city crime is rising, particularly homicides. Between January 1, 2000 and December 31, 2000 there were 589 murders in New York. This year, excluding the World Trade Center murders, there have already been 629 homicides and the year is not yet over. Of those, 184 involved handguns or rifles.
Be well. Stay safe. Stand defiant.
Laurie Garrett
