Little Johnny bursts in the door crying, "Mommy, Frankie hit me in the nose." As mother wipes away the blood, Dad throws down his paper and, rising in anger from his chair, says, "I'm going after Frank's father and the principal." Mom, taking Johnny aside, asks, "What did you do to Frankie?" Shamefully, Johnny replies, "I just yanked off his baseball cap." The house settles down.

While many Americans and Washington responded to the Twin Towers and Pentagon bombings like Johnny's Father, wiser minds have been asking: "Wherein lies our responsibility?"

In the world of real politic, the gradually-increasing violent responses of the Muslim world to Washington's Mideast bullying have been carefully documented. President Reagan, during Israel's genocidal 1982 invasion of Lebanon, lent a hand to Sharon's brutal destruction of Beirut, ordering our USS New Jersey to shell that City's suburbs, driving 500,000 Lebanese into the mountains. Not long after, some 200 US Marines paid with their lives for our President's brazen support of Israel. When the US, despite many warnings from the Muslim community, bivouacked US soldiers onto the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War, American Marines were blown up in their barracks.

As we pursued our genocidal biological warfare in Iraq, despite repeated warnings from the International Red Cross, Amnesty International, the Red Crescent; and after two Administrators of the UN's "Oil for Food" program (Denis Halliday and Von Tronbek) quit in disgust, but Washington added bombing to its brutal agenda. Not long after, two of our largest embassies in Africa (Kenya and Tanzania) were blown to bits along with their staffs of several hundred. President Clinton's knee-jerk missile response wiped out affordable medicines for all of Africa as their pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum lay in ruins, and in Afghanistan, young students studying in a mosque, were blown to bits.

Careful reading of Reporter John Miller's interview with ex-Saudi millionaire Osama Bin Laden in 1998 in Afghanistan told us the Muslim would no longer tolerate either the butchering of Palestinian youths by Israeli troops nor the genocide in Iraq. Clinton, however, responded with increased bombing of Iraq. Not long after, the USS Cole, anchored off the Yemeni, had a large hole blown in its side and crew members killed. Our quiet killing in Iraq continued while Sharon butchered more Palestinians, bull-dozing their homes and targeting their officials. Next, New York's Twin Towers and a wedge from the Pentagon disappeared in dust.

No one in Washington seems to possess the political or moral courage to admit any responsibility for these violent responses to our unrelenting killing of both Iraqis and Palestinians, so Bush found it easy to stampede a weak Congress into permitting the devastation of Afghanistan.

As I write this on January 16, our B-52's at 50,000 feet are still demolishing Afghan's towns and villages, creating death and havoc for a starving, impoverished people. We pursue a war Congress never declared, and the UN Security Council never authorized, a war supposedly to punish the leading party, the Taliban, whose leader Mohammed Omar felt a moral responsibility to shelter an ex-Saudi millionaire, Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda organization from a belligerent West. Bin Laden is accused by Washington of masterminding the Twin Towers and Pentagon bombing, but no proof has ever been offered by the Bush-Blair team.

Today, some five months into this carnage, except for a few Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners, we have little to show for our billions of dollars of military hardware save for the deaths of thousands of Afghan citizens and the devastation of their already impoverished country. Our bemedaled generals in press "briefings deny most reports of civilian deaths, but no one believes them. Mideast and European media report a wedding party of 107 in the town of Qalaye Niazi disappeared in dust. Reporters found a child's shoe and part of a doll. Kama Ado, with its 115 people, was blown to bits, and almost a hundred Afghan dignitaries in a caravan heading for the inauguration ceremonies of the new Afghan Government were decimated from 50,000 feet.

Marc Herold, a professor at the University of New Hampshire, has been tracking Afghan civilian deaths. Scouring news reports from around the world, Professor Herold calculated that between October 7 and December 6, some 3,767 civilian deaths could be accounted for. Those thousands of Afghans who starved to death or froze in the mountain passes were buried on site and no record kept.

The world watches with disgust and horror as the US pursues its war against "terrorism." Washington, however, has little respect for international law or world opinion. Peter Beaumont (The Observer, Jan. 13) says: "The reality of what is happening to the prisoners in Afghanistan is a scandal of international proportions. Brutalized and often tortured, these are men who have been stripped of their most basic rights under international and US law." "Drugged and bound and then flown out of the country to an island camp (The US Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba) ...where normal guarantees of defendant's rights do no apply." Both Ashcroft and Rumsfeld say their detainees, "are not prisoners of war but criminals," but the rights of criminals are also guaranteed under US laws. Our military has also been handing over some Taliban prisoners to the Northern Alliance Forces, knowing that they will be tortured and often killed.

When the International Red Cross demanded access to prisoners being flown to Cuba, and Amnesty International criticized their treatment, photographers and camera crews from CNN, CBS, The Army Times and others were finally permitted to photograph in Kandahar prisoners boarding C-17 cargo plane bound for Guantanamo Bay, but the military then refused to permit those pictures be transmitted.

In the San Francisco Chronicle of September 26, 2001, Staff Writer Frank Vivano observed, "The hidden stakes in the war against terrorism can be summed up in a single word, 'oil.' The map of terrorist sanctuaries and targets in the Middle East and Asia is also... a map of the world's principal energy sources in the 21st century... the war against terrorism will be seen by many as a war on behalf of America's Chevron, Exxon and Arco; France's TotalFinaElf; British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell and other multinational giants." Martin notes, "... most corporate-controlled media outlets, the television networks, and major national daily newspapers have maintained a silence that amounts to deliberate, politically-controlled self-censorship."

Regarding oil-gas issues in the Caspian Basin, on January 3, 2002, columnist Patrick Martin (leftcoastobnen@msn.com) reported that on December 31, shortly after the Washington-backed interim government of Hamid Karzai took office, Bush appointed "a former aide to the American oil company UNOCAL, Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad, as special envoy to Afghanistan. Martin notes that UNOCAL, which headed the Centgas consortium, planned a 48-inch pipeline extending south from the Turkmenistan oil fields through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Arabian Seacoast. As advisor to UNOCAL, Khalilzad, who had participated in talks between UNOCAL and Taliban officials in 1997, in a Washington Post Op-Ed four years ago "defended the Taliban against accusations it was a sponsor of terrorism."

Martin reports Bush appointed Khalilzad, "to head the Bush-Cheney transition team for the Defense Department, and advised incoming Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld." Khalilzad's subcabinet appointment to the National Security Council had not required Senate approval. He reports to Condoleeza Rice, NSC advisor and oil company advisor for Central Asia. Rice was on the Board of Directors of Chevron Corporation, which holds the largest oil-gas concessions in the Kazakstan region.

As we head into 2002, our economy is in shambles, money needed for social programs is poured instead into the military, our civil rights are threatened by a Patriot Act, and our President who, after illegally abrogating the ABM Treaty, now promises to pursue Washington-designated "terrorist organizations" around the world. Our money-corrupted Congress again is funding research for a Star Wars we thought had disappeared with Reagan. Many Americans are beginning to realize that we had better play a more active role as citizens if we want this country to survive as a democracy.