Sami Ullah was asleep when it happened, and so his friends and neighbours had to tell him about the bomb that struck his house and what it did to him and his family. How the American planes, which had been over earlier in the evening, had returned after everyone went to bed and how, instead of the Taliban base two miles away, they dropped their bombs on a residential area of the town of Tarin Kot.

Mr Ullah's injuries are obvious enough even now ­ deep cuts caused by the collapsing house and the fragment of something in his belly that might be bomb shrapnel. One of his cousins was also pulled alive from the rubble but no one else was. In the 11 hours between the explosion and the moment when he finally regained consciousness, the bodies of Mr Ullah's wife, his four children, his parents, and five of his brothers and sisters had been lifted from the rubble of their home and buried.

What do you say to a stranger who tells you he has just lost every member of his immediate family? All you can decently do is ask questions.

When did it happen? On Friday night or early Saturday morning. Where? In a suburb of Tarin Kot, capital of the Afghan province of Oruzgan. And why? But Mr Ullah, who is not familiar with the phrase "collateral damage" or "just war" does not have an answer.

In the 19 days of the bombing campaign, many terrible things have been reported but the scenes at the Al-Khidmat Al-Hajeri hospital, where Mr Ullah lay last night, are the most pathetic I have seen. In one ward lay a woman named Dery Gul, about 30 years old, with her 10-year-old daughter, Najimu, and a baby named Hameed Ullah. The little girls have bruised and cut faces; the cheek of the baby is cut neatly in a T shape, as if by a knife. But to understand how lucky they were you only have to look at their mother.

Her face is half-covered with bandages, her arm wrapped in plaster. "The bomb burned her eyes," says the doctor. "The whole right side of her body is burned." The reason Ms Gul is so battered and her daughters so lightly injured, they say, is because she cradled them.

From the Pakistani city of Quetta, where the injured people were carried late on Tuesday, the town of Tarin Kot is just a dot in the middle of the map of Afghanistan, traversed by a single road, surrounded by contour lines. But even if it amounts to no more than a few thousand mud houses with a handful of administrative buildings, it is a provincial capital ­ an Afghan York or Norwich. Yes, the people in the hospital yesterday said, of course there were Taliban there; but, no, they were miles away from Sami Ullah, Dery Gul, the little girls and their dead relatives.

There had been bombing earlier in the evening, Sami Ullah said, and the military camp had been hit. "There were four bombs that hit the Taliban," he said, "but many more bombs fell on the houses."

While some of the villagers were pulling their neighbours out of the rubble, more bombs had fallen, and more people had been hurt ­ "about 10 people were injured, and 20 were killed". But the danger appeared to have passed by the time the family went to sleep. If the planes roared overhead, they did not wake them and perhaps those who died ­ 12 in Sami Ullah's house, eight in the home of the mother and her girls ­ did not even know what had happened to them.

What then went wrong? The Pentagon has already admitted this week bombing an old people's home in Herat with a simple targeting error. Two weeks ago, bombs killed dozens in the village of Karam where, according to the local people, there had once been an Osama bin Laden camp which had moved years before. Other stories like it suggest that in some cases American intelligence is simply out of date.

But there is a third possibility ­ that the Taliban are deliberately moving military personnel and equipment close to civilian areas, turning their oblivious inhabitants into de facto human shields.

In another hospital in Quetta yesterday, a nurse told of how nine days ago the Taliban had turned up at her family's house and ordered them to leave. "They said it was for our own safety, because there was a barracks a few hundred metres away," she said.

"But after we had left they moved Taliban soldiers in and stayed there themselves. Afterwards the bombs did fall, and my house was destroyed and the civilian people who stayed behind were hurt too."

"We heard the bombs falling often," said Mr Ullah, as I start to run out of questions, "but we didn't feel afraid because everyone said that American bombs were accurate, and that they would bomb the Talibs, but not the innocent people."

The American broadcasters have a phrase which they repeat in reporting civilian casualties in Afghanistan: "The claims cannot be independently confirmed". And, of course, there is no way to check on anything that the people at the Al-Khidmat Al-Hajeri hospital say.

But if this is all a hoax perpetrated by the Taliban, why does Mr Ullah speak of them with such disdain? And would even the Taliban mutilate a baby to win a political point? I believe that Sami Ullah and Dery Gul and her girls are what they appear ­ innocent victims of an increasingly cack-handed war, and that there will be many, many more of them before it is close to being over.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

Back in America, poor people are also going hungry. USA Today's cover story for its October
30 edition carries headings proclaiming "Tough times for laid-off, low-income workers," "After
attacks, the jobless rate climbs, and assistance is harder to come by for the working poor" and
"Unemployment claims at 10-year high." The story reports that unemployment was up from 5.5
million in September 2000 to 7 million in September 2001.
Haziza, a 12 year old girl from Kabul, Afghanistan, helped find her mother and baby brother dead in the rubble of their
home on the first night of the U.S. bombing in early October.

In the N.Y. Times on October 30, from Peshawar, Pakistan, Barry Bearak reports that Haziza said she recalls two still
bodies, "their faces crushed and covered with blood." Beneath a numbingly depressing sub-head of "Bombs, death,
flight, and now a new life in squalor," Bearak relates how Haziza now lives with her father and older brother in "the
wretchedness of ...one of Peshawar's many squatter camps that teem with Afghan refugees" who have fled the
bombing of their homeland. "Haziza sleeps on the dank concrete of their single room,...Around them is poverty's
familiar cavalcade--naked children wallowing in the mud, grown men despairing in idleness, chickens foraging in
garbage heaps, sewage odors spoiling each breeze."

Hugh Pope of the Wall Street Journal reports on October 30 from the Makaki refugee camp in Afghanistan about the
refugees who have little sympathy for the Taliban. However, a refugee named Abdulaziz, who arrived yesterday with six
families of relatives after 20 days on the move, said, "We don't believe in America, the people are the target. For every
two Taliban they kill, they kill 20 of us. The Taliban have plenty to eat,...but the people go hungry."

Back in America, poor people are also going hungry. USA Today's cover story for its October 30 edition carries
headings proclaiming "Tough times for laid-off, low-income workers," "After attacks, the jobless rate climbs, and
assistance is harder to come by for the working poor" and "Unemployment claims at 10-year high." The story reports
that unemployment was up from 5.5 million in September 2000 to 7 million in September 2001.

With more than 350,000 jobs lost since September 11, economists are predicting that as many as 1.5 million more
jobs might be lost in the next three quarters. This will sorely test the efficacy of the 1996 "welfare reform" as some
welfare recipients are becoming ineligible as businesses are laying off folks.

Some states have even reduced the 5-year lifetime cap on how long folks can receive welfare. Social service support
agencies like food banks have been strained due to donations to special emergency relief funds for September 11.

Professionals have been losing their jobs and unskilled workers are at a disadvantage in vying for jobs with them.
Unfortunately, unemployment benefits are woefully inadequate with most of them being below the poverty level. Fewer
than 40% of jobless Americans received unemployment benefits last year.

The Wall Street Journal reports that according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, big corporations laid off 117,000
workers last month after September 11. While poor and working class people are being laid off by big corporations
and neglected by government, the U.S. House of Representatives gave huge tax breaks to big business at the expense
of fired workers in the economic "stimulus" bill they passed last week.

The $100 billion bill is mainly a big corporate tax boondoggle that would speed up depreciation schedules for
businesses and repeal the corporate alternative minimum tax that has required corporations with heavy deductions and
tax breaks to pay at least some federal income tax.

The corporate alternative minimum tax repeal would give the corporations $24.4 billion next year with Ford Motor Co.
getting $2.4 billion, IBM-$1.4 billion, General Motors-$832 million, General Electric-$671 million, Chevron-$314 million,
Enron-$254 million, K-Mart--$102 million, U.S. Steel-$39 million, and Kroger-$9 million.

Commenting on the 216-214, mostly party-line vote, House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt said, "This bill is a giant tax
giveaway to the largest corporations" and that "The workers who have lost their jobs get crumbs from this bill." Others
said the Republicans were rewarding their largest donors.

This piece of trickle-down federal government largesse for the rich now goes to the U.S. Senate where, hopefully, the
bill will be amended to cut back on the big breaks for the corporations and concentrate more on increasing
unemployment benefits and subsidizing health care coverage for unemployed workers. South Carolina Congressman
Lindsey Graham voted for the corporate giveaway and he will be endorsed on Thursday by retiring Strom Thurmond to
take Thurmond's seat in the Senate.

South Carolina is a bottom tier state in per capita income and is facing rising unemployment, declining tax revenues,
and budget cuts that will affect such vital services as health care for the poor and public education. Graham has already
raised more than $2,000,000.00 for his campaign for the U.S. Senate with much of it coming from the big corporate
interests who will benefit the most from the stimulus package.

I wonder what would happen if some poor, laid-off workers from South Carolina or raggedly refugees from Afghanistan
showed up to dine at the $1,000.00-per-head luncheon of the Republican Senatorial Committee where Graham will
receive the blessing of Strom Thurmond to take his fabled seat in that august body?



L´Etat, une fiction immaginaire...c´est tout!

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State controls, because they are afraid! Afraid of what? That you copy them....

Preventing Terrorism , just say the truth now!

On April 4, 1967, exactly a year before he was assassinated, the Reverend Dr.
Martin Luther King summed up what many feel provoked the September 11
attacks: "the greatest purveyor of violence on the planet -my own government."

But we should not feel guilty! The government's militarism does not represent the
people! From Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States", pages 545
and 558: "By 1975, public opinion polls showed that '65 percent of Americans
oppose military aid abroad because they feel it allows dictatorships to maintain
control over their population.'" But Congress has given military aid to the Afghans
since 1980 and as recently as May of this year sent the Taliban $43 million to "fight
drugs."

The 1975 polls quantify what President Eisenhower stated: "The people want
peace; indeed, I believe they want peace so badly that the governments will just
have to step aside and let them have it." The government's military policies are in
the control of the weapons manufacturers, the biggest business on earth according
to the UN Research Institute. They can buy the most congressmen, who then vote to
keep them number one. Eisenhower warned, in his farewell address to the nation:
"We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or
unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist."

The week following the 9/11 events the stock market suffered its worst decline
since 1940, but if you owned stock in weapons manufacturers you'd have made a
killing: the seven top gaining stocks (by percentage and by points) that week were
all military (details on request).

There is a serious and comprehensive proposal to rectify this and other failures of
the government to represent us. It was developed by one of the key people who
brought peace in Vietnam. U.S. Senator Mike Gravel in 1971 single-handedly
filibustered the Senate until they agreed to end the draft after 2 more years. At great
personal and professional risk, he officially released the Pentagon Papers which
exposed the lies and duplicity bulwarking our Vietnam policy. He was the first to
oppose nuclear power. His organization Philadelphia II is preparing an amendment
to the Constitution to permit We the People to propose and vote for the laws we
want, in parallel to existing legislative bodies. Then we can vote to change the
government's wicked military policies which arm our enemies and make us all the
target of the oxymoronic "holy war."

This is not going to be "instant democracy" or even the "fast-track" which the
President wants from Congress for trade issues. Our proposal includes extensive
hearings, deliberations by randomly-selected "citizen juries" and public information.
Claims by Washington Post uber-pundit David Broder that the initiative process in
24 US States is in the pockets of big money are largely false. The only academic
studies of this show quite the opposite. See  http://Vote.org/gerber. Most problems
with initiatives are caused by the limitations imposed by the legislatures, which our
proposal addresses.

We're not going to beg Congress for this amendment making them share power
with us! (Gravel and others tried that in 1977, to no avail.) We're going to put the
Democracy Amendment in the Constitution the way We the People originally
ratified the Constitution -ourselves. This is called First Principles, known to few
besides constitutional lawyers. We are convening a symposium to address this and
other matters on February 16-18 in historic Williamsburg, Virginia. All details are on
our web site at  http://ni4d.org.

There are many other reasons for us sharing law-making power with politicians.
This way we learn responsibility instead of being treated like children --abused
children. It gives us an incentive to educate ourselves. It gives politicians some
competition and incentive to do better. 100 years of state initiatives show an
excellent track record of legislation; much was later adopted by Congress (see
 http://Vote.org). The 9/11 attacks give us a new reason: If the plane which crashed
in Pennsylvania had hit the US Capitol as the hijackers apparently planned, the US
would now be without a legislative branch of government. The "Legislature of the
People" we propose would be everywhere, impossible to target.

Don't hate the government, become the government!


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It is time for President Bush to stop the cheer-leading and speak the truth.

He said last Thursday, "This great nation will never be intimidated. . . . Life in
America is going forward."

Who is he trying to kid? Last Friday at Los Angeles airport I saw people trying to
check their baggage - standing in a
line that was at least 200 yards long. I stood in five separate lines to identify
myself and my carryon luggage. The
soldiers in fatigues with submachine guns reminded me of a Third World country.

The politicians live in their own unreal world, with no idea of what's happening in
America. How many times has Air
Force One been late taking off? How many security lines have Donald Rumsfeld,
Tom Ridge, and Dick Cheney stood
in?

They care little about the traveling businessman who now must cut his work short
at lunchtime in order to catch a 5pm
flight. Or the individual who must get up at 4am to catch a morning flight.

Has the President noticed the hundreds of billions of dollars being added to
federal, state, and local government
budgets - spending piled on top of previous budgets, spending that's causing
huge deficits and tax increases,
spending that's coming out of the hide of American taxpayers?

When will he say straight out: "America rules the world by force, and the price of
that is for you to pay high taxes and
live in a nation that looks more and more like a police state."

No Neutrals

President Bush says, "You're either with us or against us."

Does that mean he'll bomb neutral Switzerland - the island of freedom, privacy,
and security in the midst of socialist
Europe - if it doesn't confiscate private bank accounts and otherwise act on every
whim of our President?

Why doesn't he simply tell the truth: "America rules the world and I rule America.
You will do as I say or I'll kill your
people."

Opposition

The President keeps telling us that the world supports the American war against
Afghanistan. But the truth is that he
has bought the support of foreign leaders with your money - while public opinion
polls show people in foreign countries
are overwhelmingly opposed to American military attacks.

Why doesn't he just tell the truth: "We are destroying the last vestiges of love for
America around the world - but that's
the price we must pay for me to become powerful and popular at home beyond
my wildest dreams."

Time for the Truth

When you know some of what politicians tell you are lies, you have to wonder how
many of their other statements are
lies as well.

What I want is the truth. I'd like to think I'm mature enough to handle whatever that
may be. And I could prepare for the
future much better if someone told me the truth - instead of all this rah-rah stuff.

America isn't leading the world. Leaders lead by example. And America is
providing no example of individual liberty,
personal responsibility, small government, or peace. America rules the world.
Rulers rule by force. They may succeed
temporarily, but at an awful cost.

It is long past time for the truth - the truth that many more Americans will have to
die to satisfy the politicians' lust for
power.

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