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Paying off the National Debt with Water

By Gene Franks

I read a clip from an engineering magazine about a Canadian inventor named Roy Jomha who has invented a toilet attachment called Econo-Flush. Mr. Jomha says that Econo-Flush can save 68% of the water that is sucked down toilets, and since 43% of the average home’s water goes down the toilet, he calculates that if every U.S. home had an Econo-Flush, the savings could take a big chunk out of the national debt in just a few years. 
This may be a good idea, but I got an even better one from the familiar medical slogan, “If we spend just one dollar on childhood immunization, we save $10 in later medical costs.” This could be the answer to the national debt, sickness care costs, and even world hunger. All we have to do is start spending $1 trillion or so per year on vaccinations, and with the $10 trillion per year we save in medical costs we can soon pay off the national debt and begin feeding the world.

I was pleased to see recently that the Centers for Disease Control, where they have lots of money to study such things, arrived at a similar conclusion about gonorrhea and the price of beer. I’ll let the Alternet  staff writer who calls him- or herself Mad Dog explain:

Somehow the scientists [at CDC] discovered that when alcohol taxes go up, gonorrhea goes down. They explain this by saying that the cheaper beer is, the more of it teenage boys can buy. The more they buy, the more teenage girls drink. And the more teenage girls drink, the more often they go down, which in turn sends the gonorrhea rate up. To put it in Einsteinian terms, beer equals sex and sex equals gonorrhea, therefore beer equals gonorrhea. No one can accuse CDC scientists of being overly complex.

They concluded that we can curb gonorrhea by raising the tax on beer. According to them, adding twenty cents to the price of a six-pack would reduce gonorrhea by about nine percent. This comes to just over two pennies a percent. If that’s the case, why stop there? Why not slap a $2.00 tax on a six-pack and stamp out gonorrhea completely?

Plans like these seem wonderful in the slogan phase,  but when you start applying them to reality you run into problems. Like whose money is being saved? And where does this money go? And doesn’t putting money in Paul’s pocket of necessity entail taking it out of Peter’s?

As a measles “victim” of the 1940s, I can’t remember a lot of expense involved with the illness. I had to miss school a few davs and suffer the inconvenience of having a blotchy face and hiding my comics from my mother. (Reading when you had measles was supposed to be bad for your eyes.) Probably my dad laid out $1.90 or so at the drug store for whatever was the placebo du jour. Apart from the $1.90, which wasn’t really a loss to the national economy since it was a gain for the drug store, and the per diem allowance that the school lost for my non-attendance but the taxpayers saved by not having to pay the school, I’m not aware of any great economic impact that resulted from my measles. Seems like about a break-even transaction to me. Similarly, when I had pertussis, which people called whooping cough in those days, I think not much expense was involved. It happened before I started to school, so there was no lost or saved per diem, and since my mother didn’t work, my illness didn’t slow the wheels of industry by keeping her off the assembly line or anything.

Most of us don’t give much thought to the purpose of measles, mumps, chicken pox and the other childhood diseases we’re always being asked to spend an additional several million a year nationally to “conquer.” Observation has convinced me that the human body, as part of the natural process, operates with an economy that precludes meaningless activities. The “common cold”, despite the lore promoted by doctors and legal drug dealers, isn’t a disease in need of correction, but a highly effective and essential cleaning exercise, initiated and carried out by the body. We owe our well being to orthodox medicine’s repeated failure to “cure” it. Cancer, in one view, is the result of the body’s inability to have a good cold.

When I had pertussis and later asthma, the doctor’s explanation was that pertussis “left me with asthma.” With the advantage of hindsight, my own view is that pertussis, with all the heaving and whooping it involves,  prepared my developing respiratory system to survive the intense asthma attacks that my lifestyle was leading me toward. They should do a study, though they won’t, comparing the life-long respiratory health of pertussis victims with that of children who were “protected” by having pertussis symptoms suppressed by vaccination. I had pertussis and I’ve also had indestructible lungs.

Measles isn’t really something the body “catches” but something the body “does.” No one seems to give much thought to what measles is. What is the body’s purpose for this brief and mildly unpleasant event that, before it was medically upgraded to a life-threatening dilemma, used to visit children once in their life and leave them, but for rare exceptions, all the stronger for the experience?

Dr. Richard Moskowitz, an M.D. and a practicing homeopathic physician, says that “the process of mounting an acute illness like the measles, no less than recovering from it, involves a general mobilization of the entire immune system.” The immune system, contrary to the cartoon version we are usually given, consists of far more than antibody production. Measles exercises the protective tissues at the portal of entry (the respiratory system, in this case), leukocytes and macrophages, the serum complement system, and “a host of other mechanisms, of which the production of circulating antibody is only one, and by no means the most important.” The purpose? Dr. Moskowitz continues:

Such a splendid outpouring leaves little doubt that such illnesses are in fact the decisive experience in the normal physiological maturation of the immune system as a whole in the life of a healthy child. For not only will the child who recovers from measles never again be susceptive to it; such an experience also cannot fail to prepare the individual to respond even more promptly and effectively to any infections he may acquire in the future. The ability to mount a vigorous response to organisms of this type must therefore be reckoned among the fundamental requirements of general well-being.

The practice of immunization, which is essentially an effort to trick the body into producing antibody by introducing a bogus version of the infective agent deep within, not only deprives the immune system of this “decisive experience” in its “normal physiological maturation,” but leaves it burdened for life with foreign contaminants it has no way of expelling.Gazette columnist Tiger Tom has said that vaccination is an initiation rite to lifelong servitude to the great modern Church of Medicine.

Beware of politicians who come to us, paying their debts to the Church of Medicine, with outstretched palms and tearful pleas for a wonderful vaccination revival that will enrich the poor and alleviate their suffering. Their crusade is really against that most feared heretic, the unvaccinated child. The “healthcare is warfare” dogma that drives the Church of Medicine supports itself on faith in the sacrament of vaccination. What the Church can least afford is a large control group of happy, healthy, unvaccinated children.

 

Should You Be Worried About Arsenic in Your Water?

by Gene Franks

Humans have always had to deal with contradiction. What’s good today is bad tomorrow.  Science stakes out a rigid position and in most cases eventually decides that the opposite is true. The American Medical Association would like you to forget that it endorsed smoking and told mothers that breast milk was nutritionally inadequate just a few short decades ago.  Chlorine, coffee, fluoride, knee surgery, sugar, estrogen therapy, therapeutic bleeding–you could name dozens–have had their ups and downs.

We’re so used to contradictory information that people didn’t  get too excited when the EPA announced that the allowable safe level for arsenic in water really isn’t 50 parts per billion (ppb), as “the experts” have been telling us for years, but it is really only 10 ppb.

How did the government’s mandated “safe” level of arsenic in drinking water shrink overnight from 50 to 10 parts per billion? Does this mean that arsenic suddenly has become more lethal? Should we take the 10 ppb limit seriously, or is it just another Swine Flu-style fundraiser?

The new arsenic limit should definitely be taken seriously.  Arsenic poisoning is terrible. And lowering the level took some real political courage.  Water utilities that were overnight out of compliance were faced with very expensive treatment requirements, and they screamed loudly.

The big drop in arsenic allowable actually makes sense. The  initial  limit for arsenic was set at 50 ppb simply because test labs before 1975 weren’t able to detect arsenic at levels below 50 ppb.  As tests got better, it became obvious that 50 ppb was too high.

After much deliberation, the EPA, with intense political pressure from both sides of the issue,  proposed reducing the allowable to 5 ppb in 2000, although the final rule did not take effect until 2006.  The number by that time had been negotiated up to the current 10 ppb.  (Two states, North Carolina and New Jersey, have independently set the arsenic allowable at 5 ppb.)

Arsenic Poisoning

Arsenic poisoning is implicated in cancers of the bladder, lungs, skin, liver, prostate and kidneys as well as non-carcinogenic endocrine, pulmonary, cardiovascular, and neurological damage. At around 60 parts per million in food or water it is an immediate threat to life and can result in sudden death.  (Note that that’s 60 parts per million, which is 60,000 parts per billion–or 6,000 times the current EPA allowable.)

The truth is that we get arsenic from lots of sources, including food. Rice, for instance, is often a source of unwanted arsenic. We get plenty of arsenic from our environment and certainly don’t need more in our water.  The only truly safe level of arsenic in water is zero.

From a water treatment standpoint,  arsenic reduction can be very easy or very complicated. Although plain carbon filtration can usually make a moderate reduction, the most commonly used strategies are reverse osmosis, anion exchange, distillation, and filtration with iron-based media. The complicated part is that arsenic exists mainly in two forms–As(III) and As(V).  Since As(III) is hard to remove and As(V) is relatively easy, the usual strategy is to convert As(III) to As(V) by oxidation to facilitate removal.  Here’s more detailed information.

How many Indians and Bangladeshis are exposed to a high level of arsenic in their drinking water? According to the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, estimates vary from a low of 28 to 35 million to a high of 77 million—more than half the population of Bangladesh, one of the most crowded nations. It is estimated that over a million Indians are also drinking arsenic-laced water. Newer cases of arsenic poisoning in the Ganges Basin suggest that many of the region’s 449 million residents could be at risk.

Dipankar Chakraborti, a researcher at the Jadavpur University in Kolkatta, India believes that more than 50 million people are exposed and thousands are already showing symptoms of poisoning.

Bangladeshis are being poisoned—usually without knowing it—by drinking water drawn from wells. Three decades ago health and development experts, and small local contractors, dug millions of deep tube wells throughout Bangladesh. The expertsencouraged the whole nation to drink well water because it was deemed to be safe, free of the bacteria that causes water-borne diseases such as diarrhea and other intestinal maladies that have long plagued the tropical country.

But in switching from rivers and other surface sources of water, the people of Bangladesh may have exchanged water-borne diseases for slow poisoning by arsenic. In the 1970’s public health specialists and government policy-makers were unaware of the problem. It was only in 1993 that “clean” well water was discovered to contain dangerous quantities of the poison.

“It is a terrible public catastrophe,” said Allan H. Smith, professor of epidemiology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a WHO consultant who has investigated the problem in Bangladesh on several trips.

The number of people affected by the arsenic disaster ranks with those being threatened by the biggest killer diseases. “By virtue of its sheer size it is pushing the limits of our knowledge and capacity to respond to it,” said Hans van Ginkel, rector of the United Nations University in Tokyo.

In a new effort to alleviate the crisis, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) is undertaking a project in which integrated geologic, hydrologic, and geochemical approaches will be used to develop criteria that will identify and map sources of safe or low-arsenic ground water. This involves the digging of new deep bore wells which might help determine arsenic levels in boththe Meghna and Ganges river basins.

Local people are being used to manually dig to the sort of depths that in the western world are normally accessible only with the assistance of sophisticated drilling rigs. David W. Clark, a specialist with USGS who is currently working in Bangladesh, says, “I have been amazed that the local folks are drilling wells up to 1,200 feet (366 meters) deep using no machinery of any kind. It is a lot of hard work and the drillers are very skilled and do an excellent job.”

But what really intrigues Clark is watching the drillers remove the 1,200 feet (36 meters) of drill stem from the well. “The entire crew of 25 to 30 laborers would climb the derrick singing a local Bangla folk song in response to the leader…at a given point they would all jump off hanging onto a rope to try to extract the pipe…this would move the pipe a few feet,” he said. “The entire process takes many hours, but it gets done.”

According to the USGS the purpose of drilling these deep wells is to get a better definition of the deep aquifer system and to see if—at least in some areas—it may provide a viable source of potable water, free of arsenic.

WHO’s most recent guideline for the maximum amount of arsenic in drinking water recommends 10 parts per billion (ppb). That was in 1993 when it was lowered to that level from 50 ppb. But most water consumed in arsenic-affected areas in Bangladesh has substantially higher levels, frequently far above 50 ppb.

Arsenic-contaminated water is not restricted to developing countries. In the western states of the United States of America about 13 million people drink arsenic-tainted water, albeit less contaminated than the well water in Bangladesh. Australia, too, has arsenic-contaminated water. So do Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Hungary, Mexico, Taiwan (Province of China), Thailand, Vietnam, and the eastern areas of India in Bengal.

Arsenic poisoning is recognizable from skin color changes, blotches all over the face and body, hyper pigmentation on the chest and upper arms, hard patches on palms and soles of the feet, inability to walk, debilitating pain, and watery eyes.

In the developed world, sophisticated methods of arsenic treatment exist. US well owners avail themselves of reverse osmosis, specialized filtration and ion exchange technologies to remove arsenic from water that tests a few parts per billion over the 10 ppb MCL. These technologies are not available in Bangladesh and other poor regions. A variety of simple filters have been devised to address arsenic poisoning in these regions with varying degrees of success.

For more information about arsenic and treatment of arsenic, please go to the Pure Water Occasional’s  Water Treatment Issues section.

The algebra of infinite justice

As the US prepares to wage a new kind of war, Arundhati Roy challenges the instinct for vengance

Arundhati Roy
Guardian

Saturday September 29, 2001

In the aftermath of the unconscionable September 11 suicide attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre, an American newscaster said: “Good and evil rarely manifest themselves as clearly as they did last Tuesday. People who we don’t know massacred people who we do. And they did so with contemptuous glee.” Then he broke down and wept.

Here’s the rub: America is at war against people it doesn’t know, because they don’t appear much on TV. Before it has properly identified or even begun to comprehend the nature of its enemy, the US government has, in a rush of publicity and embarrassing rhetoric, cobbled together an “international coalition against terror”, mobilised its army, its air force, its navy and its media, and committed them to battle.

The trouble is that once Amer ica goes off to war, it can’t very well return without having fought one. If it doesn’t find its enemy, for the sake of the enraged folks back home, it will have to manufacture one. Once war begins, it will develop a momentum, a logic and a justification of its own, and we’ll lose sight of why it’s being fought in the first place.

What we’re witnessing here is the spectacle of the world’s most powerful country reaching reflexively, angrily, for an old instinct to fight a new kind of war. Suddenly, when it comes to defending itself, America’s streamlined warships, cruise missiles and F-16 jets look like obsolete, lumbering things. As deterrence, its arsenal of nuclear bombs is no longer worth its weight in scrap. Box-cutters, penknives, and cold anger are the weapons with which the wars of the new century will be waged. Anger is the lock pick. It slips through customs unnoticed. Doesn’t show up in baggage checks.

Who is America fighting? On September 20, the FBI said that it had doubts about the identities of some of the hijackers. On the same day President George Bush said, “We know exactly who these people are and which governments are supporting them.” It sounds as though the president knows something that the FBI and the American public don’t.

In his September 20 address to the US Congress, President Bush called the enemies of America “enemies of freedom”. “Americans are asking, ‘Why do they hate us?’ ” he said. “They hate our freedoms – our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” People are being asked to make two leaps of faith here. First, to assume that The Enemy is who the US government says it is, even though it has no substantial evidence to support that claim. And second, to assume that The Enemy’s motives are what the US government says they are, and there’s nothing to support that either.

For strategic, military and economic reasons, it is vital for the US government to persuade its public that their commitment to freedom and democracy and the American Way of Life is under attack. In the current atmosphere of grief, outrage and anger, it’s an easy notion to peddle. However, if that were true, it’s reasonable to wonder why the symbols of America’s economic and military dominance – the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon – were chosen as the targets of the attacks. Why not the Statue of Liberty? Could it be that the stygian anger that led to the attacks has its taproot not in American freedom and democracy, but in the US government’s record of commitment and support to exactly the opposite things – to military and economic terrorism, insurgency, military dictatorship, religious bigotry and unimaginable genocide (outside America)? It must be hard for ordinary Americans, so recently bereaved, to look up at the world with their eyes full of tears and encounter what might appear to them to be indifference. It isn’t indifference. It’s just augury. An absence of surprise. The tired wisdom of knowing that what goes around eventually comes around. American people ought to know that it is not them but their government’s policies that are so hated. They can’t possibly doubt that they themselves, their extraordinary musicians, their writers, their actors, their spectacular sportsmen and their cinema, are universally welcomed. All of us have been moved by the courage and grace shown by firefighters, rescue workers and ordinary office staff in the days since the attacks.

America’s grief at what happened has been immense and immensely public. It would be grotesque to expect it to calibrate or modulate its anguish. However, it will be a pity if, instead of using this as an opportunity to try to understand why September 11 happened, Americans use it as an opportunity to usurp the whole world’s sorrow to mourn and avenge only their own. Because then it falls to the rest of us to ask the hard questions and say the harsh things. And for our pains, for our bad timing, we will be disliked, ignored and perhaps eventually silenced.

The world will probably never know what motivated those particular hijackers who flew planes into those particular American buildings. They were not glory boys. They left no suicide notes, no political messages; no organisation has claimed credit for the attacks. All we know is that their belief in what they were doing outstripped the natural human instinct for survival, or any desire to be remembered. It’s almost as though they could not scale down the enormity of their rage to anything smaller than their deeds. And what they did has blown a hole in the world as we knew it. In the absence of information, politicians, political commentators and writers (like myself) will invest the act with their own politics, with their own interpretations. This speculation, this analysis of the political climate in which the attacks took place, can only be a good thing.

But war is looming large. Whatever remains to be said must be said quickly. Before America places itself at the helm of the “international coalition against terror”, before it invites (and coerces) countries to actively participate in its almost godlike mission – called Operation Infinite Justice until it was pointed out that this could be seen as an insult to Muslims, who believe that only Allah can mete out infinite justice, and was renamed Operation Enduring Freedom- it would help if some small clarifications are made. For example, Infinite Justice/Enduring Freedom for whom? Is this America’s war against terror in America or against terror in general? What exactly is being avenged here? Is it the tragic loss of almost 7,000 lives, the gutting of five million square feet of office space in Manhattan, the destruction of a section of the Pentagon, the loss of several hundreds of thousands of jobs, the bankruptcy of some airline companies and the dip in the New York Stock Exchange? Or is it more than that? In 1996, Madeleine Albright, then the US secretary of state, was asked on national television what she felt about the fact that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of US economic sanctions. She replied that it was “a very hard choice”, but that, all things considered, “we think the price is worth it”. Albright never lost her job for saying this. She continued to travel the world representing the views and aspirations of the US government. More pertinently, the sanctions against Iraq remain in place. Children continue to die.

So here we have it. The equivocating distinction between civilisation and savagery, between the “massacre of innocent people” or, if you like, “a clash of civilisations” and “collateral damage”. The sophistry and fastidious algebra of infinite justice. How many dead Iraqis will it take to make the world a better place? How many dead Afghans for every dead American? How many dead women and children for every dead man? How many dead mojahedin for each dead investment banker? As we watch mesmerised, Operation Enduring Freedom unfolds on TV monitors across the world. A coalition of the world’s superpowers is closing in on Afghanistan, one of the poorest, most ravaged, war-torn countries in the world, whose ruling Taliban government is sheltering Osama bin Laden, the man being held responsible for the September 11 attacks.

The only thing in Afghanistan that could possibly count as collateral value is its citizenry. (Among them, half a million maimed orphans.There are accounts of hobbling stampedes that occur when artificial limbs are airdropped into remote, inaccessible villages.) Afghanistan’s economy is in a shambles. In fact, the problem for an invading army is that Afghanistan has no conventional coordinates or signposts to plot on a military map – no big cities, no highways, no industrial complexes, no water treatment plants. Farms have been turned into mass graves. The countryside is littered with land mines – 10 million is the most recent estimate. The American army would first have to clear the mines and build roads in order to take its soldiers in.

Fearing an attack from America, one million citizens have fled from their homes and arrived at the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The UN estimates that there are eight million Afghan citizens who need emergency aid. As supplies run out – food and aid agencies have been asked to leave – the BBC reports that one of the worst humanitarian disasters of recent times has begun to unfold. Witness the infinite justice of the new century. Civilians starving to death while they’re waiting to be killed.

In America there has been rough talk of “bombing Afghanistan back to the stone age”. Someone please break the news that Afghanistan is already there. And if it’s any consolation, America played no small part in helping it on its way. The American people may be a little fuzzy about where exactly Afghanistan is (we hear reports that there’s a run on maps of the country), but the US government and Afghanistan are old friends.

In 1979, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI (Inter Services Intelligence) launched the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA. Their purpose was to harness the energy of Afghan resistance to the Soviets and expand it into a holy war, an Islamic jihad, which would turn Muslim countries within the Soviet Union against the communist regime and eventually destabilise it. When it began, it was meant to be the Soviet Union’s Vietnam. It turned out to be much more than that. Over the years, through the ISI, the CIA funded and recruited almost 100,000 radical mojahedin from 40 Islamic countries as soldiers for America’s proxy war. The rank and file of the mojahedin were unaware that their jihad was actually being fought on behalf of Uncle Sam. (The irony is that America was equally unaware that it was financing a future war against itself.)

In 1989, after being bloodied by 10 years of relentless conflict, the Russians withdrew, leaving behind a civilisation reduced to rubble.

Civil war in Afghanistan raged on. The jihad spread to Chechnya, Kosovo and eventually to Kashmir. The CIA continued to pour in money and military equipment, but the overheads had become immense, and more money was needed. The mojahedin ordered farmers to plant opium as a “revolutionary tax”. The ISI set up hundreds of heroin laboratories across Afghanistan. Within two years of the CIA’s arrival, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderland had become the biggest producer of heroin in the world, and the single biggest source of the heroin on American streets. The annual profits, said to be between $100bn and $200bn, were ploughed back into training and arming militants.

In 1995, the Taliban – then a marginal sect of dangerous, hardline fundamentalists – fought its way to power in Afghanistan. It was funded by the ISI, that old cohort of the CIA, and supported by many political parties in Pakistan. The Taliban unleashed a regime of terror. Its first victims were its own people, particularly women. It closed down girls’ schools, dismissed women from government jobs, and enforced sharia laws under which women deemed to be “immoral” are stoned to death, and widows guilty of being adulterous are buried alive. Given the Taliban government’s human rights track record, it seems unlikely that it will in any way be intimidated or swerved from its purpose by the prospect of war, or the threat to the lives of its civilians.

After all that has happened, can there be anything more ironic than Russia and America joining hands to re-destroy Afghanistan? The question is, can you destroy destruction? Dropping more bombs on Afghanistan will only shuffle the rubble, scramble some old graves and disturb the dead.

The desolate landscape of Afghanistan was the burial ground of Soviet communism and the springboard of a unipolar world dominated by America. It made the space for neocapitalism and corporate globalisation, again dominated by America. And now Afghanistan is poised to become the graveyard for the unlikely soldiers who fought and won this war for America.

And what of America’s trusted ally? Pakistan too has suffered enormously. The US government has not been shy of supporting military dictators who have blocked the idea of democracy from taking root in the country. Before the CIA arrived, there was a small rural market for opium in Pakistan. Between 1979 and 1985, the number of heroin addicts grew from zero to one-and-a-half million. Even before September 11, there were three million Afghan refugees living in tented camps along the border. Pakistan’s economy is crumbling. Sectarian violence, globalisation’s structural adjustment programmes and drug lords are tearing the country to pieces. Set up to fight the Soviets, the terrorist training centres and madrasahs, sown like dragon’s teeth across the country, produced fundamentalists with tremendous popular appeal within Pakistan itself. The Taliban, which the Pakistan government has sup ported, funded and propped up for years, has material and strategic alliances with Pakistan’s own political parties.

Now the US government is asking (asking?) Pakistan to garotte the pet it has hand-reared in its backyard for so many years. President Musharraf, having pledged his support to the US, could well find he has something resembling civil war on his hands.

India, thanks in part to its geography, and in part to the vision of its former leaders, has so far been fortunate enough to be left out of this Great Game. Had it been drawn in, it’s more than likely that our democracy, such as it is, would not have survived. Today, as some of us watch in horror, the Indian government is furiously gyrating its hips, begging the US to set up its base in India rather than Pakistan. Having had this ringside view of Pakistan’s sordid fate, it isn’t just odd, it’s unthinkable, that India should want to do this. Any third world country with a fragile economy and a complex social base should know by now that to invite a superpower such as America in (whether it says it’s staying or just passing through) would be like inviting a brick to drop through your windscreen.

Operation Enduring Freedom is ostensibly being fought to uphold the American Way of Life. It’ll probably end up undermining it completely. It will spawn more anger and more terror across the world. For ordinary people in America, it will mean lives lived in a climate of sickening uncertainty: will my child be safe in school? Will there be nerve gas in the subway? A bomb in the cinema hall? Will my love come home tonight? There have been warnings about the possibility of biological warfare – smallpox, bubonic plague, anthrax – the deadly payload of innocuous crop-duster aircraft. Being picked off a few at a time may end up being worse than being annihilated all at once by a nuclear bomb.

The US government, and no doubt governments all over the world, will use the climate of war as an excuse to curtail civil liberties, deny free speech, lay off workers, harass ethnic and religious minorities, cut back on public spending and divert huge amounts of money to the defence industry. To what purpose? President Bush can no more “rid the world of evil-doers” than he can stock it with saints. It’s absurd for the US government to even toy with the notion that it can stamp out terrorism with more violence and oppression. Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease. Terrorism has no country. It’s transnational, as global an enterprise as Coke or Pepsi or Nike. At the first sign of trouble, terrorists can pull up stakes and move their “factories” from country to country in search of a better deal. Just like the multi-nationals.

Terrorism as a phenomenon may never go away. But if it is to be contained, the first step is for America to at least acknowledge that it shares the planet with other nations, with other human beings who, even if they are not on TV, have loves and griefs and stories and songs and sorrows and, for heaven’s sake, rights. Instead, when Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, was asked what he would call a victory in America’s new war, he said that if he could convince the world that Americans must be allowed to continue with their way of life, he would consider it a victory.

The September 11 attacks were a monstrous calling card from a world gone horribly wrong. The message may have been written by Bin Laden (who knows?) and delivered by his couriers, but it could well have been signed by the ghosts of the victims of America’s old wars. The millions killed in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, the 17,500 killed when Israel – backed by the US – invaded Lebanon in 1982, the 200,000 Iraqis killed in Operation Desert Storm, the thousands of Palestinians who have died fighting Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. And the millions who died, in Yugoslavia, Somalia, Haiti, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Panama, at the hands of all the terrorists, dictators and genocidists whom the American government supported, trained, bankrolled and supplied with arms. And this is far from being a comprehensive list.

For a country involved in so much warfare and conflict, the American people have been extremely fortunate. The strikes on September 11 were only the second on American soil in over a century. The first was Pearl Harbour. The reprisal for this took a long route, but ended with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This time the world waits with bated breath for the horrors to come.

Someone recently said that if Osama bin Laden didn’t exist, America would have had to invent him. But, in a way, America did invent him. He was among the jihadis who moved to Afghanistan in 1979 when the CIA commenced its operations there. Bin Laden has the distinction of being created by the CIA and wanted by the FBI. In the course of a fortnight he has been promoted from suspect to prime suspect and then, despite the lack of any real evidence, straight up the charts to being “wanted dead or alive”.

From all accounts, it will be impossible to produce evidence (of the sort that would stand scrutiny in a court of law) to link Bin Laden to the September 11 attacks. So far, it appears that the most incriminating piece of evidence against him is the fact that he has not condemned them.

From what is known about the location of Bin Laden and the living conditions in which he operates, it’s entirely possible that he did not personally plan and carry out the attacks – that he is the inspirational figure, “the CEO of the holding company”. The Taliban’s response to US demands for the extradition of Bin Laden has been uncharacteristically reasonable: produce the evidence, then we’ll hand him over. President Bush’s response is that the demand is “non-negotiable”.

(While talks are on for the extradition of CEOs – can India put in a side request for the extradition of Warren Anderson of the US? He was the chairman of Union Carbide, responsible for the Bhopal gas leak that killed 16,000 people in 1984. We have collated the necessary evidence. It’s all in the files. Could we have him, please?)

But who is Osama bin Laden really? Let me rephrase that. What is Osama bin Laden? He’s America’s family secret. He is the American president’s dark doppelgänger. The savage twin of all that purports to be beautiful and civilised. He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by America’s foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of “full-spectrum dominance”, its chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous military interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts. Its marauding multinationals who are taking over the air we breathe, the ground we stand on, the water we drink, the thoughts we think. Now that the family secret has been spilled, the twins are blurring into one another and gradually becoming interchangeable. Their guns, bombs, money and drugs have been going around in the loop for a while. (The Stinger missiles that will greet US helicopters were supplied by the CIA. The heroin used by America’s drug addicts comes from Afghanistan. The Bush administration recently gave Afghanistan a $43m subsidy for a “war on drugs”….)

Now Bush and Bin Laden have even begun to borrow each other’s rhetoric. Each refers to the other as “the head of the snake”. Both invoke God and use the loose millenarian currency of good and evil as their terms of reference. Both are engaged in unequivocal political crimes. Both are dangerously armed – one with the nuclear arsenal of the obscenely powerful, the other with the incandescent, destructive power of the utterly hopeless. The fireball and the ice pick. The bludgeon and the axe. The important thing to keep in mind is that neither is an acceptable alternative to the other.

President Bush’s ultimatum to the people of the world – “If you’re not with us, you’re against us” – is a piece of presumptuous arrogance. It’s not a choice that people want to, need to, or should have to make.

© Arundhati Roy 2001

This article is reprinted courtesy of the Guardian Unlimited.

Other Works by Arundhati Roy on this site: War Is Peace.

War Is Peace

Arundhati Roy

The world doesn’t have to choose between the Taliban and the US government. All the beauty of the world—literature, music, art—lies between these two fundamentalist poles.

Editor’s Note: Arundhati Roy is a novelist, essayist, film maker, and passionate activist from India. She is no ordinary writer. Her first novel, The God of Small Things, won the coveted Booker Prize and has sold six million copies.

 Her political commentary is sharp and precise. If your brain has been “shrink-wrapped” in a flag, as she puts it, you probably are going to get mightily pissed off by this article.

But read on–getting pissed off is good for you. — Hardly Waite.

As darkness deepened over Afghanistan on Sunday, October 7, 2001, the US government, backed by the International Coalition Against Terror (the new, amenable surrogate for the United Nations), launched air strikes against Afghanistan. TV channels lingered on computer-animated images of Cruise missiles, stealth bombers, Tomahawks, ‘bunker-busting’ missiles and Mark 82 high-drag bombs. All over the world, little boys watched goggle-eyed and stopped clamouring for new video games.

The UN, reduced now to an ineffective abbreviation, wasn’t even asked to mandate the air strikes. (As Madeleine Albright once said, “The US acts multilaterally when it can, and unilaterally when it must.”) The ‘evidence’ against the terrorists was shared amongst friends in the ‘Coalition’. After conferring, they announced that it didn’t matter whether or not the ‘evidence’ would stand up in a court of law. Thus, in an instant, were centuries of jurisprudence carelessly trashed.

Nothing can excuse or justify an act of terrorism, whether it is committed by religious fundamentalists, private militia, people’s resistance movements—or whether it’s dressed up as a war of retribution by a recognised government. The bombing of Afghanistan is not revenge for New York and Washington. It is yet another act of terror against the people of the world. Each innocent person that is killed must be added to, not set off against, the grisly toll of civilians who died in New York and Washington.

People rarely win wars, governments rarely lose them. People get killed. Governments moult and regroup, hydra-headed. They first use flags to shrink-wrap peoples’ minds and suffocate real thought, and then as ceremonial shrouds to cloak the mangled corpses of the willing dead. On both sides, in Afghanistan as well as America, civilians are now hostage to the actions of their own governments. Unknowingly, ordinary people in both countries share a common bond—they have to live with the phenomenon of blind, unpredictable terror. Each batch of bombs that is dropped on Afghanistan is matched by a corresponding escalation of mass hysteria in America about anthrax, more hijackings and other terrorist acts.

There is no easy way out of the spiraling morass of terror and brutality that confronts the world today. It is time now for the human race to hold still, to delve into its wells of collective wisdom, both ancient and modern. What happened on September 11 changed the world forever. Freedom, progress, wealth, technology, war—these words have taken on new meaning. Governments have to acknowledge this transformation, and approach their new tasks with a modicum of honesty and humility. Unfortunately, up to now, there has been no sign of any introspection from the leaders of the International Coalition. Or the Taliban.

When he announced the air strikes, President George Bush said, “We’re a peaceful nation.” America’s favourite ambassador, Tony Blair, (who also holds the portfolio of Prime Minister of the UK), echoed him: “We’re a peaceful people.”

So now we know. Pigs are horses. Girls are boys. War is Peace.

Speaking at the FBI headquarters a few days later, President Bush said: “This is our calling. This is the calling of the United States of America. The most free nation in the world. A nation built on fundamental values that reject hate, reject violence, rejects murderers and rejects evil. We will not tire.”

Here is a list of the countries that America has been at war with—and bombed—since World War II: China (1945-46, 1950-53); Korea (1950-53); Guatemala (1954, 1967-69); Indonesia (1958); Cuba (1959-60); the Belgian Congo (1964); Peru (1965); Laos (1964-73); Vietnam (1961-73); Cambodia (1969-70); Grenada (1983); Libya (1986); El Salvador (1980s); Nicaragua (1980s); Panama (1989), Iraq (1991-99), Bosnia (1995), Sudan (1998); Yugoslavia (1999). And now Afghanistan.

Certainly it does not tire—this, the Most Free nation in the world. What freedoms does it uphold? Within its borders, the freedoms of speech, religion, thought; of artistic expression, food habits, sexual preferences (well, to some extent) and many other exemplary, wonderful things. Outside its borders, the freedom to dominate, humiliate and subjugate—usually in the service of America’s real religion, the ‘free market’. So when the US government christens a war ‘Operation Infinite Justice’, or ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’, we in the Third World feel more than a tremor of fear. Because we know that Infinite Justice for some means Infinite Injustice for others. And Enduring Freedom for some means Enduring Subjugation for others.

The International Coalition Against Terror is largely a cabal of the richest countries in the world. Between them, they manufacture and sell almost all of the world’s weapons, they possess the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction—chemical, biological and nuclear. They have fought the most wars, account for most of the genocide, subjection, ethnic cleansing and human rights violations in modern history, and have sponsored, armed, and financed untold numbers of dictators and despots. Between them, they have worshipped, almost deified, the cult of violence and war. For all its appalling sins, the Taliban just isn’t in the same league.

The Taliban was compounded in the crumbling crucible of rubble, heroin, and landmines in the backwash of the Cold War. Its oldest leaders are in their early 40s. Many of them are disfigured and handicapped, missing an eye, an arm or a leg. They grew up in a society scarred and devastated by war. Between the Soviet Union and America, over 20 years, about $45 billion worth of arms and ammunition was poured into Afghanistan. The latest weaponry was the only shard of modernity to intrude upon a thoroughly medieval society. Young boys—many of them orphans—who grew up in those times, had guns for toys, never knew the security and comfort of family life, never experienced the company of women. Now, as adults and rulers, the Taliban beat, stone, rape, and brutalise women; they don’t seem to know what else to do with them. Years of war have stripped them of gentleness, inured them to kindness and human compassion. They dance to the percussive rhythms of bombs raining down around them. Now they’ve turned their monstrosity on their own people.

With all due respect to President Bush, the people of the world do not have to choose between the Taliban and the US government. All the beauty of human civilization—our art, our music, our literature—lies beyond these two fundamentalist, ideological poles. There is as little chance that the people of the world can all become middle-class consumers as there is that they’ll all embrace any one particular religion. The issue is not about Good vs Evil or Islam vs Christianity as much as it is about space. About how to accommodate diversity, how to contain the impulse towards hegemony—every kind of hegemony, economic, military, linguistic, religious, and cultural. Any ecologist will tell you how dangerous and fragile a monoculture is. A hegemonic world is like having a government without a healthy opposition. It becomes a kind of dictatorship. It’s like putting a plastic bag over the world, and preventing it from breathing. Eventually, it will be torn open.

One and a half million Afghan people lost their lives in the 20 years of conflict that preceded this new war. Afghanistan was reduced to rubble, and now, the rubble is being pounded into finer dust. By the second day of the air strikes, US pilots were returning to their bases without dropping their assigned payload of bombs. As one pilot put it, Afghanistan is “not a target-rich environment”. At a press briefing at the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld, US defense secretary, was asked if America had run out of targets.

“First we’re going to re-hit targets,” he said, “and second, we’re not running out of targets, Afghanistan is…” This was greeted with gales of laughter in the Briefing Room.

By the third day of the strikes, the US defense department boasted that it had “achieved air supremacy over Afghanistan”. (Did they mean that they had destroyed both, or maybe all 16, of Afghanistan’s planes?)

On the ground in Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance—the Taliban’s old enemy, and therefore the International Coalition’s newest friend—is making headway in its push to capture Kabul. (For the archives, let it be said that the Northern Alliance’s track record is not very different from the Taliban’s. But for now, because it’s inconvenient, that little detail is being glossed over.) The visible, moderate, “acceptable” leader of the Alliance, Ahmed Shah Masood, was killed in a suicide-bomb attack early in September. The rest of the Northern Alliance is a brittle confederation of brutal warlords, ex-communists, and unbending clerics. It is a disparate group divided along ethnic lines, some of whom have tasted power in Afghanistan in the past.

Until the US air strikes, the Northern Alliance controlled about 5 per cent of the geographical area of Afghanistan. Now, with the Coalition’s help and ‘air cover’, it is poised to topple the Taliban. Meanwhile, Taliban soldiers, sensing imminent defeat, have begun to defect to the Alliance. So the fighting forces are busy switching sides and changing uniforms. But in an enterprise as cynical as this one, it seems to matter hardly at all. Love is hate, north is south, peace is war.

Among the global powers, there is talk of ‘putting in a representative government’. Or, on the other hand, of ‘restoring’ the Kingdom to Afghanistan’s 89-year-old former king, Zahir Shah, who has lived in exile in Rome since 1973. That’s the way the game goes—support Saddam Hussein, then ‘take him out’; finance the mujahideen, then bomb them to smithereens; put in Zahir Shah and see if he’s going to be a good boy. (Is it possible to ‘put in’ a representative government? Can you place an order for Democracy—with extra cheese and jalapeno peppers?)

Reports have begun to trickle in about civilian casualties, about cities emptying out as Afghan civilians flock to the borders which have been closed. Main arterial roads have been blown up or sealed off. Those who have experience of working in Afghanistan say that by early November, food convoys will not be able to reach the millions of Afghans (7.5 million according to the UN) who run the very real risk of starving to death during the course of this winter. They say that in the days that are left before winter sets in, there can either be a war, or an attempt to reach food to the hungry. Not both.

As a gesture of humanitarian support, the US government air-dropped 37,000 packets of emergency rations into Afghanistan. It says it plans to drop a total of 5,000,000 packets. That will still only add up to a single meal for half-a-million people out of the several million in dire need of food. Aid workers have condemned it as a cynical, dangerous, public-relations exercise. They say that air-dropping food packets is worse than futile. First, because the food will never get to those who really need it. More dangerously, those who run out to retrieve the packets risk being blown up by landmines. A tragic alms race.

Nevertheless, the food packets had a photo-op all to themselves. Their contents were listed in major newspapers. They were vegetarian, we’re told, as per Muslim Dietary Law(!) Each yellow packet, decorated with the American flag, contained: rice, peanut butter, bean salad, strawberry jam, crackers, raisins, flat bread, an apple fruit bar, seasoning, matches, a set of plastic cutlery, a serviette and illustrated user instructions.

After three years of unremitting drought, an air-dropped airline meal in Jalalabad! The level of cultural ineptitude, the failure to understand what months of relentless hunger and grinding poverty really mean, the US government’s attempt to use even this abject misery to boost its self-image, beggars description.

Reverse the scenario for a moment. Imagine if the Taliban government was to bomb New York City, saying all the while that its real target was the US government and its policies. And suppose, during breaks between the bombing, the Taliban dropped a few thousand packets containing nan and kababs impaled on an Afghan flag. Would the good people of New York ever find it in themselves to forgive the Afghan government? Even if they were hungry, even if they needed the food, even if they ate it, how would they ever forget the insult, the condescension? Rudy Giuliani, Mayor of New York City, returned a gift of $10 million from a Saudi prince because it came with a few words of friendly advice about American policy in the Middle East. Is pride a luxury only the rich are entitled to?

Far from stamping it out, igniting this kind of rage is what creates terrorism. Hate and retribution don’t go back into the box once you’ve let them out. For every ‘terrorist’ or his ‘supporter’ that is killed, hundreds of innocent people are being killed too. And for every hundred innocent people killed, there is a good chance that several future terrorists will be created.

Where will it all lead?

Setting aside the rhetoric for a moment, consider the fact that the world has not yet found an acceptable definition of what ‘terrorism’ is. One country’s terrorist is too often another’s freedom fighter. At the heart of the matter lies the world’s deep-seated ambivalence towards violence. Once violence is accepted as a legitimate political instrument, then the morality and political acceptability of terrorists (insurgents or freedom fighters) becomes contentious, bumpy terrain. The US government itself has funded, armed, and sheltered plenty of rebels and insurgents around the world. The CIA and Pakistan’s ISI trained and armed the mujahideen who, in the 1980s, were seen as terrorists by the government in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. While President Reagan posed with them for a group portrait and called them the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers. Today, Pakistan—America’s ally in this new war—sponsors insurgents who cross the border into Kashmir in India. Pakistan lauds them as ‘freedom fighters’, India calls them ‘terrorists’. India, for its part, denounces countries who sponsor and abet terrorism, but the Indian army has, in the past, trained separatist Tamil rebels asking for a homeland in Sri Lanka—the LTTE, responsible for countless acts of bloody terrorism. (Just as the CIA abandoned the mujahideen after they had served its purpose, India abruptly turned its back on the LTTE for a host of political reasons. It was an enraged LTTE suicide-bomber who assassinated former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.)

It is important for governments and politicians to understand that manipulating these huge, raging human feelings for their own narrow purposes may yield instant results, but eventually and inexorably, they have disastrous consequences. Igniting and exploiting religious sentiments for reasons of political expediency is the most dangerous legacy that governments or politicians can bequeath to any people—including their own. People who live in societies ravaged by religious or communal bigotry know that every religious text—from the Bible to the Bhagwad Gita—can be mined and misinterpreted to justify anything, from nuclear war to genocide to corporate globalisation.

This is not to suggest that the terrorists who perpetrated the outrage on September 11 should not be hunted down and brought to book. They must be. But is war the best way to track them down? Will burning the haystack find you the needle? Or will it escalate the anger and make the world a living hell for all of us?

At the end of the day, how many people can you spy on, how many bank accounts can you freeze, how many conversations can you eavesdrop on, how many e-mails can you intercept, how many letters can you open, how many phones can you tap? Even before September 11, the CIA had accumulated more information than is humanly possible to process. (Sometimes, too much data can actually hinder intelligence—small wonder the US spy satellites completely missed the preparation that preceded India’s nuclear tests in 1998.)

The sheer scale of the surveillance will become a logistical, ethical and civil rights nightmare. It will drive everybody clean crazy. And freedom—that precious, precious thing—will be the first casualty. It’s already hurt and hemorrhaging dangerously.

Governments across the world are cynically using the prevailing paranoia to promote their own interests. All kinds of unpredictable political forces are being unleashed. In India, for instance, members of the All India People’s Resistance Forum, who were distributing anti-war and anti-US pamphlets in Delhi, have been jailed. Even the printer of the leaflets was arrested. The right-wing government (while it shelters Hindu extremists groups like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal) has banned the Students’ Islamic Movement of India and is trying to revive an anti-terrorist act which had been withdrawn after the Human Rights Commission reported that it had been more abused than used. Millions of Indian citizens are Muslim. Can anything be gained by alienating them?

Every day that the war goes on, raging emotions are being let loose into the world. The international press has little or no independent access to the war zone. In any case, mainstream media, particularly in the US, has more or less rolled over, allowing itself to be tickled on the stomach with press hand-outs from militarymen and government officials. Afghan radio stations have been destroyed by the bombing. The Taliban has always been deeply suspicious of the Press. In the propaganda war, there is no accurate estimate of how many people have been killed, or how much destruction has taken place. In the absence of reliable information, wild rumours spread.

Put your ear to the ground in this part of the world, and you can hear the thrumming, the deadly drumbeat of burgeoning anger. Please. Please, stop the war now. Enough people have died. The smart missiles are just not smart enough. They’re blowing up whole warehouses of suppressed fury.

President George Bush recently boasted: “When I take action, I’m not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It’s going to be decisive.” President Bush should know that there are no targets in Afghanistan that will give his missiles their money’s worth. Perhaps, if only to balance his books, he should develop some cheaper missiles to use on cheaper targets and cheaper lives in the poor countries of the world. But then, that may not make good business sense to the Coalition’s weapons manufacturers. It wouldn’t make any sense at all, for example, to the Carlyle Group—described by the Industry Standard as ‘the world’s largest private equity firm’, with $12 billion under management. Carlyle invests in the defense sector and makes its money from military conflicts and weapons spending.

Carlyle is run by men with impeccable credentials. Former US defense secretary Frank Carlucci is Carlyle’s chairman and managing director (he was a college roommate of Donald Rumsfeld’s). Carlyle’s other partners include former US secretary of state James A. Baker III, George Soros, Fred Malek (George Bush Sr’s campaign manager). An American paper—the Baltimore Chronicle and Sentinel—says that former President George Bush Sr is reported to be seeking investments for the Carlyle Group from Asian markets. He is reportedly paid not inconsiderable sums of money to make ‘presentations’ to potential government-clients.

Ho Hum. As the tired saying goes, it’s all in the family.

Then there’s that other branch of traditional family business—oil. Remember, President George Bush (Jr) and Vice-President Dick Cheney both made their fortunes working in the US oil industry.

Turkmenistan, which borders the northwest of Afghanistan, holds the world’s third largest gas reserves and an estimated six billion barrels of oil reserves. Enough, experts say, to meet American energy needs for the next 30 years (or a developing country’s energy requirements for a couple of centuries.) America has always viewed oil as a security consideration, and protected it by any means it deems necessary. Few of us doubt that its military presence in the Gulf has little to do with its concern for human rights and almost entirely to do with its strategic interest in oil.

Oil and gas from the Caspian region currently moves northward to European markets. Geographically and politically, Iran and Russia are major impediments to American interests. In 1998, Dick Cheney—then CEO of Halliburton, a major player in the oil industry—said: “I can’t think of a time when we’ve had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian. It’s almost as if the opportunities have arisen overnight.” True enough.

For some years now, an American oil giant called Unocal has been negotiating with the Taliban for permission to construct an oil pipeline through Afghanistan to Pakistan and out to the Arabian Sea. From here, Unocal hopes to access the lucrative ’emerging markets’ in South and Southeast Asia. In December 1997, a delegation of Taliban mullahs traveled to America and even met US State Department officials and Unocal executives in Houston. At that time the Taliban’s taste for public executions and its treatment of Afghan women were not made out to be the crimes against humanity that they are now. Over the next six months, pressure from hundreds of outraged American feminist groups was brought to bear on the Clinton administration. Fortunately, they managed to scuttle the deal. And now comes the US oil industry’s big chance.

In America, the arms industry, the oil industry, the major media networks, and, indeed, US foreign policy, are all controlled by the same business combines. Therefore, it would be foolish to expect this talk of guns and oil and defense deals to get any real play in the media. In any case, to a distraught, confused people whose pride has just been wounded, whose loved ones have been tragically killed, whose anger is fresh and sharp, the inanities about the ‘Clash of Civilisations’ and the ‘Good vs Evil’ discourse home in unerringly. They are cynically doled out by government spokesmen like a daily dose of vitamins or anti-depressants. Regular medication ensures that mainland America continues to remain the enigma it has always been—a curiously insular people, administered by a pathologically meddlesome, promiscuous government.

And what of the rest of us, the numb recipients of this onslaught of what we know to be preposterous propaganda? The daily consumers of the lies and brutality smeared in peanut butter and strawberry jam being air-dropped into our minds just like those yellow food packets. Shall we look away and eat because we’re hungry, or shall we stare unblinking at the grim theatre unfolding in Afghanistan until we retch collectively and say, in one voice, that we have had enough?

As the first year of the new millennium rushes to a close, one wonders—have we forfeited our right to dream? Will we ever be able to re-imagine beauty? Will it be possible ever again to watch the slow, amazed blink of a new-born gecko in the sun, or whisper back to the marmot who has just whispered in your ear—without thinking of the World Trade Center and Afghanistan?

December 7, 1941: A Setup from the Beginning

By Robert B. Stinnett

As Americans honor those 2403 men, women, and children killed — and 1178 wounded — in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on December 7, 1941, recently released government documents concerning that “surprise” raid compel us to revisit some troubling questions.
At issue is American foreknowledge of Japanese military plans to attack Hawaii by a submarine and carrier force 59 years ago. There are two questions at the top of the foreknowledge list: (1) whether President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his top military chieftains provoked Japan into an “overt act of war” directed at Hawaii, and (2) whether Japan’s military plans were obtained in advance by the United States but concealed from the Hawaiian military commanders, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel and Lieutenant General Walter Short so they would not interfere with the overt act.

The latter question was answered in the affirmative on October 30, 2000, when President Bill Clinton signed into law, with the support of a bipartisan Congress, the National Defense Authorization Act. Amidst its omnibus provisions, the Act reverses the findings of nine previous Pearl Harbor investigations and finds that both Kimmel and Short were denied crucial military intelligence that tracked the Japanese forces toward Hawaii and obtained by the Roosevelt Administration in the weeks before the attack.

Congress was specific in its finding against the 1941 White House: Kimmel and Short were cut off from the intelligence pipeline that located Japanese forces advancing on Hawaii. Then, after the successful Japanese raid, both commanders were relieved of their commands, blamed for failing to ward off the attack, and demoted in rank.

President Clinton must now decide whether to grant the request by Congress to restore the commanders to their 1941 ranks. Regardless of what the Commander-in-Chief does in the remaining months of his term, these congressional findings should be widely seen as an exoneration of 59 years of blame assigned to Kimmel and Short.

But one important question remains: Does the blame for the Pearl Harbor disaster revert to President Roosevelt?

A major motion picture based on the attack is currently under production by Walt Disney Studios and scheduled for release in May 2001. The producer, Jerry Bruckheimer, refuses to include America’s foreknowledge in the script. When Bruckheimer commented on FDR’s foreknowledge in an interview published earlier this year, he said “That’s all b___s___.”

Yet, Roosevelt believed that provoking Japan into an attack on Hawaii was the only option he had in 1941 to overcome the powerful America First non-interventionist movement led by aviation hero Charles Lindbergh. These anti-war views were shared by 80 percent of the American public from 1940 to 1941. Though Germany had conquered most of Europe, and her U-Boats were sinking American ships in the Atlantic Ocean – including warships – Americans wanted nothing to do with “Europe’s War.”

However, Germany made a strategic error. She, along with her Axis partner, Italy, signed the mutual assistance treaty with Japan, the Tripartite Pact, on September 27, 1940. Ten days later, Lieutenant Commander Arthur McCollum, a U.S. Naval officer in the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), saw an opportunity to counter the U.S. isolationist movement by provoking Japan into a state of war with the U.S., triggering the mutual assistance provisions of the Tripartite Pact, and bringing America into World War II.

Memorialized in McCollum’s secret memo dated October 7, 1940, and recently obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the ONI proposal called for eight provocations aimed at Japan. Its centerpiece was keeping the might of the U.S. Fleet based in the Territory of Hawaii as a lure for a Japanese attack.

President Roosevelt acted swiftly. The very next day, October 8, 1940, the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Fleet, Admiral James O. Richardson, was summoned to the Oval Office and told of the provocative plan by the President. In a heated argument with FDR, the admiral objected to placing his sailors and ships in harm’s way. Richardson was then fired and in his place FDR selected an obscure naval officer, Rear Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, to command the fleet in Hawaii. Kimmel was promoted to a four-star admiral and took command on February 1, 1941. In a related appointment, Walter Short was promoted from Major General to a three-star Lieutenant General and given command of U.S. Army troops in Hawaii.

Throughout 1941, FDR implemented the remaining seven provocations. He then gauged Japanese reaction through intercepted and decoded communications intelligence originated by Japan’s diplomatic and military leaders.

The island nation’s militarists used the provocations to seize control of Japan and organized their military forces for war against the U.S., Great Britain, and the Netherlands. The centerpiece – the Pearl Harbor attack – was leaked to the U.S. in January 1941. During the next 11 months, the White House followed the Japanese war plans through the intercepted and decoded diplomatic and military communications intelligence.

Japanese leaders failed in basic security precautions. At least 1,000 Japanese military and diplomatic radio messages per day were intercepted by monitoring stations operated by the U.S. and her Allies, and the message contents were summarized for the White House. The intercept summaries were clear: Pearl Harbor would be attacked on December 7, 1941, by Japanese forces advancing through the Central and North Pacific Oceans. On November 27 and 28, 1941, Admiral Kimmel and General Short were ordered to remain in a defensive posture for “the United States desires that Japan commit the first overt act.” The order came directly from President Roosevelt.

As I explained to a policy forum audience at The Independent Institute in Oakland, California, which was videotaped and telecast nationwide over the Fourth of July holiday earlier this year, my research of U.S. naval records shows that not only were Kimmel and Short cut off from the Japanese communications intelligence pipeline, so were the American people. It is a coverup that has lasted for nearly 59 years.

Immediately after December 7, 1941, military communications documents that disclose American foreknowledge of the Pearl Harbor disaster were locked in U.S. Navy vaults away from the prying eyes of congressional investigators, historians, and authors. Though the Freedom of Information Act freed the foreknowledge documents from the secretive vaults to the sunlight of the National Archives in 1995, a cottage industry continues to cover up America’s foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor.