|
CounterPunch
September
20, 2002
20 Questions
We Ought to Get Answered Before We Start Killing Arabs ... Again
by
BRUCE JACKSON
1. Why did the White House announce that George
Bush himself authorized the arrest of the Lackawanna Six, since
arrests warrants are normally the purview of an assistant attorney
general and the White House never before announced the direct
involvement of George Bush in any criminal investigation?
2. Why did George Pataki do most of the talking
in the nationally-televised FBI press conference about the Lackawanna
arrests?
3. What was George Pataki doing there at all?
4. Was there a single new fact about Saddam Hussein's
inability to work and play well with others in George Bush's
UN speech?
5. Why did George Bush announce that the US was
rejoining UNESCO one paragraph before he demanded that the UN
take military action against Saddam Hussein if Saddam Hussein
didn't agree to full inspection by UN experts?
6. Why did George Bush say that Saddam Hussein's
agreement to full inspection by UN experts didn't comply with
his demand that Saddam Hussein agree to full inspection by UN
experts?
7. Why is the possibility that Saddam Hussein might
develop the ability to manufacture weapons-grade plutonium or
uranium in the future more dangerous to our welfare than, say
Pakistan's present ability to manufacture weapons-grade plutonium
or uranium?
8. Why, if our sole interest is preventing Hussein
from developing weapons-grade materials, don't we do what we
(and Israel) have done in the past: take out the troublesome
installations with a missile or bomb?
9. Why, if we can't find the location of Hussein's
putative weapons-grade plutonium or uranium factories (they are
big and give off a lot of heat), are we spending those billions
and billions of dollars on high-tech spy hardware?
10. Why, as former President Bill Clinton points
out, would Saddam use nuclear or biological weapons of mass destruction
on us when he knows that using them would result in immediate
massive and deadly counterattack by us?
11. Why, as former President Bill Clinton asks,
wouldn't Saddam use such weapons, and distribute them to other
people who might use them, if we made a preemptive attack, since
the point of our attack would primarily be to slaughter him and
everyone close to him anyway? What, Clinton said, would he have
to lose?
12. The single document President Bush has quoted
in support of his assertion that Saddam is close to producing
a workable nuclear device is a 1998 International Atomic Energy
Agency report that now turns out to be nonexistent, so what evidence
is there that Iraq is even close to developing a workable nuclear
device?
13. What happened to Jose Padilla, that international
terrorist Attorney General John Ashcroft called his emergency
Moscow press conference about several months ago, the Bin Laden
agent about to detonate a dirty nuclear device in Manhattan?
You know, the guy they locked in a Navy brig and wouldn't let
out or bring to trial, even though they later said he didn't
really have any connection with Bin Laden or a dirty nuclear
device to set off.
14. What bad thing, other than having been in a
country in which it was then legal for Americans to be, and perhaps
having heard a lecture by Bin Laden they couldn't have known
beforehand they were going to hear while they were there, did
the Lackawanna Six actually do?
15. What American rights, specifically, are better
safeguarded by the new White House policy of locking American
citizens up without trial, without access to attorneys, family,
or the press?
16. What happened to the inquiry into the way Dick
Cheney got very rich on his way out of Haliburton just before
Haliburton tanked?
17. What happened to the House investigation into
Dick Cheney's stonewalling about his meetings with Enron officials
and how influential they were in setting Bush administration
energy policy?
18. What happened to the inquiry into the way George
W. Bush got very rich on his way out of Harken Energy and why
his partners in it gave him a $12 million present when he was
in the Texas governor's office? (See: Paul Krugman, "Steps
to Wealth," NY Times, 16 July 2002 for more on this.)
19. How much does all of this have to do with the
elections for US Senate and House of Representatives seats and
the New York governorship scheduled for November 5?
20. What is the premise, plot and possible present
applicability of Barry Levinson's film Wag the Dog, starring
Dustin Hoffman and Robert de Niro? (If you don't remember, visit
http://www.wag-the-dog.com
for a plot summary.)
Bruce Jackson
is Samuel P. Capen Professor of American Culture at University
at Buffalo. He is editor of Buffalo Report, on line at http://buffaloreport.com.
He can be reached at: bjackson@buffalo.edu
Today's Features
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Goodbye
to All That
Jeffrey St. Clair
Cancerous
Air
Born Under a Bad Sky
Ben Tripp
Smoking
Gun of a Hatchet Job
Peggy Thomson
20 Years
After:
Sabra and Shatila
Thomas Mountain
September
1982
Sabra and Chatila (Poem)
William Cook
Yet Another
Bush Doctrine
Kathleen Christison
Israel's Other Voices
New
Print Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- Hunting Commie Perverts:
The Scarlet Professor
- DC's Best Political
Mind; DC's Most Dangerous Man;
- Dershowitz the Torturer:
Guess Why He Wants Clean Needles;
- Lese Majeste: That's
Against the Law Too;
- The Greatest Endorsement
AAA Will Ever Get;
- Merle Haggard on Civil
Liberties;
- Dullness Hailed: The Press on the Defeat of McKinney,
Traficant and Barr;
- National Review Puffs
into Town.
Remember, the CounterPunch website is
supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. Our worldwide
web audience is soaring , with about seven million hits a month
now. This is inspiring, but the work involved also compels us
to remind you more urgently than ever to subscribe and/or make
a (tax deductible) donation if you can afford it. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe
Now!
Or Call Toll Free 1-800-840-3683
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|
September
18, 2002
Rep. Cynthia
McKinney
Goodbye
to All That
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Cancerous
Air
Born Under a Bad Sky
Ben Tripp
Smoking
Gun of a Hatchet Job
Peggy Thomson
20 Years
After:
Sabra and Shatila
Thomas Mountain
September
1982
Sabra and Chatila (Poem)
William Cook
Yet Another
Bush Doctrine
Kathleen Christison
Israel's Other Voices
September
17, 2002
Adam Federman
All
That Matters is Oil
Linda S.
Heard
Paranoid
Americans
Hussein Ibish
The Incident
at Shoney's
Francis Boyle
Is Bush's
War Illegal?
Let Us Count the Ways
Heidi Lypps
Bush's
Crackdown on
Medical Marijuana
Riad Z. Abdelkarim,
MD
Why
Do They Hate Us?
September
16, 2002
Wayne Madsen
The Shoney's
Snoop
America's Horst Wessel
Tariq Ali
Debating
Daniel Pipes
on Bush's Wars
Ahmad Faruqui
American
Primacy at Bay
Kurt Leege
Voices
for Peace
M. Shahid
Alam
A New Theology
of Power
Robert Fisk
Bush's War
Dossier:
Blindness, Hypocrisy & Lies
Dave Randall
Mad, Mad World:
J. Edgar Hoover's Obsession with Mad Magazine
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By
Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
|