Joe Gotta Go!: A Victory in Selma, Alabama

The last time I was in Selma, Alabama was in 1972, traveling across the South with a group of activists making a movie. (It never came out, which was just as well.) Our group was received with traditional Southern hospitality everywhere throughout the South, except in Selma. We sat down in a café right next to the famous Edmund Pettus Bridge, where voting rights marchers had been gassed and beaten on Bloody Sunday, seven years before. The atmosphere was so thick I had to go stand outside to collect myself. On the street I met an elderly black man in overalls who had worked all his life in Chicago ' 'second worst place in the world' ' before retiring back home to Selma ' 'the worst.' Twenty-eight years later I returned to find the town finally climbing out of that bottom spot.

In Selma, Alabama, there is actually an intersection of Jefferson Davis and Martin Luther King streets. As a spot for a polling place, it asks an obvious question about which way Selma wants to go in the 21st century. The answer, by 57% in a runoff election with a 75% turnout, is Selma's first African American mayor, James Perkins, Jr.

Retribution Follies

A couple of phrases give us useful pointers to the moral and political intricacies of retribution. The Pentagon is talking about establishing "killing boxes" around Kabul, where U.S. helicopter gunships can fire at will. The Pentagon's assumption is that such "killing boxes" contain only Taliban troops, fair game for everything the gunships can throw at them.

Thus we see the return of an old friend from counterinsurgency in an earlier time, when "free-fire zones" meant that any Vietnamese peasant could be swiftly identified as Viet Cong, and thus a legitimate target.

Motorized transportation in Afghanistan mostly consists of old trucks. My brother Patrick, reporting from the Panjshir Valley for the London Independent, told me on his satellite phone Friday morning that he was being driven around in a truck with bullet holes in the windscreen that the Northern Alliance had captured not long before from the Taliban.

From the air an old truck looks like an old truck, whether the fellow driving it is a Taliban warrior or a farmer. In the 50 odd miles

Yugoslavia: Off The Wall

On 28 June 1991, the Yugoslavian Federation fell off the wall. The Humpty-Dumpty of nations shattered into pieces, and years of civil war and domestic conflict blighted the now-independent countries of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia. As the decade of the 1990?s waned, the Americans and their NATO allies helped in the continued destruction of Yugoslavia by assisting an ethnic Albanian minority to claim land and independence from what remained of Tito?s Cold War creation.

The Gulf War was still being celebrated during the final days of June 1991. Few people, especially Americans, paid any attention to Yugoslavia. Your correspondent was among the ignorant, reporting on the events in the Middle East and ignoring the crisis brewing in the Balkans until a fateful train ride on 28 June 1991.

The International Train

Iraq: 10 Years After Gulf War

Written by Stephen Zunes, Middle East EditorForeign Policy In Focus Editors: Tom Barry (IRC) and Martha Honey (IPS)

Key Points The U.S. effectively coddled Husseins dictatorial regime during the 1980s with economic and military aid, likely emboldening the invasion of Kuwait. The 1991 Gulf War forced the withdrawal of Iraqi troops from Kuwait and led to an ongoing U.S. military presence in the region. Certain provisions of the cease-fire agreement, severe economic sanctions and ongoing military operations, have limited Iraqi sovereignty and have created a severe humanitarian crisis.

Ten years after the Gulf War, U.S. policy toward Iraq continues to suffer from an overreliance on military solutions, an abuse of the United Nations and international law, and a disregard for the human suffering resulting

Highlands Nature Sanctuary

There is an incredibly biologically special place, right here in Ohio. It's called the Highlands Nature Sanctuary. It had been known by its current name for 5-6 years. It's located in south central Ohio, in which (at least) three major bio-regions exist. It includes land where the glaciers came through, and stopped, (depositing seeds of plant species usually found further north), the western front of the Appalachian foothills, limestone bedrock of the west, and sandstone and shale of the east. All of these "edge" effects increase biodiversity exponentially-gifting the area with an extraordinarily high number of rare wildflowers, trees, and ferns. It is one of the most biologically diverse areas in the state, possibly in the country (ok, excluding the Everglades). Although the woodlands in this region have

Compiled News Updates

MEDICAL MARIJUANA RESEARCH FINALLY APPROVED

Source: Marijuana Policy Project http://www.mpp.org/, Marijuana Policy Report Vol. 7, No. 2 ? Spring 2001

(California) On June 13, a federal shipment of marijuana arrived at the San Mateo County Health Center for a medical marijuana study involving people with AIDS. The county will test the feasibility of allowing patients to take marijuana out of a hospital setting to smoke it for medical research. Assuming that there are no diversion problems or other drawbacks, the study? s subsequent phases may generate the clinical data needed to meet FDA?s requirements for the approval of marijuana as a prescription medicine. This study is unique in that it is being funded entirely by the county. (And it is the only study underway in the country.)

Iraq: 10 Years After Gulf War

Editors: Tom Barry (IRC) and Martha Honey (IPS)

Key Points The U.S. effectively coddled Husseins dictatorial regime during the 1980s with economic and military aid, likely emboldening the invasion of Kuwait. The 1991 Gulf War forced the withdrawal of Iraqi troops from Kuwait and led to an ongoing U.S. military presence in the region. Certain provisions of the cease-fire agreement, severe economic sanctions and ongoing military operations, have limited Iraqi sovereignty and have created a severe humanitarian crisis.

Ten years after the Gulf War, U.S. policy toward Iraq continues to suffer from an overreliance on military solutions, an abuse of the United Nations and international law, and a disregard for the human suffering resulting

Rumors

AUSTIN -- On war, and rumors of war. In 1950, the United States got involved in a war and called it a police action. We are now involved a police action we're calling a war. The semantic confusion is having unfortunate effects on everyone.

As we bomb Afghanistan, Secretary of State Colin Powell is waging a diplomatic offensive in the region, including plans for a broad-based future government to include "moderate elements of the Taliban" -- an arresting concept. This must be as confusing to the Afghans as it is to us. However, it makes perfect sense in the context of a police action with limited aims and a substantial humanitarian commitment.

On anthrax and rumors of anthrax, television is showing symptoms of the Condit Syndrome -- a story with little news and a lot of speculation. After the Sept. 11 attacks, John Leonard, the television critic, wrote in Salon.com, "After a couple of days of doing what they do best, which is grief therapy, the television networks and cable channels reverted to what they do worst, which is to represent the normal respiration of democratic

The Televised Greatness of George W. Bush

President Bush's upward spike of popularity owes a lot to his presence on television -- a medium that has not always been so kind. At times, under pressure, he has earned many comparisons to a deer in headlights. But after a wobbly performance on Sept. 11, Bush got into a groove of seizing the TV opportunity and making the most of it.

Today's television environment is, more than ever, warmly hospitable to simple -- and simplistic -- declarative statements. That's just as well for Bush, who has shown a distinct tendency to get entangled in a morass of fragmentary linguistic riffs. Last year, on many occasions, he seemed painfully anxious to make his way to the end of sentences without further embarrassment. But now, for the most part, it's a very different story.

Stone Age

AUSTIN --- Afghanistan is to nation-building what Afghanistan is to war -- pretty much the last place on earth you'd choose, if you had any choice at all. I point this out not to oppose the idea, about which I think we have no choice, but to underline that the task is hard, long and incredibly complicated. President Bush has said that from the beginning, but it cannot be said too often.

There are some signs of what could become a dangerous division in what has been an unusually unified America since this crisis began, and they have to do with a class difference in information. To oversimplify, those who are getting their information from the Internet and/or a broad range of publications are having conversations with one another that are radically different from those heard on many radio talk shows. This is more than the simplistic jingoism that is a constant in American life; this is simplistic jingoism with a dangerously short attention span. The "let's nuke 'em" crowd is still looking for a short, simple solution, and there just isn't one. More stark evidence of this is the poll of Pakistanis just

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