We as spiritual beings or souls come to earth in order to experience the human condition. This includes the good and the bad scenarios of this world. Our world is a duality planet and no amount of love or grace will eliminate evil or nastiness. We will return again and again until we have pierced the illusions of this density. The purpose of human life is to awaken to universal truth. This also means that we must awaken to the lies and deceit mankind is subjected to. To pierce the third density illusion is a must in order to remove ourselves from the wheel of human existences. Love is the Answer by means of Knowledge and Awareness!

World Socialist Web Site www.wsws.org
----------------------------------------------------------------------
WSWS : News & Analysis : The US War in Afghanistan

Relatives of September 11 victims expose human toll of US war in Afghanistan
By Jeremy Johnson
2 February 2002

Relatives of several of the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks 
spoke at a public meeting in Brooklyn, New York on January 27, after 
returning from an eight-day trip to Afghanistan. They reported on the plight 
of Afghan civilians whose lives have been devastated by the US war on their 
country.

The meeting was sponsored by the local Green Party and the War Resisters' 
League on behalf of Global Exchange, a San Francisco-based human rights 
group which organized the trip to bring together the US and Afghan victims.

Rita Lasar of New York City lost her brother, Abe Zelmanowitz, age 55, in 
the World Trade Center attack when he insisted on staying behind to assist a 
wheelchair-bound friend on the twenty-seventh floor. A retired small 
businesswoman, she has spoken out repeatedly against the US bombing campaign.

Kelly Campbell, 29, is a California-based environmental activist. Her 
28-year-old brother-in-law, Craig Amundson, was killed in the attack on the 
Pentagon. She traveled on behalf of his widow, Amber Amundson.

A third tour member speaking to the capacity audience at the Park Slope 
United Methodist Church was Medea Benjamin of Global Exchange.

The meeting exposed the cynicism and hypocrisy behind the campaign to use 
the victims of September 11 and their relatives to whip up popular support 
for the Bush administration's war drive as well as the attacks on democratic 
rights and civil liberties at home. This campaign has consciously avoided 
and covered up the thousands of civilian deaths in Afghanistan resulting 
from the US bombing. Not surprisingly, the Brooklyn meeting was virtually 
ignored by the mass media.

Kelly Campbell began her remarks by explaining her reason for traveling to 
Afghanistan: "The day that we held a memorial service for Craig Amundson—my 
brother-in-law and also my friend—we gathered to focus on his memory. We 
turned on the TV, and it was the day the US started bombing Afghanistan. I 
wanted to think about Craig, but I couldn't help but think about all the 
innocent lives that were about to be lost, and I realized more had to be done."

Ms. Campbell brought photographs of children whose stories she shared as she 
held up their pictures. A six-year-old living in a neighborhood where eight 
people were killed had stopped talking immediately after the attack. "Nobody 
knows why the neighborhood was bombed, except that it is near Kabul airport, 
which they suppose was the intended target," she said.

She then showed pictures of a nine-year-old girl and a ten-year-old boy who 
lived in a house that was bombed in the same neighborhood, next door to the 
one in which the eight people were killed. They too had stopped talking. 
"There is no such thing in Afghanistan as treatment for mental disorders," 
she reported. She also spoke of a 25- year-old mother with a seven-year-old 
son whose house was bombed. "They want to rebuild but have no money to 
rebuild. Both are severely traumatized."

A 20-year-old man in his house when it was bombed "took shrapnel in his 
leg," Campbell recounted. "He spent one month in the hospital before they 
decided it had to be amputated. The only prosthetic legs available in 
Afghanistan are wooden ones, which are very painful. 
This man had been working as a painter for his father before the bombing. 
His income had been sending his sister and brother to school, but now they 
can no longer go. This family also wants to rebuild, but there are no funds 
from the US government, which bombed their house."

Ms. Campbell described people who used to live and farm in an area next to a 
large crater made by a US bomb. Showing a picture of the crater, she added, 
"The people who lived near here can no longer farm due to the cluster bombs 
left in the area.... Everywhere we turned we met someone who had been 
affected by the bombing."

Rita Lasar was the next speaker. "Soon after September 11, I felt sick that 
in my brother's name other innocent people were going to be killed," she 
declared. "I spoke at peace rallies, but I knew that wouldn't do it, that 
more had to be done.

"Afghanistan is filled with the most generous, beautiful, good, kind, 
intelligent people I have met anywhere, " Ms. Lasar added. She described 
children in classrooms as "eager to learn" in spite of having next to 
nothing to work with, not to mention all of the problems created by their 
conditions of life. "They live in rubble— imagine sandcastles after the 
water has started to wash them away."

She described Kabul's Intercontinental Hotel—the best in town—as having 
neither hot nor cold running water, no working elevators, nor any heat in 
the middle of winter. Yet her living conditions on tour were far superior to 
those endured by most Afghans: "We talked with a family of 10 people living 
out in the cold, not because they don't have a home, but because cluster 
bombs surrounded their home and it was not safe for them to be there."

"People came to us after they had received no help either from their 
government or from the US government. They handed us lists of names of 
people who needed help and said to us, `Please give this to somebody and see 
if they can do anything for us.'" Lasar held up some of the lists she had 
been given.

She described a woman whose husband and seven children were killed in the 
bombing and who had no way to support herself. "She went to the US Embassy 
and was told, `Go away, we don't accept beggars.' We alerted the press and 
went back to the embassy with her. The gates were closed with Marines behind 
the gates. After breaking down and crying, she managed to tell her story to 
the press. We then got one of the Marines to take the letter telling her 
story and promise to give it to the top US official there."

Medea Benjamin from Global Exchange discussed the general impact of the US 
bombing: "The people here were so poor to begin with, after the bombing 
campaign began, they had nowhere to turn. There have been more casualties in 
this war than in the Balkan War. Why does the US continue to use cluster 
bombs, which most countries put in the same category as land mines?" She 
cited the report by Marc Herold of the University of New Hampshire, 
conservatively documenting the deaths of over 4,000 Afghan civilians since 
the bombing began.

The purpose of the Global Exchange-sponsored trip was, as Ms. Benjamin 
explained, to get the United States government to set up a massive fund for 
humanitarian aid to the Afghan victims of its assault; and further, to get 
the US government to give an accounting of how many Afghan civilians were 
killed in the bombing, and to explain how the deaths occurred. The tour 
participants were headed to Washington, DC the next evening to lobby 
Congress for these proposals.

It must be said that expectations the US government will exhibit any 
humanitarian concern for its Afghan victims is extremely naïve at best. The 
deaths and devastation being visited on Afghanistan are not the result of 
some mistake that can be corrected by a more humane imperialist policy. 
Rather than give an accounting of the number of deaths, US forces have 
continued their bombing campaign, and when confronted with their "mistakes" 
in the form of civilian deaths, regularly claim the victims were al Qaeda 
and Taliban fighters.

The latest such incident occurred on January 24, when US commandos killed 21 
village soldiers in an unprovoked pre-dawn raid on former school buildings 
that had been turned into weapons depots as part of a local disarmament 
campaign in the mountain village of Oruzgan, 100 miles north of Kandahar. No 
Taliban activity had been reported there in over a month, since the interim 
government took over in Kabul last December 22.
---------------------------------------------------------------------- 

Copyright 1998-2001
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved

*****

Bush Seeks To Restrict Hill Probes Of Sept. 11 
Intelligence Panels' Secrecy Is Favored 

By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 30, 2002; Page A04 

President Bush asked House and Senate leaders yesterday to allow only two 
congressional committees to investigate the government's response to the 
events of Sept. 11, officials said.

The president said the inquiry should be limited to the House and Senate 
intelligence committees, whose proceedings are generally secret. Senate 
Democratic leaders want a broader investigation, involving some committees 
that would be free to air their findings. The focus of the committee probes 
is likely to center on intelligence failures preceding the terrorist attacks 
that killed about 3,100 people.

A senior administration official said Congress "is already well set up 
through the intelligence committees to review intelligence matters, and 
those committees have a history of working with secret and classified 
documents that other committees lack. . . . The president thinks it's 
important for Congress to review events in a way that does not unduly burden 
the defense and intelligence communities as they are still charged with 
fighting a war."

Capitol Hill sources said Bush made the request of Senate Majority Leader 
Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) during a breakfast meeting with congressional 
leaders. The White House would not confirm that. The congressional sources 
said Vice President Cheney called Daschle last week with the same request.

Daschle told reporters that Cheney had "expressed the concern that a review 
of what happened on September 11 would take resources and personnel away 
from the effort in the war on terrorism." Daschle said the probe will start 
with the Intelligence Committee in an effort "to limit the scope and the 
overall review of what happened."

"But clearly I think the American people are entitled to know what happened 
and why at some point, just as they were desirous of knowing what happened 
after the Pearl Harbor attack," Daschle said. "We did that right during the 
early stages of World War II. So we haven't made any conclusions yet."

A Senate Democratic aide said one objection to limiting the investigation is 
that "most of what the Intelligence Committee does is behind closed doors 
and never sees the light of day. If there is an issue, the public deserves 
to know about it."

The two intelligence committees are planning a joint, bipartisan 
investigation. The Democratic aide said lawmakers are expected to look into 
what was known before Sept. 11 about the possibility of a major attack, "why 
our intelligence wasn't better -- why we didn't know," how different parts 
of the government responded, and perhaps whether the government is prepared 
for a future attack.

© 2002 The Washington Post Company 

*****

Bush's Speech Sends Shockwaves Around World By Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey 
Pravda.ru 
2-3-2
 
The amateurish, jingoistic, arrogant and ludicrous State of the Union speech 
has sent shockwaves reverberating around the world. 
  
The position of the British Foreign Office, regarding the speech, was made 
clear by a spokesperson, who declared that "we do not believe about 
everything (the US says)." He added that "We believe that in a long term, we 
can overcome disagreement by talking to each otherî. 
  
"President Bush's comments about Iran do not change British policy, which 
remains to engage with the Iranian government and to improve relations with 
a view to building a better understanding between our countries", he 
continued. 
  
Another Foreign Office spokesperson declared to the Iranian news agency, 
IRNA, that "Britain certainly has no wish to engage in any kind of 
confrontation." 
  
These comments come in the wake of the "axis of evil" speech in which George 
W. Bush appears to have got his geography wrong, naming Baghdad 
(predictably), Pyongyang (of course) and Teheran as the three countries 
which supposedly had their weapons of mass destruction pointing at the USA. 
  
Exactly why George Bush was allowed to include Teheran in his speech, after 
all the co-operation that the government of Iran has given to the USA in 
recent months, is the cause of a huge question mark among practically all 
the governments, and population, of the European Union. 
  
Iran's president Sayed Mohammad Khatami denounced Bush's outburst as 
"intervening, warmongering, insulting, a repetition of his past propagation, 
and worse than all, truly insulting towards the Iranian nation." 
  
He continued: "What is of top importance is that adopting such aggressive 
moods merely leads to further unity and solidarity among the Iranian nation 
in their confrontation with those governments whose appetite will never be 
saturated and are always intending to intervene in othersí affairs." 
  
Furthermore, he declared that "Iran is both a victim of terrorism and a 
victim of chemical weapons, which were generously donated to our enemies by 
those who intended to uproot the Islamic Revolution. Today, America insists 
on supporting the racist Zionist regime that resorts to all sorts of crimes 
against the Palestinians that are the most oppressed, most innocent nation 
in the world." 
  
Praising the USA as a 'great nation', the Iranian President declared that 
this country has an important role as a peace broker, while only too often 
its policies bring tyranny and injustice, cloaked in a disguise of freedom 
and individual liberty. 
  
The State of the Union speech was a monumental blunder, a gross 
miscalculation and a massive display of arrogance, which basically served to 
take away any degree of sympathy, to counter all feelings of commiseration 
and at a stroke, annul the outrage felt by the international community for 
the United States in the aftermath of September 11th. 
  
One wonders whether the President of the United States of America had been 
eating pretzels again - they pack a mighty punch, after all.

*****

Tehran Warns US Attack Would Be An 'Irreparable Mistake' 2-5-2

(AFP) - Iran warned the United States that any attack against it would be an 
"irreparable mistake" and denied US claims it was harbouring al-Qaeda members. 
  
Foreign ministry spokesman Hamid-Reza Asefi also dismissed President George 
W. Bush's charge last week that Iran is developing weapons of mass 
destruction. 
  
"I only hope the Americans will not make such a huge, irreparable mistake," 
Asefi told reporters Monday after being asked about the possibility of a US 
attack on the Islamic republic. 
  
"It would be better if American leaders expressed themselves on the basis of 
real facts and not their imagination, and if they furnished some proof," he 
said. 
  
"The recent US accusations against Iran are inspired and dictated by the 
Zionist regime, which shows yet again that the Americans are not sincere 
when they say they want rapprochement with Iran." 
  
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Sunday he had no doubt that 
Tehran helped members of the al-Qaeda network and its allies, Afghanistan's 
former ruling Taliban, escape into Iran from neighbouring Afghanistan. 
  
"We deny all reports about the presence of al-Qaeda members in Iran," Asefi 
said. "As far as we are concerned, our borders are closed and we are 
blocking all illegal entry." 
  
Asefi's remarks come amid a war of words between the two foes, which have 
not had diplomatic relations since 1980, several months after Islamic 
radicals seized the US embassy in Tehran. 
  
The verbal sparring was set off by Bush's claim, in his State of the Union 
address last Tuesday, that Iran, Iraq and North Korea constitute an "axis of 
evil" in the world. 
  
Government spokesman Abdullah Ramazan-Zadeh was also quoted by radio as 
describing Bush's remarks as "fundamentalist and contrary to the ideals of 
civilisation," and comparing the US president to a "Roman gladiator." 
  
Asked about alleged Iranian weapons of mass destruction, Asefi said, "If you 
are talking about the Bushehr nuclear plant, it is supervised, monitored and 
visited by the International Atomic Energy Agency and Iran is a signatory of 
all international conventions in this regard." 
  
Asefi also said Iran was opposed to threatened US strikes against its 
neighbour Iraq, with which its relations are still poor after their bitter 
1980-88 war. Tehran opposed all attacks against an Islamic state, he added. 
  
Asefi welcomed however the stance of the European Union and Russia, which 
had distanced themselves from the US sabre-rattling. "The world in general 
has not welcomed these American accusations against Iran," he said. 
  
Copyright © 2002 AFP. All rights reserved. 

*****

Iran Charges US Wants To Dominate The Planet By Rupert Cornwell
2-5-2

If it ever existed, the post-11 September diplomatic flirtation between Iran 
and the United States is over, and with it any hope that the attack on 
America might have ended 23 years of enmity. 
  
As recently as two months ago, the two countries were working on the interim 
government for Afghanistan, and conducting less visible meetings on a new 
relationship. Today they are trading insults. 
  
Less than 24 hours after Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defence, accused 
Iran of helping al-Qa'ida and Taliban fighters escape, Tehran said the US 
charges were based on "hallucinations not evidence". 
Mohammad-Ali Abtahi, a Vice- President and a member of the reformist 
faction, replied to President George Bush's claim that Iran belonged to an 
"axis of evil" by declaring that the US wanted to dominate the world, and 
was using threats to do so. 
  
The events have left no doubt that any brief rapprochement was built 
primarily on a common dislike of the Taliban, and the ancient principle that 
"my enemy's enemy is my friend". 
  
Some State Department officials now fear that Mr Bush's attack has made it 
hard for moderates to dispute what the hardline clerical rulers have always 
said ñ that the US has no intention of becoming a friend. 
  
http://news.independent.co.uk  

*****

Israeli Sources Say US To Attack Iraq In May By Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey
Pravda.ru
2-6-2

Israeli military sources claim that Iraq is to be attacked in May. 

The Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot quotes Israeli military sources as 
claiming that the United States of America is planning to attack Iraq in 
May. These sources claim that the Pentagon has been given the go-ahead to 
draw up attack plans in the second phase of the war against terrorism. 
  
It is further stated that contact is being made with opposition forces 
inside and outside Iraq, with a view to setting up a new government after 
Saddam Hussein and his regime is overthrown. 
  
Binyamin Eliezer, the Israeli Defence Minister, intends to request the USA 
to co-ordinate their attack with Israel, during his visit to the USA this 
week. Eliezer declared that this time the USA will not ask Israel to show 
restraint if there are any attacks on this country by Iraq. 
  
There have been repeated rumours that an attack on Iraq is imminent, and the 
State of the Union speech by George Bush last week, calling this country a 
member of an "axis of evil", did nothing to dispel the suspicion. 
  
One thing is a war against terrorism. Another is interfering in the internal 
affairs of sovereign nations. The dividing line is extremely fine. The 
stupidity of Osama Bin Laden made it possible for the USA to go 
globe-trotting, removing regimes which it deems hostile and replacing them 
with sycophants, all in the name of a war against terrorism. 
  
This war is legitimised by two countries, the USA and the UK, with the rest 
of the world looking passively on. Such a situation has even brought the 
wrath of the NATO Secretary-General, Lord Robertson, who claims that "even 
super-powers need allies and coalitions to supply bases, fuel, air space and 
forces". 
  
http://english.pravda.ru