Greenfield Recorder, February 21, 2022

Readers Write

 by Pat Hynes

President Biden recently signed an executive order to free $7 billion Afghanistan assets in the Federal Reserve in New York City and to split them between humanitarian aid for starving, freezing and sick Afghanis and surviving relatives of the September 11 attacks.

What is crucially wrong – historically and morally – with this decision?

First, the U.S. is stealing the Afghani people’s money in not returning their full $7 billion in the Federal Reserve Bank, contributing to their economic desperation and threatening to cause more deaths from starvation and illness than civilians we killed in our 20-year futile and failed war there. The former U.S.-supported Afghan President Hamid Karzai has called on Biden to reverse his decision — a decision he calls “unjust,” “unfair,” and an “atrocity”— and return the full $7 billion to the Afghan Central Bank.

Second, the Afghani people did not plan and attack the United States on 9/11. It was primarily Saudi Arabians, out of anger for the U.S. setting up military bases in their country and perpetrating war in the Middle East. No Afghan people were involved.

Third, the logical and ethical response for reparations for 9/11 surviving families is to withhold the millions of dollars in military aid to Saudi Arabia that our government provides each year and use this “blood money” as compensation for 9/11 victims’ families. Doing so, the U.S. would end its collusion with Saudi Arabia in the most extreme humanitarian crisis today — the military war on Yemen with its bombing of hospitals and schools and blockades of food and medical supplies.

Two-thirds of the 20 million Yemeni people need crucial humanitarian aid (food, shelter, medicines, health care).

PAT HYNES

Traprock Center for Peace and Justice