Frederick Pollack wrote:
<snip>
Our brave soldiers [...] will bring justice to bin Laden and his associates:
the only kind of justice now available. And thereby preserve you and your
kind's freedom to sentimentalize [...] The US government and people can be
mobilized to take what action necessary to avenge our victims
<snip>

and earlier:
<snip>
The Taliban leadership was given a chance to repudiate their paymaster
bin Laden and to turn him and Al-Qaeda over. They refused. The blood
of their people is on their hands far more than ours. The words
Dresden, Hitler, and Bomber Harris could be substituted with equal
validity.
<snip>

The number of the deaths in the WTC was roughly three times the annual US
death rate from child abuse alone. 40% of children in Kabul have lost at
least one parent during the civil and other wars.

How any sense of the sudden tragedy of the WTC and the much longer and
larger tragedy of Afghanistan has been progressively deformed (mainly but
not exclusively within the US; Cf Tony Blair) into decorative sentimentality
('our brave soldiers'), into a generalised hatred free of any moral
grounding ('the blood of their people is on their hands far more than
ours'); how real moral choices are glibly elided ('the only kind of justice
now available'), and how key concepts (here *justice* and *revenge*, *non
negotiable*, *surrender* and *dead* in various utterances of the divine
Donald Rumsfeld, the 1977 Protocol to the Geneva Convention notwithstanding)
have all been defining features of the past few manic weeks.

<The Taliban leadership was given a chance...>

Was it? The term 'war' was used more or less from the start. (And not by
simple mistake: it was a creative introduction, conferring a spurious
legitimacy on what was known to be about to happen and which subsequently
did.) Taleb leaders were ordered, collectively, through a megaphone,
to surrender UbL into US hands. No evidence was presented. This is not the
conventional route to cooperation between two nations.

According to the British judge who is hearing the (not unrelated) Lotfi
Raissi case, the evidence against Mr Raissi has been 'tenuous' at best.
Three men who ran the office of the Advice & Reformation Committee, Usama's
UK embassy according to some and easily walked to from my home, are also in
British custody. One of them, at least, is still resisting extradition for
the attack on the Kenyan embassy. So should Britain now be bombed?

<...to repudiate their paymaster...>

'Paymaster' is an OpEd cliché: long on rhetoric, short on meaning. In fact,
little seems to be known about the funding of the Taleban. And there are (at
least) three versions of how al Qa'ida receives its own funding. One is
probably as crazy as the spoof Nostradamus prophecies and/or the
Mossad theory; the other two are disputed. The crazy explanation is that al
Qa'ida funded itself by, say, short selling insurance stocks and/or buying
put options before September 11. The disputed explanations are (1) that UbL
is a rich man who doesn't need other funds and (2) that UbL is the
mastermind of hawala (or some perversion of hawala) whereby funds
transmitted by expat Pakistanis and Somalis (via, say, al Barakat) were
skimmed and used for terrorism.

These three explanations are by no means incompatible; however, they tend in
different directions. Taken together, they suggest immutable prejudice, not
an evidence-based conclusion.

<...and to turn him and Al-Qaeda over...>

This presupposes that it was in their power to do so. Since various US
officials have claimed, with who-knows-what degree of truth, that there are
10,000 members of al Qa'ida operating within Afghanistan and that 80% of al
Qa'ida operates elsewhere, what should be done about the other 40,000?

<They refused>

Wrong. They blew hot and cold. This was one of many indications that the
Taleban was a loose coalition and not the command and control structure that
Rumsfeld would have us believe. However, it was ignored. At one stage, the
Taleban offered to hand UbL to another Islamic country. They had also, some
considerable time _before_ September 11, tried to rid themselves of bin
Laden. That too had been ignored.

<The blood of their people is on their hands far more than ours>

This was Pilate's defence. And also the defence used by the School of the
Americas (now rechristened WHISC) against accusations that murderous SoA
graduates (such as Roberto d'Abuisson) were the implementers of de facto US
foreign policy.

President Allende was murdered on September 11, as it happens. Stand up if
you will please, Dr K.

After the 'prison riot' at Mazar i Sharif, where there were at one stage 'no
survivors' (I quote the BBC), corpses were found with their hands bound or
big toes tied together. This activity took place at the headquarters of the
fragrant General Abdul Rashid Dostum (whose previous deeds of derring-do
involving unarmed prisoners and tank tracks are part of the public record),
apparently under his supervision and certainly under the eyes, ears and
noses of the CIA So the subsequent US insistence that there was 'no
evidence' of a massacre is very deeply shaming.

<The words Dresden, Hitler, and Bomber Harris could be substituted with
equal validity.>

Are you by any chance suggesting that the fire-bombing of Dresden was _not_
a war crime? The phrase 'collateral damage', another creative evasion, arose
precisely out of the wish to avoid being accused of that sort of thing.

Christopher Walker