Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2001 22:36:52 -0000
Reply-To: change-links@yahoogroups.com

[Preface]
Although I'm not a member of the party which made the statement
below, I couldn't have said it better myself than "The following
statement by Martín Koppel, candidate for mayor of New York
[which] was released September 11 by the Socialist Workers
Party." -- Barry

[Text] 

Waving the banner that "America is under attack," that it has
sustained "a second Pearl Harbor" in the wake of today's assault
on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the
U.S. government will seek to advance its "right" to launch
military assaults on other countries, as it has done over the
past few years against the peoples of Yugoslavia, Iraq, the
Sudan, and Afghanistan. The U.S. rulers will become even more
brazen in their backing for the Israeli regime's escalating war
drive against the Palestinians.

Calls by capitalist politicians and apologists for stiffer
measures to prevent future such "intelligence failures" are being
played up nonstop by the big-business dailies, news agencies, and
TV and radio networks. Anti-Arab and anti-Islamic bigotry is
being cranked up to bolster this onslaught.

The Socialist Workers Party calls on workers, farmers, and all
defenders of democratic rights to speak out against the
U.S. rulers' demagogic efforts, in the name of preempting
"terrorism," to rationalize restrictions on political rights. We
must oppose the campaign by the U.S. government -- Democrats and
Republicans alike -- to curb the constitutionally guaranteed
space for political organization and activity and to legitimize
the use of the U.S. armed forces at home and abroad.

During its final months in office, following several years of
preparations, the Clinton administration established, for the
first time in U.S. history, a North American command -- that is,
the command structure for deployment of U.S. armed forces at
home, aimed first and foremost at working people in this
country. The White House appointed a commander-in-chief of this
new homeland command, and over the past two years this
euphemistically called Joint Forces Command has carried out
simulated "antiterrorist" military operations -- together with
city, state, and other federal police forces -- in New Jersey,
northern California, New York City, and elsewhere.

The Bush administration is now deploying these forces in their
first actual domestic military operations. On September 11 the
U.S.  government placed U.S. armed forces worldwide on
hair-trigger war alert. It called out an army regiment of light
infantry onto the streets of Washington, D.C.; mobilized the New
York National Guard under federal command; and deployed heavily
armed FBI "counter- terrorism squads" and other special federal
police units in Los Angeles, along the borders with Mexico and
Canada, and elsewhere across the country.

In coming days, as the administration acts on Bush's vow "to hunt
down and punish those responsible," the labor movement and all
democratic-minded organizations and individuals must be on the
alert to protest government frame-up trials and oppose its
trampling on the presumption of innocence; the right to due
process; Fourth Amendment protections against arbitrary search,
seizure, and wiretaps; and freedom of association without spying
and harassment by government informers and agents
provocateurs. The last four years of the Clinton administration,
and the opening months of the Bush White House, have been marked
by stepped-up bipartisan efforts to strengthen the federal death
penalty, erode the rights of the accused and convicted, and
increase the room for commando-style operations by the U.S.
Border Patrol and other Immigration and Naturalization Service
cops, the FBI, and other federal assault agencies.

Whoever may have carried out the September 11 operations, the
destruction of the two World Trade Center towers, and the air
attack on the Pentagon -- with the resulting deaths and injuries
of thousands of men, women, and children -- these actions have
nothing to do with the fight against capitalist exploitation and
imperialist oppression. Revolutionists and other class-conscious
workers, farmers, and youth the world over reject the use of such
methods.

The U.S. government and its allies for more than a century have
carried out systematic terror to defend their class privilege and
interests at home and abroad -- from the atomic incineration of
hundreds of thousands at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the
10-year-long slaughter in Indochina, to the war against the Iraqi
people in 1990- 91, to the burning to death of 80 people at Waco
on its home soil, to other examples too numerous to list. In
recent weeks, the White House and Congress have stood behind Tel
Aviv as it escalated its campaign of both random killings and
outright murders in its historically failing effort to quell the
struggle by the dispossessed Palestinian people for the return of
their homeland.

Half a century ago the revolutionary workers movement and other
opponents of colonial outrages, racism, and anti-Semitism in all
its forms warned that by waging a war of terror to drive the
Palestinians from their farms, towns, and cities, the founders of
the Israeli state and their imperialist backers in North America
and Europe were pitting the Jewish people against those fighting
for national liberation in the Middle East and worldwide; they
were creating a death trap for the Jews, which Israel remains to
this day. By its systematic superexploitation of the peoples of
Asia, Africa, and Latin America; by its never-ending insults to
their national and cultural dignity; by its ceaseless murderous
violence in countless forms -- U.S. imperialism is turning North
America into a death trap for working people and all who live
there.

The U.S. rulers know that as they press their assault on the
living and working conditions of workers and farmers in the
United States, they will meet growing resistance, as working
people organize to defend their livelihoods and their
rights. That's why Washington is systematically strengthening its
hand against the battles its knows are coming.

The Socialist Workers Party calls on workers and farmers in the
United States and worldwide to speak out in defense of the
struggle of the Palestinian people, the people of Western Sahara,
the Puerto Rican people, the rights of the people of Cuba, and
others the world over fighting for their national rights and
against all the ways in which the world capitalist order presses
humanity toward fascism and war. We must oppose U.S. military
intervention anywhere in the world.  We must oppose efforts by
Washington to escalate an assault on the political rights of
working people and the organizations of our class and its
oppressed and exploited allies.

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