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PRINTED DECEMBER 5
IN THIS ISSUE
2 LETTERS
EDITORIALS & COMMENT
3 REAPING THE WHIRLWIND
5 ENRONS RISE AND FALL
William Greider
6 WARS WITHOUT END
Michael T. Klare
7 CABLE SNOOZE
Michael Massing
7 DEPORTED DISAPPEARED?
Amy Bach
9 A CHAIN REACTION
Jonathan Schell
COLUMNS
3
VOLUME 273, NUMBER 21
ARTICLES
13 AND DARKNESS COVERED THE LAND
A report from Israel and Palestine.
Robert I. Friedman
20 LETTER FROM LONDON
Europe and the United States have begun
to follow diverging scripts on the war.
D.D. Guttenplan and Maria Margaronis
23 IN DEFENSE OF JUST WAR
THINKING
The only acceptable purpose of war is to
restore peace on a more durable basis.
Richard Falk
11 DIARY OF A MAD
LAW PROFESSOR
More Juice?
Patricia J. Williams
EDITORIALS
the Palestinians, paving the way for recognition of the PLO and the
beginning of the Oslo process.
Powell showed no such resolve, with the result that his speech
had no effect. Instead, the blind rush of events has propelled the
White House to a far more dangerous course. After a horrendous
series of violent actswhich began with the killing in Gaza of
five Palestinian children who tripped a booby-trapped bomb
planted by the Israeli army, and the provocative assassination
of a Hamas leader who, Israelis said, was behind recent suicide
bombingsthree more Palestinians blew themselves up in crowded streets and on a bus, killing at least twenty-five Israelis and
wounding hundreds more. And this time, there were no calls from
the Bush Administration for Israeli restraint.
The Palestinians desperate and appalling turn to terrorism has
backfired. For there seems to be little willingness in Washington
to see equivalence between their tactics and Israeli military operations even when those parallels may exist. Were not about to tell
Mr. Sharon what he should do, said Powell, in the least belligerent of several statements to come from the White House. Given
that green light, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon took the unprecedented step of bombing Yasir Arafats offices and attacking
several police headquarters, even though the Palestinian Authority
had arrested about 100 Palestinian militants. The last time Washington gave Sharon a green light was in 1982, when as commander of Israeli forces in Lebanon he occupied Beirut and was
responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians. That war,
which Sharon supposedly devised to destroy the PLO, instead
The Nation.
EDITORIALS
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The Nation.
COMMENT
territorial swaps, as we now know from various post-mortems on
the last round of intensive Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, are not
far from reach. Whats needed is the political will. The question
now is whether Washington really cares about peace in the Middle
East, or whether US policy-makers dont mind what Israel does
there as long as all-out war does not break out.
The Nation.
COMMENT
count on Washington. Even after Enrons meltdown, leading
Democrats continue to shill for more deregulation, aware that their
money patrons will be most upset if they reopen fundamental
scrutiny of how wealth is created in the magic market. Elite
opinion leaders will probably stick with the laissez-faire dogma,
as it continues to fall apart, until the bloody losses lap over their
shoes too.
WILLIAM GREIDER
William Greider is The Nations national affairs correspondent.
The Nation.
COMMENT
Cable Snooze
On the evening of Saturday, December 1, when three
PRESS bombs went off in Jerusalem, causing mass carnage,
CNN, MSNBC and Fox News all pounced on the
story, showing footage from Israeli TV accompanied
by interviews with Mideast experts. ABC and CBS
stayed with their college football games, and NBC remained
with the NBA. The contrast provided further evidence of how the
center of gravity in television news is shifting from broadcast to
cable. At any time of day or night, Americans have three newscasts they can tune into. Thats the good news. The bad is that all
three remain of pretty poor quality. Since September 11, Fox has
solidified its reputation as the most blatantly biased source of
news on TV. As Jim Rutenberg recently observed in the New York
Times, the network has become a sort of headquarters for viewers who want their news served up with extra patriotic fervor inflected by unabashed vehement support of a war effort, carried
in tough-guy declarations often expressing thirst for revenge.
Yet CNN and MSNBC are not much better. If you watch the
former for even a short while, for instance, youre likely to see retired general Don Shepperd standing before a map of the Middle
East discussing US military capabilities. Shepperd makes no effort to divorce his role as a news commentator from his position as
a former Air Force officer. Worse, CNN seems increasingly to rely
on him to comment on political matters that extend well beyond
his expertise. On a recent segment, for instance, reporter Catherine
Callaway fed the general a series of leading questions about which
countries the United States should go after next in its war on terrorism. Do you think Somalia could be a likely target? she asked.
Well, yes, Shepperd said. If youre serious about terrorism, you
have to go against Somalia at some time.
The problem extends beyond flag-waving, though. For all its
aspirations to be a global news network, CNN remains relentlessly parochial. Its anchors love to engage in happy talk, making the
network at times seem like a local TV station. Interviewing Danny
Glover about a benefit he was planning for Afghanistan, the endlessly effervescent Paula Zahn fawned all over him. Stories about
September 11, meanwhile, tend toward the mawkish. When we
went by ground zero, what went through your mind? a reporter
asked tourists aboard a Circle Line trip around Manhattan.
Even more troubling, CNN, while devoting far more time to
international affairs since September 11, has narrowed its definition of the world. In the initial weeks after the attacks, the network
made at least a token effort to explore the nature of Islam and the
politics of the Middle East. Over time, though, it has essentially
conflated foreign news with the war on terror and the fight in
Afghanistan. While obsessively covering the hunt for Osama bin
Laden, it has spent next to no time examining Third World poverty,
the exploding AIDS epidemic, the economic meltdown in Argentina or the changes sweeping Putins Russia.
MSNBC has seemed similarly fixated. In recent days, for instance, as the military campaign in Afghanistan has progressed, it
has become fascinated with the caves of Afghanistan, flashing sophisticated diagrams of underground bunkers as military experts
WATCH
describe how to penetrate them. Its daily show A Region in Conflict, meanwhile, seems largely a star vehicle for correspondent
Ashleigh Banfield. With her stylish haircut, designer glasses and
plucky reporting style, Banfield has become TVs new It girl,
but her dispatches from the field often seem cartoonish. In one
early report from Peshawar, Pakistan, she charged into a marketplace in the middle of the night to interview displaced Afghans
about their political preferences. OK, which do you support,
king, Taliban or Northern Alliance? she asked over and over,
moving restlessly from one startled subject to another, conveying
little to viewers beyond the fact that she, Ashleigh Banfield, was
willing to go out among the great unwashed at 2 in the morning.
In the past two weeks, however, MSNBC has given some sign
that it is willing to break the mold of cable news. As retired general
Anthony Zinni arrived in the Middle East on his peaceseeking
missionan event largely ignored by CNNMSNBC correspondent Gregg Jarrett began a week of on-the-ground reports
from Israel and Palestine. Peering into places TV cameras rarely
venture, Jarrett took us to a neighborhood in southern Jerusalem
that is so often targeted by nearby Palestinians that each apartment
has at least one room with bulletproof glass, where family members can gather when the shooting starts. He also filed from a
Jewish settlement in the West Bankthe first time I recall seeing such a report on American TV. Jarrett spoke with the parents
of Yaakov Mandel, the 13-year-old boy who last spring was beaten
to death while hiking in the nearby hills. Despite the guilt they
said they felt over his death, the couple expressed their determination to remain.
On the other side, Jarrett reported from a refugee camp in
Ramallah. A lot of Americans wonder why Palestinians are so
angry, he said. They feel this is their land, and that its occupied. In many areas, he went on, there are no running water, no
toilets, no jobs. At an Israeli-manned checkpoint, Jarrett highlighted the humiliations Palestinians must endure, and in Bethlehem he showed the physical scars left from ten days of occupation
by Israeli troops. One family showed him the remains of their
house after the Israelis got done with it; they were living in a tent.
Overall, Jarrett did an extraordinary job of capturing the
grievances on both sides and of showing the need for a peace settlement to end the escalating bloodshed in the region. He also
showed what cable news is capable of, if only it has the imagination, and the nerve.
MICHAEL MASSING
Michael Massing writes on press coverage of the current crisis.
Deported Disappeared?
The Nation.
COMMENT
year-old son spotted his father surrounded by Jordanian security
and American INS agents. Her son recognized one: Donna
Chabot, an INS criminal investigator who had attended hearings in
Dallas wearing a jacket with an antiterrorism task force insignia.
Samira Dahduli returned home and waited for her husbands
call. After a week she still hadnt heard from him. I would love
to hear his voice, she said from a furnished apartment she has
rented in Amman. Friends there tell her not to worry. They need
to make sure that he is not a danger to his community, she said.
Everyone says that this is normal procedure.
If the first chapter of the 9/11 detention story was the rounding up of 1,200 people, Dahdulis case ushers in the next phase,
in which the government will decide their fate. Amnesty International believes that Dahduli is the first 9/11 deportee who could
be facing ill treatment or torture in another country, says Angela
Wright, Amnestys chief US researcher. The arrest at the Amman
gate and the accompaniment by a US task force member are
troubling and unusual, according to immigration advocates and
Dahdulis Dallas lawyer, Karen Pennington. Nobody represents
him now, said Pennington. They took him away, and now he
will be without the protections of American law, and they can
torture him as much as they want.
Dahduli had a tense relationship with the US government well
before September 11. He had been a leader of the Islamic Association for Palestine, an Illinois-based nonprofit with an office in
Texas that has been the subject of federal scrutiny for allegedly
having ties to Hamas. On September 25, 2000, federal agents
confronted Dahduli in a Wal-Mart parking lot and then threatened
to deport him, but offered to halt the proceedings if he agreed to
become an informant on the IAP and other Islamic organizations.
The FBI warned him that if he refused and was deported to Jordan,
officials there would not be so understanding, according to three
lawyers who worked on his case. Says Pennington, The FBI said
he would be treated a lot better by them than he would be by Jordanians. Elise Healy, a lawyer who represented him during the
early deportation proceedings, adds, He was perfectly willing to
give information if he had it. But he was unwilling to be a lifetime
mole. Dahduli not only rejected the governments offer but made
it public, and news of it soon appeared on the Internet. He became useless to them, says Healy. The INS began deportation
proceedings but set him free on $50,000 bond.
Meanwhile, Dahduli was pursuing several avenues in immigration court to stay in the United States. He also filed an asylum
claim, arguing that the FBI would paint him as a terrorist if he
was returned to Jordan, rendering him vulnerable to torture.
Amnesty has documented Jordans practice of torturing terrorist
suspects. In a trial last year in Jordan of Al Qaeda associates
accused of planning bombings in Israel and Jordan during the
millennium celebrations, the defendants testified that they had
falsely confessed after beatings that included shabeh (suspending the victim by the feet with arms tied behind the back) and
falaqa (lashings on the soles of their feet, sometimes followed
by dousing in salt water). In the mid-1980s, in order to penetrate
the Abu Nidal organization, responsible for 900 deaths or injuries
in twenty countries, Jordanian security moved against suspects
family members.
In the wake of the September 11 attacks, INS officials revoked Dahdulis bond and arrested him on September 22 at his
home in Richardson, Texas. A few days later, news accounts
said, the name of Dahduli had turned up in an address book of
Wadih el Hage, a former personal secretary to Osama bin Laden
who was convicted in the 1998 bombings of the two US embassies in Africa. Pennington says that in the 1980s, when the
two were students in Tucson, Dahduli and el Hage were members
of the same mosque, the Islamic Center of Tucson. Later, they
had a brief encounter in 1998 at a Dallas restaurant.
In late November, Dahduli gave up his asylum claim and
agreed to be deported to Jordan. Now, in the Dallas Muslim
community, everybody is sick and worried, said a colleague at
Dahdulis mosque, where he was a leader. INS spokesman Russ
Bergeron said the INS accompanies deportees who pose a risk of
flight or a risk to public safety. He declined to comment on Dahduli and denied the possibility of torture. As a signatory of the
torture convention it is a US policy not to deport someone to a
country that there is reasonable cause to believe that person will
be tortured or physically or mentally abused, he said. (Chabots
voicemail says she wont return calls until December 11. Lynn
Ligon, INS spokesperson in Dallas, says Chabot is on leave
until then. The Jordanian Embassy did not return e-mails or calls.)
Other 9/11 detainees could encounter similar problems. The
government has reported links to Al Qaeda among only ten to fifteen detainees; the rest are being held on material-witness warrants and on immigration charges for violations like overstaying
visas or lying on documents. It is doubtful that theyll be allowed
to stay, although under the revamped responsible cooperators
program, some who offer helpful information might remain.
Many, however, will likely be deported, often to countries that
dont offer protection from interrogational abuse.
Its possible that the Jordanian government is holding Dahduli
as part of a routine check on a man with a native passport who
has been detained in the United States; or maybe Jordan has some
information on Dahduli; or Dahduli may have made an extradition deal with the United States and Jordan, in which he agreed
to work as an informant (his lawyers and wife deny this); or
perhaps, as Pennington fears, the FBI hopes to reap the benefits
of interrogation tactics that contravene US law.
Why did Dahduli decide to abandon his fight with the US
government and agree to be deported to Jordan? Pennington says
it was because his application to the United Arab Emirates took
too long, and he wanted to get out of jail. An Amnesty memo on
postSeptember 11 human rights abuses, which describes Dahdulis case without naming him, says he was shackled during contact visits, held in solitary confinement for months and allowed
only one hour of exercise per week. He seemed to be treated more
harshly than other detainees, said Wright of Amnesty. Could
Americas justice system have appeared so bereft of due process
that he preferred the possibility of torture in Amman? We had exactly that discussion, said Pennington. If he didnt end up killed
in Jordan, he thought he would be treated much more fairly there.
He thought he would get out much more quickly.
AMY BACH
Amy Bach is the Haywood Burns Fellow at the Nation Institute.