The chairman of CNN, Walter Isaacson, said that when reporting on the civilian casualties of the United States bombing in Afghanistan, his correspondents should mention that it should be viewed “in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous suffering in the United States.”
I wonder what the American people would think if they were told to view the “suffering in the United States” in the context of the suffering of the Palestinian people and other victims of America’s dubious foreign policy. So much for impartial and unbiased reporting. Ahmed Kadwa, Wandsbeck
Author Joseph Conrad (born Korzeniowski in 1857, died 1924) almost described the US bombing of Afghanistan, except that he was writing of West Africa. In Heart of Darkness he wrote: “We came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn’t even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts. Her ensign drooped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long six-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy swell swung her up lazily and let her down, swaying her thin masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech and nothing happened. Nothing would happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives he called them enemies! hidden out of sight somewhere.”
No further comment required. Brian Ross, Drummond, KwaZulu-Natal
Actual warfare is not the way of the terrorist Osama bin Laden. His successes have so far had more to do with communication strategy than with playing hide and seek with Pentagon generals.
Bin Laden’s strategy is not just terror for the sake of destruction. It is to create panic in the US and to provoke even stronger responses from the Pentagon, thereby transforming the US’s war on terrorism into a war between civilisations.
Bin Laden has realised the worst nightmares of the US’s generals because he knows them infinitely better than they know him. John Hund, Institute of Foreign and Comparative Law, Unisa