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[1] From: Shiva Shankar <sshankar@cmi.ac.in Date: Mon Sep 12, 2005 Subject: Remembering the other September 11 (fwd) Remembering the other September 11 By Farooq Sulehria The News September 10, 2005 http://jang.com.pk/thenews/ As the fourth anniversary of September 11 is approaching, the other September 11, the other mastermind of September 11 and the other terrorist organisation will again go missing in the media hype on this occasion. It is not because the Western media are ignorant of the other September 11, unleashed on Chile in 1973, masterminded by Henry Kissinger and carried out by CIA. It is because the Chilean September 11 is embarrassing. Or perhaps because world remains the same when USA attacks another country. But the "world will not be the same again" if the US is attacked. After all, it is not a dog biting a man that makes news. It is man biting a dog that makes headlines. The 9/11, 1973 was a case of routine dog bite. Hence, while a hunt for Osama goes on, the USA refuses to hand over the other 9/11 mastermind to Chile, even when Chilean judge Juan Guzman filed an international subpoena for Henry Kissinger to appear for questioning regarding the coup and its aftermath. Instead, a war-is-peace kind of joke by George Bush was his decision to appoint Henry Kissinger to head up an investigation into the adequacy of US defenses against Al-Qaeda. In a way, it was a wise decision since "it takes one to know one". But it was like asking Mullah Omar to investigate abuse of women rights in Afghanistan. Now when another September 11 anniversary is approaching, it is time to join Chilean masses in demanding for the trial of Henry Kissinger for his role in military coup claiming 30,000 lives. A coup Nixon-Kissinger administration unleashed merely because Kissinger, in his own words, saw no reason why a certain country should be allowed to "go Marxist" merely because "its people are irresponsible". The "irresponsible people" of Chile had voted Communist Party candidate Dr Salvador Allende to power weeks before the declaration of this Kissingerian doctrine. Allende's election scared US corporations (doing business in Chile. The corporation concern was communicated to Nixon. The president was beholden to Pepsi Cola. As a young lawyer, Nixon was given his first corporate account by Pepsi Cola President, Donald Kendall. Nixon's immediate reaction was: Allende was not to assume office. He screamed: "$ 10,000,000 available more if necessary. Full time job -- best man we have... Make the economy scream. 48 hour for plan of action". Unlike Pakistan, Chile had a military that for 150 years had stayed away from politics. Chilean General Staff Rene Schneider also posed problems since he was adamantly opposed to military intervention in politics. The Kissingerian team planned to kidnap Scheneider and implicate Allende in this crime. The resulting confusion, thought Kissinger, would panic the Congress into denying Allende the presidency. In a rare show of democratic spirit, outgoing president Eduardo Frei, a Christian Democrat, said he was opposed to any US intervention and would vote to confirm Allende. Two days before his oath taking, hired military thugs belonging to a right wing gang murdered Scheneider. Allende, nonetheless, took his oath to become the first communist elected head of a state. On November 9, 1970, Kissinger authored National Security Council's "Decision Memorandum 93" reviewing policy towards Chile in the wake of Allende's confirmation as president. The "Decision Memorandum 93" was merely a reflection of secret cable traffic that went on at a hectic pace prior to Allende's oath taking. In one of his cable messages, Kissinger has passed the message to his agents in Chile: "It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup. It would be much preferable to have this transpire prior to 24 October but efforts in this regard will continue vigorously beyond this date." The "Decision Memorandum 93" proposed routine measures to "make (the) economy scream" on one hand and remove Salvador Allende by all means necessary. This is what CIA code-named as Project FUBELT. All aid to Chile was cut off. The CIA spent at least $8 million to bring down Allende. On September 11, l973, US efforts finally bore fruit. A military coup assassinated Allende and destroyed democracy in a country that had enjoyed nearly l50 years of democratic government. Thousands were killed. Tens of thousands were tortured. Dr Salvador Allende, with a pistol in his hand, died the heroic death of a martyr. Either it was the murder of democracy or assassination of his friend Dr Allende, that Noble laureate legendary Chilean poet, Pablo Nureda, found it hard to live anymore. It was him the Chilean Communist party had nominated as presidential candidate but he had stepped down in Allende's favour. A week after military coup, heart broken poet also died of "September 11". A post-junta truth commission found that the Argentine military had "disappeared" at least 10,000 Argentines in the "dirty war" against "subversion" and "terrorists" between 1976 and 1983. The human rights groups in Argentina put the number at 30,000. Newly declassified State Department documents show that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger gave his full support to the Argentine military junta and urged them to hurry up and finish the "dirty war" before the U. S. Congress cut military aid. When Vanity Fair columnist Christopher Hitchens (yes the one George Galloway called "drink-sodden ex Trotskyist popinjay") was not on the same side of fence as Kissinger is, he considered Kissinger an appropriate candidate for the dock. In his book "The Trial of Henry Kissinger", he wrote regarding Kissinger's role in Chile: "All of above-cited crimes and many more besides, were committed on Kissinger's 'watch' as secretary of state. And all of them were and are punishable, under local and international law, or both." Hitchens believes that Henry Kissinger could be brought to the dock under four different sets of laws: 1) International Human Rights Law comprising covenants on the rights of individual in relation to state, as well as other actors in the international community. 2) The Law of Armed Conflicts governing "law of war". 3) International Criminal Law concerning any individual, including any agent of state, committing atrocities against his "own 'citizens or citizens of another state' ". 4) Domestic Law and Law of Civil Liberties that govern crime such as murder, kidnapping, etc. These laws in many cases permit a citizen of any country to seek redress in the courts of offender's "host" country or country of citizenship. In USA, one such statute is Alien Tort Claim Act. But alas! Laws are like cobwebs. Strong enough to detain Pinochets (or Milosovics) but too weak to hold the Kissingers! PS: A good September 11 barter would be trading Osama with Kissinger. The writer is a freelance journalist based in Sweden. Email: mfsulehria@... --------------------------------------- [2] From: Shiva Shankar <sshankar@cmi.ac.in Date: Mon Sep 12, 2005 Subject: A revealing tale of haves and have-nots (fwd) A revealing tale of haves and have-nots Polly Toynbee Hurricane Katrina has exposed the scale of inequality in American society. REMEMBER SHOCK and awe? It was meant to radiate a might never seen before on the face of the earth. Armed as no power has ever been, pre-eminent as only Rome before it, America the all-conquering would spread democracy across the globe by the force of its invincible armoury. When daisy-cutters dropped on a Taliban that fled leaving their hot dinners on the frontline, when Baghdad fell with hardly a battle, shock and awe looked easy. Now the shock is something else. It is the shock of discovering that Oz is only an optical illusion and the Wizard is a small man with no magic power after all. America now looks like some fearsome robotic dinosaur stomping across the landscape, a gigantic Power Ranger toy, all bright gadgets and display but no power and nothing inside. It can't actually do anything useful after all. The hollow superpower stands exposed, but it may take a little while for the world to readjust its set to this new reality. Just as everything has been re-imagined after the end of the old Cold War, now the single superpower scenario is in need of urgent revision. Iraq has shown that smart missiles, heavy-metal techno-tricks, and soldiers whose helmets are electronically controlled from Southern Command in Tampa, are virtually useless. The lessons that the Vietcong on bicycles thought they had taught the behemoth are being learned all over again as failure and calamity stare the White House in the face. This the world has seen unfold nightly on the news as civil war engulfs Iraq, exactly as forewarned by all the war's opponents. What irony that Iran, the heart of America's "axis of evil," without lifting a finger or firing a shot, will win its ambition to breathe its influence across both Afghanistan and Iraq. As the U. S. finds that the power to break nations is useless without the power to make them, shock and awe is over. But it took Hurricane Katrina to expose the real emptiness under the U. S. carapace. No wonder governing Iraq was far beyond the competence of a nation so feebly governed within its own borders. How does a State where half the voters don't believe in government, run anything well? A nation ideologically and constitutionally committed to non-government is bound to crumble at the core. Rome had no doubts about governance. What the great Louisiana catastrophe has revealed is a country that is not a country at all, but atomised, segmented individuals living parallel lives as far apart as possible, with nothing to unite them beyond the idea of a flag. The 40 million with no health insurance show the social dysfunction corroding U. S. capacity. For the poor at the bottom of the New Orleans mud heap, there never was even the American dream to cling to. They always lived in another country. The born-agains absolve themselves from sympathy with the victims by explaining Katrina as God's wrath on the Sodom-and-Gomorrah sins of New Orleans. But it took the mother of the nation, Barbara Bush, to perfectly capture rich America's distance from the scene. Visiting refugees in the Houston Astrodome, she pronounced them lucky: "So many of the people were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them." She let slip darker fears: "What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas." Katrina lifts the lid on the hidden America invisible in sitcoms, but above all shows how the rich don't acknowledge shared nationhood with the rest. So to talk of "average" incomes or GDP per capita in the U. S. is meaningless: there is no "average," only first world and third world, with virtually no mobility between the two. International figures should no longer be given in such crude statistics. Who has what defines a nation, not how much is in the pot from which only the well-off feed. OECD figures on health, wealth or employment should all be reconfigured to describe where the money lies. If Bill Gates moved to Albania its GDP would soar meaninglessly. A statisticians' joke says that a man with his head in the oven and his feet in the fridge is on average OK: in reality he's dead. Thursday's U. N. Human Development Report confirms a growing volume of international research showing that extreme inequality within nations does great damage whatever a country's overall wealth. Poorer countries sharing more fairly get better health, crime, education and social results than richer but more unequal countries. Since people are finely attuned to social status, the fate of those at the bottom of a pecking order within a rich society is far worse than those in a poor country who feel they belong among the generality. The U. N. figures show that exclusion kills, in both infant deaths and shorter lives. But before we get too piously smug about America, just imagine a flood crashing through the Thames barrier and drowning London and Essex. What would we see? Essentially the same thing, even if London mayor Ken Livingstone did evacuation well. The middle classes would escape to friends and relatives. The poor who have no networks beyond other poor people would collect in camps. They would be as pitifully helpless and there would be millions of them too. In New Orleans people could not get away for lack of the price of a taxi out of town. In London too, floods would expose what is hidden to well-off Britain because we also live strictly segregated lives. Don't look across the Atlantic and preen over our European values, welfare state and beneficent government. We may do better, but the U. N. report puts us closer to the U. S. model than to Europe's. - Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005 ----------------------------------- [3] From: Regi P George <george_regi@yahoo.com> Date: Mon Sep 12, 2005 Subject: Muslim women get own Jamaat, want mosque Muslim women get own Jamaat, want mosque http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=77958 PUDUKOTTAI, SEPTEMBER 10: It began as a regular statement against gender bias. But development organisation STEPS, now made up of some 8,000 determined Muslim women spread across Tamil Nadu??s southern districts, is rewriting history. While a national debate raged about a common nikahnama and triple talaq, Pudukottai??s Muslim women quietly established the first all-women Jamaat in the world. Now, in the town??s orthodox backyard, a mosque will rise where these women can pray. Of course there was bound to be opposition. When the all-women Jamaat first raised their voice in unison for a mosque for themselves last year, the local Jamaat offered a piece of land at Parambu village in Pudukottai district. The mosque was to be a ??????real one???? with minarets and even a woman moulvi well-versed in the Koran and the Islamic tenets. But after fierce protests from Pudukottai??s conservative Muslims, the local Jamaat hastily withdrew its offer. Now the members of STEPS are secretive about their plans for the mosque. ??????We are determined that a mosque will come up soon. But, we don??t want to say anything more about it,???? said founder Daud Sharifa Khanam. The movement demanding rights for Muslim women began rather diffidently about 15 years ago. In Manapparai, in the neighbouring Tiruchirapalli district, Sharifa was the tenth child in a Muslim family. As a young girl, with a rebellious streak and wild imagination????????I would even dream about wearing a necklace of burning coals around my neck??????Sharifa opposed tradition and refused to wear the burkha. She questioned the inequities of the Shariat laws and dreamt of a world where women and men lived ??????the way they should????. ??????I never thought I could make it a reality,???? Sharifa (40) said, relaxing in the STEPS office, housed in a small bungalow, which she began in 1991. The place is ??????a platform for protest and relief???? for battered Muslim women and victims of the ???triple talaq?? and dowry harassment. In fact, each of STEPS?? bricks, now covered with a shabby coat of paint, has a story to tell. Defying the diktats of their society and the powerful and influential maulvis, the STEPS women have taken the bold step of stepping out of their homes and fighting for their rights. Initially, it was just a trickle. ??????The men would abuse me and intimidate the women from approaching me for help,???? said Sharifa, a post-graduate in history and office management from Aligarh University. But now, more than 15 petitions relating to mostly to nikah disputes flow in every day, amazingly many directed to STEPS by the other Jamaats. The cases are tossed over to the 35-member Tamil Nadu Muslim Women??s Jamaat Committee for solutions. In the last one year, the committee has solved 55 cases. Every time a petitioner knocks on the STEPS doors, the case is perused by the committee members and taken up for discussion at the monthly sittings. At these sittings, which take place in a different district, both the men and women involved take part in the debate, mediations or negotiations. ??????This is so unlike what happens in the other chauvinistic all-male, one-sided Jamaats. The women can never present their side. Decisions are taken based on the man??s version alone and talaq is pronounced without hearing what the woman has to say in her defence,???? pointed out Sharifa. For instance, Sajjida Banu (23) of Pudukottai was not only tortured by her in-laws for more dowry but also abandoned by her husband. The local Jamaat refused to sympathise. ??????Sajjida finally came to us. We got her husband jailed and we are also trying for a decent settlement for her,???? said Sharifa. Sajjida is now an active Jamaat member. Initially, before the all-woman Jamaat put on its battlegear, it went around pleading with the all-male Jamaats to be reasonable and fair while settling disputes. Soon, it decided to take matters in to its own hands. The Jamaat Committee aimed to ensure human rights, social empowerment and improved standards of living for Muslim women. If the men or their relatives refused to heed to its decisions, it threatened to take the cases before the police.In the case of one Fowsia Banu (21), the Jamaat got her out of a marriage to a deaf, dumb and allegedly impotent man. But the Jamat??s success has been in drawing complaints from men as well as women. In fact, Labbaikudikadu village in Perambalur district was so swayed by the all-woman Jamaat??s reasonableness in handling issues that village leaders agreed to conduct marriages without accepting dowry. ??????The women were so harassed they only needed a spark. That is all that I provided??and a space. The suggestion for an all-woman Jamaat came from them,???? said Sharifa. ----------------------- [4] From: rup roy <delhigroup498a@yahoo.co.in> Date: Mon Sep 12, 2005 Subject: Money can't buy you love. - Legal Terrorism In India . Money can't buy you love. - Legal Terrorism In India . by rup Money can't buy you love. - Legal Terrorism In India . An ever-increasing number of the city's privileged women and Men (more) http://indiatalking.com/blog/swarup/1318/ An ever-increasing number of the city's privileged women and Men are waking up to this brutal reality. An estimated 95% of the Story received by the Save Indian Family Yahoo Group ( SFI)in recent times have been from the IIT , IIM , IT and well educated People who believes in hard working , honesty and self respecting and well settled in their Carrier . (If any one abuse your old , sick parents and sister , what you will do ? ) www.pariwariksuraksha.blogspot.com www.pariwariksuraksha.org ------------------------------- [5] From: Sukla Sen <suklasen@yahoo.com> Date: Mon Sep 12, 2005 Subject: Stop The Loonies! suklasen http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/10/AR2005091001053.html?referrer=email&referrer=email Pentagon Revises Nuclear Strike Plan Strategy Includes Preemptive Use Against Banned Weapons By Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, September 11, 2005; Page A01 The Pentagon has drafted a revised doctrine for the use of nuclear weapons that envisions commanders requesting presidential approval to use them to preempt an attack by a nation or a terrorist group using weapons of mass destruction. The draft also includes the option of using nuclear arms to destroy known enemy stockpiles of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. ----------------------------- [6] From: yogi sikand <ysikand@yahoo.com> Date: Mon Sep 12, 2005 Subject: September 2005 issue of Qalandar (www.islaminterfaith.org) Dear Friend After much delay [and having changed our mind and now having decided not to close down our website!], the September 2005 issue of our webmagazine Qalandar is now out. You can access it on www.islaminterfaith.org Contents: 1. "A Deobandi With A Difference: Waris Mazhari on the Imrana Affair" 2. "Advani Praises Jinnah: Or How Hindu and Muslim Fascists Make Perfect Bedfellows" 3. "Imrana, the Maulvis and the Shariah: A View From Bangalore" 4. "Ahmedabad Consultation on Muslim Social and Economic Conditions: A Report" 5. Interview: Ahmad Shaikh, secretary of the Legal Cell of the Gujarat unit of the Jamiat ul-???Ulama-I Hind, based in Ahmedabad. Do send us your comments and also consider contributing articles for our website to make it more interactive. Regards Yoginder Sikand |
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