An intertransdimensional missive --'raw, no spelling corrections' -- from intrepid tripster Ken Kesey:

Because we are talking not just about war, this time, but about the war above the war: the Real War. This war has already been been waged, and it's not between the US and the Taliban, or between the Moslems and the Isralies or any of the familiar forces, but between the ancient gutwrenching bonebreaking fleshslashing way things have always been and the timerous and fragile way things might begin to be. Could begin to be. Must begin to be, if our lives and our children's lives are ever, someday, in the upheaving future, to know honest peace.

True, the warriors on our side of this Real War seem few and flimsey, but we have a secret advantage: we don't fight our battle out of Hate. Anger, yes, if we have to, but anger is enough. Hate is the flag the other side battles beneath. It is the ancient flag of fire and blood and agony, and it waves over the graves of millions and millions.

Our side's flag is a thin, airlight blue, drifting almost unseen against the sky. Our military march is a meadowlark's song among the dandolions. And our Real War rally isn't given any space at the United States Congress. Where can you hear it? Lots of places, if you listen. Across Dairy Queen counters. In the careful post office talk. The e-mail is where I've been hearing it, for days now, and the entries are getting clearer and more numerous. At first only ten or fifteen. Then fifty or sixty. And this morning more than three hundred!

::Ken Kesey, 'The Real War' via abuddhas memes

More defeatism from the New York Times...

In the Egyptian newspaper Al Gomhuria, Samir Ragab, who is said to be close to President Hosni Mubarak, asked: "Where are the Americans now? We all thought they were superhuman, equipped with invincible power, wealth and the ability to manipulate." Because Americans bomb while being unable to catch Mr. bin Laden, he said, "innocent civilians in Afghanistan who complain that they have not tasted beef for three years are suffering most of the casualties."

. . . The American notion that anger at America is simply resentment of its culture, that foreigners are unhappy because McBurgers outsell escargots or Stallone outsells Truffaut, is seen overseas as just more American smugness.

When foreign writers complain about America now, their complaints are quite specific, and foreign-policy oriented: America should not silently let the Israelis commit assassinations, bulldoze houses and colonize Palestinian land; America should pay attention to Muslim fury that American troops occupy the land of the Prophet Muhammad; America should not bomb dirt-poor Afghan cities with no antiaircraft defenses.

When old sores are scratched, they are usually about American foreign policies: Alfredo Pita, a Peruvian writer, recalled that the 1973 coup encouraged by Richard Nixon that killed Chile's elected president, Salvador Allende, also began on Sept. 11.

Eduardo Galeano, a Mexican journalist, asked why 5,000 New York deaths were televised, but not the deaths of 200,000 Guatemalans "sacrificed not by Muslim fanatics but by terrorist militias supported by the successive American governments."

::Donald G. McNeil, 'More and More, War Is Viewed as America's' via Cursor

A selection of American radio broadcasts in Afghanistan, posted by the monkeyfist collective:

Taliban leaders! By harboring Al Quaeda and their leader Usama bin Laden you have declared war on the United States, and by doing this you have just guaranteed your own demise. Hand over these criminals and you will save yourselves from destruction. By not turning over Usama bin Laden and Al Quaeda to stand trial you are showing the world you are weak, and that you need a criminal organization and its leader to protect you.

However, they cannot protect you from what will happen if you do not comply. Like all criminals they will try to hide from their impending punishment. They will leave you to fight the United States and our overwhelming military by yourselves. Our military is bigger, faster and stronger; with more modernized weapons and better-trained troops. You will be attacked by land, sea, and air. There will be no warning as to when and where we will attack. Destruction is imminent if our will is not met.

Ohhh, it's so forceful...

::Kendall Clark, the monkeyfist collective: 'US Broadcasts Propaganda into Afghanistan' via wood s lot

Seymour Hersh looks set to do it again:

Taliban troops wounded 12 US Delta Force commandos, injuring three men seriously, in a gun battle two weeks ago, it emerged last night.

The firefight between the élite special forces unit and the Taliban took place on the same night as a separate raid by US Rangers parachutists on an airfield near Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan. This assault was broadcast to the world as a morale-boosting success for the coalition.

No US soldiers were injured in that raid but according to a report released last night by the respected US journalist Seymour Hersh, the Delta Force unit was engaged in a much bloodier confrontation, in the same area.

::Severin Carrell and Andrew Gumbel, The Independent: 'US special forces injured in night raid on Kandahar'

A glossary of hip phrases from the Guardian:

Hawks and doves

Not the division between warmongers and peaceniks that you may expect. As the Bush administration prepared for war, the media divided its main players into "hawks" such as Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz (who talked of "ending states" that sponsor terrorism) and "doves" like Colin Powell. Though the terms are relative, Mr Powell once spoke of his wish to "cut the head off ... and kill" the Iraqi army, and - it appears - his mission before this war was to build multilateral backing for a US military action.

However, it is possible a "dove" such as Mr Powell supports a more limited war than Mr Wolfowitz. Anti-war sentiment is "dissent".


Moderate Arab opinion

Pro-western Arab opinion.

Non-specific threat

Now standard FBI jargon that allows it to issue a warning without compromising intelligence sources, or admitting how much / little it knows. Intended to sound terrifying / reassuring. May lose its impact.

Proportionate response

Means whatever you want it to, or alternatively nothing at all. A "proportionate response" to September 11 could have included the deliberate killing of 5,000 civilians (taking a life for a life) or a covert intelligence operation against al-Qaida (taking the necessary action to minimise the terrorist threat). The bombing of Afghanistan falls somewhere in between the two, but being a form of retaliation, is also a "proportionate response". Uniquely among the phrases on this list it holds an appeal to both hawks and doves (see above) as it covers both bases.

Simon Jeffery, The Guardian: War of Words

Common Dreams has posted a 1970 commentary from historian Arnold Toynbee. Some of his observations sound like today, some sound like dreams vanished irreclaimably into history:

People now still alive, who were born and brought up in the West before 1914, have lived to see the world turn a different color from what they had expected. By the time they were born, civilization had been gaining ground against barbarism for two centuries. Our forefathers had abolished the slave trade and then slavery itself. They had banned the baiting of lunatics, bulls and bears.

They had abrogated capital punishment for minor offenses. They had tried to reduce war to a contest between uniformed soldiers, and they had gone far towards succeeding in exempting civilians from being robbed and being killed or being evicted from their homes. They had established the International Red Cross. On the strength of these partial victories for civilization, we had come to believe that barbarism was fighting its last rear guard action and that it was now doomed to be driven off the field. We expected that parliamentary representative constitutional government and the rule of law were going to spread from the Western countries that had first achieved them to all the rest of the world.

Today we are wondering whether these achievements of our civilization are going to survive even on their own native ground.

::Arnold Toynbee, via Common Dreams, 'Human Savagery Cracks Thin Veneer'

A Guardian story that reads like a collaboration between Evelyn Waugh and John le Carre, under duress:

While the B52s and the F14s have rumbled and howled through the clear skies over Kabul and Kandahar, a quieter conflict has been taking place, pitting the intelligence services of the US-led coalition against the those of the Taliban. It is being fought in the air-conditioned lounges of the luxury homes of the top Afghan commanders, in the panelled chancelleries of foreign ministries, in dark corners of filthy bazaars and in rooms with mud floors in timber-roofed Afghan huts. But, though there is no obvious battlefield, it is a war as fiercely fought as its more overt counterpart.

Though on the map Afghanistan divides nicely - in the north there is the opposition alliance, largely composed of Afghanistan's ethnic minorities, across the rest of the country are the Taliban, largely drawn from the Pashtun tribes which predominate - the ground reality is far more complex. It is a shifting three dimensional jigsaw of tribal, religious, ethnic and political allegiances, both national and international.

But where conventional military planners see challenges, less conventional operatives see opportunities. The warriors in the secret war are the spies and specialists of a dozen nations, ranging from Turkey to India, all vying for some advantage in the new 'Great Game'.

The labyrinthine contours of the Great Game may already be flummoxing the Allied campaign:

The military failure so far follows the intelligence failure. According to M J Gohel, the director of the Asia-Pacific Foundation in London, "Washington is beginning to realize that they've made a big blunder in putting so much faith in the ISI [Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence]." The Americans had placed their faith in the ISI for military intelligence but "Washington is finding that information useless or worse, designed to delay the effectiveness of the bombing". The British military that had been skeptical earlier is now turning resistant to a continuation of blind bombing.

::Jason Burke, The Guardian: 'The new 'Great Game': Torture, treachery and spies - covert war in Afghanistan' via wood s lot
::Samanta Ten, Asia Times Online: 'Differences emerge between US and Britain over war' via Cursor

Same news organization. Same day. Same story?

The New York Times: 'B-52's Slam Kabul Front Lines, Cheering Opposition to Taliban'.

An opposition commander watching the Kabul raids from the roof of his house today in the village of Rabat told Reuters, "These attacks are spot on!" He said he saw flames and smoke rise from positions used by the Taliban to shell the Northern Alliance opposition at the Bagram airbase, about 35 miles north of the capital.

"The bombardment was very effective," an opposition spokesman, Waisuddin Salik, told The Associated Press.

The New York Times: 'Taliban's Foes Say Bombing Is Poorly Aimed and Futile'

"The American bombs were the biggest I have seen in my life, but they missed the Taliban."

All along this stretch of rolling hills near the Tajik border, where Taliban and Northern Alliance soldiers are separated in some places by no more than a few hundred meters, the soldiers gave identical reports: that the waves of American bombs that fell here delivered plenty of flash and thunder but appeared to have largely missed their targets.

. . . In an interview at his headquarters just a few kilometers from the Taliban targets the American bombers were trying to destroy, Deputy Defense Minister Atiqullah Baryalai complained that the American use of heavy bombers to strike Taliban targets was a largely futile enterprise.

He complained that the American officials planning the campaign appeared to be disregarding the advice of the Afghans who know better.

"Mr. Rumsfeld chooses the targets in America," Mr. Baryalai said. "This is our country. We know it best. If I were the defense minister of America, I could use his weapons better than he."

Mr. Baryalai gave a somewhat rosier view of American strikes than many of his local commanders, who complained that as few as three bombs out of 30 had struck Taliban positions.

But he said that the B-52s - the heaviest bombers in America's arsenal-were too lumbering to hit the zigzag pattern of Taliban positions, and were unable to fire into hillsides, where he said many Taliban soldiers were hiding in caves.

Mr. Baryalai said that the B-52s were showing the same disappointing results on the Taliban lines near Kabul, where he said the heavy bombers had apparently missed all their targets.

::Terence Neilen, New York Times: 'B-52's Slam Kabul Front Lines, Cheering Opposition to Taliban'
::Dexter Filkins, New York Times, 'Taliban's Foes Say Bombing Is Poorly Aimed and Futile' via Cursor

. . . the bombardment has complicated efforts to form a "Southern Alliance" among the Pashtuns dominant the south of Afghanistan. Angered by the attacks, some Pashtuns seem to have rallied to the Taliban.

::New York Times: 'Trouble in Deploying Commandos Is Said to Hurt U.S. Air Campaign'

I should have posted this a couple days ago. Infolibre, wood s lot, Robot Wisdom and others have done so already.

This page attempts to convey the chilling effect that responses to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have had on information availability on the Internet as well as some sense of the effect on people trying to provide this information.

Currently, this page tracks the following:

* Websites Shut Down by US Government
* Websites Shut Down by Other Governments
* Websites Shut Down by Internet Service Provider
* Websites Shut Down or Partially Removed by Website Owner
* US Government Websites That Shut Down or Removed Information
* US Government Requests to Remove Information
* Media Professionals Terminated or Suspended
* Other Employees Terminated or Suspended
* Related Incidents
* Related Links

::Electronic Frontier Foundation: Chilling Effects of Anti-Terrorism (Thanks to James, et al...)

With any given posting he makes on the New York Press Daily Billboard I find I either agree with Andrey Slivka and admire his sadistic turn-of-phrase, or viscerally disagree and end up wincing. It pains me to admit it, but I suspect he's right about this one, though:

I’d be surprised if the country’s mood weren’t accurately captured by the website nukethemiddleeast.com, which offers a collection of war-related amusements, including attack simulations you can download and play around with.

Entering the site, I appreciate the intro expressing 'sincere condolences' for the victims of 9/11 and their families, followed up with 'Let's do it', let the megadeath begin.

Playing the actual game, I was struck with how empty an experience it was to nuke a given country. You choose your target, do your clicking on the interface, see some dots move on the readout, and learn that the target was annihilated. How unsatisfying.

But as consolation you are immediately invited to 'choose another target'.

::New York Press Daily Billboard
::Andrey Slivka, NYP DB'Country People, City Mice'
::Nuke The Middle East, 'Attack Sim' Flash required.

Hey, this war's no fun! Bring back Stormin' Norman! We wanna see some surgical strikes and have some parades!

Sticking with admirable dedication to the quagmire script, after a couple days of criticism of the military campaign creeping into the mainstream, the best and the brightest have begun blaming the media for its shortcomings.

William Saletan condenses the various responses to critical coverage, arguing that reporters' 'political bias in favor of their country is being overwhelmed by professional biases that skew their coverage the other way, undermining the morale of the United States rather than that of the Taliban'.

Let's set aside whether criticism might be a reasonable response to current affairs, or which 'professional biases' (factuality? accuracy?) are suspect, or how American media could reasonably be expected to undermine Taliban morale. (They blow up TV sets, don't they?) What interests me is what the 'morale' is needed for on the home front. Americans aren't being asked to do anything except to shop and to sit apathetically while special interests loot the treasury and lawmakers strip them of their rights. And nobody does passive consumption as an expression of liberty better than Americans.

Presumably the concern is that the public might lose enthusiasm for relentlessly bombing one of the most miserable places on earth for no apparent strategic reason. The images from Afghanistan are undeniably potent, but criticism of the American media seems a classic case of blaming the messenger, and a little ungrateful besides. They're doing all they can to help. The New York Times reports that 'the burden of defending America at home is being borne by American television news shows, which are careful not to offend viewers with images or reports that cast the United States in a negative light.'

In accordance with a directive from CNN chairman Walter Isaacson, reports of civilian casualties must be accompanied by a disclaimer reminding viewers about that WTC attack that everyone has forgotten, and assurances that the Pentagon is doing everything it can to minimize civilian deaths -- short of curtailing an ineffective bombing campaign.

Interestingly, this regulation only applies to the American network, not to CNN International, which bears the burden of competing with media that acknowledges reality.

Americans should consider themselves lucky they are being shielded from international opinion, because at the moment it's not terribly sympathetic to the plight of the Allies. Tony Blair, hoping for an encore of his much-hailed diplomatic tour prior to the campaign, has received a considerably cooler reception this time out. Especially embarrassing was having to endure a lecture on human rights from one of the most barbaric regimes on earth:

[Syria's leader] Mr. Assad, dispensing with the usual diplomatic niceties, used a joint press conference to rebuff Mr Blair over the bombing of Afghanistan and Syria's policy of providing a haven to anti-Israeli groups classified by both the US and Britain as terrorists.

Diplomatically, it was a disaster. Mr Blair has not looked as uncomfortable in the presence of a foreign leader since an outburst on Chechnya by the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, during a joint press conference in London last year.

. . . It now looks a blunder. The Syria trip joins the list of growing diplomatic setbacks since Mr Blair and the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, embarked on a series of whirlwind tours after the September 11 attacks. Mr Straw ran into trouble in Iran and Israel and Mr Blair was snubbed by Saudi Arabia two weeks ago.

Mark Steel's column in the Independent is characteristically scathing on the coordinated urging never to forget the horror of September 11th:

Still, as it's "never forget" week, two weeks ago the US military announced they had "run out of targets" in Kabul. But this weekend they announced that Kabul had been subjected to "the two heaviest nights of bombing so far". So they suddenly found some targets, did they? They looked at their maps and said: "Oh what clots we are. There's about 50 tank factories here, we've been mistaking them for post offices. And a suicide-bomber recruitment centre, you can only just see it on the crease in the A-to-Z."

Or might it be that the Taliban hung opposition leader Abdul Haq, and in revenge we had to bomb something? That would explain the array of frazzled civilians, although Tony Blair had another explanation. "The Taliban do quite deliberately make sure that they have their military hardware in areas where there are bound to be difficulties to bomb." The cheating bastards. If they had any decency they'd put all their military hardware in an airship and float it over the US navy, and their troops in a fairground under a sign saying "Kill a fundamentalist and win a beach ball."

One reporter, on Sky News, said the US attitude to civilian casualties was: "We suffered thousands of civilian casualties in New York and Washington." So maybe that's the idea, to even it up and then everyone will feel better. CNN should have a big chart with the current tally, like they have on Comic Relief. Then the American version of Gaby Roslin can shriek: "Ooh, someone's rung in from Kandahar to say a family of six has been blown up, which takes us close to the thousand mark. But there's a long way to go so remember, keep those casualties rolling in."

::

A special bonus to Blowback's regular readers (all you irregular readers avert your eyes): some shameless Gallic-style rumour-mongering:

Two months before September 11 Osama bin Laden flew to Dubai for 10 days for treatment at the American hospital, where he was visited by the local CIA agent, according to the French newspaper Le Figaro.

The disclosures are known to come from French intelligence which is keen to reveal the ambiguous role of the CIA, and to restrain Washington from extending the war to Iraq and elsewhere.

Bin Laden is reported to have arrived in Dubai on July 4 from Quetta in Pakistan with his own personal doctor, nurse and four bodyguards, to be treated in the urology department. While there he was visited by several members of his family and Saudi personalities, and the CIA.

The CIA chief was seen in the lift, on his way to see Bin Laden, and later, it is alleged, boasted to friends about his contact. He was recalled to Washington soon afterwards.

I feel compelled to add that the basis of this story is extremely shaky... But the mere fact that French intelligence is up to this sort of stuff renders it somewhat newsworthy.

::William Saletan, Slate, 'Bad News Bearers' via Cursor
::Allessandra Stanley, New York Times, 'Battling the Skepticism of a Global TV Audience'
::Molly Ivins, Chicago Tribune via Common Dreams: 'The Oppressive World We May Unwittingly Create'
::Matt Wells, The Guardian: 'CNN to carry reminders of US attacks'
::Ewen MacAskill and Patrick Wintour, The Guardian: 'How Blair's Syria gamble failed'
::Mark Steel, The Independent: 'We're going wobbly (and the Taliban are cheating)'
::Anthony Sampson, The Guardian: 'CIA agent alleged to have met Bin Laden in July'
::Joseph Fitchett, International Herald Tribune: 'Dubai Clinic Denies Report' (Thanks Sandra)