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This is, of course, Shrub, the front man for Hussein, Hussein who must the most freedom loving person in all of recorded history considering the number of times he's been attacked in the last almost 12 years. Shrub the Moron. To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23866-2002Nov21.html Bush's Gift to Putin By Masha Lipman MOSCOW -- President Bush has likened the Oct. 23 seizure of hostages in a Moscow theater to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States. He couldn't have come up with a better present for his good friend Vladimir before their meeting in St. Petersburg. President Vladimir Putin, of course, will not admit that the terrorist attack was in any way related to the ferocious and bloody war the Russian army has waged on Chechnya for the past three years. This war, which Putin started in 1999 as a reasonable response to Chechen incursions, has turned into a tragic vicious circle. Chechen fighters' attacks on the occupying Russian forces month after month have been followed by Russian retaliation -- most of it directed at civilians, since it's much easier to carry out punitive operations against them than to go after guerrillas in the mountains. The Chechen civilians are routinely tortured and robbed. They are taken from their homes, to be released later -- if they are lucky -- in exchange for money paid by their relatives. This war has claimed the lives of about 4,500 Russian soldiers and 10,000-15,000 Chechens, and it has led to ever-growing hatred by the Chechen people for the occupiers. Those who seized more than 800 hostages in the Moscow theater were monstrous criminals. Yet to say that "the people who seized the hostages were killers, like the people who carried out the attack on America," as Bush did this week, is to help Putin shed responsibility for the Chechen war, a war that has propelled him to popularity and whose practices he has never publicly regretted. "The more you love freedom," Bush told Radio Free Europe, "the more likely it is you'll be attacked." But the Chechen killers who seized the hostages did not do it because Russia is such a lover of freedom. Their unpardonable crime is directly related to the atrocities committed by the Russian army against the Chechen people. "Some people are attempting to blame Vladimir," Bush said, "but it is the terrorists that ought to be blamed for everything." In fact, those who "blame Vladimir" are liberal Russian media and a group of liberal politicians who are trying to find out how a gang of terrorists traveled across Russia and its capital and transported a whole arsenal of guns and explosives to the Moscow theater. They also seek to establish what caused the deaths of more than 120 people, of whom only a few died at the hands of the terrorists. Based on their own independent investigation, members of a liberal Duma faction blame those in charge of the operation for their disregard for human lives. Most of the casualties were caused by the bungled rescue operation after the storming of the theater. Those people died because of the lack of timely medical aid. Unconscious and unable to breathe, those men, women and children needed urgent measures to restore breathing. Instead, they were thrown into buses, which took them to hospitals -- in many cases too late for medical treatment. Doctors who agreed to talk to the press said that the number of casualties could have been much smaller had the medical part of the operation been organized properly. Although Bush's support is no doubt welcome, the Russian president has shown that he is quite capable of standing up for himself. And he is not squeamish about the rhetoric he picks to defend his cause. When a French reporter at the recent European summit in Brussels asked him an unfriendly question about the performance of the Russian army in Chechnya, Putin responded in a bizarre and ugly manner. He invited the reporter to come to Moscow to be circumcised, and in a threatening tone he promised to see to it that "nothing would grow back afterward." Putin also has other defenders. The Russian consulate in Berlin sent a warning to Germany's ARD television because it deemed its coverage of the theater tragedy inappropriately critical of policymakers. The channel was warned that their journalists would find it hard to work in Moscow. As for the Russian media, those not directly controlled by the government did a good job of informing the public about the anti-terrorist operation and how human lives were lost. According to some sources, this resulted in the chief executive of a national channel being summoned to the Kremlin and threatened with the loss of his job. Meanwhile, to discourage the overly inquisitive press, the Russian legislature hurriedly passed amendments imposing limits on how acts of terrorism may be covered. And to further prove its loyalty to Putin, the Duma refused to open a parliamentary investigation into how the hostages died. The investigative initiative launched by a liberal Duma faction was voted down by other legislators. What Bush apparently sought, with his words on the theater tragedy, was not to defend Putin, who is not exactly under fire in Russia, but rather to enlist the Russian president's support for his impending war in Iraq. Chechnya, of course, is much less important than Iraq, just as in 1995-96 it was much less important than the goal of NATO expansion, which the Clinton administration was then pursuing. Thus the United States raised no serious objections when former Russian president Boris Yeltsin waged the first Chechen war, even though Washington had far more influence with the Kremlin than it has now and the war at that time was unpopular with the Russian people. "We should have focused . . . more critically and more consistently on the damage that the Russian rampage was inflicting on innocent civilians," Strobe Talbott, deputy secretary of state in the Clinton administration, wrote in his book about the United States' Russia policy. So it went with America and the Chechen people then, and so it still goes. The writer, deputy editor of the Russian newsmagazine Ezhenedel'ny Zhurnal, writes a monthly column for The Post. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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