Evil Doers blow up university students

I really don't understand how those people can be so brainwashed .... that is incredible. I respect a guy like Candle since his "trading posts" are quite wise.
But what can I say of the crap he publishes outside trading... this guy is ill and brainwashed like many americans....

 

http://www.counterpunch.org/eco1.html

A text on civilization written by Umberto Eco...

You will may be learn a few things

 

Article written by Robert Fisk: Bush is walking into a trap

And while Mr Bush – and perhaps Mr Blair – prepare their forces, they explain so meretriciously that this is a war for "democracy and liberty'', that it is about men who are "attacking civilisation''. "America was targeted for attack,'' Mr Bush informed us on Friday, "because we are the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world.'' But this is not why America was attacked. If this was an Arab-Muslim apocalypse, then it is intimately associated with events in the Middle East and with America's stewardship of the area. Arabs, it might be added, would rather like some of that democracy and liberty and freedom that Mr Bush has been telling them about. Instead, they get a president who wins 98 per cent in the elections (Washington's friend, Mr Mubarak) or a Palestinian police force, trained by the CIA, that tortures and sometimes kills its people in prison. The Syrians would also like a little of that democracy. So would the Saudis. But their effete princes are all friends of America – in many cases, educated at US universities.

I will always remember how President Clinton announced that Saddam Hussein – another of our grotesque inventions – must be overthrown so that the people of Iraq could choose their own leaders. But if that happened, it would be the first time in Middle Eastern history that Arabs have been permitted to do so. No, it is "our'' democracy and "our'' liberty and freedom that Mr Bush and Mr Blair are talking about, our Western sanctuary that is under attack, not the vast place of terror and injustice that the Middle East has become.

Let me illustrate what I mean. Nineteen years ago today, the greatest act of terrorism – using Israel's own definition of that much misused word – in modern Middle Eastern history began. Does anyone remember the anniversary in the West? How many readers of this article will remember it? I will take a tiny risk and say that no other British newspaper – certainly no American newspaper – will today recall the fact that on 16 September 1982, Israel's Phalangist militia allies started their three-day orgy of rape and knifing and murder in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila that cost 1,800 lives. It followed an Israeli invasion of Lebanon – designed to drive the PLO out of the country and given the green light by the then US Secretary of State, Alexander Haig – which cost the lives of 17,500 Lebanese and Palestinians, almost all of them civilians. That's probably three times the death toll in the World Trade Centre. Yet I do not remember any vigils or memorial services or candle-lighting in America or the West for the innocent dead of Lebanon; I don't recall any stirring speeches about democracy or liberty. In fact, my memory is that the United States spent most of the bloody months of July and August 1982 calling for "restraint".

No, Israel is not to blame for what happened last week. The culprits were Arabs, not Israelis. But America's failure to act with honour in the Middle East, its promiscuous sale of missiles to those who use them against civilians, its blithe disregard for the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi children under sanctions of which Washington is the principal supporter – all these are intimately related to the society that produced the Arabs who plunged America into an apocalypse of fire last week.
America's name is literally stamped on to the missiles fired by Israel into Palestinian buildings in Gaza and the West Bank. Only four weeks ago, I identified one of them as an AGM 114-D air-to-ground rocket made by Boeing and Lockheed-Martin at their factory in – of all places – Florida, the state where some of the suiciders trained to fly.

It was fired from an Apache helicopter (made in America, of course) during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, when hundreds of cluster bombs were dropped in civilian areas of Beruit by the Israelis in contravention of undertakings given to the United States. Most of the bombs had US Naval markings and America then suspended a shipment of fighter bombers to Israel – for less than two months.
The same type of missile – this time an AGM 114-C made in Georgia – was fired by the Israelis into the back of an ambulance near the Lebanese village of Mansori, killing two women and four children. I collected the pieces of the missile, including its computer coding plate, flew to Georgia and presented them to the manufacturers at the Boeing factory. And what did the developer of the missile say to me when I showed him photographs of the children his missile had killed? "Whatever you do," he told me, "don't quote me as saying anything critical of the policies of Israel."
I'm sure the father of those children, who was driving the ambulance, will have been appalled by last week's events, but I don't suppose, given the fate of his own wife – one of the women killed – that he was in a mood to send condolences to anyone. All these facts, of course, must be forgotten now.
Every effort will be made in the coming days to switch off the "why'' question and concentrate on the who, what and how. CNN and most of the world's media have already obeyed this essential new war rule. I've already seen what happens when this rule is broken. When The Independent published my article on the connection between Middle Eastern injustice and the New York holocaust, the BBC's 24-hour news channel produced an American commentator who remarked that "Robert Fisk has won the prize for bad taste''. When I raised the same point on an Irish radio talk show, the other guest, a Harvard lawyer, denounced me as a bigot, a liar, a "dangerous man'' and – of course – potentially anti-Semitic. The Irish pulled the plug on him.
No wonder we have to refer to the terrorists as "mindless''. For if we did not, we would have to explain what went on in those minds. But this attempt to censor the realities of the war that has already begun must not be permitted to continue. Look at the logic. Secretary of State Colin Powell was insisting on Friday that his message to the Taliban is simple: they have to take responsibility for sheltering Mr bin Laden. "You cannot separate your activities from the activities of the perpetrators,'' he warned. But the Americans absolutely refuse to associate their own response to their predicament with their activities in the Middle East. We are supposed to hold our tongues, even when Ariel Sharon – a man whose name will always be associated with the massacre at Sabra and Shatila – announces that Israel also wishes to join the battle against "world terror''.
No wonder the Palestinians are fearful. In the past four days, 23 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank and Gaza, an astonishing figure that would have been front-page news had America not been blitzed. If Israel signs up for the new conflict, then the Palestinians – by fighting the Israelis – will, by extension, become part of the "world terror'' against which Mr Bush is supposedly going to war. Not for nothing did Mr Sharon claim that Yasser Arafat had connections with Osama bin Laden.
I repeat: what happened in New York was a crime against humanity. And that means policemen, arrests, justice, a whole new international court at The Hague if necessary. Not cruise missiles and "precision'' bombs and Muslim lives lost in revenge for Western lives. But the trap has been sprung. Mr Bush – perhaps we, too – are now walking into it.
Independant, London (UK)

 

Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian workers in New York and Washington, it has become painfully clear that most Americans simply don't get it. From the president to passers-by on the streets, the message seems to be the same: this is an inexplicable assault on freedom and democracy, which must be answered with overwhelming force - just as soon as someone can construct a credible account of who was actually responsible.

Shock, rage and grief there has been aplenty. But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process - or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world - seems almost entirely absent. Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue workers struggle to pull fire-fighters from the rubble, any but a small minority might make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world.

But make that connection they must, if such tragedies are not to be repeated, potentially with even more devastating consequences. US political leaders are doing their people no favours by reinforcing popular ignorance with self-referential rhetoric. And the echoing chorus of Tony Blair, whose determination to bind Britain ever closer to US foreign policy ratchets up the threat to our own cities, will only fuel anti-western sentiment. So will calls for the defence of "civilisation", with its overtones of Samuel Huntington's poisonous theories of post-cold war confrontation between the west and Islam, heightening perceptions of racism and hypocrisy.

As Mahatma Gandhi famously remarked when asked his opinion of western civilisation, it would be a good idea. Since George Bush's father inaugurated his new world order a decade ago, the US, supported by its British ally, bestrides the world like a colossus. Unconstrained by any superpower rival or system of global governance, the US giant has rewritten the global financial and trading system in its own interest; ripped up a string of treaties it finds inconvenient; sent troops to every corner of the globe; bombed Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Iraq without troubling the United Nations; maintained a string of murderous embargos against recalcitrant regimes; and recklessly thrown its weight behind Israel's 34-year illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as the Palestinian intifada rages.

If, as yesterday's Wall Street Journal insisted, the east coast carnage was the fruit of the Clinton administration's Munich-like appeasement of the Palestinians, the mind boggles as to what US Republicans imagine to be a Churchillian response.

It is this record of unabashed national egotism and arrogance that drives anti-Americanism among swaths of the world's population, for whom there is little democracy in the current distribution of global wealth and power. If it turns out that Tuesday's attacks were the work of Osama bin Laden's supporters, the sense that the Americans are once again reaping a dragons' teeth harvest they themselves sowed will be overwhelming.

It was the Americans, after all, who poured resources into the 1980s war against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, at a time when girls could go to school and women to work. Bin Laden and his mojahedin were armed and trained by the CIA and MI6, as Afghanistan was turned into a wasteland and its communist leader Najibullah left hanging from a Kabul lamp post with his genitals stuffed in his mouth.

But by then Bin Laden had turned against his American sponsors, while US-sponsored Pakistani intelligence had spawned the grotesque Taliban now protecting him. To punish its wayward Afghan offspring, the US subsequently forced through a sanctions regime which has helped push 4m to the brink of starvation, according to the latest UN figures, while Afghan refugees fan out across the world.

All this must doubtless seem remote to Americans desperately searching the debris of what is expected to be the largest-ever massacre on US soil - as must the killings of yet more Palestinians in the West Bank yesterday, or even the 2m estimated to have died in Congo's wars since the overthrow of the US-backed Mobutu regime. "What could some political thing have to do with blowing up office buildings during working hours?" one bewildered New Yorker asked yesterday.

Already, the Bush administration is assembling an international coalition for an Israeli-style war against terrorism, as if such counter-productive acts of outrage had an existence separate from the social conditions out of which they arise. But for every "terror network" that is rooted out, another will emerge - until the injustices and inequalities that produce them are addressed.

 

defending herself???? lol lol lol lol lol....i guess that's what she was doing when she tried to sink the USS Liberty. and why does she keep electing war criminals/terrorist as prime ministers??? and while were at it, why were mossad agents filming and celebrating the burning of the WTC towers???? and when they were caught why were they deported??? and what about the mossad agents that lived on the same street as Atta??? and what about Carl Camerons story that mysteriously was removed from Fox's web site??? doesn't anybody worry about depleting our military resources and leaving our "homeland" vunerable???
why are our military leaders against going into Iraq, but these chicken hawks in the Bush administration are frothing at the mouth?????

 

why shouldn't Muslims regard the Afganistan attack
as a war on Islam?'

08 November 2001

"Air campaign"? "Coalition forces"? "War on terror"? How much longer must we go on enduring these lies?
There is no "campaign" ? merely an air bombardment of the poorest and most broken country in the world by
the world's richest and most sophisticated nation. No MiGs have taken to the skies to do battle with the
American B-52s or F-18s. The only ammunition soaring into the air over Kabul comes from Russian
anti-aircraft guns manufactured around 1943.

Coalition? Hands up who's seen the Luftwaffe in the skies over Kandahar, or the Italian air force or the
French air force over Herat. Or even the Pakistani air force. The Americans are bombing Afghanistan with a
few British missiles thrown in. "Coalition" indeed.

Then there's the "war on terror". When are we moving on to bomb the Jaffna peninsula? Or Chechnya ? which
we have already left in Vladimir Putin's bloody hands?

I even seem to recall a massive terrorist car bomb that exploded in Beirut in 1985 ? targeting Sayed
Hassan Nasrallah, the spiritual inspiration to theHezbollah, who now appears to be back on
Washington's hit list ? and which missed Nasrallah but
slaughtered 85 innocent Lebanese civilians. Years later, Carl Bernstein revealed in his book, Veil, that the CIA
was behind the bomb after the Saudis agreed to fund the operation. So will the US President George Bush be hunting down the CIA murderers involved? The hell he will.

So why on earth are all my chums on CNN and Sky and the BBC rabbiting on about the "air campaign",
"coalition forces" and the "war on terror"? Do they think their viewers believe this twaddle?

Certainly Muslims don't. In fact, you don't have to spend long in Pakistan to realise that the Pakistani
press gives an infinitely more truthful and balanced account of the "war" ? publishing work by local
intellectuals, historians and opposition writers along with Taliban comments and pro-government statements
as well as syndicated Western analyses ? than The New York Times; and all this, remember, in a military
dictatorship.

You only have to spend a few weeks in the Middle East and the subcontinent to realise why Tony Blair's
interviews on al-Jazeera and Larry King Live don't amount to a hill of beans. The Beirut daily As-Safir
ran a widely-praised editorial asking why an Arab who wanted to express the anger and humiliation of
millions of other Arabs was forced to do so from a cave in a non-Arab country. The implication, of
course, was that this ? rather than the crimes against humanity on 11 September ? was the reason for
America's determination to liquidate Osama bin Laden.

Far more persuasive has been a series of articles in the Pakistani press on the outrageous treatment of
Muslims arrested in the United States in the aftermath of the September atrocities.

One such article should suffice. Headlined "Hate crime victim's diary", in The News of Lahore, it outlined
the suffering of Hasnain Javed, who was arrested in Alabama on 19 September with an expired visa. In
prison in Mississippi, he was beaten up by a prisoner who also broke his tooth. Then, long after he had
sounded the warden's alarm bell, more men beat him against a wall with the words: "Hey bin Laden, this
is the first round. There are going to be 10 rounds like this." There are dozens of other such stories in the
Pakistani press and most of them appear to be true. Again, Muslims have been outraged by the hypocrisy
of the West's supposed "respect" for Islam. We are not, so we have informed the world, going to suspend
military operations in Afghanistan during the holy fasting month of Ramadan. After all, the 1980-88
Iran-Iraq conflict continued during Ramadan. So have Arab-Israeli conflicts. True enough. But why, then,
did we make such a show of suspending bombing on the first Friday of the bombardment last month out of
our "respect" for Islam? Because we were more respectful
then than now? Or because ? the Taliban remaining unbroken ? we've decided to forget about all that
"respect"?

"I can see why you want to separate bin Laden from our religion," a Peshawar journalist said to me a few
days ago. "Of course you want to tell us that this isn't a religious war, but Mr Robert, please, please stop
telling us how much you respect Islam." There is another disturbing argument I hear in
Pakistan. If, as Mr Bush claims, the attacks on New York and Washington were an assault on
"civilisation", why shouldn't Muslims regard an attack on Afghanistan as a war on Islam?

The Pakistanis swiftly spotted the hypocrisy of the Australians. While itching to get into the fight
against Mr bin Laden, the Australians have sent armed troops to force destitute Afghan refugees out of
their territorial waters. The Aussies want to bomb Afghanistan ? but they don't want to save the
Afghans. Pakistan, it should be added, hosts 2.5 million Afghan refugees. Needless to say, this discrepancy doesn't get much of an airing on our satellite channels. Indeed, I have never heard so much fury directed at
journalists as I have in Pakistan these past few weeks. Nor am I surprised.
What, after all, are we supposed to make of the so-called "liberal" American television journalist
Geraldo Rivera who is just moving to Fox TV, a Murdoch channel? "I'm feeling more patriotic than at any
time in my life, itching for justice, or maybe just revenge," he announced this week. "And this
catharsis I've gone through has caused me to reassess what I do for a living." This is truly chilling stuff. Here is
an American journalist actually revealing that he's possibly "itching for revenge".

Infinitely more shameful ? and unethical ? were the disgraceful words of Walter Isaacson, the chairman
of CNN, to his staff. Showing the misery of Afghanistan ran the risk of promoting enemy propaganda, he said.
"It seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan ... we must talk about
how the Taliban are using civilian shields and how the Taliban have harboured the terrorists responsible
for killing close up to 5,000 innocent people."

Mr Isaacson was an unimaginative boss of Time magazine but these latest words will do more to damage the
supposed impartiality of CNN than anything on the air in recent years. Perverse? Why perverse? Why are
Afghan casualties so far down Mr Isaacson's compassion? Or is Mr Isaacson just following the
lead set down for him a few days earlier by the White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, who portentously announced to the Washington press corps that in times like these "people have to watch what they say and watch what they do".

Needless to say, CNN has caved in to the US government's demand not to broadcast Mr bin Laden's
words in toto lest they contain "coded messages". But the coded messages go out on television every hour.
They are "air campaign", "coalition forces" and "war on terror".

 

As Mahatma Gandhi famously remarked when asked his opinion of western civilisation, it would be a good idea.

 

well as long as the public believes that the War Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post are a free american press then we will continue to allow the uncivilized to freely exploit justice.

 

You'll get no argument from me.

 

Are we trying to focus the public's attention on Iraq now? Our domestic problems are huge. But sure, why bother uncover the corruption and true evil doers here in our own back yard, when we can always bomb some third world country, line the pockets of few select groups and milk the American people dry again?

My tax dollars at work.. financing wars, and subsidizing the old boy's club. Ken lay and the rest building 20 million dollars mansions, while the cousin in law father lost all in the ENE 401k and at the age of 69 working at the cash register. If we need to wage war we need to do it here and clean up all the dirt from our system.

Yes this is the greatest country compared to many, but opening our eyes and see what is really going on behind the scenes, makes at least some of us re-think how good we really are. I used to be a hardcore republican, thought it was good for the country. Dems? why bother with them, but we did have some of the greatest expansion in US history during the last administration.

Nowadays, makes one wonder where our priorities are. Not sure who is worst up there anymore. Not sure who to vote for next time. They all seem way too crooked.

Josh_B