Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September
19, 2003
Ilan Pappe
The
Hole in the Road Map
Bill Glahn
RIAA is Full of Bunk, So is the New York Times
Dave Lindorff
General Hysteria: the Clark Bandwagon
Robert Fisk
New Guard is Saddam's Old
Jeff Halper
Preparing
for a Struggle Against Israeli Apartheid
Brian J. Foley
Power to the Purse
Clare
Brandabur
Hitchens
Smears Edward Said
Website of the Day
Live from Palestine
September
18, 2003
Mona Baker
and Lawrence Davidson
In
Defense of the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
Wayne
Madsen
Wesley
Clark for President? Another Neo-Con Con Job
Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Wesley Clark and Waco
Muqtedar Khan
The Pakistan Squeeze
Dominique
de Villepin
The
Reconstruction of Iraq: This Approach is Leading Nowhere
Angus Wright
Brazilian Land Reform Offers Hope
Elaine
Cassel
Payback is Hell
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Leavitt
for EPA Head? He's Much Worse Than You Thought
Website
of the Day
ALA Responds to Ashcroft's Smear
Recent
Stories
September 17, 2003
Timothy J. Freeman
The
Terrible Truth About Iraq
St. Clair / Cockburn
A
Vain, Pompous Brown-noser:
Meet the Real Wesley Clark
Terry Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Moore on Gen. Wesley Clark
Mitchel Cohen
Don't Be Fooled Again: Gen. Wesley Clark, War Criminal
Norman Madarasz
Targeting Arafat
Richard Forno
High Tech Heroin
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Website of the Day
The Ultimate Palestine Resource Site!
September 16, 2003
Rosemary and Walt Brasch
An
Ill Wind: Hurricane Isabel and the Lack of Homeland Security
Robert Fisk
Powell
in Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
Imperial Sociopaths
M. Shahid Alam
The Dialectics
of Terror
Ron Jacobs
Exile at Gunpoint
Christopher Brauchli
Bush's War on Wages
Al Krebs
Stop Calling Them "Farm Subsidies"; It's Corporate
Welfare
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Wreck
Website of the Day
From Occupied Palestine
September 15, 2003
Stan Goff
It Was
the Oil; It Is Like Vietnam
Robert Fisk
A Hail of Bullets, a Trail of Dead
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
James T. Phillips
Does George Bush Cry?
Elaine Cassel
The Troublesome Bill of Rights
Cynthia McKinney
A Message to the People of New York City
Matthew Behrens
Sunday Morning Coming Down: Reflections on Johnny Cash
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
Hammond Guthrie
Celling Out the Alarm
Website of the Day
Arnold and the Egg
September 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
Hot Stories
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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September
20, 2003
Indians, Attack Helicopters
and Resistance
On
Apache Terrorism
By GARY LEUPP
"Oh, sure, an F-18 roaring nearby
across the sky will raise goose bumps on even the most jaded
of American patriots, but when an Apache helicopter rises from
behind some hillside and hangs in a hover, looking at youWell
that's our enemy's nightmare: He ain't gettin' away."
A patriot and Apache
admirer
The Apache twin-engine army
attack helicopter, produced by Boeing and first used in the
invasion of Panama in 1989, has figured prominently in U.S. military
operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the Boy Scouts'
July 2001 National Jamboree at Ft. Hill, Virginia. ("Kids
love helicopters" said Maj. Forrest Carpenter, 3rd Battalion
executive officer.)
More than half of those produced have
been sold to U.S. allies, and they are routinely deployed by
Israel against Palestinian targets in Gaza. At present, this
aircraft is supposed to be serving the "War on Terrorism,"
as that most vaguely conceptualized of wars expands, targeting
anyone on the Bushites' expanding terrorist enemies list.
Ironically, the Apache is named after
a people who for many decades of North American history were
regarded by most whites settling down in their homeland (straddling
what is now New Mexico and Arizona) as ferocious savages customarily
inflicting terrorist atrocities upon civilized Christian society
for no good reason.
I often think, when reading about "terrorism,"
of the violent historical encounters between white settlers and
Native Americans. The latter, overwhelmed by the superior technology
and resources of those claiming their lands, were obliged to
deploy the "weapons of the weak" in their efforts to
stave off encroachment, dispossession and what was termed "Indian
removal."
In other words, they were intent upon
maintaining their homeland security, and "homeland"
in the Apache case means a habitat enjoyed for centuries before
the Europeans first came barging in. (Not that the whites were
the Apaches' only problem; the Comanches drove them out of part
of their ancestral homeland as well. By the way there's also
a "Comanche"
attack helicopter). Thus the Apaches sometimes attacked whole
white communities---yes, men, women, and children---offing them
all indiscriminately in order to send the settlers a message:
Get out, go back where you came from, stop threatening our
way of life and killing our people. Just a few examples
out of Apache history, randomly collected from the internet:
In 1751, in Tubac, in what is now Arizona,
then under Spanish rule, Apaches raided Santa Ana and the mission
of San Ignacio. They killed at least 105 people, including two
German Jesuit missionaries (who had beaten "mission Indians");
36 Spanish men, 15 Spanish women, and 37 children. (I guess you
could call this "targeting
civilians." Not that it's anything like Hiroshima or
Nagasaki.)
In 1849, Jicarilla Apache warriors in
what is now New Mexico killed half a dozen white men traveling
through their territory, capturing the wife and daughter of one
of them, along with two Black women. An Apache woman killed the
wife when she tried to escape; it's not clear what happened to
the other captives. In northern Mexico, bands led by Apache leader
Cochise, and his successors Victorio and Ju, killed
over 15,000 Mexicans.
During the early 1860s, Cochise allegedly
"used the distraction caused by the Civil War to invade
and destroy whole towns and settlements" in U.S. territory.
"Nothing escaped his vengeance. At one point, he even burned
Tubac to the ground. His war lasted twelve years. During that
time, he tortured
his captives to death by slow fire, scalped and mutilated others,
and stole women and children for slaves."
In the 1870s, Apaches in the Arizona
Territory "swooped
down on isolated farms and small settlements killing all"
. In 1885, Apache leader Geronimo "killed
a ranching family."
The Chicago Times in 1881 reported
on "Apache Atrocities," emphasizing female involvement.
The Apache man, according to the reporter, "cuts off the
nose of a prisoner while yet alive, and throwing [it] on the
coals will allow [it] to become half broiled, and then thrust
[it] in the mouth and down the throat of his victim. He will
heat a piece of iron and with this pierce the cheeks of a living
man through and through, and then let the instrument serve as
a gag between the jaws of the horrified captive. Terrible as
these tortures may appear, it is the squaw who exhibits a refinement
of cruelty that puts the male Apache to shame. She
it is who invents new and startling devices for mutilation of
the dead, and in their execution chuckles with feverish glee."
Makes one think of how CNN covered the ululating matrons of Gaza
right after the 9-11 attacks.
I can't testify to the accuracy of any
of these old reports, and in any case, unquestionably, the atrocities
committed by settlers against the Apaches greatly exceeded any
attributed to the latter, to whose "petrified tears"---their
sufferings gave the name to a gemstone---the
late great Johnny Cash paid tribute. The Mexican government,
when it ruled their homeland, actually rewarded genocidal bounty
hunters for any Apache scalps: "in
1835, a warrior's scalp would bring 100 pesos, and by 1837 Mexican
officialdom was offering 50 pesos for a woman's scalp and 25
pesos for that of a child."
I'll just observe that the Apaches once
had a very, very bad press, like certain peoples collectively
resisting oppression receive in our own time. But it was the
victimizer's press, warped by racism and bullheaded religious
doctrine (the "manifest destiny" of God's chosen white
people to populate the Promised Land, after ridding it of the
ungodly savages still resident therein). Today, now that the
50,000 surviving Apaches are not a "terrorist threat,"
the southeasternmost county of Arizona can be named after Cochise,
a U.S. postage stamp can celebrate Geronimo, and a key piece
of the U.S. "anti-terrorism" arsenal can even be named
after this worthy people. (By the way, "Apache" in
the language of the Zuni means "enemies." It's not
the name the Apache traditionally applied to themselves; that
was just N'de (the People): they are, in their western branch,
the Northern and Southern Tonto, Mimbreno, and Coyote; in their
eastern branch, the Chiricahua, Mescalero, Jicirilla, Lipan,
and Kiowa. They are related to the Navajo who speak the same
Athabascan language and also resisted Spanish, Mexican and U.S.
encroachment.) Towards the end of the Vietnam War (1972), Hollywood
could finally produce (as an allegory of the relationship between
U.S. GIs and the "hostiles" of the Vietcong), a fairly
balanced, nuanced film about Apache resistance: Ulzana's Raid,
set in Arizona in 1882.
Clearly some sort of historical reassessment (revisionism?) has
occurred. As it has with Nelson Mandela, who was just recently
removed from the U.S. State Department's "terrorist
list", although he might still be regarded as such by Vice
President Cheney. Things change. Perceptions of who is the
terrorist, and who the terrorized, really do evolve over time,
even in the challenged minds of the power elite who are best
placed to create and manipulate public opinion. So when you read
that Apaches have wiped out 250 Taliban fighters in the Sha-e-Kot
Valley of Afghanistan (March 2002); or that Apaches killed 33
civilians in Hillah, Iraq (April, 2003); or that an Apache attack
has killed two nurses in Gaza City hospital (as one did March
5); or that an Apache attack killed a Hamas leader and three
bodyguards (March 8); that eight civilians were wounded in an
Apache attack on Gaza workshops (as occurred June 1); or that
two Qassam Brigades fighters were killed in an Apache attack
on Zaitoon neighborhood in southern Gaza (June 12); or that 11
Hamas members were killed by Apache missile attacks as of Sept.
2; think (with or without irony) about the past vilification
of the gunship's namesake. Imagine also a future (maybe some
decades from now) in which a super-gunship, crafted and used
by who knows whom, might be proudly dubbed the "Chechen,"
the "Kashmiri," the "Kurd," the "Moro,"
or the "Palestinian."
* * *
One must suppose today's Apaches have
mixed feelings about their soaring namesake. On the Fort Apache
Indian Reservation in Arizona, the military still has a presence.
According to a reservation website, "illegal incursions"
of Apache helicopters and other military aircraft "on Apache
airspace happen almost daily because the military can claim it
wasn't really them, and no one in the State,---or
in Congress, is concerned about illegal military flights."
Apache intrusions into Apache airspace.
Even
the U.S. military has a sense of humor.
Gary Leupp
is an an associate professor in the Department of History at
Tufts University and coordinator of the Asian Studies Program.
He can be reached at: gleupp@tufts.edu
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
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