From
the International Paper
Yossi Melman Ha'aretz, 17 September 2001
said “5 Israelis detained
for “puzzling behavior” after WTC tragedy, the five Israelis who
had worked for a moving company based in New Jersey are being held
in U.S. prisons for what the Federal Bureau of Investigation has
described as "puzzling behavior" following the terror attack on
the World Trade Center in New York last Tuesday. The five are expected
to be deported sometime soon.
The Los Angeles Times: There
must be no finger pointing based on ethnicity or religion. If Americans
turn on each other, those behind the heinous acts will be the winners.
Never again can this nation be quite so secure. Tuesday was a day
that changed America.
The Miami Herald: The
attacks exposed a special weakness in America's national security.
President Bush wants to spend billions more on a missile-defense
shield that would have been useless yesterday (September 11th, 2001).
In an article named “adding insult to nation’s
injury” Robert L. Jamieson Jr. a columnist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
wrote: “After the 1993
bombing at the World Trade Center, innocent Arab Americans were
on the receiving end of hate hurled by people who were mad, angry
and hurt. A few years later, Arab Americans were targeted again
after the Oklahoma City bombing. In that tragedy, the main culprit
turned out to be a white American man. So why is it so easy for
some of us to point fingers, blame Arab Americans and make the evil
of a few the burden of an entire people? For the most part, the
answer is racism.
In an article named “Americans cannot ignore
what their government does abroad” Seumas Milne wrote in the Guardian
Britain Thursday September 13, 2001
”Nearly two days after the horrific
suicide attacks on civilian workers in New York and Washington,
it has become painfully clear that most Americans simply don't get
it. From the president to passersby on the streets” then he added,
“why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities,
sacrificing their own lives in the process - or why the United States
is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries,
but across the developing world - seems almost entirely absent.
Already, the Bush administration is assembling an international,
coalition for an Israeli-style war against terrorism, as if such
counter-productive acts of outrage had an existence separate from
the social conditions out of which they arise. But for every (terror
network) that is rooted out, another will emerge - until the injustices
and inequalities that produce them are addressed”
In an article named “There is a legal way
out of this...” Geoffrey Robertson wrote in the Guardian Britain
Friday September 14, 2001
”We expect a hot blooded "retaliation"
rubber-stamped by NATO and legally justified by reference to the
primitive "right" of a state unilaterally to use force in self defense.
There will be no burden on the US to prove more than a suspicion
of guilt, and no questioning of the presidential proposition that
a state is as "guilty" as the terrorists it happens to harbor. This
is incorrect in law (unless those who run the harboring state know
of their plans) and affords no moral mandate for killing its innocent
and oppressed citizens. Two wrongs, in law as in logic, cannot make
a right”.
“The treaty lays down detailed mechanisms for bringing perpetrators
to justice, if not in their own country then at an international
criminal court. The most formidable opponent of international criminal
justice has been the Pentagon, allied with the Jesse Helms faction
of the Republican Party, obsessed with the notion that American
sovereignty would be degraded if an American were ever indicted
as a war criminal. Their latest wheeze has been to promote in Congress
the misnamed American Service Members Protection Act, designed to
sabotage the court by withdrawing US cooperation and permitting
the president to use force to free any American ever "captured"
by the Hague prosecutors.”
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