POLICY QUESTIONED

To the editor:

We Americans have killed over 3,700 Afghani civilians. Since our
bombing began, many millions more are hungry and homeless. We
destroyed: Red Cross food distribution warehouses, a mosque during
prayers, the only land mine dog training center in Afghanistan (over
10 million unexploded land mines remain; there are about 500,000
disabled orphans from exploded land mines), villages, a hospital, and
many other actually intended targets. We are creating the next
generation of terrorists, who are unlikely to be thankful to the
United States for killing family members, and disrupting entire cities.

We offered Afghanistan $467 million to rebuild billions in damages
from our bombs. We gave Colombia $1.3 billion (Andean Initiative) to
bomb, fumigate and assassinate civilians, and President Bush wants
more. President Clinton already waived the human rights stipulations
attached to those funds.

We paid Pakistan to stop cultivating opium. They then supplied 70
percent of the world's heroin. The production then shifted to
Afghanistan, who warehoused their product in Pakistan. The Taliban
stopped opium production in 2001.

Afghanistan was producing 75 percent of the world's heroin. They still
have 3,000 metric tons of heroin stored in Pakistan. With the Taliban
disruption, poppy fields again are growing in Afghanistan. Our
government is aware of this.

Bush and Cheney want an oil pipeline through Afghanistan to sell oil
to China, and created a humanitarian nightmare in the process.
American civil liberties have been trashed, the drug war just keeps
humming along, and we spend more to destroy than rebuild.

CLARK BRITTAIN
Bloomington