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Yugoslav Internet Shut Down?
An Anonymous Reader wrote in to say "Beograd.com is reporting that the US has ordered the shudown of satellite feeds into Yugoslavia. This may just be rumor, but I read www.rts.co.yu and www.serbia-info.com on a daily basis. As of this morning, both Serbia-based sites are now inaccessible. "
I aso haven't managed to find confirmation of this, but I've
heard it from several folks too. This is a scary form
of warfare.
An information blackout is the least scariest form of warfare. Blowing someone to bits is far more scarier.
Since we bombed the Chinese Embassy it has got scarier...
Are you really that dumb??
There is big difference in a few isolated bigots attacking minorities and state sponsored persecution.
You'll notice that in the United States, the bigots are on trial and will be punished.
For all our flaws, we do not participate the activities that Hiltler practiced.
One possible objective is to help cut the flow of intelligence *into* Yugoslavia. We can hit the ground installations relating to communications, but obviously we're not going to break our committment to space as a DMZ and hit satellites.
Considering that a single person with *any* information that can help Yugoslav forces, such as data on troop deployments, targetting, and so forth can make a difference, communications are a viable, perfectly reasonable target. It may also help to assuage fears about pro-Serbian terrorism, but a) I doubt they'd be that _stupid_, and b) most cells would very likely be acting completely independent of official government ties, anyway.
The site I like to check is http://inet.co.yu/. It's pretty good. It's a running report on what places are being attacked. Check it out.
Shutting down their connection is scary because this makes it impossible for them to get the real news out and for us to hear the truth. NATO is feeding us with propaganda and so are the serbs and for us to be able to form a real opinion we need more sources of information. Shuting down their connection will just make things worse but i guess NATO needs to control the information that we're beeing fed with to form an opinion amongst people and get support.
We need to be able to judge what's true and what's not and this is best done by hearing as many voices as possible.
Surely the US could only order the termination of US owned satetite feeds. Through NATO they could efectively order all NATO coutries to terminate links. I have no idea what links serbia has but if they have links through russia or china the US would have a hard times ORDERING them to terminate links.
Violence breeds violence, i cannot comprehend how a force the size of NATO bullying (granted it does seem to justified) a small coutry like serbia is going to make serbia start being friendly in the long term.
There can be no winners with the course of action taken by nato.
Friends come and go, enemies are forever. !
The war information site www.yu is still up.
Look the US taught the Serbs the rules when we supplied the Croats the arms the drive the Serbs out of the Krajina and into Serbia. Now we are acting like hypocrites by criticizing the Serbs for clamping down on separtist guerillas in Kosovo. Why? Because a weak President acts before he thinks. Remember how the President said he was acting to stop genocide in Kosovo? Okay, I'll wait here. You go look up how many people were killed in the raging civil war between Christians and Muslims in Kosovo last year.... tick ... tick... tick... okay you're back. 2000 people? Right! IN THE MIDDLE OF A CIVIL WAR WHICH THE US IS SUPPLYING ARMS. Is that "genocide"? No, not in my book. Atrocity? Certainly. Should we now attack Turkey, China, Angola, Senegal, Mexico, Colombia, Russia, Israel, Iraq , Sudan for their treatment of ethnic groups? Well, remember, let's try no to be hypocrites and single out one sovereign nation for special treatment. The bottom line is that you war-mongers have been deceived.
We should then blow up that roomful of students, no?
Why do you believe anything you read in the U.S. News? You are operating under the assumption that 'our side' would never use propaganda.
Everything you read, especially during a war, is suspect. Internet=porno,bombs,rape, and now Serbian propaganda. Gimme a break.
-kabloie
And NATO has CNN, ITN, BBC, ABC, CBC, NBC, CBS, ABS and ...
Yeah, who has the propaganda machine?
> Civilians using these systems are just innocent bystanders.
Yes. Serbs were just on "stand-by"...when Vukovar was destroyed...they were on "stand-by" (maybe idle) when Sarajevo was destroyed....they should be on "standy-by" when Beograd will be destroyed .
PS: of former Jugoslavija only Serbia is left. This is not Jugoslavija anymore.
:from former citizen of Jugoslavija.
Don't get bogged down in a war in the Balkans.
Diplomacy
The time the 10% Tutsi minority killed millions of
of the 90% Hutu majority in the 1960's and the US sided with the Tutsi? Or the 1990's when the %90 Hutu majority killed (got revenge?) on the %10 Tutsi minority and the US sided with the Tutsis?
This was the case in both world wars, not during Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq. Personal radio communications were banned for the duration and for about a year afterwards (then only amateur radio). The reason is that the latter 3 were not declared wars, so the US government had no authority to restrict personal communications.
If this "conflict" escalates to the point of ground troops being used and the US and/or the other NATO countries do declare war the same thing will happen. All communications facilities will be allocated for military use only. This includes amateur and CB radio, cellular phone frequencies, and the internet (originally a US military project BTW).
Ask your parents or grandparents about the restrictions in freedoms during WW2 (at least in the US). And it was worse in WW1!
Hopefully this will not happen, but be prepared for the worst if it does.
The first to believe in rules of war is the first to lose.
and hasn't been since August 1945 when World War 2 ended. Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq/Kuwait were not declared wars.
It didn't make any difference to those fighting and dying in these "police actions" or "conflicts" since they were still being shot at, but it does make a difference in how the US government acts as far as the civilians are concerned.
Anyone old enough to remember the protests during the Vietnam war^H^H^Hconflict? They were legal (believe it or not - you wouldn't have known it then) at the time but if war had been declared, the army would have had the authority to shoot-to-kill protestors. Most personal freedoms are on hold during a declared war (elections still happen but protesting the government is a no-no). This is one reason why the US Congress doesn't want to declare war and why Clinton hasn't asked them to. It's not necessary yet, anyway.
>So far this year, Kosovo has been less violent than Littleton, CO
And so far this year, Monaco has been larger than the USA. Also, the world is cube-shaped, Microsoft decided to base Windows 2000 on the Linux kernel, and Disney was bought out by Ben and Jerry's.
Blair and Clinton are the fascists, not Serbia. If not for the courage of the Serbs as historic protectors of Europe, you Swiss would be wearing turbans and praying to the Moon God five times a day.
I can independently confirm his facts.
KLM.
Hi!
Just a simple Question: How do you know? Probably you watched TV and they told that Milosevic is bad. In the recent US-wars (gulf-war and all that) EVERY president was an evil dictator, oppressing his own people, and was at least as bad as hitler. nice... I must say, in a war you can't believe anybody. The NATO is lieing to us. And the serbs are lieing, too. The only thing I know is, that there are some guys dropping bombs over some country. Maybe it's justified. Most likely not. At least the reason by the NATO is a piece of shit: a humanitary mission. When are they going to drop bombs on China or the Turkey? And even the US got a "bad critics" from Amnesty International last year for human rights violations! Blocking the internet is a really bad idea. It won't stop people from asking questions. It will probably only stop you from hearing the oppionions from the other side... very bad.
Nato is the aggressor here. Serbia has a legitimate claim to Kosovo just like USA has to Texas. And since when does a non-representative organisation like Nato take military action against countries in a civil war? This whole thing is getting way out of hand and the pathetic knee-jerk responses of the mass-media brainwashed "public" is just so sad.
Any comparisons of Milosevic to Hitler are plain wrong - Hitler annexed nations which no prior historical dispute existed (France, Greece, etc..) and then embarked on a mass extermination of "undesirable" ethnic groups, ie. Genocide. There is no evidence of genocide in Kosovo.
Oh, and where was the cavalry in Rwanda, a genuine genocide - prevaricating, sitting on their hands and tidily ignoring the horrors. 900 000 hacked to death (mainly with machetes) in 100 days. Hello, even the Nazis weren't that quick. What about china in Tibet - Missed that one, Clinton, or are your balls smaller than your principles? What about East Timor and Indonesia - not too late to show you care! Hey, don't forget Iraq nerve-gassing and Turkey shooting their ethnic minorities. Israel and palestinians - oh, sorry, you guys payroll the netanyahu regime.
Oh, god, whats the use.
The US does not need to be involved in this war - This is not bosnia - this a purely internal dispute between two equally distastefull groups of people. The KLA are *NOT* the heroes of the revolution.
I will be 52 years old next month. Not since the Cuban missle crisis have I felt so close to a nuclear war. Clinton has managed to piss off both the Russians and the Chinese. Russia is essentially without a government and Chinese nationalism is at a fever pitch.
What was the lesson learned in our school days of long ago? Duck and Cover! Translation: bend over and kiss your ass goodbye.
Oh yes they do. Turkey bombs, rapes, kills Kurds. Indonesia commits ethnic cleansing on "primative" Irian-Jayans and goes house to house killing East Timorese Christians. Mexican government wages secret war on dissident, dirt poor Indians. US government backs Guatemalan dictators in "genocide" against rural Indians. American troops burn/murder murder villagers in Vietnam war. Russians herd Jews into their own "autonomous" Republic - in Siberia. Israel routinely bulldozes dissident Palestinians homes in the West Bank. Kosovo's Muslim government routinely seizes Christian Serb lands in 1980's in "ethnic cleansing" push - NY Times reports "rape" campaign against Serbian girls in 1987. US Goverment arms Croats and ethnicly cleanses Krajina of majority Serbs. Iraq's Shiite minority
murders Shia majority. Should I go on, or are you
convinced that you have been deceived?
All's fair in love and war.
From http://prorev.com/balkan.htm
"Albanians in the government have manipulated public
funds and regulations to take over land belonging to the
Serbs. Slavic Orthodox churches have been attacked and
flags torn down. Wells have been poisoned and crops
burned. Boys have been knifed and some young ethnic
Albanians have been told by their elders to rape Serbian
girls." - From a New York Times article in 1987
Well, obviously they don't control yours all that well :)
I wasnt born and raised here. There are americans who are willing to question also. The authors of the books I mentioned are Americans.
anything, the Anglo-Saxon world (UK and US) has a much deeper distrust of the government than the rest of the world.
I would contradict this. I have seen other societies. I would recommend that you read an article by Thomas Frank. I forget the article's name. And I dont have it here at work. It is the first article in "The Baffler" Number-11. He tells you how the press in England, France and India are far more likely to be critical than American Press.
Superset to Kaa's Law: Anybody labeling large segments
of the population as idiots a priora has only
proven themselves as an idiot.
Or anything their parent corporation permits
them to print. You dorks are so naive, as if
Big Brother was only the government. Bill
Gates and Microsoft scares me more than those
clowns on Capital Hill. Get a job and find out
what it's like to live in a totalitarian society
8-12 hours a day.
Mr. Kaa,
From the various post I have seen of yours. I got an impression that you are someone who strongly supports the war against Yugoslavia. I wish you had atleast half as much knowledge as squeeze truck.
You wish to use UN as it suits you. Against Iraq UN Charter was an important element of what should govern the behaviour of nations. Now it is a meaningless document.
This is a rogue action by Nato under the guise of Moral Superiority - Its just "Might is Right"
The point of trying to sever internet connections is obvious. The current bombing campaign is entering a new stage, where NATO will be conducting "Area Bombing" of Yugoslav cities and towns, using B-52's and massive amounts of conventional bombs.
These have the intended effect of killing large numbers of civilians, and it's important for the U.S. government to ensure that reports of these indiscriminate, widespread killings do not reach the western public to any significant degree.
Controlling all information sources is therefore vital. Broadcast media were targeted first, since some Serb TV images were getting re-broadcast in the west. The internet is even more important, since much of the educated elite in NA and Europe (who have some influence over government actions) rely on the internet rather than the mass media as their primary source of information. The handful of large media corporations that control television can easily provide a single message, but fortunately the internet doesn't work that way.
Whether the U.S. government will succeed in cutting off the Yugoslavia's internet feeds remains to be seen. That they'll keep trying to do so is a certainty.
Alex Berkman
Re:Why do American Hearts bleed?
/., believe it or not. Frankly, I can't believe anyone thinks the
by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 13, @11:30AM EDT
Ah, yes. "Piss us off and die, mofos." Real enlightened attitude for the world's most powerful nation to take. Let me enumerate a few of my
problems with the standard set of excuses for this undeclared war...
-"We have to stop the genocide!" There have been, and still are, a whole lot of genocidal conflicts which the US government has not been the
least bit interested in. Hell, look at how Turkey treats its own Kurdish population, and we have bases in Turkey.
-"Well, we can't stop all of them, but we can at least stop this one." This is pretty bogus because it doesn't explain _why_ this one.
-"Maybe we finally got tired of sitting by and watching it happen." Actually seen on
US government and/or NATO has a conscience that has finally gotten bothered; everything else about their actions reeks of realpolitik. It also
fails to explain why so many other nations are against NATO's actions. They're all inhuman monsters who just don't care about genocide? They
just haven't reached their genocide-tolerance threshhold yet?
My call? There's an unspoken, and probably not even consciously realized belief among Western politicians that what brown people do to each
other in distant corners of the world doesn't really matter; they're just primitive and will probably keep killing each other until the end of time.
Seeing white people killing each other in NATO's playground gives folks the willies, though;
If you are going to start cleaning your "playground" seems to be the place to start before starting to clesn out more foriegn parts.
as to Tibet china is a nuclear power and US/NATO
does not have the power to free Tibet. (A Nuclear war between superpowers is unwinnable)
They have some funky firewalls that seem to not like pings at various places, but I've done a whole bunch of traceroutes to computers all over yu and random addresses in Yugoslavian IP blocks. Slow, but things are working.
I'm more worried about the fact that the government *could* shut down whatever sections of the 'Net that it wants to. Isn't the 'Net supposed to be sort of an area free from governments, where they don't have any power or control?
Both propaganda sites are up.
Just rumors.
This is last reply to you
You show clear signs of being racist. I dont think I can have logical discussions with you.
I'm in France too and I'm routed through Netherlands :
traceroute www2.eunet.yu
(bla bla bla)
9 RBS2-p4-0-0.rain.fr (194.250.88.134) 119.928 ms 119.828 ms 119.946 ms
10 gip-raspail-2-fastethernet1-0.gip.net (204.59.18.194) 171.710 ms 160.878 ms 378.948 ms
11 gip-amsterdam-1-atm6-0-0-636-atm.gip.net (204.59.10.41) 141.733 ms 130.665 ms 128.128 ms
12 Asd-ar11.NL.EU.net (134.222.249.57) 149.926 ms 137.975 ms 141.794 ms
13 Asd-nr12.NL.EU.net (134.222.186.12) 138.083 ms 131.772 ms 138.017 ms
14 Belgrade1.YU.EU.net (134.222.34.2) 221.869 ms 228.853 ms 231.841 ms
15 Belgrade10-E2.EUnet.yu (194.247.193.123) 200.012 ms 191.833 ms 178.930 ms
16 www2.EUnet.yu (194.247.192.60) 181.025 ms * *
Cutting them off is counter productive.
We can always use up all our bombs on Yugoslavia and lie that our Pentagon budget is used up but the Republicans would then demand us to throw a few trillion more dollars to fund the military. Or, maybe we can commit acts that'll convince the public that we no longer are capable of settling disputes and so no one in the international community would expect us to get involved in other countries' problems.
Deng Xiaoping (sp?) was the chairman of the Communist Party back in 1989 and was the one responsible for T. Square. The current chairman (title sure sounds like one used in a society of capitalist pigs) is Jiang something and is responsible for the recent protests, I think. Obiviously, these two have different methods of playing dictator and the latter will probably hurt the tight grip of control the communists have over the people by allowing the protests.
If you notice the person with nick "kaa" almost always gets score:2. I have noticed that it happens immediately after the post appears. I feel there is something fishy going on here. Nobody should have more "say" than others. I refuse to believe that he/she is always comes up with the greatest of ideas or opinions (as a matter of fact it is unbelievable about anyone).
Someone who has the authority and resources, please investigate.
R.
We have not renounced genocide at all. Our Nato allies in Turkey have "cleansed" 1.4 million Turkish Kurds. I don't see Klinton dropping bombs on Turkey. Klinton's Chinese pals have slaughtered over a million Tibetans. Why isn't Klinton bombing Beijing? I'll tell you what this is about: Only one nation in Europe has refused to be occupied by Nato. Guess which one. If you really want to know what's going on, see www.antiwar.com.
Remember Berlin after the Nazi's lost? Remember seeing the images of Berlin? Maybe the military got this idea that you have to annihilate the opposition (their stronghold, that is) in order to win a campaign. I guess that includes making hundreds of thousands or even millions of people homeless.
Of course not. If they're uplinking to US owned satellites! As for pings.. hell.. any decent company firewall would be blocking traceroutes and pings anyway so I wouldn't take that as any indication of it being down.
One point a lot of people seem to have missed are the various groups in the US who want to form their own "countries." Some white supremacists, instead of plotting to take over the US, plan to obtain land and create their own "homeland." Religious cults, like the one who killed themselves in Waco, Texas, want their own country to rule over their subjects. Of course, the gov. would never allow them to do so b/c of their nefarious plans (threat to gov.). BTW, I will never feel any sympathy for those lunatics.
Before Nato attacked, only 65 people had died in the Kosovo civil war this year, and it is just that, a civil war. Before Nato attacked, Kosovo was more violent than Littleton, but only by a little bit. Is it OK to slaughter women and children in Belgrade on the theoretical possibility that it might save women and children in Pristina?
Just wait till the body bags come home.
First, Milosevic (sp?) denies freedom of speech to the citizens and now NATO helps by denying internet connectivity. Ha, ha, I can't believe where the world is heading towards.
What are you afraid of? If it's all just silly progaganda, let's all have a good laugh. Why is Nato bombing all the television transmitters and even some of the studios? What is NATO afraid of? If Clinton has the right to censor Yugoslavia, he certainly has the right to censor YOU!
ever since the bombing started those first few nights i was reading news off the yugoslav embassy page---until they stopped posting info in protests sy/
goto:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/yuemba
it was last updated ****MARCH 26*****-45 days ago?
from there you can read Yugoslavia's Reason's for their crackdown on ethnic albanians.
Lotsa propoganda here and news that dates back about a year.
I dunno the last thing that we should be doing is shutting down their internet its the only place that Yugoslavs can get THE REAL TRUTH
Yugoslavia is using computer warfare against Nato also- by pinging the servers so this may be justified
the feelings in my heart are such that i cannot commit to the keyboard my feelings
I started to read the article referenced by the previous
/. geeks?
poster ( http://www.natall.com/who-rules-america/ ) and
was rather surprised to find garbage like the following:
"On the other hand, a White racist -- that is, any
racially conscious White person who looks askance at
miscegenation or at the rapidly darkening racial situation
in America -- is portrayed, at best, as a despicable
bigot who is reviled by the other characters, or, at worst,
as a dangerous psychopath who is fascinated by
firearms and is a menace to all law-abiding citizens. The
White racist "gun nut," in fact, has become a familiar
stereotype on TV shows."
Needless to say, I didn't bother reading much further, but
I did scan for a few more gems like:
"Another example is the media treatment of racial issues
in the United States. Some commentators seem almost
dispassionate in reporting news of racial strife, while
others are emotionally partisan -- with the partisanship
always on the non-White side. All of the media
spokesmen without exception, however, take the position
that "multiculturalism" and racial mixing are here to stay,
and that they are good things."
or--
"[...] the U.S. government is backing the wrong side in the
Arab-Jewish conflict and that it served Jewish interests
rather than American interests to send U.S. forces to
cripple Iraq, Israel's principal rival in the Middle East."
Should we assume that my fellow Anonymous Coward
didn't bother reading the article he pointed us to, or does
this kind of stupidity actually exist among
I got spammed by some pyramid-scheme slimeballs and scammers from yugoslavia a few weeks ago.
And theyre STILL up and running.
If anyone deserves NATO bombs, its these yugoslavian spammer scumbags.
It is NOT true that Yugoslav sites are inaccessible.
Whatever the reason for those two sites being down, there are other Yogoslav sites UP.
Like this one
http://www.gov.yu/
I wish people would do a little more due diligence before starting this kind of nonsense.
PS. Since Puerto Rico isn't a State, if they decided to become their own country, yes you'd be right...but it would have nothing to do with the
;-)
colour of their skin or their religion.
Actually, no, he wouldn't be right. Puerto Rico has been given at least two opportunities in recent memory to vote on their future. IIRC, the latest vote allowed three possibilities: become the 51st state, become independent, or remain a protectorate. Apparently the inhabitants prefer remaininga protectorate.
He said the US not Nato
Somebody near the frontier could make a radio link. Then do a masquerade box with port fowarding and maybe some guest access with restricted lynx and we would have bidirectional access again. A bit hard to our side, but usable anyway. To their side, if the four ISPs route correctly, almost perfect access with _sloooow_ link.
They can do information warfare, so can us. We are the elite of the net, the ones that built it and make it work. Let's avoid some 3133t military guy interfering with the net freedom.
Well, quite possibly not, but who *knows*
In the spirit of propaganda, they could easily have done it themselves and then use it to good advantage against the US.
After all, just look at how many people are willing to side against the US after this...
Acording to your reasoining all black people should go back to africa.
Shot up.
It's not a war. We havent decared war.
(1) Media lives and dies by its reputation. Tabloids aside, any publication that was caught intentionally lying is in big, big trouble. Everybody knows it and it is a good incentive to avoid blatant misinformation (but not subtle/clever one, of course).
US news media makes a car blow up with a model rocket, and says it was because of a crash.
The car stopped selling because of what they did.
The TV news media is just like any tv.
It's all about viewership.
I was seeing spotter reports of NATO planes
on various usenet groups. You would see
somebody in Macedonia reporting what planes
were flying in what direction to somebody in
Serbia. Same with Montenegro and serb parts of
Bosnia and Hercegovina.
The way I see it NATO had two choices,
Intercept and modifiy/flood different messages
or
Shut it down.
Seems to shut it down is easier.
Well you American ppl are so smart and knowledgable, I really envy you.
Get a grip man! You don't know nothing about tha Balkan. Nada, zip, no darn nothing. I live in this place and I can tell you it has its long, long history. I am Greek and proud to live in a country with more than three thousand years of history.
Someone in a previous post said that the Serbs have commited three genocides in this decade and that someone should stop them (god bless america, bliah). One that does not know, should not speak. Does this person know what the croats have done in the area, in the not-so-far-away past? Does this person know the whole history behind Bosnia? No, he doesn't. Most americal people don't. Unfortunately, most european people don't (count brits, germans, french in them). What most people are aware of is what TV and government propaganda is telling them. You say there's an ethnic cleansing there just becuase your *******-around president told you so. He and the NATO did not provide ANY evidence at all about this. Those places described as mass graves where anything but mass graves. Milosevic is no saint, he is a murderer who has killed people, no doubt. He is also a person trying to keep his country from falling apart (even more). I have to say I do not approve his killing of albanians, but -for Christ's sake!- how can you approve of bombing and killing innocent civilians? How can you stay speechless in front of bombing their national tv station under the excuse that it was a propaganda media? Isn't CNN, ABC etc. such? So many people died there! So many people also died by NATO's (lead by clinton) little ``mistakes'', when they bombed a caravan of refugees, a train full of them and a bus too. It seems like nato has killed more people than the serbs have.
More notes: Much worse things happen in turkey. Turks are commiting a genocide against the Kurds, but your president is sucking them up because they have an airport base right over Iraq, and they provide a way for the oil channel to mediterranean. Your government does not do anything about the Turks occupying Cyprus either. Do you have any idea what a genocide is? That happened back in 74 when they entered the island. What about Rwanda?
More points: Why do I have to stand the ecological disaster your bombing causes? Radioactive elements have increased dramatically over the last days, and quite many toxic substances are in the air and moving around, in Greece, Bulgaria, Rumania, Albania, FYROM (which everyone incorrectly calls macedonia but's that's another issue). Why do my children have to live in an ecological nightmare because of nato's and particularly the usa's doubtful motives? What if NATO does yet another mistake and strikes on the Koslodui nuclear power station in Bulgaria? There's already one rocket that falled in the broader area of this country! They even had to get their whole air-defense around the place, but who xan assure me?
Bottom line is, DON'T BELIEVE WHAT THEY FEED YOU. It's all about money people, money and power. NATO had to justify its existance, clinton had to destruct your attention from his scandals and gain public momentum again, the area is full of uranium (yes that also applies) and serbia was the last powerful, ex-communist country that stood as a bartizan in front of Russia. NATO's and clinton's motives are anything but humanitarian. Trust me on this.
Costas
PS: I also forgot to say that the person your government sent in the area some months ago, described KLA as an ``undoubtfully terrorist organization''/ organization'', much like these people describe the kurds at the moment. Think about it.
I suppose M's idea of throwing out reporters was a stupid idea too, eh? I don't see you commenting on that as a bad idea. Essentially, this rant of yours really boils down to you hoisting up a double standard.
So let's break your shoddy argument down.
You maybe do not effectively have formed in your mind that traffic coming out and *in* is cut off and constrained. You only present reasons why NATO would be listening or that Serbia can't get their news out. You protest this US action inhibits this.
No duh. That's the *point* of the action. And it is potentially a very effective one.
The percentage of the Serbians online and listening (to anything online, I'm not talking just US propaganda but whatever they choose to) are nothing compared to the number listening to TV, which you readily admit is state generated TV. It's a joke to think that the move of information INTO Serbia reaches enough people to make a difference. It's a joke to consider that state run TV would find a story from outside Serbian, e.g. pro-NATO argument, and run it. They wouldn't and couldn't before. So cutting of the lines does nothing to what they could do.
The information flow, therefore is one-sided, as you adamantly point out.
By killing the Serb connection, the US kills off the stuff from the inside going out. The US population easily uses the internet a lot more, and the potential impact for stories going out of Serbia and being listened to is greater, and easily far greater than any Serb on the inside listening. Yes, the US population still uses TV and radio by far over the Internet, but don't forget the rising percentage of people that do use the Internet as an info source, not to mention all the reporters that use online material for (debatedly) news-worthy material.
Given how the US media latches on to misrepresentative tidbits, and the facts information in Serbia is already effectively slanted to a state-run propaganda machne, it's a very easy decision to cut off the information flow to the outside.
The fact that you are pissed just gives some credence to the fact that the US action has made an impact.
--------
To get off-topic and into war opinion, to the US action, yay!
This is war. This isn't some higher moral ground that people keep screaming we need. To debate that is like trying to be the priests around the middle age debating whether a holy war should or should not be fought. They, like the moral ground holders today, are ignorant of the limits of mass morality and what wars will play out anyways.
We all know the benefits of doubt and confusion that M generated during the start of this conflict by his foreign news blackout. We couldn't answer "why were people of that state fleeing?" He did what he wanted during the time, all under the shadow of our confusion. He clearly ramped up the expulsions and atrocity level. And some people I know STILL deny that people died at this monster's hands.
Everyone in Serbian has literally sat on their hands, ignoring his murders, for years. They yell now, "what about the NATO murders?" The bombings? What do you expect when some place gets bombed? "What about our parents, family, and friends in Serbia?" Yes, they are in danger. Yes, they might be harmed. But meanwhile, while your family and friends were sitting pretty, people in that state were dying. In *your* country. You win nothing for your passivity while others died. You win nothing for your false sense of altruism that suddenly flairs up when your vested interests are harmed, ignoring the rights and lives of others that were taken.
This is based on simple concepts. You can get pissed all you want at the US and rest of NATO about their response. Is it the right one? Historians will be debating this for years. High school papers will be written in the future about this conflict.
I always ask, what fundamentally caused the response? To this issue, it lies within Serbia. All other talk about how American troops shouldn't be there, Clinton as the next Hitler, etc., all is tangential and apologetic; they all side-step the important point of the deaths and evictions already going on in that state.
The Serbs are the ones who should be ashamed, who turned the other cheek when others were in harm's way.
As a reformed baby boomer, who cares about folks who act like Nazi's. Really, I am not an uniformed fool. What are all those people doing on the border, and in the countries surrounding Kosovo? They aren't there for their health, that's for damn sure. Quit crying about civilian deaths, this is war, and it's never clean. Information blackout Vist the hate filled web sites you reference, and listen to Goerrings ravings about the unfairness of it all.
Simple to get back to where we all were:
1.Leave Kosova
2.Implement international force led by Nato and the US
3.Indite that Nazi Milosovic, and if we get a chance hang him.
4.Embrago their butts till the cows come home; it's hard to make the populace pay; but they have to fing the where-with-all to remove the madman from thier presence.
5.Quit whining till you've implemented 1 and 2 minimum.
If you don't like war, don't pick on the little guys. Personally I hope we bomb your butts into the 3rd world. When you fight the Law, it wins; every time; ask Russia. We bankrupted them in the cold war. Feel fortunate, we're also magnamious. remember the Warren Plan; we rebuilt Europe; and when you comply, I'm sure I'll pay for it out of my taxes; but not hopegully till all war criminals are under indictment/or tried
The worst idiocy of this war is the use of depleted uranium-tipped missiles and bombs. Search the BBC news site at www.bbc.co.uk/news. They're the only people who have commented on this as far as I know. And it's going to affect the inhabitants for generations.Every explosion generates low-level radioactive dust.
I don't remember the KLA being in Bosnia, but the Serbs did the same thing there.
n _healy/johnston.htm
s html)
In fact, over 800,000 *SERBIANS* have been "ethnically cleansed" from the US/German-backed ethnic statelets of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina since 1991, which is by far the largest displacement of any ethnic group living in the former Yugoslavia. (see:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/gratta
http://www.iacenter.org/bosnia/tragedy.htm)
In the Krajina region alone (which Serbs had lived in for over 500 years), over 200,000 Serbs were driven out by CIA-trained Croatian forces armed with U.S.-supplied heavy arms. About 14,000 Serbs were killed in that slaughter alone. (http://originalsources.com/OS5-99HL/5-13-1999.2.
The US, and apparently *YOU* are very selective about which types of ethnic cleansing should be supported, and which others should be met with bombing by the west -- you're either very ignorant about the history of the re-balkanisation of Yugoslavia since '91, or a complete hypocrite (I'll be charitable and assume the former).
This is nothing more than Serbian nationalism rearing its ugly head, trying to regain the glory days before the Turks arrived, looking to regain the 'Lebansraum' it lost in Kosovo in 1389...
The 'Lebansraum' [sic] you refer to has been an integral part of Serbia (not merely Yugoslavia, but *Serbia*) since the state was formed in about 1912. It requires an amazing twist of logic to suggest that the Serbs are somehow being expansionist by refusing to surrender territory that's been part of their country for as long as anyone can remember.
Milocovic is wrong, he's evil and he must be stopped. If you thinks what he's doing is OK, then you should be stopped too.
I don't support "Milocovic" [sic], but I do unconditionally oppose the NATO bombing campaign. No doubt you think these two positions are equivalent. I'm curious as to what a good "humanitarian" like yourself thinks should be done to "stop" me. Bombs, perhaps?
Alex Berkman
Oh, and btw, as a Canadian, your hate-filled, militaristic attitude disgusts me. I'm ashamed to have you as a fellow citizen.
The Ramboullet Treaty is quite fair to both sides, as is the current offer, sponsored in part by Russia.
o /rambouillet.html o 67.htm
This comment suggests that you've actually *read* the treaty. If you have, then your notion of "fair" is quite different from mine, or that of any sane person. Here's what you consider "fair" (direct quotes from Appendix B of the Rambouillet diktat, which was intended to apply to all of the "FRY" (Federal Republic of Yugoslavia), not merely Kosovo):
6. a. NATO shall be immune from all legal process, whether civil, administrative, or criminal.
b. NATO personnel, under all circumstances and at all times, shall be immune from the Parties, jurisdiction in respect of any civil, administrative, criminal, or disciplinary offenses which may be committed by them in the FRY. The Parties shall assist States participating in the operation in the exercise of their jurisdiction over their own nationals.
c. Notwithstanding the above, and with the NATO Commander's express agreement in each case, the authorities in the FRY may exceptionally exercise jurisdiction in such matters, but only in respect of Contractor personnel who are not subject to the jurisdiction of their nation of citizenship.
7. NATO personnel shall be immune from any form of arrest, investigation, or detention by the authorities in the FRY. NATO personnel erroneously arrested or detained shall immediately be turned over to NATO authorities.
8. NATO personnel shall enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY including associated airspace and territorial waters. This shall include, but not be limited to, the right of bivouac, maneuver, billet, and utilization of any areas or facilities as required for support, training, and operations.
9. NATO shall be exempt from duties, taxes, and other charges and inspections and custom regulations including providing inventories or other routine customs documentation, for personnel, vehicles, vessels, aircraft, equipment, supplies, and provisions entering, exiting, or transiting the territory of the FRY in support of the Operation.
10. The authorities in the FRY shall facilitate, on a priority basis and with all appropriate means, all movement of personnel, vehicles, vessels, aircraft, equipment, or supplies, through or in the airspace, ports, airports, or roads used. No charges may be assessed against NATO for air navigation, landing, or takeoff of aircraft, whether government-owned or chartered. Similarly, no duties, dues, tolls or charges may be assessed against NATO ships, whether government-owned or chartered, for the mere entry and exit of ports. Vehicles, vessels, and aircraft used in support of the operation shall not be subject to licensing or registration requirements, nor commercial insurance.
11. NATO is granted the use of airports, roads, rails, and ports without payment of fees, duties, dues, tolls, or charges occasioned by mere use. NATO shall not, however, claim exemption from reasonable charges for specific services requested and received, but operations/movement and access shall not be allowed to be impeded pending payment for such services.
[...]
15. The Parties recognize that the use of communications channels is necessary for the Operation. NATO shall be allowed to operate its own internal mail services. The Parties shall, upon simple request, grant all telecommunications services, including broadcast services, needed for the Operation, as determined by NATO. This shall include the right to utilize such means and services as required to assure full ability to communicate, and the right to use all of the electromagnetic spectrum for this purpose, free of cost. In implementing this right, NATO shall make every reasonable effort to coordinate with and take into account the needs and requirements of appropriate authorities in the FRY.
16. The Parties shall provide, free of cost, such public facilities as NATO shall require to prepare for and execute the Operation. The Parties shall assist NATO in obtaining, at the lowest rate, the necessary utilities, such as electricity, water, gas and other resources, as NATO shall require for the Operation.
17. NATO and NATO personnel shall be immune from claims of any sort which arise out of activities in pursuance of the operation; however, NATO will entertain claims on an ex gratia basis.
This so-called "peace plan" for Kosovo was unanimously rejected by all parties in the Yugoslav parliament, on two separate occasions over "Appendix B", and not over the portion of Rambouillet dealing with Kosovo autonomy, which they had already accepted. They couldn't possibly have done so -- the Rambouillet diktat would have resulted in THE MILITARY OCCUPATION OF ALL OF YUGOSLAVIA, by an unlimited number of NATO troops having carte-blanche to do whatever they pleased to the entire country and its people.
No sovereign state would ever agree to sign an agreement like this, except as the terms of surrender in a war. The US State Department knew this, of course, but needed a pretext to begin the bombing. The current G8 proposal is equally absurd -- it doesn't commit NATO to stop its bombing, even if Yugoslavia fulfilled *all* of its obligations. Its (perfectly reasonable) rejection by Yugoslavia can then be used by NATO as another example of how "Milosevic" refuses to agree to "peace", and so NATO must continue the bombing.
Here are some references to the full Rambouillet text (hey, don't believe me? read it for yourself!), and some analysis of it as well as the latest G8 proposal:
http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/dossiers/kosov
http://www.iacenter.org/rambou.htm
http://www.oneworld.org/news/reports99/pressinf
Alex Berkman
I liked the part: :))
"As to Kuwait, it was not the "violation of section II" that led
to the Gulf War. Essentially, US and Europe decided that
Saddam is not going to get away with this and so they went
to war."
That was funny
They went to war, just for the oil.They didn't want Saddam to control so much of the oil production, because that would have made the prices go up.
KAA wake up.NATO is illegal with the bombings.
nvon
You said:
" and a conflict isn't likely to
snowball into something truly nasty"
For God's sake, do you know what you are talking about?A couple of days ago I read on the newspapers that, inspired by what is going on with
the bombings,the turkish minority in Bulgaria wants independance because it is opressed!!!
Please read some history, stop being naive and simplistic.You think that when NATO wins, that will be that?The whole shi* will come back in 5, 10 or 20 years.I don't know when, but it is a sure thing.Making half a dozen countries out of one is not an answer, it's a liability for the future.
And btw,USA(=NATO), wants just that.Small fragile "countries", it can control easily.
nvon
Go read up on your post WWII history; it should
It was Burundi, Rwanda's sister state, where Tutsi
killed a bunch of hutus. Sorry.
It looks like the more people know two side story, the better the NATO.
There is no harm for US citizen to read both side story. Anyway, I think the US government are experience on handling this kind of stuff, where the people will find a way for it.
But open flow info is BAD for Yugoslavia. In war time, you DON'T WANT FREE FLOW OF INFO. Because it can deplete your soldier and people moral.
Furthermore Yugoslavia doesn't have any experience handling this issue, because they don't want their people find a resolution. THE GOVERNMENT IS THE RESOLUTION.
IMHO, Yugoslavia hates internet more than NATO.
It's out there! It seems to be more of a
LaRouche production than a Tomlinson one.
Sloby Milo is a dumb ass
Whats worse, war ? or give up Kosovo.
Jeez, for fuks sake, if he backed down yugo would be like any other eastern country, still prospering, but no, that dickhead still thinks like hitler, yeah fight to the death, who gives a ratts ass!
All people care about is if they can still work have a caree, have a wife and still have freedoms, how bad can it be to let the UN in?
THEY have NOTHING to loose if they let the UN in , hell they would even help kosovo people.
YUGOslavia has rocks in its head, or at least Mr Slobyisucide
Well, good one Sloby, you just cost your country $200+ billion dollars in damage and also probly $50billion in kosovo damage and restitution.
He is the 3rd anti christ!!!
WW3 here we come
Actually, Serbs have long history in ethnic cleanses and lies, and when we are speeking of Kosovo, what they are doing now, they were doing even before World War One! Teritory, they have now (and I think on Serbia itself) was taken by lies, murders, etc. But, I'll leave the history, as the history is the only thing the Serbs are calling upon (and it is some imaginary history) - and we are NOT in the history!
To conclude, I find it indescribable for someone to asks for some rights, while in the same time, it is restricting those same rights to the others. I cann't find the words to descibe it!
> Nationalistic asshole you are...
Tell me why ?
American cowboys exterminated the Indians to build America. American Cowboys dropped 2 nuclear bombs in Japan when the war was almost over. I don't think any1 should be surprised with any of these attacks to Yugoslavia. Cowboys are like that. They love to shoot.
I wonder when NATO is going to declare ISP's in Yugoslavia military targets..for the reason that they 'help the Serb military machine and spit out propaganda'.
They did it with a TV station, so we only have to wait for the event to happen.
Rwanda is far away from NATO-bases.
It would have taken months just to build up suplycenters and concentrate forces. And then you mostly had to fight it house to house or to be more precise, tree to tree.
The modern state of Albania was formed this century. Albanians lived in Kosovo before any Europeans set foot on America - i.e. your reasoning is even internally flawed.
Subject: hitno objaviti...
Date: Fri, 14 May 1999 00:44:56 +0200
From: "Slavko Radosavljevic"
To:
CIA , in cooperation with Croatia, prepared "GALEB" airplanes
(painted them and put YU marks on them) with intention to attack
with napalm bombs refugees in North Albania. CNN - Amanpour
with her crew is ready to shoot this and broadcast immediately.
This would, like MARKALE, shock public and authorize further
actions against our country. Please publish this information
before this happens. I read this on Internet.
Patriot from Spain.
The Turks tried to bring civilization to Serbia, but their efforts to
uplift a whole people out of illiteracy and idol-worsip were largely
unappreciated. Some did convert, but now those whose ancestors
did accept something better are being murdered, raped and
burned out of their homes by those whose ancestors stubbornly
refused to surrender to a more enlightended way of life.
Jugs think that they were protectors of Western Christianity but
Western Christianity is embarrassed by their lack of civilized
standards. Civilized nations of Western and Central Europe and
Eastern Europe from Italy to Hungary to Bulgaria have, like the
Turks, made various efforts to extend a helping hand but that hand
has always been bitten. After hundreds of years of rejection
they have learned their lesson. Cutting off internet access to
these barbarians is mostly a means of freeing up some bandwith
for more civilized discourse and trade. It's good for everyone.
Tito, also, tried to bring order to the ignorant masses of the Jug
people, and to force Serbs to get allong with other ethnic groups.
There was some hope that this would lead to a larger Jugoslavia
in which people could live together in peace, but Serbs wouldn't
allow that after Tito was gone. They fell back into their old patterns
of rape, idol-worship and murder.
Serbia - a nation of cowards and bullies, who have turned their
back on God in the name of God.
Serbs will only learn their lesson when their way of life is totally
destroyed. The ignorance and hatred is passed down from
one generation to another, as is, apparently, their dirty underwear.
The world dosn't need or want either.
Bill Kaufmann of the London Independent wrote a very wry and scathing assessment of the talking heads and globalists who who have started this unwanted war. This war is tremendously unpopular in America, particularly among everyday working Americans and veterans groups. Check out the link.
..can be a very dangerous thing, my friends.
Voltaire (French philosopher of the 18th century) said in an argument:
"I totally object to what you say, but I will defend till the death your right to express it".
Fellow Americans, this is not a matter of good-against-evil. This is about blunting your judgement. Things aren't (always) as they seem to be. The killing of the Kosovars is just an excuse for putting a giant multi-billion war machine into operation.
When NATO "errors" become commonplace, shutting down opposition media that show Albanian villages wrecked by NATO "smart" weapons is the only way to go FOR THE BIG BROTHER.
Just think about it.
Can't take a joke?
Shutting down the Serbian net connection is entirely justified. Genocide is one thing, but when they started cross-posting propaganda into unrelated newsgroups (like soc.culture.japan!?) they WENT TOO FAR!
Sure, why not, although I'd rather focus on outgoing connections. Think about sneakernet and all the Wen Ho Lees out there; the OSS; information is _important_, and communications infrastructure is a perfectly valid target.
Kung-fu movies aside, blind warriors fight poorly.
I do take contention, though, with your statement that such an embargo would be similarly devastating. Cutting off food and fuel to a country that does not have self-sufficiency is far more damaging, both in direct damage (hardship), and indirect (instability). A regime of Net-deprived people is likely in better shape than a regime of food-starved people, eh?
I didnt think countries declared war anymore, war is such an ugly word, i havent noticed the US or NATO actually declare war on yugaslavia. Vietnam wasnt officially a war either though was it.
The pictures were the first time I have seen anything from the ground. It seems like the only coverage I see in US media consists of colored maps and NATO officials giving briefings.
If I can get these pictures on the internet, what excuse do the press and television have for not showing them? Are they afraid of seeming unpatriotic?
I'm very thankful for the internet. It lets me get information from many sources and it allows me to use my own brain to figure out the truth. I'm no longer dependent on what some editor thinks I need to know. This is why the First Amendment exists. It's also why television and newspapers are becoming increasingly irrelevant to me.
Ah, yes. "Piss us off and die, mofos." Real enlightened attitude for the world's most powerful nation to take. Let me enumerate a few of my problems with the standard set of excuses for this undeclared war...
/., believe it or not. Frankly, I can't believe anyone thinks the US government and/or NATO has a conscience that has finally gotten bothered; everything else about their actions reeks of realpolitik. It also fails to explain why so many other nations are against NATO's actions. They're all inhuman monsters who just don't care about genocide? They just haven't reached their genocide-tolerance threshhold yet?
-"We have to stop the genocide!" There have been, and still are, a whole lot of genocidal conflicts which the US government has not been the least bit interested in. Hell, look at how Turkey treats its own Kurdish population, and we have bases in Turkey.
-"Well, we can't stop all of them, but we can at least stop this one." This is pretty bogus because it doesn't explain _why_ this one.
-"Maybe we finally got tired of sitting by and watching it happen." Actually seen on
My call? There's an unspoken, and probably not even consciously realized belief among Western politicians that what brown people do to each other in distant corners of the world doesn't really matter; they're just primitive and will probably keep killing each other until the end of time. Seeing white people killing each other in NATO's playground gives folks the willies, though; only NATO is allowed to kill people here... It has nothing to do with "causing trouble". WHAT trouble has Milosevic, or anyone else in the region, caused for the US, beyond the problems that we've decided to make our own? Hey, even the Europeans have dropped the lame excuse that we have to stop this because it might destabilize the rest of Europe. Ironically, getting involved _does_ threaten to destabilize things...
Given my American Heritage where we get shot in schools and on the highway, the murders in Yug is trivial. But CROSS POSTING????? I say, nuke the bastards!
Scariest eh! Even scarier than a tough game of Doom.
Get real! War involves death. Lots of it. Being cut off from you favorite Web site doesn't even hit the charts.
The world is a dangerous, unfair, hostile place, not your living room or favorite coffe shop. Stop living in a fairy tale!
--Alchemist
The United States, for all its flaws and problems (and there are many), has for a long time now renounced genocide and ethnic hatred. It is time others did the same.
. shtml
HAHAHA! Good One! The US carries out ethnic cleansing and sometimes even genocide whenever it finds the tactic useful. Of course, it's a big world, so the work is usually done by proxy. The US-sponsored and directed ethnic cleansing of over 200,000 Serbs (14,000 killed, mostly civilians) from the Krajina region of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1995 is a textbook case. See:
http://originalsources.com/OS5-99HL/5-13-1999.2
for more information on how this works. (Or look into Kurdistan, East Timor, Guatemala,... if you're looking for the general pattern.)
Alex Berkman
The internet is one of the few sources of independent news avaliable to Yugoslavia. Cutting it off is just playing into the serbian's hands.
I live in America. It is so scary how much the media and the government control the people's thoughts. People who did not even know the existence of Yugoslavia 60 days ago are rabid supporters of the bombings today. After coming here, I saw a completely new aspect of human nature (certainly there are several exceptions). Give them the material goods and they give you their power to think, analyse and question. Take the material goods away and everything is questioned. For those who are willing to read, I am listing some books which discuss how the "FREE" press in "FREE" America is so very tainted. It would be nice if you bought them. These journalists, although hard working do not have the financial backing of organisations like NBC (which is owned by GE, the largest arms manufacturer).
Secret State Silent: new militarism, the Gulf and the mordern image of warfare. By Richard Keeble
Politics of War, By Walter Karp
The second front, By John MacArthur
20 years of censored news, By Carl Jensen
Keeble is English. The other two are Americans. If you are more interested, there is a journal called "Index of censorship"
This post getting a score:5 illustrates that some moderator is an extremely biased
supporter of war against Yugoslavis. He also believes that everything is fair, including people's right to knowledge and people's right to
express. I will be surprised even if one in 1000 people in Yugoslavia have computers. This is aimed directly to prevent
the American people to know what is happening or what the views of people there are. They may be doing something which may take away the people's support of war here in America.
Firstoff, I have no problems reaching the
mentionned sites from Switzerland. So this might
be an US-only problem.
Second, what we have in Serbia is not "just some
poor people getting bombed by evil forces", but
some Big-Brother-type dictator Milosevic
whose politics are strikingly similar to those of
a certain Adolf Hitler in 1938.
- dispossessing people of a ethnic minority
- ethnic "cleansing"
- crushing in-serbian opposition (Radio B92...)
What we have is the rise of another fascist state.
I'm not very pleased with the bombing, but I see
it as a necessity to do whatever is possible to
crush that governement.
This goes not against you serbian people, this
goes against a fascist governement. Do something
about this.
Kirth
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
A recent U.S. News had a short article about Yugoslavia's electronic propaganda war. They literally have an entire room full of computers run by people (mostly students, IIRC) solely for the use of sending propaganda over the internet (and they've been doing a much more effective job than NATO!). Far from the bulwark of free and independent news, the internet is being used a a tool to further Milosevic's own political goals.
Posted by The Mongolian Barbecue:
Bill Clinton's stale old excuse that we're not really at war with the serbian people is looking more and more tired.
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
He didn't state any facts. He made claims not backed up by anything.
If you are saying you would like to make the same claims, go ahead--but it proves nothing.
If you are saying you have facts to back up his (and presumably your) claims go ahead and present them. For instance, show us a before and after satellite photo (be sure to prove which is before and which after) AND show that the difference is due to systematic policy and not merely accident.
Posted by noflesh:
I agree it would be a very bad thing to cut off the internet connection. We need more information flowing back and forth not less.
Here's the big difference between NATO and the Serbian military though: the Serbs are trying to hurt and murder people while NATO is trying not to.
I'm not saying the bombing is the right thing to do but when you talk about NATO propoganda you're disregarding the voices of thousands upon thousands of suffering people. If you do disregard these people you're just one step above the raping, murderous scum at work in Kosovo.
Posted by patg:
This whole conflict is a pathetic failure and waste!
What has it acheived? Who is better off for it? Who's going to foot the huge bill to pay for the damage and military expenses?
Clinton is trying so desparately to have some sort of legacy other than lecherism and dishonesty, and it's a huge failure. You don't solve problems in a region with such a long history of problems by simply dropping bombs. So much rationalism for this that could be applied for so many other conflicts in the world such as Rwanda, that nothing was done about. To risk global conflict for this is utterly insane. It was bad enough, now they "accidently" drop a bomb on the Chinese embassy (China, by the way, is the country who was able to get missle technology from the US due to to political favours by transfering technolical trade regulation from the State dept. to the commerce dept. making it all that much more easy for them to get this information from the US) was that a mistake, or another distraction on top of a distraction? Now something that the Chinese really weren't involved in (this conflict) they have been drawn into (and are more likely to be against it)
What a pathetic sham of a campaign. On top of that, Yeltsin's rule is in question, and the Russians aren't exactly thrilled about this conflict. This is a volitile situation that Clinton and alot of the american public doesn't understand the repercussions of. There's two sides to every story, and only one is being propagated in this situation.
Just another example of Clinton's inability to properly utilise the military (which he's professed in the past to "dispise the military").
and inability to comprehend effective foreign policy.
What an embarassment!
But why Yugoslavia? As someone pointed out, it's because "people like us" (i.e. caucasian, albeit swarthy ones) are being massacred. It's also because it's in the US's backyard (the US is a European power, ever since WWI).
But why Yugoslavia? Massacres equally as heinous are going on elsewhere; if bombs must fall on Serbia, why not send a few to the Sudan, where the Muslim government in the north wants to destroy and/or convert and/or enslave the Christians in the south. Right-wing pols (and voters) in the US like to say that their country is a "Christian nation", yet they don't raise a fuss about the Sudan.
What about East Timor? Let drop some bombs on the Indonesians. East Timor should have become independent about 25 years ago, as Portugal was releasing its colonies. But they were invaded by Indonesia (with some help, or at least acquiesence from Dr Kissinger and Friends), and have been slowly genocided ever since.
What about Latin America? The CIA overthrew a government in Chile, and the US looked the other way as murders and human-rights abuses took place over a long period of time. Ditto in places like Argentina, except there was no need for some spectacular US-sponsored coup. In Central America, Merkins swallowed whole a bunch of lies about Contra thugs being "freedom fighters", and to this day the US government and media refuse to acknowledge that there were free elections (complete with international observers) in Sandinista Nicaragua long before the election that brought Dona Violeta to power. And in other Central American countries, those that didn't have the audacity to overthrow their US-backed dictators and US-trained generals, massacres occurred, based on the "we had to destroy the village in order to save it" ethos of Vietnam.
What about Tibet? Though the Dalai Lama probably wouldn't approve, maybe the US should have been bombing China all these years, rather than sit idly by and let China run roughshod over that land.
Why Yugoslavia? Why now? Why was there a clause in the Rambouillet accords that would have forced Milosevic to cede his country's sovereignty over to outsiders? Why was that accord drawn up so maliciously that Milosevic would have no option other than to walk away from it and face NATO bombs? And wasn't Milosevic "our guy", once upon a time, just like Saddam and Pol Pot and Osama bin Laden before? They only became "monsters" when they no longer suited the purposes of the West.
Why? The US, and the West, perpetrates a lot of violence -- military, political, and economic -- around the world every day, and no fuss is raised about it. Now, all of a sudden, a despot in the Balkans is coerced into accepting a bunch of smart bombs on his soil. It makes for lots of exciting TV programming, but, in a way, it's nothing new. Except for all the unanswered questions. NetAid : a 24-hour Peace Netcast in honor of (and in aid of) Radio B92 on its 10th birthday, 15 May 1999.
--
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=8^
--
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=8^
DU-enhanced weapons are like Lite Nukes minus the Giant Mushroom Clouds and the guilt; the reason the guilt isn't there is because there doesn't seem to be much reportage or discussion about it. See No Evil, etc. It will take widespread news footage of deformed babies and livestock, and mutant produce before that discussion will begin, and then Americans may just choose to ignore it unless it happens on their own soil. And it has, in a way -- Gulf War Syndrome and health problems in post-Gulf offspring may well be related to DU; if there's a ground war in Serbia, the NATO troops may be exposed to the radiation, leading to Who Knows What?®
--
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=8^
No, it isn't uncool to be pro-american, the thing that is uncool is the behavior of the american goverment towards the rest of the world. You only need to take a look to the list of countries that the US army have attacked: all the way from Mexico to Serbia, including in the tour Morocco, Cuba, Vietnam and Afganistan, among many other places that I don't remember right now. So it isn't come as a surprise that too many people around the world like to bash the U.S., specially when the Dept. of State keeps feeding them with new material to work...
"They cite foreign news sites which contradict US news as proof the US media is lying." Personally, I didn't find-yet- a US news service lying, but, no matter if it is the Discovery Channel or NBC, the US media is very prolific at the time of spread half-truths and overreact about anything. This stuff couldn't be a big deal, if the US media only reached US, but they cover the entire world, and, in the places that they didn't reached, you will find a lazy producer that will make a copycat, with all the innacuracies of the original, and some new ones.
"People die from bombs, or they die from small arms fire (ground troops poindexter...) Either way they die. I'd prefer they die from bombs, as that means less of my fellow citizens would lose their lives for this cut-rate region who's inability to act civilized has caused much more trouble then it could ever be worth."
Where is the need for your "fellow citizens" to go there and lose their lives in that country in the first place? This war isn't about human rights, Kosovo or the evil Milosevic. It's just a lesson to the world to teach about NATO's and US goverment's power, and how the only way to be safe for a country is building nukes like Russia, China, India and Pakistan, whose goverments can kill at pleasure and still get loans, weapons, and privileges from the western democracies, but, if in some country without nukes appens to have a leader that doesn't share the "democratic principles", it's OK to bring him down, even if him was elected democratically (for example, Francisco I Madero in Mexico, or Salvador Allende in Chile; two civilian goverments crushed by the militia, with the back up of -surprise!!- the US goverment).
Anyway, you have a good reason to be upset for all those people that keeps talking about "all those evil americans" and doesn't stop to think that maybe, maybe all the americans, serbs, albanians or mexicans are people like them, and have more things in common than they can even wonder.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
No, it isn't uncool to be pro-american, the thing that is uncool is the behavior of the american goverment towards the rest of the world. You only need to take a look to the list of countries that the US army have attacked: all the way from Mexico to Serbia, including in the tour Morocco, Cuba, Vietnam and Afganistan, among many other places that I don't remember right now. So it isn't come as a surprise that too many people around the world like to bash the U.S., specially when the Dept. of State keeps feeding them with new material to work...
"They cite foreign news sites which contradict US news as proof the US media is lying." Personally, I didn't find-yet- a US news service lying, but, no matter if it is the Discovery Channel or NBC, the US media is very prolific at the time of spread half-truths and overreact about anything. This stuff couldn't be a big deal, if the US media only reached US, but they cover the entire world, and, in the places that they didn't reached, you will find a lazy producer that will make a copycat, with all the innacuracies of the original, and some new ones.
"People die from bombs, or they die from small arms fire (ground troops poindexter...) Either way they die. I'd prefer they die from bombs, as that means less of my fellow citizens would lose their lives for this cut-rate region who's inability to act civilized has caused much more trouble then it could ever be worth."
Where is the need for your "fellow citizens" to go there and lose their lives in that country in the first place? This war isn't about human rights, Kosovo or the evil Milosevic. It's just a lesson to the world to teach about NATO's and US goverment's power, and how the only way to be safe for a country is building nukes like Russia, China, India and Pakistan, whose goverments can kill at pleasure and still get loans, weapons, and privileges from the western democracies, but, if in some country without nukes appens to have a leader that doesn't share the "democratic principles", it's OK to bring him down, even if him was elected democratically (for example, Francisco I Madero in Mexico, or Salvador Allende in Chile; two civilian goverments crushed by the militia, with the back up of -surprise!!- the US goverment).
Anyway, you have a good reason to be upset for all those people that keeps talking about "all those evil americans" and doesn't stop to think that maybe, maybe all the americans, serbs, albanians or mexicans are people like them, and have more things in common than they can even wonder.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
Judging from the fact that the site is now up, it is unlikely that the satellite service (if there was any) was severed, rather it was a temporary outage. Maybe the power went off?
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
ujans@ullisys:~ > date && traceroute www.serbia-info.com Thu May 13 18:12:43 MEST 1999
traceroute to www2.EUnet.yu (194.247.192.60), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 router.pond.sub.org (192.168.1.129) 2.309 ms 1.521 ms 1.466 ms
2 pond-gw.ilk.net (10.10.10.9) 167.92 ms 164.426 ms 153.316 ms
3 cs1.ilk.net (10.10.10.1) 173.428 ms 154.921 ms 191.488 ms
4 194.122.227.61 (194.122.227.61) 227.502 ms 155.431 ms 156.134 ms
5 frankfurt.core.xlink.net (194.122.225.42) 160.131 ms 160.496 ms 156.474 ms
6 * Ffm-ar02.eunet.com (134.222.19.1) 167.689 ms 166.677 ms
7 Asd-nr02.NL.EU.net (134.222.228.45) 170.753 ms 164.811 ms 168.695 ms
8 Asd-nr12.NL.EU.net (134.222.186.12) 164.431 ms 186.031 ms 168.671 ms
9 Belgrade1.YU.EU.net (134.222.34.2) 630.23 ms 640.8 ms 702.692 ms
10 Belgrade10-E2.EUnet.yu (194.247.193.123) 684.487 ms 669.633 ms 570.612 ms
11 www2.EUnet.yu (194.247.192.60) 658.286 ms 615.495 ms 735.829 ms
The Internet *does* route around the blockage! (Especially look at the ping time difference between hop 8 and 9, which IMHO appears as a satellite leg)
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
I got through to both of those web sites just now.
Probably their power was out for a few hours last night, and people started stupid rumours.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
asinus sum et eo superbio
asinus sum et eo superbio
in omnibus veritas
Serbia-info is certainly selective with the truth. A large part of it seems to be badly written paraphrases of articales in the western media.
That's a difficult choice there: Do I read the original column, or do I read a paraphrase of an English article, and then translated back by a less than fluent translater.
No one media outlet has a monopoly on the truth. I enjoy reading the New York Times, the Washington Post, and viewing ITN and the BBC, and sometimes I am irked by the government line. But Serbia Info is a propaganda vehicle -- nothing more and nothing less.
The fact that the "Serbian Ministry of Information" is plastered across the web-page testifies to this.
But the issue brought up is a different thing. No matter that a "war" is on.(Or is it a "police action"?) There are rules, even in war - Geneva convention, etc - and for good reasons (they are to everyone's long-term benefit). For political leaders to deny connectivity to individuals, groups or nations on any pretext is a slippery slope leading to lack of freedom for everybody. Even scum should have their day in court (including and always, the court of public opinion).
And claiming that removal of 'net connectivity will affect military communications is absurd.
An esoteric scratched itch:
Homeworld Map Maker Tool
Their feed through EUnet is still up... Maybe some other bandwith provider got hit, tho.
I don't see this really happening. The main reason is because of the fact that agencies that remain there use the internet to get information. UNHCR and the Red Cross both just used the dialups to EUNet in Pristina when I was there in december.
Another reason this is bad is because if its the US doing it, then its censorship. Believe it or not the news you get from CNN is biased (yes it really is). I've been forced to stop going there for information on this situation. Even the BBC and Telegraph are biased. Not to say that www.serbia-info.com isn't biased, but it provides another view of the situation. A single view promotes groupthink which is bad and just reinforces bad ideas.
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
several million Rwandans mean nothing to the US, but about 2016 Albanian dead mean we demand the unconditional surrender of Serbia?
Seems pretty black & white to me.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Virginia is where the internet crosses the Atlantic to Europe. Any European or Russian site will appear to come from Virginia.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
The Yugoslavs themselves say they get internet via sattelite. Beograd.com certainly is, it's run off a generator in some guys apartment.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
We should send NATO to DC, where people are REALLY oppressed homeless and dying.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
What the hell is going on here?
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
I think the big brother award certainly goes to the NATO countries, and the US/CNN in particular.
Faking satellite photos, faking dead bodies, faking pictures of muslims in refugee camps, and doctoring photos to make Clinton taller than anyone else in the picture; Bombing many many civilian vehicles, and then telling the people "oops"; eradicating civilian journalists (Serb and Chinese) who broadcast pictures of the destruction out of the country.
Not to mention the sheer audacity of flouting all international law in order to maintain one's "credibility".
Milosevic may be bad, but trying to reconquer ancient Serb territory from the neo-nazi KLA hardly makes him Hitler. Hitler invaded sovergn nations under the pretext of humanitarian intervention (Czechoslovakia). Sound familiar?
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Russia, China, India, Japan, S. Africa, Brazil, and all the CIS countries are flatly against this war and are demanding an immediate halt. That puts the majority of powerful nations against us.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
From a Sam Smith piece at http://www.prorev.com ...
FROM A COLUMN BY TONY SNOW: Key
members of the United States Senate sat
slack-jawed through a confidential briefing last
Thursday from the Clinton administration
foreign-policy team. ~~ After the foreign-policy
wise men asserted that the United States has a
moral imperative to stop the murderous Serbian
president, Slobodan Milosevic, one senator
asked: How many Albanians have Milosevic's
troops massacred this year? The president's
emissaries turned ashen. They glanced at each
other. They rifled through their papers. One
hazarded a guess: "Two thousand?" No, the
senator replied, that was the number for all of last
year. He wanted figures for the last month - or
even the year to date, since the president had
painted such a grisly picture of genocide in his
March 24 address to the nation. ~~ The senator
pressed on. How often have such slaughters
occurred? Nobody knew. As it turns out,
Kosovo has been about as bloody this year as,
say, Atlanta. You can measure the deaths not in
the hundreds, but dozens. (I'm not trying to deny
Milosevic's brutality here; only to provide some
comparisons.) More people died last week in
Borneo than have expired this year in Kosovar
bloodshed - more died in a single Russian bomb
blast; in a single outburst of violence in East
Timor; in a single day in Rwanda. China has been
bloodier this year.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
the whole NATO air force by now?)...
I think NATO is hiding it's losses, don't you? NATO praises the effectiveness of Serb AA, then says it can't hit anything.
Bombing many many civilian vehicles, and then telling the people "oops"
Are you saying NATO does this intentionally, on purpose? If so, could you tell us all what that
purpose might be?
To break the will of the Serbian people of course. The same reason we bombed civilians in Vietnam and Iraq.
eradicating civilian journalists (Serb and Chinese)
Do you want to say that US intentionally targeted the Chinese embassy in order to kill Chinese
journalists? Really?
To appear tough on China in the wake of the bribery scandal? To rally the ultra-right behind the President? Who knows. The excuses are pretty flimsy.
Not to mention the sheer audacity of flouting all international law in order to maintain one's "credibility"
International law is very vague with regard to waging war, for obvious reasons. Could you specifically
tell us exactly which law is NATO breaking?
The UN charter (by waging war without security council approval), and the Geneva Convention (by targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure like schools and hospitals), and by using cluster bombs, which are a banned weapon.
trying to reconquer ancient Serb territory from the neo-nazi KLA
KLA are not angels, but they have are fighting for survival. And "ancient Serb territory" -- how about
Germany trying to recover ancient German territory -- Prussia -- from Poland and Russia? Or Poland
recovering traditional Polish lands from Ukraine and Belorussia? Or Azerbaijanis recovering their land
from Iran? I could go on and on...
Whatever may have happened previously, the KLA started this particular round of fighting. The KLA had conquered 2/3 of Kosovo before the Serb military decided to react.
Anyhoo, I don't hate the US, I just deplore this illegal, immoral, and ineptly-executed war. Imperialism in any form is deplorable.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
NATO hears rumors, and then puts it forward as fact. If there is no evidence of mass killing, its pretty stupid to assume it happened anyway just because NATO says so.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
The 1998 CIA world factbook puts the entire Albanian population of Kosovo at 800,000.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Slightly off-topic, but scary. here
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
without the UN approval? I don't think so. Regarding the Geneva convention, I don't think
NATO *targets* schools and hospitals. It hits them occasionally, sure, but specifically
targeting them? Again, I don't think so.
"I don't think so" has got to be my favorite argument. Go read section II of the UN Charter (www.un.org) and get back to me.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Well, that about sums it up for England and France. So I suppose the US is the only country that qualifies as powerful. Don't break your arm patting yourself on the back...
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
In English:
The flag highly the series firmly closed S. A. marched with calmly
fixed step Kam'raden the red front and the reaction shot Marschier'n
in the spirit in unsern series also
The road freely the brown asking ALL ions the road freely the storm
department department of it schau'n auf's heel cross fully hoping
already millions the day fur liberty and fur bread starts
To the letzen mark now appeal blown for the fight steh'n we all
already ready soon to flutter Hitler flags Uber all roads the farmhand
shank lasts only more short time
The flag highly the series firmly closed S. A. marched with calmly
fixed step Kam'raden the red front and the reaction shot Marschier'n
in the spirit in unsern series with
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
90% ethnic Albanian is pure poppycock. Even if it were true, that would mean the US would have no authority in New Mexico, S. California, DC, Puerto Rico, or any other place where white folk are in a minority.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
If I can refresh your memory, it was precisely the violation of section II against Kuwait (a UN member) that led to the UN mission against Iraq. Up until very recently, the world, NATO countries included, has viewed the charter as binding and has done a decent job of enorcing it.
As a matter of fact, NATO is using the UN charter itself extensively in it's defense against Yugoslavia in the World Court of Justice. The Netherlands, for example, is invoking section 7 of the charter saying it gives NATO the right to invade (dubious, but I won't argue it here), and also a 1992 UN resolution saying that FRY does not automatically assume the vacancy left by SFRY when it ceased to exist (and FRY is therefore not a UN member).
Israel was created by a UN resolution, does that make it's existence illegal if the UN has no authority?
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Clinton starts the NATO-Yugoslav war so that the US will maintain relevancy in a strengthening European Union. Britain is strongly for it because it is afraid of being eclipsed in the EU by a much stronger Germany.
D'oh! This war is going badly, and more than half of Italians and a full 97% of Greeks want O-U-T OUT! The new Czech and Hungarian members are also having second thoughs. There goes NATO...
But wait! If we can get a foreign scary power or two to decry NATO expansionism, and threaten to contain it, then the unraveling NATO will be scared back under the US's military umbrella. The US won't face losing everything it worked for after WWII under the Marshall Plan, and we can spend a ton more on arms to combat the new foreign threat.
Sound like a dream-come-true for the US and the defense contractors? It's happening.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
The only reason I'm responding to this thread is because my name is on it...
If the assertion is that the Serb government has no authority over regions that are mostly ethnic Albanian, then the same should apply to regions of the US that are mostly ethnic hispanics or ethnic african-americans. Do you see what I was trying to say now? Both of these ethnic minorities in the US didn't exactly come under the sway of the American colonies under voulontary circumstances.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Here is what they have:
Ethnic groups: Serbs 63%, Albanians 14%, Montenegrins 6%, Hungarians 4%, other 13%
Religions: Orthodox 65%, Muslim 19%, Roman Catholic 4%, Protestant 1%, other 11%
Languages: Serbo-Croatian 95%, Albanian 5%
This is also interesting:
Geography-note: controls one of the major land routes from Western Europe to Turkey and the Near East; strategic location along the Adriatic coast
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
From the CIA World Factbook
Telephones: 700,000
Telephone system:
domestic: NA
international: satellite earth station-1 Intelsat (Atlantic Ocean)
Radio broadcast stations: 27 (public or state-owned 1, private 26)
Radios: 2.015 million
Television broadcast stations: 8 (state owned 1, privately owned 7) plus 1 Satellite TV down link and 48 cable distribution systems
Televisions: 1 million
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Very effective use of the net, I'd say.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Now the Corporate Republic of America can rape loot and plunder abroad with impunity, and the American people will simply redouble their efforts to comprehend the Starr Report.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
DU is radioactive by the Pentagon's own admission. Not only that it is HIGHLY toxic, and causes kidney problems, birth defects, and very high rates of cancer. I guess you'd call it "Gulf War Syndrome". Hundreds of thousands of pounds of this crap is now strewn in and around Baghdad, causing an unprecidented level of these problems in the civilian population. A mini-Chernobyl, without the explosion.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
During the past couple of days NATO has bombed a bread truck, an elementary school, a farmers collective, a hospital, and yes, plain old villiages full of people.
The undeclared objective in this conflict is to break the resistance of the Serbs to get them to capitulate. The only way life can suck any more for these people is if NATO expands its civilian bombing.
Obviously, NATO doesn't want the rest of us to see these images of clusterbombs and dead civilians, which is why they have been going after Serb TV like crazy. Of course the media blackout is incomplete with all these Serbs posting war information and pictures to their websites.
Toink! There go the satellites.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Well Altus came up with this, but I don't see it here...
"A communications disruption can mean only one thing...."
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
...no, it's pretty standard. Why we're doing it this late in the game, I don't know.
In the past, it has been: capture or knock out telecom, TV, radio, newspaper systems. Capture is better than knock out, so you can feed the people your own propaganda. But with some special planes that the US has, we can knock out their TV & radio systems and broadcast our own stuff instead.
But this is a NATO-run operation. So that would also explain why this has happened only now.
That Milosovec has been allowed to spew the utter BS crap for so long is amazing to me. Yugoslavia doesn't have the FAX network that China or Russia has. Yugoslavia probably doesn't have the sympathetic connections in the media here and in Europe that Viet Nam somehow managed to acquire...
-Corey
The problem here is not that losing one's
internet connection is on par with losing
one's fellow citizens - the problem is that
losing one's internet connection means you
can no longer tell anyone on the net that
you are losing your fellow citizens. Let's
be frank, atrocities are far easier to
commit when the victim can't complain to
anyone.
-- Larry Smith
I was just thown agast by the comment that this was "a scary form of warfare"...and ready to rant...but thatnks to the above reply hopefully you can understand warfare is alot more horrible than a net connection....
-"We have to stop the genocide!" There have been, and still are, a whole lot of genocidal conflicts which the US government has not been the least bit interested in. Hell, look at how Turkey treats its own Kurdish population, and we have bases in Turkey.
"We have bases in Turkey." Exactly. Turkey is an ally, and an important one. Attacking Turkey would split NATO apart, and destabilize much of the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
-"Well, we can't stop all of them, but we can at least stop this one." This is pretty bogus because it doesn't explain _why_ this one.
Serbia has no important alliances with us (unlike Turkey), has no important alliances elsewhere (unlike Cuba, back when we cared about Cuba), is not a powerful state in it's own right (unlike China), and has a surrounding military orgization, NATO, to carry out the attacks (unlike Indonesia).
We can stop Milsoevic because Serbia is a weak state in a region we have a lot power, and a conflict isn't likely to snowball into something truly nasty.
But the American (and British, and French etc, etc) people already know the truth of what's going on - they see the weapon cam films virtually every day on the news and can see whether or not NATO is telling the truth. Our media has been as open and truthful as possible, owning up to verifiable incidents of bombs hitting Serbian civilian targets, with NATO giving each day accounts of targets hit. Serbian media on the other hand has shown nothing but the few blunders NATO has made, along with lies, more lies and damned lies.
The internet has been flooded (especially on IRC) with sites purporting to be about discussion of the issues surrounding the conflict in the Balkans, but when anyone tries to raise these issues (eg on #kosovo on Undernet) they get banned as the sites & channels are run by Serbs and Serb sympathisers who just will not allow NATO's case to be put.
Given that a country like the US fights its wars dependant on the support of their people, and that their defeat in Vietnam was largely put down to lack of public support due to images of war on their media (and let's face it, war is horrible - there's no getting over that), can anyone blame NATO for putting a muzzle on Serbian lies which could damage chances of a satisfactory conclusion to the conflict?
In WW2, the majority of casualties of any bombing of cities was civilians. Dresden was piled high with hundreds and thousands of dead civilians. If a hundred Serb civilians get killed by accident, yes, this is tragic - terrible! But given that NATO have called off bombing raids in mid flight because they could not be sure enough of hitting a military target, it should be obvious to anyone that NATO are bending over backwards to avoid civilian casualties. Smartbombs against military bunkers are a lot less likely to kill civilians as the Serbian artillery that was used on kosovar albanian villages. Artillery shells are inaccurate at best - not that the Serbs ever tried to avoid hitting civilians. They have tried from the start to kill as many kosovar albanian men of fighting age as they can.
If the common Serbian people want an end to this conflict, the answer is in their hands - throw Milosevic out! He has done nothing but damage the country since he came to power. No good has come from him for the Serbian people; he has just led them into conflict, poverty and ruin.
This is a very good sign of a very wrong situation indeed. With all due respect to the US political
system, I wouldn't like the US goverment to decide
for ME and MY country what export control policy I should promote or what I am allowed to see in the Internet.
Hopefully, the backbone framework will develop well enough to allow people of any country to access the Internet no matter whether the US govt wants it or not.
www.serbia-info.com seems to be up, but I've noticed that net access to yugo has been sporadic at best since the bombings started.
Let's clear up a few things here. Our government
...
has not always been clean as the brits preceeding
them. There were the brits who eliminated part
of the people in Acadie while stealing their
country. There were the brits followed by the
Americans who killed thousands of natives.
I am of Acadian and native descent
I'm sure we can compare Kosovo with what happened
in this country, on the other hand whatever
happened here years ago is past and the rules
of laws are observed in this great country of
today and despite the past I feel home here
just like any other American.
So to the morons who try to compare today's USA
with Kosovo : Get a life!
Michel
http://www.netonecom.net/~bbcat
Thank you to everyone!
From beograd.com:
*********************************************
16:50 According to the last information, "LORAL ORION" has given up, until further notice, disconnecting Yugoslavia from Internet, because of the protests from all around the world that followed the announcement
15:55 FONET - One of the biggest US communication satellites of the firm "LORAL ORION" has informed Belgrade provider "Informatika" last night that because of "vis major" they wiould have to stop Internet emitting toward all Yugoslav providers who are linked to providers in USA. "This decision is the
result of the executive order of the President of USA, Bill Clinton, banning emitting of all services from USA into Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Monte Negro)", says the message of "LORAL ORION" to the general Director of "Informatika", Slobodan Sreckovic.
"In accordance with that, LORAL ORION will, starting from May 12, 1999, stop its services", it is said at the end of the statement. On Thursday, May 13, in morning hours, "Informatika" confirmed to Fonet this has not
happened yet, but they are expecting to be disconnected from USA Internet satellite service toward Yugoslavia any minute/hour now".
***********************************************
Your Internet voice has infinite power...
--diva
diva Pasty Drone NewsTrolls, Inc.
Here is the info that went out yesterday on beograd.com. If you want to see it yourself, it has now been archived so go to "Previous News" and look under 5/12/99. We have no confirmation yet of whether it will go down today or not:
*
.yu:
* * .yu ISPs found here:
**********************************************
LATEST UPDATE: [5/12/99]
US shuts down Yugoslav Internet - For immediate release
BELGRADE, MAY 12 - We have reliable information that the US Government ordered shut down of satellite feeds for Internet customers in Yugoslavia, as a result of NATO air war against this country.
This action might be taken as soon as later tonight or tomorrow (May 12 or 13, 1999).
This is a flagrant violation of commercial contracts with Yugoslav ISPs, as well as an attack on freedom of the Internet.
A Web site in protest of these actions should be up shortly. We will supply you with the URL. In the meantime, please be so kind to inform as many people as possible about this tragic event for the Internet community in Yugoslavia and Europe.
BeoNET
Belgrade, Yugoslavia
***********************************************
Here is info on the ISPs in
Eunet Yugoslavia
Obilicev Venac 4
11000 Beograd
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
Contact : Radoslav Stankovic
Phone : + 381 11 328 2608
Fax : + 381 11 328 2760
E-Mail : info@Yugoslavia.EU.net
WWW : http://www.Yugoslavia.EU.net/
(DI = modem access number(s))
BeoTelNet www.beotel.yu/
Telefonija www.telefonija.co.yu/
SezamPro http://www.sezampro.yu/
Bits http://www.bits.net/
***********************************************
Here is an article with more specifics on the
From Yugoslav Net:
Yugoslavia's Internet is a rickety structure that could easily be taken out by NATO bombs. If that happens, one of the few lines of communication from the war zone will be severed. Asked how long the Internet infrastructure will hold up under the assault, the administrator of the Yugoslavia top-level domain said he did not know.
"My answer will be extremely short, since I have to write it between two air strikes," wrote Berislav Todorovic in an email. "The Internet service providers in Yugoslavia will do their best to keep the current quality of service, as long as it is technically possible.
"I can't and don't want to give out any speculative predictions about the possible effects of this disgraceful act of the NATO to the national Internet infrastructure.
"All I can [say] and want [to] say is -- we shall see."
The nation's four large public Internet service providers seem to rely on only three land lines and a single satellite link out of the country.
"As soon as the NATO decides to stop violating basic principles of international law and justice and cease their aggressive actions in the country, I'll be glad to give you a better, more detailed story."
With the country's telephone network running beyond capacity, it is almost impossible to get a connection out. The Internet may become the only way for Yugoslavs to communicate with the rest of the world.
Network engineers beyond the country's borders said the situatuon looks bleak.
"It doesn't look very robust," said Scott Ellentuch, a communications security specialist with Internet consultancy TTSG.
"It's not like the United States, where there's a lot of connectivity redundancy and if lines are taken out, the network would heal itself quickly and you'd hardly notice."
Ellentuch said the country's ISPs -- EUnet Yugoslavia, BeoTelNet, SezamPro and BITS -- appear to rely on only three pipes and a single satellite link.
One of the pipes runs through London and is owned by EuNet, a large European network operator.
"It's overloaded," said Pierre Baume, a EuNet network engineer based in Amsterdam. "But it's been overloaded for as long as we can remember."
Meanwhile, the administrators with Eunet Yugoslavia appear to be lying low.
"As a result of recent NATO attacks on Yugoslavia, Eunet Yugoslavia is unable to provide its customers with payment services and customer support," says an notice on the site. "We hope that we will return to normal operation soon." This story belongs to Wired News. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
Copyright © 1994-99 Wired Digital Inc. All rights reserved
diva Pasty Drone NewsTrolls, Inc.
This is not a matter of 1) OR 2).
Would you rather have internet access while your country is being bombed so you can at least get the message out, or would you prefer losing your net access as well as getting the shite bombed out of you?
And besides, I do think this sort of information warfare is more scary than bombs. Bombs are straightforward, they drop and go bang, and that's that.
Information warfare is way more sneaky than that, because when you shut up your enemy you can say what you want about them because there's nobody who will deny it, so the gullible masses will just assume it's true.
This was what made the cold war so succesful. You only heard one side of it, and that was the american propaganda.
My dad once told me that he and a lot more people back then thought that those people in russia could never be human, that there were some kind of monsters living there. So sure, go ahead and bomb the crap out of them, then. This is what propaganda does to people!
Now the great thing about the internet is that you can just contact people worldwide and ask them what things are like on the other side. It's about knowledge. If people know what's really going on, the propaganda doesn't work anymore, and then people might conclude that this whole shit isn't good and that it should stop.
I have yet to hear of a government harnessing the Internet for propoganda purposes...
I checked the Serbian news site. It would seem that they're doing a good job of this already. Click here.
I think the main point is that the government of the United States hasn't hacked this site to insert their own messages yet. No surprise -- it's probably a violation of Federal and International laws to do so. Sure, in theory, you could do all kinds of cool things: hack pages, flood news channels, spam users, &c, with NATO propoganda. NATO is so tied to their lawyers that I do not see this happening.
Finding God in a Dog
NATO SAYS they don't want to hurt people, but they've hurt plenty of people already. Is it right to kill innocent civilians to save the lives of other innocent civilians? That's not necessarily true.
Three free links on Slashdot's
front page. Kudos to whoever
thought of that one.
K.
-
--
To the extent that I wear skirts and cheap nylon slips, I've gone native.
-- Proud descendant of semi-nomadic cattle-herders.
NATO is bombing because it can. We have lotsa cruise missiles and Raytheon wants to sell to the goverment some more of them. And pays politicians to use up the old ones. That's it.
Tell me, have you ever heard much about war in Chechnya? When Russians put heavy multiple launch artillery near Grozny and destroyed the city with all its population? Then continued to kill tens of thousands of civilians. Where was NATO "high moral ground" then? Sure, Chechens guerrilas are no better then KLA - nationalist bandits, arming themselves with drug dealing. Nevertheless.. The only real difference is that Russia had half a zillion nuclear warheads and rockets that do not explode one after another like Titan IV's and Delta's recently.
Morality has nothing to do with war. Nothing even close. Kill your TV.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
What our forefathers did to the native Americans was inexcusable. What Hitler did to the Russians, Gypsies, Jews, and other minorities was inexcusable. What the Serbian nationalists did to the Bosnians and the Croatians was inexcusable, and what they are doing right now to the Kosovars is inexcusable. While forming racist notions about the Serb people based on the actions of their government and an (admittedly large) group of ultranationalist mauraders would be very inappropriate, standing idly by while they murder their weaker neighbors for a THIRD time this decade would be more than inappropriate, it would be gross, even criminal, negligence.
The United States, for all its flaws and problems (and there are many), has for a long time now renounced genocide and ethnic hatred. It is time others did the same.
Would this mean there won't be lunatic fringes espousing these obscene views and policies in the future? No. But at least they wouldn't be running entire countries, and destroying four decades of unprecendented peace in a region fraught with peril and tragedy.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I said we renounced genocide. I don't recall genocide being committed by us, or anyone else, in Hawaii. As for your slant on Hawaiian events ... what you describe may or may not be accurate. I suspect the truth lies somewhere between the "all rosy" official history and your infammatory depiction, but regardless, the subject is GENOCIDE, not oppression, which has a much more slippery definition.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Gee, I thought all those arial photos of mass graves were real. I guess I was wrong. I guess all those Kosovar women and children showing up at the border talking about how their husbands and fathers were shot into ditches were lying..I guess they had all that time marching to Macedonia to get their story straight.
I didn't see any photos of mass graves until a week after NATO's intervention.
Of course they're real. And so were the rapes and the forced marches. And NATO bombing gave them the excuse to hurry the job, as Western diplomats snubbed offers of talks with Serbian leaders, preferring to settle the argument with high explosives from a safe distance.
J
I say we bomb Serbia into the F***g stone age.
This is the whole point. Serbia wouldn't invite Western investors in, so it has to be taught a lesson. In ten years' time, all Yugoslav industry will be low-wage and foreign-owned.
Like Indonesia.
J
one of the things Milosevic is best at is playing the propoganda game, twisting the news to meet the interpretation of the facts he wants.
Not half as good as Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch and the United States State Department.
Read some back issues of Western papers and you will see plenty of reports of agression against Serbs, often many months before any retaliation was reported. The difference is that some atrocities (those perpetrated by nations who rely on heavy Western trade and investment) are reported on p. 5, while others (those perpetrated by nations who prefer to retain ownership of their assets) are reported on p. 1.
That's all.
J
It is scary, in that by cutting off the 'net to Yugoslavia they are cutting off one of the most important means of *independent* communications. It's no longer possible for 'just anyone' to read the point of view of everyday people within Yugoslavia.
The Internet is a boldly subversive technology, once you realize that you don't have to get your information from Turner or Murdoch. You can get it from anyone prepared to give it. The Internet is the samizdat of the new world order, and it serves to undermine the Milosevics as well as the NATOs of the world.
In the last few weeks Yugoslavia has been transformed from a moderately wealthy industrial nation (with an oppressive government) into an underdeveloped one.
It has lost its oil refineries, its power stations, its television studios, its clothing and munitions factories, major bridges and gas pipelines. And yes, these losses mean more to the long-term future of the country than the loss of a few lives.
The public, who a year ago were vocal in their opposition to the President and to Yugoslav policy in Kosovo, are now almost unilaterally behind Milosevic. And it doesn't take a genius to see why.
Meanwhile ethnic cleansing has continued apace. Before NATO action, approx. 100,000 people had been "relocated" from Kosovo, with "several thousand" deaths. Now 3/4 of a million -- half Kosovo's Albanians, and most of them women & children -- have been moved, while many of the men have been shot or mobilized in the KLA.
This war is now on a par with that of Turkey against the PKK. Except that Serbia does not have the benefit of Western investment, commercial broadcast media, low-wage export industry and the drug trade -- it will have to beg for that later.
J
athe-telecom-yu-peer.customers.otenet.gr (195.170.5.30)
this is where the traffic for www.yu and inet.co.yu and www.serbia-info.com goes through
so if you come to greece you are as good as in serbia (no more satellites)...
-- NoWonder of WonderWorks/OmegaProject
sorry for being offtopic - but i just have to say this:
this thread is one the best ones i've ever seen
on slashdot or anywhere else in the internet.
of course, not every comment is a pool of wisdom
and knowledge, but on the average this is just
what i imagine as an open discussion of a fairly
difficult topic.
-- NoWonder of WonderWorks/OmegaProject
Hmmmm.
--
--
The Internet is the Suppository of All Knowledge. You get it in the end.
I hope I'm not the only one who find it ironic that China was encouraging student protests against the US embassy. It wasn't too long ago that the world saw how China responds to student protests.
Agreed. The first things you go for in a war are communications and supply lines. As stated above, without communications the opposing forces can not plan a large scale attack or strategy. You cut the supply lines because under fed soldiers will become fatigued and have less morale (making it more likely they will surrender). They can also run out of munitions making it practically impossible to defend themselves.
www.serbia-info.com aka www2.eunet.yu works for me. I'm in France and the traceroute goes through Greece.
.yu on its side of the Net. Could people in the US try it again?
Of course, I can't test whether the US government censors
an admirable point...warfare of _any_
sort is abhorrant but I still get the
wierd feeling that i'd rather have my
net access shut off than have a rather
large chunk of bomb shrapnel sticking
out of my eye.
the "ethnic cleansing" that has been
occurring is horrible, the nato bombing
that has been going on is horrible,
and the disruption of information access
that is now going on is, also, horrible.
all of it is disgusting and all of it
is, and should be, unnecessary. i'd have
prefered a simpler, less bloody solution
to the conflict (send whatever super-secret
stealth assassins the gov't has after
milosevic and take him out real quiet-like)
but it is still better than doing nothing
and allowing what has been going on to
continue going on.
-dk
Dream with the feathers of angels stuffed beneath your head.
Yes, but if you remove speed and reliable availability from the Internet for the masses of Foonia, you've reduced the available resource...which is what embargo is all about.
The joke is going to be on the Chinese government - once their citizens realize that they can protest things they don't like, we'll see some real changes in China. Their government made a strategic blunder when they encouraged people to take to the streets. Authoritarian regimes really don't want to be encouraging any sort of activism in the citizenry.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
I believe, sir, that you have formed a false impression of my underlying beliefs. I am in no sense an apologist for the actions of Serbia. Allow me to explain my thoughts on the points you brought up:
Throwing out the Western journalists only makes sense if there is something to hide in Yugoslavia. That action on the part of Serbia should make a reasonably critical person more distrustful of Milosevic's motives, not less. I made this same comment when that issue came up in this forum last month. Unfortunately, Slashdot doesn't have the link to my comment anymore. I didn't mention it here because that's not really the topic anymore, is it?
Actually, if you'll read carefully you'll see that I mentioned information flow in both directions - the Serbs getting information from outside of their country and NATO getting information from inside of Serbia. In both cases it's important that people get information from other sources besides the "traditional" media, as we know that these can be co-opted during wartime.
Of course not too many people get their information from the Internet yet. I was trying to be forward-looking when I wrote my original comments. But even if news from outside Serbia only reaches a few people in that country, it can still make a difference. As long some people know that the official party line isn't the whole truth, then the information can spread. In this situation you can't forcibly change the mindset of a nation, even if TV, radio, and newspapers were all open to opposing viewpoints. But you can make all the information available to people, and let them draw their own conclusions. Just the knowledge that there may be more to the story could be enough.
If I understand you correctly, your argument is that since more people use the Internet for news in the U.S. than in Serbia, citizens of the U.S. are more likely to believe Serbian propaganda than citizens of Serbia are to believe the NATO propaganda. I don't agree with you for two reasons.
First, I don't think the numbers of people involved in each country directly affects their viewpoints. Just because more people in the U.S. get their news from the Internet doesn't mean that they are somehow less critical of it. In fact, getting your information off the Internet tends to make people much more critical of what they read, because it's so easy to check for opposing views. Sure, more people in the U.S. may check out the Serbian government web page, but more people may also check out the NATO web page, or the web pages of Kosovar supporters worldwide. As far as I'm concerned, the more opposing views available on the Internet, the better.
Second, I think you are making the assumption that the U.S. perspective is automatically more valid than the Serbian perspective. There is no reason to trust the statements of the U.S. over the statements of any other government. The United States is a sovereign nation and, like all sovereign nations, has no interest in dealing fairly with other nations if it doesn't suit their interests. I'm a U.S. citizen and I generally support the NATO actions, but that doesn't mean that I can't consider the motivations of my government as well as the Serbian motives in this conflict. A knee-jerk uncritical reaction of "USA all the way!" is just as wrong as the people who automatically demonize and question everything the U.S. does. In both cases, the more open-minded consideration of the issues the better.
As I said before, I support the NATO position in this matter, just as you do. I've also argued with people who say that there is no ethnic cleansing, that NATO has somehow caused 780,000 (as of 5/14/99, on NPR) people to leave home, or that President Clinton is the next Hitler (I know, Godwin's law is now in effect). These people are exactly the reason that the lines of communication need to stay open - so that more people can hear both sides of the story and form their own opinions. I've considered all the information I can about the conflict, and I decided that NATO has the moral high ground in this case. But I want people all over the world to come to their own conclusions without listening to the propaganda of NATO, their own governments, or the Serbs. That is the point I was trying to make before - I hope I have explained it more clearly now.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
I was just able to access Radio Television of Serbia at 08:22 CST, so it's either up or I got a cached copy from somewhere. So this particular item may be more rumor than fact. However, it wouldn't have surprised me if it were true, and it would have been a major mistake if that were the case.
Why? Because the more people who have access to information, the better. It's important for the people of Serbia to be able to get information from outside their own (state-controlled) media, and it's also important for the citizens of NATO countries to be able to understand just what the Serbs are thinking, rather than getting it through their own (possibly slanted) media. It's sort of like Radio Free Europe, except that the information transfer goes both ways. The more people who can access all the facts and form their own opinions, rather than getting their opinions prepared by CNN or Radio Television of Serbia, the better.
Let's face it, it's a lot harder to fight a war when every day you see what's happening to the other side - that they're people too. I don't think we're going to see governments whipping up their citizens through propaganda during wartime as much in the future, because anyone can find out exactly how their nation's actions are perceived by the rest of the world. In a way, this will bring war into the home the same way that TV coverage of Vietnam did. Once individuals can see the effects of war on other people, they will be swayed less by nationalism and patriotism and more by simple humanity.
Of course, none of these factors are working at 100% right now. Most citizens still get their news from TV, radio, or newspapers, which have local or national distribution rather than international. And some countries even try to block access to the Internet when there is information that they don't want their citizens to know. But in the long run, I see everyone connected to the global network as a matter of course. When that is the case I don't think any government will be able to effectively block information transfer from one citizen of the world to another.
This is why the U.S. would be making a mistake in cutting off 'net access to Yugoslavia. If the U.S. and NATO are on the moral high ground in this conflict, then there's no reason not to let people in Serbia find out about it on the Internet. Conversely, if it turns out that the Serbians are the victims, then the rest of the world should be able to get that information as well. Without this exchange, the people of the world are forced to follow their government's national policy, because they can't find out about their other options. That would be the real tragedy of disconnecting Serbia from the rest of the world.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
If true (I don't think it is), that's a terrible thing to do. As I understand it, many people in Belgrade rely on email to keep in touch with their families abroad; it's evil to cut them off like that.
It's also important for us on this side of the fence to know what people in Belgrade are thinking, so that we can see their point of view and the effect that the war has on them; even if we think their news sites are just propaganda, it still offers some insight into what is going on in Serbian minds.
Lying is a deliberate disregard of the truth; i.e. you know what the truth is, and you say something else. CNN and the BBC have not lied. At worst, they have reported things that are not true that they have no independent ability to refute (and, no, a Serbian-censored media pool is not "independent").
Examples of lying: showing a bus (probably full of Serbian militia) that was attacked by god-knows-who (the KLA, most likely, using small-arms fire) and claiming it was hit by a missile (never mind that no missile ever invented would hit a bus, blow out the windows, but leave its structure completely intact). "There is no ethnic cleansing in Kosovo." Sure, whatever... let's see what Brent Sadler would turn up if he wasn't followed around by Serbian minders 24/7.
Remember the infamous bunker in Iraq? "Innocent civilians"? Hardly. Try senior Ba'ath Party officials and their relatives---ordinary Iraqis didn't get air raid shelters: in Saddam's eyes, they were disposable.
My Blog. Sela Ward can sell me long distanc
They're afraid the Yugos might try to download PGP!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
All of the sites mentioned above translate to
either www2.EUnet.yu or www3.EUnet.yu - is big
brother changing our DNS tables??
---
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
---
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Several points
i) You might ask your brother what the Croat
army did to the Serb population of Krajina, with
in this case Nato air cover.
ii) Civil wars are nasty, its a fact of life. But atrocities were committed by all sides. The roots of the current conflict lie in the wave of violence against ethnic Serbs in Kosovo which lead the Yugoslav government to revoke its autonomous status. What is needed is not Western intervention (which has already made things worst) but a locally agreed solution. The British and US government hardly have clean fingers in respect of the wars of the last 50 years, are you heading down to Washington to bomb the US government too?
iii) You want to 'bomb Serbia into the stone age"
and yet you condem ethnic violence. It is simply incredible you don't seen the discontinuity between these statements.
iv) I'm not a Serb agent and it shows the weakness of the case for the war that its defenders are reduced to name calling
The Ramboullet were a charade. The US government prevented face-to-face contact between the parties and less than 18 hours before the talks were due to end presented the Yugoslav delegation with 56 new pages of text. The agreement provided for the virtual occupation of the whole of Yugoslav, no sovereign government could have signed it and the Yugoslavian government weren't intended to.
Second, we (i.e. our governments) did quite a lot in Bosnia, we encouraged the Bosnian Muslims to fight on in the hope that the US would intervene on their behalf. More importantly, at the beginning of the breakup of Yugoslavia we gave the green light to the independence of Croatia, Slovenia and then Bosnia, making a solution that preserved Yugoslavia impossible.
Thirdly, it is important what other sides did. It begs the important question, why Serbia, why now?
And yes, the KLA does kill Serbs (who are a substantial part of the population of Kosovo), so another Krajina might be on the cards if the Yugoslavian army wasn't there.
Fourthly, I know a number of Yugoslavians living in Britain and none of them are any more irrational than any other nationality, and to say so is rascist. Moreover, nationalism doesn't arise out of a vacum, it was created by the extremely high levels of unemployment in Yugoslavia after our friendly, non-intervening superpowers cut financial aid.
Your comment alone is is no better then the propaganda that is being spread by everyone else. This is a war, there will be civilian casualties, regardless of the reason for this war which whether I agree with or not is not the issue) You have absolutely no proof what so ever that NATO, cnn or the BBC has lied, just like I have no gaurenteed proof that www.serbia-info.com has not lied. Information is only as good as the sources that provide it, and if those sources are goverernment run, they are generally propaganda based. I'm more likely to believe cnn or the bbc because they are free to publish whatever they want, rather then being forced to publish "place whatever topic here".
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
Faking satellite photos, faking dead bodies, faking pictures of muslims in refugee camps, and doctoring photos to make Clinton taller than anyone else in the picture; Bombing many many civilian vehicles, and then telling the people "oops"; eradicating civilian journalists (Serb and Chinese) who broadcast pictures of the destruction out of the country.
wtf!!! are you smoking crack??? (just in case your an ignorant native, thats a drug) Apoligies to anyone other then this fool that I may have insulted by the native comment. Who ever you are, your an ignorant asshole who knows absolutely shit about the world around you. I may not like the war, hell I pay just over a third of my salery in taxes to fund this damn war. But I don't go around spouting shit like this. Speak only about the facts, not what you imagine in your dreams
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
Okay, so apparently what you're saying is that, since we didn't intervene in one genocide situation, we shouldn't do so now? That seems like a great philosophy!
darkmagus
If I've noticed anything from my years on the internet, it is this: It is not 'cool' to be pro-american. The set of non-US netizens contains a small sub-set who love to bash the U.S. They cite foreign news sites which contradict US news as proof the US media is lying. Oh yeah, and you don't think the media/goverment combination of those countries doesn't have their own agenda? It sucks that Yugo civilians are dying, but hey, thats what you get when your dictator pisses off a large portion of the world's powerful nations. I'm so weary of people trying to paint Yugoslavia as a noble soverign state being picked on by Nato. Fuck that. People die from bombs, or they die from small arms fire (ground troops poindexter...) Either way they die. I'd prefer they die from bombs, as that means less of my fellow citizens would lose their lives for this cut-rate region who's inability to act civilized has caused much more trouble then it could ever be worth. Call me selfish...
Rant Off.
Blar.
Woohooo we got a few atom bombs and now we're a "Powerful Country". Are you from the U.S.? If you are, you'd better leave before you consume yourself with hatred and self-loathing for being within the borders of such a fascist state.
Blar.
I hear tell of some British pipe, and possibly a Russian pipe to the 'net. They don't have to use the US service if they don't like the terms of service you know...
Blar.
I find it difficult to believe the US government is behind this. (OK, so soon all governments will shrivel and die as the web replaces their functions one by one, but the US government at least pays lip service to freedom.) My guess would be that it's Milosevic spreading a little FUD here after shutting .yu himself.... but I have no problem getting into rts.yu from Paris. The US acting like a Communist country? Weird.
- Read fiction at www.espressostories.com
If Europeans would just ake care of business in their own backyard rather than waiting for the US to do something all the damn time, things might be different. You can't have it both ways; people cried about Bosnia for years, but no one did a damn thing until the US finally got involved. If Europe wants to be a superpower, then they should start acting instead of talking. Of course, they could do what they've done for all the time after World War II, sit on their ass, talk, and rake in the money any way they can, ethics be damned.
Embassy bombing a mistake?
;)
NATO's bombing efforts are not working (go w/ me on this...) and the US needs a contigency plan to get out and still save face. So what do they do?
If we could get say, China, to oppose us in the bombing we'd have a way out. How do we get China to oppose us? Hmmmm. ideas?
This is purely hypothetical.
wtf??????? The United States' government only has authority over white people??? It's an all-white government with jurisdiction only over the same race?? bwa hahahahahahahaha!! You prove the other guy's point. SqeezTruck = fool.
Lets see. Milosovic's regime is using military force to shoot ethnic Albanians into the mass graves the army forced them to dig (as they also did in Croatia and Bosnia earlier in the decade..I'm not even going into the rape camps...). They are emptying a province of 90+% of its population based soley on their ethnicity, in apparent revenge for a battle the Serbs lost fair and square in 1389 (over 600 years ago!).
Now, RedGuard, please explain which part of these actions are "reasonable". Don't give me the "I'm falling for NATO propaganda" crap either...my brother was a UN Peace Keeper in Bosnia and has seen first hand how the Yugoslav government behaves reasonalby(handcuffing soldiers to flag poles as human shields, raping the women in entire villages after shooting all the men into ditches).
Milocivic is wrong. He's committing genocide. It just that simple. I say we bomb Serbia into the F***g stone age. Maybe then the next time some petty dictator in Cambodia, or Uganda or Rawanda (or elsewhere) decides to kill a large part of his or her population, they will have to think twice about the consequnces.
NATO is doing the Right Thing.
Evil Florishes when good men do nothing.
Apparently not enough of YU domains were shut down if an obvious Serb agent like you can post here..
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
A province with 90% of the population being Ethnic Abanian is being emptied by the Facist Serbs. The KLA was a response to years of Serbian repression of the majority. So when 90% of the people are only in control of 2/3 of their own territory when the military "reacted" is ridiculous. I don't remember the KLA being in Bosnia, but the Serbs did the same thing there. Besides, you didn't answer Kaa's main point..just because the Serbs lived there 600 years ago does not give them the right to murder and displace the vast majority of the regions populace today. If that was the case, then it would be alright for the Germans to invade Poland, Russia to invade the Ukraine and hell, any one of Celtic blood to invade anyone else in all of Europe (I haven't mentioned the Mongols or the Romans either.).This is nothing more than Serbian nationalism rearing its ugly head, trying to regain the glory days before the Turks arrived, looking to regain the 'Lebansraum' it lost in Kosovo in 1389...it was wrong in WWII and its wrong now.
Maybe if the US and Britain had showed some spine in 1936 or 38, 35 million might have been spared.
Milocovic is wrong, he's evil and he must be stopped. If you thinks what he's doing is OK, then you should be stopped too.
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
Well, I followed your link to discover, HATE propoganda against muslims...fancy that. A fundementalist christian bigot site. Please go away and don't come back.../. is for enlightened, albeit spirited debate on a lot of topics. You represent niether of these. I may not like SqueezeTruck, but at least ST debates back and forth and is fairly intellegent. You, well, your the reason I'm and atheist. If being christian means hating other people, especially if they don't share the same idea about god or happen to be of a slightly darker hue and texture, then no thanks. I'd rather eat my own sh*t than even be mistaken for one of you guys.
BTW, I'm white and formerly christian, in case you were wondering....
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
According to the CIA yearbook you're so fond of quoting its 90% - so do you only believe and quote facts you find that agree with your particular viewpoint and ignore everything else as "poppycock"? And besides, so what if its not 90% (which it is). Does that make the Serbs treatment of them any less deplorable? The treaty NATO is trying to enforce would have them disarm the KLA as well, don't forget.
"Even if it were true, that would mean the US would have no authority in New Mexico, S. California, DC, Puerto Rico, or any other place where white folk are in a minority. "
Huh? Buddy, not everything comes down to race/skin colour or religion. Sometimes you have to do the right thing. Up here in Canada we have a province like Kosovo - Quebec is over 80% French
within the province but the French minority only represents 24% of Canada's total population. We've let them vote on separation twice in the last 20 years, and we'll probably let them do it again. If they vote to separate in a fair and free election, then we'll let them go and become their own country(that's the right thing to do isn't it?). If my Prime Minister decides to role in the tanks, and shoot people into ditches simply because they are French in order to keep the "ancestral homeland" of Canadians, I hope NATO bombs my country into the stone age too - we'd deserve it.
I can argue with you all day if you like but the fact remains that the Serbs are committing atrocities in Kosovo (as they did in Bosnia, or is my own brother in on this conspiracy too? He was a Peace Keeper there and saw it all) and are systematically driving the majority ethnic group out of lands and homes they have owned for over 600 years. That is wrong. There is no excuse that can be made to justify the behaviour of the Yugslav governemnt/Serbia in this situation. They had many opportuities to stop this with the Ramboullet Treaty (sp?) but chose not to, for what ever nationalistic reasons. Now they have to pay the piper.
PS. Since Puerto Rico isn't a State, if they decided to become their own country, yes you'd be right...but it would have nothing to do with the colour of their skin or their religion.
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
The main difference - I agree with the NATO bombing because of what the Yugoslav government is doing, not because of who or what they are. I could care less if they were Serbs or Croats, green or purple. If the tables were turned, I'd say bomb the Kosovars.
Are the Serbs going to prevent another Krajina by killing all the Albanians in Kosovo? (I beleive the commander of that Croat army unit is before the Hague). If it was wrong for the Croats to do it in Krajina, it's wrong for the Serbs to do it in Kosovo (or Pale, or Sreberniza or where ever else they've done it in the last 10 years).
Would you rather stand by and do nothing, like we did in Bosnia? How many bodies and mass graves are they still finding in that country after the war there? What's happening in Kosovo has more to do with irrational Serb nationalism and a battle which took place in 1389 than with anything which happened in 1987-89. Milosovic engineered that to take away Kosovos autonomy because Kosovo contains the Field of Black Birds - the very focal point of Serb nationalism. It also conveniently keeps Slobo the Communist dictator in power.
As for the US and Britain's dirty hands, well, I think they were alot dirtier when they stood by and let the slaughter take place in Bosnia and Rawanda. It's about time they finally did the right thing.
As for name calling, well, chalk that up to frustration with all the Serb apologists I see who keep throwing Molotov coctails at the US consulate in downtown Toronto. I do appologize for that, but at least my agruement isn't "well look what the Croats did...They did it First!Why aren't you going after them! WAAAAAAWAAAAAA!"
What the Croats did was inexcusable, but that doesn't mean NATO should let the Serbs do the same thing. They should certainly learn from their mistakes.
The Ramboullet Treaty is quite fair to both sides, as is the current offer, sponsored in part by Russia. It allows Yugoslavia to remain in tact and NATO/UN would disarm the KLA and best of all, ALL the refugees would be able to return to their homes. If Slobo is serious about peace, he still knows exactly what he can do to stop the bombing. If not, its pretty obvious he's bent on destroying the Albanian population of Kosovo no matter what (kinda like Hitler exterminating Jews, Gypsies and Poles right up to the time the Russians roled in, even though the trains and men could have been beter used on the front)
Nationalism is the last bastion of the idiot.
Now with that off my chest, lets get back to the business at hand the 2.3.0 kernel...
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
Serbia and Montenegro
I thought we were talking about Kosovo, not all of what is left of Yugoslavia? By they way, if Slobo is so right in what he is doing, why is the president of Montenegro basically against what Slobo is doing in Kosovo? Even parts of his own country don't agree (at least the parts with a relatively free press and open society).
Besides, you missed the point - 90%, 50%, 14% or whatever - The Yugoslav government under Milocovic does not have the right to force people off of their land and out of their homes based soley on their ethnicity, for revenge for a battle that was lost 610 years ago. End of story.
Send in the troops to go after the KLA? Sure. But since when does that give them the right to murder and expel everyone who is NOT Serb?
For a country and a people who often pride themselves on fighting Hitler and Facism in WWII ( and love to point out how the Croats collaborated and massacre Serbs during the same time), I find it odd that they are now acting exactly like the Nazis when it comes to the Kosovars. This wouldn't have anything to do with the Kosovars being Muslims now would it? Sounds like a bigoted progrom to me...
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
check out this, its a Yugoslav Gov't site
http://www.gov.yu/kosovo_facts/enter1.html
Accoding to this only 16% of the Kosovars are Serbs, yet they wish to dictate their will on the rest of the population (mostly Albanians and Muslims). Again this is Kosovo, not the rest of Yugoslavia.
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
Yeah except that your whole assumption rests on the fact that SOMEONE has control over another based on their race/religion. Whereas in the US and Canada, the government is made up of a mix of people from all races and all areas of the country (admittedly not a fair mix at times)who try to represent their people in government, Yugoslavia is ruled predominantly by the majority in Serbia. How many Kosovar Albanian cabinet ministers are there in the Milosovic government? How many Kosovar Albanians are there in the Government at all? Is there any representation at all?
From what I see the situation in Kosovo is like Canada ruling Quebec (one of our Provinces)with no provincial government made up of the French minority (majority in the province, however)and no representation in the Federal Government (Kosovo lost that remember). That's not right nor is it fair. The Serb government has NO juridiction over a people who they do not represent - I don't remember any elections taking place recently, do you? (Trick question - No one in Slobo's government was elected - he's a Facist dictator). Hell, that alone is reason to bomb him but I digress.
When the Kosovar Albanians dared to do publicly what you are doing right now (express your opinion and/or distaste with the actions of "their" government), the were met with repression and progroms. They were forced form their homes and made to flee. Some were lined up and shot. With no other recourse (no impartial civil law, no elected representatives in the government etc) they took up arms to defend themselves (as the Americans did for almost identical reasons in 1775 and the French an few years later). When the West tries to do the right thing and prevent a gneocide, Serb apologist whine about NATO's repression!
All because Slobo wants to keep a field where the Serbs lost a battle 610 years ago - I guess that's why he seems to hate Albanians/Muslims so.
Considering the above your comparison makes no sense whatsoever.
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
Gee, I thought all those arial photos of mass graves were real. I guess I was wrong. I guess all those Kosovar women and children showing up at the border talking about how their husbands and fathers were shot into ditches were lying..I guess they had all that time marching to Macedonia to get their story straight.
We won't get the "proof" until the conflict is over and ground troops are in place. Then they will be able to do what my brother did while on tour in Bosnia - stand guard over a UN Forensic Anthropology Team while they exhume human remains for the War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague.
Maybe the lack of "proof", as you put it, shows that the NATO action is actually preventing Milosovic from doing what he did in Bosnia - we should keep it up.
Besides, I don't know where your from (although I have an Idea) but up here in Canada, support for NATO is actually increasing, not eroding, as it is in most NATO countries.
Serbia is wrong. They are murdering, raping and driving people (who make up the majority of the province - 90%)out of the homes they have had for over 600 years. Whether they kill 100 or 1000000 makes no difference - Serbia is wrong and NATO is trying to stop them. It's just that simple.
Maybe some right thinking Serbs should get rid of the War criminal Milosovic and do the right thing.
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
This isn't particularly scary --- it is, after all, a war --- but it's stupid. It's stupid because one of the things Milosevic is best at is playing the propoganda game, twisting the news to meet the interpretation of the facts he wants.
....
In the eyes of the average Serbian, the genocide in Bosnia and Croatia was directed exclusively at them; the bombing of Dubrovnik, and the ethnic cleansing of moslems and Croats, was, they have been taught to believe, a retaliation --- if they even know about it. Similarly, the refugees are fleeing our bombing, not the genocide that everyone in the west believes is happening
The internet is one of the few sources of information, aside from television and radio in neighboring countries and CNN rebroadcasts out of Podgorice (Montenegro) which can combat the propoganda spewed by Milosevic's regime.
Yet, if this story is true, the west is cutting off the internet --- undermining its own attempts to win the hearts and souls of the serbian people.
Either this means: (a) that the leadership of NATO is a bunch of clueless morons (an idea which certainly can't be completely discounted given the way they've run this war so far) or (b) NATO believes that the yugoslav government has been using the internet as a source of _information_ which has hindered the war effort.
IOW, maybe we're afraid of yugoslav hackers?
What suprises me is that it took them this long
to cut their internet connections.
One of the most basic principles of was is the
destruction of all infastructure ( Roads, Power, Communication ) and internet would definatly fit into that arena.
all over the planet. They are called SHORTWAVE RADIO STATIONS. BBC isn't off the air, nor is Deutsche Welle, the Voice of America, or any of the numerous other shortwave news providers.
Additionally, satellite TV is also available: I'd say the vast majority of commsats over Europe are NOT under direct NATO control. .
I don't like it but the above was correct. Currently there isn't ethnic cleansing in the US. There is in Kosovo. However the US has done this in the past. As any Native American. The trail of tears was pretty damn nasty affair. However, some of the leaders of the Native American community have come forward to say they are in favor of this bombing. Because they don't want what happened to them at the hands of the US gov't to happen to others.
-cpd
Er, dude, you're somewhat confused. The idea that ethnic cleansing (and its bigger brother, genocide) is bad is a fairly recent concept. Only in the XIX century people began to think that exterminating entire populations isn't necessarily a moral thing to do. Before that what we call ethnic cleansing was called a successful war. All civilizations practiced it and there is nothing special about the US. The understanding of right and wrong changes over time, so don't be too quick to judge people and countries over what they did centuries ago.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Consider this: last time the genocide was attempted (in Rwanda) the West sat on its hands and did nothing. The results were horrible. This does make you sensitive to other attempts at ethnic cleansing, doesn't it?
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
AFAIK the Serbs officially declared war on NATO.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Well, yes, the UN Charter *is* mostly a set of nice ideas. The only part of UN that can actually do something is the Security Council (that is by design). However, to get more to the point, there is different legal language attached to different issues in the Charter. Some issues are "declarations" and "principles" -- such as those listed in Article 2. These define what the world should look like, but, I repeat, they are not legal obligations of member states. Basically, if the drafters of the Charter wanted to say "A member state cannot go to war against another member state", they knew how to say this :).
:)
As to Kuwait, it was not the "violation of section II" that led to the Gulf War. Essentially, US and Europe decided that Saddam is not going to get away with this and so they went to war. Article 2 was probably quoted for justification/propaganda reasons, but it was not *the reason* for the Gulf War. To remind you, China swallowed Tibet with nary a peep from the UN.
Ask any Israeli if he/she believes that the state of Israel exists only because of UN authority.
And if I'm the first person you met who thinks that the UN Charter has no power, you really should go out more often...
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
"Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it". To effective isolate Foonia you need to make sure that *every single connection* to the net is disabled, which requires massive cooperation from everybody.
Let's say there is another country, Quxia, which is not all that enthusiastic about the embargo of Foonia. If Foonia has a connection to Quxia, you would not be able to lock out Foonia without locking out Quxia as well. Yes, you can try to block based on originating host, but there are many counters possible. And don't forget plain-vanilla dial-out over POTS.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Even leaving aside the propaganda that comes out of Milosevic's camp (didn't the Serbs shoot down the whole NATO air force by now?)...
Bombing many many civilian vehicles, and then telling the people "oops"
Are you saying NATO does this intentionally, on purpose? If so, could you tell us all what that purpose might be?
eradicating civilian journalists (Serb and Chinese)
Do you want to say that US intentionally targeted the Chinese embassy in order to kill Chinese journalists? Really?
Not to mention the sheer audacity of flouting all international law in order to maintain one's "credibility"
International law is very vague with regard to waging war, for obvious reasons. Could you specifically tell us exactly which law is NATO breaking?
trying to reconquer ancient Serb territory from the neo-nazi KLA
KLA are not angels, but they have are fighting for survival. And "ancient Serb territory" -- how about Germany trying to recover ancient German territory -- Prussia -- from Poland and Russia? Or Poland recovering traditional Polish lands from Ukraine and Belorussia? Or Azerbaijanis recovering their land from Iran? I could go on and on...
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
You are mixing up "powerful" and "having a lot of mostly very poor population". The countries you listed are populous, but not powerful. Also, governments in countries like China are not known for expressing the views of their people.
Besides, since when the majority view has anything to do with what is the right thing to do and what is not?
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Just because nobody knows for sure how many people were killed in Kosovo this year doesn't mean that nobody was killed. We just don't know now. It may turn out that a couple of hundred were killed, it may turn out that several thousand were killed -- it's too early to tell.
Besides, does driving people off their land, looting, burning, raping, etc. count for anything?
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
I'm not saying US media is lily-white. But I want to point out that:
(1) Media lives and dies by its reputation. Tabloids aside, any publication that was caught intentionally lying is in big, big trouble. Everybody knows it and it is a good incentive to avoid blatant misinformation (but not subtle/clever one, of course).
(2) Published photos are routinely tweaked using PhotoShop and similar editors. It's normal to remove a bit of extra waistline from model pictured on the cover. Make her legs longer? Sure. Hide the unsighty mole? No problem. Done every day. Given this I wouldn't be surprised to see Clinton artificially "elongated", but so what? Besides, I suspect most of the effect comes from the perspective of the shot (if you are closer to the camera, you seem larger than the people behind you; also taller if the photographer is standing lower than Clinton). Intentionally faked satellite shots is another matter, but I haven't heard much about it outside of paranoid conspiracy theories.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
I live in America. It is so scary how much the media and the government control the people's thoughts. :) But really, there is nothing specific to US here. A majority of people in any country in the world are likely to belive whatever the media/government wants them to believe, if the propaganda is done skillfully enough. You might argue that this is a regrettable aspect of human nature, but still this has nothing to do with US. If anything, the Anglo-Saxon world (UK and US) has a much deeper distrust of the government than the rest of the world. So be glad you live in US, otherwise you probably would not be thinking these thoughts at all.
Well, obviously they don't control yours all that well
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
I'm glad you like the argument :)
For your information, UN Charter has no sections. It is divided into Chapters and Articles. I assume you refer to Article 2, which reads, in part:
The Organization and its Members, in pursuit of the Purposes stated in Article 1, shall act in accordance with the following Principles (italics mine, so that you pay attention to this word).
1.The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.
2.All Members, in order to ensure to all of them the rights and benefits resulting from membership, shall fulfill in good faith the obligations assumed by them in accordance with the present Charter.
3.All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.
4.All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.
...etc.
These are *principles* which are not legal obligations and are not binding on the members. Phrases like "All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means" clearly describe how the world *should* work, but, again,
do not prohibit anyone from going to war against another state.
And if you want to be lawyerly, you can even argue that the NATO war against Serbia is not "against the territorial integrity or political independence" since all NATO claims it wants (it is lying) is to enforce the unsigned Rambouillet Agreement. This, of course, doesn't make any sense, but NATO didn't come up publicly with a resonable goal for this war.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
First, get your Latin straight: it's "a priori", not "a priora". Second, Kaa's Law is empirically derived -- I formulated it based on my own personal observations. With regard to your superset of the law (er.. do you know what a superset is?), I, at least, do not recall meeting anybody who called himself an Anonymous Coward.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
England is the cradle of the Anglo-Saxon world. :) Obviously. Press in France or India -- I am not sure about it. I think that what's happening is that in US the political mainstream is fairly narrow. You do get all kinds of publications, very critical of govt, but the mainstream publications tend to be bland copies of one another (e.g Time and Newsweek). In Europe the mainstream is wider, especially towards the left. Socialist and even communist publications (especially in Italy, France) are considered to be part of mainstream. That's why people argue that the press in Europe is more free, but they are wrong. The press is actually more free in the US (mostly because of First Amendment), but the European mainstream press is more diverse and tends to present more points of view. However if you want a different point of view in the US it's easy to find one, it just will not be a 'mainstream' publication. As to the press in the developing countries (e.g. India) I have a feeling that it's more rude than free.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Well, the original point put forward by Squeeze Truck was that NATO breaks all of international law by waging war against Serbia. I asked him to show what specific law was being broken and he came up with "section II" -- I assume he meant Article 2 -- of UN Chapter. I looked it up and replied, saying that Article 2 imposes no legal obligations on the UN members (leaving aside all issues of moral authority and the way world *should* work). I don't see anywhere here using UN as it suits me (and did I say anything about Iraq?). You seem to be confusing me with the American government. Thankfully, I'm not it.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
CNN correspondent Brent Sadler reported
seeing two bodies pulled from the rubble as
rescue workers used bulldozers to reach
other bodies trapped beneath the wreckage
of the building.
Sadler said the attack, which destroyed what
NATO claimed was the nerve center of Serb
propaganda, left behind "a scene of complete
devastation".
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
IIRC, making this sort of thing difficult was part of the design of the Internet. The US military wanted a way for, say, Little Rock and Boise to communicate even if all the major cities were taken out.
If the US really wanted to sever Serbia from the Internet, it would have to stop all traditional internet connections (not a trivial thing). It would also have to bomb the phone lines, stop ham radio transmissions, etc. And as others have mentioned, this wouldn't stop the sneakernet; only a tight police force able to prevent smuggling would do that.
Here's a question: Why has the shutdown of satillite feeds taken several serb sites down? Does that much internet traffic go through satillites?
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
The internet was designed solely as a network that will continue to work when single links (even many) drop. The suggestion that the US can pull a satellite link and *.yu is net silenced is a little hasty. They may block yu traffic on *their* own satellites but that is not the only link in and out of the former Yugoslavia.
A www.Netcraft.com search for co.yu sites lists many, most still just as live as last week. If the US has changed their TCP/IP routing, that's up to them. Thankfully they also designed the net to make their action largly futile.
Traceroute shows a few places happy to route to Yugoslavia. I can't imagine them all turning off the routers or filtering YU traffic.
Phill
I wonder if we'll start seeing more of this sort of thing. Let's say some random country, which we'll call Foonia, has been doing stuff that a few heavyweight Western nations disagree with. These nations can sever their IP connections to Foonia, or refuse to accept incoming Foonian traffic. In effect, you've implemented an information embargo on this country. In the future, this could be as devastating as a "normal" trade embargo.
What our forefathers did to the native Americans was inexcusable. What Hitler did to the Russians,Gypsies, Jews, and other minorities was inexcusable. What the Serbian nationalists did to the Bosnians and the Croatians was inexcusable, and what they are doing right now to the Kosovars is inexcusable.
You mention what Hitler did to the Jews and the Gypsies, why do you fail to mention the half million Serbs who died in concentration camps run by the Bosnians and Croats at Hitler's bidding?
You mention the atrocities committed by the Serbs against the Bosnians and Croats in recent years, yet you fail to mention the 1.3 million Serbs run out of Croatia, an action which the U.S. supported politically and financially. You fail to mention that Bosnian Serbs in areas that are majority Serb were bombed to prevent them from exercising their right of self-determination, a right we now say the Kosovars should have.
Why do you fail to mention the atrocities commited by Albanians in Kosovo throughout the 1980's?
How many Albanian Kosovars died at the hands of the Serbs before the bombing started? An editorial in the New York Times said that a total of 64 Kosovars were killed in the three months before the bombing began. I see in the news today that NATO killed a 100 Kosovar civilians last night.
Why do I defend the Serbs? The Serbs stood up to Adolf Hitler when no one else would. While the Bosnians and Croats shook hands with Hitler and did his dirty work in the concentration camps of World War Two, the Serbs fought. When the British wouldn't, when the Americans wouldn't, with no chance of winning, and at great cost to themselves, the Serbs stood up to Hitler.
I seriously, honestly cannot understand why we hate the Serbs so much. They are not doing anything that hasn't been done to them, both recently and in the distant past, and when it was being done to them, we either ignored it or helped those who were doing it.
I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I just can't seem to get myself whipped up into a bloodthirsty frenzy over a civil war in a completely unimportant backwater of Europe where atrocities are being committed on all sides.
And now they're using my tax dollars to commit them.
'Only the dead have seen the end of war'
I think that we are missing the point of the US taking this action when we only talk about information that was coming out of Yugoslavia. Especially considering the fact that the action seemed specifically designed to stop traffic going INTO Yugoslavia.
I think that the underlying reason for this action is the info going INTO Yugoslavia from those people opposed to the NATO campaign. Specifically, information pertaining to NATO military activity, such as plane launces.
It has even been theorized that this was how they managed to shoot down a F-117 "stealth" fighter, by calculating it's trajectory based on e-mail reports of when it was launched, other physical sightings, what direction it was heading and then calculating what time it would arrive and then launching a missle to hit it.
This has also been given as a reason why some of NATO's prime targets were actually evacuated minutes before they were hit, because they had advanced warning that it was coming via e-mail.
I know first hand that war is not a laughing matter, but I can't help but find humor in the fact that the billion dollar NATO war machine has been rendered practically ineffective by a bunch of low-tech observers e-mailing ahead what they have seen. Especially effective when these pbservers are positioned close to military bases and can thus witness all launch activity.
I guess this gives new meaning to the terms electronic/information warfare, one that NATO probably hadn't counted on. Too bad for NATO that cutting off US feeds won't solve their problem, because as others have said, the internet was designed to route around such things.
Knocking out Yugoslavia's link to the Internet would not have any effect on their internal communications infrastructure. It seperates them from the rest of the net, but one person in Yugoslavia wouldn't need that satalite to talk to another person in Yugoslavia. That satalite would only be used if someone in Yugoslavia wanted to talk to someone in another country.
They shouldn't have only one connection to the internet anyway. Part of the idea behind the Internet was that if any one site was nuked, the rest could still talk. Having only one road in is asking for trouble.
I doubt that their military and government would rely on the Internet for communications anyway. I would assume they rely primarily on radios and maybe their own private network for e-mail.
If this is true, and it is quite possible,it is indeed scary.
The US government and others in NATO have protested against the censorship in Serbia, and the fact that State media acts as a mouthpiece for the government.
Yet here we have a situation where the US/NATO/whoever is removing any chance of accurate/non-state-approved information being available.
What is the aim? The only thing I can think of is that it will make Serbians feel even more cut off and alone, and increase their determination to oppose the attacks on them and their country. Why have all NATO tactics had this (predictable) result?
The NATO attack is in breach of international law. If the Serbian government (it is poor tactics to try to personify it as only being Slobodan (sp?)) is attacking Kosovars, as claimed by NATO propoganda, then there is a moral imperative to take effective action. The keyword though is effective - and the action to date has merely been murderous, destructive and cowardly.
Andrew
I'd rather go down in familiar flames than be lost in that endless blue.
That may be one of the basic rules of warfare, but how does it actually apply to cutting off internet access to the rest of the world? "Infrastructure" usually would refer to such things as telephone lines and broadcasting stations _inside_ the country. Frankly, actions like this and bombing TV stations don't really cast NATO in a very good light. Not that I'm saying that people should just sit by and do nothing about the situation, but the whole gung-ho let's bomb 'em back into the stone age, kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out methodology that NATO (let's face it, the US really) is using leaves a lot to be desired. The general policy, as usual, seems to be to make life as difficult and miserable as possible for everyone in general, not just the military. These policies seem to come from the same sort of people who think that playing loud rock music at the enemy during a standoff is a good idea.
First priority - destroy the enemies communications infrastructure. Without this the enemy cannot effectively mount any large scale coherent strategy.
If they have done this it isn't about freedom of speech - it's simple warfare tactics. If the net is left open then they have a worldwide comms network available to them - i'm surprised it hasn't happened sooner.
Thinking....
Okay, I've thought enough to reach a preliminary conclusion: That's one of the most asinine comparsions I've ever read. Go find out what the Kosovars are going through, and compare that to the experience of any minority in America. The closest match you're going to find are the WWII internment camps for Japanese-Americans, and as shameful as they were, they still look pretty mild compared to full-scale ethnic cleansing.
As for this "scary form of warfare," nonsense. Can I see a show of hands? Would you rather have 1) your internet service cut off, or 2) your country relentlessly bombed? Thought so. Is my calendar mismarked? It said nothing about today being Idiot Day....
Why?
Are they saying something I should not hear?
Lies will betray themselves, won't they?
The most damning web site I've seen trace-routed
to Virginia.
Problem is that the Balkan countries have been a seething cauldron for hundreds of years. The only thing that kept them in check in this century was Tito and WW II and even that was an uneasy alliance. Now everyone else is getting drawn into it.
I read a book many years ago that theorized that if global or semiglobal conflict was to hapen again it would probably start in either the Balkans or the Middle East. I hope they weren't being prophetic.
-- Holerith
>There is big difference in a few isolated bigots attacking minorities and state sponsored persecution.
>You'll notice that in the United States, the bigots are on trial and will be punished.
>For all our flaws, we do not participate the activities that Hiltler practiced.
Oh really?
Is that why kids all over america are being detained, arrested, and censored because they wear trenchcoats or have anything "abnormal" to say?
Isn't it strange how no one in america gives a fuck that these kids' rights, the very ones that America was founded upon and the very thing they hold the most dear, are being trampled?
The fact of the matter is that the US only participates in domestic squabbles IFF they have something to gain from it.
Think about it:
Saddam Hussein was put into power by the Americans in order to secure their oil supply.
Hitler was named man of the year by Time magazine.
It's very interesting to see how the Americans were so interested in shutting out Cuba for being communist, while they openly embraced South Africa, who were deeply entrenched in apartheid. Hey, you know what? South Africa is the single largest producer of diamonds, and with all the "kaffer" labour, they can export them rather inexpensively. HMMMMMMMM...
The korean war
The viet nam war
Desert storm
The war in the pacific
All of these and more were economically driven.
I haven't even mentioned what they did in southeast asia.
Isn't it strange how the Americans are using NATO (a purely defensive organization who are forbidden by their own charter from encroaching on non-member countries) for their attacks?
Why not the UN? This would be UN territory IF there was a majority of the member countries in agreement.
BTW I can still read the Ygoslav pages from Japan.
Recently NATO announced that they would be targeting power grids. Would any of these sites or the internet routers be affected by brownouts or total lack of electricity? Power grids are legitamate military targets. The internet is likely just a side issue.
Dyslexics Untie!
... when Government regulations will do. As of May 1, by executive order, all trade with Yugoslavia was prohibited. This is just part of the fallout as companies start complying with the law.
--doug
Doesn't the internet route around problems like this? Even if the direct satellite link they used was down, don't they have some direct cable to Russia or somewhere that we have no direct control over? Once the new routing tables propagate it just may take longer to get there.
BTW, I got connected to both 10 AM EST 5/13.
Do really dense people warp space more than others?
If the Serbian government and military are communicating via Internet, they are being patently stupid. Were I a NATO general, the last thing I would want to do would be to stop this communication. My first instinct would be to petition the US for NSA resources. Crack the transmissions, then use the intercepted data and insert our own datastreams. The NSA has a literal army of Federal crackers, and the general assumption is that they are competent.
I have yet to hear of a government harnessing the Internet for propaganda purposes; I'm not quite sure that it is technically possible. Remember Kremvax during the Russian coup attempt? IIRC, that was the only reliable datastream into or out of Moscow.
If the NATO mission is to get the people and/or military to rise up against the Milosovic regime, you want to destroy Government-controlled media while assaulting all possible bandwidths with your own media. Assuming Milosovic doesn't control the Internet feeds (how could he?), those feeds are more subversive than Radio Free Europe.
Milosovic has all the reasons to isolate Serbia's Internet from the global net, but NATO has all the reasons to keep those connections open. Of course, NATO may have still selected Internet feeds as targets for other reasons, or not thinking about the exceptional strategic uses of the Internet. How many geeks wear stars on their shoulders?
--The basis of all love is respect
you probably mean yugoslavia, but you could very well be talking about the US which leads to an even scarier concept...
all of this [as well as the persecution of many more minorities other than simply ethinicity-based] is going on in your own back yard.
think about it!
--
Rare Window - free your photos
I don't think this is scary at all. We're bombing them as US made sattelites provide them with services? We're destroying their TV stations, now we deprive them of Internet.
It's a thankless job, but I've got a lot of Karma to burn off
as of 09:10 EST5EDT
It's very scary for us, netizens, because it interfers our FREE society. Fortunately, it is not so weak, so alternative routing is possible. Of course, new channels are too narrow to serve everyone wishing to know their point of view, but at least, sites are up. It's our small vistory.
They (I mean www.serbia-info.com) have never blatant lied unlike the CNN. Of course, propaganda is propaganda, but they are accurate enough. These sites are much more informative for one who wishes to dig out the truth than the CNN and BBC...
--
Dr Bug of Future Hackers, Russia.
-- Vladimir "Dr Bug" Medeiko of Future Hackers St.Petersburg, Russia
http://www.wired.com/news /news/politics/story/19671.html - This article describes what's going on with the satillite feeds. Enjoy!
Sorry I keep replying to myself, but I had a couple drinks and can't think straight :] ANyways, heres a ZDNet article on the satillite predicament.
I'm not sure how net access is controlled in Yugoslavia (if its unrestricted or is like Chinas) and here I'm assuming their access is for the most part not restricted.
Yugoslavia has government controlled tv, which means they're seeing mostly nothing but government propaganda against the allies. (Our TV in the US is propagated too, I know, I know.) Now, the only gateway to outside information that wasn't handed down from the government is generally going to be through the Internet. If the allies were to take out satillites that provided net connectivity, then the government would have even less to worry about when it comes to the Yugoslav people being informed about the atrocities their own country is commiting against the Albanians, and would make it even more simpler for the government to control what they know.
It just wouldnt make sense, in my eyes, for the allies to take out their net access.
Some of you apparently didn't watch G.I. Joe as kids. For those of you who don't get it > Their internet access isn't being cut off to keep you in the dark, it's being cut to keep Slobo-cop in the dark. You just happen to want to use the same web he does for the same information. It's being done for the same reason we are not told of what goes on in top secret labs. Sure, we are americans and are entitled to know where our money goes, but if we made it available to the general public our enemies would have easy access to it and be able to develop counter measures. Cutting off Slobo's access to information, ANY information (TV, radio, internet) is integral to winning any sort of battle there. If you don't agree with the war over there - fine. But don't criticize the tactics because those are sound.
For an historical perspective, rent "The Falcon and The Snowman". For 20 years one naval officer gave the KGB what he thought was meaningless data (he was blackmailed and did it for less than $500 total). A KGB defector in 1987 said that if America had gone to war with the USSR during the last 15 years they could have sunk our Navy within one hour of the declaration of war. From the information he provided they cracked codes, blackmailed other officers, and gathered more intel. From that information they knew where our ships were exactly, and which direction they would turn if attacked, communications that would be transmitted, and what counter measures we would take in any situation.
Don't doubt for a second that the intelligence community doesn't know what their doing.
My cube. My friend. My solace. My prison.
Their positions and reporting are biased - and they admit it freely. To refrence them as a source is like proving the bombing is right by quoting Clinton. And that's with a "C" not a "K" moron. I'm not a fan of Clinton either, I just can't stomach the blind following of propaganda from either side - of which you are clearly a victim. And by the way, my guess is France, but everybody hates the french so what are you saying?
My cube. My friend. My solace. My prison.
You probably didn't know this but part of the Texas charter for statehood has reserved the right to succeed from the US at any time for any reason. Meaning that if Texas didn't want to be a part of the USA they could simply say so and the US wouldn't have a legal tank to stand on...
:)
My cube. My friend. My solace. My prison.
http://x42.deja.com/getdoc.xp?AN=477363915&search= thread&CONTEXT=926603412.148373616&HIT_C ONTEXT=926603412.148373616&HIT_NUM=10&hitnum=0
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/1962 0.html
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19990514S0001
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
The sort of timing you are speaking of is not possible through internet, or even by phone.
If you know "for a fact" how awful a war is, then you should know this too. Unless you got your "experience" by watching CNN.
The other stuff you state, trying to keep info from going into Yugoslavia, is very valid and is probably the main reason for attempted internet blocking of any sort.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
http://jya.com/mi6-list.htm#jump
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Anybody have any info on this, like the URL for the often mentioned, never revealed, website?
If Geocities pulled it, anybody have a cached copy?
UK ACTS TO STOP SPY WEBSITE...
SPY POSTER CALLED: TRAITOR...
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
You know no history.
Its not about a net connection, ye of little vision.
Its about information warfar, all satcoms are off.
Information warfar is ONLY used to make murder
easier.
So get a brain and shut up.
I'm not sure why shutting down websites would be scarier that dropping 2000 pound bombs in downtown Belgrade. The idea is to paralyse the government, and communication is always one of the first targets. Civilians using these systems are just innocent bystanders.
1) I am a US citizen. Just wanted that in the clear. I believe it is wrong what the serbs or Yugoslavian Gov. is doing. However, that is not what this post was about.
I think we have to be careful to ask the Q "Why" for both sides. For instance,
* why did the US and NATO get involved in the whole Krosovo and Yugoslavia ordeal in the first place?
- What I believe to be the answer: Because what was/is going on in Yugoslavia and what the Gov. there is doing is wrong. My take is that is just fine, if not our (US that is) duty as substantial member of the global community
Situation number two (taking a look in the mirror):
* Why did US cut off Net/Sat access to Yugoslavia. To answer this you have to ask your self what could possible be threatening to them (US Gov).
- What I believe is the answer: Well, I know that I personally read many articles from residents in Yugoslavia about the bombings and where they were REALLY hitting. This is what I believe the US Gov. or NATO would find threatening. They can't stand that all their actions are out in the open. And yeah, your saying that the reports on the internet from Yugoslavia are false. 1) There are way to many of them to all be false and 2) Why can't I, we, determine weather the reports are truth or lie for ourselves. Its like the US Gov. is saying "They are all lies and you are not allowed to read them".
I'll read any Dam lies I want and determine for myself.
The people in Yugoslavia had one voice to level the media playing field. Now the US Gov. is try, allegedly, to take that away. I guess it is the US's portrayal of freedom?
Please, I reiterate that I very much disagree with what the Yugoslavian government is doing. But as my mother always said "Two wrongs don't make a rite".
- Cyphunk
mindmore@mindless.com
Send some mail to Loral Orion, the satellite provider threatening to cut off internet access, here:
http://www.loralorion.net/contacts/contmain.htm
Mailing their satellite services snd their network management center would probably be the most effective. Let them know that this is not cool.
-ali
Send some mail to Loral Orion, the satellite provider threatening to cut off internet access. Their e-mail addresses are here:
http://www.loralorion.net/contacts/contmain.htm
Mailing their satellite services snd their network management center would probably be the most effective. Let them know that this is not cool.
-ali
You are bombed day after day. There's no electricity, no TV no internet. You don't dare to go to the local bar/pub cause the air raid's been hitting the wrong targets. Your house's cold the bathroom stinks cause there's no water to flush and you stink cause you can't shower. Your only night time activity is sleep( no power no lights).
I am sure some of you read the asimov books. I am also sure some of you have read the "foundation". What the characters did was something like this cut off all the little things in life.
It isn't fun to be bombed and it's even less fun if you can't find something to take you mind off it. This is a terrible form of warfare. It's not bombs or bullets it's an attack on your mind. It's pychological warfare!