By A.V. Krebs
Editor\Publisher The Agribusiness Examiner

Dear Friends and Colleagues:

Yesterday, September 11, 2001, a day that began, where I live, under a bright sunny blue sky, similar to that same one that greeted people arriving for work in New York City and Washington D.C., was going to be the day that I finally after innumerable delays was to be about the business of posting Issue #125 of The Agribusiness Examiner.

But just as I still see in my mind's eye exactly where I was standing and who I was with when on those other days of infamy -- December 7, 1941 and November 22, 1963 -- so to will I remember my disbelief when first I began making my check of the several online major daily newspapers that I puruse each day for relevant news items, and the first paper I examined left me stunned with the news of the unspeakable terror that had been visited upon the Big Apple and our nation's capital.

For the next 36 hours, just as I listened to the radio continuously for 24 hours in those dark days of December, 1941 and those four disbelieving days in November, 1963, I listened and watched the news on TV unfold from lower Manhattan and the Pentagon.

Watching speechless as those twin 110-story monuments to capitalism imploded and became the burial grounds for thousands of innocent men and women, I could not help but think of the time that I worked for the National Sharecroppers Fund, with offices in lower Manhattan and each morning about that same time, commuting from Central New Jersey, I would emerge from the "tubes" below the Trade Center and transfer to the subway line that would take me to my office.

And as I continued watching the news and listening to the commentary in the hours that followed that horrendous event I found myself, maybe even perhaps as an emotional defense mechanism, becoming more and more of the journalist than just an idle television viewer, impatient at times with the incompleteness of the news and the inane comments by many of the nation's so-called experts on international "terrorism" and military affairs.

The most frustrating aspect, however, of the reporting that I was witnessing during that time was due to the fact that I still think of myself as an ol' school journalist -- principally I still believe any good news stories should contain the "5W's and H!!!" -- Who? What? When? Where? Why? and How?

Throughout the agonizing hours of the "attack on America" most every story and commentary that I saw fulfilled to varying degrees only four of the five W's... and, of course, by simply viewing the unbelievable pictures and film television provided us throughout the day and night the public -- saw the how?

The fact though that for the most part TV made little effort to answer that all-important fifth W -- why? -- called into serious question in my mind whether we as a nation were actually learning anything from the events of September 11, 2001???

For to truly understand what happened on that day it is essential that we deal with the question -- why? -- why this carnage took place? For we need as a nation, as a self-proclaimed "global power," to ask what have we done to inspire such hatred, .such anger, such contempt, to motivate fellow human beings to be so cold-blooded and unrepentant killers?

Make no mistake about it, the perpetrators of the World Trade Center and Pentagon carnage should stand condemned and brought to justice before the world, but at the same time the words of the Washington Post's outstanding sports columnist Thomas Boswell rings true. He writes:

"For many Americans, including me, our lives have been conducted in a society where nearly all forces are benign. Our tragedies, of health or accident, are the inescapable sort that no society can prevent. The rest of the world looks at our wealth, our distance from their problems, even our self-absorption, with a wide range of responses. One of those responses is hatred.

Hate begets hate. Killing begets killing. And the totality of the accumulated pain makes rationality almost impossible. The agony that Americans feel right now is relatively small compared with the pain and fury for revenge that entire regions of the world drink by the gallon each day like mother's milk."

We decry, just as we did yesterday, when hate takes innocent lives. We voice our collective national puzzlement and condemnation when our fellow human beings in the world community say that to achieve their own narrow self-serving interests that taking the lives of innocent civilians is simply the end justifying the means.

But does by simply waving our K-Mart American flags and lighting candles in the window, as this out take of a May, 1996 interview with former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright , somehow give us the right to consider ourselves the Great Exception in international relations???

Lesley Stahl, 60 Minutes:

"We have heard that a half million children have died [because of sanctions against Iraq]. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima and you know, is the price worth it?"

Madeleine Albright:

"I think this is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it."

Television reporters, political and national defense pundits, and newspaper headline writers have had a field day with the use of the word "terror" and "terrorism" to describe the events of yesterday, but as my respected colleague Sam Smith points out in his Progressive Review Undernews:

"The media and politicians call what happened terrorism. This is a propagandistic rather than a descriptive term and replaces the more useful traditional phrases, guerilla action or guerilla warfare. The former places a mythical shroud around the event while the latter depicts its true nature. Guerillas do not play by the rules of state organization or military tactics.

"This does not make them cowardly, as some have suggested, but can make them fiendishly clever. The essence of guerilla warfare is to attack at times and places unsuspected and return to places unknown. You can not invade the land of guerillas, you can not bomb them out of existence, you can not overwhelm them with your technological wonders.

"This was a lesson we were supposed to have learned in Vietnam but appear to have forgotten... Our war against `terrorism' has been in many ways a domestic version of our Vietnam strategy. We keep making the same mistakes over and over because, until now, we could afford to. One of these has been to define the problem by its manifestations rather than its causes.

"This turns a resolvable political problem into a irresolvable technical problem, because while, for example, there are clearly solutions to the Middle East crisis, there are no solutions to the guerilla violence that grows from the failure to end it," Smith continues.

"In other words, if you define the problem as `a struggle against `terrorism' you have already admitted defeat because the guerilla will always have the upper hand against a centralized, technology-dependent society such as ours... There is one way to deal with guerilla warfare and that is to resolve the problems that allow it to thrive.

"As we have shown in the Middle East, one need not even reach a final solution as long as incremental progress is being made. But once that ceases, as happened in the past year, the case for freelance violence is quickly strengthened and people simply forget that peace is possible."

If we as a justifiable angry nation now allow ourselves to not learn from history, realizing that violence only begets violence, then we are destined to continue to make the same mistakes that leads only to more violence.

The words of novelist Ken Kesey might well provide us with not only thoughtful commentary on what happened on an unforgettable late summer day in New York and Washington, D.C. that has left a whole nation and world in shock, sorrow, and prayer but his words might also give us some context and a sad but true perspective on the events of that tragic day.

"When God wants to really wake up a nation,
He has to use somebody that counts.
When God wants to get your attention,
He always has to use blood."

Agribusiness Examiner September 12, 2001

This is from Tamim Ansary, a writer and columnist in San Francisco who is a native of Afghanistan. It's both interesting and chilling....

I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio today, allowed that this would mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but "we're at war, we have to accept collateral damage. What else can we do?" Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing whether we "have the belly to do what must be done."

And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived here for 35 years I've never lost track of what's going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I'm standing.

I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters.

But the Taliban and Ben Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps."

It's not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rat's nest of international thugs holed up in their country.

Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan -- a country with no economy, no food.

There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban.

We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age.Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that.

New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans, they don't move too fast, they don't even have wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with the Taliban -- by raping once again the people they've been raping all this time

So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of "having the belly to do what needs to be done" they're thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people. Let's pull our heads out of the sand.

What's actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden's hideout. It's much bigger than that folks. Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I'm going. We're flirting with a world war between Islam and the West.

And guess what: that's Bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he wants. That's why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It's all right there. He really believes Islam would beat the west. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he's got a billion soldiers.

If the west wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose, that's even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong, in the end the West would win, whatever that would mean, but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?

Tamim Ansary

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