February 9, 2003

Fifteen minutes to touchdown, and 200,000 feet above the earth, seven mortals disintegrated into space, leaving a stunned nation grieving.

President Bush rushed back from Camp David — where he goes off on weekends — to address Americans and offer his condolences to the family members who will never see their loved ones again.

Fighting off tears, the world’s most powerful man suddenly looked so vulnerable. Even his shoulders had drooped and his face fallen.

Was it the same man who only four days ago stood before the cheering members of the Congress and spoke of teaching Iraq a lesson? Was it the same man who had taken upon himself to destroy Saddam Hussein in order to save the world?

Bush is very blunt. At times he looks inhuman. His swagger is so obvious. Like his religious-right attorney, General Ashcroft, Bush, too, believes that God has sent him to do a job — keep America safe. Ending his State of the Union Address to the lawmakers on Capitol Hill, said the President of the United States: “Americans are a free people, who know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation. The liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world, it is God’s gift to humanity. (Applause).

“We Americans have faith in ourselves, but not in ourselves alone. We do not know — we do not claim to know all the ways of Providence, yet we can trust in them, placing our confidence in the loving God behind all of life, and all of history. May He guide us now. And may God continue to bless the United States of America.”

Four days later, his tone and tenor changed. When tragedy struck on a cold and rainy morning: “The Columbia’s lost. There are no survivors,” he whispered. He appeared a helpless, broken man flanked by two American flags (notice how Americans rally around the flag when they are really down and out?), speaking slowly, his voice a mere tremble with brows furrowed and a mouth down turned.

This time around he quoted the Scripture: “The same Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today. The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to earth, but we can pray they are safely home.”

Still, Bush is determined to continue with his search into the unknown: “Mankind is led into the darkness beyond our world by the inspiration of discovery and the longing to understand. Our journey into space will go on.”

In one simple verse, the Holy Quran sums up so eloquently the power of God in relation to man: “He regulates the affair from the Heavens to the earth; then shall it ascend to Him in a day the measure of which is a thousand years of what you count.”

In times of unbearable loss and tragedy, reflexively one turns to God. But within days, the strum of life takes over and back comes the noxious swagger and the pride.

America’s armed might and the global imbalance of power today can be compared to the Roman Empire at its zenith. Other nations have been dwarfed into compliance. They have little option against the galloping military industrial complex that has converted the US into a Godzilla, the monster who can trample the world.

But with all its high-tech superiority and intelligence operations, the slippage of America might well have begun. What happened on September 11 has shaken up the foundations of this monolith that could never believe that it, too, was vulnerable, and that its mighty towers and the Pentagon would ever be in flames.

Months before 9/11, in the spring of 2001, US Supreme Court Chief, Justice Rehnquist, remarked while giving judgment on a First Amendment (freedom of information) case, “technology now permits millions of important and confidential conversations to occur through a vast system of electronic networks. These advances, however, raise significant privacy concerns. We are placed in the uncomfortable position of not knowing who might have access to our personal and business e-mails, our medical and financial records, or our cordless and cellular telephone conversations.”

And yet the FBI and CIA failed to connect the dots and prevent 9/11.

Now the Congress is debating instituting the Pentagon-sponsored ‘Total Information Awareness’ (TIA) Act and is being pressured to accept the appointment John Poindexter, Reagan’s national security adviser, who secretly sold missiles to Iran to pay ransom for the hostages, and with the illicit proceeds to illegally support Contras in Nicaragua. He was declared a felon and indicted on five counts of misleading the Congress by lying to the lawmakers.

The system that is collapsing around us cringe many in America. “War or no war with Iraq, the economy will not jump start, the premium on health insurance has gone up from 13 per cent to 25 per cent in one year, while four million of us remain jobless.”

Meanwhile, religion has been hijacked by men with radicalized views that are extreme. Bigots here have been encouraged by Bush’s Christian right groups to openly attack Islam, its Holy Prophet (Peace be upon him) and the Holy Quran, inciting hate against Muslims living in America. God’s message to men who are blind to other faiths is so profound: “We have explained for men in this Quran every kind of similitude, but most men do not consent to aught but denying.”

While a lot of frenzy is being stirred up to scare Americans into silence with Bush and his men sing God bless America, no one is talking about America helping eradicate poverty, infectious diseases, malnutrition, injustice and dictatorship, and bring in education and development.

President Bush declared “You’re either with us or against us.” Here is the answer of 45,000 prominent Americans who took out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times: “Let it be said that the people of United States did nothing when their government declared a war without limit and instituted stark new measures of repression.

“The US government has created two-classes of people: those to whom the basic rights of the US legal system are at least promised, and those who now seem to have no rights at all. The government rounded up over 1,000 immigrants and detained them in secret and indefinitely. For the first time in decades, immigration procedures single out certain nationalities for unequal treatment.”

Correction: In my last column “Behind the facade”, I mentioned the arrest of Dr Raana Akbar, president of APPNA (Association of Pakistani Physicians of North America) by the INS in Chicago. I quoted extensively from a letter appearing to have been written by Dr Akbar that was circulated by a New York-based Internet Forum of Pakistani intellectuals. Unfortunately, the moderator of the Forum posted the letter from Dr Akbar without prefacing it and clarifying that the first-person narrative was not that of Dr Akbar but another Pakistani who had been arrested. I rang up Dr Raana Akbar for clarification. Here is her account:

She took over charge as the president of APPNA last month. She receives many e-mails related to Pakistan issues and forwards them to various forums for information sharing. While she recalls sending this particular e-mail, she has taken strong exception to the irresponsible manner in which it was forwarded.

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