Slashdot Mirror

Clean hands you have there, keep that chin up and remember useful idiots like yourself are as indispensable to mass murders like Stalin, Milosevic, Assad etc as their own armies. Carry on with pride, job well done, no blood on your hands at all. How's that Syria thing working out for you?

On the other hand, the demand for hasty action leads to stupid foreign policy blunders like supporting fascist extremists conducting genocide in a war of their own aggression against relatively secular and moderate leaders like Slobodan Milosevic and Bashir Assad.

Compare Milosevic to Izetbegovic, and then read the news from Syria: the rebels receiving foreign guns and money and winning military victories are explicitly al-Qaeda, while the Free Syrian Army is only a front group that pretends to be secular in front of Western audiences.

The problem is of course the current namby-pamby nanny-state commie liberal president you've got, who insists on signing every drone death warrant personally.

As opposed to some previous manly man presidents, who used B-52s instead.

Or Clinton, who used cruise missiles to blow up a Sudan pharmaceutical plant: http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/jared/sudan.html

Serbs with their hateful xtian idealogy

You're wrong here, it was Catholic Croats collaborating with NAZIs who persecuted Orthodox Serbians. More recently the Albanians, especially the KLA, Kosovo Liberation Army, were persecuting Serbians and others. And the KLA deals in opium with an idea of a Greater Albania.

It's not just Serbians who are instigating violence.

Falcon

The mujaheddin is to Afghanistan what the cowboy is to the US. Calling them terrorists is hard as they were heavily sponsored and acclaimed as freedom fighters by the US.
They have decades of battle experience, against USSR, and each other. Afghanistan, today, is just the result of the Colonial "great game" followed by brilliant idea Carter had when he gave the USSR its Vietnam War... So stop whining, you had the chance to survive to the results of US history, and you helped writing another page your children will have to live with.

THE CIA NAZI CONNECTION

Posted By: Phoenix
Date: Sunday, 9 December 2001, 3:12 a.m.

In Response To: THE BUSH FAMILY CIA & NAZI PAST (Phoenix)

This posted at Emperor's Clothes is about an article in The San Francisco Bay Guardian that discusses the recently unclassified CIA files.

There are also many more references at the end of Part Two.

Part 1 - WORST KEPT SECRETS OF THE BUMBLING BEAR - the CIA/NAZI marriage

URL for this article: http://emperors-clothes.com/docs/gehlen2.htm

Please feel free to reprint and re-post any Emperor's Clothes article. Also, please include the article's Web address and author(s).

www.tenc.net * [Emperor's Clothes]

WORST KEPT SECRETS OF THE BUMBLING BEAR (Part 1 of 2)
by Jared Israel
[Originally Posted 22 May 2001]
[Reposted 2 December 2001]

Below is an article from the 'San Francisco Bay Guardian', entitled, 'The CIA's Worst-Kept Secret.' It discusses some recently unclassified CIA files. These documents, 18,000 pages in all, confirm that U.S. intelligence recruited and protected Nazis starting at the end of World War II.

I am posting and writing about this article for two reasons. First, it includes some useful information about the Nazi-CIA marriage. Second, it presents that information from a perspective that I consider at once mistaken and widespread; hence worth discussing.

The article was written by Martin Lee. Mr. Lee argues that after World War II, Nazi spies duped the U.S. into hiring them, thereby protecting themselves and their networks from prosecution.

He cites the example of General Reinhard Gehlen. Gehlen had been chief of Nazi intelligence in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. According to Mr. Lee, Gehlen fooled spymaster Allen Dulles, who later became Director of the CIA, in the following way:

"Gehlen was quickly spirited off to Fort Hunt, Va. The image he projected during 10 months of negotiations at Fort Hunt was, to use a bit of espionage parlance, a "legend" --one that hinged on Gehlen's false claim that he was never really a Nazi, but was dedicated, above all, to fighting Communism. Those who bit the bait included future CIA director Allen Dulles, who became Gehlen's biggest supporter among American policy wonks. " (From the text below)

There's a bit of a problem here.

Starting more than a decade earlier, Allen Dulles, a leading diplomat and spy, and his brother, John Foster, a Wall Street insider, had created a financial-intelligence apparatus to assist the Nazis. So Dulles had long-standing, friendly relations with Nazis. That being the case, why would Dulles be upset if he 'learned' that Gehlen (a top Nazi spy) was a Nazi? (1)

Moreover, Gehlen had not been some cloistered spy. His job had not been simply to coordinate the gathering of information. He had been a key leader of the work of fascist groups in the occupied East, such as the Iron Guard in Romania, the Lat

You know what? Fuck You.

http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/stowell/a-bomb.htm

Japan committed horrific crimes. America committed worse.

..was to make sure that, no matter what the circumstances, there would be fighter jets available and put in the air to avoid any such incident.

I know that average Joe Doe may never have thought about planes flying into buildings, but apart from some 'crazy conspiracy nuts' who e.g. watched the first episode of the Lone Gunmen or those architects actually responsible for designing the WTC even the government officials must have been aware of scenarios in which hijacked planes would be flown into civilian buildings or nuclear plants.

In fact during the cold war certain government officials were even far more creative in finding ways to start a war based on false or fabricated evidence. A plan had been put forth to the government detailing how to create support for a war by laying false evidence (e.g. hijackings of civilian airplanes and attacking civilians by military aircraft). Those plans, due to Kennedy's refusal, have never been put into action, but they show what certain members of government (in this case up to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) were willing to do; imagine what might have happened if the president had instead been GW Bush back then..

The government is (or should be) concerned about and has the means to evaluate any potential thread against its citizens and act accordingly so that the citizens don't have to. Instead this administration has let four airplanes slip through that killed thousands of civilians and afterwards starts a campaign aided by the media to scare its citizens shitless as to what could happen next? (tm)

..was to make sure that, no matter what the circumstances, there would be fighter jets available and put in the air to avoid any such incident.

I know that average Joe Doe may never have thought about planes flying into buildings, but apart from some 'crazy conspiracy nuts' who e.g. watched the first episode of the Lone Gunmen or those architects actually responsible for designing the WTC even the government officials must have been aware of scenarios in which hijacked planes would be flown into civilian buildings or nuclear plants.

In fact during the cold war certain government officials were even far more creative in finding ways to start a war based on false or fabricated evidence. A plan had been put forth to the government detailing how to create support for a war by laying false evidence (e.g. hijackings of civilian airplanes and attacking civilians by military aircraft). Those plans, due to Kennedy's refusal, have never been put into action, but they show what certain members of government (in this case up to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) were willing to do; imagine what might have happened if the president had instead been GW Bush back then..

The government is (or should be) concerned about and has the means to evaluate any potential thread against its citizens and act accordingly so that the citizens don't have to. Instead this administration has let four airplanes slip through that killed thousands of civilians and afterwards starts a campaign aided by the media to scare its citizens shitless as to what could happen next? (tm)

..was to make sure that, no matter what the circumstances, there would be fighter jets available and put in the air to avoid any such incident.

I know that average Joe Doe may never have thought about planes flying into buildings, but apart from some 'crazy conspiracy nuts' who e.g. watched the first episode of the Lone Gunmen or those architects actually responsible for designing the WTC even the government officials must have been aware of scenarios in which hijacked planes would be flown into civilian buildings or nuclear plants.

In fact during the cold war certain government officials were even far more creative in finding ways to start a war based on false or fabricated evidence. A plan had been put forth to the government detailing how to create support for a war by laying false evidence (e.g. hijackings of civilian airplanes and attacking civilians by military aircraft). Those plans, due to Kennedy's refusal, have never been put into action, but they show what certain members of government (in this case up to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) were willing to do; imagine what might have happened if the president had instead been GW Bush back then..

The government is (or should be) concerned about and has the means to evaluate any potential thread against its citizens and act accordingly so that the citizens don't have to. Instead this administration has let four airplanes slip through that killed thousands of civilians and afterwards starts a campaign aided by the media to scare its citizens shitless as to what could happen next? (tm)

..was to make sure that, no matter what the circumstances, there would be fighter jets available and put in the air to avoid any such incident.

I know that average Joe Doe may never have thought about planes flying into buildings, but apart from some 'crazy conspiracy nuts' who e.g. watched the first episode of the Lone Gunmen or those architects actually responsible for designing the WTC even the government officials must have been aware of scenarios in which hijacked planes would be flown into civilian buildings or nuclear plants.

In fact during the cold war certain government officials were even far more creative in finding ways to start a war based on false or fabricated evidence. A plan had been put forth to the government detailing how to create support for a war by laying false evidence (e.g. hijackings of civilian airplanes and attacking civilians by military aircraft). Those plans, due to Kennedy's refusal, have never been put into action, but they show what certain members of government (in this case up to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) were willing to do; imagine what might have happened if the president had instead been GW Bush back then..

The government is (or should be) concerned about and has the means to evaluate any potential thread against its citizens and act accordingly so that the citizens don't have to. Instead this administration has let four airplanes slip through that killed thousands of civilians and afterwards starts a campaign aided by the media to scare its citizens shitless as to what could happen next? (tm)

Look at the ties the Bush family has to that dirty Nazi money also. Maybe the corporations are just following the lead set by the Presidential family.
http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/randy/swas5.h tm
http://www.rense.com/general26/dutch.htm
http://www.john-loftus.com/bush_nazi_scandal.asp
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32 55.htm


technoid_

The Pope didn't just save jews. He also collaborated with Hitler, signing a concordat, effectively stating that he'd turn a blind eye to the Final Solution in exchange for favors to catholics living in Germany... I just started reading the book "Hitler's Pope," and it's been interesting so far. And this is coming from someone raised Catholic, though not the kind of Catholic who really believes in papal infallibility, most especially in non-spiritual matters... The Church doesn't like to talk about it's failures, but the rest of the world doesn't need to ignore them. After all, the Church is a church of humans.

http://www.unknownnews.net/fis020603.html
http://www.balkan-archive.org.yu/politics/rape/nan ag/
http://english.pravda.ru/diplomatic/2001/12/21/241 41.html
http://www.brasscheck.com/yugoslavia/directory/517 99a.html
http://www.michaelparenti.org/MediaAtrocities.html
http://www.fantompowa.net/Flame/mandel_canada.htm
http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/sinclair/why. htm

If you can provide links to websites that actually can provide hard evidence of the things that required something drastic to be done, I'd love to read them. I'd also love to read any websites you have that explain how the US was dragged kicking and screaming. Thanks.

First of all, to say that "Yugoslavia" caused the Bosnian war is as meaningless as saying that the United States caused the (U.S.) Civil War.

The Bosnian war started because some leaders of the Bosnian Muslims-- who as a people had historically been pro-Yugoslav-- wanted to secede from Yugoslavia and start their own Islamic state, and to impose Islamic law on all the people living there-- including the ethnic Serbs and Croats who made up a majority of the population. This was all detailed in their president Izetbegovic's "Islamic Declaration". Along with taking advantage of all the usual Muslim suspects-- including Osama's right-hand man al-Harbi-- who flocked there to fight the jihad, the Bosnian president also recreated a WWII-era SS Division to help in the fight.

A history lesson, since falcon5768 and probably others need it: hundreds of thousands of Serbian civilians were murdered in concentration camps during WWII, when they were on the Allied side while the Bosnians and Croats were allied with the Nazis. Memories are long in that part of the world, and Islamic law is not much fun either-- so is it any wonder that not just Serbs but moderate Muslims like took up arms to prevent the secession of Bosnia, or at least keep their own land out from under the thumb of Izetbegovic and his cronies?

I am confused why you say that the Bosnian war "DID kill US and UN troops". What US or UN troops were in the region? And as for the "mass slaughter" of Muslims at Srebrenica, the story is now starting to leak out that it's not so clear-cut as that-- most of the bodies have never shown up, and many of the dead turned out to be the troops of Muslim warlord Nasr Oric, who would use the UN-protected "safe areas" as a base from which to launch raids involving beheadings of prisoners... sound familiar?

The most laughable part of your post (and, by extension, the US's case against Bobby Fischer) is when you go on about how the sanctions were meant to prevent the world from contributing to the war. Of course, as the Guardian newspaper in England documented (much later after it was no longer inconvenient for the facts to come out), the US government was violating the embargo all along:

...the Pentagon had incurred debts to Islamist groups and their Middle Eastern sponsors. By 1993 these groups, many supported by Iran and Saudi Arabia, were anxious to help Bosnian Muslims fighting in the former Yugoslavia and called in their debts with the Americans. Bill Clinton and the Pentagon were keen to be seen as creditworthy and repaid in the form of an Iran-Contra style operation - in flagrant violation of the UN security council arms embargo against all combatants in the former Yugoslavia.

The result was a vast secret conduit of weapons smuggling though Croatia. This was arranged by the clandestine agencies of the US, Turkey and Iran...

The reason you, and so many other people, hold this inaccurate and deluded view of the Bosnian war, is attributable mostly to the really top-notch propaganda war waged in the U.S. and U.K. media, making the Bosnian Muslims out to be the wonderful, multicultural good guys and the Serbs the baddies. It doesn't matter that so much of the lies have now been exposed-- like

Interview with UNOCAL.

One unsubstantiated Le Monde article was all the "evidence" ever provided.

This guy is viewed as a Class-A crackpot in Austin, Texas. He has a cable access show twice a week in which he rants about conspiracy theories of all kinds of varieties.

Before you start calling people names you should do your research. Everything he covers is not a conspiracy theory but conspiracy fact. He does not talk about things he can't back up with news articles, witnesses etc. He even tells you to not believe him and do the research yourself.

He has run numerous shows on how the government literally has black helicopters following him around South Austin.

He was predicting armageddon when the Y2K bug was supposed to hit.

He never said that the Y2K bug was going to cause armegeddon. In fact he said it was a distration story that FEMA would use as an excuse to put in their command centers.

He fully espouses the notion that Bush not only had previous-knowledge of 9/11 but planned it.

He did a special where he claims that all presidents past and present meet at Bohemiam Grove, worship an owl god, and sacrifice children.

So before you bash someone because their views are different than yours, I suggest you do the research!

CIA is one of the most evil organizations in the last 50 years. Following in the footsteps of other similar spy organizations like the SS and the KGB, the CIA is responsible for hundreads of thousands of deaths and for torturing many more.

I would urge Americans to limit their agents to WITHIN their country. Overthrowing other governments, killing innocent people, and spreading torture techniques is not my idea of defense. You want to protect your country? Use the agents to track and monitor people WITHIN your country. Sending them off to cause troubles in other countries is neither moral nor effective.

Countries where CIA has been complicit in kiling or torturing more than 10 people include El Salvador, Guatemla, Chile, Argentina, Indonesia, Iran, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and many more...

CIA blowbacks include Iraqgate (money laundering to Iraq via Banca de la Franca), Iran-Contra (no comment), Usama bin Laden (contrary to US govt propaganda, he learned all his techniques off the CIA), and so forth. Then again, nothing out of the CIA should surprise anyone. I mean, this is the same organization that saved (and was influenced by) some of the most cruel Nazi war criminals. (another story here)

I guess I just got blacklisted for that...fuck the CIA and everything that it stands for :(:(:(

Sivaram Velauthapillai

wired: U.S. Could Deny GPS To Taliban

The international fear and uncertainty has become so large that the Pentagon even feld compelled to say they wouldn't enact a global GPS blackout during war time. This is obviously a completely unbearable situation for anyone besides the US government. Here is a link:

Reuters: Pentagon pledges 'no global GPS blackout'

I don't know what happened to the Russian space positioning system that was once discussed as alternative, but the European Union is completely right in that they think they have to create an alternative to GPS. Even more puzzling is the fierceness with which the USA have tried to stop Galileo (why would they do that if not to leverage their monopoly pressure?). Here is a satnews.com story about it:

EU Postpones Decision on Galileo System Until 2002

The argument of the US government against Galileo was that it "could be abused by future enemies". So you can see how the US government is using GPS to pressure others. It is very important to create an alternative to GPS, even if it's just to stop the US from bullying other nations.

So much about Galileo, but what about other reasons for a non-US space program? I think one of the most dramatic display of bullying ever to be seen by any government is what the US government semi-openly discussed according to a Reuters story this February: to deny other nations access to space:

U.S. Pentagon Sees Space as Military 'High Ground'

If any sovereign nation sees something like this, it is obvious that a big space program besides the US one is absolutely necessary. The USA have proven time and again that they are a very volatile friend who on a whim decides to deny their resources to their friends.

There was one well documented case in the Bosnian war that is quite telling. The US vehemently denied ground troops and any real war involvement of theirs in Bosnia, on the grounds that Clinton thought his political career would be over of pictures of dead soldiers arrived home. So the role of the USA was mostly reconnaissance and intelligence and they did help keeping the air space empty. However, it later turned out that they gave weapons to the rebels, in violation of NATO orders. Here is one link about it:

Washington finances ethnic warfare

This is a very serious issue, please don't take my word for it, look for yourself. There was a good joint European documentary about it a while ago, where they interviewed the NATO official in Bosnia, a Norwegian military official, and he said that the USA basically denied their allies the contractually guaranteed intelligence to cover up their covert operations.

In my eyes this kind of behaviour leaves Europe no other choice but to go for independence in space and military. Most nations have given in to US surveillance and intelligence superiority, some like Australia and Britain even joined the Echelon system. There are stories that even those very close allies do not have full access to the jointly generated intelligence. In effect, the USA is exploiting and abusing everyone else around them, and now Mr Bush has stepped over the line with his excessive bullying and the other nations are banding together.

I have been waiting for this for many years, and I am happy that it finally happened. While I despise Bush on all levels, he did something very valuable for the world. He gave them enough motivati

his rhetoric is restrained. it is entirely reasonable to suppose that bush (and staff) had not just a little foreknowledge of 2001september09 events.
those folks' rhetoric is not restrained, but is, alas, rigorously backed up. the part about andrews air force base standing down is telling.
if true, it would not be the first time the US military has considered citizens expendable. as far as removing rights - shiva h vishnu, where to begin?off the top of my head (this is slashdot after all!) try to tell me it is impossible for someone to accuse you of a crime. if such a bad fate should befall you, would you like the right to a trial? no? it is being denied to some, and once that started there's no reason to suppose you could not be next.

I check out slashdot, anandtech and other tech and science links. Also news.google.com and csmonitor.com (Christian Science Monitor). These to get an idea of the mainstream. I can't stand CNN and such so I skip those. Then I move on to my far left political links:

From the Wilderness http://www.fromthewilderness.com/
What Really Happened http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/
Centre for Research on Globalization http://www.globalresearch.ca/
Center for Cooperative Research http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/home.htm
Independent Media Center http://www.indymedia.org
Emperor's New Clothes http://emperors-clothes.com/indict/911page.htm
9-11 the people's investigation http://www.911pi.com/
Guerrilla News Network http://www.guerrillanews.com
International A.N.S.W.E.R. http://www.internationalanswer.org/
UK: The Observer (John Pilger) http://www.observer.co.uk/
UK: Independent (Robert Fisk) http://argument.independent.co.uk/

As a side note, I rarely use browser bookmarks; I keep my own index.html that I update daily, putting in references to articles I like and updating the top portion, of which the above are a subset. Then I can keep a copy of this on the internet in case I ever need it from a remote location.

well, how about:

here

here

and here

Although the last one is a bit wacky

As if it's not on the tip of everyone's tongue, we all know one thing: the 9/11 attacks, like every war catalyst for the past century, were allowed to happen.

9/11 is in the same category as the sinking of the Maine, the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, and the Gulf of Tonkin: the government either conspired to create or simply let happen the catastrophe to spur the public into war.

Why? Because America needs war to sustain its multinational corporations, and the Bush administration has an agenda of tyranny. We are trying to secure the next 50 years of energy through securing the middle east and central asia with dictators who represent our corporate interests, and we're losing our rights every day to Bush's schemes.

The NSA may have changed their ways, but the senior leadership obviously knew of the plot and let it happen -- the workers there were simply blindfolded to what was truly going on. The entire pdf file is full of lies, deceit, and spin to cover up what really went on at the NSA.

There are a myriad of questions that have been raised (see links below), and we may never know the answers to them.

http://www.rense.com/Datapages/bushkn.html - Bush Knew!
http://www.rense.com/Datapages/inv911.html - 911 Datapage
http://emperors-clothes.com/indict/indict-1.htm - an indictment of Rumsfeld, Myers, and Bush

Oh, and fix the flag.gif please -- I may hate the government, but I love this country.

I'm not talking about the determination of the hijackers, I'm talking about the - let me say it again - massive failure by many US authorities to follow best practices before and after the event. For examples before, just search Time Magazine for "whistle blower" and "FBI". For examples on the day, here is a good start.

The US already attempted a "regime change" in Venezuela this year. This "regime change" was an effort to install a leader that would privatize Venezuela's oil industry. Privatization would allow foreign investors to manipulate the price of oil. Venezuela is an OPEC country so this would have a world-wide effect (imagine Enron on a global scale). If I remember correctly Venezuela broke the oil embargo in the 70's.

To bring us back on topic... The US government does a lot of awful things like this that the people of the US would not approve of. There is no reason a democratic government should be overthrowing other governments. This war, like the war on drugs, is a racket and a sham.

There are a lot of unanswered questions about 9/11. All we can do is continue to search for answers to the questions of who stood down that day and who is making money off this.

Oh well. It seems Salon may be going out of business through faults of their own, and that's news. However, Emperors-Clothes is being attacked by media giants because they report the truth, and that's not news.

Have I missed something here?

Oh well. It seems Salon may be going out of business through faults of their own, and that's news. However, Emperors-Clothes is being attacked by media giants because they report the truth, and that's not news.

Have I missed something here?

Oh well. It seems Salon may be going out of business through faults of their own, and that's news. However, Emperors-Clothes is being attacked by media giants because they report the truth, and that's not news.

Have I missed something here?

A lot of folks believe IBM provided Nazi Germany with electronic cataloging support which allowed for the Unpopular to be shipped-off to death camps:

• Probing IBM's Nazi Connection
• How IBM Helped Automate the Nazi Death Machine in Poland
• IBM Warns Against Nazi Book

Since its publication in February, Edwin Black's book "IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation" has stirred unprecedented controversy among students of the Holocaust, American enterprise and information technology.

Of course, an informed person might not believe every little thing they read. ;)

IBM and Germany have been working together for years

The big deal is that when a person or a company is trying to coverup something that they don't wan the public to know. I think it's a major problem. In traditional news outlets (ie magazines, newspapers, tv) once a report is out, it is out. People can refer to it and see things change through history. However, if we can't guarantee that for the internet, how can we make it an legitimate source of reference. The web will become even more so a.. "put up anything as news..we can always change it later"

Take for example this analysis of the Chavez reporting from the Associate Press. They totally changed the story. [Read that link..it's actually quite damning]

There was ample warning, and the procedures for intereception were absolutely standard, but were not used, as demonstrated by this thorough analysis using only mainstream news sources.

There are precedents for this. During the 1960s, senior figures within the US Government considered staging terrorist incidents to justify a war with Cuba (including downing a US passenger jet).

And there's the classic example: Emperor Nero fiddling while Rome burned. He blamed the Christians, but many suspected that he started the fire.

I am in no way saying that what you heard might not be true, but read this analysis of it. I don't totally agree with their analysis, but it sure does make you think. According to them, no jets were scrambled until after the fact.

Make your own decision...

What I'm saying is that these extremists want us dead and our society destroyed. And there is absolutely nothing we can peacefully do, politically or otherwise, to change that. There is no reasoning with these extremists because their end goal is the complete and utter destruction of our (re: most average Americans') way of life.

Oh, and as far as military action in the Middle East for centuries goes...don't forget war amongst the tribes, fueding warlords, etc, etc. It ins't just the West that's been fighting there.

If there were effective alternatives to forcefully protecting ourselves, then I'd love to hear them.

And just what is the West trying to accomplish in Afghanistan?

• whatreallyhappened.com
• WAR ON TERROR: THE REAL VICTIMS
• Boom, Bust and Echo: A Dark Theory Behind Black Tuesday (This one is a little over the top, but there is some interesting information)
• Asking "Why?"
• Explaining Arab anger
• They can't see why they are hated
• Who did it? Foreign Report presents an alternative view
• When Will We Learn?
• Why we should reject American propaganda
• emperors-clothes.com
• zmag.org, see especially:
  • The New War Against Terror

But, you can make it clear to other nations that a given government will not be allowed to exist if said government either turns a blind eye to terrorists operating in its borders or, even worse, endorses and supports terrorists.

Here's an excerpt:

The Afghan resistance was backed by the intelligence services of the United States and Saudi Arabia with nearly $6 billion worth of weapons. And the territory targeted last week, a set of six encampments around Khost, where the Saudi exile Osama bin Laden has financed a kind of "terrorist university," in the words of a senior United States intelligence official, is well known to the Central Intelligence Agency.

The C.I.A.'s military and financial support for the Afghan rebels indirectly helped build the camps that the United States attacked. And some of the same warriors who fought the Soviets with the C.I.A.'s help are now fighting under Mr. bin Laden's banner.

From those same camps, the Afghan rebels, known as mujahedeen, or holy warriors, kept up a decadelong siege on the Soviet-supported garrison town of Khost.

This was written in 1998.

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it (as somebody once said ...).

Your analogy is one of the worst I have ever seen. There are more holes in it than I wish to address, but I will point out a few:

* A single person commiting an act of unprovoked violence is not comparable to a complex political situation that sometimes involves violence.

* The US is the puncher, not the receiver of the punch. Our cold war and oil interests cause us to meddle in the affairs of almost every country in the middle east. We aided Osama Bin Laden and put the Taliban into power. They used to be called "freedom fighters" in the past. Our sanctions in Iraq have caused the deaths of over 500,000 CHILDREN. We sponsored and trained terrorists in Nicaragua that resulted in over 30,000 civilian deaths. The list goes on. Now who is the aggressor here?

* A true pacifist is willing to die before hitting back. If someone thinks violence is evil, how can you combat evil with violence?

* And why would anyone take advice and learn lessons from an asshole who punches peaceful people in the face?

Turn your radio dial away from Rush Limbaugh and start finding out the true story, instead of knee-jerking off.

This laymness philter is starting to annoy me.

Brainwashed /. readers, who would of thunk it.

Ronald Reagan administration gave 3 billion dollars to Afghanistan for weapons, the same weapons that the Taliban are using now. We can thank the CIA (Under RRA) for helping Afgahnistan terrorist groups, the same ones today that formed the Taliban.

Nothing like Americans killed with Republican funded weapons, and Republican created terrorist groups.

The only Republican I can approve is the Secretary of State Colin Powell. I have no respect for that draft dodger Bush who uses a mostly republican seated Supreme Court and his brother in florida to help him overthrow an election.

-
My how people forget, when its not on CNN.

http://www.emperors-clothes.com/docs/camps.htm

it's also posted at http://emperors-clothes.com/docs/camps1.htm

btw note the use of "mr. bin laden" ;)

--+

Afghan Taliban Camps Were Built by NATO

The New York Times August 24, 1998

By TIM WEINER

- WASHINGTON, Aug. 23

Throughout the 1980's, the Soviet Union threw almost every weapon it had, short of nuclear bombs, at the Afghan camps attacked by the United States last week.

During their nine-year occupation of Afghanistan, the Soviets attacked the camps outside the town of Khost with Scud missiles, 500-pound bombs dropped from jets, barrages of artillery, flights of helicopter gunships and their crack special forces. The toughest Soviet commander in Afghanistan, Lieut. Gen. Boris Gromov, personally led the last assault.

But neither carpet bombing nor commandos drove the Afghan holy warriors from the mountains. Afghanistan has a long history of repelling superpowers. Its terrain favors defenders as well as any in the world, whether their opponents, like the Soviets, are trying to defeat them on the ground or whether, like the United States, they are trying to disperse, deter and disrupt them. It is uncertain that the United States, which fired dozens of million-dollar cruise missiles at those same camps on Thursday, can do better than the Soviets.

The camps, hidden in the steep mountains and mile-deep valleys of Paktia province, were the place where all seven ranking Afghan resistance leaders maintained underground headquarters, mountain redoubts and clandestine weapons stocks during their bitter and ultimately successful war against Soviet troops from December 1979 to February 1989, according to American intelligence veterans.

The Afghan resistance was backed by the intelligence services of the United States and Saudi Arabia with nearly $6 billion worth of weapons. And the territory targeted last week, a set of six encampments around Khost, where the Saudi exile Osama bin Laden has financed a kind of "terrorist university," in the words of a senior United States intelligence official, is well known to the Central Intelligence Agency.

The C.I.A.'s military and financial support for the Afghan rebels indirectly helped build the camps that the United States attacked. And some of the same warriors who fought the Soviets with the C.I.A.'s help are now fighting under Mr. bin Laden's banner.

From those same camps, the Afghan rebels, known as mujahedeen, or holy warriors, kept up a decadelong siege on the Soviet-supported garrison town of Khost.

Thousands of mujahedeen were dug into the mountains around Khost. Soviet accounts of the siege of Khost during 1988 referred to the rebel camps as "the last word in NATO engineering techniques." After a decade of fighting during which each side claimed to have killed thousands of the enemy, the Afghan rebels poured out of their encampments and took Khost.

"This was the most fiercely contested piece of real estate in the 10-year Afghan war," said Milt Bearden, who ran the C.I.A.'s side of the war from 1986 to 1989.

United States officials said their attack was intended to deter Mr. bin Laden, whom they call the financier and intellectual author of this month's bombings of two American embassies in Africa, which killed 263 people, including 12 Americans. They said the damage inflicted on the Khost camps was moderate to heavy.

But the communications infrastructure used by Mr. bin Laden is based on portable satellite telephones, not a centralized command-and-control system that can be destroyed with a missile, intelligence officials said. The strongest power that binds his loose-knit network of confederates is his money, which is hidden inside a thus-far impenetrable global maze.

And history does not favor superpowers trying to subdue men dug into the mountains of Afghanistan.

Mr. bin Laden has said he spent the 1980's supporting the mujahedeen from their political base in Peshawar, Pakistan, near the foot of the Khyber Pass. He was most strongly allied with the most fundamentalist leaders of the Afghan resistance, particularly Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the head of the group called the Islamic Party. After the fall of the Soviet-backed Government, Mr. Hekmatyar spent most of his brief tenure as Prime Minister hurling missiles and mortars at Kabul, trying to dislodge more moderate rebel leaders from power.

The more militant Afghan rebels, like Mr. Hekmatyar, denounced the United States and backed Iraq during the Persian Gulf war in 1991, as did Mr. bin Laden. A year after the Persian Gulf war, posters throughout eastern Afghanistan displayed heroic, if imaginary, portraits of Saddam Hussein and Mr. Hekmatyar standing side by side.

No amount of money or moral support could keep the veterans of the Afghan resistance from killing one another after the fall of Kabul. The chaos that their infighting created led to the rise of the Taliban, the militant armed religious party that now controls most of Afghanistan and harbors Mr. bin Laden.

In the nine years since the Soviet withdrawal, Afghan resistance veterans have hoarded the remaining weapons sent by the C.I.A. and set up military training centers at resistance camps like the one near Khost, according to United States officials. In those years, thousands of Islamic outcasts, radicals and visionaries from around the world came to the borderlands of Afghanistan to learn the lessons of war from the mujahedeen. Mr. bin Laden sponsored many of those foreigners.

In a 1994 interview, a commander loyal to Mr. Hekmatyar, Noor Amin, said that "the whole country is a university for jihad," or holy war.

"There are many formal training centers," Mr. Amin said. "We have had Egyptians, Sudanese, Arabs and other foreigners trained here as assassins." United States officials said the former mujahedeen camps it attacked on Thursday were precisely that kind of "university for jihad."

Mr. bin Laden, stripped of his Saudi citizenship and formally stateless, returned to the anarchy of Afghanistan in 1996 from the Sudan, where United States intelligence analysts believe he built at least three training camps for veterans of the Afghan war.

He said in an interview with CNN last year that one of his main missions during the war, which he helped finance with millions of dollars of his own money, was to transport bulldozers, front-end loaders and other heavy equipment to Pakistan to help build tunnels, military depots and roads inside Afghanistan for the mujahedeen.

It is unclear whether Mr. bin Laden, who inherited about $250 million from a fortune his father made building mosques, palaces and public works for the Saudi royal family, personally helped build the Khost camps during the war against the Soviets, or has substantially upgraded them since returning to the mountains of Afghanistan.

[(c) 'N.Y.Times', 1998, Reprinted for Fair Use Only]

Now the US is allowed to find out how its own brew is tasting. Washington Post has
it in print since 1992 But who cares to read?

The real funny thing is that the Taleban were funded by the US for years to fight the bad commie Afghan government. Now the flames have come home into the house where they once were fueled.

If you were capable to read in 1992 instead to look at comic strips only, you would know it. But today nobody seems to care. Pray on folks but don't expect too much from it. Instead intelligent foreign policy might help. But as it seems, idiots don't learn too fast.

Now snake bites its masters hand. Anybody surprised?
Blame those criminals who are responsisble for this development.

The writing was on the wall since 1992.
Nobody cared to read it. And even now nobody cares.
Praying isn't enough when it comes to decision making.
Thinking may help. Better the US may chose friends more
carefully next time. But as it looks, the next explosive relationship
is ready to go.

Anatomy of a Victory: CIA's Covert Afghan War
By: Steve Coll, 'Washington Post', July 19, 1992

A specially equipped C-141 Starlifter transport carrying William Casey touched down at a military air base south of Islamabad in October 1984 for a secret visit by the CIA director to plan strategy for the war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Helicopters lifted Casey to three secret training camps near the Afghan border, where he watched mujaheddin rebels fire heavy weapons and learn to make bombs with CIA-supplied plastic explosives and detonators.

During the visit, Casey startled his Pakistani hosts by proposing that they take the Afghan war into enemy territory -- into the Soviet Union itself. Casey wanted to ship subversive propaganda through Afghanistan to the Soviet Union's predominantly Muslim southern republics. The Pakistanis agreed, and the CIA soon supplied thousands of Korans, as well as books on Soviet atrocities in Uzbekistan and tracts on historical heroes of Uzbek nationalism, according to Pakistani and Western officials.
"We can do a lot of damage to the Soviet Union," Casey said, according to Mohammed Yousaf, a Pakistani general who attended the meeting.

I propose an amendment to your first paragraph: you watch FOX news to get the permissible conservative viewpoint, then switch to CNN for the permissible liberal one. After all, there are standards; whether you identify yourself with the left or the right, there are certain things it just wouldn't do to say on the air, if you want to stay on the air.

For example: by prevailing international standards, Nightline mainstay Henry Kissinger is a war criminal (see Christopher Hitchens' articles in the two most recent issues of Harper's).

Or: based on similar standards, the Sudanese government has as much of a case to extradite and prosecute Bill Clinton (for the bombing of a pharmaceutical plant there) as Spain did for attempting to extradite and prosecute Augusto Pinochet.

Or: the full truth of the deaths of dozens Branch Davidians at the hands of the FBI has been laundered, and is likely to stay that way.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

But sad to say, plain .TXT is not much of a marketing tool these days. Tom Paine's handprinted manifestos lit the fire of revolution; today, only a multimedia manifesto would catch the public attention. We are a society of Web surfers and couch potatoes. The revolution had better be televized, or it's not gonna fly.

(It's offtopic, but those televised images of the Bosnian prisoner camps that TMiB mentions are a great example. It turns out they were faked (there's an article and even a video with the skinny on how it was done. But they sure built up a lot of sympathy for the Bosnian Muslim separatist movement, didn't they?!)

But pirate radio and TV transmitters are easy to jam and track down. That leaves computers. Freenet is not going to be a speed demon, and Publius will enforce this 100k limit. So the single most important way for people of limited means to disseminate controversial information is, I would argue, the Web. And, in fact, just about any political or controversial group you'd care to name has a Web site by now.

Once the Web becomes truly a mass medium worldwide, I predict that we will soon start seeing national governments go after the Web sites of movements they don't like. Thing is, some of those sites will be backed by other national governments. I wonder what the 'net will look like then. More firewalls like China's? Special agents attacking server rooms? ISP workers getting threatened like judges in South America?

I guess you haven't been listening to the news lately: http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/international/s tory/0,3604,102378,00.html

Quote from the link above: "These K-For figures suggest that there are as many murders now as there were in the two months of mutual ethnic attacks before Nato air strikes began against Yugoslavia in March - roughly 15 to 20 a week." Happen to know how many Serb civilian were killed by NATO airstrikes? (Hint: it's more than the number of people from all sides that had been killed in Kosovo before the NATO airstrikes.

It looks like that if you are Serb, Roma, muslim Slav, Jew, or even moderate Albanian being killed doesn't count as ethnic cleansing: http://www.seattle-pi.com/opinion/soap131.shtml and http://www.emperors-clothes.com/interviews/ceda.ht m

At least the NATO troops at Kosovo have some perks . http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/2000/02/ 05/timfgneur01001.html?1984

Care to reconsider your views? Maybe human rights didn't have much to do with the Kosovo "virtual war"?

English libel law is far worse than US. And yes, that is saying something.

Check out what happened to LM recently, or Count Nicolai Tolstoy earlier in the century. Apparently, in England at least, the truth is not an allowed defence against libel charges.

there is nothing more valuable than just realizing the truth, and realizing nothing will change it.

worth a read:
www.emperors-clothes.com/
(Check out the Collateral Damage in Seattle link)

Subject: COLLATERAL DAMAGE IN SEATTLE

COLLATERAL DAMAGE IN SEATTLE

by Portland student/reporter Jim Desyllas

Called-in from a pay phone outside Seattle. Wed., 7:30 pm Pacific time.

(Posted at www.emperors-clothes.com 12-2-99. Feel free to distribute in full including this note.)

I just spent 4 days in Seattle. The "information" people are getting from the mass media is false. This was not, as Pres. Clinton claims, a peaceful protest marred by the actions of violent protesters. This was a massive, strong but peaceful demonstration which was attacked repeatedly by the police with the express purpose of provoking a violent response to provide photo opportunities for the Western media. I know because I watched it happening. I'll tell you how they did it.

As Michel Chossudovsky says in his "Disarming the New World Order" (See Note # 1 at end for link to that article) - the government put a lot of effort into making sure the protesters in Seattle were a "loyal opposition" who wanted to reform the WTO, not get rid of it. But the people in Seattle - American steel workers, Canadian postal workers, college kids from all over, environmentalists from Australia - you name it - were not for reforming the WTO. They were for getting rid of it.

And this wasn't just true of the protesters. I interviewed delegates. None of them had anything favorable to say about the WTO. Two delegates from the Caribbean were angry about job loss. One delegate from Peru took a bullhorn and got up on a car and spoke to the protestors against the World Trade Organization. He said it hurts the workers and farmers. I interviewed a Norwegian guy from Greenpeace. Totally against it. Even a delegate from Holland said it had hurt the farmers there. He said though it is supposedly democratic, that's actually a lie: the US, England and Canada and a few others get together and decide what they want to do. Then they ask the rest of the countries to vote and if they vote wrong they threaten,"You won't get loans," or whatever. They get them to do what they want by blackmailing them. The Italians we interviewed were upset too. I couldn't find any delegates who were in favor.

So the government instigated a "riot" to discredit the movement against the WTO because they couldn't dilute it. I am not guessing about this. I was there. I saw it happening. And I will tell you I am frankly shocked to see, close up, just how little our leaders care what happens to ordinary people. Clinton can pose and speak a lot of flowery stuff but the truth is - we are nothing to them. I saw this with my own eyes.

Sunday and Monday, there was no violence. None. The people were aggressively non-violent; they were self-policing. Up until Tuesday at 4pm there was one window broken in the whole city - a McDonalds window. This compares favorably to the typical rock concert, let alone a demonstration of people who were non-violently barring entry to the World Trade Center!

At this point, a new group of police - tactical police - moved in and started gassing people and shooting rubber bullets. Is it any surprise that people got mad? Of course, the young kids hit back by breaking some windows in retaliation for being gassed, sprayed with very painful pepper gas, and shot with dangerous "rubber" bullets. The police instigated these kids, plain and simple.

Sunday and Monday they had young cops, using them to block the streets. These were trainees. But Tuesday they had the real cops; none of them were young. They were trained to attack people. A small group, maybe 100 people total, struck back. Then these cops herded that group around the city, making sure there were plenty of photo ops of "violent protesters."

A number of times they had these 100 or so protesters caught between buildings and walls of police. They could easily have arrested and detained this small number of people and gotten it over with. Instead they would gas them and let them go. Then trap them again, gas them again, and again let them go. The cops made no arrests that I know of until late Tuesday night though the skirmishing was going on from three till 9:30. The cops would blockade three or five blocks of an area, give the angry kids room to operate, keep gassing them - when you gas a person, let me tell you, it gets them fighting mad.

Tuesday night the police gassed all of downtown. This was going on from 3 PM, till 6 PM.. Gas everywhere. The kids broke a few windows - McD's, Starbucks - small stuff - burned a few garbage cans. The police were using these people as extras. It was staged. I believe also the police had their own people in there, encouraging people to break stuff - if people think I may be exaggerating, I saw supposed protesters - they were screaming and so on - and then later, when everything was over, the same people tackled other protestors and put handcuffs on them.

At 6pm they issued a State of Emergency. At that point they had pushed the 100 people outside the city limits, so the police went outside the limits too, and they started gassing that area too, gassing the neighborhoods where the regular people live. I am not exaggerating. The police were relentless.

This was in an area from the city limits for about 10 blocks to the Seattle Central Community College. If you were alive, the police gassed you. People coming back from work, kids, women, everyone. People would go out of their houses to see what was happening because these tear gas guns sound like a cannon - and they would get gassed. A block away there was a Texaco gas station - they threw tear gas at gas pumps, believe it or not - they were like vandals. They gassed a bus. I saw it with my own eyes. A bus. The driver, the riders, the people just abandoned it .

I was sitting in a little coffee shop called Rauhaus, [Jim did not spell this - the spelling may be wrong.] They were shooting "rubber" bullets at the glass. I picked up a dozen of the things in a few square feet. They were also shooting this paint that you can only see with a florescent light. They would paint anyone and everyone and then go hunting them.

Anyway, because they were gassing everybody, the local people got mad too and they joined the 100 who had been herded out of the city. So soon there were 500 including the neighborhood people and all very angry. Naturally. Because they had been gassed and hit with pepper spray, that stuff does a number on you. And shot with these damn bullets. Then people set up barricades at Seattle Central Community College. The cops organized themselves for about an hour and then moved in and gassed that area.

Today they started mass arrests. That was because Clinton - the Greeks call him the Planitarchis, Ruler of the World - was coming. Weeping crocodile tears about how he just LOVES peaceful protest, which of course you'd have to be two years old to believe he had nothing to do with the police action. This whole thing, this police attack, this was US foreign policy, not some action decided by some bureaucrat in Seattle. This was the State Department. They wanted to discredit the people.

When things started on Sunday, there was a protest rally of solidarity involving people from different walks of life. Monday it got even bigger. Tuesday there was a big sort of carnival where people were doing different things, a band was playing music and people were blocking the World Trade Center. And about 3 PM the cops started throwing tear gas.

The thing that drove Clinton crazy was that on Tuesday the protesters had succeeded in making nonviolent human chains and had therefore stopped everyone from going into the World Trade Center. Only maybe 27 delegates got through, mostly US and British. There were what seemed like tens of thousands of protesters involved. So the police did their gassing number against these nonviolent people to break up the human chains and make the protesters look violent.

Today (Wednesday) I followed the union protest put together by the Longshoremen's Union. They went down to the docks and had a rally then marched to Third Avenue. As soon as they got there the cops started gassing them. There was an old lady there. She had gone downtown by bus to buy something. This lady was in her 70's and I saw her trying to run, but she couldn't breathe. She was in shock. I carried her to a building entryway. She was gasping, terrified. She had been in Germany, and it was like she was having flashbacks. The tear gas sounds like gunfire and there were helicopters overhead, sirens, cops on horses, everything.

They had clearly made a decision to destroy this movement.

So anyway there I was with her in this building and she wanted to go to the hospital but there was tear gas everywhere and I was afraid if I tried to move her she'd be gassed again. I went to this line of cops and begged - I mean begged - these riot police to help her. They ignored me. A girl told me later that a one year old had been gassed. And I myself saw a girl no more than 18 - a cop had busted her lip wide open - she was bleeding - and then they gassed everyone including her. After that she was kneeling on the ground crying like a baby and praying for 15 minutes, Hail Mary, Hail Mary. Over and over. She was in a state of shock. They just gassed these people who were sitting down non-violently and doing nothing. Nothing.

At one point the Seattle Mayor said his boys were not using rubber bullets. Miraculously, by then I had ten in my pocket. I could open a little market, sell the things. They are everywhere. I and other people started giving them to delegates and stuff. "See what they're doing? They're shooting "rubber" bullets and lying about it." We showed them to the media. I guess enough people and the media got the information because the Mayor made a new statement then that they were using them. As if he hadn't known.

They shot rubber bullets from four feet away into the face of a guy next to me, broke all his front teeth. When that happened I lost it. I forgot I was supposed to be getting the news for all of you and I started yelling at the cops, "What the hell is wrong with you? Are you sick, man?" So this cop aimed his gun right at me. That was his answer. So I first put my hands in front of my face because I didn't want to lose my teeth. And then I thought, to hell with it. I was wearing my target shirt that said "Collateral Damage", you know? With a bullseye target, like they wore during the bombing in Yugoslavia. And I told this guy, "Go ahead, shoot! Here! Here's the target!" He didn't shoot me.

I want to emphasize, these protesters were NOT violent people. They were the most non-violent people I have ever seen. Even when I was screaming at the cop, this girl came up to me and said, "Do not scream. This is non-violent." These people were too much to believe. They must meditate all the time, I don't know.

Clinton said he supports nonviolent protest. That is baloney. Today (Wed.) the protesters were causing absolutely no "trouble". In downtown the cops had people running who weren't even protesters - like that old lady or just people going to work or shopping - everyone was getting gassed. The busses weren't running because of the gas. I was lucky to catch one with a driver who could still see. I begged him to drive the old lady home - the driver changed his route especially for her. If you want to find human decency, stay away from the Planitarchis. Go to the to regular people. They have some. The Planitarchis lost all his years ago. Now he wouldn't know human decency if it came up and bit him.

So now I have made personal acquaintance with the people who run this country, and they are quite simply scum. There were people at work, people with babies, they were all getting gassed because the government would not allow an assembly of people speaking their minds. It is the same as what happened in Athens. Clinton's requirements on the Greek government created the riot and he did the same thing here. And then he says he supports nonviolent protest? How? By shooting rubber bullets? And today they outlawed gas masks. They want to make sure everyone gets his money's worth.

Today, just like yesterday night, the police were in the residential neighborhoods. People in cafés were getting gassed and shot at, you could hear it on the windows, bang, bang, bang. A guy trying to cross the street to go to his house got gassed. First a drunk guy outside a bar yelled at the cops "Get out of here!" so they gassed him. And then this other guys was just crossing the street to go home so the cops figured, might as well gas him too. People got gassed for coming out of restaruants and bars and coffeee shops. I'm amazed that nobody died who had asthma or something.

Or maybe somebody did die and they didn't talk about it. I mean after all, it's just collateral damage..

***

Note # 1 - For a critical look at the World Trade Organization, click on SEATTLE AND BEYOND

If you would like to browse articles from Emperors-Clothes.com, click here: Click here: The Emperors Clothes

Subject: COLLATERAL DAMAGE IN SEATTLE

COLLATERAL DAMAGE IN SEATTLE

by Portland student/reporter Jim Desyllas

Called-in from a pay phone outside Seattle. Wed., 7:30 pm Pacific time.

(Posted at www.emperors-clothes.com 12-2-99. Feel free to distribute in full including this note.)

I just spent 4 days in Seattle. The "information" people are getting from the mass media is false. This was not, as Pres. Clinton claims, a peaceful protest marred by the actions of violent protesters. This was a massive, strong but peaceful demonstration which was attacked repeatedly by the police with the express purpose of provoking a violent response to provide photo opportunities for the Western media. I know because I watched it happening. I'll tell you how they did it.

As Michel Chossudovsky says in his "Disarming the New World Order" (See Note # 1 at end for link to that article) - the government put a lot of effort into making sure the protesters in Seattle were a "loyal opposition" who wanted to reform the WTO, not get rid of it. But the people in Seattle - American steel workers, Canadian postal workers, college kids from all over, environmentalists from Australia - you name it - were not for reforming the WTO. They were for getting rid of it.

And this wasn't just true of the protesters. I interviewed delegates. None of them had anything favorable to say about the WTO. Two delegates from the Caribbean were angry about job loss. One delegate from Peru took a bullhorn and got up on a car and spoke to the protestors against the World Trade Organization. He said it hurts the workers and farmers. I interviewed a Norwegian guy from Greenpeace. Totally against it. Even a delegate from Holland said it had hurt the farmers there. He said though it is supposedly democratic, that's actually a lie: the US, England and Canada and a few others get together and decide what they want to do. Then they ask the rest of the countries to vote and if they vote wrong they threaten,"You won't get loans," or whatever. They get them to do what they want by blackmailing them. The Italians we interviewed were upset too. I couldn't find any delegates who were in favor.

So the government instigated a "riot" to discredit the movement against the WTO because they couldn't dilute it. I am not guessing about this. I was there. I saw it happening. And I will tell you I am frankly shocked to see, close up, just how little our leaders care what happens to ordinary people. Clinton can pose and speak a lot of flowery stuff but the truth is - we are nothing to them. I saw this with my own eyes.

Sunday and Monday, there was no violence. None. The people were aggressively non-violent; they were self-policing. Up until Tuesday at 4pm there was one window broken in the whole city - a McDonalds window. This compares favorably to the typical rock concert, let alone a demonstration of people who were non-violently barring entry to the World Trade Center!

At this point, a new group of police - tactical police - moved in and started gassing people and shooting rubber bullets. Is it any surprise that people got mad? Of course, the young kids hit back by breaking some windows in retaliation for being gassed, sprayed with very painful pepper gas, and shot with dangerous "rubber" bullets. The police instigated these kids, plain and simple.

Sunday and Monday they had young cops, using them to block the streets. These were trainees. But Tuesday they had the real cops; none of them were young. They were trained to attack people. A small group, maybe 100 people total, struck back. Then these cops herded that group around the city, making sure there were plenty of photo ops of "violent protesters."

A number of times they had these 100 or so protesters caught between buildings and walls of police. They could easily have arrested and detained this small number of people and gotten it over with. Instead they would gas them and let them go. Then trap them again, gas them again, and again let them go. The cops made no arrests that I know of until late Tuesday night though the skirmishing was going on from three till 9:30. The cops would blockade three or five blocks of an area, give the angry kids room to operate, keep gassing them - when you gas a person, let me tell you, it gets them fighting mad.

Tuesday night the police gassed all of downtown. This was going on from 3 PM, till 6 PM.. Gas everywhere. The kids broke a few windows - McD's, Starbucks - small stuff - burned a few garbage cans. The police were using these people as extras. It was staged. I believe also the police had their own people in there, encouraging people to break stuff - if people think I may be exaggerating, I saw supposed protesters - they were screaming and so on - and then later, when everything was over, the same people tackled other protestors and put handcuffs on them.

At 6pm they issued a State of Emergency. At that point they had pushed the 100 people outside the city limits, so the police went outside the limits too, and they started gassing that area too, gassing the neighborhoods where the regular people live. I am not exaggerating. The police were relentless.

This was in an area from the city limits for about 10 blocks to the Seattle Central Community College. If you were alive, the police gassed you. People coming back from work, kids, women, everyone. People would go out of their houses to see what was happening because these tear gas guns sound like a cannon - and they would get gassed. A block away there was a Texaco gas station - they threw tear gas at gas pumps, believe it or not - they were like vandals. They gassed a bus. I saw it with my own eyes. A bus. The driver, the riders, the people just abandoned it .

I was sitting in a little coffee shop called Rauhaus, [Jim did not spell this - the spelling may be wrong.] They were shooting "rubber" bullets at the glass. I picked up a dozen of the things in a few square feet. They were also shooting this paint that you can only see with a florescent light. They would paint anyone and everyone and then go hunting them.

Anyway, because they were gassing everybody, the local people got mad too and they joined the 100 who had been herded out of the city. So soon there were 500 including the neighborhood people and all very angry. Naturally. Because they had been gassed and hit with pepper spray, that stuff does a number on you. And shot with these damn bullets. Then people set up barricades at Seattle Central Community College. The cops organized themselves for about an hour and then moved in and gassed that area.

Today they started mass arrests. That was because Clinton - the Greeks call him the Planitarchis, Ruler of the World - was coming. Weeping crocodile tears about how he just LOVES peaceful protest, which of course you'd have to be two years old to believe he had nothing to do with the police action. This whole thing, this police attack, this was US foreign policy, not some action decided by some bureaucrat in Seattle. This was the State Department. They wanted to discredit the people.

When things started on Sunday, there was a protest rally of solidarity involving people from different walks of life. Monday it got even bigger. Tuesday there was a big sort of carnival where people were doing different things, a band was playing music and people were blocking the World Trade Center. And about 3 PM the cops started throwing tear gas.

The thing that drove Clinton crazy was that on Tuesday the protesters had succeeded in making nonviolent human chains and had therefore stopped everyone from going into the World Trade Center. Only maybe 27 delegates got through, mostly US and British. There were what seemed like tens of thousands of protesters involved. So the police did their gassing number against these nonviolent people to break up the human chains and make the protesters look violent.

Today (Wednesday) I followed the union protest put together by the Longshoremen's Union. They went down to the docks and had a rally then marched to Third Avenue. As soon as they got there the cops started gassing them. There was an old lady there. She had gone downtown by bus to buy something. This lady was in her 70's and I saw her trying to run, but she couldn't breathe. She was in shock. I carried her to a building entryway. She was gasping, terrified. She had been in Germany, and it was like she was having flashbacks. The tear gas sounds like gunfire and there were helicopters overhead, sirens, cops on horses, everything.

They had clearly made a decision to destroy this movement.

So anyway there I was with her in this building and she wanted to go to the hospital but there was tear gas everywhere and I was afraid if I tried to move her she'd be gassed again. I went to this line of cops and begged - I mean begged - these riot police to help her. They ignored me. A girl told me later that a one year old had been gassed. And I myself saw a girl no more than 18 - a cop had busted her lip wide open - she was bleeding - and then they gassed everyone including her. After that she was kneeling on the ground crying like a baby and praying for 15 minutes, Hail Mary, Hail Mary. Over and over. She was in a state of shock. They just gassed these people who were sitting down non-violently and doing nothing. Nothing.

At one point the Seattle Mayor said his boys were not using rubber bullets. Miraculously, by then I had ten in my pocket. I could open a little market, sell the things. They are everywhere. I and other people started giving them to delegates and stuff. "See what they're doing? They're shooting "rubber" bullets and lying about it." We showed them to the media. I guess enough people and the media got the information because the Mayor made a new statement then that they were using them. As if he hadn't known.

They shot rubber bullets from four feet away into the face of a guy next to me, broke all his front teeth. When that happened I lost it. I forgot I was supposed to be getting the news for all of you and I started yelling at the cops, "What the hell is wrong with you? Are you sick, man?" So this cop aimed his gun right at me. That was his answer. So I first put my hands in front of my face because I didn't want to lose my teeth. And then I thought, to hell with it. I was wearing my target shirt that said "Collateral Damage", you know? With a bullseye target, like they wore during the bombing in Yugoslavia. And I told this guy, "Go ahead, shoot! Here! Here's the target!" He didn't shoot me.

I want to emphasize, these protesters were NOT violent people. They were the most non-violent people I have ever seen. Even when I was screaming at the cop, this girl came up to me and said, "Do not scream. This is non-violent." These people were too much to believe. They must meditate all the time, I don't know.

Clinton said he supports nonviolent protest. That is baloney. Today (Wed.) the protesters were causing absolutely no "trouble". In downtown the cops had people running who weren't even protesters - like that old lady or just people going to work or shopping - everyone was getting gassed. The busses weren't running because of the gas. I was lucky to catch one with a driver who could still see. I begged him to drive the old lady home - the driver changed his route especially for her. If you want to find human decency, stay away from the Planitarchis. Go to the to regular people. They have some. The Planitarchis lost all his years ago. Now he wouldn't know human decency if it came up and bit him.

So now I have made personal acquaintance with the people who run this country, and they are quite simply scum. There were people at work, people with babies, they were all getting gassed because the government would not allow an assembly of people speaking their minds. It is the same as what happened in Athens. Clinton's requirements on the Greek government created the riot and he did the same thing here. And then he says he supports nonviolent protest? How? By shooting rubber bullets? And today they outlawed gas masks. They want to make sure everyone gets his money's worth.

Today, just like yesterday night, the police were in the residential neighborhoods. People in cafés were getting gassed and shot at, you could hear it on the windows, bang, bang, bang. A guy trying to cross the street to go to his house got gassed. First a drunk guy outside a bar yelled at the cops "Get out of here!" so they gassed him. And then this other guys was just crossing the street to go home so the cops figured, might as well gas him too. People got gassed for coming out of restaruants and bars and coffeee shops. I'm amazed that nobody died who had asthma or something.

Or maybe somebody did die and they didn't talk about it. I mean after all, it's just collateral damage..

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Note # 1 - For a critical look at the World Trade Organization, click on SEATTLE AND BEYOND

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