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1. nuclear bombs
when Bush warned of the Al-Qaeda's potential nuclear capability, many people (including myself) regarded it as mothing more than a cheap piece of paranoia-feeding misdirection. the news that Turkish police have just last week managed to catch wideboy gangsters selling weapons-grade uranium on the black market makes me nervous - to say the least.
2. daisy-cutters!
meanwhile, over in Afghanistan, the US has moved from heinously-expensive 'smart' bombs, to the portable minefield by any other name that is the cluster bomb - into a phase of carpet bombing (until recently, even derided as part of a dishonourable past by the US military themselves) - and now...
laydeez and gannelmen, i give you the single - most - destructive - bomb (short of the nuuuuclear option - it quite literally sets - the air - on - fire - vapouriiiiises everything inside a square - kilometre - it's the
daisy-cutter!
at least two of these confirmed dropped today.
3. hunger
a big fave since biblical times - read it and weep:
quote:Experienced, respected food aid organizations warn that even before the bombing of Afghanistan began on October 7, some 7,500,000 Afghans were -- through a gut-wrenching combination of poverty, drought, war, dislocation, and repression -- at risk of starving to death this winter. When the bombing began, almost all delivery of food from the outside world stopped. Now, roads and bridges are destroyed, millions more people are dislocated, and the snow is steadily approaching from higher elevations and from the north.
Seven and a half million people at risk of dying in a matter of months. That's three times the number of people Pol Pot took years to kill. Thirty-five times the number that died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, combined. If 5,000 died on September 11 (a number that reports are now suggesting is vastly inflated), we're talking the equivalent number of deaths to ten World Trade Centers, every day, for 150 days. Slow, painful deaths. Entirely avoidable deaths. Deaths whose sole cause is not the United States, but most of which can still be prevented -- except that the United States is refusing to allow them to be prevented.
That's today. What will happen if millions of Afghans die this winter? How much future terrorism will the dunderheads of the Bush Administration have inspired then? If several million Islamic sisters and brothers starve to death, innocent civilians trapped between winter and the rage of America, how many of Islam's 1.2 billion adherents -- or the five billion other people on earth -- are going to take George Bush's proclamations about eradicating "terrorists" and "evildoers" to heart, and label him, and us, as the prime examples?
a caveat, here - i've seen reports in the media from NGOs themselves that would seem to suggest the 7.5 million figure is a worst case scenario, and - despite everything, they feel they've done enough to stave off death on this scale (though, obviously, there's no way of knowing - difficult to get reliable info from a warzone...)
as apathy and plain old boredom seize the public, it seems the stakes have been raised again.
- more on this in the lo-tech terror thread.
[ 08-11-2001: Message edited by: autopilot disengaged ] |
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