[CTRL] (Fwd) Views from Down Under

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From TheNewAustralian
http://www.newaus.com.au/asia118treason.html

The New Australian


Clinton's guarantee to Beijing


By Peter Zhang
No. 118,   10-16 May 1999

Clinton's Chinese spying scandal is like super glue — I just cannot
get away from it. Much as I prefer to write about the state of the
Chinese economy, readers keep insisting on information about
Beijing's intelligence activities despite my protestations of being
inadequately informed on the subject. The most frequent question is:
"What was in it for China." Though I had raised the same question
myself, it was only in a rhetorical sense as I thought, at least by
now, that the answer was obvious. Clinton gave Beijing a free reign
and a guarantee that its activities would not be interrupted during,
what he quaintly calls, his "watch" so that China could clear out
America's military and high-tech secrets. Simple.

But questions regarding Clinton, particularly on this matter, only
lead to more questions. How could Beijing be certain that Clinton,
even as president of the United States, could make good such a
guarantee? One, I think, should start with his governorship of
Arkansas. There seems little doubt that Clinton ran it as his
personal fiefdom, replacing or shoving aside those who could prove
troublesome. Some would argue that this is the norm. That is probably
true in American politics, but not to the corrupt and ruthless extent
that Clinton practised it. His approach to power and people is truly
medieval, minus the noblesse oblige. Given this fact, and his support
in the media, it is not surprising that reports made out to Chinese
intelligence suggested that Clinton would be favourably disposed to
dealing with Chinese representatives — for a price.

Intelligence assessments were supported by Clinton's action, shortly
after entering (or is it soiling?) the Oval Office, in asking all US
Attorneys to resign. This unprecedented and dictatorial move gave the
Clinton administration control over the prosecutorial machinery of
the federal government in every judicial district in the US. No need
to tell you who was impressed by this breathtakingly brazen move. Why
Clinton even tried to appoint Webster Hubbel to the post of Attorney
General. Imagine where that would have led. But what struck a
particular chord was the way the American media acquiesced to the
Clintons' manoeuvres. Beijing does not underrate the power of the
Western media, especially in America. That, with the exception of a
few lone voices, it was prepared to collaborate with the Clintons
gave further assurance to Beijing that Clinton was able to deliver.

But what of the CIA and the FBI, asked some readers? I have no wish
to be patronising, but the naiveté of the American public is almost
touching. It didn't even notice that William Sessions, FBI Director,
a man noted for his integrity and opposition to political
interference in the Bureau's affairs, was removed as quickly as
Clinton moved into the Oval office. There is no doubt that Clinton
deliberately acted to chain the CIA and the National Security Agency
as well as the FBI. One method was to have Clinton supporters in
sensitive positions so that they could delay, if not derail, any
budding investigations into Clinton's China operations.

With these bodies effectively neutered Chinese intelligence would
have a field day. Now being ineffective does not mean uninformed.
These agencies new very well what Chinese intelligence was up to but
were largely powerless to do anything. After all, what could they do
when the commander in chief, the president himself, had, by his
actions, made it clear that investigations into China's spying
activities were not to be implemented.

Just to make sure that nothing embarrassing emerged, Clinton
appointed Janet Reno to head the Justice Department with the
intention of sabotaging any investigations into Chinese intelligence
operations. I should point out at this stage that several Chinese
officials let it drop that they believed Clinton was blackmailing
Reno over certain activities concerning her personal life. Whatever
the truth of the matter, Reno's role as the last of Clinton's
gatekeepers, so to speak, has more than satisfied Beijing's
expectations by thoroughly corrupting the Justice Department and
blocking FBI requests.

No wonder Beijing was so satisfied with its part of the deal that if
felt sufficiently in command to 'request' that Clinton see to it that
John Huang be given top security clearance and placed in a favourable
position, favourable to Chinese intelligence, that is. Thus we find
Huang being given a position in the Commerce Department at the
insistence of Clinton. Hence he was able to use his security
clearance to directly obtain information from the CIA. I am told that
CIA officials were in no doubt about Huang's activities but were held
in check by Clinton, despite CIA complaints. Does any reader honestly
believe that Clinton is so innocent that he had no idea w

[CTRL] Int'l Narcotics Report

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

Excerpted from:
http://www.state.gov/www/global/narcotics_law/1998_narc_report/europ98
.html

<>

International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, 1998
Released by the Bureau for International Narcotics and Law
Enforcement Affairs, U.S. Department of State
Washington, DC, February 1999



EUROPE AND CENTRAL ASIA



ALBANIA

I. Summary

Organized crime is making increased use of Albania as a transit point
for drugs being smuggled to Western Europe, due to the strategic
location of the country and the continued weakness of its police and
judicial systems. Authorities also believe that the domestic
production of cannabis is increasing, even though the scale of the
problem remains comparatively small. Likewise, drug abuse is a
problem that continues to grow, but which is still small compared to
the situation in Western Europe. The Government's efforts to deal
with these problems have long been complicated by the poor level of
professional training of the police and other officials, by a general
lack of resources and by widespread corruption. Albania is not a
party to any of the UN Narcotics Conventions, including the 1988 UN
Drug Convention.

II. Status of Country

Despite many obstacles, the Albanian government is continuing efforts
to interdict drug smugglers, reduce cannabis production and provide
some form of social safety net for drug abusers.

The military and police are working closely with Italian police,
navy, and coastal patrol organizations to stop the activities of the
small boats that make the smuggling runs to Italy. The Albanian
Government permits Italian personnel to be based in Albania, and to
operate in Albanian territorial waters. These efforts are aimed at
the full range of contraband that is passing through Albania--drugs,
illegal immigrants, arms and other goods.

The response to the new but growing drug abuse problem has been very
slow, and virtually no special treatment programs for drug abusers
exist. Some very small programs at particular hospitals have received
coverage in the press, along with government announcements on plans
to expand rehabilitation efforts; however, the reality remains grim
for Albanian addicts and abusers. There is a small anti-drug media
campaign aimed at young people.

The current Albanian Government of Prime Minister Pandeli Majko has
been in office only since October, and has not yet launched any new
initiatives aimed specifically at the problems of drug trafficking or
abuse. The new government does, however, appear to be making serious
efforts on a broad front to rebuild and reform the structures of law
and order, which would make further anti-drug efforts possible.

III. Country Actions Against Drugs in 1998

Albania is not a party to the 1988 UN Convention against Illicit
Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, or any of the
other UN Narcotics Conventions. Nevertheless, Albania has made
efforts to achieve or maintain compliance with the goals and
objectives of the 1988 UN Drug Convention.

Illicit Cultivation. Press reports periodically note the destruction
of small fields of cannabis plants by the police, but while still
comparatively small, the press reports that cannabis cultivation is
an increasingly serious problem.

Production. Albania is not known as a location for the production of
significant quantities of illegal chemical substances.

Distribution. The police consistently arrest of individuals caught
distributing drugs. In general, however, there is a high level of
lawlessness in the country and some regions are essentially not under
government control. Given these circumstances, efforts to combat drug
distribution are limited and difficult.

Sale, Transport and Financing. As already noted, Albania is a
significant transit point for the smuggling of illicit drugs to
western Europe. The Albanian press reports that international
organized crime is involved in many of these smuggling operations,
and is in control of the sales and financial arrangements. The
Albanian Government is making genuine efforts to combat the smuggling
operations, and is doing so in cooperation with international law
enforcement agencies. The best example of this is the arrangement the
Government has made with Italian authorities to interdict smugglers
at sea.

Asset Seizure. Asset seizure was legalized as an anti-smuggling
weapon in 1998 when legislation was passed that allows for the
seizure and sale of boats used for smuggling. The measure was
controversial because many Albanians are deeply suspicious of any law
that allows the government to take property without compensation--a
legacy of long years of communist rule.

Extradition. The U.S. has an extradition treaty with Albania that
entered into force on November 13, 1935. For 1998, there are no known
cases of other countries requesting that a drug suspect be
extradited, or of Albania requesting another country to extradite a
drug suspect.

Mutual Legal Assistance. No cases are known.

L

[CTRL] Country Commercial Guide: UK

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From http://www.state.gov/www/regions/eur/cntryinfo.html

one can access the U.S. Gov't's positions on various regions and
countries, in one case, shown below, commercial perspective.


> Country/Regional Information
> -- Europe and Canada
>
> 
>
> Background Notes on Europe
> Country Reports on Economic Policy and Trade Practices
> Country Commercial Guides for U.S. Investors
> Country Reports on Human Rights Practices
> International Narcotics Control Strategy Report
> European embassies in the United States
>
> 
>
> Go to:
>
> Bureau of European Affairs Home Page.
> DOSFAN Home Page.
>
> This is an official U.S. Government source for information on the WWW.
> Inclusion of non-U.S. Government links does not imply endorsement of
> contents.


> 
>
>
> Country Commercial Guides
> FY 1999:   United Kingdom
>
>
> 
>
> CHAPTER I. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
>
> This Country Commercial Guide (CCG) presents a comprehensive look at
> the United Kingdom's commercial environment, using economic, political
> and market analysis.  The CCGs were established by recommendation of
> the Trade Promotion Coordinating Committee (TPCC), a multi-agency task
> force, to consolidate various reporting documents prepared for the
> U.S. business community. Country Commercial Guides are prepared
> annually at U.S. Embassies through the combined efforts of several
> U.S. Government agencies.
>
> Long-term political, economic, and regulatory stability, coupled
> with relatively low rates of taxation and inflation make the
> United Kingdom (UK) attractive to U.S. exporters and investors.
> U.S. firms doing business in the UK encounter a familiar
> language, legal framework and business practices.  The UK imposes few
> impediments to foreign ownership, and no restrictions to the free flow
> of capital.  Within the EU, Her Majesty's Government (HMG) is a strong
> defender of the rights of any British-registered company, irrespective
> of its nationality of ownership.
>
> The UK is highly receptive to U.S. goods, services and
> investment, largely due to the British perception of a shared
> cultural heritage.  With its $1.25 trillion GDP, the UK remains
> the United States' largest European market and fourth largest
> market worldwide, after Canada, Japan and Mexico.  The United
> States exported $36.4 billion of goods to the UK and imported
> British goods worth $32.7 billion in 1997.
>
> The U.S. and the UK are the largest foreign investors in each
> other's country.  Investment by U.S. companies in the UK and by
> UK companies in the U.S. is roughly balanced at $142.6 billion.
> Establishing a base in the UK is an effective means of accessing
> the European Single Market, as the abolition of most intra-European
> trade barriers enables UK-based firms to operate with relative freedom
> throughout the EU.  Sixty of the UK's five hundred largest companies
> are U.S.-owned, and, according to the Invest in Britain Bureau, all
> but one of the 100 largest U.S. companies has operations in the UK.
>
> [end of document]
>
>
>
> Note* International Copyright, United States Government, 1998 (or
> other year of first publication). All rights under foreign copyright
> laws are reserved. All portions of this publication are protected
> against any type or form of reproduction, communications to the public
> and the preparation of adaptations, arrangement and alterations
> outside the United States. U. S. copyright is not asserted under the
> U.S. Copyright Law, Title17, United States Code.
>
>
>
> 
>
> Next Chapter | Table of Contents
> Country Commercial Guides Index
>
>


A<>E<>R
~~~
The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled
one is truly vanquished. -Johann Christoph Schiller,
   German Writer (1759-1805)
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that
prevents us from living freely and nobly. -Bertrand Russell
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material
is distributed without charge or profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information
for non-profit research and educational purposes only.

DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==
CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing!  These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections 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, CTRL
giv

[CTRL] (Fwd) ZNet Commentary, May 17 - Marc Weisbrot

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

--- Forwarded Message Follows ---
From:   "Michael Albert" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject:ZNet Commentary, May 17 - Marc Weisbrot
Date sent:  Mon, 17 May 1999 08:17:42 +0100

Here is today's ZNet Commentary Delivery from Marc Weisbrot. The attached
file is the same material in nicely formatted html so that you can read it
in your browser if you wish.

To pass this comment along to friends, relatives, etc. please note that the
Commentaries are a premium sent to monthly donors to Z/ZNet and that to
learn more about the project folks can consult ZNet (http://www.zmag.org)
and specifically the Commentary Page
(http://www.zmag.org/Commentaries/donorform.htm).

Here then is today's ZNet Commentary...

--

No Change at Treasury, But It Sure is Needed
By Marc Weisbrot

Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin picked a good time to resign. As a senior
White House official said, Rubin "made his fortune selling at the top of the
market." Perhaps that's why the Dow initially dropped 200 points on the
news: some of Rubin's colleagues on Wall Street may have sensed that he was
getting out while the getting was good.

The market subsequently rebounded, partly because Deputy Treasury Secretary
Lawrence Summers, Rubin's replacement, was seen as continuing the policies
of his predecessor.
But continuity is the last thing we need. Rubin's admirers have noted that
the stock market has been booming lately, money is flowing back into
"emerging markets," and the threat of "contagion" in the international
financial system-- from Russia's default on foreign debt, for example-- has
receded.

But the disasters that Robert Rubin helped create in his four years at
Treasury are still festering. There are tens of millions of newly
impoverished people in Indonesia, South Korea, and the other Asian countries
that were dragged into the swamp last year. The Russian economy, cut in half
after seven years of Western management, is again contracting-- spurring a
seemingly endless political crisis. Brazil's economy is shrinking even
faster, thanks to a Treasury-organized bail-out of foreign investors that
began last November. It is only a matter of time before more of Treasury's
chickens, dispersed throughout the globe, come home to roost.

It is no exaggeration to say that the U.S. Treasury Department is the
primary culprit in this continuing economic turmoil. It was at their urging
that the Asian countries opened their economies to the massive foreign
borrowing that pushed their financial systems to the precipice. For example,
an internal Treasury Department memorandum of June 29, 1996 listed "priority
areas where Treasury is seeking further liberalization" in South Korea.
These included the short-term foreign borrowing by Korean companies that
made their economy-- as well as others-- especially vulnerable to a sudden
reversal of capital flows.
Then they turned the financial crisis into a regional depression, by forcing
"austerity" policies on the injured economies of the region: high interest
rates, tax increases, and budget cuts.

To understand how Treasury can do so much damage to the world, it is
necessary to look at the mechanisms of their power. The most important is
the International Monetary Fund. Although it is ostensibly an organization
of 182 member countries, in practice it is controlled by the U.S. Treasury
department. Furthermore, they have set up the system so that a government
that does not agree to the IMF's conditions for lending will be denied
credit from the World Bank, other multilateral lending agencies, and often
private sources as well. So it is very difficult, and for many governments
it is practically suicidal, to refuse the IMF's-- and therefore Treasury's--
demands.

Rubin went to great lengths to preserve this system of absolute power. In
August of 1997 Japan proposed a $100 billion fund to stabilize the region's
currencies. Lawrence Summers was assigned to kill the plan, and accomplished
his mission. Maintaining the Treasury's control over the conditions of any
bailout was more important than preventing the region's descent into
economic chaos, which was still possible at that time.

Rubin also distinguished himself by fighting to keep the Clinton
administration from increasing spending on programs for the poor. But his
largesse knew no limits when it came to bailing out his Wall Street friends
when their loans went sour in Mexico or South Korea. In 1995 during the
Mexican peso crisis, he ran into Congressional opposition-- after all, most
people think that if you make risky loans and get high interest rates for
your gamble, the government shouldn't bail you out when you lose. So he did
an end run around Congress and grabbed $12 billion from a special Treasury
fund that is supposed to be used only for stabilizing the dollar.

Over the last two years there has been a major 

[CTRL] BAP / Brit Malaise

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From New Statesman

The NS Profile - The British-American project

Right-wing conspiracy or right-on broker of the special relationship?
By Duncan Parrish

To some it is just a conference to promote warmer ties between two
great nations. To others it is proof of the continuing stranglehold
of American interests over the British establishment. The British-
American Project, like the United States itself, plays to British
desire and prejudice.

That's if you have heard of it at all, so rarely is its name
whispered in the press, other than in recent comment by John Pilger
in the New Statesman. Cloistered American groups with influential
memberships fascinate and scare the left - always troubled that the
most powerful nation on earth, sworn to defend the right to freedom
of speech, exercises it against them.

The British-American Project for the Successor Generation (as it used
to be known before it quietly contracted its title) was founded in
1985. Each year the project invites 24 American and 24 British
delegates to take par
t in four days of dinners, parties and discussions (ranging from the nature of the 
"special relationship" to security and economic issues). Delegates enjoy comparative 
luxury (the class of '98 stayed at the $285-a-night O
mni Royal Crescent in New Orleans). The aim, to quote the report of the 1985 
conference, is "to create, at a time of growing international strains and stresses, a 
closer rapport between Britain and the United States among
 people likely to become influential decision-makers during the next two decades". 
Delegates are nominated by existing fellows; once they have come through the process 
of selection (in the UK, this is based on competitive
 debating sessions with other nominees), they have their travel and other expenses 
paid to the more or less exotic locations of the conference. Last year New Orleans, 
this year . . . Harrogate.

The plenary session introduces the weighty topic of the conference - "The politics of 
identity", or "Present alliance, future challenges" - and then the group splits up for 
discussion. In many ways this is a conventional
if high-powered conference, but the newsletters impress upon delegates the networking 
possibilities.

It is the directory of alumni that both opponents and supporters of the project point 
to as proof of its clout. "Big swing to BAP" trumpeted an article in the project's 
newsletter following the 1997 general election: thre
e members of Tony Blair's cabinet - George Robertson, Chris Smith and Mo Mowlam - 
appear next to Peter Mandelson and Liz Symons. Powerful figures from the world of 
policy - Jonathan Powell, Blair's chief of staff, Matthew
 Taylor of the Institute for Public Policy Research and Geoff Mulgan of the No 10 
Policy Unit - are listed with big names in the media: Jeremy Paxman and James Naughtie 
of the BBC, Trevor Phillips, and the Daily Telegraph
 editor Charles Moore. With graduates like these, it is no surprise that the project 
is viewed with alarm by some as central to the Americanisation of British foreign 
policy.

The project was first suggested in 1982 by Nick Butler, a Labour Party insider of the 
old right and a research fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs 
(Chatham House). Along with many others in the US and B
ritain who viewed the special relationship favourably, he had become concerned about 
the growing tide of anti-American sentiment, particularly within his own party. This 
was the time of Greenham Common, CND and the battle
s over US deployment of cruise missiles in Europe. Vietnam and Watergate were fresh in 
everyone's memory.

Butler's response was to propose a series of conferences, similar in format to the 
annual get-together of the Anglo-German elite at Konigswinter, developing personal 
relationships between the participants and broadening u
nderstanding. This rapidly gained backing from Chatham House, then from other 
establishment bodies, such as the Royal United Services Institute and the US embassy 
in London. But at this stage there seemed little prospect
of funding.

It was Sir Charles Villiers, the former chairman of British Steel,
who overcame this obstacle by roping in two American anglophile
friends of his, Lew van Dusen and Isadore Scott, who were able to
secure $460,000 through the Pew Charitable Trusts, the second biggest
grant-making body in the US.

Opponents of the project would protest that its origins were
political, not philanthropic. For John Pilger, the project is a very
low-profile "casual freemasonry" with a right-wing background and
funding. Many from the so-called left who are now in government, he
notes, have attended. His conclusion is that this government is as
much a part of the right-wing security and foreign affairs
establishment as every previous British government and just as likely
to commit crimes of diplomacy - and its friends in the media are just
as willing to excuse and overlook these crimes. Jame

[CTRL] (Fwd) [BRIGADE] PJB: WH Our Worst Security Risk

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

--- Forwarded Message Follows ---
From:   "Linda Muller" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date sent:  Mon, 17 May 1999 07:28:17 -05:0
Subject:[BRIGADE] PJB: WH Our Worst Security Risk
Send reply to:  [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Dearest Brigade,

Here's Pat's column and a link to Free Republic comments -
GO PAT GO!!
Linda

--

From:   [EMAIL PROTECTED]

 http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a373d72af6ce2.htm">Click
here:

Check out the responses to Pat's article at the FreeRepublic website
(if you haven't already).

---

San Jose Mercury News
White House is our worst security risk
BY PAT BUCHANAN

WHETHER Wen Ho Lee should have kept his top-secret clearance at Los
Alamos years after being fingered as a suspected spy misses the point. It is
not Lee; it is this White House that has become an unacceptable national
security risk for the United States.

Not even during the Red Decade and World War II, when Josef Stalin's spies
and traitors looted the Roosevelt administration at will, were U.S. security
secrets under less competent stewardship.

But there is this difference: Half a century ago, America was a serious
nation. When Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were unmasked as atomic spies,
they were marched to the electric chair. Now, yawns greet the news that
Beijing has stolen every atomic weapons secret America has and acquired,
through our Fortune 500 companies, the ability to rain down multiple
warheads on the United States.

In the Reagan era, when we learned Toshiba had transferred silent-propeller
technology to Moscow, America was enraged. Yet, the report that China in
1997 stole U.S. radar satellite technology, enabling it to track and kill U.S.
subs underwater, was buried in a New York Times story whose front page
told of the president's latest apology for mistakenly hitting China's embassy
in Belgrade.

As our ``strategic partner'' bused mobs to our embassy to hurl bricks, the
White House fretted that the trashing might impede plans to chaperone
Beijing into the World Trade Organization.

No wonder the Chinese despise us; our groveling is despicable.

To see China heap abuse on us, even as our president burbles his apologies,
proves again the old adage: It is the whimpering dog that gets kicked.

Consider the record of Bill Clinton's CIA. Based upon dirt samples, it
concluded that a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant was producing biological
weapons. U.S. missiles destroyed it. When the Sudanese challenged us to
prove our case, the CIA could not. Now, we learn the CIA -- to program
``precision'' air strikes on Belgrade -- has been using 5-year-old maps that do
not even show the Chinese embassy.

Before launching this Balkan war, the president was briefed to believe
Slobodan Milosevic would cave and withdraw. Today, there are more Serb
troops in Kosovo than when the air war began; a human rights crisis has
become a catastrophe; the Balkans are destabilized; the Russians are
enraged; and the Serbs have rallied behind Milosevic.

Why has no one accepted responsibility or resigned?

Consider the state of our military. Since Clinton began to hand out NATO war
guarantees to Eastern Europe, police the Balkans and declare ``dual
containment'' of Iran and Iraq to be U.S. policy in the Persian Gulf, he has
drawn down U.S. forces to pre-Pearl Harbor levels.

Now, in an air campaign against a tiny Balkan nation, the last superpower
finds itself running out of air-launched cruise missiles and laser-guided
munitions, taking weeks to fly a dozen Apaches to a war zone where two
crash before any see action, cannibalizing F-16s for spare parts, and calling
up the reserves. And for the first time in 50 years, our Pacific fleet has been
stripped of carrier-based air power.

How, exactly, would we now honor commitments to Korea, Kuwait and
Taiwan, if, simultaneously, our IOUs were called in?

How stands NATO, ``the most successful alliance in history''? The Greeks
sell oil to the Serbs and will not let Thessalonika be used to bring in troops;
France opposes a blockade; Germany says ground troops are off the table;
Italy objects to hitting TV stations; and the Dutch object to hitting Milosevic's
palace for fear a Rembrandt may be disfigured.

Even allies sense our indifference to our own security. Israel, the beneficiary
of $100 billion in U.S. aid, has, according to London's Financial Times, sold
China the technology for its Python 3 air-to-air missile and Phalcon radar,
giving Beijing the capability track and shoot down aircraft. China has also
reportedly acquired the technology for Israel's Star-1 anti-missile radar, the
U.S.-backed Lavi fighter and the Patriot missile.

Should China move on Taiwan and decimate a U.S. fleet that sails to defend
it, the craven appeasement of China and cowardly refusal to confront I

[CTRL] Real Sports

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From Independent (UK)

War in the Balkans - Kosovars suffer new ethnic hatred

By Phil Davison in Blace



Azemi Elias thought the insults of Serb border police were the last
he would have to endure. A 32-year-old Kosovar Albanian car mechanic,
he had crossed into Macedonia with his wife and children, was
nibbling on some cheese in the border refugee camp in Blace and was
glad to be alive.

He had reckoned without the Macedonian police.

"Your papers!" shouted a police colonel who later refused to give me
his name but is known as Miki. Azemi's two sons, Buyar, five, and
Behan, three, cowered on the blanket where they were eating their
first decent food in days. They had heard that demand so many times
on their long trek to the border from their home in the Kosovo
village of Laskovari. They had also cowered in beneath the
floorboards of their house when Serbian paramilitary troops shot out
their windows and robbed their parents of everything they had.

"But I just gave them to you coming in, officer," said Azemi. "Show them again!" 
insisted the colonel. Azemi did. "And watch what you're saying to that reporter!" 
barked the colonel, fingering the Serb-made CZ-99 pistol i
n his holster.

Azemi had just told me that Serb police and paramilitary troops were forcing Kosovar 
Albanian men to live on sites - including schoolyards and hospital grounds - where 
they were hiding tanks, field guns and ammunition. A
short while later "Miki" and another officer hauled me off to the camp gates to check 
my identity.

Kosovar Albanians find no welcome in Blace. Their Macedonian neighbours, except for 
the ethnic Albanian minority, leave them in no doubt that they are unwanted. Historic 
tension between the majority Slavs and the ethnic A
lbanian Macedonians and the Kosovar Albanians is running higher than ever.

There is talk of yet another civil war in the former Yugoslavia, regardless of what 
happens in Kosovo. Slav Macedonians say their country's ethnic Albanians are 
well-armed. That did not worry them when they knew they coul
d rely on the federal Yugoslav army. Now, with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's 
men at least pinned down and, according to Nato, badly "degraded", Macedonia's Slavs 
are worried that the ethnic Albanians would have
the upper hand in a civil conflict.

The only thing the Macedonian government and police, supported by the
Slav majority, don't like about the Serb's "ethnic cleansing" of
Kosovar Albanians is the fact that many of the Serbs' victims have
ended up here. Macedonia wants them to move on as fast as
international humanitarian flights can pack them in.

"They stink. They don't wash. They don't abide by our laws," said my
Macedonian taxi driver, a Slav. "And they breed like rabbits. They're
all after a Greater Albania, including western Macedonia, even the
west bank of the Vardar river [through the capital, Skopje]." He was
not a Serb but, like the majority in Macedonia, left no doubt he
supported Mr Milosevic and opposed the Nato bombing. His keyring bore
the double eagle symbol of Serbia's hardline Chetnik nationalists and
their motto: "Only unity saves the Serbs."

He was proud that he and his fellow Skopje taxi drivers were going to
drive to Serbia tomorrow to donate their blood to victims of the
bombing. This, after all, is the city where the locals attacked the
US embassy after the Nato operation began.

On Saturday night, I had witnessed a street brawl in Skopje. It
started as a drunken fight between an ethnic Albanian and a Slav but
soon a dozen men were involved. Between kicks and blows, ethnic slurs
were exchanged. Locals said such scenes were happening nightly since
the refugee crisis began almost two months ago.



>From Irish Times
--
UN humanitarian mission arrives in Belgrade
--
Kosovan refugees resume flight to Macedonia
--
Cluster bombs 'not serving human rights'
--
Opinion: Alliance with big powers flies in the face of our anti-
colonial past
--
Monday, May 17, 1999

Politicians team up with
clubs to achieve goals
--
The Government's decision to boycott the June 5th match in Dublin
between Ireland and Yugoslavia is only the latest example of how,
when it comes to the Balkans, football and politics are hopelessly
intertwined.

Using the sport as your political football has brought dividends for
a whole generation of politicians across the post-communist Balkans.
Yugoslavia has escaped the ban from world football arising from the
war in Bosnia, but with visiting teams unhappy about dodging cruise
missiles, it will see its home matches for the 2

[CTRL] (Fwd) Inside the KLA

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

--- Forwarded Message Follows ---
<>

Foreign Affairs May/Junel 1999 (volume 78, number 3)

Kosovo's Next Masters

By Chris Hedges

INSIDE THE KOSOVO LIBERATION ARMY

The rumbles of yet another nationalist earthquake are shaking the
former Yugoslavia. Rising from the fetid hovels of Pristina and the
concrete-block family farms of rural Kosovo is the newest political
and military force to beset the Balkans -- the Kosovo Liberation Army
(KLA), known to Albanians as the Ushtria Clirimtare e Kosoves.

The emergence of this militant armed group, now numbering several
thousand fighters, has dimmed hopes that even a compromise agreement
with Belgrade could be successfully implemented. Emboldened by NATO's
March bombing of  the Serbian military, the KLA will wage a
protracted guerrilla war in the Serbian province that could ignite a
wider war in neighboring Macedonia and Albania, potentially even
dragging in Greece and Bulgaria. The KLA is uncompromising in its
quest for an independent Kosovo now and a Greater Albania later. And
it has, to the consternation of Washington's would-be peacemakers,
supplanted the ineffectual leadership of the moderate voice of
Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority, Ibrahim Rugova.

The KLA is important out of all proportion to its size -- not merely
because it will probably eventually get Kosovo to secede from Serbia,
but because it now represents the aspirations of most Kosovar
Albanians. To unders tand the current conflict in Kosovo and
America's stakes in its resolution, one must understand the KLA, how
it came into being, who leads it, what drives it, and why it now
speaks for a majority of Kosovars. Even a truly vicious, Bosnia-like
wave of atrocities by the Serbs in reprisal for NATO's attacks will
only pour fuel on the separatist fire. The grim reality is that we
had better get to know the KLA -- because it is not going to go
away.

 break 

In Kosovo, the stationing of international troops may prevent all-out
fighting and provide the breathing space to negotiate a workable
solution. But given the deep rifts between the sides, the latter is
hardly likely. The international community would then face the stark
choice between remaining in Kosovo for a long time or pulling out
after the proposed three-year period, with the likelihood that those
on both sides of the divide would again pick up their guns. In the
end, it will come to this: Led by the KLA, Kosovo will separate from
Serbia, whether by negotiations or by violence.

Chris Hedges, currently a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, was
The New York Times' Balkan Bureau Chief from 1995 to 1998.

>>End excerpt>>
--

Copyright 1999 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
All rights reserved.



>From Janes Defence Wkly
defence.janes.com/

BALKAN ENDGAME?

<>

Following devastating airstrikes in Yugoslavia, what are the
options for an acceptable settlement on the ground? Richard Bassett
examines the prospects for the future and the lessons of the past

In the wake of NATO's attack on Yugoslavia the Balkans ends the
century much as it began; an expression of great power rivalry and a
source of potentially destabilising conflict.

As at least one military historian of note, John Keegan, has written,
the problems of Bosnia, Macedonia and indeed Kosovo would be wearily
familiar to any official of the Austro-Hungarian empire posted to
Sarajevo in 1908. The inevitable competing spheres of influence led
the great 19th-century German Chancellor, Bismarck, to observe: "The
Balkans are not worth the bones of a Pomeranian Grenadier."

If history is one of the inescapable millstones of the Balkans,
geography is another. Albania today still lies across two of the most
important routes that link Europe with the East.

Its appearance on the global stage, in 1912 at the Ambassador's
conference, when it was described as the "child of Austria, with
Italy acting as midwife" was an attempt to balance the pretensions of
Russia's main protegé in the region, Serbia, and limit its access to
the Mediterranean.

--- break ---

The precarious internal situation in Russia also militates against
the confidence-building measures the West feels are essential to any
joint solution of the Balkans crisis. The obvious policy disputes
between Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Primakov may be just
questions of degree but they continue to overshadow the ability to
come to agreements at the highest level which can be seen as having a
chance of sticking.

Yet without such an agreement there is every indication that the
Balkans will continue to smoulder and that the flames of ethnic
cleansing will continue to blaze for several years to come.

<>

Richard Bassett, JDW's Business Editor, is a former Central Europe
correspondent for the Times of London

Jane's Defence Weekly

Jane's Defence Weekly can be bought online from this site in
hardcopy, CD-ROM, or online 

[CTRL] MAI Mk II

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From www.monde-diplomatique.fr/en/





LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE - May 1999




TRANSATLANTIC WHEELING AND DEALING

Watch out for MAI Mark Two



Sheltered from the hubbub of war and crisis, Europe, the United States and the World 
Trade Organisation (WTO) are devising agreements that will remove the final obstacles 
to the free play of "market forces" and require co
untries to submit to the unfettered expansion of the multinationals. Learning from the 
failure of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), big business and 
technocrats are trying to force through a decision before
the end of 1999.
by CHRISTIAN DE BRIE *








The corpse of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) hardly had time to get 
cold in the vaults of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 
(1) before the ultra-liberal Dr Jekylls led by Sir
 Leon Brittan, the outgoing European Commission vice-president and Thatcherite 
die-hard, have tried to clone it, excitedly hoping to see new Draculas emerge from 
their test tubes by the year 2000.

This urgent work is being carried out in two secret laboratories with "keep out" signs 
to deter anyone not wearing a lab coat: the Transatlantic Economic Partnership (TEP) 
and the Millennium Round of the World Trade Organ
isation.

The first of these, which opened on 16 September 1998, is dedicated (though it will 
not admit it) to that favourite project of the British and the Americans - seeing the 
European Union dissolved in a free trade area with
the United States. Following the failure of the first attempt in 1994, a rehashed 
version presented by the European Commission on 11 March 1998 under the name NTM (New 
Transatlantic Marketplace) was thrown out by the fore
ign ministers of the Fifteen on 27 April.

As he had done before, Brittan went back to his drawing board (without seeking a 
mandate) to come up with a disguised version of his pet scheme. If the 27 pages of the 
Commission recommendation on the negotiation of agree
ments in the field of technical barriers to trade between the EU and the US (2) are 
anything to go by, the outcome promises to be instructive. (An abbreviated version was 
approved by the Council, empowering it to negotiat
e on behalf of the member states, then by the European parliament in September and 
November 1998).



On the pretext of removing "technical barriers to trade", which include health, social 
and environmental protection regulations, the ultimate aim is to "reach a general 
commitment to unconditional access to the market in
all sectors and for all methods of supply" of products and services, including health, 
education and public contracts. In the inimitable jargon of the Commission, states and 
local authorities are required to make all dero
gations explicit in the form of "a negative freedom" given that the agreements 
negotiated apply to all the territory of the parties, regardless of their 
constitutional structures, at all levels of authority. This is very
restrictive for the local authorities of the European countries, but of little risk to 
the US, where the federal states are not bound by Washington's signature in the matter.

The aim is gradually to draw up common minimum regulations "based on the 
recommendations of enterprises" in order to "create new outlets" for them - all this 
in "a spirit of conviviality". Involved in the TEP talks from t
he outset, the multinationals have greatly influenced the content thanks to a powerful 
lobby that has been institutionalised for four years: the Transatlantic Business 
Dialogue (TABD) bringing together the upper crust of
big business on both sides of the North Atlantic. Its last two-yearly meeting took 
place in Charlotte (North Carolina) in November 1998.



Big business to call the tune



In order to allay suspicion, they are trying to rush through the establishment of a 
Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue, a Transatlantic Labour Dialogue and a Transatlantic 
Environment Dialogue for consumers, trade unions and
 ecologists respectively, who will have to stay firmly within the bounds set by big 
business in the TABD. The latter has no intention of giving anything more than a 
half-hearted commitment to optional codes of conduct wit
h no sanctions attached.

Thus "hemmed in", talks proceed behind closed doors, using salami tactics to avoid 
alerting public opinion, so that everything can be sewn up by December 1999. 
Industrial goods, services, public contracts, intellectual pr
operty, etc. - in a dozen fields, slice by slice, "mutual recognition agreements" 
(MRA), apparently technical but in fact political, seek to reduce standards and 
regulations to the lowest common denominator. The outcome i
s that the safeguards that Europe has built up, in food, the environment and health in 
particular, are bein

[CTRL] (Fwd) For Your Own Good

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From www.reason.com/ogmyt.html

For Your Own Good


Ten Myths of the Anti-Smoking Movement





These"Ten Myths of the Anti-Smoking Movement" appear as an appendix in For Your Own 
Good.

1. The tobacco companies hid the truth about the hazards and addictiveness of 
cigarettes from the American public. Industry double-talk notwithstanding, warnings 
about the health risks of smoking go back hundreds of years
. James I, in his 1604 Counterblaste to Tobacco, called smoking "a custome lothsome to 
the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs." In 
every generation, tobacco’s opponents have echoed
him, attributing a long list of maladies to smoking. (See Chapter 1.) Persuasive 
scientific evidence of tobacco’s hazards, which began to emerge in the early 1930s, 
has received widespread attention since the ’50s. (See C
hapter 2.) Likewise, the difficulty of giving up the tobacco habit
has been common knowledge for centuries. James I’s lord chancellor,
Sir Francis Bacon, observed, "In our times the use of tobacco is
growing greatly and conquers men with a certain secret pleasure, so
that those who have once become accustomed thereto can later hardly
be restrained therefrom." The 17th-century polemicist Johann Michael
Moscherosch called smokers "thralls to the tobacco fiend," while
Cotton Mather dubbed them "Slave[s] to the Pipe." Fagon, Louis XIV’s
court physician, described the tobacco habit as "a fatal, insatiable
necessity…a permanent epilepsy." (See Chapter 7.)

2. "Tobacco is tobacco." Although all tobacco products pose some
health risks, cigarettes are by far the most hazardous. Cigars and
pipes are considerably less dangerous. Research by the American
Cancer Society found that "[d]eath rates were far higher in cigarette
smokers than in nonsmokers," while "[c]igar smokers had somewhat
higher death rates than nonsmokers," and "there was little difference
between the death rates of pipe smokers and the death rates of men
who never smoked regularly." By one estimate, smokeless tobacco is 98
percent safer than cigarettes. (See Chapter 2.)

3. People smoke because of advertising. There is remarkably little
evidence that advertising plays an important role in getting people
to smoke, as opposed to getting them to smoke a particular brand. The
1989 surgeon general’s report conceded that "[t]here is no
scientifically rigorous study available to the public that provides a
definitive answer to the basic question of whether advertising and
promotion increase the level of tobacco consumption. Given the
complexity of the issue, none is likely to be forthcoming in the
forseeable future." The 1994 report, which focused on underage
smoking, also acknowledged the "lack of definitive literature." None
of the widely publicized studies that have appeared in recent years,
including the much-hyped research on Joe Camel, actually measured the
impact of advertising on a teenager’s propensity to smoke. (See
Chapter 3.)

4. Smoking imposes costs on society. Because smokers tend to die
earlier than nonsmokers, the short-term costs of treating tobacco-
related illness are balanced, and probably outweighed, by savings on
Social Security, nursing home stays, and medical care in old age.
Every analysis that takes such long-term savings into account,
including reports from the RAND Corporation, the Congressional
Research Service, and Harvard economist W. Kip Viscusi, concludes
that "social cost" cannot justify raising cigarette taxes. (See
Chapter 4.)

5. Secondhand smoke poses a grave threat to bystanders. The evidence
concerning the health effects of secondhand smoke is not nearly as
conclusive as the evidence concerning the health effects of smoking.
The research suggests that people who live with smokers for decades
may face a slightly higher risk of lung cancer. According to one
estimate, a nonsmoking woman who lives with a smoker faces an
additional lung cancer risk of 6.5 in 10,000, which would raise her
lifetime risk from about 0.34 percent to about 0.41 percent. Studies
of secondhand smoke and heart disease, including the results from the
Harvard Nurses Study published in 1997, report more-dramatic
increases in disease rates—so dramatic, in fact, that they are
biologically implausible, suggesting risks comparable to those faced
by smokers, despite the much lower doses involved. In any case, there
is no evidence that casual exposure to secondhand smoke has any
impact on your life expectancy. (See Chapter 5.)

6. If secondhand smoke really is dangerous, smoking ought to be
banned everywhere, except in private residences. Since almost all of
the epidemiological evidence about the health effects of secondhand
smoke relates to long-term exposure in the home, the fact that this
is the one place exempted from current and proposed smoking bans
suggests a residual concern for property rights. Yet business owners
ha

[CTRL] (Fwd) Gun Control I

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

--- Forwarded Message Follows ---
Date sent:  Sun, 16 May 1999 11:14:04 -0700
From:   David Gould <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject:Gun Control I

Post Number 122: Gun Control 1
Never in history has any government disarmed the people of the nation
unless genocide was planned.  For reference, please see Russia and China
in this century, not to mention Nazi Germany.  The intent of the
so-called leaders of any nation can be revealed, clearly, in these
actions to create a defenseless populace.

The frightening thing is that so few people understand that the country
which is the premier leader in disarming people is the British
government.  As the quote which follows reveals, the British have been
doing this for a long time, and not solely in India.  A study of what
went on in South Africa during the Boer Wars will give you a very good
look into the heart and soul of the British, and it is not a pretty
sight.  For the first time that I know of, extermination camps were used
for civilians by the British in the Boer Wars.  Now, they were not
called this, but by far the greatest losses the Boers suffered during
these wars was the frightening losses suffered in these camps, of their
women, old men and children.

 And it makes no sense to argue that these deaths were an accident, just
as it does no good to argue that the so-called Un-Constitutional laws
“within” the United States are an accident, and if we just work a little
harder, we can get them changed.  Ridiculous!  If they were an accident,
they would be changed already.  Just as the way that the British ran
their camps in South Africa would have changed after the first 10,000,
or maybe after the first 20,000 deaths in the camps.  That the British
did not change how the camps were operated reveals the true intent
behind the camps, as nothing else can, just as the laws which continue
to be enacted “within” the Untied States reveals the true intent behind
those in Washington, DC.   For reference, see Post #4; Real republicans.

"Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look
upon  the Act which deprived a whole nation of arms as the blackest."
-- Mahatma Gandhi, An Autobiography, p. 446.

When the police can't protect us
OCR  May 2, 1999
Why did the police SWAT team, whose armored members surrounded the high
school for hours, not enter the building more quickly?

Predictably enough, the Columbine High School massacre has provoked
calls by the Clinton administration and gun-control activists to do
something about gun violence, such as further limiting Americans' access
to firearms.   The basic idea behind gun control is that average people
should not be allowed to possess firearms for self-protection – since
some will use them improperly - but should depend on the police and
other authorities in the face of danger. Yet a close look at the tragedy
in Littleton, Colo. does more to debunk this basic gun-control premise
than to support it.

An article in The New York Times last week gingerly raised a question
that has become a heated topic on the Internet and talk radio: Why did
the police SWAT team, whose armored members surrounded the high school
for hours, not enter the building more quickly?   In a recent column,
James Bovard, author of  freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and
the Demise of the Citizen, quoted some of the explanations offered by
Littleton-area police: One deputy who initially exchanged fire with a
shooter, then left to call for
backup, said his actions helped fleeing students. The sheriff said his
forces were outgunned. A sheriff's department spokesman said they were
worried about protecting policemen.

These bromides only reinforce Mr. Bovard's premise: [T]he ... slow
response by SWAT teams and other lawmen to the killings in progress
turned a multiple homicide into a historic massacre.  The ... excuses
being offered vivify how law enforcement has no legal liability to
people they fail to protect.  The Colorado killings offer stark evidence
why citizens cannot rely on government for personal safety.

Indeed, the government's position is simple: We don't trust you to
protect yourself with handguns or rifles, but the police have no
obligation to protect you, either.  This point, rather than
hand-wringing about violent video games and easy access to guns, needs
to capture more attention, because it holds the key to making schools
safer.   There's nothing wrong with trying to learn what makes some
seemingly normal teens commit such an atrocity.  Or to look at
nihilistic aspects of our culture, which may have contributed to the
killings.  But such approaches offer imprecise answers at best.

Even if all guns were outlawed, the black market would flourish, just as
it does for illegal drugs.  Rather than aim for the unachievable goal of
banishing all firearms, policy makers should look for ways to ensure
that law-abid

[CTRL] Brit Views (Blair)

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From the Independent (UK)
www.independent.co.uk/sindy/stories

Leaders

Worse than a mistake

The death of as many as 100 Albanian villagers in a Nato bombing raid
on southern Kosovo may give Mr Blair pause, but it seems unlikely.
Nothing so far has dented his Churchillian resolve. He will not rest,
he has told us, until good has triumphed over evil. There will be
setbacks along the way, to be sure, but "those who want a war that is
perfect, with no mistakes, no errors, no civilians hurt, are not
realistic about war". Let us be realistic, then. Nato's latest attack
on civilians was a mistake, but it was an inevitable one. It is what
happens when airmen are required to launch attacks from 15,000 feet.
Perhaps, as Nato says, the target was "legitimate" and perhaps
cluster bombs were not used. Nato spokesmen do not deliberately lie.
Nevertheless, from the evidence so far available, what happened on
Thursday night in Korisa borders on the criminal. That much, indeed,
may be said about any action in this conflict: Nato's war against
Serbia contravenes international law.

The illegality of the war is one reason why this newspaper has
opposed it from the start. There are other, equally pressing reasons.
On 28 March, four days after the first wave of bombers went in, we
wrote that no matter how bad things were in Kosovo, Nato's action
would make them worse: the bombing would serve as a cover for death
squads; the deployment of ground troops, should it occur, would
sacrifice good lives in the name of bad policies. We pledged our
support for British servicemen, but at the same time we insisted that
such support did not exempt politicians from condemnation.

The Prime Minister does not like to be condemned. Even mild criticism
agitates him. Last week, after Michael Howard had spoken of the
"gross incompetence" of the Chinese embassy bombing, Mr Blair accused
the Opposition - and by implication all those who are against the war
- of undermining the morale of the armed services. It can't be long
before he starts to tell us that careless talk costs lives. For there
is an element of moral blackmail as well as hysteria in the Prime
Minister's words. He would like to silence criticism by suggesting,
however obliquely, that it puts the lives of British servicemen at
risk: after all, demoralised soldiers and airmen are more vulnerable
than those who are cheerful and confident. In fact, the people whose
lives are seriously at risk at the moment are the Albanians and the
Serbs.

Not that we are impressed by Mr Howard's attack on the Government.
The Tories have all along supported the bombing: they have backed the
Government's aims and its means. They knew, as we all knew, that
smart bombs would kill civilians and that the wrong targets would be
hit. It is much too late for Mr Howard and the Tories to become
scrupulous, far less contemptuous of Mr Blair's running of the war
(not, incidentally, that Mr Blair has much to do with the running of
what is an American show). All Mr Howard is doing now is to make
political capital out of squalid tragedy. It may be what he is paid
to do as an Opposition politician, but it would be foolish to take
anything he says about this war seriously.

It would be foolish, too, and disgusting, for opponents of the war to
yield to moral triumphalism. Many good people support this war. They
believe that it is a just response to Milosevic's abominable cruelty
to the Kosovar Albanians. We do not. We believe that Milosevic's
worst excesses in Kosovo have been made possible by this war; that a
war begun to avert a human catastrophe has in fact created a human
catastrophe. Milosevic alone is guilty of the crime of ethnic
cleansing, but Nato has acted as his enabler. Today, however, the
emphasis is on Nato's victims, not on Milosevic's. Last week, by
cruel irony, Mr Blair accused the BBC of ignoring the plight of
ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. They won't be this week, Prime Minister.

Citizen Shame

>From the beginning of 2000 a new and important subject will be taught
in our schools: citizenship. The Government's declared purpose in
placing this subject at the heart of the new curriculum is "to
produce civilised and decent citizens". In a nation which has
recently seen its very antithesis in an outburst of nail-bomb hatred,
we would all surely say "amen" to that. Cynical, alarmist and comic
commentators, though, have been quick to pick up on the
constitutional significance of the term: the very title "citizenship"
suggests that New Labour no longer thinks of us as subjects of an
(albeit constitutional) monarch, but as citizens of a self-
modernising state. And many might say "amen" to that, too.
Unfortunately, announcing high moral standards and ordering their
implementation doesn't work. Only last week we learnt that after
years of "personal and social education", th
e stable-mate of citizenship education, our teenagers have more
abortions and sexually transmitted diseases than those of a

[CTRL] Da Bombz!

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From www.startribune.com/stOnLine/

Published Saturday, May 15, 1999


Editorial: Cluster bombs -- For Yugoslavia's kids, a pernicious gift

In Yugoslavia, as in every other land, children wake up on a weekend
morning ready to play. They check the sky and, if it's free of clouds

and F-15s, head out into the neighborhood. They play ball, kick
sticks and hunt through the grass for bits of treasure. Lately
they've been stumbling upon some especially alluring objects --
bright orange-yellow things the size of soda cans, and shiny spheres
the size of tennis balls. The kids snatch them up. They explode. The
kids lose an arm, an eye or a life.

This scenario is made possible by NATO, which has been scattering the

colorful trinkets across Yugoslavia for weeks. The soda-can things
are CBU-87 and RBL755 bomblets, while the bright little balls are
ATACMS bomblets. None of them is meant for children, of course.
They're unexploded submunitions -- the little bombs inside of cluster
bombs. NATO likes to drop them on enemy airfields, because cluster
bombs release a shower of explosives that then explode again -- doing
great damage to planes and other equipment.

But every now and then NATO misses its mark. It drops cluster bombs
not on a military installment, but on a civilian center. This
happened earlier this month in the southern Yugoslavian city of Nis,
when an airstrike meant for an airfield instead hit a hospital
complex and a market. The damage of such a mishap doesn't end with
the airstrike. That's because the bomblets inside cluster bombs don't
always explode when they're dropped. A good 5 percent of them are
duds -- lying in quiet wait for an unwitting walker to happen by.
They become a kind of land mine, detonating when they're disturbed on
the ground. Like land mines, they remain lethal years after a
conflict has ended -- killing innocent civilians.

This circumstance has caught the attention of the acclaimed
international group Human Rights Watch, which is calling on NATO to
stop using cluster bombs. The group cites testing data that suggests
that each cluster bomb leaves behind 5 to 10 duds on average. The
danger posed by these bomblets is anything but theoretical: On April
24, Human Rights Watch reports, five children playing with unexploded
submunitions in southern Kosovo were killed. Two were injured. The
death toll is likely to increase.

NATO and Pentagon spokesmen insist the cluster bomb is an especially
effective weapon in a campaign like this because of its ability to
devastate a wide area. But similar arguments can be made for many
other weapons already forsaken -- chemical and biological weapons,
for instance. Civilized nations refrain from using them not because
they're ineffective, but because they hurt civilians as well as
soldiers and because their effects outlast even the longest war.

This war -- any war -- can't help but stir pangs of conscience for
the thoughtful. Slobodan Milosevic's cruelty to the Kosovars evokes
horror, and pounding his military machine may seem the only proper
response. But it's impossible not to wince at the idea that Serbian
children have been left motherless by NATO jets. And it seems right
to cry out in anguish at the news that NATO's weapons are leaving
behind spangly lethal little toys that beckon to little Yugoslavian
children. Surely no wager of war -- especially one fighting to save
lives -- should leave such a legacy.

© Copyright 1999 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.


R >>

~~~
Via www.antiwar.com
Excerpted from The-Times (UK)

<>
May 15 1999 BALKANS WAR

Italian fishermen injured as munitions explode; 100 feared dead in
Kosovo raid

Nato jets dump bombs off Venice

FROM RICHARD OWEN IN ROME

ITALIAN authorities yesterday cordoned off a coastal area off Venice
where hundreds of cluster bombs apparently dumped by US warplanes
flying bombing missions in the Balkans had fallen. Officials said
fishermen who had hauled in the bombs had been injured and
minesweepers were to move into the area today.

The news came amid claims that up to 100 Albanians had been killed
and many more injured by Nato cluster bombs dropped in Kosovo. If
confirmed, the death toll would be the highest among civilians in a
single airstrike since the bombing began seven weeks ago. Still-
smouldering tractors, trailers and dead bodies littered the streets
of a village near the Albanian border yesterday, more than 12 hours
after the reported attack.

<>



<>

<>

>From www.inet.co.yu/war/info/newscen12-05-1.htm

<>

Black operations: Markale market "massacre” the sequel


1994, Sarajevo, Bosnia. War crime at its worst. Muslim troops fired
at their own people, in a propaganda ploy to win world sympathy and
draw military intervention.

We have been notified from our unofficial sources (rather reliable,
so far) that a sequel to Sarajevo Markale market "massacre" is in
preparation. NATO countries' public has been reluctant t

[CTRL] Refugees Refuse

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From Int'l Herald Tribune (www.iht.com)

Paris, Saturday, May 15, 1999

Tired Refugees Loath to Pull Up Roots

Kosovars Resist Efforts to Move Them From Overflowing Border Area


--
--
By John Ward Anderson and Molly Moore Washington Post Service
--
--
KUKES, Albania - They wait here, tens of thousands of them, in the
dusty, dirty tent cities of this overcrowded border town, hoping to
be reunited with family and friends who were forced to stay behind,
wanting only to remain close to home, to Kosovo.

But in the curious logic of the relief effort here, where the
psychological needs of refugees do not always coincide with the
practical demands of international aid agencies, these refugees are
being asked to move farther south in Albania. And they do not want to
go.

Seven weeks into Europe's worst refugee crisis since World War II, aid officials say 
they now expect hundreds of thousands of the people who have fled Yugoslav forces in 
Kosovo to remain in Albania for at least another ye
ar.

The prospect is a daunting one for Albania, the poorest and most backward country on 
the continent. Nowhere is the problem greater than in Kukes, transformed over the past 
two months from an impoverished backwater of 24,0
00 inhabitants into a refugee encampment overflowing with more than 100,000 people.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the government say that Kukes, already 
suffering water shortages, rising crime, inadequate sanitation, and insufficient 
schools and hospitals, cannot cope much longer. On top of t
hat, they fear the camps here make tempting targets for Yugoslav artillery positions 
just over the mountainous border about 25 kilometers (about 15 miles) away.

But with more people arriving from Kosovo every day, officials are approaching a moral 
dilemma: how to move traumatized refugees, who have already been pushed around too 
much, to the Albanian interior if they do not want
to go.

The aid agencies say they will not order the refugees to resettle farther south, but 
they began an information campaign Tuesday to try to persuade them to move 
voluntarily. As of Thursday, fewer than 3,300 had agreed to g
o. If this campaign does not work, the Albanian government is considering ordering 
them to move.

When they think about forcing people to go, though, they are confronted by stories 
like that of Sabrije Haliti, whose daughter was killed and son severely wounded in 
Kosovo last month when Yugoslav forces tossed a grenade
 into a crowd of people they had corralled in a field. Mrs. Haliti's 17-year-old 
daughter-in-law and 11-month-old granddaughter were marched away during the incident, 
and soldiers prevented her husband from accompanying h
er or their wounded son on a bus to Albania. Now he is hiding in the mountains, or so 
she hopes.

Mrs. Haliti and her son are safe in a refugee camp, and the thought of being uprooted 
again is frightening. ''If all the other people go, I will go with them,'' she said.

Although nearly 300,000 refugees have already been relocated deeper inside Albania, 
Kukes is beginning to feel like home to many.

Some are waiting to be reunited with families or friends. Others claim relatives in 
the Kosovo Liberation Army, which is fighting for independence for the Serbian 
province.

Others are simply too fatigued, traumatized or demoralized to move again.

In addition, thousands of refugees fled with their Yugoslav-made farm tractors, which 
sell for about $6,300 each. That is almost a life's savings for people who have 
already had their houses burned and livestock slaughter
ed; they do not want to abandon their last asset. Officials are exploring the idea of 
storing the tractors in a guarded parking lot.

''Most have been here several weeks, and they've put down roots, and they don't want 
to leave,'' said Ray Wilkinson, a spokesman for the United Nations refugee agency.

That problem was vividly illustrated this week in Macedonia, which has been pressing 
relief organizations to move some of the 231,000 refugees there to the West or Albania.

The government is alarmed at the mounting cost of accommodating the refugees and fears 
their continued presence could upset Macedonia's delicate ethnic balance.

NATO officials have talked of transferring 60,000 people to Albania, but few have 
opted to leave.

In Kukes, the dilemma faced by officials is even more complex. The UN High 
Commissioner for Refugees forbids placing refugees near unsafe borders, and Albania's 
border with Kosovo is anything but safe. ''The KLA is active
 in this area,'' Mr. Wilkinson said, adding, ''all it takes is one shell'' from 
Serbian artillery to create a horrific tragedy in a camp.

Seven refugee camps just outside Kukes have grown into small tent cities, some quite 
well equipped.

In fact, some relief workers have privately expressed

[CTRL] Women @ War

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From www.thenation.com/issue/990517/0517tax.html




May 17, 1999

FUNDAMENTALIST SOCIAL MOVEMENTS ATTACK FEMINISM AS PART OF THEIR WAR
ON MODERNITY; THE LEFT IGNORES CULTURAL MOVEMENTS AT ITS PERIL.

World Culture War



by MEREDITH TAX





In the past ten years, nationalist, communalist and religious fundamentalist social 
movements have surfaced all over the world, moving into the power vacuum created as 
local elites have been overwhelmed by the new global
financial ruling class. The emerging struggle is not between East and West, as Samuel 
Huntington would have it, but within both; it is a struggle between the forces of 
globalization and the atavistic social movements that
 have sprung up to oppose it. Civilian populations, especially ethnic minorities, 
women and children, are caught in between. Among such movements are the Taliban in 
Afghanistan; the Serbian nationalist movement (and its o
pposing counterparts elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia); Islamic fundamentalist 
movements in Egypt, Algeria and elsewhere; the Hindu communalist movement in India; 
the Israeli settler movement in the West Bank; and a who
le range of militantly patriarchal Christian groups, from the militias to Operation 
Rescue, in the United States.

These movements have in common a desire for racial, ethnic and religious homogeneity; 
an apocalyptic vision of purification through bloodshed; and a patriarchal view of 
women and the family. I call them atavistic because
of the way they yearn back to a mythic past, often the age of barbarism, when their 
nation, tribe or religion was great. ("Atavism: Biol. the reappearance in an 
individual of characteristics of some more or less remote an
cestor that have been absent in intervening generations." American College Dictionary) 
In Israel, to take one example, religious fundamentalists who believe they should 
control all the land that was biblical Israel's at i
ts point of greatest territorial strength have repeatedly brought the peace process to 
a standstill. And in the United States, a cadre of religiously driven conservative 
leaders paralyzed the federal government for more t
han a year in their campaign against the Sixties and Sin, both exemplified by Bill 
Clinton.

As central to such movements as ethnic or religious homogeneity is the control of 
women. Atavistic social movements attack feminism not only as an obstacle to such 
control but as part of their war on modernity itself, for
, like other movements for social and political rights, feminism is inescapably 
secular and thus part of the project of modernity, opposed to older forms of social 
organization in which women's needs and voices were subsu
med into a communal or religious entity represented by male elders. Even in countries 
where the women's movement is led by female versions of tribal elders, feminism 
resists being swallowed up in male definitions of the c
lass, the nation, the community; it sticks in the craw. Add to this the threat of 
female sexual and reproductive autonomy, then place both in the context of a volatile 
world situation where local males are losing power an
d the family has become the last bastion of unquestioned male authority and privilege, 
and what have you got? A world culture war, in which feminism becomes the scapegoat 
for every frustration and women become the focus o
f every contradiction.

This war takes culturally specific forms in each country, targeting poor women, 
because they are most vulnerable, and feminist intellectuals and organizers, because 
they stir up the others. Last month in the Bronx, Tabith
a Walrond, a 19-year-old African-American, was tried for homicide in the death of her 
infant son. She had been breast-feeding him; her milk was insufficient, and he died of 
malnutrition. The prosecution also charged her w
ith second-degree manslaughter and endangering the welfare of her child by failing to 
get him emergency medical care when his condition became acute. But Walrond was unable 
to get medical care for her son; she was repeate
dly denied a Medicaid ID number by a city administration that has shown an unholy 
eagerness to get women off the welfare rolls regardless of what will happen to them 
and their children. Tabitha Walrond is but one example
of the way American women are caught between the drive to cut government spending and 
release capital from all constraint on the one hand, and backlash tendencies invoking 
earlier, more patriarchal forms of social organiz
ation on the other.

To nationalist, communalist and religious backlash movements, feminism, no matter how 
rooted in local conditions, represents the globalizing forces that are undercutting 
patriarchal traditions. For them, it is intrinsical
ly foreign, a fifth column undermining their efforts at unity. This contradiction is 
vividly apparent in the former Yugoslavia. Relatively weak before the Yugoslav 
federation began to unravel, feminist groups in the vario
us r

[CTRL] Strange Brew

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From Inst for War & Peace Reporting
www.iwpr.net

Europe's Kosovo Dominoes

NATO's bombing campaign against Yugoslavia risks creating "new
Kosovos" throughout Central and Eastern Europe.

By Denisa Kostovicova in Bratislava

NATO's bombing campaign against Yugoslavia has sent shock waves
throughout Eastern Europe which are rocking the foundations of the
region's fledgling democracies.

Should democracy lose ground, the field for the nastiest of ethnic
politics remains wide open in a part of the world which is dotted
with potential, as yet unexploded Kosovos.

Stroll along the streets of Bratislava, Slovakia's capital, and you
could be forgiven for thinking you are in Belgrade. "STOP NATO", with
a swastika squeezed into the "O" of NATO, is scrawled on the walls.
Further on, protesters wave their placards: "NATO Hands Off
Yugoslavia."

Support for the hard-line, nationalist policy of Yugoslav President
Slobodan Milosevic is only partly a manifestation of Slav solidarity
between Slovaks and Serbs.

It also reflects attitudes of nationalist Slovaks to Slovakia's
Hungarian minority. Indeed, ethnic Hungarians, who make up 10.6 per
cent of the country's population, are already taking fright at the
apparent attraction of the Balkan recipe of an ethnically pure nation
state to some Slovak nationalists.

The new reformist liberal government aspires to Slovak membership of
NATO and has even allowed the alliance use of its airspace for the
operation against Yugoslavia.

But the majority of Slovaks, hitherto reluctant, are now convinced
that they do not want to join NATO. And they oppose the air strikes
against Yugoslavia.

As Slovakia prepares to go to the polls to elect a new President,
NATO's bombing campaign is stirring nationalist passions to the
advantage of the country's own strongman, Vladimir Meciar. Fears of a
return to intolerant authoritarianism with Meciar again at the helm
are more palpable with each day.

He has, after all, already managed two miraculous political comebacks
when prime minister before finally losing power in last autumn's
elections.

Ethnic Hungarians, who now have three ministers in government, are
acutely aware of what Meciar's return might herald. One of his last
legislative gifts was a ban on the Hungarian language on school
certificates and the subjugation of Hungarian-language schools to
Slovak jurisdiction.

In the face of the common threat, all ethnic Hungarian political
parties have put aside their ideological differences and banded
together to form a national bloc. It is a phenomenon which Slovak
political analysts have called "Slovakia's Kosovisation".

Nationalists across the border in Hungary are also raising their
voice. Although a marginal force in Hungarian politics, they
nonetheless have parliamentary representation and are calling for a
change of Hungary's southern borders to protect the Hungarian
minority in Serbia's northern province of Vojvodina, whom they
consider Serb hostages.

Janos Martonyi, the country's foreign minister, has denounced the
Hungarian nationalists, as has the leader of Vojvodina Hungarians,
who has also condemned the NATO intervention, not once but several
times. Neither Serbian nor Slovak Hungarians, it seems, wish to see
any change of borders.

The demands of Hungarian nationalists are, nevertheless, music to the
ears of their Slovak counterparts. As ever, extremists feed off and
derive strength from each other.

Romanians do not require interference from Budapest to feel uneasy
about their Hungarian minority, who account for 7.1 per cent of the
country's population. Romanians have already declared Serbs to be
heroes and view Kosovo as an unwelcome precedent. For them, NATO is
now fighting a war of independence on behalf of Kosovo's Albanians.
They fear the Hungarian-dominated Transylvania will be next.

Small wonder then that NATO-phobia has spread across Romania in the
wake of the bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. Only recently
enthusiastic about joining the military alliance, many Romanians now
view NATO as an aggressor and the United States as an interfering
bully, in similar terms to their Serb neighbours.

Ordinary Romanians are increasingly at odds with their elected
representatives who still aspire to NATO membership. But popular
support for Serbia has not gone unnoticed by Romania's Hungarians.
The improvement in inter-ethnic relations in Romania over the past
decade is by no means irreversible.

The democratic consensus between the leadership and the electorate
has come under pressure even in those Central and Eastern European
countries basking in the safety of relative if not absolute ethnic
homogeneity. Again, the trigger has been NATO's offensive against
Yugoslavia.

Popular opposition to the NATO operation is growing in the Czech
Republic. No sooner did Czechs become members of NATO then it ceased
being the alliance they had wanted to join in the first place. Czechs
sought membership to provide security from 

[CTRL] Espionage

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From TheIndependent (UK)
http://www.independent.co.uk/stories/indint.html

Secret British radar project hit by espionage scandal

By Mary Dejevsky in Washington



With the revelation that China's theft of American nuclear secrets
may have compromised the security of Britain's nuclear deterrent,
America's ever-expanding Chinese espionage scandal is now lapping at
British shores.

But the details are complex, confusing, and the effects largely
unproved. This is a tale of two nuclear projects, two US
laboratories, and two Dr Lees. The first Dr Lee, Wen Ho Lee, worked
at the US National Laboratory at Los Alamos for almost 20 years,
specialising in nuclear weapons design. After suspicions about his
loyalties, the Taiwan-born scientist was dismissed two months ago,
but the proof needed for prosecution, according to the FBI, is
lacking and he will not apparently be prosecuted.

According to revelations in The New York Times, Wen Ho Lee downloaded hundreds of 
top-secret files from his own secure computer system on to an unclassified computer, 
where they may have been accessed by the Chinese. Amon
g the data transferred, according to US officials, were details of British nuclear 
tests. The accessing is supposed to have been done by Chinese intelligence.

Wen Ho Lee's name was first mentioned in connection with China's apparent acquisition 
of US designs for a miniaturised nuclear warhead, which enabled a missile to be armed 
with multiple warheads. The theft, assumed to hav
e taken place in the mid-Eighties, came to light only when China tested one of the new 
missiles in 1995, and a close similarity was observed to their US equivalent.

The theft claim precipitated a welter of inquiries, and a security "tsar" is to be 
appointed to oversee all the US Department of Energy's laboratory security. In 
announcing the changes the Energy Secretary, Bill Richardso
n, conceded that China had been spying on US research laboratories for two decades, 
including the six years of Mr Clinton's presidency.

For Britain, however, it is another laboratory and another Lee who may have done the 
most damage. A Chinese-born physicist, Peter Lee, was working for a private company, 
TRW Incorporated, under the auspices of the Pentago
n. The technology was developed at the Lawrence Livermore national laboratory in 
California, where Dr Lee was working on a classified British-American project to 
develop radar that would be able to detect submarines from
the air. In May 1997, according to US officials, Dr Lee passed the information to 
Chinese scientists during a two-hour lecture in Peking.

Some details of the case emerged from a US Senate intelligence sub-committee report 
published this week, and Senator Jon Kyl was quoted as saying that China now had the 
technology to detect British and American nuclear su
bmarines. Britain's only nuclear deterrent is the Trident submarine.

Dr Lee pleaded guilty to filing a false statement about his trip to China in 1997 and 
to divulging classified data on laser technology to Chinese scientists during a trip 
to China 12 years before.

But the Senate intelligence sub-committee report acknowledged that much of the 
information used by China in weapons development could have been obtained from 
published sources. The proliferation of academic exchanges betw
een top scientists from China and the US has opened up much previously classified 
information. The growing practice of commissioning defence work from private research 
companies blurs responsibilities further.

Even if the spying allegations are true, there is no consensus on the extent of the 
damage. With the miniaturised nuclear warhead technology, experts say China may have 
recouped between 10 and 15 years of its research lag
 with the US.

Nick Cook, a military group specialists with Jane's, said the leak
about nuclear submarines was potentially devastating.

But Dr Eric Grove of the Centre for Security Studies at Hull
University said the theft would be more embarrassing than dangerous.
Even if the Chinese were able to detect a submarine, he said, they
lacked the expertise to do anything about it. Such a project, he
said, would "probably take up the entire Chinese defence programme".


And, and, and ...
the link to a version Tomlinson's web site is
(via Guardian/Observer):

http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/mi6/

A<>E<>R
~~~
The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled
one is truly vanquished. -Johann Christoph Schiller,
   German Writer (1759-1805)
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that
prevents us from living freely and nobly. -Bertrand Russell
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
Forwarded 

[CTRL] (Fwd) [FAIR-L] FORGOTTEN COVERAGE OF RAMBOUILLET NEGOTIATIONS

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

--- Forwarded Message Follows ---
Date sent:  Fri, 14 May 1999 15:43:53 -0400
Send reply to:  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From:   FAIR <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject:[FAIR-L] FORGOTTEN COVERAGE OF RAMBOUILLET NEGOTIATIONS
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]


 FAIR-L
Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting
   Media analysis, critiques and news reports




FAIR Media Advisory:
May 14, 1999

FORGOTTEN COVERAGE OF RAMBOUILLET NEGOTIATIONS:
Was A Peaceful Kosovo Solution Rejected by U.S.?

Since the beginning of the NATO attack on Yugoslavia, the war has been
presented by the media as the consequence of Yugoslavia's stubborn
refusal to settle for any reasonable peace plan--in particular its
rejection of plans for an international security force to implement a
peace plan in Kosovo.

An article in the April 14 New York Times stated that Yugoslavian
President Milosevic "has absolutely refused to entertain an outside
force in Kosovo, arguing that the province is sovereign territory of
Serbia and Yugoslavia."

Negotiations between the Serb and Albanian delegations at the
Rambouillet meeting in France ended with Yugoslavia's rejection of the
document that had been adopted, after much prodding, by the Kosovo
Albanian party.

But is that the whole story?

There were two parts to the peace proposals: a political agreement on
autonomy for Kosovo; and an implementation agreement on how to carry out
the political deal--usually understood to require international
peacekeepers in Kosovo.

By the end of the first round of Rambouillet in February, the Serb side
had agreed to the essentials of a political deal. Agence France Presse
(2/20/99) quoted a U.S. official as saying that the "political part" of
a peace accord "is almost not a problem, while the implementation part
has been reconsidered many times."

The U.S. wanted the Kosovo plan to be implemented by NATO troops under a
NATO command, and had already made plans for a 28,000-troop force. The
Yugoslavian leadership was opposed to the idea, claiming such an
arrangement would amount to a foreign occupation of Kosovo by hostile
forces.

On February 20, the Russian ITAR-TASS news agency reported from
Rambouillet that unnamed "Contact Group members may offer, as a
compromise, Milosevic an option under which a multinational force will
be deployed under the U.N. or the OSCE flag rather than the NATO flag as
was planned before."

Agence France Presse reported the same day that the Serb delegation
"showed signs that it might accept international peacekeepers on
condition that they not be placed under NATO command" and added that the
head of the Serb delegation "insisted that the peacekeepers answer to a
non-military body such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation
in Europe...or the United Nations." A U.S. official confirmed this to
AGP: "The discussions are on whether it should be a UN or OSCE force,"
the official said.

The next day, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright declared: "We accept
nothing less than a complete agreement, including a NATO-led force."
Asked on CNN the same day: "Does it have to be [a] NATO-led force, or as
some have suggested, perhaps a UN-led force or an OSCE...force? Does it
specifically have to be NATO-run?" she replied, "The United States
position is that it has to be a NATO-led force. That is the basis of our
participation in it."

Two days later, Albright repeated this position at a press conference:
"It was asked earlier, when we were all together whether the force could
be anything different then a NATO-led force. I can just tell you point
blank from the perspective of the United States, absolutely not, it must
be a NATO-led force."

Over the next month, this position was repeated countless times with
increasing vehemence by State Department officials. Furthermore, the
U.S. refused to allow the Serbs to sign the political agreement until
they first agreed to a NATO-led force to implement it.

"The Serbs have been acting as if there are two documents but they can't
pick and choose," Albright said (AGP, 3/13/99). "There is no way to have
the political document without the implementation force that has to be
NATO-led If they are not willing to engage on the military and
police chapters, there is no agreement."

Finally, on March 23, the day before the NATO bombing began, Ambassador
Richard Holbrooke met with Milosevic one last time to deliver his
ultimatum: Sign the agreement or be bombed. The response was delivered
that night by the Serbian parliament, which adopted resolutions again
rejecting the military portion of the accords, but expressing
willingness to review the "range and character of an international
presence" in Kosovo.

At a March 24 State Department press briefing, spokesman James Rubin was
asked about this development:

QUESTION: Was there any follow-up to the Serbian Assembly's yesterday?
The

[CTRL] Selective Memory

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From Boston Globe

Clinton offers a plan for Balkan rebuilding

By Michael Kranish, Globe Staff, 05/14/99

ASHINGTON - President Clinton proposed a postwar rebuilding
effort in Kosovo and other parts of southeastern Europe yesterday
that would be comparable, he suggested, to the Marshall Plan. Efforts
to negotiate an end to the war, meanwhile, continued slowly on
several fronts.

Yugoslav officials distributed a videotape of 150 soldiers who had
reportedly left Kosovo, attempting to show a partial pullout was
under way. But NATO spokesman Jamie Shea in Brussels said the event
was staged and meaningless. Some 40,000 Yugoslav troops remain in
Kosovo, NATO officials said.

Clinton, in a speech to veterans in Washington, again laid out the
rationale for the air raids, comparing President Slobodan Milosevic's
''ethnic cleansing'' of the Albanians in Kosovo to the Holocaust.

''Though his ethnic cleansing is not the same as the ethnic
extermination of the Holocaust, the two are related - both vicious,
premeditated, systematic oppression, fueled by religious and ethnic
hatred,'' Clinton said.

In Moscow, the US deputy secretary of state, Strobe Talbott, met with
Viktor Chernomyrdin, Russia's envoy to the Balkans. After the
meeting, Chernomyrdin said, ''We have moved closer to a solution.''

It was difficult to gauge the state of the negotiations because
Russia is in turmoil over the impeachment proceedings against
President Boris N. Yeltsin and his firing of Prime Minister Yevgeny
Primakov.

A White House official said there had been no breakthrough in the
talks, and Russia's UN ambassador, Sergei Lavrov, said no resolution
on a Kosovo peace plan can pass the Security Council until the
bombing has stopped.

Yeltsin, for a second day in a row, threatened to withdraw Russia
from diplomatic efforts to find a political settlement if NATO
continues to bomb Yugoslavia over Moscow's objections.

Yeltsin made the remarks at a meeting yesterday with visiting French
President Jacques Chirac, who later said that ''nothing would be
worse than if Russia left this negotiating process.'' Chirac added,
however, that he saw no indications that Russia was actually planning
to pull out.

Chinese officials, still angry over last week's accidental bombing of
their embassy in Belgrade, remained adamant that the bombing of
Yugoslavia should stop before they will back a truce plan. But NATO
warplanes continued to hit targets throughout the region, shelling a
number of sites in Kosovo yesterday.

Without providing any specifics, Clinton called for a massive
rebuilding program in Kosovo and neighboring areas affected by the
war, suggesting that the effort would be comparable to the Marshall
Plan following World War II.

''Southeastern Europe after the Cold War was free but poor. As long
as they are poor, they will offer a less compelling counterweight to
the kind of ethnic exclusivity and oppression that Mr. Milosevic
preaches,'' Clinton said.

''If you believed the Marshall Plan worked, then we have to work with
our European allies to rebuild southeastern Europe and give them an
economic future that will pull them together,'' the president told
200 members of Veterans of Foreign Wars.

In light of prior statements by Clinton that NATO is not trying to
replace Milosevic, Clinton's proposal for a postwar aid program
prompted questions about whether Milosevic might benefit from the
plan. White House spokesman Joseph Lockhart declined to rule out the
possibility that Milosevic's government would get the aid, but he
cast doubt on the idea.

''I just can't imagine that as we look into the future, that the rest
of Europe would be looking to work cooperatively with an autocratic
regime that could perpetrate the kind of atrocities that have been
done over the last several years,'' Lockhart said.

Clinton has said that Kosovo should be an autonomous region, but
should remain part of Yugoslavia, while the Kosovo Liberation Army
wants a separate state.

Clinton made his speech, aimed at shoring up public support for the
NATO attacks, a day after the White House hired a new public
relations consultant, Leslie Dach, for the temporary job of improving
the administration's communications about Kosovo. Dach, vice chairman
of Edelman Worldwide, is a well-known figure in Washington who once
was communications director for Michael S. Dukakis's presidential
campaign.

Today, Hillary Rodham Clinton is scheduled to visit the Brazda
refugee camp near Skopje, Macedonia, that has 18,700 refugees.

Meanwhile, Mary Robinson, UN high commissioner for human rights, was
denied her request to meet with Milosevic in Belgrade. Robinson said
she had collected evidence that ''people in uniform'' had driven many
ethnic Albanians from their homes.

''In all of the cases, I asked, `Was it the bombing?' and I was told
`No, it was not.' I have to conclude that there must be some reason
why President Milosevic did not wish to meet me. I certainly wanted
to me

[CTRL] Camping: 05-14-99

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From Irish Times

Friday, May 14, 1999

600,000 people in Kosovo 'struggle to survive'
--
With expulsions from Kosovo still continuing, refugee agencies must
consider the long-term implications, Kathy Sheridan reports from
Skopje

KOSOVO: For now, the figures look neat. Around 79,000 places are
still available on the humanitarian evacuation programme for around
85,000 currently in the camps.

What they do not include, however, are the 150,000 refugees currently
billeted with host families in Macedonia. Nor do they include the
many thousands presumed to be sitting it out across the border in
Kosovo, where according to a new US government report, at least
600,000 displaced people "are now struggling to survive".

Far from diminishing, the pace of expulsions has continued to build,
averaging more than 10,000 a day into Albania and Montenegro, meaning
that it may be a matter of weeks before the Serbs achieve their goal
and most of those remaining will be out or on their way out.

No one knows how many are dammed up behind the Blace border but the
feeling in Skopje is of the calm before the storm. A second camp is
being built at Blace with a 9,000 capacity.

Yesterday, border police allowed 47 undocumented refugees through at
the Blace crossing - by far the highest number in the eight days
since it was effectively closed. It may signify a relaxation on the
part of the government here and it will certainly be encouraging news
for others left behind, who monitor the BBC and Macedonian television
for news of crossings and read the signs. "If we don't come back,
you'll know we've crossed," said those who went ahead.

Those crossing through mountain areas report that the Serbs are
continuing to mine unofficial crossings.

One woman claimed that she had been shot at by Macedonian police
while trying to cross two weeks ago.

They had their first night of peace last night in the not-so-
luxurious surroundings of Stenkovec 1, where yesterday some classy
paving was being laid in the baked earth outside the shabby building
housing the police station and three shops.

With refugees stubbornly refusing to be coaxed towards Albania - a
dirt-poor place of anarchy, criminals and rapists, they say, where
the camps are as blisteringly hot and horrible as anywhere else -
this may be an intimation of administrators digging in for the long
haul.

Despite an open invitation from the Albanian government to all
comers, only 166 have taken it up.

Flights to Slovenia and Turkey have also been poorly subscribed to.
Some observers believe that the UNHCR's central premise that all such
moves should be strictly "voluntary" is taken too literally and that
not enough is being done to educate or inform.

Meanwhile, planners must try to second-guess the politicians and
decide whether to "winterise" the camps - in these parts temperatures
can reach 40C in the summer and plummet to 20C in the winter - or
assemble materials for the rebuilding of Kosovo. The UNHCR says it
has begun to do both.

Should they build latrine blocks or exchange the tents for pre-fabs?
Seek to heat the (currently cold) water? Establish centralised
cooking points, fuel and heating? And how will the Macedonians
respond once they see a sense of permanence developing around these
eyesores, peopled with angry young men, the poor and the
dispossessed?

But the possibility of a return to Kosovo has also to be considered -
another imponderable as no one knows what remains standing there.
UNHCR logistics teams are storing timber supplies on the basis of the
Bosnian experience where returnees were able to make at least one
room habitable quickly.

There is nothing simple about this war. And there is no doubt that
some big players are in for the long haul. US civilians working on
the construction of the US army base here have told The Irish Times
that they have signed five year contracts.

~~

>From Boston Globe

Life in the camps

By David Nyhan, Globe Columnist, 05/14/99

olunteering in Tirana to help the American Refugee Committee set
up on the ground to help minister to hundreds of thousands of Kosovar
refugees, Peter Lucas promptly discovered what was most needed in the
1,000-person camp at Golem on the Adriatic coast: ''frozen chicken
and ladies' underwear.''

It was part Frank Perdue and part Victoria's Secret, but it worked.
Red tape, inefficiency, ethnic rivalries, and desperate shortages of
everything from good roads to adequate transport make it hard to
shuffle supplies to those most in need. So the veteran Boston-born
journalist-turned-bureaucrat, one of the first Americans of Albanian
descent to reenter the tiny nation after its half-century-long
isolation from the West under communism, played his hole card: the
plastic one.

''With my friend, Agim, I went to the American Express office in
Tirana, gave them my credit card, and eventually got $2,000 in
traveler's chec

[CTRL] Right to Know

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From http://www.pirg.org
Via http://www.commondreams.org/pressreleases/may99/

MAY  12, 1999  1:50 PM
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: US Public Interest Research Group
Allison LaPlante (202) 546-9707
Paul Burns (617) 292-4800
  Right-To-Know Data Show Significant Increases In Toxic waste;
Industrial Pollution Prevention Efforts Failing   WASHINGTON - May 13
- Increases in toxic wastes managed and chemicals released to the
environment reported to in the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI)
demonstrate that pollution prevention is failing, according to U.S.
PIRG.

The EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory data show that toxic wastes
managed by industries increased by 11.7 percent between 1996 and
1997. This indicates that industries are failing to reduce the toxic
wastes they manage and failing to reduce toxic pollution at the
source. The data also show that toxic chemical releases to the
environment have increased slightly. Releases to the air, land and
water between 1996 and 1997 increased by 2.2 percent nationally.

“It is troubling to see a first-time increase in toxic chemical
releases to the environment, but it is even more troubling that toxic
wastes managed by industries continue to increase year after year,”
said Allison LaPlante, U.S. PIRG Environmental Advocate. “This
pattern indicates that pollution prevention in this country is not
working. A nearly twelve percent increase in quantities of waste
managed is the greatest increase we’ve seen in several years.”

The 1990 Pollution Prevention Act declared a national policy that
pollution “should be prevented or reduced at the source whenever
feasible,” but the TRI data indicate that these goals are not being
met. The quantities of toxic wastes managed from year to year are
currently the best indicators of industry trends in pollution
prevention. Increases in quantities of waste managed show that
industries may be shifting toxic hazards from one area of the
environment to another, rather than avoiding creating the waste in
the first place.

States with Right to Know programs that go beyond the federal program
and focus on how toxic chemicals are used show very different
results. In Massachusetts, for example, manufacturers decreased their
total toxic chemical use by 24 percent, their waste generation by
41percent and their total toxic chemical releases by 80 percent
between 1990 and 1997. In contrast, TRI data show a national increase
of eight percent in waste managed by industries between 1991 and
1997.

“The numbers from Massachusetts tell a better story about pollution
prevention,” said Paul Burns, MASSPIRG’s Toxics Advocate. “Since the
1990 Toxics Use Reduction Act has been in place, Massachusetts has
been a leader in pollution prevention. Industries in Massachusetts
are reducing their reliance on chemicals that may cause cancer, birth
defects or other serious health problems. Although Massachusetts
industries must continue to reduce toxic chemical use, this state’s
program should be a national model,” said Burns.

“The federal Right to Know program has provided the public with
critical information and has led to significant decreases in toxic
chemical pollution, but it is only a fraction of the real toxic
picture. We are urging Congress to support legislation that would
require industries to publicly report on their toxic chemical use,
allowing the public to more accurately track pollution prevention
progress and encouraging industries to reduce hazardous wastes and
toxic chemical use,” said LaPlante.

Legislation is pending in Congress that would expand the federal
Right to Know program to include toxic chemical use reporting,
additional sources of toxic chemical pollution, and stricter
reporting for extremely dangerous substances. The Children’s
Environmental Protection and Right to Know Act of 1999, H.R. 1657, is
modeled after successful state programs in Massachusetts and New
Jersey. The bill was introduced last week by Representatives Henry
Waxman (D-CA) and Jim Saxton (R-NJ) with the support of 123 original
cosponsors.

The Waxman/Saxton Right to Know bill is being introduced as the EPA
is also considering expanding the Right to Know program to include
reporting on extremely dangerous substances that currently escape the
public’s view because of a loophole in the law. Persistent
Bioaccumulative Toxins (PBTs) like dioxin, mercury and lead are
extremely dangerous in small quantities, persist in the environment
for long periods of time and build up in human and animal tissue.

“The public receives almost no information about the toxic chemicals
that pose the greatest threat. These are the substances we should be
working to eliminate. At a minimum, we have the right to know when
they are being used and released in our communities,” said LaPlante.
“We are calling on the EPA to require complete reporting of all
persistent or bioaccumulative toxins.” said LaPlante.
###

>From www.citizen.org (via commondreams.org)

MAY  13, 1999  3:10 PM
FOR

[CTRL] Trade War

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From Int'l Herald Tribune

Paris, Friday, May 14, 1999


WTO Fight Raises Risk Of Further Trade Wars

Deadlock on Chief Stymies Trade Body


--
--
By Alan Friedman International Herald Tribune
--
--
ROME - With the World Trade Organization increasingly paralyzed by a
bitter dispute over who will be its next leader, the risk of a series
of regional and global trade wars is mounting, according to senior
trade officials and economists.

In Tokyo, a two-day meeting of senior trade officials from the United
States, the European Union, Japan and Canada ended Thursday without
agreement or even any apparent progress on who should be the next
director-general of the WTO, the leading arbiter of international
commercial disputes and embodiment of global trade rules and
regulations.

In Brussels meanwhile, the EU on Thursday ignored a deadline set by
the WTO to lift its 10-year ban on U.S. and Canadian beef produced
with genetically engineered hormones. This move is likely to trigger
retaliation from Washington and could lead to a new trans-Atlantic
trade war. (Page 17)

The WTO leadership vacuum, and divisions among member states, could
also delay efforts to negotiate terms for China's long-sought
membership in the Geneva-based organization. Experts also note that
preparations for an important fresh round of global trade talks,
scheduled to begin in Seattle this year, remain stalled, a
disagreement exacerbated by the WTO impasse.

''The big risk,'' said Robert Hormats, a vice president of Goldman,
Sachs International and a former U.S. financial official, ''is that
this situation will weaken the WTO at a time when it really needs all
the cohesion and unity it can muster.''

Mr. Hormats warned that in the absence of strong leadership, trade
tensions between the United States and its partners in Europe and
Japan could fester. ''I think the great danger to the system now is
that having survived the worst financial crisis of the postwar
period, we could soon find ourselves embroiled in an escalating
series of trade conflicts which would be very harmful to the world
economy,'' he said.

The leadership struggle - which pits a former prime minister of New
Zealand, Mike Moore, against the deputy prime minister and commerce
minister of Thailand, Supachai Panitchpakdi - is seen by both U.S.
and European officials as highly divisive, especially as it has begun
to polarize blocks of developing countries against some of the
leading industrialized powers.

White House officials refrain from criticizing Mr. Supachai in
public. But some officials make clear privately why they are refusing
to back him by accusing him of improper campaign tactics. In
Washington, a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said
the Clinton administration ''began with a fairly agnostic position at
first, but then swung behind Moore when we began hearing reports
about Supachai being divisive, campaigning against the idea of
discussing trade and labor issues, and even making promises of WTO
jobs to some member countries in exchange for their support.''

Speaking from Tokyo on Thursday, Charlene Barshefsky, the U.S. trade
representative, did not criticize Mr. Supachai, but gave strong
support to Mr. Moore, a free-trade advocate who is credited with
having helped to transform New Zealand from a bastion of
protectionist regulations into a model free-market economy.

''We believe that Mr. Moore would be the most effective consensus-
builder within the WTO, and on that basis support his candidacy,''
Ms. Barshefsky said. She added that the WTO needs ''leadership across
a wide spectrum of issues of concern to developing and developed
countries alike.''

While Mr. Moore has the backing of the United States, plus France,
Germany, Italy and many countries in Africa, the Caribbean and Latin
America, Mr. Supachai has won the support of Japan, most Asian
nations, many in the Middle East and almost half of the European
Union.

Britain has voiced support for Mr. Supachai, arguing that it is time
for a WTO chief who hails from the developing world, while the
Netherlands supports him because of his ties to Amsterdam.

Mr. Supachai, who could not be reached for comment Thursday, has
denied claims of vote-buying and of opposing trade talks related to
labor issues. In a recent interview with the International Herald
Tribune, he complained of a campaign of rumor and innuendo against
his candidacy.

On Wednesday, Thailand claimed Mr. Supachai had majority support.
''In our latest survey, dated May 7, we have 77 countries supporting
Supachai and 41 supporting Moore,'' a Foreign Ministry spokesman
said.

Those figures contrast sharply with those of Ali Mchumo, the
Tanzanian trade ambassador who is chairman of the WTO selection
committee. Mr. Mchumo has said that 62 countries support Mr. Moore
and 59 back Mr. Supachai.

[CTRL] Logistics, Policy, Purpose

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/133/oped

How to mount a ground war in the Balkans

By Bernard E. Trainor, 05/13/99



espite the G-7 and Russian proposal to solve the Kosovo
crisis, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is not willing to
consider it without a halt to the bombing. This would allow him to
string out negotiations while he finishes his dirty work free of air
attacks. Moreover, there is no indication that the air campaign is
bringing him to heel. If he remains obdurate and turns a deaf ear to
a negotiated settlement on other than his own terms, NATO must
consider the use of ground forces.

White House denials to the contrary, the failure of NATO strategy
thus far keeps the topic alive. If, in the long run, NATO does decide
to look for a solution on the ground, there are basically two
choices. One makes the clearest military sense, if success is defined
as a quick and clear victory, but it has daunting political
implications. The other achieves a more limited goal, but is
militarily complicated.

The option most frequently discussed publicly would see NATO ground
troops come into Kosovo from either Macedonia or Albania or both.
This option has the advantage of dealing directly with the problem at
hand and conforms with the current limited NATO goals of returning
displaced Kosovar Albanians to their homes and protecting them from
further attacks.

To mount such an operation into Kosovo, NATO needs a far larger and
more heavily equipped force than the 12,000 troops currently in
Macedonia, who were to be peacekeepers under the Rambouillet
agreement. Half measures in Kosovo, such as carving out a ''safe
haven'' for the Kosovar Albanians with the small NATO forces at hand
in Macedonia could be foolhardy as it would make the enclave an easy
target for Serb artillery and ground attacks despite allied air
supremacy. However, wars are not won or lost solely with numbers.

There is an old military saying that applies: ''Amateurs talk
strategy, professionals talk logistics.'' The logistics in this case
are particularly demanding and it could take months to prepare an
attack from the south. Because of the mountain remoteness and lack of
infrastructure in the region, military engineers would have to build
and improve roads and bridges before NATO forces were capable of more
than token intervention into Kosovo. Even if Macedonia agreed to
allow heavy NATO reinforcements to stage on its territory and the
Greeks permitted their transit (not a certain thing), there is only
one decent road running from the port of entry in Salonika in Greece
to Skopje in Macedonia.

Albania presents even greater geographical and logistic obstacles.
Its border with Kosovo consists of rugged mountains, with only one
primitive road at Kukes passing through them to Kosovo. Albania's
capital, Tirana, has the largest airfield in the country, but it is
inadequate for heavy military traffic. Its two ports at Durres and
Shengjin cannot be used to move large amounts supplies and equipment
quickly.

A long, slow buildup of forces for an offensive out of either Albania
or Macedonia could lead to a winter campaign, which NATO certainly
does not want as it would sorely degrade allied air support. While
the lengthy buildup proceeded, the Yugoslavian army would have ample
time to reinforce its 43,000 soldiers and paramilitaries already in
Kosovo and to build defenses. They would also be secure in the
knowledge that when their defenses were breached they always had the
option of retreating into Serbia and dragging the war out.

While the Macedonia military option fails to challenge Milosevic's
power directly, political leaders may find it acceptable because it
is limited in scope and nature, but military logic runs against it.

When it comes to military planning, the quickest way to victory is
not always a straight line. Yugoslavia's geography offers NATO
planners another military option, but at a much higher political
risk. It would require NATO to abandon limiting its goal of returning
and protecting the Kosovar Albanians for one that would destroy the
Yugoslavian army and remove Milsosevic and his ruling clique from
power.

>From a military perspective, a powerful NATO army could be set in
motion much more quickly and effectively from the north out of
Hungary. The troops are at hand for such an offensive. Taking
advantage of Europe's superior transportation systems, armored and
mechanized infantry forces of the United States, France, Britain,
Germany and the Netherlands, currently stationed in northern Europe,
could move by rail and road to the borders of Yugoslavia through the
Czech Republic and Hungary far more quickly than transporting them to
Macedonia or Albania.

NATO, of course, would have to persuade two of its new members to
allow their territory to be used as transit and staging areas for the
attack, no simple matter.

Several hundred thousand ethnic Hungarians live in Vojvodina, the
region of Serbia near the Hun

[CTRL] Int'l Views

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From Slate.CoM

international papers

Let's Blame Bill

By Alexander Chancellor


The frustration of the bellicose British press at the half-hearted
pursuit of the war in Kosovo vented itself Wednesday in an
editorial in the Times attacking President Clinton, who, it said,
has "proved his absolute inadequacy as a Commander-in-Chief,
stumbling on a stage that is bigger than his talents can match and
performing with hesitancy, frailty and fear." It added, "[T]his war
will not be serious until Mr Clinton listens to the Pentagon,
rather than the latest opinion poll. He has never countenanced a
campaign plan; and in the absence of one, even air power has been
misapplied. ... Mr Clinton has retreated into the semantic
ambiguities for which his presidency has become infamous." The
editorial concluded that "[f]or Nato, for European peace and for
Britain, the true, high reckoning begins: it is called failure."

The Daily Telegraph led its front page Wednesday with a report that
both Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were struggling
"to hold back a growing tide of criticism of their leadership of
the Kosovo conflict." Along with other papers, the Telegraph
reported cracks in British bipartisan support for the NATO
offensive. In an article in the Telegraph, the Conservative Party
spokesman on foreign affairs, Michael Howard, called for the
establishment of a committee of inquiry into the war and the
"diplomatic failures" that preceded it. Howard described the
bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade as "an act of gross
incompetence." He said, "To use outdated street maps for an
operation of this kind beggars belief."

The liberal Guardian led Wednesday on "gloom" in NATO as China and
Russia hardened their demands for a halt to airstrikes before they
will agree to support peace moves in the United Nations. Having
consistently urged the use of ground forces, the paper finally
recognized in an editorial that "the possibility of a ground attack
has dwindled." It said that the British and the French have been
willing to do their bit but that Clinton "could not muster the
will, or lacks the necessary political weight, to commit the United
States to ground action." The central issue now, it said, is that
"NATO forces, acting for the Kosovo Albanians, must have
preponderant physical power on the ground, whatever the formalities
of status may be." The liberal Independent's front-page lead spoke
of "an unmistakable whiff of panic and confusion in the West's
councils of war."

There was gloom on the continent as well. Le Monde of Paris led its
front page Wednesday with the headline "Kosovo emptied of half its
population" and said in an editorial that President Slobodan
Milosevic knows--"because we have been at pains to tell him"--that
he need not fear a land offensive, and he knows the limits of the
air bombardments. "He can, at his leisure, test the unity and
determination of the allies," it added. "One way or another, it is
always he who holds the cards." On Tuesday, the Greek daily Ta Nea
published a leaked NATO document warning that Albania, Montenegro,
and Macedonia are in imminent danger of economic and political
collapse because of the Kosovo crisis. The displacement of nearly
600,000 Kosovar refugees threatens to destabilize the entire
region, it said. The "restricted" memo, dated April 29, was
reported to have been sent by NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana
to the alliance's 19 member states last week.

With only five days to go before voting in the Israeli general
election, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is
reported to be reconciled to defeat. The main headline Wednesday in
the daily Maariv quoted Netanyahu as saying, "I'll apparently
lose." One senior Likud Party official told Yediot Aharanot, "We
don't have many good reasons to be optimistic." Meanwhile, two more
public opinion polls showed that Labor Party and One Israel leader
Ehud Barak is moving inexorably ahead. The Jerusalem Post led
Wednesday on Netanyahu deciding, because of the polls, to take
personal charge of Likud's TV advertising campaign.

Ha'aretz led on Defense Minister Moshe Arens accepting the
possibility of a Palestinian state. He reportedly said that recent
developments have made territorial compromise inevitable. The
Jerusalem correspondent of the Independent of London described the
hatred among different religious and ethnic communities that has
surfaced during the Israeli election campaign. In one TV debate,
Yusef Lapid, a Holocaust survivor and founder of the Shinui Party
which seeks to reduce the influence of ultra-Orthodox Jews,
challenged Eli Suissa, the ultra-Orthodox interior minister, with
the words: "Maybe you'd like to put me in a concentration camp?" To
this Suissa replied, "You've already been in a concentration camp
and you didn't learn your lesson."

The firing of Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov by Boris
Yeltsin two days before impeachment proceedings against the
pre

[CTRL] Perspectivisationalisticity

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/thomas.html

Jewish World Review May 12, 1999 /26 Iyar 5759

Cal Thomas

""What's to go back to, and who will pay to rebuild the houses? If
you guess the American taxpayer in order to save Bill Clinton's
"legacy,'' you would be making a safe bet.""

OAF-ish behavior explains U.S. mistakes

(JWR)  (http://www.jewishworldreview.com)
THE MILITARY AIR FORCES assembled to bomb Yugoslavia are known as
Operation Allied Force, acronym OAF, or oaf. An oaf is defined as:
"Originally, an elf's child; a changeling left by fairies or goblins;
hence, a deformed or foolish child; a simpleton; an idiot.''

That about sums up our policy in the matter of the relentless and, so
far, ineffective air attacks on Yugoslavia. Nothing has gone right,
unless you count Jesse Jackson's freelance rescue mission, which the
Clinton administration supposedly opposed.

Our announced goal of stopping Slobodan Milosevic from his ethnic
cleansing of Kosovo has failed. Now we say our policy is to make
Kosovo "safe'' for the return of the refugees, many of whose houses
have been destroyed and whose relatives are dead. What's to go back
to, and who will pay to rebuild the houses? If you guess the American
taxpayer in order to save Bill Clinton's "legacy,'' you would be
making a safe bet.

The bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade was a fiasco. I'm
surprised the president didn't claim that it was a retaliatory strike
for stolen nuclear secrets and the systematic effort by the Chinese
government to influence the 1996 election, which is expected to be
detailed in the soon-to-be released Cox committee report. Why not?
Given Clinton's success at persuading the polled that his motives are
good, even if his actions are not, he could have had those soccer
moms swooning again.

The embassy bombing was first described as an accident and one of the
unfortunate consequences of warfare (though this unfortunate "war''
remains undeclared and a spineless Congress has been unable to come
up with anything remotely approaching leadership on the issue). It
was then said NATO was operating off old and "bad intelligence.'' Bad
intelligence describes the people who conceived and are executing
this unworkable strategy with unwinnable objectives.

Apologies were repeatedly offered to China. The Clinton
administration, which has based its domestic strategy on feelings,
apparently can't understand why apologies don't work with Beijing. A
government-sponsored demonstration against the U.S. Embassy put
American ambassador James Sasser and his staff under virtual house
arrest.

Ulysses S. Grant had this view of war: "The art of war is simple
enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can.
Strike at him as hard as you can and as often as you can, and keep
moving on.''

Such a philosophy presumes one has the will, the expertise and the
proper implements to wage war successfully. In the case of the
Clinton administration, there is no vision, save a '60s-generation
"one-world'' mentality; our military is as weak as, or weaker than,
during the Carter years; our intelligence capabilities may not have
been this poor since Sen. Frank Church's committee began dismantling
the CIA in the '70s; and the doctrine of Colin Powell, so successful
in the Gulf War, has been replaced by an air war conceived in error
and carried out with the same goals as a video game -- no combat
deaths, no injuries and, depending on the results, the presumption
that something significant has been won or that nothing important has
been lost.

The only way to keep Milosevic from killing more innocent people is
to remove him and his friends from office by force. Doing that will
require sending massive numbers of ground troops, which President
Clinton knows he cannot afford to do. Remember, he let his fellow
Americans go to Vietnam and get killed while kept himself safe for
the presidency.

The cost of this administration will be paid on an installment plan
over many years. More than our defense and intelligence capabilities
will have to be rebuilt when Clinton finally leaves office. American
credibility and prestige will also have to be repaired. The
credibility and prestige part might not take long if our next
president has integrity. The rest will take longer and cost a lot of
money.

But that's what happens when we elect and maintain an oaf in office.





I05/07/99: Israel's high-stakes election
05/04/99: Jeb Bush chooses to save kids, not institutions
04/26/99: Surrendering our civilization
04/26/99: War abroad, war at home
04/22/99: Those wild and crazy (Democrat) tax-cutters
04/16/99: Bubba’s contemptible behavior
04/14/99:Elizabeth Dole's choice
04/09/99: The taxman cometh
04/05/99: MEMO: MAKE LOVE AND WAR -- AND KEEP IT SIMPLE
03/30/99: Human-rights terror in China
03/25/99: Yasser Arafat:
bad cop, worse cop
03/23/99: Bubba’s multiplied lies
03/18/99: Reinventing AlGore
03/16/99:Americans get bull while China sh

[CTRL] Brits at War

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From wsws.org

WSWS : News & Analysis : Europe : The Balkan Crisis

Chinese embassy bombing escalates political tensions in Britain

Conservatives tell Blair to mount ground war or prepare for defeat

By Chris Marsden
13 May 1999

The aftershock from NATO's bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade
has split cross-party unity in Britain for the air war against
Serbia. The Conservative Party, sensing a disaster in the making,
have launched a campaign to make sure that everyone knows that this
is "Blair's war" and that any blame for failure must be laid to rest
at his door. They have coupled this with demands for ground war as
the only realistic option for success.

Shadow Foreign Secretary Michael Howard first launched an attack on
the government in Parliament, calling the bombing of the Chinese
embassy an example of "gross incompetence". The following day he
upped the ante by writing an article in the Daily Telegraph, in which
he noted that the air war had worsened a "humanitarian disaster" and
that there were "diplomatic failures leading up to the crisis."

"Two things have been lacking," he added, "clarity in NATO's
objectives, and a consistency in the means employed to carry them
out. The impression is given that the action is being made up as we
go along, and has not been properly thought through." Pointing to
Blair's contradictory statements regarding the use of ground troops,
he asked, "We want to know whether such a decision has been
taken—and, if not, if and when it will be."

Howard concluded by calling for the convening of an inquiry into the
conduct of the war after it ended. His line was echoed by Sir Malcolm
Rifkind, former Secretary of State for Defence, who said, "I am still
puzzled why Mr. Blair did not take the advice of our military. I was
at the Ministry of Defence during the Bosnia conflict where the
limits of air power were impressed on me. I cannot imagine that the
assessment would be any different now."

Heavyweights within the civil service and the military were quoted in
sympathy with these views. Sir John Weston, former British Ambassador
to both NATO and the UN, said, "The continued credibility of both is
an overriding long-term Western interest, and requires a surer touch
by political leaders. Meanwhile, persevere; and be ready to put
forces on the ground in Kosovo."

Former Chief of Defence Staff Lord Craig asked, "Are we now after
military victory? Will we use ground forces? What are our military
objectives? Where is the consistency in all of this?"

The reaction in the Conservative Press has been even more forthright.
In an article in the Telegraph entitled "It's time for Plan B—always
assuming NATO has got one", columnist Boris Johnson wrote, "With the
distinguished exception of Sion Simon, I can't think of a single
general, armchair supremo, or indeed anyone, who thinks this war is
anything but a complete and utter shambles The point is that
Milosevic has at no point been confronted by the kind of offensive
that might have made sense of the war."

The Times said of the embassy bombing, "A single crass mistake has
compounded the already growing public unease that the conduct of this
war is fundamentally unserious Both politically and militarily,
time is running out if disaster is to be avoided. The war of public
opinion is being lost."

Calling for a ground war, its editorial continued, "War on the cheap
is an oxymoron. The Kosovans have already suffered disastrously from
this half-war. For NATO, for European peace and for Britain, the
true, high reckoning beckons: it is called failure."

Blair has become increasingly desperate regarding the mounting
opposition to the war against Serbia and the crisis faced by his
government. This week he even made a scathing attack on the media for
its supposed underplaying of the plight of Kosovar Albanians—the
central justification for the NATO offensive. He berated the
assembled journalists with the remark, "Once you've reported one mass
rape, the next one's not so newsworthy. Seen one mass grave, you've
seen the lot."

The government response to Howard's statements was to accuse the
Tories of “undermining the morale” of the British forces. Blair's
main spokesman, Alistair Campbell, said, “Michael Howard won't cut
much ice with the government or the British people, who acknowledge
that in conflict situation things can get tough from time to time and
people have to show some determination and resolve, not flake off at
the first sign of trouble.”

The situation is an explosive one. Faced with the failure of their
air-war strategy, growing antagonisms with Russia and China, and a
vociferous campaign by the Conservative right, the Labour government
is being pushed into a no-win situation. Blair has linked his future
firmly to that of Clinton in the US. Only the US can decide whether a
ground war will be called. If it is not, then Blair will be savaged
by the Tories and the media for his Balkan escapade. If it is,

[CTRL] Balkan "Klondike"

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From  www.sfgate.com

Albanians Try to Take Over Kosovars' Crime Network
War leaves drug, arms traffic up for grabs
Frank Viviano, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 11, 1999
©1999 San Francisco Chronicle

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-
bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1999/05/11/MN20212.DTL



In the shadows of the war in Kosovo, a ferocious upheaval is
reshaping the criminal landscape of Europe.

As NATO bombs and Serbian troops disrupt a Kosovar crime network
that has dominated the narcotics trade across the continent,
underworld clans from neighboring Albania are making a powerful
bid to take over.

They are the real government of Europe's poorest -- and most
lawless -- nation, and by some estimates even more dangerous to
the Allied campaign than the tanks and anti-aircraft systems of
Yugoslavia.

``Albania has become the leading country in a wide variety of
trafficking, in clandestine immigration, in prostitution. It
ranks as a top exporter of narcotics,'' the nation's own former
president, Sali Berisha, charged in a January speech accusing
his successors of corruption and links to criminal syndicates.

``Until recently, our heroin abusers got their supplies from
Kosovars based in Zurich,'' Chief Jean-Bernard Lagger of the
Geneva police brigade told investigators from Geopolitical Drug
Watch (OGD), Europe's most respected narcotics surveillance
organization. ``But now, Albanian traffickers have moved into
Geneva to deliver drugs to their doorstep.''

Police officials say that the clans, known as ``fares'' in
Albanian, have even begun contesting turf with South American
cartels in the European cocaine market.

``The criminal mentality in certain fares existed before the
war, but it was relatively small-time,'' says Michel Koutouzis,
senior researcher at OGD and Europe's leading expert on
organized crime in the Balkans. ``What the Kosovo crisis and the
war have done is to elevate that mentality enormously, to push
it to a much higher level.''

The clans have embraced what police officials call the
``Sicilian model'' of criminal organization. Put simply, this
model works on the consolidation of a firm power base at home,
with deadly influence on the political structure, from which
domestic crime syndicates gradually build international
operations.

By the time NATO and hundreds of thousands of Kosovar refugees
arrived in Albania two months ago, the consolidation was well
under way. ``Whole districts and towns are actually under the
utter control of the gangs,'' former president Berisha says.

In the countryside surrounding the cities of Vlore and Durres,
according to the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur and other
European periodicals, refugee convoys from the war zone have
been held up by armed bands in the past two weeks, with young
Kosovar women singled out and abducted.

Elsewhere in the country, humanitarian workers and journalists
from many Western news services report highly organized war
profiteering -- including the diversion of aid shipments into
the black market, bribery demands by customs agents processing
the shipments in Albanian ports, and gang-run ``taxi firms''
charging as much as $120 to transport exhausted refugee families
less than eight miles from the Kosovo border to the Albanian
town of Kukes. The normal fee is $4.

An unheated room for aid workers in Kukes today rents for $300
per night, in ramshackle houses that sold outright for less than
$1,000 before the NATO bombings began.

``It's like the Klondike during the Gold Rush,'' Albanian
journalist Frrok Cupi told the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche,
describing the profits being reaped from foreign military and
humanitarian operations.

Men claiming to be sales agents for the national
telecommunications company have asked as much as $3,000 for the
computer card necessary to connect a cellular phone with the
satellite network.

``We should know from experience -- from places like Rwanda and
Somalia and Bosnia -- that humanitarian agencies must deal with
the local mafias in a war zone,'' says Koutouzis. ``There is no
other way to get to the victims.''

Those who try to sidestep the clan syndicates do so at their own
peril, in a land where the number of illegally owned Kalashnikov
automatic assault weapons in some cities is greater than the
number of residents.

On April 30, the Associated Press reported that ``almost every journalist'' who has 
gone to the refugee camp at Bajram Curri in northern Albania has been robbed, 
including a team from the Associated Press. The Organizatio
n of Security and Cooperation in Europe, which oversees the camp, has had two of its 
official vehicles hijacked by armed men.

The U.S. Army's Task Force Hawk installation at the Tirana airport, outside the 
Albanian capital, ranks ``crime'' ahead of ``Yugoslav forces'' among the main threats 
to American troops in Albania.

Locked inside a hermit country for half a century while the eccentric pseudo-Marxist 
regime of the late En

[CTRL] Chinese Views

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From Wash (DC) Post

Bombing Intended, Chinese Believe
U.S. Explanations Widely Discounted

By John Pomfret and Michael Laris
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, May 12, 1999; Page A24

BEIJING, May 11—The most remarkable thing about the protests that have erupted across 
China over the last four days is that the great majority of China's best and 
brightest, from software engineers to academics to busines
smen, believe deeply that the United States planned to destroy their embassy in 
Belgrade.

Millions more people in the world's most populous country seem convinced that the 
United States is out to get them. From posters around the campus of Beijing University 
to headlines in the state-controlled press, the NATO
 attack on the Belgrade embassy is being viewed here as part of a long-standing 
American plot to contain China.

"After the breakup of the Soviet Union, China has become United States' No. 1 
strategic enemy, not only today but into the 21st century," read a poster that 
received close attention today near the Beijing University campu
s. "While we are calling: 'Down with the USA,' " the poster said, "the United States 
is seriously engaging in work to overthrow China."

The depth of these beliefs, which is hard to exaggerate, helps explain why China has 
been reluctant to accept apologies made by President Clinton. Chinese, from 
well-connected security officials to university professors,
complained that Clinton's words lacked sincerity; several said they were surprised 
that the United States did not attempt to send an envoy to smooth the waters.

Moreover, for a complex web of reasons, many people in China
have no interest in believing the attack was a mistake. The
Communist Party does not want to believe the embassy was bombed
in error, because it can use the incident to deflect attention
from the 10th anniversary of the June 4 government crackdown on
democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. China also faces
enormous social problems, such as unemployment and official
corruption, so a round of full-throated nationalism, despite its
inherent risks, is seen by the party as a welcome distraction
from domestic concerns.

China's army and hard-line factions within the party and
government also are uncomfortable with the country's current
direction; it is becoming more capitalistic, less restrictive
and more open to Western ideas. A round of nativist, anti-
foreign demonstrations could be the antidote to such trends,
these people think.

Nevertheless, whether they were marching in angry mobs, gathered
on university campuses or relaxing at a McDonald's, the Chinese
view of the bombing has been unmistakable. Several dozen people
have charged in interviews that the United States intentionally
bombed the Belgrade embassy because it wants to keep China down.
Over and over, people declared that the United States never
would have killed three Chinese citizens if China were as strong
as America.

"It wasn't an attack on the embassy; it was that America wanted
to make a point," said Zhang Bin, a Beijing software engineer.
"America has a strategy. It wants to feel out China. It wants to
do an experiment -- to hit you and see if you respond, to see if
Chinese people will submit to this kind of American power
politics."

U.S. officials have said the attack was a tragic mistake caused
by military planners who had relied on an outdated map. But
people here said their respect for America's technological
prowess makes it impossible for them to believe that
explanation. "You have the best science in the world. How could
you lie and say it was a mistake?" said Wang Yali, a 33-year-old
award-winning documentary filmmaker, who has lived in New York.

The background of Chinese nationalism offers clues to the depth
of feeling about these issues here, where nativist sentiments
coexist uneasily with a desire to be open to the world. The same
people who are protesting today could be applying for U.S. visas
tomorrow.

For decades, the Beijing government's propaganda apparatus has
beaten the drum of nationalism, exploiting a history of invasion
by Western powers and the Japanese. The ruling Communist Party
bases its legitimacy on its role in helping Chinese "stand up"
in the world after more than 100 years of foreign humiliation.

On the street, NATO is routinely compared to the alliance of
eight foreign armies that, at the beginning of this century,
crushed the Boxer Rebellion, an uprising of Chinese farmers
against the depredations of Western imperialist powers. The
government-approved slogans are also laden with history: "Down
with American imperialism" has its roots in the Cultural
Revolution of 1966-76. "America, paper tiger" dates to the
Korean War of the 1950s.

Conspiracy theories have always had great currency in Chinese
society, in part because of people's restricted access to
information. But the conspiracy theories stemming from the
embassy attack border on the wacky.

A Chinese bu

[CTRL] Collateral Goals

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From Int'l Herald Tribune

"" Despite the European Union ban on fuel exports and NATO
emphasis on stopping the supply of fuel to the military, as of
Monday ''large quantities'' of fuel were flowing into the
country via the Danube River, and along highways from
Montenegro, Croatia and Romania, intelligence reports showed.""

R >>

Paris, Wednesday, May 12, 1999


Serbs Met Their Goals in Kosovo, Experts Say


-
---
By R. Jeffrey Smith and Dana Priest Washington Post Service
-
---
WASHINGTON - Military forces of Yugoslavia, rather than
retreating to escape punishment from NATO air attacks, can
afford a limited withdrawal from Kosovo now because they have
accomplished most of their aims and can trim operations without
jeopardizing control of the province, according to intelligence
and defense officials.

During the last seven weeks, 40,000 security troops have nearly
completed a yearlong project, reducing a separatist rebel army
to scattered enclaves and forcing all but 10 percent of the
province's 1997 population of 1.7 million ethnic Albanians from
their homes, and more than 700,000 of them into exile.

As a result, Yugoslav troops are devoting much of their effort
to digging in for a long stay in Kosovo, often using forced
ethnic Albanian labor to build bunkers, trenches and other
defensive earthworks to prepare for a ground invasion, according
to intelligence officials.

''There's no one left, it's time for peace,'' a high U.S.
military officer said Monday with sarcasm.

New, unreleased information obtained by Western sources has
convinced NATO officials that President Slobodan Milosevic
ordered a military offensive in Kosovo with the explicit goal of
slashing the province's majority population of ethnic Albanians
and thereby reinforcing Serbian control.

The Yugoslav offensive operations still under way in Kosovo are
aimed both at completing this assignment and at rousting the
remaining units of the Kosovo Liberation Army. Security forces
have launched attacks on enclaves of civilians under the
separatist rebels' protection. The largest of these, holding
about 130,000 people, was isolated east of Pec.

Roughly 16,000 civilians from this area fled over the weekend
into Albania and also into Montenegro, Serbia's junior partner
in the Yugoslav federation.

The pace of the expulsion has recently averaged more than 10,000
ethnic Albanians a day, meaning it may be only a few weeks
before most of the remaining residents are out or on their way
out.

Ivo Daalder, a former Clinton aide and a National Security
Council specialist on the Balkans, said Yugoslav forces ''are
basically done'' in Kosovo. In the contest with the world's most
powerful military alliance, Yugoslavia's low-tech security
forces have so far achieved far more of their goals than NATO,
an alliance official said.

After numerous setbacks, said a senior diplomat, NATO's aim is
now the ''rollback, not the prevention'' of Yugoslavia's war
aims.

Although NATO has boasted officially of pinning down Serbian
forces, officials say privately that Yugoslav forces have shown
renewed energy in Kosovo. A NATO spokesman said Yugoslav forces
had taken advantage of cloudy weather to step up their campaign
of removing ethnic Albanians and to maneuver their tanks and
other armored vehicles into new positions.

Yugoslav gunships last weekend conducted their first attack
since early April on the village of Kosari, a main supply route
for the KLA. The 72d Special Operations unit was conducting
operations in the Rogova Mountains, acting as forward spotters
for artillery battery units seeking to wipe out remaining
pockets of rebel activity.

On Saturday, Serbian forces in central Kosovo repositioned their
forces to fight rebels in the Drenica region of central Kosovo.

Both the Yugoslav Army and the special police forces moved
ground forces and armored vehicles of the 252d Armored Brigade
to the routes between Klina-Malisevo and Srbica.

Despite the announced withdrawal, Yugoslav forces also have been
fortifying their positions. General Nebojsa Pavkovic, commander
of the Yugoslav 3d Army based in Pristina, the Kosovo capital,
is now engaged full time at the army headquarters in Nis in
planning a defense against any NATO invasion, Western
intelligence officials say.

An intelligence official predicted that in the next month,
''both sides will be making gains.'' As NATO attacks from the
air, government forces will expel more civilians on the ground.

Several officials envisioned an eventual stalemate, with
Yugoslav troops largely dispersed, inactive, and focused on
strategic defense. ''Without an assembly point these guys will
fly and fly and fly,'' a military official said. ''We can't bomb
the woods.''

After seven weeks of bombing, Serbian forces are largely intact
and able to move around in Kosovo.

NATO has d

[CTRL] New States

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From http://www.newstatesman.co.uk/199905030019.htm

The NS Essay - This country is not so special

Linda Colley demolishes the historical myths about Britain, the
US and Europe

Five years ago, in 1994, Britain had two causes for celebration
and remembrance. One was the 50th anniversary of the D-Day
landings, and we all recall the scale of the commemoration and
the sponsorship it received from monarch, ministers and media
alike. The second cause for celebration was, or should have
been, the opening of the Channel Tunnel, a permanent highway to
Continental Europe. Yet in Britain at least, this was a notably
low-key event. We discussed the safety of the tunnel, the
potential damage to property values in Kent, the effect on our
French holidays, the quality of the train service. It was
treated, in short, as a late 20th-century amenity, not as an
epic event.

How strange, and how sad! The idea of a Channel Tunnel has a
long history: Brunel lobbied for it, Queen Victoria backed it,
Winston Churchill, between the wars, advocated it as a "notable
symbol in the advance of human ci
vilisation". And the tunnel is one of the greatest engineering feats of the 20th 
century. Yet in 19
94 we did not feel able properly to celebrate this, thus doing violence both to our 
history and to
our present achievement
s. We chose to focus not on our present, not on our future, and not on our long and 
complicated his
tory, but on D-Day and our comparatively recent past.

I do not minimise the significance of the second world war or Britain's role in it. 
But, as Hugo Yo
ung has suggested, the notion that this was our finest hour has cast something of a 
paralysing spel
l, in a way that the au
thor of that phrase would never have wanted. By remembering a certain version of the 
war too well,
we tend to neglect and misperceive our longer history, and so miss out on 
possibilities for the pre
sent and the future.

Britain is a set of islands on the western periphery of Europe. Nonetheless, as a 
major British pol
itician once observed, "our links to . . . the Continent of Europe have been the 
dominant factor in
 our history". Who said
 this? Margaret Thatcher in Bruges in 1988. She was right.

For almost four centuries, much of what is now Britain was governed from Rome. From 
1066 to the 16t
h century, kings of England were also kings of parts of France. At the end of the 17th 
century, we
were ruled by a Dutch m
onarch. From 1714 to 1837, German kings ruled over us in tandem with their home state 
of Hanover. T
he impact of all this went far beyond politics into the very texture of our society. 
The Romans and
 the Norman French cont
ributed to the vocabulary we still use today. Dutch expertise helped to construct the 
City and the
stock exchange. Until recently, the British royal family was overwhelmingly German in 
blood and oft
en in preferred languag
e as well.

But surely, you might say, the determining factor in Britain's history is that it is 
an island, cut
 off from the Continent by the sea. On some occasions, this was indeed so; for certain 
minds, it is
 always so. But the sea
 is a highway as well as a barrier. Before the railways, transport by water was much 
faster than tr
ansport by land. The most important impact of the sea on parts of Britain was not that 
it cut them
off from the rest of Eu
rope, but rather that it allowed regular and substantial contacts with it. Just think 
of the close
maritime, trading and cultural links between the Orkneys and Shetlands on the one hand 
and Scandina
via on the other, or be
tween East Anglia and the Dutch. Even now, Norwich has no direct air link with London, 
but it has o
ne with Amsterdam.

Historically, it makes little sense to generalise about "Britain" and "Europe" as 
though they are o
r ever were monoliths. Over the centuries, different parts of what is now Britain had 
different rel
ations with different p
arts of the rest of Europe - and different relations with each other, too. Wales was 
only incorpora
ted and given representation at Westminster in the 16th century. Scotland had its own 
parliament be
fore 1707, which it reg
ains in 1999. The Irish had their own Dublin parliament until 1800. Without detracting 
from the imp
ortance of the Westminster parliament, then, it is simply not the case that it 
represents a thousan
d years of exceptional
British constitutional development. For parts of Britain, Westminster's centrality is 
a more recent
 phenomenon. Viewed this way, devolution is less an innovation than an overdue 
recognition of diffe
rences within these isl
ands that have always existed.

What of war and empire? These indisputably helped to knit the different parts of 
Britain together.
But did they also drive it apart from Continental Europe? As with the sea, it depends 
how you choos
e to look at it. Mariti
me empire was something the British had in common with many other European states: at 
various times
, the Portuguese, the Dutch

[CTRL] (Fwd) [BRIGADE] More Brigade Comments.....

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

--- Forwarded Message Follows ---
From:   "Linda Muller" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date sent:  Tue, 11 May 1999 18:59:41 -05:0
Subject:[BRIGADE] More Brigade Comments.
Send reply to:  [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Dear Brigade, here's a few selections from today's Brigade Mail
Bag - FYI - Linda

---

From:   Bobby
Subject:Internet-brigade
Date sent:  Tue, 11 May 1999 15:20:49 -0400

Dear Linda,

If I can help with some html code or other internet activity let me
know. While I did not vote for Pat in the past because of his stand
on abortion and other fundamentalist leanings, I am beginning to
think he may be the only candidate running with a grip on reality.
Returning this country to a republic is a perhaps the most pressing
issue of our times.

It is quite a shame that he must run as a republican or democrat
and not as an independent. Perhaps one day we can end this
partisan government and restore it to the people.

Let me know if I can help.

-

From:  Alan T
Subject:  Joke from Belgrade

How did the war start in Yugoslavia?

US Secretary of State Madelaine Allbright entered the conference
room in Rambouillet. Sat down and said: " So Gentlemen, shall we
make Love or War?"

The rest is history.

--

From:  Jock
Subject:   BUCHANAN: Links Anti-US Protests To MFN Status

Pat Buchanan on anti-US protests in China: "I would call in the
Ambassador and say, 'Look, this has gone on long enough, and if
it doesn't stop I'm going to lead the battle in Congress to remove
MFN, and that will sink your currency and your economy, as well.
So cut it out.'"

More Buchanan: "They know they've got a very weak President
here whom they can push around, and they can really enhance
their own stature by rubbing his nose in the dirt for all of Asia to
see" ("O'Reilly Factor," FNC, 5/10).



Date sent:  Tue, 11 May 1999 12:00:52 -0700
From:   "Wheeler, Richard" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject:RE:[FTC]  INS, Meatpackers Make Illegal Deal on
Workers...

"Operation Vanguard"?  More like "Operation Fannieguard"!



Date sent:  Tue, 11 May 1999 16:15:32 -0400
From:   "Mark A. Smith" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject:More great words...

Pardon the comparison, but I see similar virtues and
characteristics in Patrick J. Buchanan. On second thought, DON'T
pardon the comparison, PJB earned it.

No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal
rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to
restrain him.
  --  Thomas Jefferson

Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is
unobstructed action according to our will.  But rightful liberty is
unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around
us by the equal rights of others.  I do not add 'within the limits of
the law,' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so
when it violates the right of an individual
  --  Thomas Jefferson

Force (is) the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism.
  --  Thomas Jefferson

I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always
oppressive.
  --  Thomas Jefferson

Let this be the distinctive mark of an American that in cases of
commotion, he enlists himself under no man's banner, inquires for
no man's name, but repairs to the standard of the laws.  Do this,
and you need never fear anarchy or tyranny.  Your government will
be perpetual.
  --  Thomas Jefferson

Resistance to tyrants is obedience to god.
  --  Thomas Jefferson

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as
are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to
say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket
nor breaks my leg.
  --  Thomas Jefferson

The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses
its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the
foundations of society.
  --  Thomas Jefferson

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain
occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be
exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all.
  --  Thomas Jefferson


The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and
bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against
tyranny in government.
  --  Thomas Jefferson

What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned
from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of
resistance?
  --  Thomas Jefferson

 When wrongs are pressed because it is believed they will be borne,
resistance becomes morality.
  --  Thomas Jeffer

[CTRL] (Fwd) [BRIGADE] Americans Ignored by Globalist Leaders

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

--- Forwarded Message Follows ---
From:   "Linda Muller" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date sent:  Tue, 11 May 1999 15:10:11 -05:0
Subject:[BRIGADE] Americans Ignored by Globalist Leaders
Send reply to:  [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Dear Brigade,

"The only national political figure who speaks in the isolationist accent of
Middle America is the Republican Patrick J Buchanan, who has denounced
the war as imperialistic and called for a withdrawal of all US troops from
Europe. Mr Buchanan has been the most clamant anti-war voice of the
1990s; he is also the only prominent politician of either party who addresses
the appalling maldistribution of wealth in our erstwhile republic"

Just found this article -- feel free to pass it on!

GO PAT GO!
Linda

--

The Independent (London)

April 25, 1999

THE AMERICANS WHO WON'T BE CELEBRATING NATO'S 50TH;

BILL KAUFFMAN ON MAIN STREET FOLK WHO ARE BLITHELY
IGNORED BY THEIR 'GLOBALIST' LEADERS

by Bill Kauffman

Hell hath no fury like a noncombatant. Bellicose talking heads froth on our
television screens: spindly journalists, the sort you'd pick last when choosing
sides for a game of kickball, bluster like John Wayne as they fidget with the
thingamyjig in their ear and coolly calculate how many Serbs to slaughter.
The CNN Brits - to the American viewer, their plummy accents add 20 points
to their IQs - plead for a ground war in Kosovo, barely containing their disgust
that parents are reluctant to sacrifice their boys to Moloch. Don't they know,
as Tony Blair told us last week, that "we are all internationalists now,
whether we like it or not"? (As if he doesn't.)

We may be sure that much the same fury is on display at Nato's 50th
anniversary bash in Washington this weekend, as canapes are crunched
with feral vigour while the missiles fall on Belgrade. The partygoers are the
placeless and the powerful: diplomats, politicians and nomadic employees of
the Atlanticist military-industrial complex, people who are no more
indigenous to the space they occupy than a Starbucks or a McDonald's.

Half a century ago Harry Truman's Anglophile Secretary of State, Dean
Acheson, responded with "a clear and absolute No" when asked by the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee if US membership in Nato meant that
the US was "going to be expected to send substantial numbers of troops
over there as a more or less permanent" force. But the troops went, in the
hundreds of thousands - and if they did not leave when the Soviet Union
disintegrated, you may be sure they are never going to leave. The very
locution "over there" strikes our foreign-policy establishment as a quaint
archaism: after all, Concorde has made London as close to Washington as,
say, Nebraska.

Yet for the vast majority of Americans who have never been to Europe "over
there" remains remote, no matter how often we are told (by those with a
stake in the matter, and often one aimed at our hearts) that the world is
shrinking. Main Street Americans ask of the Serbian war, "What in hell are
we doing over there?". At Nato's hideous jubilee party, these doubters are
the great uninvited.

Such Americans are the dreaded isolationists who haunt the globalist
dreams of the Clintons and Blairs (if such men can be said to dream). For
their pacific concerns they are vilified as nativists and xenophobes. Why is it,
by the way, that those who oppose killing foreigners are the ones called
xenophobes?

The Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, has called isolationism a
"cancer". If so, the cancer is congenital. Mrs. Albright may be unfamiliar with
the basic foreign-policy statement of the American founding, the Farewell
Address of George Washington, in which the father of our country adjured his
posterity to "steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the world".

Washington's carcinogenic advice is still regarded as sound by millions of
his countrymen. Even at the height of the Cold War, opinion polls found that
one -third of the citizenry wanted to bring the boys home from Europe, and,
despite nightly lectures by the Instant Balkan Experts of the idiot box, they
would really rather sit this one out. But the two parties will not let them do
so. Just as in the early 1960s, liberal Democrat technocrats have stumbled
into an unpopular and potentially disastrous war, and the Republicans have
demanded ... escalation!

The corporate media's favourite Republican presidential contender, the
Arizona Senator John McCain, is calling for a ground war in a disgusting
attempt to appear "presidential". Also plumping for ground troops is the
Republican hopeful Elizabeth Dole, wife of the world's most famous sufferer
from erectile dysfunction. (Though it must be added that Viagra succeeded
where his wife did not: Bob Dole is again tumid, or so the advertisers assure
us.)

It should not surprise u

[CTRL] Collateral Damage

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

www.sfgate.comReturn to regular view

Feinstein Condemns Bombing of Embassy
She voices doubt about NATO's air campaign
Carolyn Lochhead, Chronicle Washington Bureau
Tuesday, May 11, 1999
©1999 San Francisco Chronicle

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-
bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1999/05/11/MN87405.DTL



Senator Dianne Feinstein lashed out yesterday against NATO's
accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, calling
for a temporary halt to allied air attacks on urban areas.

The California Democrat, a long- time and vocal supporter of
greater U.S. openness toward China, first strongly condemned the
stray attacks during a radio interview, saying she thought ``the
mission ought to be brought to an end.''

Feinstein later issued a much more restrained press release that
criticized NATO ``errors'' but reiterated her earlier position
that ``our cause in this conflict is just and that our resolve
must continue.''

Feinstein spokesman Howard Gantman said the comments used from
the radio interview ``are not inaccurate, but the senator wanted
to really show exactly what are the issues for her.''

Gantman said Feinstein spoke with National Security Adviser
Sandy Berger yesterday to urge the administration to ``reassess
their procedures in targeting and intelligence before moving
ahead with intensive bombing in urban areas.''

During the interview with KCBS radio, Feinstein said, ``I don't
believe you can win wars by tossing bombs around like popcorn.''


``I'm beginning to get very concerned about how this campaign is
being carried out,'' Feinstein added. ``It seems to be right now
just about how much destruction we can create.''

The embassy bombing has sparked violent anti-American street
protests in Beijing -- with tacit support from the Chinese
government -- and has also damaged U.S.-China relations on
several critical fronts.

China has broken off talks on human rights and arms control, and
a raft of valuable trade concessions China offered in an effort
to gain entry to the World Trade Organization are now in doubt.

In her press release, Feinstein said she had ``very serious
concerns'' about ``flaws in intelligence and bombing procedures.
These have taken far too many innocent lives and caused far too
much collateral damage.''

But Feinstein added a strong condemnation of Yugoslav President
Slobodan Milosevic's attacks on the Kosovo province.

President Clinton ``has expressed the nation's deep regrets''
for the embassy bombing, Feinstein said, ``but he also
rightfully pointed out that the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo --
which has led to the killing of thousands of people, the use of
rape as an instrument of war, and the relocation of over 600,000
people -- is an ongoing, deliberate and systematic crime.''

In a Chronicle interview April 12, when the NATO air war was
just a few weeks old, Feinstein was strongly supportive, ticking
off the number of air sorties run, the percentages of
Yugoslavia's oil refining and ammunition production that had
been destroyed and the number of clear nights that allied pilots
had experienced.

But Feinstein also is an ardent supporter of China, having
forged closer ties to the Chinese government than perhaps any
other U.S. politician. Feinstein has cultivated a personal
relationship with Chinese President Jiang Zemin that dates back
to the early 1980s, when the two met as mayors of ``sister
cities'' San Francisco and Shanghai.

She has met with Zemin many times over the years, once making a
personal appeal to Zemin on behalf of Tibet's Dalai Lama.

Representative Barbara Lee, an Oakland Democrat who has opposed
the NATO air war from the beginning, also condemned the embassy
bombing yesterday, saying, ``Massive bombing raids are a morally
unacceptable way of achieving peace.''

Lee said war ``is defined in part by its collateral damage'' and
that the Chinese Embassy bombing ``is particularly upsetting''
given China's veto power in the United Nations Security Council,
which could oversee a potential peace settlement between NATO
and Yugoslavia.

``Given the utter failure of the NATO bombing strategy,'' Lee
said, ``there can be no question that our best hope for peace
and stability in Yugoslavia is the negotiation of an immediate
cease-fire.''



©1999 San Francisco Chronicle  Page A13


>From LA Times

Tuesday, May 11, 1999


International Law May Halt the Bombing
Serbia: NATO attacks on nonmilitary targets, deliberate or otherwise, may be 
deemed war cr
imes.
By JONATHAN M. MILLER







ADVERTISEMENT




nternational law now constrains U.S. military operations in Serbia in ways 
that the Uni
ted States has never faced before. The Clinton administration's plan of constantly 
increasing bombi
ng pressure until Serbi
a submits will fail, not because air power cannot bring a nation to its knees, but 
because long bef
ore that point, international law will force the bombings to a halt.
 In 1993, the United Nations Security Council 

[CTRL] Phony Philathropy

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From http://www.cagw.org/Reports/Phony-Philanthropy/phony.htm

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
INVESTIGATIVE REPORTS


Phony Philathropy: How Government Grants are Subverting the
Missions of Nonprofit Organizations
-
Introduction

Nonprofit groups represent the best of American society. Alexis
de Tocqueville wrote, "Better use has been made of association
and this powerful instrument of action has been applied to more
varied aims in America than anywhere else in the world. Apart
from permanent associations such as townships, cities and
counties created by law, there are a quantity of others whose
existence and growth are solely due to the ini
tiative of individuals."1

Citizens donating time and money to help solve a particular
problem is truly an American tradition.  Billions of dollars are
donated each year to help nonprofit organizations fight
everything from illiteracy, hunger, alcohol disease abuse – even
government waste. The strength of these organizations is the
voluntary public support they receive. In 1997 alone, voluntary
giving to nonprofits amounted to more than $143.5  billion.2 In
recent years, however, the efforts and missions of many
nonprofits have been compromised by the increased in flux of tax
dollars. According to the Independent Sector, an association
which represents charities , religious groups and social welfare
organizations, total nonprofit revenues from federal sources
were approximately $130 billion in FY 1996.3 Unfortunately, many
groups use these tax dollars to conduct a particular program or
to fund their day-to-day operations such as paying rent and
payroll or purchasing supplies, while at the same time
advocating, lobbying or promoting policies that many Americans
would find untenable.
-
Uncovering the Truth
Many taxpayers don’t know how to look objectively at the
effectiveness of nonprofits and who is pulling their financial
strings. There are several ways to determine the efficacy of
nonprofit organizations. For example, the Council of Better
Business Bureaus and similar organizations issue criteria and
provide ratings on nonprofits. Another method is to review
the organization’s tax returns, which can differentiate between
those that truly receive voluntary public support, and those
that are subsidized by tax dollars, or involuntary
contributions. If the "initiative of individuals" of which
deTocqueville spoke is the historic and tru e basis of
associations, are those that accomplish their mission without
government support more worthy than those that take money from
taxpayers indirectly through government grants?

When trying to discover an organization’s funding sources, the
best place to start is the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Form
990. This form is a financial snapshot of an organization. The
IRS requires most nonprofits to submit a Form 990, which is
equivalent to an individual’s Form 1040 tax return. The 990
includes useful information such as total revenue within a one-
year period, government funding, investments in securities,
salaries of the highest paid officials, and net assets (or fund
balance), which represent the "wealth" of an organization.
Organizations are required to allow anyone from the public to
view their 990 during regular working hours either at their
principal office or any regional office that has more than three
employees. In 1996, President Clinton signed into law the
Taxpayers Bill of Rights II. This new law requires organizations
to also provide a copy of their 990 to anyone who asks for it in
person or in writing.

Another valuable source of information is the organization’s
annual report, which will usually provide details on the
organization’s mission, activities, balance sheets, sources of
funding, and donors. In addition, more organizations are
starting to use the Internet as a vehicle to provide information
on their financials and activities.
-
Nonprofits — An American Tradition Compromised?

John Filer, head of the Commission on Private Philanthropy and
Public Needs, recognized the importa nt role nonprofits play in
our society, but also saw the problems that develop when the
government gets involved in fundin g nonprofits. When the
commission released its report in 1975, it found that the
government contrib uted about $23 billion to nonprofit
organizations; private sources contributed $25 billion. As
government contributions gr ew, nonprofits increasingly became
hybrids — part private, part public institutions, ever more
dependent on government funding and the strings attached
thereto. Nonprofit organizations that accept f ederal funding
subject themselves to political processes, pressures and
priorities.4

Federal grants to nonprofits result in significant trade-offs,
including the six detailed here:

•Federal grants are ac

[CTRL] Lawyers' War

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

From
http://www.intellectualcapital.com/issues/issue225/item4235.asp

The Lawyers' War in Yugoslavia
by Thomas Lipscomb
Thursday, April 29, 1999
Comments: 100 posts 







The Pitfalls of Foreign-Policy Morality : Alan Tonelson calls
for a moral majority for war-making decisions.

Clinton's Strategic Failure : Melvin Goodman sees plenty of room
for improvement in the current administration's foreign policy.

The 'Gatekeepers' Arrive on the Internet : Thomas Lipscomb
laments the dearth of First Amendment advocates in cyberspace.








Search

 Union Gen. 
William Tecumseh Sherman spent some early years in the South and understood his 
campaign in Georgia was fighting the intransigent myth of a u
nified culture as much as a military force. To achieve victory, his army had to leave 
the citizens of Georgia in total despair ("Make Georgia howl ...") as well as conquer 
it militarily. The only road to peace Sherman cou
ld see was one violent enough to destroy the ingrained civilian will to resist. His 
lesson should not be ignored.

Where's the fortitude?

What we are pursuing currently in Yugoslavia is the same kind of "lawyers' war" we 
have fought repeatedly for the past 50 years with poor results. The lawyers, 
professors and wonks in charge of U.S. military policy today
wring their hands over each casualty, and have difficulty dealing with the inevitable 
collateral damage and mistargeting of war. They dream of a legendary Renaissance set 
piece between mercenary condottiere where armies m
aneuver, but never fight, preferring to negotiate endlessly for bloodless treaty 
exchanges of territory and gold.

It does not help that the only military experience in the entire Clinton national 
security team is Sandy Berger's service as an Army file clerk and dental hygienist, 
curiously missing from his official biography on the Wh
ite House Web site. Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Bill Cohen, et al. are "nice" 
people who have never been in a school yard fight, much less a bar brawl and do not 
particularly want to know anyone who has. Their idea
of combat is withholding tenure, dropping people from VIP lists, holding insulting 
press conferences and filing lawsuits.

Not surprisingly, in a field of expertise that employs "sticks and stones" rather than 
"words," the measured methods preferred by our current leaders are ineffective 
precisely because the results can be debated. After all
, facing imminent invasion of the home islands, the Japanese War Cabinet was still 
arguing alternative military strategies and even considering a coup in August 1945. 
The arguments stopped a few days later.

Unless we can bring sharp, cruel and violent war home to the Serbs, we have no 
business engaging them. And that is a difficult decision for an easily distracted 
polyglot superpower run by a national security superstructur
e that cannot tell the Armed Forces from the Boy Scouts.

Where have you gone, Colin Powell?

This is not a new problem. The government of the early United States felt its 
institutional understanding of its military establishment slipping away as the 
experience of the Revolutionary War receded in the memory of its
 elites. The Military Academy founded to retain that understanding was only saved from 
elimination in the nick of time by the Mexican War. The concept of the use of military 
force as a fully professional set of skills and
 mental attitudes that must be learned and applied has endured only with the greatest 
difficulty.


Is Colin Powell the only one
who understands America's
contempt for the military?
Today, contempt for the professional military has reached an historic zenith among our 
leadership classes. Colin Powell understood that, which is why he extended and delayed 
his retirement until he coulduse his prestige t
o keep the new administration's trigger-happy civilians from getting bogged down in 
Bosnia. But the perfumed princes we select for our General Staff candidates these days 
are not about to take any chances with their caree
r objectives by trying to educate the administration's current team, much less resign 
in protest.

And when our Yale- and Oxford-educated president believes World War II began in the 
Balkans and our secretary of state with a Columbia Ph.D. has a sense of history so 
fragile she does not even know who her grandparents ar
e, one might wonder how much progress our military leaders could make even if they 
tried.

A call for leadership

Military operations succeed in proportion to their ability to rapidly process and 
respond to information from the battlefield. That information can be positive or 
negative, but there is a time premium on its validity paid
 in human lives. In the political arena, spin can contain or at least delay disaster. 
In the military, it compounds catastrophe.

A defense establishment that does not understand this is likely to spend an inordinate 
time fighting the news cycle rather than the war, something we

[CTRL] Keynes

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

From wsws.org

WSWS : News & Analysis : Europe : The Balkan Crisis

Lord Skidelsky's criticism of NATO: the driving forces of "ethical imperialism"

By Nick Beams
10 May 1999

There is a particular significance to the criticisms of the NATO war against Serbia by 
Lord Robert Skidelsky and his warning that its doctrine of "ethical imperialism" could 
result in a breakdown of the economic and polit
ical order of world capitalism.

Skidelsky, who issued his criticisms in a series of lectures in Sydney and Melbourne 
last week, is the author of a widely-acclaimed two-volume study of the life and work 
of the British economist John Maynard Keynes. He is
 currently writing a third volume dealing with Keynes' role in the Bretton Woods 
Agreement of 1944, which played such a central role in the economic restabilisation of 
world capitalism following World War II.

In the popular mind Keynes is most directly associated with the policies that bear his 
name, based on government stimulation of the economy and "demand management" to 
prevent the emergence of slump and depression. But thi
s was only part of his theoretical work, which was aimed at trying to establish the 
mechanisms to effect a stabilisation of world capitalism.

Keynes first came into public prominence in the aftermath of World War I. A member of 
the British delegation at the Versailles negotiations he resigned his post in June 
1919 and issued a devastating critique of the Versai
lles Treaty under the title Economic Consequences of the Peace. Keynes had two central 
objections to the Versailles arrangements: that the policy of harsh war reparations 
imposed on Germany would destroy the economic mech
anisms on which pre-war Europe had been based, leading to a war of vengeance by 
Germany, and that the terms of the treaty increased the power of American finance 
capital over Europe.

Following his criticisms of Versailles, Keynes became increasingly critical of the 
free market orthodoxy which dominated official government circles and in 1925 wrote a 
scathing attack on the decision of the then British
Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill, to return Britain to the pre-1914 gold 
standard. Issuing a pamphlet entitled The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill, he 
warned the policy would require a 10 percent cut i
n British wages and could only be achieved by "intensifying unemployment without 
limit."

As the economic problems deepened in the 1920s, Keynes was increasingly concerned with 
devising measures which, in Skidelsky's words, could "reconstruct the capitalist 
social order on the basis of improved technical manag
ement."

In the aftermath of the economic collapse of 1932, he appealed to the incoming US 
President Roosevelt to reverse the policies of the previous Hoover administration, 
which threatened to bring social revolution. In an open
letter to Roosevelt on the New Deal early in 1933, he wrote: "If you fail, rational 
change will be gravely prejudiced, leaving orthodoxy [the doctrine of the free market] 
and revolution to fight it out."

In 1936, Keynes published his most famous work, the General Theory of Employment, 
Interest and Money in which he denounced the assertion of the defenders of free market 
orthodoxy that the capitalist system could automatic
ally reach equilibrium at full employment, arguing that government intervention was 
necessary to increase "effective demand" to lift national income and employment.

His policy prescriptions for state intervention were based on a key assumption--that 
finance capital should remain within the confines of the national state. As he had 
written in 1933, ideas and culture should, by their n
ature, be international, goods should, where possible be "homespun", but capital had 
above all to be national in scope.

The necessity for the strict regulation of finance capital in order to facilitate 
national economic regulation by governments was to form a key component of the Bretton 
Woods Agreement of 1944, drawn up by Keynes and his
American counterpart in the negotiations, Harry Dexter White.

Under the agreement, the value of major world currencies were tied in fixed exchange 
rates to the US dollar, which, in turn, was to be backed by gold at the rate of $35 
per ounce. Loans were to be provided to countries th
at experienced balance of payments difficulties, ruling out the need for the 
imposition of tariffs, and currency devaluations, which had brought about the 
devastating contraction of world trade in the 1930s.

While providing the framework for free trade, the Bretton Woods system embodied strict 
government controls on the movement of finance capital. As US Treasury Secretary Henry 
Morgenthau told the conference, the aim of the
agreement was to "drive the usurious moneylenders from the temple of international 
finance."

In less flamboyant language, Keynes explained that: "Not merely as a feature of the 
transition but as a permanent arrangeme

[CTRL] Blair-y Eyed

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From www.newstatesman.co.uk

Blair revives imperialism

The war over Kosovo (or "conflict" as western politicians insist
on calling it) is beginning to migrate to the inside pages of
the newspapers and to the backs of our minds. This was no doubt
inevitable; the late-20th-century mind has a chronically short
attention span. We have created a desert, called it a
humanitarian intervention, and soon we shall grow bored with it.
Yet the western leaders who have recklessly intervened in the
Balkans will soon face painful choices about the region's
future.

The war was launched on a false assumption: that Slobodan
Milosevic would quickly back down; indeed, that he wished to do
so and merely needed a few bombs as political cover against hard-
line Serbian rivals. When that premise proved unsustainable,
Nato switched to another false assumption: that Milosevic is
personally responsible for the atrocities in Kosovo and that,
once he is removed from power or forced to climb down, everybody
can go home and live happily ever after. The reality is
different. The west has taken responsibility for a region where
the ethnic groups show no signs of co-existing in peace. The
violence is now in Kosovo; it was formerly in Bosnia; it may
next be in Macedonia or Montenegro or even Serbia itself. We may
be bored; but there is not the remotest chance that Serbs,
Albanians, Macedonians, Hungarians and others will grow tired of
their ancient quarrels, any more than have the Catholics and
Protestants of Ulster. The west must therefore do one of two
things: police the region indefinitely, or preside over a series
of partitions and population exchanges. And if humanitarian
intervention is to become the norm, as Tony Blair suggests, the
west is likely to face similar choices in parts of Africa, the
Middle East, the Caucasus, and south Asia. Yet the western
liberal mind will not be comfortable with either alternative.

The first option - policing - means in effect the revival of imperialism, with the 
liberal humanitarian's burden replacing the white man's burden. Imperial powers have 
always been the most effective at suppression of ethn
ic conflicts, as the British were in India and Africa, the Habsburgs in central 
Europe, the Russians in Caucasia. Just as western powers once took peace and 
Christianity to savage people, so now (if we accept Mr Blair's l
ogic) they will take peace and western liberal democracy. Just as markets were once 
secured for the East India Company, so now they will be secured for Microsoft or 
McDonald's, since our belief in the civilising benefits
of western trade and capital is quite as strong as our ancestors'. But imperialism is 
not usually a pretty thing. If policing is to be effective in areas of ethnic 
division, it must be armed and it must be ruthless. Other
wise, the population will continue to fear the local police and
the ethnically based gangs more than they fear the outside
authorities, so that hatreds continue to build. The security
must also be offered without any fixed time limit; local police
officers will not act against their own ethnic group if they
think they would be left unprotected from revenge a year later.
These lessons, in different ways, can be learnt from both Bosnia
and Ulster.

The second alternative - partition and population exchange - was
most famously adopted by the British in India. It was clumsily
done, with horrific short-term results, yet the Indian
subcontinent, by international standards, has stayed mercifully
free of serious ethnic conflict. Population exchange has
happened in Europe, too, notably between Greece and Turkey in
the 1920s. Though never officially recognised, partition has
been the solution for Cyprus. Yet our minds recoil. Partition
and population exchange legitimise ethnic cleansing; worse, they
encourage it elsewhere and seem to undermine the principles of
tolerance and multiracialism that western societies have
struggled so painfully to establish.

So this is a choice between a rock and a hard place if ever
there was one. No wonder western leaders prefer not to think
about either too much. Is there, to coin a phrase, a third way?
Yes, though not a very glamorous or exciting one. It is simply
to re-state the UN principle that the proper occasion for war is
when international boundaries are breached; to keep out of other
people's internal conflicts, unless there is overwhelming
evidence that we can enforce a solution; to spend on food,
medicine, clothing and shelter what we now spend on bombs and
missiles; to give a warmer welcome to refugees who flee tyranny
or ethnic harassment; and to show our disapproval of odious
regimes by ostracising them and refusing to sell them arms or to
give them trading privileges. That option - which is more or
less what worked for South Africa - has the merit of being both
realistic and humanitarian.


New Labour's secret godfather

Charles Leadbeater discovers that Blair and Brown owe a
surprising 

[CTRL] NEATO Views

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From Irish Times

Monday, May 10, 1999

Those watching NATO are confident of victory




Chris Stephen

NATO's military view on the ground is that Yugoslavia can be defeated in Kosovo, given 
time, writes Chris Stephen in Tirana, but NATO's politicians know that time may not be 
on their side.

The strike against the Chinese embassy in Belgrade has widened to a chasm the gap 
between the soul-searching of NATO's political masters and the growing confidence of 
those on the ground who think victory is in sight.

An upbeat feeling is hard to avoid among the diplomats, military observers and NATO 
officers now pouring into neighbouring Macedonia and Albania. Those watching the 
action believe the Alliance will win, given enough time
and the willingness to use, and perhaps lose, some ground troops.

This is based on a number of assumptions. The first is that nearly 50 days of bombing 
is beginning to have an incremental effect on the Serbian war machine. The Serbs now 
have little refining capacity, so oil must be impo
rted in its expensive, refined, state. And paid for by a country which is technically 
bankrupt. And stored in canisters because anything larger has been bombed. And 
transported along roads with blown bridges and constant
battering from prowling jets.

While NATO can churn out more and more bombs, the Serbs cannot
so easily replace lost tanks and men. Furthermore, half the
45,000 Serb troops in Kosovo are police units, sufficient for
tussling with lightly armed guerrillas, but neither equipped nor
trained for battle with tanks supported by aircraft.

Under the grinding law of diminishing returns, NATO's planners
here expect eventually to smash Serb forces to the point where a
compact ground force can roll into Kosovo from neighbouring
Albania.

The diplomats here say Serbia's fighting record is poor. Its
heroic resistance to Nazi occupation in the second World War has
yet to be seen in the wars in Yugoslavia in the past decade.

Against Croatia in 1991 the cream of the army, badly led and
prone to desertion, took three months to take one town, Vukovar,
against a far smaller Croatian force.

Five years on the Croats, helped by US advisers, took two days
to recapture its Serb-held province of Krajina, puncturing the
legend of military prowess of the Krajina Serbs, who once
guarded the borders of Christendom against Ottoman invaders.

A few months later Bosnian Croat and Muslim forces swept the
Serbs from much of northern Bosnia. When one Serb position fell,
the entire line fell back, units more frightened of being taken
captive than defending their homeland.

Serb forces have yet to demonstrate that they can hold their own
against forces of comparable strength.

KOSOVO could be different. This province is the most sacred part
of Serbdom, and Serbs could yet decide to fight sacrificial
battles to defend it. But that, say NATO staff here, is the
whole point. For a Serb unit to fend off a NATO armoured column,
which could call on unlimited air support, would mean a
sacrificial holding action. Some Serb units might be willing to
do this. NATO is betting that most would rather run away.

A ground offensive of sorts is already under way, with the rebel
Kosovo Liberation Army having carved out a modest slice of
northern Kosovo from bases in Albania.

More KLA units are active inside Kosovo, picking off isolated
Serb units and further battering morale already strained by air
strikes and lack of leave.

Quantifying all this is difficult, and Alliance intelligence
inconclusive. Nevertheless, some think they see weakness in the
Serb withdrawal last week from the key northern Shalja mountain.
The KLA says the Serb pullout has nothing to do with its own
action, and hopes it is a sign of the Serbs drawing in their
lines as they grow weaker.

One by one, Serb positions are being found, mapped and then
"taken out" by NATO jets. Such strikes are poised to increase
massively.

Forget about the Apaches, hightech helicopters that will find it
hard to find targets in the mountainous border. The weapon that
has them excited in the bars of Skopje and Tirana is the
Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS).

About 15 of these tracked beasts are now in northern Albania,
each with the ability to take out, in NATO's user-friendly
parlance, everything within an area the size of a football
field. Hence, for instance, NATO could "pave the way" along a
road by simply destroying every Serb firing position along it.

And here, of course, the military and political views collide.
The military men here know that, given enough time, NATO can
simply "MLRS" its way through Kosovo. NATO's politicians know
they may not have that time.

"The opinions here, these are from military men," said a French
diplomat in Tirana. "In Europe they are thinking, we've been
bombing and the atrocities are still happening. People are
thinking, 'Are we doing something 

[CTRL] Uniting Belief

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From Irish Times

Monday, May 10, 1999

Romanians told to
heal rift with Orthodoxy



-
---
>From Kieran Cooke, in Bucharest

NICOLAE Ceausescu, the former Communist dictator of Romania
overthrown in a violent revolt 10 years ago, had a passion for
grandiose building projects.

In the centre of Bucharest, Ceaucsescu ordered the construction
of what is one of the world's biggest buildings, a lavishly
decorated palace with more than 1,000 rooms.

In the shadow of this gigantic Communist monument, the fiercely
anti-communist Pope John Paul II said Mass yesterday evening on
the final stage of a three-day visit to Romania.

More than 200,000 people, one of the biggest crowds seen in
Romania for several years, had gathered in hot spring sunshine
to attend. Many had journeyed for several hours from Romania's
Catholic heartlands of Transylvania, in central Romania, and
Moldova in the north-east of the country.

While the Pope's trip to Romania was a relatively subdued affair
in comparison with many papal tours, it was seen by Rome as a
vital bridge-building exercise with the Orthodox Church.

Romania's Orthodox Church is the world's second-biggest after
Russia. The Pope's trip marks the first time a pontiff has paid
an official visit to a country where the majority are Orthodox.

Pope John Paul, who impressed the crowds by speaking in Romanian
at all his public engagements, talked of the need for arguments
between Rome and the world of Orthodoxy to be resolved.

"These ancient wounds must be healed," he said. Patriarch
Teoctist, the head of the Romanian Orthodox Church, accompanied
the pontiff on a drive through the capital.

The two were in attendance at each other's services, singing
their blessings to the crowds like a well practised duet.

The Romanians, though strongly influenced by their Slav
neighbours, are primarily Latin in their language and character.
Patriarch Teoctist is reported to have joked with the Pope about
the strange paradox of a trip in which a Slav pope came to meet
a Latin patriarch.

Romania, racked by economic problems with rising unemployment
and much of its infrastructure in serous decline, is desperate
for foreign investment. The Pope's visit was seen as a way of
showing that the country is opening up to the world. Romania's
economic problems have been exacerbated by the Yugoslav
conflict. One of the country's main trade routes, the Danube,
has been blocked as a result of NATO's bombing campaign.

However, Bucharest, which has made EU and NATO membership key
objectives of its foreign policy, is allowing NATO aircraft to
use its air space.

The Pope and the Orthodox patriarch issued a joint declaration
calling on all sides in the conflict to put down their arms and
stressing the dangers of war in the Balkans region. But for all
the bonhomie between the two church leaders, there are still
tensions between Rome and the Orthodox Church.

Only about 6 per cent of Romania's 23 million people are
Catholics. These include about 250,000 who are Greek Catholics,
a community that broke away from Orthodoxy in the 17th century.
The Greek Catholics recognise the jurisdiction of Rome but
follow many Orthodox practices, including allowing priests to
marry. The Greek Catholics were suppressed during the years of
Communist rule: priests and bishops were tortured and imprisoned
and church property was confiscated. Some Greek Catholics accuse
the Orthodox Church of having collaborated with the Communists
and arguments over the return of confiscated Greek Catholic
properties are only now being addressed.

A<>E<>R
~~~
The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled
one is truly vanquished. -Johann Christoph Schiller,
   German Writer (1759-1805)
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material
is distributed without charge or profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information
for non-profit research and educational purposes only.

DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==
CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing!  These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections 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, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holoc

[CTRL] Early Returns

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

From
http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/Observer/Story/0,3879,48806,0
0.html

 Jordan to slam dunk boring Gore

Basketball stars shoot for presidential nomination

By Ed Vulliamy in New York
Sunday May 9, 1999


Already they're calling it the 'basketball election'.
Michael Jordan, wizard of the slam dunk, is considering a
role as front man in a campaign to dislodge Vice-President
Al Gore from the Democratic presidential nomination he
regards as his right.

There are reports that Jordan has already given $1,000 to
the war chest of former basketball pro Bill Bradley. If so
he would join a host of other basketball stars who have
piled in behind him.

Bradley played for the New York Knicks team in the 1970s.
Now the team mates who helped him win two NBA championship
medals are falling in line to speak at fundraisers, among
them Phil Jackson.

Jackson was Bradley's room mate on tour with the Knicks and became the most celebrated 
and successful coach in the game - the man who took the Chicago Bulls to six NBA 
championships, the unchallenged zenith of basketball,
 before retiring last year.

Jackson is the only man in the world with any sway over Michael Jordan - when Jackson 
quit after winning the Bulls their third consecutive championship, Jordan caused a 
stir by following suit - saying that he would only r
eturn to the Bulls if his coach came back, too. There was an almighty row that went 
something like this: does a manager choose a team or vice versa?

On his way into politics, Bradley kept his basketball career in the background, 
preferring to emphasise his Rhodes scholarship. But now that Bill Clinton has turned 
the US presidency into a pop celebrity cult, Bradley has
, as he puts it, 'loosened up'. He is using the Clintonian postures of pop politics to 
challenge Clinton's man.

The reason for the Bradley challenge - and for many Democrats supporting him with 
millions of dollars - is that the polls suggest the unthinkable: Al Gore could lose to 
the Republicans.

For weeks the polls have shown Gore trailing Texas Governor George Bush Jr, and even 
sometimes Bush's challenger, Elizabeth Dole. Women - Clinton's bedrock of support - 
are the problem: they don't like Gore. It is as thou
gh Gore, the Washington insider, was stuck with the job of treating the sewage of the 
Clinton Administration without the charm, charisma or luck to overcome the stench.

By playing it safe, Gore has managed to make few enemies, and few friends. He was 
loyal to the President, but without too much conviction in case things went horribly 
wrong. He was not right-wing enough for the Right, but
 in courting them he lost his environmentalist support on the left.

Enter Bradley, a flash-in-the-pan. There are no other contenders. For 11 months it 
will be one-on-one, as they say in basketball. As a player, Bradley was well known for 
his positioning, his quick-footedness off the ball.
 And he seems to have maintained this skill. Bradley is thus able to wander the farms 
of Iowa and the flats of Florida sounding rather like Bill Clinton did in 1991 - 
assailing poverty and low standards in schools. He cou
nters questions about his limited political experience with answers about 'my life 
experience'.

There is the added advantage of Mrs Bradley - or Professor Ernestine Misslebeck 
Schlant - a woman of high calibre who provides a startling contrast to her opposite 
number, Tipper Gore. Professor Schlant is a sharply dress
ed don of literature who has survived breast cancer and speaks five languages.

On Bradley's other arm is Bulls coach Jackson, who called Bradley 'something real 
special' while smooching with the AFL-CIO union conglomerates in Florida. Jackson 
stumped for him at a college in Crete, Nebraska, explaini
ng 'I'm recognisable to young people who may not know who Bill Bradley is', before 
quoting Harry Truman in one breath, then telling the kids how he dealt with wild man 
Dennis Rodman in the next.

On the other side of the court, defending his political hoop, is George W. Bush - or 
just plain 'W'. Although he has yet to declare his candidacy, Bush is a clear 
front-runner. A 'conservative with a conscience', 'W' can
stand for wishy-washy or wise, depending on who you are. He insists that he is cast in 
a different mould from Dad, but has signed up many of his father's staff.

Navigating a centre line, 'W' has the advantage of being a Republican who is for 
things rather than just against whatever President Clinton does; he has a way of being 
an avid free-marketeer who is also preoccupied with '
social promotion' for the working class.

Bush's opposition is slight: Liddy Dole draws big crowds but would find it harder to 
raise big money than her husband's Viagra-enhanced assets. The billionaire-nerd Steve 
Forbes has the funds, but is too extra-terrestrial
 for mainstream voters.

Dan Quayle put his foot in it as usual the other day, saying he hoped Clinton would 
not use the Littleton disaster a

[CTRL] On-Line Pubs

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From www.sfbg.com/lit/may99/index.html

The Electronic Library
Well-designed Web sites and high-tech gadgets may make e-
fiction a reality

By Jeremy Russell

IN AN AGE in which everyone agrees that the
Internet is the future, it's hard to understand why no
major book publisher has yet begun to publish fiction
online in any serious way and why no critical acclaim has
fallen on any novel published exclusively in electronic
format.

Conceivably there are any number of benefits to a yet-to-be-
invented body of e-literature. Imagine what the winding
works of Julio Cortazar or William Burroughs might have
been like had they been written in the age of hyperlinked
text. And, useful to the academic writer, an electronic
format allows for the seamless incorporation of endless
footnotes, taking the reader in any number of directions.
Illustrated works could be expanded to include animation
and film -- a boon for the biographical study. Music, too,
used previously only in such obscure instances as Ursula K.
Le Guin's saga Coming Home, could become an integral part
of the reading experience. There's no reason why novels of
the future couldn't feature mood-setting soundtracks.

More sites for readers


Boondock Books www.boondockbooks.com

Diskus Publishing www.diskuspublishing.com

Domhan Books www.domhanbooks.com

Dreams Unlimited www.dreams-unlimited.com

Hard Shell Word Factory www.hardshell.com

Indigo Publishing www.booktrain.com/indigo

LionHearted Publishing Inc. www.lionhearted.com

MountainView Publishing www.whidbey.com/mountainview

New Concepts Publishing www.newconceptspublishing.com

Online Originals www.onlineoriginals.com

Petals of Life Publishing www.petalsoflife.com

The Reading Edge www.thereadingedge.com

Electronic publishing is in fact quite utopian. There is the potential for reducing 
the use of paper and paper costs, thereby lowering book prices and expanding the book 
market to include the kinds of regional and niche w
orks that struggle to get national distribution. Book hunting could be expedited with 
the aid of a search engine. And the apartment-dwelling book lover's well-stocked 
library need take up only as much room as a laptop.

E-publishing also offers the benefit of increased interactivity. There is limitless 
space for a reader's annotations. If the font of an e-published book is too small, it 
can be enlarged with the click of a button. And if
you sometimes find yourself reading a paperback with pencil in hand, circling typos, 
electronic publishing means the ultimate satisfaction of actually entering your own 
corrections.

If you are seduced by these benefits, you're in luck. Many e-publishers have sprung 
up, advertising themselves as the best means for up-and-coming talent to reach an 
audience. The selections of e-fiction are growing but r
emain limited by a lack of clear copyright laws and contract protections for writers 
pursuing online publication. Still, some companies have recruited tough or desperate 
writers, making their books available in four basic
 formats -- computer download from the Internet, disk or CD, e-book download, and 
print-on-demand.

Surf to stories

Computer download is the most purely electronic and, not coincidentally, most widely 
available mode of accessing e-fiction, but for some customers it may be nice to have 
the novel somewhere other than on the hard drive, w
hich makes the floppy format the second most popular. Download and disk files are 
available in HTML, TXT, PDF, and a few other formats. Some e-publishers are trying to 
make special reader programs, similar to the Adobe Ac
robat Reader, specifically for the books that they sell. One e-publisher, Sansip 
(www.sansip.com), plans to have a reader ready this month. The Sansip reader will be 
available free with the purchase of a book and will fea
ture, interestingly enough, "the capability to display the time required to finish 
reading a work."

Sansip, with its straightforward, elegantly simple site, offers a variety of genres. 
Editor Don Wynn, speaking enthusiastically of a mystery series -- now six novels deep 
-- set in the fictional town of Dot, N.D., notes t
hat "the Dot novels are in a genre that we are calling erotic thrillers because they 
address adult themes." Along with erotic thrillers, Sansip has quite a large library 
of books -- all for under $10 each. It should be no
ted that some of the titles are in the public domain, as is the case with many 
e-publishers; works by classic authors such as Edith Wharton or Henry James, offered 
by Sansip for a price, may be available free from univers
ity archives.

Another publisher offering as many downloads and an even more elegant Web design -- 
the best that I saw -- was Mind's Eye (tale.com). The Web site was well constructed, 
intuitive, accessible, and featured a well-developed
 pay-per-view system. Visitors read the first half of any Mind's Eye story, and the 
last half is withheld pending payment. Prices

[CTRL] Secret History

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From IntellectualCapital.CoM

America's Secret History
by Eric Alterman
Thursday, May 06, 1999
Comments: 52 posts 







Courage Under Fire : Eric Alterman assesses President Clinton's decision to bomb 
Yugoslavia.








Search

 On April 29, 
1999, just as the NATO bombing campaign against Serbia was finishing its first month, 
the State Department quietly released "Foreign Relati
ons of the United States, 1964-1968, Volume XV, Germany and Berlin."

"Between 1964 and 1968," read the volume's press release, "the administration of 
President Lyndon B. Johnson was a participant in what Ambassador George C. McGhee 
called the creation of a new Germany."

The description quoted above happens to be true, but in Germany, 1964, as in 
Yugoslavia, 1999, the devil is in the details. And in both cases, the details will be 
difficult to discern, much less trust. The virus of secrec
y has so infected our government that if current practices continue unabated, we will 
never -- repeat never -- learn the truth of how President Clinton and Secretary of 
State Madeleine Albright led us into this war -- or
what secret offers and guarantees were made to both sides.

The case for history

Journalism, as the saying goes, is the first draft of history. For something 
approximating the truth beyond the day's spin on events, we need genuine history. The 
U.S. government, however, has grown so addicted to the dru
g of secrecy injected regularly during the Cold War that it seems to believe it has 
the right to protect its secrets from its own citizens forever.

The policy, on its face, is absurd. No one is asking that genuine foreign-policy 
secrets of the kinds that appear to have been stolen recently from the Los Alamos 
laboratories be made public. We are talking about history,
 in some cases with incidents that took place almost a half-century ago.

Think about it. We live in a democracy, after all. The Cold War is over. And yet the 
barons of the U.S. national security establishment refuse to level with interested 
researchers about actions taken decades ago by the U.
S. government using taxpayer dollars in the name of our country's citizens. One 
imagines that even Joe Stalin would be impressed.

A recent report to Albright by the State Department's Advisory Committee on Historical 
Diplomatic Documentation highlights the problem. The committee, which is comprised of 
some of the nation's most distinguished American
s and diplomatic historians, points "to an impending crisis for the Foreign Relations 
series."

According to the historians, "the most immediate issue was the refusal of various 
authorities to acknowledge a number of policy initiatives and covert actions, all 30 
or more years in the past, that were integral to the '
thorough, accurate,' and 'comprehensive documentation of the major foreign policy 
decisions and actions of the United States government' as required by statute." In 
other words, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is re
fusing to cooperate with the laws on the books in order to protect its proprietary 
information about operations it may have undertaken in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. As 
a result, a full and comprehensive history of our na
tion's actions in the world can never be written.

A culture of secrecy


Was everyone truly
agreed on "opening
up the book"?
Based on an August 1997 report by the committee outlining the conditions above, 
Albright, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, and CIA Director George Tenet agreed 
on the urgent need to establish a high-level panel wit
h representation from the State Department, the CIA and the National Security Council 
(NSC). The plan was to allow everyone concerned to review the classified documents 
relating to U.S. covert actions and intelligence act
ivities selected for inclusion in Foreign Relations volumes
and recommend to the national security adviser whether the
time had come to finally open up the books.

Most of the security issues have since been settled, and
the NSC has agreed to declassification. Yet owing --
surprise, surprise -- to bureaucratic delays in the
committee's operation, none of the Foreign Relations
volumes affected has yet been published. As of today, for
example, we are still saddled with an official U.S. history
of the 1954 Guatemalan coup that pretends that the CIA
played no role in that democratically elected government's
overthrow. To citizens and scholars genuinely concerned
with coming to terms with their nation's role in history of
the region, as well as in the global Cold War, this is as
silly as it is insulting.

Moreover, the State Department's Foreign Relations series
is the merely the tip of a submerged iceberg of foolish and
unnecessary secrecy and deception on the part of our
government.

The CIA is once again withholding from the public an
overall budgetary figure for its fiscal-year spending. It
is doing so despite a successful lawsuit last year by the
Federation of American Scie

[CTRL] At A Loss

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From http://www.usajournal.com/1999
Archives/May1999/jdcolumn0507.htm

U.S. IS LYING ABOUT LOSSES IN KOSOVO

MAY 7 – On one of his recent radio shows, I heard Oliver
North casually dismiss any notion that U.S. losses in
Kosovo of men and materiel are actually higher than what is
being reported, as "Internet rumors" and "just plain
wrong." Specifically, he made mention of some 30-odd U.S.
military personnel who had been killed in the fighting in
Yugoslavia and had been secretly shipped back home through
a Greek port.

He said, "That just hasn’t happened." Really? I guess the
government didn't fudge the casualty numbers when you were
in Vietnam either.  Of course, we can't blame those
erroneous reports on the Internet, since it wasn't around
(for civilian use) then.

Well, heck. Coming from Oliver North – not quite the
bastion of truth, a la his role in the Iran-Contra affair,
which he still denies – that is a remarkable assumption, as
well as an insult to our intelligence. To believe what he
has said, you’d also have to believe that as a marine
attaché with the National Security Council (NSC) under
President Ronald Reagan, neither he nor any of his other
NSC cronies ever withheld vital information or
 conducted secret military operations on behalf of the United States.

Come off it, Ollie. We know better.

But hey. If he is right and the U.S. government, as well as most of the European 
press, is being honest with us about what is really going on in Kosovo right now, then 
it’d be the first time the government hasn’t lied to
us since, oh, about 1789.

I posed the question of whether or not the Clinton administration was lying about our 
losses in Yugoslavia in an earlier article, and I’m asking that question again today 
because there is more evidence, most of it credibl
e, that suggests we are taking a bigger beating in Yugoslavia than the U.S. government 
wants to admit.

According to the International Strategic Studies Association’s Defense and
Foreign Affairs, "It is clear from the amount and quality of intelligence received by 
this journal from a variety of highly-reputable sources that NATO forces have already 
suffered significant losses of men, women and mat
eriel."

DFA is reporting that, as of April 20, some 38 NATO combat aircraft have been lost, 
including three U.S. F-117A fighter/bombers – 2 to anti-aircraft fire and one from a 
Yugoslav MiG-29 air-to-air missile. They also say si
x helicopters (plus the two Apaches that have been lost since then), over a half-dozen 
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (for reconnaissance), and a number of U.S. cruise missiles 
have also been downed.

"Several other NATO aircraft were reported down after that date, including at least 
one of which there was Serbian television coverage." said DFA. "At least one USAF F-15 
Eagle fighter has been lost, with the pilot, repor
tedly an African-American major, alive and in custody as a POW.

At least one German pilot (some sources say two men, implying perhaps a Luftwaffe crew 
from a Tornado) has been captured. There is also a report that at least one US female 
pilot has been killed. In one instance in the fi
rst week of the fighting, an aircraft was downed near Podgorica. A NATO helicopter 
then picked up the downed pilot, but the helicopter itself was then shot down, 
according to a number of reports."

DFA also says that losses of U.S. and NATO ground forces have been "extensive," and 
gave details about the loss of a 20-man U.S./British commando team that had been 
ambushed by Serb soldiers.

DFA, by the way, is a respected foreign policy and intelligence journal, distributed 
to foreign and domestic officials and lawmakers in the U.S. and 170 other countries 
worldwide. You don’t achieve that kind of growth bei
ng wrong all the time.

To further illustrate NATO and the US’s hypocrisy, retiring German General Klaus 
Naumann admitted to the London Times last week during his ‘exit interview’ that 
indeed, at least some of the U.S. and NATO aircraft that had
 been reported as having crashed due to "engine failure" (a favorite military cover 
term) were instead shot down by Serb missiles and gunners.

He also complained that the buildup of forces in Albania and Macedonia was 
"progressing much too slow," indicating that Clinton, NATO General Secretary Javier 
Solano, and NATO/U.S. Commander General Wesley Clark have all
been lying through their teeth about "no combat troops" and
"no ground war" in Kosovo.

But come on. Did we really expect any more than this?
Clinton knew he and his "crack" foreign policy team were
lying when they told Americans those evil Serbs would not
accept NATO’s and the US’s "reasonable" peace terms for
Kosovo. He lied to make the deal, then he lied to justify
this bombing campaign.

Consequently, he knew he could never maintain the backing
of the American people if, all along, he had been telling
us, ‘Hey, you know, we are losing men, planes, and materiel
in Kosovo.’ Good as his p

[CTRL] Int'l Criminal Tribunal

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

From
>From http://ban.joh.cam.ac.uk/~maicl/index.htm

<>

Submission to the International Criminal Tribunal for the
former Yugoslavia, requesting the investigation and
indictment of Prime Minister Tony Blair, Foreign Secretary
Robin Cook and Defence Secretary George Robertson of the
United Kindgom for serious violations of international
humanitarian law committed in the territory of the former
Yugoslavia

Back to the Introduction
Requests for information



BACKGROUND

1. On 24 March 1999, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
(NATO) commenced military operations against the Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia, with the stated aim of deterring
human rights violations in the Kosova region of Yugoslavia.
Operations began at 8p.m. Manned aircraft were used from
the start of the military mission, initially in concert
with ship-launched cruise missiles. During the first few
days of military operations, attacks were directed largely
against the air-defence systems of the Federal Republic,
including anti-aircraft missile batteries, radar and
command-and-control facilities. By the end of March, NATO
aircraft were mostly attacking wider military targets,
including army headquarters, ammunition dumps, and
airfields. However, as the Yugoslav government continued to
refuse to accede to NATO’s demands, the list of targets was
enlarged to include fuel depots, oil refineries
(specifically those in Novi Sad and Pancevo) and government
offices; and by 4 April 1999, power stations and
communications links, including roads, tunnels, bridges and
railway links were openly targeted, including those not
inside the region of, or in the vicinity of, Kosova. By 23
April, attacks were being launched against television
studios and transmitters.

This shift from attacking military targets to attacking
civilian infrastructure and objects is apparent in both
announcements of the NATO spokesman and NATO Heads of
Government on the one hand, and also in the nature of the
sites in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia attacked on the
other. On 20 April 1999, Mr Tony Blair, Prime Minister of
the United Kingdom, said in the Press Conference at NATO HQ
in Brussels:
"I think it is extremely important that all of us do
everything in our power to make sure that the economic
measures that we are taking against Serbia are effective
and our attacks of course have done immense damage to the
lines of communication, the lines of supply, the oil
refineries and the oil supplies of the Milosevic regime."
(emphasis added)

Mr George Robertson, UK Secretary of State for Defence,
stated:
"At the outset of the air campaign, NATO Ministers
collectively agreed to certain categories of targets--the
first of which was, self-evidently, the Yugoslav air
defences. We subsequently agreed to widen the range of
targets to include strategic assets such as bridges,
barracks and headquarters." (House of Commons, 19 April,
Hansard, col.667, p.830).

Dr James Shea, Spokesman of NATO and Deputy Director of
Information and Press, made similar statements on attacking
economic and telecommunications targets shortly afterwards.
On 21 April 1999, also at NATO HQ in Brussels, Dr Shea
said:
"[A]ny aspect of the power structure is considered as a
legitimate target by NATO, the power structure, and of
course in dictatorial societies it becomes progressively
impossible to distinguish between the party and the state,
as we all know, they become conflated with each other, and
this is also the party headquarters which contains the
propaganda too of the ruling socialist party and that is
enough for us to consider that to be a wholly legitimate
target."

More clearly, the increased volume of attacks on civilian
infrastructure can be detected in the chronology of NATO
attacks, which forms Annex I to this submission. The first
attacks on bridges occurred on 1 April 1999, with the
strikes on the Varadin Bridge over the Danube. On 3 April,
the Republican and Federal Ministry of the Interior in
Belgrade was severely damaged by NATO attacks, and damage
was done to the building of the Institute for Security of
the Ministry of the Interior in Banjica. On 4th and 5th
April, numerous road and railway bridges throughout the
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia were directly targeted.
Electric power stations, oil refineries and fuel storage
sites were also targeted. Industrial sites and factories
were primary targets on 15 April, and have continued to be
so. TV transmitters and the Radio Televizija Srbija (RTS)
Studio were targeted later in April. Such instances will be
described in greater detail below (see paragraph 7), and a
case will be made that many such attacks constitute serious
violations of international humanitarian law, amounting to
a breach of a rule protecting important values, and with
grave consequences for persons with interests in the
infrastructure so destroyed.

A further stage in NATO's campaign can be seen on the night
of 2 May 1999, when five major electricity stations wer

[CTRL] UN Reaction

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From AP


Security Council Shocked by Blast

By Nicole Winfield
Associated Press Writer
Saturday, May 8, 1999; 8:45 a.m. EDT

UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- The Security Council today
expressed shock and concern over the damage and
casualties caused by a NATO missile strike on China's
embassy in Belgrade.

China, Russia, Yugoslavia and their allies condemned
the incident as a ``barbaric'' attack that violated
international law and the Geneva Conventions
protecting diplomats. China called an emergency late
night meeting that continued until the early morning.

While apologizing for the loss of life, the United
States and its NATO allies countered that Yugoslav
President Slobodan Milosevic bore the blame for any
casualties from the NATO raids because he had refused
to comply with international demands for a peaceful
settlement in Kosovo.

China's state-run news agency Xinhua said three people
were killed.

The sparring came during nearly five hours of tough
closed-door negotiations and sometimes acrimonious
public debate. The session indicated that the incident
was certain to complicate efforts to reach a peace
agreement in Yugoslavia.

China is a permanent member of the Security Council,
where the United States and Russia are seeking
approval of a Kosovo peace plan.

NATO spokesman Jamie Shea admitted the alliance had
hit the wrong building.

``We explained to the Chinese authorities this is an
accident. We offered our sincere regrets,'' Shea told
a morning briefing at NATO headquarters in Brussels,
Belgium.

NATO bombs were targeting a weapons warehouse that coordinates Yugoslavia's weapons 
imports and exports, close to the Chinese Embassy during the heaviest night of bombing 
in Belgrade.

Shea could not explain how the embassy was mistaken for the Yugoslav government 
building.

Chinese Ambassador Qin Huasun said NATO should be punished for the ``indiscriminate 
attack,'' and should also stop its air campaign immediately and unconditionally.

Yugoslavia's U.N. representative, Vladislav Jovanovic, said the bombing was not an 
accident.

``This is one accepted crime by those who have decided to stage a total war against 
Yugoslavia, against a part of Europe, against Europe as a whole,'' Jovanovic said.

``NATO would never target civilians and NATO would never target an embassy,'' Deputy 
U.S. Ambassador Peter Burleigh told the council.

Burleigh urged council members to ``look at the big picture, and the big picture is 
this: One man alone is responsible for this crisis ... and his name is Slobodan 
Milosevic.''

An exasperated Russian Ambassador Sergey Lavrov rejected his claim, saying the ``big 
picture'' was that NATO was exploiting a humanitarian crisis in Yugoslavia to 
``destroy the present world order,'' which is based on int
ernational law and the charter of the United Nations.

Arriving in Germany on a trip aimed at finding a political solution to the conflict, 
Russian envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin sharply criticized the embassy bombing.

Chernomyrdin was expected to go to Belgrade to follow up on a proposed peace plan 
worked out by the Western powers and Russia. Diplomats are hoping Russia, now taking a 
stance closer to the West, would be able to exert pr
essure on Yugoslavia to accept a peace deal.

China called the emergency meeting, hoping to condemn what it called a ``barbaric'' 
NATO missile attack on its embassy as a ``serious violation of international law.''

Instead, a consensus statement reached after nearly three hours of closed-door 
negotiations expressed the council's ``shock and concern'' over casualties and damage.

The statement, which carries no legal weight and is merely a reflection of the 
council's thinking, expressed the council's sympathy and condolences to the Chinese 
government and the families of the victims.

U.S. officials said they were pleased with the final statement. But they then had to 
sit through an open council debate in which not only Yugoslavia's allies in the Kosovo 
conflict but Iraq and Cuba, too, condemned Washin
gton.

Iraqi Ambassador Saeed Hasan said the attack on the
embassy was similar to the ``aggression'' Iraq was
suffering at the hands of Washington -- a ``pattern of
the American behavior which flouts international law
and the rights of nations and peoples.''

Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi said it was
``deplorable'' that the embassy was hit. He said Japan
would work to find peace in the Balkans as soon as
possible.

Vietnam, a longtime rival of China with which it
fought a bloody border war in 1979, said the embassy
attack was a ``serious violation of international
law.''

The Southeast Asian nation called for an ``immediate
stop'' to the bombing campaign and a ``settlement of
the issue through negotiations.''

© Copyright 1999 The Associated Press

Now as I research my recollection for the specificity
of facts concerning embassy bombings, isn't there some
precedent for retaliatory actions against the
perpetrators of the bomb

[CTRL] UNHCR / G8

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From http://www.unhcr.ch/news/media/kosovo.htm

8 May 1999

AT A GLANCE

•Thousands of refugees arrive in Albania; officials
say they will accept as many as one million refugees
if necessary amid reports of a continuing influx from
Kosovo.

•Only a handful of refugees arrive in Macedonia
despite assurances in Skopje that the borders are
open.

•Departures under the humanitarian evacuation program
in the FYR of Macedonia yesterday were 1,914, bringing
the total to more than 34,000.

•The estimated number of refugees and displaced people
has reached more than 718,000, including 230,900 in
the FYR of Macedonia, 407,000 in Albania and 62,000 in
Montenegro.



Major Developments

ALBANIA

More than 5,000 refugees arrived in Albania through
the Morini crossing on Saturday and the influx was
continuing at midday. They came in tractor-wagons from
the Pec area in western Kosovo and repeated similar
stories which previous arrivals had told of mass
killings and attacks by Serbian troops using artillery
to empty villages.

Arrivals through Morini on Friday totalled an
estimated 900.

Also on Friday, UNHCR Special Envoy Dennis McNamara
paid a flying visit to Kukes and announced that
Albania would accept as many as one million refugees
if necessary.

McNamara also said that the tented camps in Kukes,
within easy artillery range of nearby Serbian
positions, must be emptied as quickly as possible and
all of the refugees moved to safer areas.

After high level discussions in the Albanian capital
of Tirana and with local officials in Kukes Mcnamara
said that "The Albanian government has agreed to take
as many refugees as necessary, as many as one million
people if that is what it takes."

"The Albanian government's gesture and decision is
extremely important to the whole humanitarian effort
at this time," McNamara said, especially given the
fact that neighboring Macedonia wants to shift as many
of the Kosovar refugees there to other countries as
soon as possible.

McNamara said the first 6,000 refugees would probably
be moved from Macedonia to the Korce region of Albania
within the next several days, with possibly tens of
thousands of others to quickly follow.

Albania already hosts the bulk of the Kosovar
refugees, around 400,000 compared with nearly 200,000
in Macedonia. Tirana has repeatedly said it welcomes
refugees to stay in the country.

McNamara said the issue of security in the Kukes area
was high on his agenda during his talks in Kukes and
Tirana and that both the government and UNHCR had
agreed "these tented camps should not be here. We are
doing everything possible to persuade the people in
the camps to leave as soon as possible."

"We are really going to press the refugees very firmly
to move to other facilities in other parts of the
country."

He added, "We won't close the tents on top of the
refugees but we will use every method we can to
persuade them to move. We are going to tell them that
at a certain point, these camps will not be here. The
services they currently enjoy will not be here. We do
not want camps near military areas.

"'The refugees should move immediately. They should
not be here," he said.

Mcnamara also stressed UNHCR's difficult financial
condition while trying to tackle one of the biggest
and most complicated emergencies in its history. The
agency, he said, faced an immediate shortfall of at
least 40 million dollars as it tried to grapple with a
still expanding emergency.

FYR of MACEDONIA

Only a handful of people crossed to Macedonia on
Friday, including a heavily pregnant woman and a man
with a Slovenian passport. For all practical purposes,
all border crossings from Serbia to Macedonia are
closed to Kosovo refugees. Those few who arrived say
there may be up to 3,000 people stuck on the Serbian
side of the border, including some 200-300 who came by
train from Pristina Friday morning.

Meanwhile, at the Blace transit center, UNHCR is
hastily putting up tents and preparing the ground for
a possible new influx.

On Thursday, Macedonian officials gave UNHCR
assurances that refugees from Kosovo will be allowed
into the country. This followed meetings in Skopje in
which UNHCR said its staff late Wednesday witnessed an
estimated 1,000 Kosovo refugees being prevented from
entering the FYR of Macedonia. They were subsequently
forced to go back to Kosovo.

HUMANITARIAN EVACUATION PROGRAM

Departures under the humanitarian evacuation program
from the FYR of Macedonia to third countries totaled
1,914 on Friday, including 103 to Austria, 242 to
Canada, 112 to the Czech Republic, 162 to Denmark, 157
to Norway, 114 to Poland, 235 to Spain, 160 to Sweden,
222 to Turkey and 407 to the United States.

So far, 34,239 refugees have departed under the
program in which UNHCR has received offers for 135,000
places in 39 countries.


KOSOVO DISPLACEMENT STATISTICS

Information as at 8 May 1999, 06:00 GMT

Total recent displacement includes figures in Tables 1
and 2. It is emphasized that t

[CTRL] EBooks

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From Slate.CoM

>
>
> browser
>
> I Have Read the Future: At dinner. In a taxi. On the
> john. With my electronic book.
>
> By Jacob Weisberg
>
>
> Since the launch of Slate nearly three years ago, we've
> joked about how you'd know when online magazines were
> ready for mass consumption. It would be when you could
> take them, like print magazines, to the bathroom. Well,
> I'm here to tell you: I've read Slate on the john.
>
> Among the other places I have been reading Slate,
> Salon, an electronic version of the Wall Street
> Journal, and the e-texts of various novels and short
> stories, in last couple of weeks:
>
> Aloud to my wife in a car at night
> In a taxi, again at night
> While brushing my teeth
> On a plane without an overhead light
> Standing on the subway
> In bed
> While eating Chinese food with chopsticks
>
> These are situations in which reading is ordinarily
> either awkward or impossible. They present no
> challenge, however, to my new favorite gizmo, the
> Rocket eBook. I'm not what you would call an early
> adopter when it comes to consumer electronics. I don't
> have a DVD player, an MP3 player, or a Palm Pilot. But
> I'm ready to blow $499 on a Rocket as soon as I have to
> send my demo model back. This chunky little device,
> which weighs just under a pound and a half, actually
> deserves that overused epithet "revolutionary," because
> it has the power to change something as basic to human
> civilization as the way people read.
>
> A lot has happened since I wrote about e-books and
> libraries last fall. You can now actually buy two
> different models. One is the Softbook, which at $299
> appears less expensive than the Rocket but actually
> costs more because you must commit to spending $479 on
> books over two years as part of the package. The
> Softbook is a writing-tablet-size screen with a leather
> cover that gives off what someone must have imagined to
> be the musty scent of an old book (but is actually the
> smell of a new shoe). The Softbook's one big advantage
> is that you don't need a PC to use it. You buy books
> directly from Softbook and download them into the
> reader via a phone line. But the Softbook has two big
> disadvantages. The first is that it's poorly designed.
> The screen is hard to read, navigating text is clumsy,
> and the whole device has an unbalanced feel. The second
> drawback is it doesn't work. After reading a bit of
> preloaded text--The Sea Wolf, by Jack London--I
> couldn't download anything else, and my Softbook soon
> purged its preloaded content as well. The only other
> person I know who has a Softbook reports a similar
> failure.
>
> By contrast, the Rocket, which is made by a Silicon
> Valley start-up called NuvoMedia, is ergonomically
> sound, with the pleasing heft of a folded-over
> paperback. The screen is superb, and you get a choice
> of large or small print as well as a variety of
> lighting settings. You can orient the text horizontally
> or vertically and position the grip for left- or
> right-handed use. And because it doesn't need to be
> held open, you can read the Rocket one-handed. In fact,
> you can even prop it up and read no-handed if you're
> eating something greasy or shaving. All you need is one
> clean finger to click the "forward" and "back" buttons
> that move the text a page at a time. The battery lasts
> for some 30 hours before needing to be recharged. And
> while the process of getting stuff to read on the
> Rocket is a bit involved, it actually works remarkably
> well. First, you load the Rocket software onto your PC.
> Second, you register your eBook and get an ID and a
> password. Third, you go to the Barnes & Noble Web site,
> which is (but won't be for long) the exclusive
> distributor of Rocket-formatted content, and make your
> e-purchase. Fourth, Barnes & Noble sends you an e-mail
> message with a Web link that allows you to download
> what you've purchased into the "Rocket Library" on your
> PC. Fifth, you transfer your book from your PC's Rocket
> Library to your Rocket, which has 4 mb of memory
> (enough to hold 20 medium-length novels). The only
> hitch I encountered in this procedure was that Barnes &
> Noble took a few hours to e-mail the link I needed to
> download books I bought. (I understand that this is not
> an uncommon problem.) Instant gratification is an
> important part of the appeal of e-books, and I found
> this delay slightly maddening.
>
> There are other drawbacks of the sort you would expect
> from any infant technology. Barnes & Noble stocks only
> 524 eBook titles at present, an unfortunately large
> number of them in the business and self-help
> categories. You can buy Endless Referrals: Network Your
> Everyday Contacts Into Sales and Life Without Stress:
> The Far Eastern Antidote to Tension and Anxiety (which
> would seem to cancel each other out) but not Uncovering
> Clinton or The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Recent
> publications are gratuitously overpriced.

[CTRL] Hitchens on Kosovo

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

From:   "Michael Albert" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject:ZNet Commentary, May 8 -- Edward
Herman
Date sent:  Fri, 7 May 1999 22:20:28 +0100

Here is today's ZNet Commentary Delivery from Edward
Herman. The attached
file is the same material in nicely formatted html so
that you can read it
in your browser if you wish.

To pass this comment along to friends, relatives, etc.
please note that
the Commentaries are a premium sent to monthly donors
to Z/ZNet and that
to learn more about the project folks can consult ZNet
(http://www.zmag.org) and specifically the Commentary
Page
(http://www.zmag.org/Commentaries/donorform.htm).

Our address for submitting checks is 18 Millfield St.
Woods Hole, MA
02543, though we much prefer credit card arrangements
via the site.

Here then is today's ZNet Commentary...

--

HITCHENS DEGRADED
Edward S. Herman

It would be hard to imagine better evidence of the
sorry state of supposedly left opinion in this country
than Christopher Hitchens' "Belgrade Degraded" in the
May 17 issue of The Nation. Hitchens never comes to
any firm conclusion on what ought to be done, but he
clearly regrets that the full-scale invasion option
"might not now receive (as it once might have done)
popular support from Serbian civilians." The notion
that it ever would have received such support is
ludicrous, and Hitchens offers no evidence for this
claim.

With great pomposity he tells his readers that a
principled peace movement
"should at least attempt to contact the few genuine
Serbian
internationalists, ask them what they think and
inquire how they can be
helped." (Always beware of words like
"internationalists." Those
recognized as in this category by the western
establishment have commonly
been members of denationalized elites who have
swallowed western attitudes
and ideologies, have lost sight of national ideals and
interests, and are
proud of their links to the morally superior West.
They are often pleased
to display their "internationalism" to the western
media, and they are
regularly spokespersons for the "reforms" of Russia,
Eastern Europe, and
Latin America.) Hitchens enlightens us with the
opinions of two
"internationalists"--one, Srdja Popovic, favors a NATO
invasion from
Hungary to remove Milosovic as "a precondition for a
settlement." The
other, Dusan Mkavejev, who used to support NATO
bombing of Serb positions
in Bosnia, is entirely against the current bombing. It
never occurs to
Hitchens, who opens his article with a critique of
NATO bombing policy and
objectives, that a man who would urge a NATO invasion
of his own country
and a NATO-organized restructuring of Yugoslav
politics is a fanatic and
nut. And the nut and his other Serb "internationalist"
contradict one
another.

Hitchens also tells us that Serbs who are "the serious
opposition...understand that the main enemy is at
home." But my informants
who have recently visited Belgrade tell me that
Hitchens' friends and
"serious opposition" are unrepresentative of the
intellectuals there, who
oppose Milosevic, consider him a political trickster
and terrible
strategist, but do not feel that even his worst
actions justify a death
penalty for an entire nation. Many informed Serbs also
believe that the
earlier NATO policies seriously biased against Serb
interests, and the
failure to pursue an equitable negotiated settlement,
all helped
consolidate Milosevic's power. And the bombing, which
has had a generally
acknowledged unifying effect on the Serbs, has made it
clear to them that
the main enemy is abroad.

Hitchens says that one segment of the peace movement
here "speaks smugly
about how all this bombing has upset the Serbian
democrats." Why this is
"smug" except as a petty smear tactic is unclear--Serb
democrats almost
uniformly condemn the bombing for its internal effects
on Yugoslavian
politics, as well as for other reasons. In his article
Hitchens shows not
the slightest awareness that the NATO powers have been
carrying out
policies hostile to Yugoslavia and the Serbs for
years, and well before
ethnic cleansing took hold.

Although Hitchens says that serious Serbs recognize
that "the enemy is at
home," he does not say that serious U.S. citizens
should recognize that
their [emphasis on their] enemy is "at home." Like so
many other supposed
leftists Hitchens has swallowed the imperial
perspective that finds the
demons--"another Hitler"--somewhere else, and exactly
where Bill Clinton
and Madeleine Albright find it. While Hitchens makes
no critical remarks
about the branch of the left that favors bombing, he
sneers further at the
bad branch--the one that smugly says bombing has hurt
Serbian
democrats--saying that "Such people also describe the
bombing as an
'aggression' and cleverly ask why we don't bomb to
save Kurds or the
Timorese."

Hitchens once again denigrates by the use of
rhetorical ploys-- q

[CTRL] Weathering Mass Destruction

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From Reagan.CoM



THE REAGAN INFORMATION INTERCHANGE






SEARCH TERMS:
www.reagan.com
Thank you for your support! 



It's OK To Describe Suffering from Oklahoma Tornadoes but NOT NATO Bombs



Reporting News is Not Propaganda but Manipulation of the News to Deceive the Public IS 
Propaganda - Not!



By: Mary Mostert,

May 7, 1999

Berry Tramel, a staff writer for the Oklahoman, in Oklahoma City, wrote describing the 
devastation caused by tornadoes that swept through Oklahoma City and it surrounding 
areas: "I've stood in Arlington National Cemetery.
 I peered through the fence at the Murrah Building. I've interviewed dying children. 
Nothing sobered me like a walk down Windemere Drive.

"Look south, and homes by the dozens are leveled. Look north, and no home still 
stands. Block after block after block, nothing but piles of rubble, interrupted only 
by trees stripped of limb and leaf. Piles with people si
fting for valuables.

"I've seen footage of tornado damage. I've seen footage of this tornado damage. I've 
never seen anything like this. This looked like something out of World War I. This was 
a barren land."

A flurry of stories chronicled the suffering of the people, left without electricity, 
housing, telephones, and water in some cases and explained the complexities of 
removing the debris left by the tornadoes, and the pain
at the losses suffered:

"Mother and son survived the storm in a neighbor's cellar.

"He came out of the cellar and said, 'Mama, you don't have a house.' Then he looked 
down the street and said, 'Mama, I don't have one, either,'" Delma Whitaker said.

As Carpenter sat on the rain-stained mattress in the sunshine and open air of what had 
once been her childhood bedroom, she began to cry. Her mother sat beside her, pulling 
her close and offering wordless comfort.

"Carpenter shook her head as she looked at the devastation around her."

On Fox News yesterday, the Big Story was the tornado damage. With 41 known dead, and 
some towns totally wiped out, damage was described by one talking head as "looking 
like the area had been bombed back to the Stone Age."


Through the pictures and written descriptions of the suffering caused by the 
tornadoes, the American people are sympathetic to the suffering described. Does that 
constitute "propaganda" - which the dictionary describes as
 the "systematic effort to spread opinion or beliefs." Are the stories repeated hour 
after hour in an effort to get the American people to think about the tornado victims 
in a certain light - and, if so, is that bad?

Simultaneously with the tornadoes, a natural disaster, there is another swath of 
destruction taking place in Yugoslavia by design as bombers and missiles rein down on 
the people of Yugoslavia, where Bill Clinton and his f
riends in NATO are determined to "bomb the Serbs" back to the Stone Age, unless they 
agree to surrender their sovereignty as a nation. Descriptions of the suffering of the 
people who are actually being bombed back to the
Stone Age are considered "propaganda" by some and they complain. For example, the 
following e-mail protesting articles about the impact of NATO bombs prompted one of 
Mike Reagan's listeners to write:

Mike: Love the show and site. Good info, but am perturbed by excessive Serbian 
propaganda at site. Sure clinton is the C-in-C from Hell, but if we blow this, it's 
not just him that goes. If we can't defeat a two-bit tinho
rn like this, much of what your Dad achieved will be dissipated. I'm with Sen. McCain.-

Very Respectfully,

David Crow

Apparently Crow believes that descriptions of suffering caused by bombs is 
"propaganda" - but descriptions of suffering caused by tornadoes is not. The 
destruction, and the resultant suffering of the injured and the dying
, the lack of food , water, heat - and in some instances - housing are the same. For 
example, from Ivanka, a 74 year old writer in Belgrade to her daughter in America: 
"May 5th-(Phone) Power goes on, power goes off. No el
ectricity at Olga's right now. Our showers are cold, laundry is dirty, and food is 
getting spoiled. I am afraid to use elevators, as power failures are so unpredictable 
that people are getting stuck and have to be rescued
. Considering that my building is almost empty, who knows how long I'd have to wait 
for help if that happened. I have no idea how my 90 year old neighbor is handling it 
all - I've spent most of the time at Olga's.

"It's frustrating, not being able to watch the news, nor access the Internet. I wonder 
if that was the reason for strangling of our power lines - killing journalists has 
proven too costly in Public relations points... Rea
listically, the army depends the least on our country's power grid. They have 
batteries and generators, as I am sure NATO knows very well if even I can think of it.

"The food in the stores is getting bad. The milk we bough

[CTRL] Purification

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From Int'l Herald Tribune

""In talks with Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov of
Russia, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright insisted
recently that every Serb soldier and policeman has to
leave the rebellious province.""

Paris, Saturday, May 8, 1999


Formula to Keep Peace: Troubling Ambiguities


---
-
By Barton Gellman and Steven Mufson Washington Post
Service
---
-
WASHINGTON - The United States and its North Atlantic
Treaty Organization allies realized a major ambition
with Russia's consent to a formula to end the war in
Kosovo. But it remains to be established whether the
formula is compatible with NATO's war aims against the
government in Belgrade.

Russia and the alliance's main powers bridged
fundamental disagreement with ambiguity. U.S.
officials stressed that the joint statement by the
Group of Seven nations and Russia was ''consistent
with'' the alliance's core demands for the removal of
Yugoslav troops in Kosovo Province and their
replacement with a well-armed force led by NATO. But
on its face, the agreement is equally consistent with
abandonment or softening of both demands.

Whether the deal becomes a reversal or a triumph for
NATO - and, conversely, for Russia - will not be
decided until events give meaning to the ''general
principles'' it sets out. Major points of silence
include whether all of Belgrade's troops have to leave
Kosovo or only some, who will decide the orders and
armaments of the foreign troops intended to become
Kosovo's effective governors and what role will be
played by the United Nations Security Council.

On central features of Kosovo's political and military
landscape that NATO insisted until now were not
negotiable, the text of Thursday's statement calls for
endorsement, adoption or decision by the Security
Council, where Russia and China hold vetoes.

Much of the meaning of the agreement hangs on the
interpretation of words such as ''effective'' - to
describe the ''civil and security presences'' meant to
lay down the law in Kosovo - and the absence of words
like ''all'' -- to describe the Yugoslav forces
required to withdraw. On this fundamental question -
who will rule Kosovo - the text specifies neither
which troops have to leave Kosovo nor which troops
will come in to keep the peace.

The United States and its allies have used ambiguity
to their advantage before, obtaining Security Council,
and therefore Russian, assent to broad language that
they later deemed adequate to authorize the war in
Kosovo and, before that, punitive expeditions against
Iraq.

But if they do hold firm on their substantive demands,
as U.S. and allied officials said they would, the
central question remains what it has been for more
than a month: Whether NATO will lose its taste for
bombing before its demands are accepted, in turn, by
Moscow and then Belgrade.

Because Russia has been Yugoslavia's major patron,
some U.S. and allied officials portrayed Thursday's
statement by the Group of Seven leading Western
industrialized countries plus Russia as the harbinger
of an important new lever against President Slobodan
Milosevic of Yugoslavia.

''It definitely will help in pressuring Milosevic,''
said a high-ranking White House official. ''I also
think it's conceivable that as we move forward with
this, not only can they pressure him more but it's
easier for Milosevic to say yes to the G-8 than to
NATO.''

Other policymakers put more emphasis on Washington's
determination to prevent collapse of pro-Western
forces on Russia's political scene, where analysts
foresee gains by angry nationalists in the election of
the State Duma, Russia's legislature, in December.
Productive negotiations with Viktor Chernomyrdin, the
Russian special envoy to the Balkans and former prime
minister, mark much improvement over Moscow's threats
last month to send an aircraft carrier to the Adriatic
Sea and to pull its peacekeeping troops out of Bosnia.

''No one wanted to see progress made in U.S.-Russian
relations fall apart because of Milosevic's
irresponsible actions,'' said an American official,
describing the view of President Bill Clinton and
President Boris Yeltsin. ''There is much more at stake
in the U.S.-Russia relationship.''

There was an internal alliance motive as well, since
many of the European allies insisted during the recent
NATO summit conference in Washington that Moscow's
participation in Kosovo must be an overriding
priority. As a U.S. official put it, ''You need to
keep enough diplomacy alive so that the allies and
Russians feel you're serious that you're trying to get
a good deal, and not lose your soul in the process.''

In talks with Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov of Russia,
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright insisted
recently that every Serb soldier and policeman has to
leave the rebellious province.

Other U.S. and allied officials said, as a 

[CTRL] War & More

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From Chicago-Sun Times
http://www.suntimes.com/output/novak/novak06.html

Balkan failure is Clark's

May 6, 1999

BY ROBERT NOVAK SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

Who is responsible for an air offensive that is building anti-American
anger across Europe without breaking the Serbian regime's will? The blame
rests heavily on Gen. Wesley Clark, the NATO supreme commander.

After 40 days, U.S.-dominated NATO air strikes no longer even pretend to
aim solely at military targets. Pentagon sources admit that the attacks on
the city center of Belgrade are intended to so demoralize ordinary citizens
that they force President Slobodan Milosevic to yield. That has not yet
happened, but diplomats believe the grave damage done to American prestige
in Central and Eastern Europe will outlive this vicious little war.

"The problem is Wes Clark making--at least approving--the bombing
decisions," said one such diplomat, who then asked rhetorically: "How could
they let a man with such a lack of judgment be [supreme allied commander of
Europe]?" Through dealings with Yugoslavia that date back to 1994, Clark's
propensity for mistakes has kept him in trouble while he continued moving
up the chain of command thanks to a patron in the Oval Office.

In the last month's American newspaper clippings, Clark emerges as the only
heroic figure of a non-heroic war. Indeed, his resume is stirring: first in
his class at West Point, Rhodes scholar, frequently wounded and highly
decorated Vietnam combat veteran, White House fellow. He became a full
general about as fast as possible in peacetime.

But members of Congress who visited Clark at his Brussels headquarters in
the early days of the attack on Yugoslavia were startled by his
off-the-record comments. If the Russians are going to sail war ships into
the combat zone, we should bomb them. If Milosevic is getting oil from the
Hungarian pipeline, we should bomb it.

NATO's actual air strategy did not go that far, but increasingly, it has
reflected Clark's belligerence. Even the general's defenders in the
national security establishment cannot understand the targeting of empty
government buildings in Belgrade, including Milosevic's official residence.
Civilian damage and casualties in Kosovo and elsewhere in Serbia are too
widespread to be accidental.

Sources inside the U.S. high command say this week's disabling of Belgrade
electrical power facilities was intended to destroy civilian morale. The
Pentagon has announced NATO "area bombing" with "dumb" bombs carried by
B-52s--clearly an anti-population tactic. In a highly limited war, Clark is
using the methods of total war.

One American diplomat with experience in the Balkans, who asked that he not
be quoted by name, told me that ground forces are needed and he is appalled
by the bombing of civilian targets. "It has no military significance, and
it is pointless--utterly pointless," he added. "But it has a terrible
impact on us. This bombing in the heart of the Balkans is costing us."

That cost is viewed by State Department professionals as the product of
Clark's deaf ear when it comes to diplomacy. His classic gaffe came in 1994
when he went off to meet Ratko Mladic, the brutal Bosnian Serb commander
now sought as a war criminal, at his redoubt in Banja Luka. Mladic
concluded their meeting by saying how much he admired Clark's three-star
general cap. Impulsively, the American general exchanged hats with the
notorious commander, who has been accused of ethnic cleansing, and even
accepted Mladic's service revolver with an engraved message.

That escapade cost Victor Jackovich his job as U.S. ambassador to Bosnia.
He was sacked partly for not exercising sufficient restraint on the
mercurial Clark and for not preventing him from gallivanting off to Banja
Luka. The sequel came at Belgrade a year later during the diplomacy leading
to the Dayton peace conference. Milosevic, smiling broadly, humiliated
Clark by returning his hat to him. That helps explain the general's intense
personal animosity for the Yugoslav president.

Clark is the perfect model of a 1990s political four-star general. Clark's
rapid promotions after Dayton--winning his fourth star to head the
Panama-based Southern Command and then the jewel of his European post--were
both opposed by the Pentagon brass. But Clark's fellow Arkansan in the
White House named him anyway. The president and the general are
collaborators in a failed strategy whose consequences cast a long shadow
even if soon terminated by negotiation.

Robert Novak appears on the CNN programs "Capitol Gang" at 6 p.m. Saturday
and "Evans, Novak, Hunt and Shields" at 4:30 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m.
Sunday.

Back to Novak Page


[News] [Sports] [Business] [Showcase] [Classifieds] [Columnists] [Feedback]
[Main Menu]

~~~

>From WorldNetDaily
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/bluesky_rockwell/19990506_xclro_violence_c.shtm
l

Violence Chic

--

[CTRL] New, Clear War

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

From
http://www.zoran.net/afp/text/guardian/nuclear_war_courtesy_of_nato.htm

NewsUnlimited
Original link: News Unlimited | Documentaries Story

Nuclear war, courtesy of Nato

Kosovo, like Vietnam, has liberal support. But what of our weapons?

By John Pilger
Tuesday May 4, 1999


The 'just and noble liberal war', in which Nato bombs have now incinerated
people on a bus, having already killed passengers on a train, refugees on
tractors, the elderly in a hostel, workers in factories and children in
their homes, is not the first. Vietnam was a liberals' war, described as a
'righteous crusade' by Bill Clinton's hero, John Kennedy, and a 'noble
cause' by Ronald Reagan, a conservative. The labels are important only as
illusion, now that Clinton is Reagan and Blair is Thatcher.

Nato's 'new vision' is to seek justification for American-led attacks all
over the world. When communism retired from the cold war game, the 'war on
drugs' was used to justify renewed American military intervention in Latin
America. After that, the pursuit of demons took over. Demons are dictators
of no further use to Washington. There was General Noriega in Panama, where
the US invasion cost 2,000 lives, and Saddam Hussein in Iraq (200,000
lives) and various warlords in Somalia (7,000 lives). Now it is the turn of
Milosevic, with whom Clinton and Blair share responsibility for emptying
most of Kosovo.

Demons as a justification for attacking countries have since been
reinforced by Weapons of Mass Destruction, or WMD. These are chemical,
biological and nuclear weapons, the possession of which, says Nato
literature, 'may require pre-emptive retaliation'. The ferocity of the
continuing military and economic assault on Iraq is justified in this way -
when the real reason has to do with the policing of an expanded American
protectorate from the Gulf to the Caspian Sea.

The hypocrisy is on a grand scale. Only one nation on earth has used all
three WMDs: the United States. Smallpox was used to ethnically cleanse
Native Americans and to spread plague in Cuba. Chemicals were used in
Vietnam: between 1961 and 1971, American planes dropped on South Vietnam a
defoliant, Agent Orange, which contained dioxin, a poison that causes
foetal death, congenital defects and cancer (this was code-named Operation
Hades).

When a Congressional inquiry revealed that the equivalent of six pounds of
dioxin had been dumped on every man, woman and child in South Vietnam,
Operation Hades was changed to the friendlier Operation Ranch Hand, and the
spraying continued. A pattern of deformities began to emerge: babies born
without eyes, with deformed hearts and small brains and stumps instead of
legs. I glimpsed these children in contaminated villages in the Mekong
Delta; and whenever I asked about them, people pointed to the sky; one man
scratched in the dust a good likeness of a bulbous C-130 aircraft,
spraying. In the towns and cities, it was not unusual to see deformed
children begging. They were known as 'Agent Orange babies'.

Recently, at the Tu Do hospital in Saigon, I was shown a group of newborn
babies, all of whom had Agent Orange deformities. The war that officially
ended in 1975 goes on; contaminated soil and water are poisoning a third
generation. Unlike American and Australian veterans of the war, who have
been finally compensated by the manufacturers of dioxin, the Vietnamese
have received nothing. Now a five-year Canadian study has discovered that
dioxin runs right through Vietnam's food chain and has called for
international help in decontaminating agricultural land, forests and
waterways. The cost of one F-16 bomber would pay for this.

'Can you imagine pilots from a democratic country doing such a thing
deliberately?' said Jamie, the Nato spin doctor, following the craven
killing of refugees by an F-16 pilot. Today, the same pilots are spreading
over Serbia and Kosovo a poison potentially as cataclysmic as Agent Orange.
It is carried in depleted uranium, which makes missiles and shells more
destructive. This is how Rosalie Bertell, a Canadian specialist, describes
the effects on humans: 'Depleted uranium comes from radioactive waste
produced for nuclear weapons and the nuclear industry. It can pierce tanks
and release a deadly radioactive aerosol of uranium, unlike anything seen
before. This lies in the dust or is suspended in the air, or carried in the
wind. It penetrates the lung tissue and enters the blood stream, storing in
the liver, kidney and bone and irradiating all the delicate tissues. It can
initiate cancer or promote cancer.'

The truth is that the US and Britain are engaged in a form of nuclear
warfare in the Balkans. In 1996, the United Nations Human Rights Tribunal
called depleted uranium a WMD. Like the Agent Orange babies of Vietnam, the
deformed and cancer-stricken children of southern Iraq, where depleted
uranium was tested by British and American forces during the 1991 Gulf war,
bear witness to the true nature o

[CTRL] British?

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From Int'l Herald Tribune

Paris, Friday, May 7, 1999


A Nation Asks: What Exactly Does It Mean to Be British?



By Tom Buerkle International Herald Tribune

LONDON - To judge by its symbols, the state of Britain is as solid and
enduring as ever. The guard changes daily at Buckingham Palace, the
Beefeaters patrol the cobbled paths inside the Tower of London, and the
Union flag flies proudly over the Palace of Westminster, the home of
parliamentary democracy.

But as voters launched a historic experiment in self-government with
elections in Scotland and Wales on Thursday, the big question facing
Britons was whether the devolution of political power would undermine their
sense of national identity.

The very notion of what it means to be British, and whether Britain itself
is a useful entity for the 21st century, are the subject of an increasingly
intense debate here, one that belies the popular impression of a timeless
country with nearly 1,000 years of unbroken history.

The postwar era has seen the decline of many of the institutions that
traditionally bound the peoples of the British Isles together, while the
transformation of Welsh and Scottish cultural identities into political
power shows signs of awakening English nationalism. With globalization
pushing people to reassert local identities from Quebec to northern Italy,
some people even question whether the United Kingdom itself can survive
indefinitely.

''Many factors behind the Union have ceased to operate, like Empire and the
dominance of Protestantism, or are coming under strain, such as the cult of
the monarchy,'' said Linda Colley, a historian at the London School of
Economics. Ms. Colley, whose views are widely admired inside the government
of Prime Minister Tony Blair, says the country needs to ''reinvent
Britishness'' as a collection of different identities that draws strength
from its diversity.

Pronouncements about the death of Britain are no doubt premature. Mr.
Blair's Labour Party seemed set to win the largest bloc of seats in
Scotland and Wales after campaigning in defense of the Union and warning of
the potential economic and political costs of independence.

Still, evidence abounds of shifting loyalties in Britain. According to
recent polls, roughly two-thirds of people in Scotland identify themselves
as Scottish rather than British, a finding that has echoes in Wales and
Northern Ireland.

In what many people here perceived as the ultimate irony, the British
Broadcasting Corp. recently warned its own programmers about using the term
''British,'' because Scots get angry if English soccer hooligans are
referred to as British, or referring to Britain as a ''nation,'' since many
Scots and Welsh consider themselves nations within the United Kingdom.

The Times newspaper blasted the BBC under the headline, ''The nation that
dare not speak its name.''

Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the Exchequer who helped revive the Labour
Party's election campaign in Scotland by championing constitutional reform,
insists that devolution will preserve Britain by making government more
responsive to local needs. Britishness today is best defined not by
unchanged institutions but by common values shared by diverse peoples, such
as ''being creative, adaptable and outward-looking, believing in liberty,
duty and fair play,'' he said in a recent speech.

''We can be proud of a Britain, which becomes the first successful
multicultural, multiethnic and multinational country in the world,'' Mr.
Brown said.

The success of Labour's campaign and the decline in support for Scottish
independence, which polls indicate only a minority would favor, suggest
that Mr. Brown's vision is shared by many Britons.

''I don't see any weakening of attachment to Britain,'' said Vernon
Bogdanor, professor of government at the University of Oxford. ''The
British are not interested in constitutional reform. They're interested in
substance rather than process.'' The appeal to common values does have its
limits, though.

Scottish nationalism developed in the 1980s largely out of frustration at
the right-wing policies of Margaret Thatcher, whose Conservative Party
dominated the British Parliament and, as a result, Scottish policy, even
though it won few seats in Scotland. Today, many Scots see Mr. Blair as
Mrs. Thatcher's heir, who has succeeded by tailoring Labour's economic
policies to middle-class English voters.

Devolution risks a backlash in England itself because the political changes
have drawn fresh attention to the way in which power and money is shared in
the country. Thanks to a 1970s formula that took account of Scotland's
geographic isolation, the British government spends 22 percent more per
person in Scotland than in England, or £4,772 ($7,800) last year compared
with £3,897.

Meanwhile, after obtaining it

[CTRL] The Party's Just Beginning

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From http://www.iwpr.net/

Vojvodina: A Second Kosovo?

A NATO land attack via Hungary could be as disastrous for Vojvodina's
national minorities as the bombing has been for Kosovo's Albanians.

By a journalist in Novi Sad
(Published on May 4, 1999)

Since NATO launched its bombing campaign against Yugoslavia and Serb forces
set out ethnically cleansing Kosovo of its Albanian population, rumour and
speculation have been rife in Vojvodina, Serbia's northern province.

Its residents wonder whether Vojvodina is about to share the fate as
Kosovo.

Much depends on factors over which people in the province have no control,
in particular on actions by the NATO alliance and Belgrade's response.
However, most agree that if NATO decides to launch a land offensive against
Yugoslavia via the north through Hungary, now a member of the alliance, the
consequences for Vojvodina's national minorities may be as catastrophic as
for Kosovo's Albanians.

NATO guarantees for the territorial security of countries bordering
Yugoslavia--which have been reinforced by US President Bill Clinton--are of
little practical value for the national minorities within Vojvodina, in
particular the Hungarians who are the most numerous, who might yet find
themselves at the mercy of Serb nationalists.

Hungarians in the provincial capital, Novi Sad, have already begun to
experience growing Serb hostility. Some have been thrown out of the bunkers
where they sought shelter during the bombing. They have been told bluntly,
"There is no place for you in the shelters, since the bombs are coming from
your country." Others have been cursed in the street and ostracised by
their
neighbours.

Thus far such incidents have been isolated. And in what is Yugoslavia's
most
ethnically mixed territory, there have also been signs of cross-community
solidarity, with some people, for example, speaking out against the
expulsions from the shelters.

But pessimists fear that such abuse is a sign of what is to come, not only
for Hungarians but also for Croats, Slovaks, Romanians and Czechs. This is
especially the case since, after the destruction of the bridges on the
Danube, many Serbs believe that NATO is attempting to sever Vojvodina from
Serbia.

In the shelters, in the streets and in the coffee shops, people speculate
about a possible carve-up of the province. According to one popular theory,
NATO will reward its allies in the region by giving Hungary the Backa
region, Croatia the Srem, and Romania the Banat area - each one a different
region each bordering the respective country.

Josef Kasa, mayor of Subotica and leader of the Alliance of Vojvodina
Hungarians, warned Budapest before the bombing campaign got under way that
the Hungarian minority in Vojvodina may suffer if Hungary, as a NATO
member,
played an active role in the military campaign against Yugoslavia.

In mid-March, when it became clear that NATO planned to launch its
campaign,
Kasa travelled to Budapest to seek assurances from Hungarian Foreign
Minister Janos Martonyi that, in the event of war, Hungary would stay out.

On his return to Yugoslavia, Kasa stated that he had gone to Hungary on his
own initiative, not at Belgrade's behest, and that his only motivation was
a
desire to contribute to peace in the region. Moreover, since the NATO
offensive got under way, he has on several occasions condemned the bombing
campaign and appealed to NATO to halt its attacks on Serbia.

Officially, Belgrade has not responded to Kasa's initiatives. The
opposition
Democratic Party of Serbia has, by contrast, assessed Kasa's conduct as
"worthy of respect". It has also urged the Serbian parliament to look
positively at proposals made by the Alliance of Vojvodina Hungarians for
reform in Vojvodina to improve the status of both the Hungarians and the
other national minorities.

Like Kosovo, Vojvodina was stripped of its autonomous status at the end of
the 1980s. In late 1998, the Alliance of Vojvodina Hungarians published a
discussion paper called "Agreement on the Political Framework of Self-Rule
in Vojvodina". The proposal was ignored by Belgrade, but endorsed by the
Reformist Democratic Party and other democratic parties in Vojvodina. It
has
also received support from the Coalition Sumadija and Coalition Sandzak,
two
regional groupings that work together closely with parties in Vojvodina.

Since the beginning of NATO's campaign, several thousand non-Serbs are
believed to have left Vojvodina rather than risk bombing, conscription, or
the possibility of ethnic cleansing.

There are no precise figures, although most are presumed to be Hungarians.
But Slovaks, Romanians, Croats and others have also been leaving. (The
Alliance of Vojvodina Hungarians estimates that some 40,000 Vojvodina
Hungarians moved out earlier in the decade during the wars in Croatia and
Bosnia. Croats were forcibly expelled during these earlier wars.)

According to the 1991 census, Vojvodina's 2 million inhabitants included
some 16

[CTRL] Camping

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From Int'l Herald Tribune

""The overcrowding at the camps is sowing tensions that have already
provoked scuffles in food lines and at tables where refugees can register
for third-country transfers. UN relief officials have been trying for weeks
to open new camps, but Macedonian officials have moved slowly, and those now
in the works are not large enough to accommodate the overflow. Worried
officials at the World Health Organization anticipate outbreaks of hepatitis
and tuberculosis and have stepped up testing.""



Paris, Tuesday, May 4, 1999
Life in Refugee Camp: Stench, Mud and Despair



By R. Jeffrey Smith and Anne Swardson Washington Post Service


BRAZDE, Macedonia - Five weeks after thousands of Kosovo Albanians began
arriving here in a quest for safety and shelter, daily life in Macedonia's
largest refugee camp has settled into a numbing routine of boredom and
despair.
A visitor approaching the unsmiling Macedonian guards at the front gate is
met first by the sharp odors emitted by hundreds of overflowing latrines and
as many as 28,000 refugees who have not bathed in a month.

Inside the overcrowded camp, built in a few hours on farmland as a temporary
holding site for thousands of Kosovo Albanians, all the defects of an
unplanned city are instantly on display: Lice are commonplace, rodents make
nightly visits to the garbage areas and everything that might make living
comfortable seems to be missing or in extremely short supply.

Thousands of tents, aligned in hundreds of rows, stretch as far as the eye
can see down the mud of flat landscape, all fenced in by 2.1-meter-high
(seven-foot-high) chicken wire.

Waiting in line often occupies much of the refugees' day. People begin
lining up at 4 A.M. for the daily ration of food, which is distributed at 8
A.M. It can take hours of waiting to make an outside call on one of the six
cellular phones available.

Other lines form at the medical tents and at the tables where people
register to be transported to refugee camps that are being established in
other countries.

Small children in ragged clothes line up to try to kick a soccer ball
through a cardboard goal.

A handful of shops sell plastic sandals, scallions and cans of Coca-Cola -
all at prices that few refugees can afford. Most refugees are penniless,
their money taken from them by Yugoslav troops, Serbian police officers or
paramilitary units as they fled their homes and headed for Kosovo's southern
border.

Mathematicians, doctors, engineers, shopkeepers, salesmen, lawyers, students
and housewives wake up each day to an existence that provides no opportunity
for expression, creativity or individuality. Every day has the same low
point - making do with a ration of sardines or canned tuna - and the same
high point, the 6 P.M. posting of a list of those who will be leaving for a
third country.

''It is an art to stop thinking here and a problem to think too much,'' said
Mufail Limani, 40, a writer. ''There is no object for thinking, nothing
concrete. Just some illusions, some hope, some fictional things.''

After five weeks in a virtual prison with no knowledge of how long their
sentences will last, everyone at the camp ''has lost perspective,'' said
Selman Llap, 50, a coffee salesman from the Kosovo capital, Pristina, who
spends his afternoons seated with 60 other men on a thin edge of concrete
that juts out from the sole permanent structure here, a blue metal shed
surrounded by mud. ''They don't know about their future. Just pay attention
to their faces. No one is laughing.''

The camp was erected by NATO troops and then turned over to the United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the Catholic Relief Services. Its
population is more than five times what aid workers say is the optimal size
for efficient, humane housing of refugees; its density is three times what
international standards specify.

Instead of a temporary transit camp, it has become the only home that its
residents are likely to know during the summer - and perhaps the fall and
winter. Only a small fraction are being airlifted elsewhere, with their
places in tents refilled each day - and then some - by thousands of new
arrivals.

More than 25,000 refugees have been flown out of the seven refugee camps in
Macedonia during the last two weeks, but Kosovo Albanians keep arriving at a
greater rate. On Sunday, more than 5,000 crossed the border, swelling the
total in Macedonia to 185,000, according to the UN refugee agency.

The overcrowding at the camps is sowing tensions that have already provoked
scuffles in food lines and at tables where refugees can register for
third-country transfers. UN relief officials have been trying for weeks to
open new camps, but Macedonian officials have moved slowly, and those now in
the works are not large enough to accomm

[CTRL] Loose Threads

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From Int'l Herald Tribune

Paris, Tuesday, May 4, 1999
Preparing to Vote, Scots Count Costs of Separatism



By Tom Buerkle International Herald Tribune


GALASHIELS, Scotland - As in many towns in the Borders region of southern
Scotland, the prosperity of modern Britain seems to have passed by
Galashiels. The traditional mainstays of agriculture and textiles have been
in decline for decades, while the recent failure of the computer
circuit-board maker Viasystems has cost nearly 1,000 jobs and underscored
the difficulty of attracting new sources of wealth to the area.
But despite the best efforts of Scottish Nationalists to exploit the
economic distress before elections for a regional Parliament on Thursday,
there are few signs that people here are ready to bet that their future lies
with an independent Scotland.

''I don't want independence,'' said Jean Lee, a saleswoman at the local
Scottish Power appliance shop, who added that she thought one consequence of
independence would be higher taxes.

''I think Scotland's a poor enough country without paying higher taxes,''
she said.

That sort of hard-headed calculation appears to be taking place in the minds
of many Scots, and it is welcome news to the Labour Party of Prime Minister
Tony Blair.

After agreeing two years ago to give Scotland its first Parliament in nearly
300 years, Labour was initially dismayed to see its support slump to the
benefit of a surging Scottish National Party, which regards devolution as
just the first step toward full independence.

But in recent months Labour has restored its standing as Scotland's dominant
party, in part because of a campaign warning that independence could cost
billions of pounds, as well as pledges of higher spending for schools and
hospitals.

Most recent polls have indicated Labour would win the largest bloc in the
129-seat Parliament and form a government, probably in coalition with the
Liberal Democrats.

''I believe people don't want to plunge into another morass of
constitutional argument,'' said Donald Dewar, who is leading Labour's
campaign and is very likely to become first minister of Scotland. ''The
overwhelming economic consensus is that there is pain in separatism.''

Victory in Scotland and in Wales, where Labour also leads in the race to
elect a new Assembly on Thursday, is critical to Mr. Blair's ambitious
program of constitutional reform in Britain. Mr. Blair contends that
devolution will produce more responsive and democratic government without
breaking the ties that bind the regions together in the United Kingdom.

Alex Salmond, the fiery leader of the Scottish Nationalists, has railed
against Labour's campaign, but many in his own party privately blame him for
several tactical blunders.

The party dulled its appeal at first by playing down its independence
demands, calling a referendum on the issue its 10th priority behind such
prosaic matters as abolishing tolls on the bridge to the western island of
Skye. Then, Mr. Salmond left the party vulnerable to charges that it stood
for higher taxes by pledging to forgo a planned 1 percent cut in income tax
rates to bolster spending on health and education.

Perhaps most important, Mr. Salmond was the only political leader in the
country to criticize Britain's role in the bombing of Kosovo, calling it
''an impardonable folly'' that worsened the plight of ethnic Albanians.

The Nationalists' stumble highlighted the difficulty of transforming its
emotional appeal for independence into a coherent program for government
that could withstand the scrutiny of a tough election campaign.

''They were never put under the spotlight until now,'' said David Steel, the
Liberal Democrat candidate who is widely expected to become speaker of the
new Parliament.

''Scottish nationalism, Scottish identity is an emotional issue,'' said Ron
Hawkes, an unemployed electrical engineer who drives a taxi in Galashiels to
make ends meet. ''But no one's really convinced that the SNP knows what
they're doing with their figures.

''No one's going to vote for economic suicide.''

Undaunted by the criticism, Mr. Salmond has sought to refocus his campaign
on independence in the past week.

The actor Sean Connery, who remains widely popular here despite being a
Bahamas-based tax exile, fired up a gathering of party faithful in Edinburgh
last week by insisting that ''Scotland should be nothing less than equal
with all the other nations of the world.''

The Nationalists also released a long-awaited economic program for
independence, claiming that although Scotland would have a modest government
deficit, in contrast to Britain's surplus, it would meet the economic
criteria for joining the single European currency.

''Across the U.K., there seems to be an acceptance that independence is
coming,'' Mr. Salmond 

[CTRL] Dispatches From the War Zone

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

_


dispatch

Dispatches From the War Zone, Message 32

By Masha Gessen

To read these dispatches from the beginning, go to
http://www.slate.com/dispatches/99-03-31/dispatches.asp?iMsg=1


Message #32: April 29, 1999

From: Masha Gessen
To: Slate - dispatch

If you are ever in Tetovo, the largest town in western Macedonia,
and you want to find Edita Tahiri, academic and part of the
leadership of the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), go to Café
Bolero, one block back from Marshal Tito Street. If, on the other
hand, you are looking for the younger and hipper crowd from
Pristina, specifically the drama and theater types, the place to go
is smallest cafe on the third floor in the new shopping center.
Then again, if you are looking for the journalists, the ones from
the Kosovo Albanian-language daily Koha Ditore, then go to Cafe
Arbi on Marshal Tito. Sure, Koha has an office, too, but what would
be the point of following complicated directions if everyone who is
anyone is holding court in the cafes? If there ever was a cafe
society, the Kosovo intelligentsia in exile, currently resident in
Tetovo, is it.

As far from Skopje's lackluster tidiness as you can get, Tetovo
reminds me of Pristina. Miserable in the drizzle of winter,
stifling in the dust of summer, Pristina was never a particularly
attractive or pleasant town, but back when life was allowed to go
on there, it overflowed. The cafes blasted and burst onto
sidewalks, crowds pushed cars off the roads, and the number of
useless, kitschy, and colorful objects for sale overwhelmed. So
when I saw decorative mobile-phone antennas for sale in Tetovo, I
had a sense of recognition. And, with Tetovo's normal population of
about 70,000 nearly doubled by the influx of refugees, the crowds
were certainly there.

The waiter at Cafe Bolero told me that Edita Tahiri had,
unfortunately, gone to Skopje. She would be back tomorrow morning,
and I could leave a message if I wished. Her cell phone, having as
it does a Kosovo number, does not work. "Is anyone else from the
LDK around?" I asked.

"Well, Shkelzen is out of town," he said, "and he is not LDK
anyway."

"That's right," I responded, eager to show off my expertise. "He is
Cafe Arbi, isn't he?"

The waiter nodded and watched--ruefully, I thought--as I walked
away toward Cafe Arbi.

"Someone here to see you," the waiter said, leading me to Baton
Haxhiu's table. Baton already had company, however, so I demurely
scheduled myself for the next time slot, in half an hour's time.

"So how does it feel to be back from the dead?" I asked in a couple
of hours, when my interview with Baton began. The day after the
NATO bombings began, the following news circled the world of those
who were concerned with specific lives inside Kosovo: the offices
of Koha Ditore had been attacked, a night guard killed, and Baton
Haxhiu, the editor in chief, was missing, presumed dead. I heard
the news in Moscow, then exchanged it with a colleague in Belgrade,
each of us growing somber at the other's knowledge, which seemed as
bad as confirmation. As Baton grew more surely dead with every
passing day, strangely, no one seemed too concerned about the fate
of Vetan Surroy, the founder and publisher of Koha Ditore, who was
rumored to be abroad--some said in Turkey, others, in the United
States. It wasn't until days later that we began to realize that
Vetan, being Vetan, would surely make public statements if he were,
in fact, abroad.

The story of Koha Ditore, as told by the staff that has made it to
Tetovo, goes like this. On the first night of the NATO bombings,
its offices were, indeed, attacked. The night watchman was killed.
Everything, including the computer equipment and all the archives,
was destroyed or looted. The paper's printing plant, located a
couple of kilometers outside of town, was also burned down. When
Baton Haxhiu came to the office in the morning, he was stopped by
the police. He called his editor, 25-year-old Ardian Arifaj, and
told him not to come to work or leave the house at all that day.
Then he went into hiding.

Ardian, a short, prematurely bald man, is someone I know, the
boyfriend of an old and dear friend, Vlera, who translated for me
the very first time I came to Pristina. The first news I had of
Vlera and her family was disturbing: They had not left Pristina
before the bombing started. The second thing I heard, already in
Belgrade, was that the family was safely in Macedonia. Still, when
I saw Vlera walk by the cafe where I was sitting this afternoon, at
first I did not believe my eyes, and then--for the first time, I
realized--I actually believed she was alive. She is working at Koha
now, with Ardi.

But back to Baton. "I really felt like a dead man for 11 days," he
says. He hid in basements, changing his location every couple of
days, only occasionally sneaking a visit with his family. "I had a
radio with me," he says, meaning short wave. "Radio i

[CTRL] Wellstone Proposal

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From http://www.commondreams.org/pressreleases/may99/050399h.htm

MAY  3, 1999  4:12 PM
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: US Senator Paul Wellstone
www.senate.gov/~wellstone/
Jim Farrell or Andrew McDonald 202/224-8440

Wellstone Proposes Conditional Pause In NATO Bombings To Bolster Diplomatic
Effort

WASHINGTON - May 3 - Senator Paul Wellstone called today for NATO to
consider a brief, conditional and verifiable halt to the air campaign
against Yugoslavia in order to improve the environment for diplomatic
discussions now underway. In a speech to the Senate proposing the idea,
Wellstone condemned the atrocities and ethnic cleansing committed against
innocent Kosovars by the Milosevic regime. He stressed that any plan for a
bombing halt would have to be linked to the assured safety of NATO troops,
and to immediate, reciprocal action by Serbian forces, including stopping
their attacks on Kosovar civilians and beginning their withdrawal from
Kosovo. Wellstone also expressed support for Russian engagement in
negotiations to end the crisis, and greater U.S. humanitarian aid for the
refugees.

"I voted, six weeks ago, to authorize the United States participation in the
NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. I did so because it was my judgment that we had
exhausted every diplomatic possibility, and that our best and most credible
information was that without NATO military action, a humanitarian disaster
was beginning to occur. I had no doubt about the wisdom and correctness of
our decision. My rationale for supporting the airstrikes was a simple one:
inaction in the face of unspeakable, imminent, and preventable violence,
including horrific atrocities that continue even now, was absolutely
unacceptable. In short, the slaughter must be stopped. I have no regrets
about that decision," Wellstone said.

"I think it's time for all the parties to consider a brief and verifiable
time-out before we proceed further down the slippery slope of further
military action, and before it's too late to turn back. With former Russian
Prime Minister Chernomyrdin and the President talking today, what I am
proposing for consideration--if it can be worked out in a way which would
protect NATO troops, and would not risk Serb resupply of their war
machine--is a brief and verifiable halt in the bombing, a cessation of what
seems to be a slide toward the bombing of a broader array of non-military
targets, a potential oil embargo directed at other countries, and deeper
involvement in a wider war that I believe we could come to regret."

"I am not naive about whether we can trust Milosevic; we have seen him break
his word too many times for that. Nor am I proposing an open-ended halt in
our effort. But rather a temporary pause of 48 hours or so, offered on
condition that Milosevic not be allowed to use the period to resupply troops
or to repair his air defenses, and that he immediately orders his forces in
Kosovo to halt their attacks and begin to actually withdraw. It would not
require his formal prior assent to each of these conditions, but if our
intelligence and other means of verification concludes that he is taking
military advantage of such a pause by doing any of these things, then we
should resume the bombing. I believe that we may need to take the first
step, a gesture, in the effort to bring these horrors to an end."

"Such a pause may well be worthwhile; if it works to prompt a cessation of
the ethnic cleansing and a return of Serb forces to their garrisons, it may
create the conditions for the possibility of further talks on the conditions
under which NATO's longer-term goals, which I support, can be met."

"A brief cessation might also enable non-governmental organizations and
other `true neutrals' in the conflict to airlift or truck in, and then
distribute, relief supplies to the internally-displaced Kosovars who are
homeless and starving in the mountains of Kosovo, without the threat of this
humanitarian mission being halted by the Serbian military. A Serb guarantee
of their safe conduct would be an important reciprocal gesture on the part
of Milosevic. These people must be rescued, and my hope is that a temporary
bombing pause might help to enable aid organizations to get to them."

"For fifty years, we have spent the blood and treasure of Americans and
Europeans to help provide for a stable, peaceful Europe. I believe we must
again work with the Europeans -- and now with the Russians and others who
have historic ties to the Serbs -- to try to resolve this crisis before the
flames of war in Kosovo and of the refugee exodus which it has prompted
consume the region. Stepped-up diplomacy, a possible pause in the
airstrikes, and other similar efforts to bring a peaceful and just end to
this crisis should be pursued right now," Wellstone said.


###

NewsCenter | NewsWire

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Stop Bombing, Read Thoreau
Th

[CTRL] Fw: Claremont Institute Precepts: Release the Cox Report

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

:
: The Claremont Institute--PRECEPTS |
| May 3, 1999
: Visit  |
| No. 161
:
: As we fight in Kosovo, where dangers multiply and success
: recedes, steps are neglected that can secure our freedom
: from attack at home.  Reports abound that America's stock
: of cruise missiles runs perilously low, and no assembly
: line is producing more.  The president has committed to
: ballistic missile defense, and yet he takes no urgent steps
: to complete a practical system and get it into operation.
:
: Meanwhile, China and Iraq give assistance to North Korea, a
: primitive and brutal place, in its effort to develop the
: means of direct and devastating attack upon the United
: States.
:
: How has China managed this? With nothing less than the best
: technology the United States has to offer.
:
: By now there can be no doubt that China possesses data on
: the most sophisticated nuclear warheads in our nuclear
: arsenal. These data the Chinese stole. Chinese spies were
: permitted to run amok in America's most secret research
: laboratories. But possessing critical data about warheads
: was not enough. The rest--that is, the technological means
: of delivering those warheads--was sold to China by American
: firms with export permits issued by the United States
: Department of Commerce.
:
: One thing is pending that would clear the air and give the
: assurance that the president is in favor of something more
: than mere posturing in defense policy.  The Cox Select
: Committee has found unanimously that American national
: security has been compromised in our recent dealings with
: the People's Republic of China. And yet the details of that
: report have not yet been released.  The White House objects
: that sources of intelligence will be revealed if too many
: details are disclosed.
:
: Remember that the report of the Cox Select Committee is a
: bipartisan document.  Every Democrat and every Republican
: voted in favor of the report. We need this information in
: order to make sure that the disasters we have suffered in
: intelligence and counter-intelligence are not repeated.
: The White House could establish its bona fides by
: cooperating in its prompt release.
:
: Today's _Washington Times_ contains an interesting article,
: with further details on this story.  To read the article go
: to: .
:
: Sincerely,
: Larry P. Arnn
: President, The Claremont Institute
:
:
: -
: Copyright (c) 1999 The Claremont Institute
:
: To subscribe to Precepts, go to: http://www.claremont.org/subscrib.cfm ,
or e-mail us at [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
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: For press inquiries, contact Nazalee Topalian at [EMAIL PROTECTED] or (909)
621-6825.
:
: The mission of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship
: and Political Philosophy is to restore the principles of the American
: Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life.
:
: The Claremont Institute | 250 West First Street | Suite 330 | Claremont,
: CA 91711 | Phone (909) 621-6825 | Fax (909) 626-8724
:
:





A<>E<>R

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new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
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A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled
one is truly vanquished. -Johann Christoph Schiller,
   German Writer (1759-1805)
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Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed
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In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material
is distributed without charge or profit to those who have
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for non-profit research and educational purposes only.

DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==
CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing!  These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections 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, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and
nazi's need not apply.

Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
==

[CTRL] Caspian Views

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From wsws.org

 WSWS : News & Analysis : Middle East

As it orients towards the Caspian, Washington modifies sanctions against
Iran
By James Brookfield
3 May 1999

The Clinton Administration made two diplomatic overtures towards Iran last
week. First, on Wednesday, April 28, it decided to allow US firms to sell
food and medicine to the country, along with Libya and Sudan. Though the
State Department continues to denote all three states as "terrorist," and to
maintain other economic restrictions against each of them, it will now
permit the sale of "human necessities" on a case-by-case basis rather than
continue the existing blanket trade embargo on all products.

Then on Friday, the State Department dropped its designation of Iran as the
world's chief terrorist nation. The New York Times quoted an unnamed
government official as saying, "If the Iranians read this as a signal for
better ties, fine."

Little official explanation was given for these changes. This is remarkable
in that only last August the US bombed a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum,
Sudan and less than two years ago William C. Ramsay, the Deputy Assistant
Secretary for Energy, Sanctions and Commodities, claimed that "no nation's
behavior poses a greater threat to US political and security interests than
that of Iran."

What accounts for the new approach from Washington?

Some cast the sanctions policy change as a humanitarian gesture. "The use of
food as a weapon is wrong," said Senator Larry Craig of Idaho. That Congress
has yet to drop embargoes against Iraq and Cuba indicates, however, that Mr.
Craig's principle is honored more often in the breach than in the observance
by US policy makers.

Other government officials pointed to less noble motivations. "For America's
farmers, this policy means opening up new markets and reviving old ones that
had been off-limits, giving them a chance to boost their bottom line." If
one reads "big agribusiness" for "America's farmers" one gets closer to the
truth. The first deal awaiting approval from the US Treasury Department is a
$500 million shipment of grain and sugar from the US-based Niki Trading
Company to Iran. In addition to the Niki deal, US companies now expect to
sell $500 million worth of commodities to Iran each year.

More significant than the expected windfall for US agriculture, however, is
the strategic shift in US policy that is being initiated via these two
diplomatic steps.

The Clinton Administration and the Iranian government of Mohammad Khatami
have been seeking, each for their own reasons, a diplomatic rapprochement of
sorts, described by US officials as a "dialogue," since the latter's 1997
election.

In the preceding four years, Washington, hostile to Tehran since the Iranian
revolution and wary of its status as a regional power, had sought to pummel
the country economically. In the spring of 1995 it ratcheted up its existing
trade sanctions. This move prompted a sharp fall in the rial and increases
in Iranian unemployment and inflation. The US followed up the next year with
the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act which threatened penalties for foreign firms
that did business with either of the two countries.

Even prior to the 1995-96 sanctions the Iranian economy was in severe
difficulty. The country had been largely bankrupted by its eight-year war
with Iraq in the 1980s. Then falling commodity prices hit. Export oil
earnings fell from $19 billion in 1986 to $10 billion in 1998. With little
capital to invest in the modernization of industry, substantial sections of
Iranian policymakers began to debate proposals for "reform" including
cutbacks on domestic gasoline subsidies and the opening of the oil industry
to private ownership and at least partial foreign control. By 1995 the
government had signed a contract with Total, the French oil company, to
develop the Sirri oil field. In 1996 Iran was reported to have launched a
secret bid to join the World Trade Organization, which would have required
the further undoing of restrictions on foreign trade. This setting served as
the backdrop to the coming to power of the Khatami government.

The new administration continued the turn toward Western investment, trade,
and diplomatic relations. Last month, for example, the parliament passed a
law allowing up to 49 percent foreign ownership of Iranian oil refineries.
The government also signed a $1 billion deal with Elf Aquitaine of France
and ENI of Italy to modernize an offshore oil field in the Persian Gulf.
Khatami also actively courted US policymakers, taking the step,
unprecedented since 1979, of granting an interview to US television in 1998.

The new Iranian orientation coincided with a foreign policy debate among US
officials and business executives about relations with Tehran. Oil
companies, effectively locked out of investing in Iran, found themselves at
a competitive disadvantage vis-à-vis their European rivals. At the same
time, Iran acquired newfound importance to the

[CTRL] Another Jamie

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From www.insightmag.com
 http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a372b2c29533a.htm

Via  http://www.antiwar.com/

<>

FreeRepublic.com "The web's premier conservative news discussion forum!"


[ Home | Latest | More | Register | Login | Logoff | Post | Search | Help! ]

Topic: White Water
Kosovo Ground War: CIA says 15,000 U.S. Dead

Insight
May 24, 1999 Jamie Dettmer



Published in Washington, D.C.. . . . Vol. 15, No. 19 -- May 24, 1999 . . . .
www.insightmag.com

Kosovo Ground War: CIA says 15,000 U.S. Dead




By Jamie Dettmer




How many American casualties would be acceptable, if President Clinton
decides on a ground war in Yugoslavia? That's a question members of the
House Armed Services Committee found themselves considering during a
briefing the CIA gave them on the eve of the NATO summit. According to
Langley, they should expect at least a 10 percent casualty rate -- in short,
a loss of 10,000 to 15,000 soldiers, depending on American force strength in
an allied army.

The exact size of an American contribution to a possible NATO force is, of
course, unclear at this stage. But most military experts -- and Clinton
administration officials -- privately acknowledge that the overwhelming bulk
of any force would have to come from the United States.

According to London sources, Britain only could muster 8,000 to 10,000
combat troops and the same holds for France and Germany. No doubt a platoon
here and a company there would be supplied by other NATO members. An
invasion force probably would have to number about 150,000, with the
American contribution being approximately 120,000.

"I'm not sure how they arrived at the 10 percent figure," a committee member
tells news alert!. "Several of my colleagues felt the rate may be
optimistic. Skepticism was muted, though. A lot of us feel more comfortable
with CIA briefings than Pentagon ones -- they tend to be less polemical,
harp less about how we are winning and are full of harder facts."

While the military briefings are more public relations in nature, lawmakers
are fully aware of the discontent sweeping the Pentagon. Some top Air Force
generals are appalled at how the Clinton administration has seized on
bombing as a panacea for overseas problems. They also are criticizing Army
Gen. Wesley Clark, NATO's supreme commander. Like some lawmakers who
recently visited Europe with Secretary of State William Cohen, they harbor
fears that Clark is becoming "intemperate" in the face of pressure and are
shocked at his gung-ho suggestion of bombing Russian tankers in the event
they continue to transport fuel to Montenegrin ports.

American generals aren't the only ones dissatisfied. Britain's top brass
also apparently are furious, or "brassed off," to use British idiom. Like
the Pentagon, the Ministry of Defense, or MoD, in London warned the
politicians that Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic would tough out any bombing
assault. But British Prime Minister Tony Blair was as adamant as his "Third
Way" twin, Bill Clinton, that Milosevic would buckle quickly and that a
nice, neat and quick war was there to be had.

Several recently retired British generals have printed their disdainful
thoughts on how the politicians messed up. Sir Michael Rose, a onetime
commander of allied forces in Bosnia, has expressed his doubts on the
thinking behind the air war. So, too, Sir Peter de la Billiere, another old
Bosnia hand, who has said: "The air assault is like a cake with icing but no
filling. Without the threat of a ground invasion, air strikes alone are
little deterrent to a dictator like Milosevic and leave no acceptable
options should they fail."

It is unusual in Britain for even retired senior officers to express
publicly such reservations about government policy. The fact that they did
suggests deep worry in the MoD -- and it is widely interpreted in London
that such officers are speaking for their active-service colleagues.

The Democrats' Running-Dog Press . . . .

In the House Speaker's Lobby on April 28 the congressional press corps was
giving a hard time to any GOP lawmaker they could find. "Why insist on a
war-powers vote?" one persistent New York reporter demanded of
Pennsylvania's Rep. William Goodling, who cosponsored a successful
resolution demanding the president seek congressional approval before
committing ground troops for an invasion force.

The reporter continued: "Republicans didn't when it came to Bush and the
gulf or Reagan and Grenada or Panama. Is it because of this president?"
Goodling kept to the constitutional argument, fearful no doubt like a lot of
his colleagues, of being accused of inconsistency or of digging up Monica
Lewinsky stuff. Would that matter? Can't a perfectly respectable argument be

[CTRL] Untidiness

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/AC/

Via  http://www.zoran.net/afp/text/guardian/oh_what_a_messy_war.htm

NewsUnlimited
Original link: News Unlimited | Documentaries Story





Oh what a messy war

Nato's strategies are frustrated at every turn, while enemy resistance is
not fading as fast as promised.
Patrick Wintour charts the bumpy course of a battle with no end in sight

Sunday May 2, 1999


'The mood is pretty grim at the moment. We will just have to keep pounding
on,' admitted a British official this weekend, five and a half weeks into
the war.

Nato had emerged broadly united following the Washington summit last
weekend; intelligence reports suggested morale in the Serb army was
collapsing; open fissures were appearing in Milosevic's own government, and
Russian diplomats might be able to lever a deal out of Belgrade.

But only one week later, that optimism has deflated and now the picture
looks a lot more messy for Nato, and for Russia.

The admittedly febrile mood in Washington seems to have shifted dramatically
with US officials now consistently briefing that the air campaign is not
having the impact intended on the Serb army. Despite claims by the Foreign
Secretary Robin Cook, based on intelligence reports that the Serb army is
deserting in droves, the Pentagon claims morale among the military is high.

General Wesley Clark, Nato Supreme Commander in Brussels and no peacenik,
was forced to admit last Wednesday that he thinks the Serbs have reinforced
their numbers inside Kosovo.

General Klaus Naumann, the second most senior Nato general, has also been
sounding less confident. He said publicly last Monday that the exclusive use
of air power had never achieved victory in the history of military
campaigns.

Estimates handed out by Pentagon officials last week confirmed this
analysis. They suggested the Yugoslav army still has 80 percent of its
tanks; 75 per cent of its most sophisticated surface-to-air missiles; and 60
per cent of its MiG fighter planes. And although Nato warplanes have blown
up the main rail links into Kosovo, five of the province's eight major roads
remain at least partially passable.

Yugoslav troops in Kosovo still have nearly half of their resupply capacity,
the Pentagon estimated last week, and have been able to maintain - or
perhaps even expand - the force of 40,000 they had when the bombing began on
24 March.

At the Italian air bases - launch pads for the sorties of Operation Allied
Force - there is frustration among the pilots because the weather and the
rules of engagement mean that individual Serb army units in the field in
Kosovo are 'close to impossible' to hit.

So Nato is scrabbling around to rethink its operations. Its options include
the use of new precision weapons, 'area bombing' missions and a reduction of
the altitude ceiling for aircraft from 15,000 ft, possibly to as low as
10,000 ft.

New weapons and bolder tactics may help. But the daily claims of the Chief
of the British Defence Staff, Sir Charles Guthrie, that the strikes are
clearly damaging the military, are beginning to sound like a stuck
gramophone record.

It is not surprising that the word 'stalemate' is on the lips of many
military analysts. Even Clinton himself spoke last week of the air campaign
stretching into July while humanitarian experts are already quietly planning
for the prospect that tens of thousands of refugees might still be in the
camps come the return of the severe Balkan winter.

The polls, obsessively monitored inside the White House, also show a shift
away from Clinton. He is getting no pick-up for his role as
Commander-in-Chief. Since the air war began, his approval ratings have
fallen by five to 10 percentage points in most polls.

Clinton is also struggling to maintain control of Congress as the
isolationist wing of the Republican Party gains ground and the Democrats
struggle to defend an incoherent strategy. The Wall Street Journal, in an
editorial last week, called for Clinton to sack his entire National Security
team including Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Defence Secretary
William Cohen.

And there are also deeper cracks in the alliance. Big anti-war rallies in
Germany yesterday, starring former German Finance Minister Oskar Lafontaine,
have put pressure on the Greens' interventionist Foreign Minister Joscka
Fischer. And the Rev Jesse Jackson had to brave White House disapproval to
meet Milosevic yesterday and plead for the release of the three captured US
soldiers. They were later freed, according to unconfirmed reports last
night. It was the only positive step of the week. Milosevic on Friday
produced his own seven-point peace plan prior to six hours of talks with the
Russian envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin in Belgrade. His formula was dismissed
outright by Nato. Making the best of the gloom, a Foreign Office official
said yesterday: 'At least he was so clear it

[CTRL] Hague/Bosnian Views

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From http://www.iwpr.net/

ICTY's Kosovo Investigation: Suspicions of Manipulation

Tribunal Update 122: Last Week in The Hague (19-24 April, 1999)

The enthusiasm with which the Western governments started co-operating with
the Tribunal's Kosovo investigation has given rise to suspicions of
manipulation of the court for political ends.

Discontented voices within the legal profession are becoming concerned that
the Tribunal is being "used for war propaganda".

Recently the Canadian daily, "The Globe and Mail," took up the thread and
asked "is war crime prosecutor Louise Arbour becoming a pawn of NATO"

The Chief Prosecutor, Louise Arbour, however, sees no reason to worry about
this, and does not believe the Tribunal's work has been compromised by
accepting offers of co-operation. "There are circumstances in which justice
and politics interests coincide," she said last week. Arbour further denied
the suggestions that she was given the green light by the Western
governments to indict Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. The question is
not whether we are free [to indict Milosevic] but whether we will now be
better equipped by those who may hold information in moving forward in this
investigation."

The critical matter for the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP), concluded
Arbour, "is not to be given a political mandate [which already exists in the
form of Security Council Resolution 827 and Statute of the Tribunal]but to
be provided with the information that would allow us to move."

The "coinciding interests" have, therefore, brought us to the point of what
Tribunal Deputy Prosecutor Graham Blewitt last week described as
"unprecedented levels of cooperation." Firstly, the German Defence Minister
Rudolf Scharping in Bonn on April 19, handed Arbour a series of aerial
photographs taken by drone reconnaissance aircraft, which show both the
destruction of villages in Kosovo and refugees being stripped of identity
papers and belongings by Yugoslav troops.

The following day in London, Arbour received promises from the British
Foreign Minister, Robin Cook, that she would soon be given a huge dossier of
intelligence material on more than 50 separate incidents over the past
month. "We have authorised the handover of British intelligence material to
the War Crimes Tribunal. It is a rare step to release intelligence material
[but] we will go on collating intelligence on further incidents as the
horror unfolds and we will pass it to the Tribunal in what will be one of
the largest releases of intelligence material ever authorised by the
British," Cook said during a briefing in the British Ministry of Defence.

It was Arbour's presence at that war-briefing that started the manipulation
rumours. Arbour used the occasion to state that since the Tribunal's
resources were limited, international co-operation was essential: "We have
no access to judicially authorised electronic surveillance methods. We have
no Tribunal-based wire tapping capacity. We have extremely limited
opportunities to invite suspects to be questioned."

On the following Thursday (April 22), Arbour spoke on the same matter with
the Dutch Defence Minister. That same day, the French government promised
its full co-operation. This included the gathering of eyewitnesses,
providing security for investigators, protecting refugees, transmitting
information of military nature, including that gathered on the chains of
command.

The French Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it was distributing
questionnaires sent by Arbour's office to French authorities dealing with
refugees coming in from Kosovo. It said France was also helping to finance
efforts by non-governmental organisations to collect accounts and eyewitness
testimony from ethnic Albanians in refugee camps in regions bordering the
southern Yugoslav province.

Arbour called recent developments "extremely encouraging", and at a press
conference at the Tribunal added: "We have been steadily building our
co-operation with a number of countries, and their decisions to increase our
access to sensitive information takes us another important step forward. It
should also send a signal to leaders and commanders on the ground who are
implicated in the commission of war crimes that they will be brought to
justice".

'The world has also heard many of the stories told by refugees and the full
picture is only beginning to emerge,' Arbour said on that occasion. "The
Tribunal's investigators are now assembling a body of direct witness
testimonies. Refugee accounts are critical, but they are not enough on their
own. The victims didn't see the command structures or the people giving the
orders at the highest levels. We therefore need the sophisticated kind of
assistance that only states can provide."

"Sophisticated kind of assistance" undoubtedly refers to intelligence-based
information that has been out of reach of the Prosecutor for a long time.
Two years ago, Arbour told Tribunal Update that she dou

[CTRL] "Humping Up the Road"

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From LA Times

Sunday, May 2, 1999
MILITARY
 When Considering Ground Troops in Kosovo, Remember Sherman
By CALEB CARR

EW YORK--And so, finally, the use of ground troops in Kosovo is being
spoken of as not a possibility but a probability, perhaps an inevitability.
Barring a dramatic diplomatic breakthrough (in all likelihood bartered by
the Russians), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United States
will not be able to achieve their stated objectives of returning the ethnic
Albanian Kosovars to their homes and ensuring they live there in safety
without conventional action on the ground. The five-week-old air campaign,
like all long-range, high-explosive bombardments, has only stiffened the
enemy's resolve, caused death and suffering among civilians, including some
we are supposed to be aiding, and worsened an already bitter conflict.
 Pentagon officials began this sorry affair by asserting the objective
could be achieved by air, and most politicians believed them. It was left to
a few brave legislators, as well as the odd military historian, to shake
their heads and see in such thinking classic military hubris and, further,
the possibility that Kosovo could become the ugliest, most prolonged
European conflict since World War II. Naturally, U.S. commanders didn't
listen to any such military progressives: They never have. Ghostly
precedents have pervaded this story from the start: the unhappy examples of
Vietnam, and the Nazi blitz of Britain and Allied "strategic" bombing of
Germany during World War II, all of which only toughened enemy resistance,
have now been discussed at length. But perhaps the most pertinent parallel
to the use of ground forces in Kosovo is that of the man who was, by general
consensus, the father of modern "total war": William Tecumseh Sherman, the
great Union general of the Civil War.
 There was no shortage of fruitless, long-range artillery bombardments
(the 19th-century counterpart of air campaigns) during our savage
internecine struggle from 1861-1865. In fact, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant stands
as the supreme exponent of the belief that slow, grinding, merciless attacks
on cities, as well as armies, would bring victory. In pursuing this course,
Grant made a genius of Gen. Robert E. Lee, a military engineer who
determined, early on, that he could build defensive fortifications that
would withstand any long-range bombardment, and, so long as his people had
food and his soldiers ammunition, such Union tactics would only strengthen
the Southern revolve to resist.
 But Sherman, the greatest military genius to emerge from the Civil War,
was a different case: He knew long-range bombardment of nonmilitary
installations in the South would have to be accompanied by carefully
orchestrated ground campaigns against key Confederate military units and,
even more important, their supply routes. In fact, Sherman never failed to
recognize it was this second part of his two-stage attack that was key:
While he allowed his men to ravage the Southern states they passed through,
creating generations of bitterness among the residents, he never hesitated
to admit that only about 20% of the work his army did--the 20% aimed at
military targets--was of real use in winning the war. It was that 20%--and
not his men's rape of the Southern countryside or Grant's relentless
hammering of cities such as Richmond--that deprived Lee's army of food and
supplies, and thereby forced the Grey Fox to surrender.
 But we, as a military culture, have not enshrined the crucial 20% of
Sherman's thinking that led to victory. We have, instead, made legend of the
remaining 80%. We focused on the civilian destruction wrought by his troops,
creating a false conception of the "March to the Sea," and thereby coming to
believe Sherman succeeded because he was, in his own words, willing to make
"war with every man, woman and child" in the South.
 This is what we did in Vietnam and, again, what we did in Iraq--all
hype about wonder weapons and dismissals of "collateral damage" (surely one
of the most obscene phrases ever devised by the military mind)
notwithstanding. It is what we are now doing in Yugoslavia. The units whose
destruction are most crucial to ending Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic's reign of terror--his well-trained, hard-fighting and
well-equipped ground troops in Kosovo--have thus far largely been spared.
The only potent weapon we have been willing to consider using to hunt them
down--Apache helicopters--took weeks to reach the combat theater, and even
managed an embarrassing training-mission crash once there, thus again
dimming any hope that the United States will develop what it needs most: an
effective, rapid-deployment conventional force to deal with precisely the
kind of conflict we are currently bogged down in. Meanwhile, Belgrade and
other Yugoslav cities are targeted by "strategic" bombs, more powerful than
those used in the bombardments of the Civil War but no

[CTRL] Fw: May 1 FEC data update & more...

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

- Original Message -
From: ; Inc <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Sunday, May 02, 1999 12:00 AM
Subject: May 1 FEC data update & more...


: *
: FECInfo - Public Disclosure, Inc Update
: www.tray.com/fecinfo/
: Kent Cooper
: Tony Raymond
: *
: 4 ITEMS:
: -- 1998 and 2000 election cycle data in on-line (www.tray.com/fecinfo/)
: -- Lobby registrations update (www.tray.com/fecinfo/bna.htm)
: -- Latest PAC registrations (www.tray.com/cgi-win/_corppac.exe)
: -- Soft Money transactions from new reports - not yet available
: electronically (below)
:
: Thanks for making FECInfo such a success!
:
: 
: ITEM 1 - Search 1999-2000 activity on FECInfo!
:
: FECInfo was the FIRST web site to allow you to seach FEC data
: interactively.  We strive to make the most current data available to you
as quickly as
: possible...other sites just aren't as timely.
:
: *
: ITEM 2 - Lobby registrations update!
:
: We've begun to  post lobby registrations within 24 hours of the time they
: are released by the US Secretary of Senate's Public Records Office.  This
: data is important in that it allows a preview major legislative pushes on
the
: Hill.  Registrations filed today point to important stories of tomorrow.
:
: Look for this area of the site to become more interactive with name
: searches and issue searches.
:
: *
: ITEM 3 -- Latest PAC registrations
:
: Much like lobby registrations, PAC registrations point to the newest
: players in the campaign finance arena.
:
: *
: ITEM 4 - Latest soft money transactions from paper - not yet available
: electronically (below):
:
: Seven large $100,000+ soft money donations were received by the national
: parties during March 1999. New reports from the RNC, NRSC, DSCC and DCCC
were
: filed April 20-26. The DNC and NRCC are not monthly filers and their first
: report for the year will not be filed until July 99.  Here are some of the
: highlights of the new filings:
:
: John W. Henry, FL (Chrm, John W. Henry Co) $100,000 3/25 to DCCC
: Thomas E. McInerney, NY (blank) $50,000 3/9 to RNC
: Victor Resnick, CA (Pres, Resnick Capital Management) $30,000 3/30 to DCCC
: David Chang, NY (Pres, Bright & Bright Corp) $30,000 3/31 to DCCC
: Anne E. Dyson, NY (physician) $30,000 3/31 to DCCC
: Robert R. Dyson, NY (blank) $30,000 3/31 to DCCC
: Nicholas C. Forstmann, NY (general partner, Forstmann Little & Co )
$25,000
: 3/23 to RNC
: Sam Fox, MO (Chrm & CEO, Harbour Group Ltd) $25,000 3/16 to RNC
: Aurora Management Partners, CA $25,000 3/31 to RNC
: Huizenga Holdings, FL $25,000 3/10 to RNC
: Securities Industry Assn, DC $25,000 3/19 to DCCC
: Thomas F. Marsico, CT (CEO, Marsico Capital Management) $25,000 3/24 to
: RNC
: Philip Matthews, CT (Managing Dir., Blackrock Financial) $25,000 3/2 to
: RNC
: John J. Cafaro, Oh (Pres, Cafaro Co) $25,000 3/30 to DCCC
: John Koza, CA (Pres, Third Millenium Venture Capital) $12,500 3/30 to
DCCC;
: $12,500 3/5 to DSCC
: Thomas O. Hicks, TX (information requested) $25,000 3/5 to RNC
: William A. Schreyer, NJ (Chrm emeritus, Merrill Lynch & Co) $25,000 3/23
to
: RNC
:
: Paine Webber Inc, NY $100,000 3/23 to RNC/Republican Governors Assn
: Conference Acct
: Lehman Brothers, NJ $15,000 3/5 to RNC/Republican Governors Assn
Conference
: Acct
: Salomon Smith Barney, NY $15,000 3/31 to RNC/Republican Governors Assn
: Conference Acct
: JP Morgan, NY $5,000 3/31 to RNC/Republican Governors Assn Conference Acct
:
: Alexander G. Spanos, CA (Chrm, A G Spanos Construction) $250,000 3/26 to
: RNC
: Lawrence Kadish, NY (Owner/exec, Kadish Real Estate) $150,000 3/12 to RNC
: National Assn of Realtors, IL $25,000 3/3 to NRSC
: Realtors PAC, IL $15,000 3/5 to RNC
: George F. Kettle, VA (regional owner, Century 21) $25,000 3/23 to RNC
: Constance Milstein, NY (real estate executive, Milstein Properties)
$20,000
: 3/25 to DCCC
: Edward G. Watkins, MA (Goodrich Properties) $25,000 3/5 to RNC
:
: David H. Koch, KS (exec VP, Koch Industries) $100,000 3/5 to RNC
: Chevron Corp, DC, $50,000 3/25 to DSCC; $25,000 3/17 to NRSC; $20,000 to
: RNC (15,000 3/12 and 5,000 3/5)
: PG&E, CA $27,500 (15,000 3/12, $12,500 3/30) to DCCC; $12,500 3/5 to DSCC;
: $25,000 3/11 to NRSC
: Enron Corp, TX $50,000 3/31 to DCCC
: Dominion Resources, VA $25,000 3/9 to NRSC; $25,000 3/23 to RNC
: Edison International, CA $40,000 3/5 to RNC
: Kenneth L. Lay, TX (Chrm & CEO, Enron) $25,000 3/2 to RNC
: TECO Energy, FL $25,000 3/24 to RNC
: American Gas Assn, VA $15,000 3/23 to RNC; $15,000 to RNC
:
: Bernard L. Schwartz, NY (Chrm, Loral Corp) $50,000 3/19 to DCCC
: TRW, OH $45,000 (20,000 3/9, 25,000 3/5) to RNC
: General Dynamics Corp, VA $25,000 3/31 to RNC; $2,000 _ to DCCC
: Aircraft Arrangements, NY, $25,000 3/31 to DCCC
: FedEx Corp, DC $25,000 3/24 to DCCC
: Union Pacific Corp $2

[CTRL] Fw: [ma] GIANT COMPANIES TO PHASE OUT BIOTECH FOODS

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

- Original Message -
From: BELGRAVE <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Sunday, May 02, 1999 1:50 AM
Subject: [ma] GIANT COMPANIES TO PHASE OUT BIOTECH FOODS


: -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- /\/\eta-axio/\/\ Mailing List -=-=-=-
: Source: Environment News Service (ENS)
: Sender: Nine
: -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
:
: GIANT COMPANIES TO PHASE OUT BIOTECH FOODS
:
: LONDON, UK, April 28, 1999 - The world's two largest food production
: companies are withdrawing their acceptance of genetically modified
: foodstuffs. Foods giant Unilever UK said Tuesday it would phase out
: genetically engineered foods, a move that was closely followed by a
similar
: announcement by Nestle UK tonight.
:
: Unilever, an Anglo-Dutch firm, sells over 1,000 brands of foods through
300
: subsidiary companies in 88 countries world-wide with products on sale in a
: further 70 countries. Nestle, headquartered in Switzerland, is the world's
: largest food production company with 495 factories around the world.
:
: The announcement by Nestle UK has major implications for the company's
: international production system, as most of its centralised production
: facilities produce for the entire European market and not for the UK
alone.
:
: The announcements are in response to continued demonstrations by European
: consumers of a strong resistance to foods containing genetically modified
: crops. In February, an unprecedented wave of debate on genetic
technologies
: in agriculture swept the country, putting the government and biotechnology
: firms firmly on the defensive. Fears were founded on research that showed
: experimental rats had been harmed by eating modified potatoes.
:
: Greenpeace spokesperson Benedikt Haerlin said the Nestle and Unilever
: announcements represent a major victory for European citizens. "When
: Monsanto's first GE (genetically engineered) soya beans were shipped to
: Europe Nestle, Unilever and Monsanto told us there was no way to stop
: having GE ingredients in our food. Three years later they have learned
that
: there is no way to ignore the concerns and demands of the majority of
: consumers," said Haerlin.
:
: "With Nestle and Unilever, the two biggest food producers in the world,
: have now broken ranks with international agro-chemical companies like by
: Monsanto, Du Pont/Pioneer, Novartis and AgrEvo and started a stampede out
: of GE food," said Haerlin.
:
: The UK's Iceland Stores is opposed to the introduction of genetically
: modified (GM) foods and has banned all GM ingredients from their own-brand
: products. Other supermarkets have followed Iceland's lead. Marks and
: Spencer's own-brand products will be GM free by the end of June 1999.
:
: Charles, the Prince of Wales, has come out against genetically engineered
: crops, saying, "I am not convinced we know enough about the long-term
: consequences for human health and the environment of releasing plants (or,
: heaven forbid, animals) bred in this way."
:
: "I suspect that planting herbicide resistant crops will lead to more
: chemicals being used on our fields, not fewer. But this isn't the whole
: story," the Prince said. "Such sterile fields will offer little or no food
: or shelter to wildlife, and there is already evidence that the genes for
: herbicide resistance can spread to wild relatives of crop plants, leaving
: us with weeds resistant to weedkiller."
:
: Meanwhile, Friends of the Earth UK has criticized U.S. biotech giant
: Monsanto for trying to use the law to deter public debate and protest over
: genetically modified food.
:
: Monsanto has obtained an injunction against six named defendants. The
: company asked the High Court April 19 to order the defendants to hand over
: a mailing list of recipients of a "Handbook For Action." The Handbook,
: which outlines ways of protesting against genetically engineered foods, is
: believed to have been sent to public figures including Prime Minister Tony
: Blair, Prince Charles and the Pope. Monsanto's intention may be to target
: any individual or organisation who might be held to have "encouraged"
: direct action against genetically modified (GM) crops, by for example,
: publishing details of trial sites, Friends of the Earth believes.
:
: In the United States such legal action is known as a SLAPP (Strategic
: Action Against Public Participation) lawsuit, a tactic sometimes used by
: large companies facing environmental protests.
:
: Friends of the Earth would consider such an order a gross intrusion of
: civil liberties and "one which would bring our system of justice into
: disrepute," the group said in a statement.
:
: Tony Juniper, policy and campaigns director of Friends of the Earth, said,
: "Monsanto have lost the public arguments over GM crops, and are now
: resorting to legal strong-arm tactics in response. I'm not the least bit
: surprised, given Monsanto's track record. They would be better advised to
: accept the failure of

[CTRL] Foreign Service Views

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From Wash (DC) Post

Tragic Policy
By Thomas R. Hutson

Saturday, May 1, 1999; Page A15

Despite the predictably disastrous direction our policy has taken in the
Balkans, it is not too late to stop the carnage. Sadly, it is too late to
stop Slobodan Milosevic's despicable leadership of the Serbs into historical
oblivion.

In briefing NATO commander Gen. Wesley Clark on another subject some months
ago, I noted that Serbs pride themselves on a quality called "inat" --
defined by a Canadian diplomat as "an absence of pragmatism," a definition
that Clark wrote down. Given Clark's brilliance and intimate exposure to the
Serb leader, it is difficult for me to conceive that he thinks we can bomb
the Serbs into submission.

Also, given Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's roots in that part of
the world, it is hard for me to accept the tragic miscalculation attributed
to her that somehow Milosevic would cave in. I am troubled even more that my
country, whose Constitution grants the power of war-making to Congress,
would be leading NATO into an undeclared war -- if only to maintain the
credibility of Secretary Albright and/or NATO.

I also am shocked that our leaders and NATO's strongly espouse the certitude
that the Kosovar Albanians will be returned to their homeland. Having spent
the past year trying, with little success, to enable returns in northeastern
Bosnia and Herzegovina, I believe they are blowing smoke. The Serbs will not
let refugees back in any great number. We are not prepared and should not be
prepared to force such a return by the use of ground forces. And we cannot
continue much longer our immoral and immaculate aggression against a
sovereign nation without sanction of the United Nations.

What are the basics to which I advocate we return? Diplomacy, respect for
the U.S. Constitution, adherence to the Charter of the United Nations and
support for enlightened institutions in Serbia.

Diplomacy: Whether we like it or not, the Russians and perhaps the Chinese
hold the key to resolving the present impasse. No doubt we have been trying
to use their influence. We have no choice but to try again, and again, and
again. Abba Eban once wrote: "Diplomacy should be judged by what it
prevents, not only by what it initiates and creates. Much of it is a holding
action designed to avoid explosion until the unifying forces of history take
humanity into their embrace." For my part, I will take a holding action over
an explosion any day.

Respect for the U.S. Constitution: We should have learned by now that we
cannot fight a war without the complete support of the American people. That
support is reflected -- or not reflected -- by a congressional declaration
of war, not by some other mechanism that allows Congress to halfheartedly
extend support and then carp from the sidelines. Although my son is a
professional in the U.S. Navy and went willingly to the Gulf War, I do not
want him to go to another war without a constitutionally declared mandate.
Nothing mealy-mouthed -- a clear declaration. Absent that, we must stop the
bombing and try other means.

Adherence to the Charter of the United Nations: Not an easy solution, but
one that is essential if, as a nation, we are to be credible in our claimed
reverence for the rule of law. Having worked closely with international
organizations in recent years, I have no illusions about what they can and
cannot do. Certainly they cannot do anything quickly. Certainly they could
not stop the Serb "cleansing" of Kosovo. Nor could they stop the Croat
cleansing of the Krajina in 1995, in which U.S. complicity was as
ill-advised as is our present bombing of Yugoslavia. But the United Nations,
warts and all, is the only institution we have to ameliorate, if not
prevent, such catastrophes. The United States cannot do it alone nor with
the support of only 19 members of the European alliance.

Support for enlightened institutions in Serbia: In 1995 I urged Madeleine
Albright, Richard Holbrooke and Leon Fuerth to consider using the
institution of a constitutional monarchy as a mechanism to move the Serbs
from support of Milosevic to more enlightened leadership. My belief that
Prince Alexander Karadjordjevic could play a role in such a transition was
pooh-poohed. I still think this man and the monarchy can play a role, even
though our bombing has united the Serbs behind Milosevic, so much so that
any movement away from Milosevic or toward any other Serb leader is now
almost unthinkable.

There are no quick fixes to this problem. Nor is it subject to resolution by
the technological behemoth of our war machine. We must adhere to the basic
rules of a civilized world order. We must return to them now. If not, the
America that I proudly represented abroad -- no matter how modestly -- for
the past three decades is diminished beyond my worst fears.

The writer, a foreign service officer for 32 years, spent eight years in the
former Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Cr

[CTRL] Fw: More about Indyk and Zogby - Washington Scene

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed

A<>E<>R

The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled
one is truly vanquished. -Johann Christoph Schiller,
   German Writer (1759-1805)
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material
is distributed without charge or profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information
for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
- Original Message -
From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <@thequest.net>
Sent: Saturday, May 01, 1999 9:43 AM
Subject: More about Indyk and Zogby - Washington Scene


: -   ___      __
:/  |/  /  /___/  / /_ //M I D - E A S T   R E A L I T I E S
:   / /|_/ /  /_/_   / /\\ Making Sense of the Middle East
:  /_/  /_/  /___/  /_/  \\   http://www.MiddleEast.Org
: __
:   News, Information, & Analysis That Governments, Interest Groups,
:and the Corporate Media Don't Want You To Know!
:-
:   To receive MER regularly email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
: ___
:
: WASHINGTON SCENE:
: A Regular MER Feature
:
:
: MORE ABOUT  MARTIN INDYK
:
:  AND THE ZOGBY-INDYK CONNECTION
:
: Part II
:
: MER - Washington - 26 April:  It's a nice arrangement for Martin Indyk -
: the Israeli/Jewish lobby's point man whom the Clinton Administration has
: quite unbelievably made the Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle
: East.  That puts him in charge of "Peace Process" with access to the
: highest secrets of the American government of course. The old adage about
: the fox being asked to guard the hen house comes to mind.
:
: Indyk was brought to Washington by "the lobby" specifically to infiltrate
: the Washington power structure as well as to open relations with those
: who head up the Arab "client regimes".  And indeed that he has done with
: gusto.  He was not even a U.S. citizen at the time Bill Clinton was
: elected President.  Then his nationality was Australian, his alliance
: Israeli.  His original appointment in 1992 to the National Security
: Council at the White House was a major political pay-off to "the lobby"
: for its intense help getting Clinton elected...and Bush/Baker defeated.
: Now, in a way only Washington-insiders can really appreciate, Indyk is in
: a position to subtly manipulate both the President and the Secretary of
: State, spending full-time with matters Middle Eastern while they are busy
: with so many other headaches.
:
: But all that's a much larger tale.  The matter at hand is much more
: straight-forward.  As a pay-off to Jim Zogby, the despised head of the
: "Arab American Institute" (AAI), and even more so to one of Zogby's main
: patrons, Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar, also a close friend of Indyk,
: last year Indyk made Zogby's son, Joseph, one of his "Special
: Assistants".
:
: What a move!  It allowed Indyk to claim he was bringing Arab-Americans
: into the State Department while in essence he was really further paying
: off Zogby for his vociferous help in publicly supporting his nomination
: as Assistant Secretary of State. Back then the Arab American
: organizations should have lead a serious attack against Indyk's
: appointment; but instead they all bowed to Zogby who has totally
: outmaneuvered them on most matters, and to Bandar, who controls them on
: important matters, and there was hardly a whimper.
:
: Then recently, when the far right-wing Zionists who control much of the
: "organized Jewish community" criticized Joe Zogby for things he had
: written about Israel in the past, Indyk at first came to Zogby's
: defense...but not for long.   Now Indyk is clearly a Clinton man -- he
: knows very well how to deceive and manipulate, how to twist and turn, how
: to back-slap and sell-out practically at the same time.
:
: The remarkable thing in this case is how Indyk has maneuvered so that he
: looks to many like a good guy -- i.e. less extreme than the Zionist
: zealots -- while in fact doing something it was in his interest to do in
: the first place.   Little is known at this point about Joe Zogby
: personally; and who knows he might even be a different type character
: then his despicable father who is one of the most self-serving and
: exploitative persons in Washington shamefully trading on his Arab-
: American name for personal gratification and selling out everyone and

[CTRL] Dispatches From the War Zone

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

dispatch

Dispatches From the War Zone, Message 31

By Masha Gessen

To read these dispatches from the beginning, go to
http://www.slate.com/dispatches/99-03-31/dispatches.asp?iMsg=1


Message #31: April 28, 1999

From: Masha Gessen
To:   Slate - dispatch

It has stopped raining, the mud has turned to dust, and, instead of
bringing relief to the refugee camps, this has brought heat.
Tensions flare all over. At Stenkovec-2, the second-largest of
Macedonia's refugee camps, I get into a shoving match with an
overeager security officer from the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe. He has been trying, with varying success, to
keep people from entering the tent. Me, I just want information.
But then, so does everyone else.

In existence for nearly a month, the camps have taken on patterns
and a tempo of their own. Stenkovec-1, being the biggest, is most
like a city. People move about in a constant quest that almost
invariably ends in a queue or a crowd of people working their
elbows or--more and more often, it seems--in a scuffle. Lines form
for no reason--because there is a rumor of someone up ahead giving
out blankets or food or the names off the next airlift list. If
only someone knew for certain where the right place to go or who
the right person to ask was--but how can anyone know for certain?

Some young refugee volunteers have set up an information tent at
Stenkovec-1. The only problem is, they don't have enough
information. After two days in operation they told me the most
common question was where to get blankets: Some people, they say,
have been here for two weeks and still haven't found the blankets.
They send everyone to a particular tent--they've heard that's where
blankets are distributed. Is that official information? No, they
say, but that's what they've been told. Another common question is
where to get a list of everyone in the camp to try to find
relatives, but neither the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees,
which registers camp newcomers, nor the Catholic Refugee Service,
which operates this particular camp, will give the volunteers the
lists. And then, they have an old man who has been kicked out of
his tent by a family that considers it theirs. And then there are
all these people who want to know how to get on an airlift.

I also want to know how people get on an airlift. At Stenkovec-2, I
saw people filling out forms and got in behind them--but these
turned out to be "Lost Child" forms. I was finally able to learn
that most airlift processing is done through Stenkovec-1, so I
headed there. Carolina Spannuth, a UNHCR protection officer,
explains the system: Coming into the camp, refugees register with
UNHCR and check off their country preferences on the back of the
form; then UNHCR prioritizes the cases, placing the sick and
vulnerable at the top and being careful not to separate families;
then the International Organization for Migration books them on
flights--sometimes directly, sometimes after the country in
question approves the choice. The IOM tent is right near UNHCR's,
and it is crowded with staff and with refugees who have found their
way in. Like all tents in this camp, it is stuffy and it smells:
Many of the refugees have not had a proper bath in a month, and,
though people manage to wash their clothes in what can generously
be called a creek, in a far corner of the camp, the cumulative body
odor in this camp is overwhelming. The IOM works a dozen notebook
computers in two shifts, 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., and they still have
enough of a backlog of names to fill planes and planes. There are
12 flights today--five to France, two to Turkey, one each to
Sweden, Holland, Norway, Finland, and the Czech Republic. Every
evening, lists of names for the next day's flights go up, alongside
waiting lists in case of no-shows--so there are no empty seats.
Each flight goes out with 15 or so passengers more than its
capacity would allow, because infants and toddlers can sit in their
mothers' laps.

But what is a refugee to do in the endless weeks of not knowing
whether he will ever get out of the camp? And what does the UNHCR
understand about Albanian families, where a second cousin is a
close relative? And what if the country options change, as they do
constantly? And, most important, what is the guarantee that the
piece of paper they fill out on arrival will not be lost or
trampled in the mud before it can translate into a seat on the
plane? This is why there is a crowd at the chain-link fence that
surrounds the registration area. Dozens of people find a way
in--tagging along with a journalist, or pretending to be one by
speaking a foreign language. While I stand in-between the tents
with Simona Opitz, IOM's public-information person, people come up
to us, one by one, until another small crowd forms.

A short, squat man with gray stubble of a consistent length all
over his head and his cheeks explains that he has been living in
Germany for 30 years but his 

[CTRL] Irish Views

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From Irish Times

Saturday, May 1, 1999

Ethnicity a response
to global inequality



WORLD VIEW/PEADAR KIRBY
The sort of scenes we are now witnessing in Kosovo seem to be fast becoming
a defining characteristic of the post-Cold War world.

>From Rwanda, Liberia and Sierra Leone to Iraq's Kurds, Bosnia and, now,
Kosovo, the mass exodus of huge numbers of people from fratricidal slaughter
is like an icon of the new world order.

Its very regularity makes humanitarianism an inadequate response. If it is
not to be repeated, we need urgently to think through the roots of
insecurity in this new world and how to prevent the breakdown of whole
societies.

NATO's action, even if it were to achieve all its aims, would have done so
at the cost of sowing deeper seeds of longterm insecurity in the Balkans.
Furthermore, there are disturbing imperial overtones to it.

One is the belief in the power of vastly superior force to resolve highly
complex and deeply rooted social problems.

Another is the tendency, for long evident in US foreign policy, to reduce
foreign actions to a crusade of good against evil, the civilised against the
barbarian, identifying where possible one figure as the personification of
the evil to be eradicated.

It is clear to even the most cursory observer that what we in Europe call
nationalism lies at the heart of most of the major security tragedies of the
post-Cold War world. Nationalism, and ethnic conflict in general, is
regarded as a throwback to some pre-modern atavism, something not supposed
to occur on the brink of the third millennium.

Yet it is occurring, with ever greater regularity it seems, and needs
urgently to be understood as a feature of today's world. It is significant
that the Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells devotes the entire second
volume of his breathtaking recent trilogy on the information age to what he
calls "the power of identity".

Castells regards ethnicity, and the struggle for identity based on it, as
the defining characteristic of resistance to economic and cultural
globalisation, especially among those who are gaining few benefits from it.

The struggle for identity may take many ugly forms, as it did in Rwanda or
as it is doing today in Kosovo. The power of Castells's point is that, far
from being a throwback to some ancient past, it is an integral part of the
information age. A far more effective way to deal with it would be to
understand the tendency of globalisation to distribute its benefits very
unequally.

This strongly suggests that a more secure world will require the
international community to devote far more careful attention to the issue of
equality, both worldwide and within each of our societies.

This is where economic and social policies and foreign policy meet.

More than ever, the roots of the world's security problems lie in
underdevelopment.

To be effective, security policy needs to intervene in this cycle long
before it reaches the extreme of mass ethnic cleansing.

This, I suggest, is where the neutral states have an important role to play.
Drawing on its own experience of national struggle, its recent development
success and its ongoing peace process, Ireland is well placed to offer an
understanding of what it requires to build stable and secure societies.

Ireland can insist that, far from an historical relic, nationalism is a
deeply rooted cultural and political force with the potential to build
stable societies if constructively channelled but also with a power for
terrifying social destruction.

On economic development, it knows better than most the importance that flows
of foreign direct investment and foreign aid, when well used, can play in
providing a better livelihood for people.

It can point out that the decline in aid flows from the OECD and the fact
that the great bulk of foreign investment worldwide goes to about 15
countries, serves to sow seeds of long-term social insecurity in those parts
of the world which are excluded.

The difficulties of our own peace process also hold valuable lessons about
how sensitive must be the attempts to coax adversaries into dialogue. The
sorts of ultimatums delivered to the Serbs at Rambouillet, we could point
out, would have been disastrous if used in our own peace process.

In achieving success at dialogue, it is vital to have interlocutors involved
who show a sympathy to the plight of each of the sides.

Consistent support over the years in Serbia for independent media, for human
rights groups, for opposition political groups could all have helped lay
stronger foundations for democracy to emerge.

The implication of this argument, then, is for Ireland to become more
involved in forums in which such a view of security building can be actively
promoted.

For this reason, involvement in Partnership for Peace is to be greatly
welcomed, but only if Ireland enters it with the confidence to prom

[CTRL] "Belgrade Answers"

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/converse.htm

This is only the beginning ... the remainder of the answers to questions is
at the site. A<>E<>R >>


<>

A Conversation with the University of Belgrade Law Faculty
JURIST Exclusive

[Pittsburgh, April 7] Last week, in the midst of the widening conflict
between NATO and Yugoslavia, the professors of the Faculty of Law,
University of Belgrade took the extraordinary step of agreeing to answer
questions from JURIST: The Law Professors' Network on the legal aspects of
the situation. In the belief that throwing the conversation open to our
readers would be the most effective way to keep the international and
Yugoslav legal communities in touch with one another during the present
crisis, we issued an open call for questions and then selected ten of those
questions for forwarding to Belgrade.

Here are the final questions and the answers given to JURIST by the members
of the Belgrade Law Faculty. JURIST readers wishing to comment on any of
these answers should e-mail JURIST at [EMAIL PROTECTED]: please include
the words "Belgrade Answers" in the Subject line of your message. For more
information, including the latest e-mail from Yugoslavian law professors,
lawyers and other academics, international and American responses, and
academic commentaries on the legal aspects of the Kosovo situation, see
JURIST's Legal Guide to the Kosovo Conflict.

<>




A<>E<>R

The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled
one is truly vanquished. -Johann Christoph Schiller,
   German Writer (1759-1805)
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed
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In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material
is distributed without charge or profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information
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DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==
CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing!  These are sordid matters
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frauds is used politically  by different groups with major and minor effects
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Om

[CTRL] Press Communique 99/17

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

From
http://www.icj-cij.org/icjwww/ipresscom/iPress1999/ipresscom9917_19990429.ht
m

Press Communique 99/17

29 April 1999

Yugoslavia institutes proceedings against ten States for violation of
the obligation not to use force against another State and requests
the Court to order that the use of force cease immediately

Hearings on provisional measures to open on Monday 10 May 1999

THE HAGUE, 29 April 1999. The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) today
instituted proceedings before the International Court of Justice (ICJ)
against (separately and in the following order) the United States of
America, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands,
Belgium, Canada, Portugal and Spain, accusing these States of bombing
Yugoslav territory in violation of their obligation not to use force against
another State.

In its Applications, Yugoslavia maintains that the above-mentioned States
have committed "acts by which [they] have violated [their] international
obligation[s] not to use force against another State, not to intervene in
[that State's] internal affairs" and "not to violate [its] sovereignty";
"the obligation to protect the civilian population and civilian objects in
wartime, [and] to protect the environment; the obligation relating to free
navigation on international rivers"; the obligation "regarding the
fundamental rights and freedoms; and the obligation[s] not to use prohibited
weapons [and] not to deliberately inflict conditions of life calculated to
cause the physical destruction of a national group".

Yugoslavia has requested the Court to adjudge and declare inter alia that
the ten States against which it has instituted proceedings are "responsible
for the violation of the above[-mentioned] international obligations", that
they are "obliged to stop immediately" that violation and that they are
"obliged to provide compensation for the damage done".

According to Yugoslavia, the above-mentioned States, "together with the
Governments of other Member States of NATO, took part in the acts of use of
force against the FRY". Yugoslavia asserts that both military and civilian
targets have come under attack during the bombings, causing many casualties
("about 1,000 civilians, including 19 children, were killed and more than
4,500 sustained serious injuries"), enormous damage to schools, hospitals,
radio and television stations, cultural monuments and places of worship, the
destruction of a large number of bridges, roads and railway lines, as well
as oil refineries and chemical plants, resulting in serious health and
environmental damage.

As the legal basis for its claims, Yugoslavia cites the obligations not to
use force against another State and not to intervene in its internal
affairs, the provisions of the Geneva Convention of 1949 and of the
Additional Protocol No. 1 of 1977 on the Protection of Civilians and
Civilian Objects in Time of War, the 1948 Convention on Free Navigation on
the Danube, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the
1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
Yugoslavia further points out that the activities of the States involved are
"contrary to Article 53, paragraph 1, of the Charter of the United Nations".

Yugoslavia also filed today, in each of the cases, a request for interim
measures of protection (provisional measures), asking the Court to order the
States involved to "cease immediately [their] acts of use of force" and to
"refrain from any act of threat or use of force against the Federal Republic
of Yugoslavia".

It maintains that if the proposed measures are not adopted, there will be
"new losses of human life, further physical and mental harm inflicted on the
population of the FRY, further destruction of civilian targets, heavy
environmental pollution and further physical destruction of the people of
Yugoslavia".

At a meeting held today, the Court decided that hearings on provisional
measures would open on Monday 10 May 1999 at 10.00 a.m. They are expected to
last two days.

Vice-President Weeramantry will exercise the functions of the presidency in
all ten cases, President Schwebel being a national of one of the Parties.



The full texts of Yugoslavia's Applications and requests for the indication
of provisional measures will be available shortly on the Court's website
(http://www.icj-cij.org).



NOTE FOR THE PRESS

1. The public sittings will be held in the Great Hall of Justice of the
Peace Palace in The Hague, the Netherlands. Mobile telephones and beepers
are allowed in the courtroom provided they are turned off or set on silent
mode. Any offending device will be temporarily retained.

2. Members of the Press will be entitled to attend on presentation of a
press card. The tables reserved for them are situated on the far left of the
public entrance of the courtroom.

3. Photographs may be

[CTRL] Rise & Shine

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

<>

>From Chicago Tribune
http://chicagotribune.com/version1/article/0,1575,ART-27634,00.html

""After the Cold War, he noted, the U.S. reduced its military manpower to
1.4 million from 2 million, and used the savings to increase its lift
capability and other means of projecting force abroad. By contrast, the 14
traditional NATO members in Europe have combined forces of 1.7 million men
and women under arms. With the forces of the three new members -- Poland,
the Czech Republic and Hungary -- that figure rises to 2.1 million.""

<>

Rising to their own defense


By Ray Moseley
Tribune Foreign Correspondent
April 25, 1999

  CONTINUING COVERAGE
Keep up with updated coverage on the conflict in Yugoslavia.



LONDON--The Kosovo conflict may be a European war, but it is no surprise
that about four-fifths of the aircraft involved in the airstrikes on
Yugoslavia come from the U.S., and all of the cruise missiles -- including
those fired by the British submarine HMS Splendid -- are American.

And, if ground troops go in, there are no cigars for guessing which country
will supply the biggest number of forces. Or for guessing, when it's all
over, whose taxpayers will pick up the lion's share of the costs.

Most of the 45 years of the Cold War, and the near-decade of Balkans
collapse that has followed, have unfolded against a chorus of complaints
from Congress and others that Europe does not pull its weight in the common
task of trans-Atlantic security. The United States supplies the manpower and
the sophisticated weapons and pays the bills, and Europe reaps the
benefits -- or so the argument goes.

Any suggestion that Kosovo is about to cause that to change is bound to
elicit a we've-heard-it-before skepticism in the U.S.; the Europeans
sometimes talk a good game, but they are hopeless at getting their act
together and can't break their dependence on the U.S. when the chips are
down.

But this time, experts say, the Europeans really do mean it, and that should
become apparent at the NATO 50th anniversary summit in Washington, which
ends Sunday. They said a strong statement in support of a European defense
initiative would be one of the main results of the summit.

"There are reasons to be skeptical," said Dana Allin, an American analyst at
the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. "But the
prospects are more serious now than I've ever seen them. The Americans and
Europeans understand better than ever before that it is in their interest to
have Europe take a bigger role."

Allin and other experts point out that Europe already had begun taking steps
toward a greater sharing of the burden before the Kosovo conflict erupted,
and they say Kosovo has merely given impetus to that.

Not many people noticed, but British Prime Minister Tony Blair and French
President Jacques Chirac took the lead in this matter in December when they
met at the Brittany port of St. Malo and launched what they called the
European Security and Defense Initiative.

The basic idea was to transform European military forces so they could
perform many of the tasks that now only the Americans can handle, and if
need be to mount credible military operations on their own. An essential
part of the plan is a more unified European defense industry.

These are no small goals. The U.S. has military assets the Europeans do not
possess -- strategic reconnaissance from high-flying spy planes and
satellites, command-and-control facilities, intelligence capabilities, the
ability to transport troops and equipment on a large scale -- that are
extremely costly and would take time for Europe to build.

Francois Heisbourg, chairman of the Geneva Center for Security Policy,
estimates the task will take at least 10 years.

"The problem in Europe now is that monies are being horribly misallocated,"
he said. "Too much goes into bloated force structures geared to territorial
defense, which made more sense during the Cold War than it does now."

Money should be reallocated, Heisbourg said, to enable European nations to
project force abroad -- as Kosovo demonstrates -- rather than focusing on
defense. He noted that Britain and France have begun work on developing
their own cruise missile, but said it would not be ready for another three
years.

"That most of the aircraft used in the Kosovo operation are American doesn't
make sense," he said. "Europe should proportionately have more stuff in
there; it's too lopsided for anybody's good. The Americans are impatient,
but why shouldn't they be?"

Heisbourg stressed that the idea behind the Blair-Chirac initiative was not
that Europeans should do all the fighting in a European war while the
Americans "are safely behind their computer screens," providing non-combat
backup. "Rather, we need more computer screens of our own to pull more
weight," he said.

Likewise, all experts recognize that neither the Europeans nor the Americans
have any interest in eliminating a U.S. role in European military a

[CTRL] German Views

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From http://www.zmag.org/germandocs.htm

IMPORTANT INTERNAL DOCUMENTS
FROM GERMANY'S FOREIGN OFFICE
REGARDING PRE-BOMBARDMENT
GENOCIDE IN KOSOVO

As in the case of the Clinton Administration, the present regime in Germany,
specifically Joschka Fischer's Foreign Office, has justified its
intervention in Kosovo by pointing to a "humanitarian catastrophe,"
"genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" occurring there, especially in the months
immediately preceding the NATO attack. The following internal documents from
Fischer's ministry and from various regional Administrative Courts in
Germany spanning the year before the start of NATO's air attacks, attest
that criteria of ethnic cleansing and genocide were not met. The Foreign
Office documents were responses to the courts' needs in deciding the status
of Kosovo-Albanian refugees in Germany. Although one might in these cases
suppose a bias in favor of downplaying a humanitarian catastrophe in order
to limit refugees, it nevertheless remains highly significant that the
Foreign Office, in contrast to its public assertion of ethnic cleansing and
genocide in justifying NATO intervention, privately continued to deny their
existence as Yugoslav policy in this crucial period. And this continued to
be their assessment even in March of this year. Thus these documents tend to
show that stopping genocide was not the reason the German government, and by
implication NATO, intervened in Kosovo, and that genocide (as understood in
German and international law) in Kosovo did not precede NATO bombardment, at
least not from early 1998 through March, 1999, but is a product of it.

Excerpts from the these official documents were obtained by IALANA
(International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms) which sent them
to various media. The texts used here were published in the German daily
junge welt on April 24, 1999. (See
http://www.jungewelt.de/1999/04-24/011.shtml as well as the commentary at
http://www.jungewelt.de/1999/04-24/001.shtml). According to my sources, this
is as complete a reproduction of the documents as exists in the German media
at the time of this writing. What follows is my translation of these
published excerpts.

Eric Canepa Brecht Forum, New York April 28, 1999



I: Intelligence report from the Foreign Office January 6, 1999 to the
Bavarian Administrative Court, Ansbach:

"At this time, an increasing tendency is observable inside the Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia of refugees returning to their dwellings. ...
Regardless of the desolate economic situation in the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia (according to official information of the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia 700,000 refugees from Croatia, Bosnia and Herzogovina have found
lodging since 1991), no cases of chronic malnutrition or insufficient
medical treatment among the refugees are known and significant homelessness
has not been observed. ... According to the Foreign Office's assessment,
individual Kosovo-Albanians (and their immediate families) still have
limited possibilities of settling in those parts of Yugoslavia in which
their countrymen or friends already live and who are ready to take them in
and support them."

II. Intelligence report from the Foreign Office, January 12, 1999 to the
Administrative Court of Trier (Az: 514-516.80/32 426):

"Even in Kosovo an explicit political persecution linked to Albanian
ethnicity is not verifiable. The East of Kosovo is still not involved in
armed conflict. Public life in cities like Pristina, Urosevac, Gnjilan, etc.
has, in the entire conflict period, continued on a relatively normal basis."
The "actions of the security forces (were) not directed against the
Kosovo-Albanians as an ethnically defined group, but against the military
opponent and its actual or alleged supporters."

III. Report of the Foreign Office March 15, 1999 (Az: 514-516,80/33841) to
the Administrative Court, Mainz:

"As laid out in the status report of November 18, 1998, the KLA has resumed
its positions after the partial withdrawal of the (Serbian) security forces
in October 1998, so it once again controls broad areas in the zone of
conflict. Before the beginning of spring 1999 there were still clashes
between the KLA and security forces, although these have not until now
reached the intensity of the battles of spring and summer 1998."

IV: Opinion of the Bavarian Administrative Court, October 29, 1998 (Az: 22
BA 94.34252):

"The Foreign Office's status reports of May 6, June 8 and July 13, 1998,
given to the plaintiffs in the summons to a verbal deliberation, do not
allow the conclusion that there is group persecution of ethnic Albanians
from Kosovo. Not even regional group persecution, applied to all ethnic
Albanians from a specific part of Kosovo, can be observed with sufficient
certainty. The violent actions of the Yugoslav military and police since
February 1998 were aimed at separatist activities and are no proof of a
persecution of the whole Albanian ethnic group 

[CTRL] Clash Theory

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From http://www.centraleurope.com/ceo/special/zoranapr30.html

Updated Fri., Apr. 30, 1999 at: Lon 12:12 p.m. Prague 1:12 p.m. N.Y. 7:12
a.m.
Editors' Pick: Kosovo Crisis -- The latest updates on the crisis in
Yugoslavia.



The Clash of Civilizations And World Peace

by Philip Cunningham

Pax Americana is in deep trouble. Even if the war in Kosovo does not turn
out to be America's "Suez" or "Dienbienphu", the ill-conceived intervention
could very well be Nato's undoing. And even if Nato holds together on the
battlefield and achieves some of its ever-shifting objectives, bombing the
Belgrade government out of power, it will have left a dangerous legacy.
Intervention in Kosovo has created dangerous rifts with Russia and China,
dangerously altering the delicate global balance of power and posing all
kinds of new problems down the road.

If US-led Nato coalition is successful in "taking out" an unfriendly
government, the world will become a more insecure place, polarized by a
dangerous precedent: --it's okay to attack a sovereign state for alleged
humanitarian reasons in defiance of international law and UN authority.

If prolonged military intervention results in a stalemate that more or less
restores the status quo ante after thousands of deaths, enduring refugee
problems, a devastated infrastructure and economic calamity one can only
wonder if the end result was worth the terrible price.

Conversely, if the US-led mission to bomb Yugoslavia is immediately halted
because of Russian pressure to go back to the table or domestic rifts within
Nato nations, the tilting of the global power balance can be righted in
time. Nothing will turn the clock back to the relative peace of the
pre-March 24, 1999 world, but diplomacy and development aid can make up for
some of the damage.

An immediate and complete halt to the bombing is not an endorsement of a
tyrant in Belgrade, nor does it condone atrocities. Indeed, bombing is both
tyrannical and atrocious, so stopping it can only be an improvement. Setting
a good example is one kind of influence. Boycotts are another. All sorts of
non-violent solutions are possible, because the means we use are as
important as ends we seek. It doesn't take much imagination to realize that
there has to be a better way to stop people from hurting one another than to
drop explosives from the sky.

So far, Nato casualities are virtually nil, which provides a golden
opportunity to cut all losses and pull out. Getting a little egg on the face
is far better than getting dragged into the mud of a quagmire. More
importantly, the terrifying, divisive and unacceptable losses of an
open-ended war can be largely be avoided. If the do-gooders led by Clinton
were less eager to cross boundaries and intervene militarily, there would be
fewer if any casualties and only a fraction of the costs that are being run
up with the astronomical military bill. Peace does not come for free, but
war is the most costly of all.

In the Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington describes a worldview that
may ultimately prove prescient, a world in which good fences make good
neighbors. His paradigm rests on the assumption that the world is
irrevocably broken into major cultural zones that will never assimilate and
homogenize into a single world culture. In such a world, war would be
avoided not by a coercive global cop, but by a relative parity of power that
would prevent disruptive projections of power across civilizational lines.
In short, a truly multipolar system is more stable than a quasi-multipolar
system which is a group of regional powers plus a single superpower. Despite
the negative tone of the title, Huntington's provocative work offers the
hope that clashes between nations can be avoided if each recognizes and
accepts the ultimate differentness of others. In this sense, Pax Americana,
with its universal aspirations, is a threat to systemic stability.
Huntington orders the world into broad civilizational categories: Western,
(US and Western Europe) Orthodox (Orthodox Christian countries), Islamic,
Hispanic, Sinitic (China, Vietnam, Korea), Hindu, Japanese, etc.

As a student in Huntington's seminar at Harvard University, I found myself
constantly arguing with the good-humored professor about the rough edges of
his bold theory. What constitutes a civilization? -Why isn't Southeast Asia
a civilization? Why does Japan stand in a category of its own, yet
multicultural America is thrown in with Europe under the rubric "Western,"
or how to determine where one civilization ends and another begins?

But the power of his ideas were such that by the end of the seminar, most of
us realized that we had bought his central thesis and were just sweating the
details. The overall trends he describes are visible everywhere. In the
absence of cold war ideology, people and nations are cloaking themselves in
culture. That's the good news and the bad news.

It takes a careful reading of his work to realize the 

[CTRL] Racak: French View

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From http://www.iacenter.org/racak.htm

Press Review from Diana Johnstone in Paris

THE "RACAK MASSACRE" QUESTIONED BY FRENCH MEDIA

Paris, 20 January 1999

French newspaper and television reports today feature evidence apparently
ignored by U.S. media, suggesting that the "Racak massacre" so vigorously
denounced by the U.S.-imposed head of the OSCE (Organization for Security
and Cooperation in Europe) "verifiers" mission to Kosovo, William Walker,
was a setup.

This coincides with reports in the German press indicating strong irritation
with Walker among other OSCE members.

Meanwhile, the ineffable State Department spokesman James Rubin appeared
tonight on CNN for short glimpses between Clinton impeachment dronings,
plodding forward amid questions from journalists even more gung-ho for NATO
bombings than he and his bride Christiane Amanpour, whose love story
apparently owes so much to the common anti-Serb cause. It seems the U.S. is
clueless as to the doubts being cast elsewhere on the "massacre" story, and
the only questions well-paid U.S. journalists could conjure up were
variations on the theme, "why isn't cowardly NATO already bombing the
Serbs?"

RENAUD GIRARD has covered virtually all the Yugoslav wars of disintegration
on the spot for the French daily "Le Figaro". Here is my rough but accurate
translation of his lead article published on January 20, 1999:

KOSOVO: OBSCURE AREAS OF A MASSACRE

The images filmed during the attack on the village of Racak contradict the

Albanians' and the OSCE's version

Racak. Did the American ambassador William Walker, chief of the OSCE
cease-fire verification mission to Kosovo, show undue haste when, last
Saturday, he publicly accused Sserbian security forces of having on the
previous day executed in cold blood some forty Albanian peasants in the
little village of Racak?

The question deserves to be raised in the light of a series of disturbing
facts. In order to understand, it is important to go through the events of
the crucial day of Friday in chronological order.

At dawn, intervention forces of the Serbian police encircled and then
attacked the village of Racak, known as a bastion of UCK (Kosovo Liberation
Army, KLA) separatist guerrillas. The police didn't seem to have anything to
hide, since, at 8:30 a.m., they invited a television team (two journalists
of AP TV) to film the operation. A warning was also given to the OSCE, which
sent two cars with American diplomatic licenses to the scene. The observers
spent the whole day posted on a hill where they could watch the village.

At 3 p.m., a police communique reached the international press center in
Pristina announcing that 15 UCK "terrorists" had been killed in combat in
Racak and that a large stock of weapons had been seized.

At 3:30 p.m., the police forces, followed by the AP TV team, left the
village, carrying with them a heavy 12.7 mm machine gun, two automatic
rifles, two rifles with telescopic sights and some thirty Chinese-made
kalashnikovs.

At 4:40 p.m., a French journalist drove through the village and met three
orange OSCE vehicles. The international observers were chatting calmly with
three middle-aged Albanians in civilian clothes. They were looking for
eventual civilian casualties.

Returning to the village at 6 p.m., the journalist saw the observers taking
away two very slightly injured old men and two women. The observers, who did
not seem particularly worried, did not mention anything in particular to the
journalist. They simply said that they were "unable to evaluate the battle
toll".

The scene of Albanian corpses in civilian clothes lined up in a ditch which
would shock the whole world was not discovered until the next morning,
around 9 a.m., by journalists soon followed by OSCE observers. At that time,
the village was once again taken over by armed UCK soldiers who led the
foreign visitors, as soon as they arrived, toward the supposed massacre
site. Around noon, William Walker in person arrived and expressed his
indignation.

All the Albanian witnesses gave the same version: at midday, the policemen
forced their way into homes and separated the women from the men, whom they
led to the hilltops to execute them without more ado.

The most disturbing fact is that the pictures filmed by the AP TV
journalists-which Le Figaro was shown yesterday-radically contradict that
version.

It was in fact an empty village that the police entered in the morning,
sticking close to the walls. The shooting was intense, as they were fired on
from UCK trenches dug into the hillside.

The fighting intensified sharply on the hilltops above the village. Watching
from below, next to the mosque, the AP journalists understood that the UCK
guerrillas, encircled, were trying desperately to break out. A score of them
in fact succeeded, as the police themselves admitted.

What really happened? During the night, could the UCK have gathered the
bodies, in fact killed by Serb bullets, to set up a scen

[CTRL] The $$$ Road to Recovery

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

Via http://www.centraleurope.com/ceo/special/rfeapr30.html

Updated Fri., Apr. 30, 1999 at: Lon 12:11 p.m. Prague 1:11 p.m. N.Y. 7:11
a.m.
Editors' Pick: Kosovo Crisis -- The latest updates on the crisis in
Yugoslavia.



Yugoslavia: Economic Recovery Plans Require Vast Sums

By Robert Lyle

The economic costs of the Kosovo crisis are getting intense scrutiny in
Washington by Yugoslavia's neighbors and the world's financial leaders.

No one yet is even considering what the costs will be of rebuilding
Yugoslavia and resettling hundreds of thousands of refugees once the bombing
is ended and peace has been restored. For now, the International Monetary
Fund (IMF) and the World Bank are attempting to put some numbers to the
costs for the neighboring countries who are handling the refugees, seeing
their trade dramatically reduced and tourist income vanish.

The difficulty, say bank and fund officials, is trying to get a handle on a
very fluid situation to which there is no end in sight.

The European Union's Commissioner for Economic, Monetary and Financial
Affairs, Yves-Thibault de Silguy, says he's heard estimates as high as $30
billion. He told a press conference in Washington:

"It will be a high cost -- by comparison with Bosnia-Herzegovina which was
five billion dollars. It will be higher - probably very much higher. How
much, I don't know. I said to you I have heard figures past $30 billion, but
there is no evidence, just a figure to say it will be perhaps 10, perhaps
20, perhaps 25, perhaps $30 billion. Nobody knows at this stage. "

The World Bank and the IMF did a quick study on estimates of costs to
Kosovo's neighbors assuming the fighting ended soon. That estimate
approached $2 billion and World Bank President James Wolfensohn said it was
clearly only an early guess.

A report on the study said that if the conflict drags on through the rest of
the year, the humanitarian costs alone of dealing with as many as 750,000
refugees could easily exceed $300 million.

If the conflict ends quickly, the study suggested that in addition to $139
million in emergency humanitarian aid, the countries of the region would
need $668 million in balance of payments help just to keep their economies
going.

In all, it said, even on the optimistic side, the costs could easily exceed
2.5 percent of the region's GDP.

Officials from most of Kosovo's neighbors -- Albania, Romania, Bulgaria,
Macedonia, Croatia and Hungary -- participated in a special meeting in
Washington Tuesday night, called by the IMF, the World Bank and the United
Nations, in an attempt to put some real figures to the needs of these
nations.

The results of that meeting are to be revealed later today Wednesday. De
Silguy says the needs of each country are so different that the only way to
fully evaluate the situation is to send missions to each country for a
complete on-the-ground review. That's what the European Commission is doing,
he says, as part of its aid program.

The EU has provided 800 million euros in humanitarian assistance and is
providing additional balance of payments support in coordination with the
IMF of 20 million euros for Albania. A proposed 60 million euro balance of
payments package for Bosnia is currently before the EU Council of Ministers,
says de Silguy, and packages of 100 million euros for Bulgaria and 200
million euros for Romania are being worked on within the EU.

Another way to help the countries which are on the front line of the Kosovo
crisis, says de Silguy, is by buying more of their products:

De Silguy said: "Economic recovery driven exclusively by internal factors
should allow the European Community to absorb more exports from countries on
the front line of the crisis." The finance ministers and central bank
governors of the group of seven major industrial nations said Monday they
would support efforts coordinated by the bank and fund to deal with the
serious economic effects of the conflict.

Copyright (c) 1999. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio
FreeEurope/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.
http://www.rferl.org





A<>E<>R

The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled
one is truly vanquished. -Johann Christoph Schiller,
   German Writer (1759-1805)
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material
is distributed without charge or profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information
for non-profit research and educational purposes only.

DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==
CTRL is a discussion and informational 

[CTRL] Spain: Next?

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From wsws.org

""Help for the Kosovar Albanians, through military attacks against Serbian
positions, was "inevitable" according to Pujol, because "it is a question of
respect for people, for their identity, for them to have their own nation,
for justice and freedom." For good measure, he added, "It's always been said
that if the democratic countries had stopped Hitler in his stride when
Austria and Czechoslovakia were annexed, the Second World War would have
been avoided." ""  <>

""Regionalist tensions dominate Spanish politics today. The "nation of the
autonomies" that was created in 1978 to replace Franco's dictatorship is
breaking apart at the seams.""

WSWS : News & Analysis : Europe : The Balkan Crisis

Yugoslavia war intensifies political tensions in Spain
By Vicky Short
1 May 1999
The right-wing Spanish government has enthusiastically joined in the present
NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.

Spain has so far sent six F18 fighter-bombers to Yugoslavia, and made
available one KC-130 Hercules for in-flight refuelling, manned by a total of
180 military personnel. Another C-212 plane is on standby at the Vicenza
base in Italy. Two more F18s and a Hercules are stationed at Torrejón and
Zaragoza bases and have been placed at the disposal of the Alliance. Spain
also contributes the frigate Victoria and the tanker Marqués de la Ensenada
to NATO's Mediterranean fleet and the frigate Estremadura to the European
fleet. The first military action of the Spanish F18s was to bomb fuel depots
in the airport of Podgorica (Montenegro) and military shelters near
Belgrade.

There are already 1,100 Spanish soldiers in Bosnia-Herzegovina and a further
400 military personnel have been dispatched to Albania, accompanied by an
amphibious warship. Military conscription still operates in Spain.

The Spanish government of José María Aznar has authorised the deployment by
the US of up to 40 KC-135 planes from the base at Morón de la Frontera
(Seville). The authorisation extends to over-flying, landing and resting of
crews in Torrejón (near Madrid) and Rota (Cadiz).

Last month, the majority of the Spanish parliamentary groups gave their full
backing to the government and the Secretary General of NATO, Javier Solana,
for the decision to bomb Yugoslavia. This was ratified in parliament on
April 15 by a full vote in Congress. The parties voting in support of the
war were: Aznar's Popular Party (PP), Socialist Party (PSOE), Convergencia I
Unió (CiU--Catalan regionalists), Coalición Canaria (Canary Island
regionalists) and Nueva Izquierda (a split from the PSOE), as well as some
smaller parties. The only exceptions were Izquierda Unida (IU--United Left)
and Bloque Nacionalista Galego, who voted against. But both have a very
small number of deputies.

Spain's government is led by the right-wing Popular Party in alliance with
the Basque and Catalan nationalists. It came to power in 1996 as a direct
result of the pro-capitalist and anti-working class policies carried out by
the PSOE (Socialist Workers Party of Spain) government, under the leadership
of Felipe Gonzalez, during the previous 14 years.

The bellicose stance of the present government is fully endorsed by the
PSOE. But how could it be otherwise--two of its main leaders are directly
involved in preparing and conducting the war, with their party's full
support.

Javier Solana is NATO Secretary General and Felipe Gonzalez is special envoy
for Yugoslavia for both the European Union and the Organisation for Security
and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). Both of them joined the PSOE in 1964. In
the early 1980s, while in opposition, they took part in countless
demonstrations opposing Spain joining NATO and demanding the removal of
American military bases from Spain. Once the PSOE entered government in 1982
they reneged on this stand and five years later ratified Spain's membership
of NATO. Today Solana can boast of being the man who "pushed the red button"
in the first NATO attack on a sovereign country in its 50 years history.

Izquierda Unida is an amalgam of left, regionalist and radical groups led by
the Communist Party, and is the only party strongly opposing the bombing. IU
called on the Minister of Defence to order the immediate return of the
Spanish pilots, to whom it appealed to become war objectors. Their
opposition to NATO, however, is based on an uncritical defence of Serbian
nationalism.

There are big divisions within the United Left. IU federations in Madrid,
Asturias and Valencia have criticised the party's support for Milosevic.
Julián Fernández, an IU delegate from Navarre, attacked the official stance
of the organisation, stating: "NATO's actions can be criticised, but we must
make it clear that it is the criminal actions of Milosevic that are
responsible for the situation. Now the UN must intervene to provide a
civilised solution."

The Basque and Catalan nationalists of the PNV and CiU also support the
attacks on Serbia for their own reasons. They use

[CTRL] Fw: Bombs Away

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

- Original Message -
From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <@thequest.net>
Sent: Friday, April 30, 1999 2:21 PM
Subject: Bombs Away


: -   ___      __
:/  |/  /  /___/  / /_ //M I D - E A S T   R E A L I T I E S
:   / /|_/ /  /_/_   / /\\ Making Sense of the Middle East
:  /_/  /_/  /___/  /_/  \\F L A S H B A C K
:  http://www.MiddleEast.Org
:US-BOMBED COUNTRIES
:_
:Call US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Australia +
:5-cents/minute - All days, 24-hours daily.
:Go to - http://www.MiddleEast.Org/pp1.htm
:  Or email to - [EMAIL PROTECTED] for all details.
:__
:
:
:THE USA AND THE WORLD:
:
:  BOMBS, ARMS, COUPS
:
: MER - WASHINGTON - 29 APRIL 1999:
: Here's a list of the countries that the U.S. has bombed since the end of
: World War II.  Now of course the number of countries where the U.S. has
: used the CIA to install regimes, bring about coups, and oftentimes
: seriously undermine democratic movements in favor of dictatorships, is
: considerably greater -- that shouldn't be forgotten for a moment.  Nor
: should it be forgotten that the U.S. sells tremendous quantities of arms
: to others who in many cases are proxie bombers -- Israel certainly at the
: top of that list.
:
: China 1945-46
: Korea 1950-53
: China 1950-53
: Guatemala 1954
: Indonesia 1958
: Cuba 1959-60
: Guatemala 1960
: Congo 1964
: Peru 1965
: Laos 1964-73
: Vietnam 1961-73
: Cambodia 1969-70
: Guatemala 1967-69
: Lebanon 1983
: Grenada 1983
: Libya 1986
: El Salvador 1980s
: Nicaragua 1980s
: Panama 1989
: Iraq 1991-99
: Bosnia 1995
: Sudan 1998
: Afghanistan 1998
: Yugoslavia 1999
:
: Note:  William Blum, author of one of the best books detailing CIA plots
: and coups around the world, compiled this list, forgetting as do many,
: that the U.S. bombed Lebanon in 1983 when the unstated policy was to help
: the Israelis establish a more compliant client-regime in Beirut.
:
:  --
: MER: IF YOU DON'T GET IT, YOU JUST DON'T GET IT!
:
:   News, Information, & Analysis That Governments, Interest Groups,
: and the Corporate Media Don't Want You To Know!
: -
:  To receive MER regularly email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
: __
:M  I  D  -  E  A  S  T  R  E  A  L  I  T  I  E  S
: For past MER articles go to: http://WWW.MiddleEast.Org
:   (c) Copyright 1999
: [EMAIL PROTECTED] / Fax: 202 362-6965 / Phone: 202 362-5266
:
:





A<>E<>R

The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled
one is truly vanquished. -Johann Christoph Schiller,
   German Writer (1759-1805)
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material
is distributed without charge or profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information
for non-profit research and educational purposes only.

DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==
CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing!  These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections 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, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and
nazi's need not apply.

Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.

Archives Available at:
http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html

http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/

To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
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[CTRL] Russia: The end of a world power

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From wsws.org

 WSWS : News & Analysis : Europe : Russia

Russia: The end of a world power
What lies behind the domestic crisis?
By Patrick Richter
30 April 1999

The arrogant attitude of Washington towards the Russian government during
the bombardment of Serbia marks a turn in relations with Russia and gives
cause to assess the real character of the liberal reforms which have been
carried out there since 1991.

These policies were aimed at completely destroying the Russian economy as a
potential competitor and turning the country into a market and source for
cheap raw materials. With the many big collective corporations bought by
Western businesses--above all in the food, chemical and pharmaceutical
industries--productive plants were closed while the retail networks were
retained as an outlet for Western products.

Following the financial crisis last summer, apart from the chocolate factory
"Red October", no larger profit-making "Russian" factories have survived.
Coal and steel companies are subsidised by the government and the contracts
for the arms industry have dropped dramatically. Only the raw materials
industry is able to yield a profit.

The type of future perspectives regarding foreign investment, in which so
much hope is still invested by the Central European countries, has been
summed up by the American banker and industrialist Thomas Wainwright: "Where
should they [the foreign investors] go with their money? Who would they
produce for? The international market is in a depression and foreign
competitors would reject products manufactured in Russia with all sorts of
protectionist measures." Steel and aluminium are already now being
threatened by such anti-dumping measures.

Last August's financial crisis burst the bubble of the overblown Russian
credit market, which on the one hand expressed the boundless and naive
illusions in a capitalist upturn but which was also consciously inflated in
order to increase Russia's dependence on the West.

The credit policies of the IMF since 1991 served the purpose of
strengthening particular layers in Russia whose job was to carry out such a
policy. Its chief supporters were chosen amongst the most corrupt and
ruthless economic and political climbers who, under the leadership of
President Boris Yeltsin, could bring the most profitable parts of the
economy under their control--the finance and oil sector--and then build up
very influential media empires.

At the height of their power these men were reputed to control over 90
percent of the economy and were known as the so-called oligarchs: Boris
Berezovsky (who built his empire with LogoWAS, the Lada distribution
network; owns newspapers, television stations and shares in oil companies
and the Russian airline Aeroflot), Vladimir Potanin (of Oneximbank; one of
the richest men in Russia, according to Forbes, with $1.6 billion),
Alexander Smolensky (SBS-Agrobank), Vladimir Gussinsky (Mostbank group),
Vladimir Vinogradov (Inkombank), Vagit Alekperov (Lukoil) and Michael
Chodorovsky (Yukos-Oil), to name just a few of the most important ones.

Their elevation came relatively easily. During perestroika the mathematics
graduates and young members of the Communist Party's youth organisation
founded private banks with party money, or just took over privatised parts
of the national banking system. In the unstable situation in the first years
after 1991 they were given cheap state credits which they could use to
speculate during a period of hyperinflation. On this basis they were able to
rack up their first millions of dollars. In the following period, the
oligarchs gradually acquired shares in industry through their banks--nearly
always at underrated market value--above all in the raw materials sector.

In 1995 the head of privatisation at the time, Anatoli Chubais, enabled them
to carry out their biggest coup with the help of the so-called "shares
against credit" privatisation program, which privatised the most profitable
key industries. In the name of a few of the oligarchs, Oneximbank head
Potanin organised a loan of $2 billion in exchange for shares of the
Berezovsky company due to be privatised. This is how Berezovsky and
Smolensky gained the majority of shares of Russia's seventh biggest oil
company, Sibneft. After the privatisation program had been carried out, this
handful of super-rich controlled the lion's share in the companies.

They continued to receive help from the state right up to the financial
crisis. The short-term government loans with which the state financially met
the demands of its private national and foreign creditors came onto the
market through the above mentioned banks. Up until the crisis, state
provision and free loans constituted the bank's main source of income and
strengthened the position of the oligarchs.

In a study dealing with the lives and intentions of this layer, Maxim Boyko,
Andrei Shleifer and Robert Vishny established that they "have absolutely no
entrepreneu

[CTRL] Arabiana: 04-29-99

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From ArabicNews.CoM

US announces sanctions changes for Libya, Sudan, Iran
Regional, Economics, 4/29/99

The US yesterday announced exemptions on certain products under the US
sanctions, which will affect current sanctions imposed against Libya, Sudan,
and Iran.

"The United States will exempt commercial sales of agricultural commodities
and products, as well as medicine and medical equipment from future
unilateral Executive Branch economic sanctions regimes, unless he determines
that our national interest requires otherwise," a statement from the US
White House press secretary said.

The statement said that the US may decide to sanction sales of these items
in certain instances: "Such extraordinary circumstances might include actual
or potential armed conflict involving the United States or its allies; a
situation in which a regime is diverting imports of food, medicine, or
medical equipment to its armed forces or to its political supporters; or a
situation in which the provision of such items would provide unjustified
economic benefit to a regime or its officials."

US Undersecretary of State for Economic, Business and Agricultural Affairs
Stuart Eizenstat said yesterday in a briefing on the change that the change
were "implemented as part of our overall approach to sanctions reform, and
it is not directed at any specific country."

He said that although there is no change in the circumstances that first
brought about sanctions, "Sales of food, medicine and other human
necessities do not generally enhance a nation's military capabilities or
support terrorism. On the contrary, funds spent on agricultural commodities
and products are not available for other less desirable uses."

Eizenstat said the change does not mean that proposed sales of affected
items to sanctioned countries would automatically be approved, but
"fully-negotiated contracts" with "non-government entities or to
governmental procurement bodies not affiliated with the coercive organs of
the state" would be reviewed on an individual basis. "It is also a
requirement that there be no US Government funding, financing or guarantees
in support of the sales authorized by this changed policy," he added.

He said that the change in policy would have no effect on Iraq, as these
items come under the boundaries of the oil-for-food program administered by
the UN.

Eizenstat said that Iran "would become eligible under the circumstances
we've laid out for food and medical sales. It was not intended to send a
signal to them; it was not intended to send a signal to Libya or to the
Sudan. But it will have an effect on them."

Eizenstat outlined two negative affects that the current sanctions have:
"Unilateral sanctions which contain prohibitions on the sale of humanitarian
products, medicines, food, et cetera, tend to have potentially negative
impacts. The first is that it can create a counter-reaction in the world
community, if it appears that it is punishing innocent people as opposed to
dictatorial regimes, and make it more difficult to get the cooperation of
even our closest allies for their sanctions."

Secondly, he said that the sanctions have have a negative impact on US
interests through reducing potential US exports.

"When you look at the unilateral sanctions that are now being applied to
Iran, Libya and Sudan insofar as they effect food and medicine, it's very
difficult to say that they've accomplished the purposes of including those
products. The conduct hasn't changed. They simply use it as an argument that
we're hurting the average citizen," he said.

Eizenstat also said that the timing of the decision had no relation to
Libya's recent handing over of the two Libyan suspects in the Lockerbie case
for trial by a Scottish court in the Netherlands.



Iran: regional security based on coordination between Saudi Arabia and Iran
Saudi Arabia, Politics, 4/29/99

Iranian Defense Minister Admiral Ali Shamakhani considered the visit of the
Saudi Arabian Defense Minister Prince Sultan Bin Abdul Aziz on Saturday to
Tehran as asserting "the Saudi will" to strengthen relations with Iran. The
Iranian minister added that the main entrance to establishing a regional
security system lies in maintaining Saudi-Iranian coordination.

In a statement to the London-based al-Hayat daily issued today, the Iranian
defense minister said that, "The Iranian military force following the
revolution has not made any attacks and pursued no other policy but just
completing its defense capabilities in a way to deter aggressions that might
be launched against it following the war with Iraq."

The statements made by the Iranian minister came in reply to the concerns
shown by the GCC in its periodic statements concerning the Iranian armament.

Admiral Shamakhani defended the naval exercises recently carried out near
the border with the UAE by Iran saying: "We are making several maneuvers
every year, and they [the GCC states] also do the same. We carry out
maneuv

[CTRL] Made in Hong Kong

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

R >>


>From Int'l Herald Tribune

Paris, Thursday, April 29, 1999
Hong Kong Fears Ruling Will Lift Population 25%



By Philip Segal International Herald Tribune


HONG KONG - A court ruling earlier this year that overturned immigration
restrictions could result in a 25 percent jump in the population of this
densely packed city within seven years, the government said Wednesday.
The estimate of the influx, which some have speculated could overwhelm Hong
Kong's schools, hospitals and public housing, came in remarks to the
legislature by the secretary for security, Regina Ip, who called it ''a very
heavy, if not unbearable burden, on Hong Kong.''

Her comments were the first time the government had publicly estimated the
number of potential new residents since the region's Court of Final Appeal
threw out a series of China-backed immigration restrictions in January.

The controversy following that decision brought Hong Kong to the brink of
constitutional crisis, as Chinese officials demanded that the ruling be
''rectified.'' It was not, and now Hong Kong's 6.8 million people are in the
position of having to accommodate 692,000 mainland Chinese who are already
here and have the right to remain.

The immigration crisis is a product of the new administration in Hong Kong,
which took over after the former British colony was returned to China in
1997. A new constitution was adopted two years ago, with China's approval,
and it says that anyone with one parent already settled in Hong Kong can
also come here.

The security secretary said that after seven years of continuous residence
in Hong Kong, many of the 692,000 new immigrants as well as other
mainlanders already in the region would be able to bring in another 983,000
new residents. That would bring the total of newcomers to 1,675,000 people,
nearly 25 percent of the current population.

The ruling comes as Hong Kong is beginning to rethink how it funds public
services. Last month, a Harvard University study said the increasingly
prosperous region would soon run into problems funding its hospital system
without major changes.

But sudden influxes of people are not entirely new to Hong Kong. Many of the
residents who now tell pollsters they are fearful of being swamped by
mainlanders were themselves refugees from Communist China.

The great wave of new immigrants flooding into this bastion of laissez-faire
economics at the end of the 1940s forced the government of the day into a
radical rethinking of public policy: After a fire in a squatter camp in 1953
killed hundreds, the government began a massive campaign to build public
housing.

Today, half of the population lives in state-subsidized accommodation.


A<>E<>R

The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled
one is truly vanquished. -Johann Christoph Schiller,
   German Writer (1759-1805)
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material
is distributed without charge or profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information
for non-profit research and educational purposes only.

DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==
CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing!  These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections 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, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and
nazi's need not apply.

Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.

Archives Available at:
http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html

http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/

To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]

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SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Om

[CTRL] House to the Rescue

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From http://www.rollcall.com/newsscoops/leadscoop.html


House Group Working to End Kosovo Conflict
Abercrombie, Weldon Want To Work With Russia

By Jim VandeHei

A bipartisan group of House Members, many of whom who feel the White House
is feeding Congress and the American people inaccurate information about the
war in Kosovo, plans to work with top Russian officials to help end the
crisis immediately, according to Members leading the private talks.
Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.) -- with the help of Democratic Reps. Neil
Abercrombie (Hawaii) and Maurice Hinchey (N.Y.) -- is organizing a meeting
with top Russian officials to "explore the terms and conditions that might
be the grounds for successful negotiations" to end the war, according to
Abercrombie. Five Republicans and five Democrats are expected to attend
talks in Vienna, Austria, on Friday, Weldon said.

Private citizens, including Members of Congress, are forbidden by law from
directly negotiating with foreign leaders. But the Members are allowed to
discuss the framework for a deal, and that's what the bipartisan group
intends to do.

While Weldon pushes for face-to-face talks with Russian leaders, Abercrombie
and Rep. Robin Hayes (R-N.C.) are circulating a Sense of Congress resolution
to end the military campaign now and find a diplomatic solution before the
war escalates.

The resolution requests that the Speaker appoint a delegation of House
Members to assist in the negotiations, according to a draft copy obtained by
Roll Call.

Their proposal is far more demanding than the resolution passed yesterday
that requires Congressional approval for troop deployment and would inject
Congress much deeper into the conflict than many GOP leaders now desire.

Hayes and Abercrombie are holding private meetings with about a dozen
Republicans and Democrats who believe Russia must be involved in any
settlement deal.

Weldon, an expert on Russia, is playing a lead role in facilitating the
talks with Duma officials in the former Soviet Union. Weldon is the U.S.
chairman of the Duma-Congress Working Group and has visited with an eclectic
group of Duma leaders during his 18 visits to Russia.

Speaker Dennis Hastert's (R-Ill.) spokesman, John Feehery, said Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright told the Speaker yesterday that the administration
would not object.

Privately, however, the Speaker has serious reservations about Members of
Congress playing such a high-profile role in the negotiations, one of his
advisers said.

If the Speaker does not sign off on the mission, Hayes will not attend, his
office said late yesterday. Feehery would only say, "If Members want to go,
they get our implicit approval, but not our explicit approval."

If they go, the 10 Members would discuss a framework for compromise with
five leaders of the Russian Duma who represent everyone from communist
hard-liners to pro-Western reformers. Two senior advisers to Yugoslav
President Slobodan Milosevic will be at the table, but will consult only
with the Russian officials, Weldon said.

Hayes and Abercrombie, both of whom surveyed the situation in Kosovo during
a Congressional CODEL to the Balkan region two weeks ago, feel the crisis is
far worse than President Clinton and his national security team concede.
Hayes characterized information delivered from the White House to Congress
as "incomplete and inaccurate."

So, starting Tuesday night, they started holding Members-only meetings to
pressure their leadership and colleagues to demand a settlement. More than a
dozen Members were expected to attend the second meeting scheduled for last
night.

"There is general agreement that this is getting out of hand and that [the
administration] has no clue where this going except on a disastrous course,"
said Abercrombie.

The Hawaii Democrat said public opinion will "drop out of sight" when voters
see the price tag of the mission and fully understand the quagmire into
which the administration has sunk the country.

"This will be seen as a political disaster regardless of party affiliation
and people will look to see who tried to get us out of this."

Hayes said interest in the meetings intensified after several Republicans
and Democrats left a White House briefing last Thursday feeling they were
fed "incomplete and inaccurate" information. "[Abercrombie and I] spoke up
jointly and said this is not a true picture of what's going on," Hayes said.

Abercrombie said the situation is far worse than Clinton wants Americans to
believe and complained that the administration could care less what Congress
thinks. "I don't think the administration is much interested in what we
think anyway," he said.

Hayes and Abercrombie planned to circulate their resolution late yesterday
and are lobbying their leadership to allow a vote. While they don't mention
Russian involvement in the resolution, that has been the most talked- about
solution inside the meetings, the Members said.

Several sources said there's 

[CTRL] At Home & Abroad

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From http://www.commondreams.org/kosovo/views/schechter2.htm

Covering Wars At Home and Abroad:
The Kosovo-Columbine Connection
By Danny Schechter
April 29, 1999

   Had the Marine Corps recruiter not gotten hung up on the fact that
Columbine H.S. student Eric Harris lied about taking an anti-depressant, he
may very well have been on his way by now to the front lines of Kosovo, the
real war he reportedly preferred to fight instead of creating his own. The
bombs bursting in air over Serbia and the bombs planted in high school
corridors in Colorado may have differed in scale -- and impact -- but there
are eerie parallels between 1999's two biggest news stories.

   It is a connection that is rarely made in the media , but the fact is
that wars overseas often intensify wars at home. The Vietnam experience was
not that long ago. The absurdity of President Clinton lecturing students
about the power of non-violence while NATO, under his command, relies on
violence was not lost on many journalists -- especially in other countries.

   In both cases, violence has been the method of choice. Frustrated by an
inability to bring Milosevic to heel through a rather convoluted diplomatic
process., NATO launched missiles rather than stepping up less violent
sanctions. Unable to make peace with their schoolmates who they felt
victimized by, the self styled Trench Coat Mafia launched its own "cleansing
" offensive, to wipe out the other cultural groupings which it had
demonized. The macho, the testosterone, the war is the only road to peace
option was in play in both situations. At Columbine High, the perpetrators
committed suicide in a library where they had seemingly no time to read and
get some perspective on their disaffection. In the former Yugoslavia, it is
the Government which seems to be bent on suicide with the co-complicity of
its miscalculating NATO adversaries with their far ineffective air campaign.

   Perhaps that's why the news coverage of both events followed a similar
trajectory. On both stories, the networks deployed regiments of
correspondents with the assignment of providing saturation coverage.

   In both cases, the analysis of causes were downplayed in favor of images
of the action -- constantly replayed helicopter footage of students fleeing
their school in horror in one instance, endlessly recycled footage of
refugees fleeing in horror in the other. In both cases, the genre has been
crime and punishment. In Kosovo, that has meant an almost exclusive focus on
Milosevic's criminality, with barely any examination of the role the West
played over the years in looking the other way and not consistently
challenging the pervasive human rights abuses.

   At Colorado, and in communities across America, young people are
virtually ignored by a media more interested in selling them products than
engaging their concerns. The video games they buy, the slasher movies they
consume, and the TV shows like MTV's "celebrity death match" are all
manufactured by corporate America which does very little to provide other
programming about positive role models and alternatives to conflict. This
Beavis and Butthead culture has been fostered by a dumbing down of TV
programming -- a calculated strategy that media companies have no interest
in critiquing in any serious way. How many times have you seen the
suggestion that there is a link between media violence and real world
violence brushed off --despite all the studies that document a connection.

   The Kosovo story has been presented with two essential images -- fires in
the sky, and lines of displaced people on the road or in camps. It has been
relatively bloodless and stage managed with well tested propaganda
techniques on both sides. NATO bombs Serb TV after it shows the consequences
to civilians of the growing number of collateral damage' incidents. This
language is as dehumanized as much of the coverage. The Serbs in turn muzzle
the brave voices of their independent media while the media here the critics
and even the victims who are shown but rarely heard. The confusing vote on
the issue in the American Congress -- where a majority voted for and against
the war at the same time mirrors media coverage that lacks depth, context
and background.

   In Colorado meanwhile, most of the coverage initially highlighted the
military style SWAT squad police operation which looked like it might have
been taking place in the Balkans. There were endless human interest stories
about the bravery of the police, the tragedy of the families who had lost
children, and the shocked community who though "it can't happen here." Give
us a break. There has been a form of low intensity warfare between
generations and cultures within America for years that has been ignored by
educators and media alike. Getting kids to conform as a form of
socialization is what many schools do with their standardized tests.
emphasis on team sports and reinforcing gender roles.

   Ultimately,

[CTRL] Blair: Calling Shots

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From wsws.org

""Shrouding himself in rhetoric about the threat from "dangerous and
ruthless men" like Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, Blair called for
NATO to impose order on the world under the auspices of the US--"by far the
strongest state". ""

WSWS : News & Analysis : Europe : The Balkan Crisis

Blair outlines his vision of the new military world order
By Chris Marsden
29 April 1999

On the occasion of his visit to America to celebrate the fiftieth
anniversary of the NATO alliance, British Prime Minister Tony Blair took
time out to espouse his new "Doctrine of the International Community".

Blair's speech to the Chicago Economic Club was the highpoint of a weekend
of bellicose statements made to the US political and media establishment on
the need to launch a ground war against Serbia.

It did more than seek to justify NATO's present war, however. Blair fancies
himself as a theoretician of what he describes as the political "Third Way".
He therefore took it upon himself to outline a rationale for any future
intervention in the internal affairs of other nations which the US and
European imperialist powers deem necessary.

"Fools rush in" ... as the saying goes. For Blair has given voice to the
fundamental considerations shaping imperialist foreign policy that are
usually concealed from the public gaze by evoking humanitarian motives.

The tone of Blair's remarks was set by his explanation of the actual content
of the "special relationship" between Britain and America. "Chicagoland," he
declared, "is the headquarters of some of Britain's most important inward
investors: Motorola, Sara Lee, RR Donnelly. Nearly half the $124 billion US
firms spent on foreign acquisitions last year went on British companies. We
would like it to be even more.

"Nor is the traffic all one way. British investment in Illinois generates
some 46,000 jobs, making us the biggest foreign investor in the state. And
the London Futures Exchange is working alongside your Board of Trade and
Mercantile Exchange to lead the revolution in electronic trading."

Blair placed NATO's war against Serbia in the context of the profound
economic changes that had taken place over the last 20 years. Globalisation
had "changed the world in a more fundamental way," he said. It has
"transformed our economies and our working practices."

"Every day about one trillion dollars moves across the foreign exchanges,
most of it in London Any government that thinks it can go it alone is
wrong. If the markets don't like your policies they will punish you."

"We live in a world where isolationism has ceased to have a reason to exist.
By necessity we have to co-operate with each other across nations. Many of
our domestic problems are caused on the other side of the world. Financial
instability in Asia destroys jobs in Chicago and in my own constituency in
County Durham We are all internationalists now, whether we like it or
not. We cannot refuse to participate in global markets if we want to
prosper."

Blair insisted that all national governments must be encouraged to abide by
the dictates of the world market--as laid down by the International Monetary
Fund and the World Bank--and allow the penetration of their economies by the
transnational corporations in the name of "transparency" and "openness".

Russia was targeted for particular attention, with Blair insisting that it
should be prepared "to take the difficult economic action it needs to reform
its economy--to build a sound and well-regulated financial system, to
restructure and close down bankrupt enterprises," etc.

Globalisation is not just an economic, "but also a political and security
phenomenon," he insisted. The dependence of national economies on the
performance of world stock markets means that "We are witnessing the
beginnings of a new doctrine of international community." This required that
all the institutions established at the end of the Second World War to
regulate relations between nations be overhauled--particularly the
respective functions of the United Nations and NATO.

Blair explicitly linked the question of financial interdependence with the
military policy to be pursued by the major imperialist powers. The obverse
side of demanding the establishment of a new economic order based on
globalisation was that the "principles of international community" must
"apply also to international security".

Shrouding himself in rhetoric about the threat from "dangerous and ruthless
men" like Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, Blair called for NATO to
impose order on the world under the auspices of the US--"by far the
strongest state". This new version of the "Pax Americana" meant that
"non-interference", long "considered an important principle of international
order ... must be qualified". The imperialist powers would instead lay down
the rules determining when intervention should take place. This must also
allow room for the European powers to match the US "wi

[CTRL] Boom Bust

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

From
http://www.globe.com/dailyglobe2/117/oped/What_we_lost_in_the_boomP.shtml

What we lost in the boom
By James Carroll, 04/27/99


harlie walks into the Ritz Bar in Paris, a favorite haunt in the old
days. With rueful sympathy, the barman says, ''I heard that you lost a lot
in the crash.''

''I did,'' Charlie replies grimly, ''but I lost everything I wanted in the
boom.''

This incident from F. Scott Fitzgerald's ''Babylon Revisited,'' a story
written in 1931, comes to mind as a parable of the American condition today.
The boom rides on. The Dow is up nearly 17 percent this year, in one record
session after another. Interest, unemployment, and inflation rates continue
to defy every prediction, staying low. An economic take-off, fueled
apparently by the new technologies, has left behind worries about budget
deficits and Social Security shortfalls. Most indicators suggest that a rare
prosperity is still maturing, with yet more records of production and
investment return ahead. The good times roll.

And then two boys walk into a school and open fire. And, all the while,
American-made bombs are falling in Serbia. A ''patient'' NATO is satisfied
with itself, despite doing nothing to protect the besieged innocents of
Kosovo. Now, perhaps a million fugitive people face starvation, and NATO
makes it worse. The word ''boom'' takes on an absurd resonance, as the boom
of gunfire in a high school, and the boom of air war ordnance serve as
counterpoints to the boom of the American economy. Already, ''boomer'' had
become a catchword for shallow self-absorption, but this new juxtaposition
of meanings suggests that the post-World War II generation of Americans
internalized the bomb shelters of our childhoods, encasing our hearts and
souls in concrete.

As this savage war drags on, NATO, and its supporters, can blame Slobodan
Milosevic. As Tony Blair and Bill Clinton slap aside Russian-brokered peace
feelers, NATO critics, like me, can lay the fault at the alliance's odd
combination of naivete and vindictiveness. But is it possible for all of us
to ask what this war is revealing about our common condition? Similarly, we
can blame the shootings at Columbine High School on a dark subculture,
neglectful parents. Or, without denying the particular responsibility of the
shooters, we can ask what epiphany this incident offers to every citizen of
this nation?

Not so long ago, a new American mantra was adopted: ''It's the economy,
stupid.'' A new breed of political leaders, eschewing the ''rhetoric'' of
the New Deal and Great Society, purged the public agenda of all but things
measured in the numbers of low rates and high growth. Lip service was given
to education reform, but only for its economic benefit. Otherwise, the
national purpose was stripped. Impending environmental crises were
downplayed, an already modest foreign aid budget was slashed, and the urgent
task of creating post-Cold War structures of international peace was never
taken up. The measure of American ambition was reduced to one thing, with
the promise that a preempting focus on the economy would bring fulfillment
in other areas as well.

Our government ''reinvented'' itself at the service of this new ideal, and
every other social hope was put in second place - or eliminated. Was crime a
problem? Instead of addressing its causes, we doubled the prison population.
Was the arms race with the Soviet Union over? Instead of transforming our
war economy, we became arms merchants to the world - and expanded NATO to
expand our weapons market.

Were people of color still insisting on equal access? Instead of keeping the
promises of Civil Rights, we redefined their insistence as itself unfair to
whites. Traditional American hopes, once unselfconsciously expressed in
language about justice and peace, were caricatured as '''60s idealism,'' and
dismissed.

''I lost everything I wanted in the boom,'' Charlie said. Characters in
fiction are what they want. The same is true of us. What do we want? What do
we really want? When we see photos of the Colorado dream house in which one
of the Columbine shooters lived, or of the BMW he drove, the pang we feel
must be partly a pang of conscience.

How did it happen that the ''American dream'' was reduced to our houses and
our cars? That our deepest hopes were reduced to ''the economy, stupid?''
Nothing more quickly yanks a people out of such shallow wanting than the
discovery that its children are in trouble. What if their trouble, finally,
is trouble with what we, their parents, want? Are some children plunged into
the despair of overt nihilism by the implicit nihilism of a consumer culture
that cares nothing for others?

Meanwhile, an apocalypse, partly of our making, is unfolding in the Balkans.
Last month, only fringe Russian legislators spoke of World War III; last
week, Victor S. Chernomyrdin warned of the danger. Who is listening? What do
''boomers'' hear beside the clang of the Stock Exchange's closing bel

[CTRL] 4-19/20 ~ Birthday Boys

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

<>

>From http://www.parascope.com/articles/0497/april19.htm

April 19, 1997:
The fourth anniversary of the incineration of the Mt. Carmel Church near
Waco, Texas, resulting in the highest fedkill body count since Wounded Knee;
the second anniversary of the murderous bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah
Federal Building in Oklahoma City, America's very own Reichstag fire. These
two events have federal officials gritting their teeth with anxiety, as a
nationwide string of bombings pockmark America's mental landscape with
media-saturated terror.

But it seems as if April 19 has always been an unofficial holiday of
violence. On April 19, 1775, colonial militia intercepted Redcoats on their
way to seize an arms depot, as the shots fired 'round the world ignited a
rebellion against the mighty British Empire. Less than a century later, when
Civil War threatened to destroy the fledgling Republic of the united States
of America, first blood was drawn on April 19, 1861, when a Baltimore mob
attempted to stop Massachusetts troops heading for Washington, D.C. (Lincoln
also ordered a blockade of Confederate ports on that same day.)

The U.S. went off the gold standard on April 19, 1933, which wasn't
necessarily a violent event, although they may as well have sliced America's
jugular, it's just a slower bleed this way.

Jews in the Warsaw ghetto began a counteroffensive against Nazi forces on
April 19, 1943 -- a heroic act of rebellion which nonetheless resulted in
the incineration of the ghetto soon afterwards. And, as if an eerie echo of
the Nazi's final solution to the Warsaw ghetto "problem," the FBI began its
final assault on the Mt. Carmel church complex on April 19, 1993, resulting
in the deaths of nearly all the Branch Davidians inside. Forward-Looking
Infrared camera footage taken by FBI planes flying over Mt. Carmel, included
in the new documentary Waco: The Rules of Engagement which premiered
recently at the Sundance Film Festival, shows evidence of FBI snipers firing
into the back of the church as Davidians attempted to escape the burning
compound.

To mark this occasion, ParaScope presents a roundup of its reports on the
Waco Massacre and the Oklahoma City Bombing, two bloody footprints left by
an increasingly schizophrenic government and its agents in the field.


>From ElectronicTelegraph (UK)

ISSUE 1433 Wednesday 28 April 1999

The birthday boys

The teenagers responsible for the Columbine High School massacre timed it to
coincide with the 110th anniversary of Adolf Hitler's birth. Nato justifies
its bombing of Serbia with veiled references to the Third Reich, and a
neo-Nazi group has been linked to the Brixton and Brick Lane nail bombs.
Niall Ferguson, the leading historian, shows how a man dead for more than 50
years remains an enduring force in our lives


 [International] Clinton presses for gun curbs to avoid another massacre

TO most Americans, the massacre of 15 schoolchildren and the slaughter of
3,700 Albanians are unconnected events which might as well have happened on
different planets. It is not just that (as the cynical saying goes) 15
deaths are a tragedy, especially when they take place in an archetypal
small-town high school, while 3,700 deaths are a statistic, especially when
they happen in far-off Kosovo. It is also a matter of motivation.

Death in Colorado was the outcome of the pathetic fantasies of two sad
teenage losers. Death in Kosovo is the work of one evil grown-up dictator.
Or so it seemed to me, as I toured the East coast of America this week.

Yet there is a connection, which also extends to another recent atrocity
closer to home: the shopping-centre bomb in Brixton. Implausible though it
seems, the link is Adolf Hitler.

>From beyond his unknown grave, Hitler has a hand in all these apparently
unrelated events. Take Brixton and Brick Lane. We still know relatively
little about who carried out the bombings; but responsibility has been
claimed by someone saying he belonged to the neo-Nazi group Combat 18, whose
name derives from the numerical equivalents of Hitler's initials (A=1, H=8).

The Colorado killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, chose the 110th
anniversary of Hitler's birth on April 21, 1889, to slaughter their fellow
pupils at Columbine High. According to the testimony of survivors, the two
were members of a clique at the school called the Trenchcoat Mafia, who
favoured black clothes and combat boots, clothing associated in their minds
with the Nazis. They saw themselves as followers of a "Goth" fashion and
occasionally could be heard speaking to one another in German. It also
appears that they selected one of their victims on racial grounds.

"I went bowling with [Klebold]," one pupil told the media last Wednesday,
"and when he would do something good he would shout 'Heil Hitler!' and throw
up his hand." The Internet "chat room" Harris listed as his favourite on his
America On Line website was called Ich bin ein Auslander ("I am a
foreigner"). Els

[CTRL] Fw: New Attention to Unpublicized Provisions of Rambouillet

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

- Original Message -
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wednesday, April 28, 1999 2:53 PM
Subject: New Attention to Unpublicized Provisions of Rambouillet


Institute for Public Accuracy
915 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045
(202) 347-0020 * http://www.accuracy.org * [EMAIL PROTECTED]
__

Wednesday, April 28, 1999

NEW ATTENTION TO UNPUBLICIZED PROVISIONS OF RAMBOUILLET

WASHINGTON -- New questions are continuing to emerge about the
actual terms of the Rambouillet text. Milosevic's refusal to sign
Rambouillet was the cited reason that NATO began the bombing of Yugoslavia.
Today, the Washington Post published an exchange between NATO spokesman
Jamie Shea and a representative of the Institute for Public Accuracy:

[The Washington Post, "For the Record," Wednesday, April 28, 1999:]

>From a NATO press conference at the National Press Club Monday with
spokesman Jamie Shea:
Q: The Rambouillet Accords, appendix B in particular...called for
the occupation of all of Yugoslavia Unrestricted passage throughout
[its] air space, territorial waters, rail, airports, roads, bridges, ports
without payment, the electromagnetic spectrum and so on. Was not the
Rambouillet accord, which [Slobodan] Milosevic refused to sign, in fact, a
desire to occupy all of Yugoslavia and not just simply Kosovo?
Mr. Shea: No, absolutely not We were looking...to be able to
deploy an international security force, and that means, of course, being
able to deploy the assets for that security force At the moment, all of
our predeployed elements in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia have
come in by the Greek port of Thessaloniki. And for that, obviously, one has
to have an agreement with the Yugoslav government to be able to have access
to those roads, those rail systems, the air space for the business of
setting up an international security presence, and therefore NATO personnel
who may have had at the time...to transit temporarily through Yugoslavia
will have had to enjoy those kinds of immunities...
Q: That's simply not the language, sir. It's "free and unrestricted
passage," the ability to detain people, for example,... and total use of
electromagnetic spectrum, sir.
A: I was not a negotiator at Rambouillet...but my understanding,
sir, is that it refers to, as you say, passage, exactly transit. And that's
the point I've made.
___

For more information and interviews on this subject and its implications,
contact:
* Robert Hayden, director of the Center for Russian and East European
Studies
  at the University of Pittsburgh, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
* At the Institute for Public Accuracy: Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David
Zupan,
  (541) 484-9167.







A<>E<>R

The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
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A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled
one is truly vanquished. -Johann Christoph Schiller,
   German Writer (1759-1805)
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Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed
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In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material
is distributed without charge or profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information
for non-profit research and educational purposes only.

DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==
CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing!  These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections 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, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and
nazi's need not apply.

Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.

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Om

[CTRL] Opinion: Intersection

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

<>


>From www.originalcources.com

Clinton's Hypocrisy and the American Public's Willingness to be Deceived
An American Indian Looks at the Hypocrisy of Clinton Administration towards
Serbs
By: Mary Mostert, Analyst, Original Sources (http://www.originalsources.com)

April 27, 1999

Someone sent me a copy of an article written by an American Indian who takes
a sharp, critical view of the Clinton Administration's war on Yugoslavia.
And, for all you American Indians out there who are going to ask if I am an
Indian, the answer if "no." I also am not Serbian. I'm just an ordinary
mongrel American who actually believes the principles upon which this nation
was founded.

In fact, I have already written about the Trail of Tears forced ethnic
cleansing of the State of Georgia of Cherokee, Creek and other Indian
tribes. They had even taken their case to the United Supreme Court and WON.
The Court said, "No, Georgia, You can't simply seize Indian Lands and drive
them to Oklahoma. They have rights, too." But another Democrat was president
then, Andrew Jackson, and he told the Court, basically to stuff it. If they
wanted to keep him from driving the Indians off the lands he considered "too
good" for mere Indians, just try it. HE, after all, was commander-in-chief
of the U.S. Army.

And, sadly, the American public not only let Andrew Jackson ethnically
cleanse Georgia, but even re-elected him.


A View from an American Indian Hypocritical is possibly the word best suited
for the American role in the aggressions against the Nation of Yugoslavia.
All the justifications rendered by the Clinton Administration for this
aggression have been and continue to be perpetrated by the United States
Government against its own Native Peoples.

Since the earliest beginning of the United States Government it has sought
to eradicate or assimilate the ethic people of the continent it occupies.
Germ warfare, massacre of women, children and the elderly, forced removal
from Homelands, and sequestering in desolate environments have been U.S.
policy.

The removal of ethnic Albanians is played up by the Americans, forgetting
that it was the United States Government who ordered the forced removal from
the southeastern part of the American continent of the Five Civilized
Nations in what was later to be called The Trail of Tears. American Indian
People forced from their homes with little more than they could carry in
their arms. Forced westward marches with the dead and dying left on the side
of the trails. Execution of any who sought to remain or escape. It should be
further noted that these Nations were guaranteed by Treaty with the United
States Government that their removal would be to lands that would forever be
"sovereign" Indian lands. This held true only until the greed of the
American's found need for this land.

It was the practices of genocide and ethnic cleansing of the American
Government against the occupants of Its lands that so inspired Adolf Hitler
in his designs for what became known as the Holocaust of World War II, and
in light of the amount of Native People infected, starved and massacred by
the United States Government, the actions of the Third Reich should be
viewed as little more than a minor copy cat venture.

The Nations of the world stand by in fear, as if frightened by a large
serpent and the threat of its fangs, as the American aggressions continue,
forgetting that in time even they will be challenged to withdraw their
sovereign rights or be attacked.

Just as the Roman, Spanish, and British Empires before it, the United States
Empire has grown in military and monetary strengths to the point that it has
placed itself in the position of making the Nations of the World it's
subjects. All the Empires before it continued to consume the rights of
others until enough courage was borne in them to stand up to the
aggressions. Even the American Empire had its beginning by standing against
what was then the greatest Empire in the World. And Its victory was only
achieved only with the aid of others tired of that Empire.

Much of what dictates the world economy today is based on the American
monetary standard. The United States has financial interests in practically
every Nation of the world. So much so that even the threat of the removal of
Its foreign aid to them will cause a dissenting Nation to back down. It
should be remembered that the American hold on such matters will remain only
so long as its position of World dominance remains. And this dominance can
only be neutralized by substantial resistance by other Nations.

The United States policies of forcing Nations to adhere to her rule have
only served to tear down and weaken those Nations who have succumbed to it.
Financial crisis, increased organized crime and overall discontent have been
the only blessings the populations of these Nations have seen as a result of
adapting to American standards.

The United States Government conceals its aggressions un

[CTRL] You've Got (Mail) Trouble!!!

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From Int'l Herald Tribune

Paris, Wednesday, April 28, 1999
You've Got Mail! As Divorce Sequels Show, You've Got Trouble!



By Maria Glod Washington Post Service


WASHINGTON - The words flowed without inhibition. In electronic mail he
allegedly wrote to friends, even to strangers, the 37-year-old lawyer
described his sexual trysts, gushed about his partners and agonized over
cheating on his wife.
''Right now I am in New Orleans with a man,'' one message read. ''My wife
thinks I am here for work, but I'm not.

''I met him on-line. He is married, two kids,'' the e-mail said. ''Italian,
muscles like crazy, beautiful face and eyes.

''You must not print this, and delete all files!! It's good to talk it out,
but dangerous.''

Dangerous is right.

Copies of this and other e-mail messages have been filed at Fairfax County
Circuit Court in Virginia, where the lawyer and his now former wife will be
fighting for custody of their children. The ex-wife says she found the
e-mail messages on computer disks stuffed into a drawer; the lawyer says the
messages are forgeries.

Records of electronic communication, a growing factor in corporate cases
such as the high-profile government antitrust suit against Microsoft Corp.,
have begun showing up in divorce and custody proceedings across the United
States.

Electronic infidelity also has become an issue.

One Virginia man, according to court documents, learned that his wife was
having ''cybersex.'' Furthermore, she ''engaged in chats wherein she has
disparaged her husband and her children.''

Some legal scholars say using the messages as a weapon raises questions of
privacy and fairness.

''I think we need to look at e-mail as something that has to be protected,''
said Paul Levinson, a communications professor at Fordham University.
''Historically, the law has always been limping behind the technology.''

For now, clients are marching into their lawyers' offices with printouts
from their home computers. The search for e-mail, said one lawyer, Marna
Tucker, is the modern equivalent of ''looking through the trash can for
discarded notes.''

And if the client does not broach the subject, the lawyer often does.

''I ask them, 'Is your spouse computer-literate?''' Mark Sandground, a
lawyer, said. ''You're going to say things to your e-mail that you wouldn't
say to your priest in confession.''

Glenn Lewis, who heads the domestic-relations section of the Virginia Bar
Association, said that even the most sophisticated husbands and wives have
let down their guard at the keyboard.

''There are people who wouldn't think about leaving an envelope open on
their desk,'' he said, ''yet they leave a computer that has their love
letters or pornography or chat-room talk.''

At its headquarters in Dulles, Virginia, America Online Inc. is served with
a steady stream of subpoenas for subscriber information, often for divorce
cases. AOL, with 17 million customers by far the world's largest base of
e-mailers, usually is able only to produce records showing how much time a
customer spent on-line, a company spokesman said. But the company
occasionally can recover the text of a message or chat-room exchange, said
the spokesman, Rich D'Amato.

AOL officials said that they responded immediately to search warrants in
criminal cases but wait 14 days in civil matters to give their customers
time for a court challenge.

Spouses most often go after electronic records to prove infidelity or to
show that their partner has emotional problems or is simply spending too
much time on-line to be a good parent.

A 48-year-old Tennessee man asked for AOL records to bolster his claims that
his spouse neglected their family. ''The wife does not clean the house
during the day,'' according to his complaint, ''but rather spends her day
shopping, visiting, meeting her paramours or on the computer.''

Lawyers who use e-mail messages in court argue that such evidence is
valuable because, unlike witness testimony, it gives a firsthand record of
the writer's feelings.

But as with most evidence presented in court, there is plenty of room for
challenge. When spouses share a computer, messages can be written under the
one another's names and existing files altered.

Besides checking files stored on a computer, some people monitor on-line
activity through Internet search engines.

Eric Hester, 33, a mortgage banker from San Francisco who wanted more time
with his sons, age 5 and 7, said he searched under his former wife's screen
name for messages she had posted in chat rooms. He looked weekly for four or
five months, he said.

Mr. Hester gave 30 pages of printouts, including one of a divorce-related
discussion in which one of his sons participated, to the mediator in his
custody case. The mediator did not change Mr. Hester's visiting rights but
did re

[CTRL] Next Stop: East Timor

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From wsws.org

WSWS : News & Analysis : Asia : Indonesia

""An even more strident demand came from the Australian Financial Review,
the country's main business newspaper. Its commentator Brian Toohey declared
the US-NATO bombing of Serbia to be a precedent for an Australian-led UN
mobilisation against Indonesia. ""

""As in Kosovo, the purpose of such an armed intervention will not be to
protect the rights and aspirations of poor villagers, but to secure the
investments and strategic interests of Western big business. ""

Western calls for intervention mount after Timor killings
By Mike Head
20 April 1999

Western governments and media columnists have stepped up calls for military
intervention in East Timor after pro-Indonesian militias killed at least 20
people and abducted dozens more in two days of violence throughout the
provincial capital of Dili last weekend.

Portugal, the former colonial ruler of the territory, was joined by the
Foreign Minister of Ireland, another European Union member, in demanding UN
action, while the United States and Australia expressed alarm about the
developments and indicated support for early UN involvement.

Between 2,000 and 7,000 members of various militia groups rampaged through
Dili, shooting known independence supporters, assaulting refugees from other
towns and burning homes, and businesses of secessionists. According to
eye-witness accounts from refugee agencies, the show of force began with a
rally on Saturday in front of the governor's office. There Eurico Guterres,
the commander of the Aitarak militia urged his followers to "conduct a
cleansing of all those who have betrayed integration. Capture and kill them,
if you need it. I, Eurico Guterres, will be responsible."

Paramilitary groups with assorted names from throughout East Timor attended
the rally, coming from towns and villages such as Atabae, Maliana, Aileu,
Same, Ainaro, Suali, Maubara, Viqueque, Bacau and Lospalos. Also present
were the Governor, Abilio Soares, the military commander, and the police
chief. Aid agencies said some Dili residents were rounded up and forced to
participate.

Gangs armed with rifles, home-made guns and machetes then circled the city,
shooting weapons and seizing vehicles. Among the homes targetted was that of
a prominent businessman and independence supporter, Manuel Carrascalao,
leader of the East Timorese People's Reconciliation and Unity Movement. Some
170 refugees from outlying areas had been sheltering in the house.
Carrascalao's adopted son and others were either shot or hacked, leaving a
likely death toll of 10-15. Many more are missing.

Gangs also ransacked the houses of two other leaders of the umbrella
secessionist movement, the National Resistance Council of Timor
(CNRT)--Leandro Isaac and David Diaz. Likewise, the home of the late Herman
das Dores Soares, the victim of a military shooting last year, was raided.
Militiamen burned the warehouse, kitchen and two cars owned by his family.
Other homes were raided or burned down.

Four truck and van loads of militia members attacked and destroyed the
offices of the local daily Suara Timor Timur (Voice of East Timor). They
smashed up computers, printing machines, archival cabinets, windows and
doors, accusing the paper of being a voice for anti-integration forces.

A number of witnesses, including aid agencies, Western reporters and the
Irish Foreign Minister David Andrews, stated that Indonesian military
commanders and soldiers watched benignly or gave signs of encouragement as
the attacks continued. At times, soldiers waved on the attackers and
provided them with food and water.

Refugee agencies reported similar rallies and violence in other towns and
villages in preceding days, including in Suai, Emera, Maubara, Viqueque and
Maliana. These events followed the previous weekend's massacre of up to 52
people in a churchyard at Liquicia and reports of military shootings
elsewhere.

In the leadup to last weekend's violence, the Indonesian regime currently
headed by B.J. Habibie gave indications of hardening its attitude toward the
prospect of East Timorese independence or autonomy. A spokeswoman for
Habibie said the government took responsibility for the events, but
emphatically ruled out any foreign involvement in East Timor in preparation
for a UN-supervised "act of free choice" on autonomy, due to be held in
July.

According to one report from New York, Jakarta is planning to demand
significant changes to the autonomy package due to be finalised with
Portugal at the UN this week. The changes include a continued Indonesian
armed forces (ABRI) presence, supervision of an East Timor police force by
the Indonesian police, Indonesian control over the territory's natural
resources (notably oil and coffee) and no East Timorese flag, emblems,
colours or sporting teams.

In addition, no details of the proposed voting method on the autonomy plan
have been released, or indeed whether any ballot is to be permi

[CTRL] East Timor: Red & White

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From etan.org

 The ETAN/U.S. Condemns Killings, Calls for U.S., UN Action
Sunday, 18 April 1999
For Immediate Release Contact: John M. Miller (718) 596-7668

East Timor Action Network Condemns Latest Killings Calls for U.S., U.N.
Action to Disarm Paramilitaries

The East Timor Action Network/U.S. today expressed outrage at the brutal
attacks by the Indonesian-armed and created paramilitaries in Dili, the
capital of East Timor. ETAN urged the U.S. government and the United Nations
exert maximum pressure on the Indonesian government and military (ABRI) to
disarm and disband the militias.

"Indonesia must allow the immediate deployment of U.N. personnel to protect
human rights and monitor Indonesian troop withdrawals and the disbanding of
the militias," said John M. Miller, spokesperson for the network.

ETAN is planning demonstrations next week at Indonesian diplomatic offices
in Washington, DC, New York and Chicago to protest the killings.

On Saturday, more than 1500 armed pro-Indonesian paramilitary members took
control of the streets of Dili. At least 13 are reported killed and the
death toll is expected to climb as Indonesian police and troops allow the
rampage to continue. Hospitals and clinics are filled with wounded;
photographers have been threatened and foreign journalists attacked.

The paramilitary soldiers organized and armed by the Indonesian military
began their assault on the people of Dili with a rally attended by the
Indonesian-appointed governor of East Timor. The military and police have
stood by refusing to halt the violence, instead providing water and
cigarettes to the paramilitaries, according to accounts received by ETAN.

Last week a coalition of paramilitary groups threatened to "wipe out" all
those who supported independence for the former Portuguese colony or refused
to fly the red and white Indonesian flag.

"Red and white now mean blood and bandages to the East Timorese," said
Miller.

"This terror campaign is clearly designed to derail any prospect of a UN
organized vote by the East Timorese on their political future," added
Miller.

At least 275 people have appeared on a death list distributed early last
week by the paramilitary groups. On the list are civil servants, members of
the National Council of Timorese Resistance, and advocates of
reconciliation. Militias have also threatened Catholic Bishop Carlos Ximenes
Belo, co-winner of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize. Several homes of people on
the hit list have been attacked or burned down.

The ABRI-supported paramilitary rampage may have only just begun. Militia
leaders have threatened to continue their "cleanup operation" into next week
when U.N.-mediated talks on East Timor are scheduled to resume.

The paramilitary groups have been recruited, armed and trained by ABRI in an
attempt to sabotage the UN ballot planned for July, in which the East
Timorese may vote for or against an Indonesian government "autonomy"
proposal.

The attack on Dili is the latest in a series of assaults by the
paramilitaries. On April 5, at least 25 people seeking refuge from previous
attacks were killed at a church in Liquica in a joint operation between a
paramilitary group and ABRI. Since then there have been daily killings by
paramilitary groups.

"The U.S. State Department has urged the Indonesian government 'to bring the
pro-integration militia groups under control,' but stronger pressure is
really needed," said Miller.

ETAN can arrange interviews with East Timorese leaders and other experts on
East Timor. Contact: John M. Miller (718) 596-7668

The East Timor Action Network/U.S. supports genuine self-determination and
human rights for the people of East Timor and democracy in Indonesia.

On December 7, 1975, the Indonesian military brutally invaded East Timor.
The following July, East Timor was illegally "integrated" into Indonesia as
its "27th province." The UN and most of the world's countries do not
recognize this, and the East Timorese reject it. According to human rights
groups and the Catholic Church more than 200,000 people -- one-third of the
pre-invasion population - have been killed by the Indonesian occupation
forces.






A<>E<>R

The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled
one is truly vanquished. -Johann Christoph Schiller,
   German Writer (1759-1805)
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material
is distributed without charge or profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information
for non-profit research and educational purposes only.

DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==

[CTRL] Fw: Claremont Institute Precepts: Forgetting the Lesson of the Cold War?

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

:
: - Original Message -
: Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 1999 3:48 PM
: Subject: Claremont Institute Precepts: Forgetting the Lesson of the Cold
: War?
:
:
: :
: :
: : The Claremont Institute--PRECEPTS |
: | April 27, 1999
: : Visit  |
: | No. 160
: :
: : This weekend the United States hosted a celebration of the
: : 50th anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
: : There is plenty to celebrate in NATO's history, above all
: : its successful 40-year showdown with the Soviet Union. But
: : even as the dignitaries and their entourages traversed
: : Washington in their limousines and enjoyed their cocktails,
: : there were ominous signs, rendered manifest by the war in
: : Yugoslavia, that NATO's and the free world's leader has
: : forgotten the chief lesson of the Cold War. To wit: an
: : overwhelming defense is the surest means to peace.
: :
: : The extreme cuts in America's defense spending over the six
: : years of the Clinton administration were not made in
: : secret. Yet many Americans seem surprised that we are
: : having to pull aircraft carriers out of strategically
: : important areas of the world to conduct an air war against
: : a country the size of a medium state, and that in the first
: : weeks of that war we nearly depleted our supply of cruise
: : missiles and have no more currently in production.
: :
: : Nor is the problem confined to liberals. Last week, former
: : Senator Bob Dole--who unlike President Bill Clinton,
: : Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and National
: : Security Advisor Sandy Berger, is not a veteran of the
: : radical anti-defense spending McGovern campaign of 1972--
: : questioned the consistency of congressional leaders who
: : want to beef up America's defense budget, and yet who are
: : less than enthusiastic about the war in Yugoslavia.
: : "What do they want more defense funding for," Dole asked,
: : "if they don't want to use it?"
: :
: : The fact that even this old Cold War patriot has forgotten
: : the common sense answer to his own question--namely,
: : "Defense"--calls to mind Winston Churchill's semi-serious
: : dictum: "Unteachable from infancy to tomb--there is the
: : first and main characteristic of mankind."
: :
: : Many of our closest friends, good people with whom we have
: : been closely allied on similar issues in the past, are
: : "whole-hog" supporters of the current war. They make two
: : arguments.  The first is that we must see this war through
: : at all costs, so that our adversaries will respect us. This
: : would make more sense if we were fighting with clear
: : objectives, in a mood of assertiveness, and from a real
: : condition of strength. As it is, we are fighting in half
: : steps, our ends unclear, and running out of weapons. Even
: : if we see this through, if that is still possible given how
: : we began, the spectacle is not likely to impress Russia,
: : China, North Korea, or Iraq.
: :
: : The second argument for the war is humanitarian.  In this
: : regard, I recommend a fine article in the May 8 issue of
: : _National Review_ by Mark Helprin, entitled "A Fog That
: : Descends From Above." It makes a strong case that the
: : forced and murderous mass emigration of Kosovar Albanians
: : over the last month has been at least as much a result of,
: : as a justification for, the war.
: :
: : This much seems clear: Our priority today should be to arm
: : the United States to an awesome level, and to build a
: : national missile defense.  We should do these things
: : primarily to make sure that the people of this country, and
: : others to whom we have given our pledge, may be safe and
: : secure in their lives and liberty.  Then, and only then,
: : should we use our strength to spread the American message
: : of freedom and justice.
: :
: : Sincerely,
: : Larry P. Arnn
: : President, The Claremont Institute
: :
: :
:
: -
: : Copyright (c) 1999 The Claremont Institute
: :
: : To subscribe to Precepts, go to: http://www.claremont.org/subscrib.cfm ,
: or e-mail us at [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
: : To be removed from this list, go to :
: http://www.claremont.org/remove_public.cfm , or e-mail us at
: [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
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: Institute, e-mail : [EMAIL PROTECTED] , or visit our website at :
: http://www.claremont.org .
: : Changing your e-mail address? Please let us know at : [EMAIL PROTECTED]
.
: : For press inquiries, contact Nazalee Topalian at [EMAIL PROTECTED] or
(909)
: 621-6825.
: :
: : The mission of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship
: : and Political Philosophy is to restore the principles of the American
: : Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life.
: :
: : The Claremont Institute | 250 West First Street | Suite 330 | Claremont,
: : CA 91711 | Phone (909) 621-6825 | Fax (909) 6

[CTRL] Fw: LM COMMENTARY: American school shootings/04-27-99

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

- Original Message -
From: LM <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: LM-commentary <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 1999 1:57 PM
Subject: LM COMMENTARY: American school shootings/04-27-99


:
: American psychos?
:
: David Nolan reports from Washington on the hysterical discussion about the
: shooting at Columbine High School
:
: Before the smoke had cleared over Columbine High School in Littleton,
: Colorado, the questions were on everybody's lips: 'Who was to blame?';
: 'What caused this tragedy?'; 'How can we stop it happening again?'. Lots
of
: people  had their say, but as James Poniewozik pointed out in the online
: magazine Salon, 'In the land of no good explanations, the man with the
: daffiest explanation is king'.
:
: As with so many recent tragedies, much coverage was devoted to the fact
: that the killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had websites, played video
: and computer games and maybe even watched too much television. One Gallup
: survey revealed that 82 percent of people said the internet was at least
: partly to blame for the shootings and 34 percent thought it was one of the
: factors that 'deserves a great deal of blame'. Sixty percent blamed the
: availability of guns, 49 percent TV, movies and music and 34 percent the
: media.
:
: The fact that the kids wore trenchcoats was even used as evidence against
: them. The San Francisco Chronicle suggested the coats were 'a symbol for
: everything from Hitler and the Nazis to mass murder to suicidal
fantasies'.
: They are also protection against the traditionally cold Colorado winters -
: but to point that out would have detracted from the irrational
: helter-skelter that passed for informed discussion on the issue.
:
: As the horror of the events became apparent, and the media had time to do
a
: quick web search, television news programmes showed images downloaded from
: websites purporting to 'predict' the carnage. Goths, or anybody dressed in
: black and wearing makeup, were interviewed. Basement rooms filled with
: game-playing computer nerds were filmed to show us all exactly where the
: tragedy came from.
:
: Soon after, the 'mind police' came on the scene. Counsellors,
: psychologists, safety experts and bullying experts all had their say. The
: fact that none of them had anything to add to what your average bar-room
: bore could make up after a couple of beers was irrelevant. In a thoughtful
: piece in the Washington Post, columnist Jonathan Yardley described the
: scene: 'First comes the sad, calamitous event...Then come the ghouls: the
: oleaginous journalists, the grief therapists, the ambulance chasers, the
: gurus, the zealots, the Mister Fix-Its...the invasion of the
bodysnatchers.'
:
: While some demanded controls on guns, and several commentators have
pointed
: out that every other country (including Serbia) has blamed the tragedy on
: America's gun culture, the discussion in the US itself has skirted the
: issue. While the Clinton administration has said that it would (yet again)
: examine the laws, that route has been tried, and few expect much to
happen.
: The rhetoric comes out, but with no expectation behind it. It is just one
: of many routes open to regulators.
:
: The real impetus is behind increasing the regulatory controls available to
: schools and the police. There is a demand for yet more controls on the
: internet, video games and television violence. But, as one almost hidden
: piece in the New York Times pointed out, it could just as easily be argued
: that these media had nothing to do with the tragedy. Citing seven multiple
: murders by teenagers between 1951 and 1979, the conclusion was obvious:
'If
: the...examples fail to show a pattern, it may be because there is none.'
:
: That won't prevent anybody from looking for one. And it certainly won't
: stop the overreaction. In the days after the shootings, several people
were
: arrested for the sort of threats dished out in schools every day of the
: week. And then every public high school in Washington was evacuated after
: one anonymous bomb threat. Last week America witnessed two tragedies. In
: one, 15 people died, including some of Colorado's brightest students. In
: the other, we took a further step towards the monitoring of our every
move,
: word and thought.
:
:
: --
: If you are not on this mailing list and would like to join, create a mail
: from the address at which you would like to receive the commentaries -
:
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: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>.
:
: ---

[CTRL] Balkans: Business as (Un)Usual?

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald

Wednesday, April 28, 1999

BALKANS: THE CONFLICT
US plays a double game on oil sales

By CHRISTOPHER LOCKWOOD in Washington and TIM KING in Luxembourg

The European Union banned oil sales to Yugoslavia on Monday, but in a
development that will be regarded as scandalous in European capitals the
United States confirmed it had no plans to follow suit.

This means that while it is now illegal for any EU country to export oil to
Slobodan Milosevic, it remains perfectly legal for American companies to
continue to fuel the Serb war machine.

In fact, they already have. On April 10, a full two weeks into the conflict,
the American firm Texaco shipped about 65,000 barrels of oil products into
Bar, the Montenegrin port that now serves as Yugoslavia's only supply route
for fuel.

Other routes, including a pipeline from Hungary or the land routes from
Croatia and Bulgaria, have effectively been cut off.

The disclosure that American firms have been selling oil to the dictator
while America pilots have been risking their lives to bomb oil refineries
and storage facilities is likely to undercut American efforts to moralise to
the rest of the world.

Texaco has now stated it will no longer sell oil to Yugoslavia. But hundreds
of other companies have yet to do the same.

A US State Department official confirmed there were no plans to introduce
the same sort of legislation that EU foreign ministers adopted on Monday in
Luxembourg, which renders it a crime to sell oil to Yugoslavia.

The embargo will be implemented on Friday.

NATO's communique on Kosovo, published at the weekend, stops short of
calling on all NATO members to adopt legal instruments to halt the flow of
oil.

What NATO is committed to do, however, is to interrupt the supply of oil,
wherever it comes from, by means of a "visit and search" regime that will
board and inspect ships heading for Bar.

Since international law says ships can only be halted in pursuit of a United
Nations sanctions resolution, it is extremely uncertain what will happen if
a Russian, or indeed an American, oil tanker declines to be searched.

Russia has refused to commit to compliance with an oil embargo so the
potential for conflict is high. If Russian merchant ships were challenged on
the high seas, it might decide to give them military escorts.

Further economic restrictions have been placed on Yugoslavia and it emerged
yesterday that the European Commission would halt a promised package of
economic assistance for Montenegro - lest it fell into "the wrong hands." -
The Telegraph, London

Oiling a black market
New York: NATO's planned oil embargo of Yugoslavia has already created a
black market in which Serb-backed buyers are paying up to a 50 per cent
premium for petrol and other refined products, according to European oil
traders.
The traders said on Monday that Lukoil, one of the biggest Russian
suppliers, has extended new lines of credit to Yugoslavia.

How much fuel the Russians will be able or willing to sell to Yugoslavia
remains unclear. But the embargo, which is expected to be enforced from this
week, means that deliveries by sea may stop. - The New York Times



Via CentralEuropeOnline (Reuters)

Macedonian Minister Quits Amid Kosovo Crisis

SKOPJE, Apr. 27, 1999 -- (Reuters) Macedonia's Economy Minister Zanko Cado
announced his resignation on Monday, sending shock waves through the
four-month-old coalition as it struggles to cope with thousands of refugees
from neighboring Kosovo.

"The functions of this ministry have been drastically reduced and I feel
completely inefficient. I feel blocked by lack of understanding from the
international community which pledged a lot and did nothing...and I also
have personal reasons," Cado said in a resignation letter to Prime Minister
Ljubco Georgievski, made available to Reuters.

"The new structure of the government, which envisages the formation of new
ministries, would cripple my ministry," he also said in his letter. A
reshuffle of the responsibilities of the various ministries has been
planned.

Three of the state's four economic ministries -- finance, development and
trade -- are held by the VRMO-DPMNE, the senior party in Macedonia's
three-way coalition and Finance Minister Boris Stojmenov and Trade Minister
Nikola Gruevski have taken some responsibilities that Cado's ministry would
have held. "I was left with all the problems, but all the means to solve
them were taken away from me," Cado, 35, told Reuters.

Slobodan Casule, a member of the executive office of Cado's Democratic
Alliance (DA) party, said the minister had felt frustrated at having some of
his suggestions for sharpening up Macedonia's lackluster economy rejected.
One proposal had been the privatization of OKTA, the main oil refinery in
the capital Skopje.

Cado's resignation was also triggered by the Kosovo crisis, Casule said.
Macedonia -- one of the Balkan region's poorest states with 35 per

[CTRL] American Pastoral ... American Berserk

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From wsws.org

 WSWS : News & Analysis : North America : The Brutal Society

The Columbine High School massacre: American Pastoral ... American Berserk
By David North
27 April 1999

Columbine High School appeared to be, at least in the view of its
administrators and the county school board, such a lovely place for young
people to grow up and learn. In its official profile, the institution
boasted of its "excellent facilities" and "long history of excellence in all
areas." Nothing seemed to be lacking--Honors and Advanced Placement classes,
foreign language instruction in Spanish, French and German, and an artistic
program that included ceramics, sculpture, acting, choir and no less than
five bands and one ensemble. There were even "Cross-categorical programs for
students with significantly limited intellectual capacity." And, of course,
there was no shortage of athletics.

"Stretch for Excellence" was the motto adopted by the school. And its
mission statement--over which, one must assume, various well-meaning people
labored--promised that Columbine High School "will teach, learn, and model
life skills and attitudes that prepare us to: work effectively with people;
show courtesy to others; prepare for change; think critically; act
responsibly; and respect our surroundings."

Columbine, with its six guidance counselors, accountability committee,
dozens of peer mediators and techniques for "conflict resolution," and an
ethos of "collaborative partnership" with parents, viewed itself as a
"twenty-first century high school." The surrounding neighborhoods were
prosperous, with housing from the low to high six-figures, numerous shopping
malls and high-tech workplaces. But on April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan
Klebold walked into Columbine High School armed with assault rifles and pipe
bombs. By the time their bloody rampage was over, they had killed twelve
students, one teacher, and themselves.

There have been, during the past two years, other school shootings that have
resulted in the death of students. But as terrible as the earlier incidents
at Pearl, West Paducah, Jonesboro and Springfield, the carnage at Columbine
was of a qualitatively different scope and scale.

Harris and Klebold manufactured dozens of pipe bombs, stashed explosives in
the school kitchen, studied the layout and traffic pattern to insure the
largest number of victims, and chose Hitler's birthday as the date for the
attack, in the course of nearly a year of preparation. Their intention was
to kill as many students as possible and blow up the entire school with a
propane bomb. Had they had the opportunity, Harris and Klebold would have
continued their rampage beyond the school. According to the diary that one
of the youth left behind, they hoped to hijack an airplane and crash it into
the center of New York City. Only an unexpected encounter with a school
guard and the failure of the bomb to explode thwarted their plan. Harris and
Klebold then fled to the school library where they proceeded to select their
victims before killing themselves.

What Harris and Klebold did on Tuesday was horrible, brutal and criminal.
But these words are only descriptions of their acts, not explanations.

As usual, the media has nothing to offer by way of analysis. It is
extraordinarily adept at milking the grief of the parents and community for
every possible rating dollar. But those who wish to understand the
underlying causes of this tragedy will find nothing of value on the network
news.

After a few perfunctory tears for the victims, the media is looking for
someone to blame. The parents, judging from the remarks of state officials,
are being singled out as the most likely target for public vengeance.
Perhaps they do bear some level of responsibility, but singling out for
exemplary punishment these grief-stricken mothers and fathers--whose own
lives have been utterly shattered by what their sons did last week--seems
not only cruel, but deceitful and hypocritical.

After all, the parents of Klebold and Harris were not the only ones who
failed to recognize and act on signs of the coming disaster. Columbine High
School administrators apparently ignored repeated warnings they received
about the boys' potential for violence.

This is not an individual failing, but one common to all the major
institutions of American society: governments, political parties,
corporations, the media, schools, churches, and trade unions. All are
essentially oblivious to the mounting social tensions, until they erupt into
homicidal violence at a post office, a high school, a McDonald's restaurant,
a commuter railroad train, or inside the US Capitol.

Then these outbreaks are invariably treated, not as a social phenomenon, but
as a police problem, to be handled by installing metal detectors, more
police, more surveillance cameras, and enlisting the population as
collaborators to inform on those with a supposed propensity to violence.

There's endless talk about

[CTRL] KLA/UCK/NATO: Who's on first ... ?

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/world/1999/0427/wor4.htm

Tuesday, April 27, 1999

KLA wants air strikes to assist ground offensive


NATO is anxious not to further the KLA's political ambitions, writes Chris
Stephen from Kukes

Kosovo: NATO officials were due to meet last night in Brussels with
officials of the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army to consider requests for
bombing missions to support guerilla operations.

The KLA wants air attacks to smash Serb forces which are blocking their
efforts to push into Kosovo from neighbouring Albania to link up with forces
trapped with thousands of refugees inside the province.

But NATO officials are worried that, in the long term, the KLA intends to
establish a dictatorship in Kosovo, and are reluctant to launch military
strikes that will help it achieve this.

"NATO will not be the KLA's airforce," said one Western official close to
the talks last night. "Can you imagine NATO establishing a protectorate in
Kosovo and then the KLA establish a military dictatorship? There's no way
the international community is going to have that."

NATO officials are concerned that the KLA appears to be trying to dominate
Kosovo's ethnic Albanian political parties, now exiled in surrounding
countries.

Militarily, the alliance says such air strikes are possible. The KLA has
spent the past week pushing into Kosovo with units being fed in through the
northern Albanian border town of Bajram Curri.

It now holds a rectangular piece of mountainous wooded territory, 5 km deep
by about 10 km across, anchored on the Albanian border, but the precarious
main supply route is constantly targeted by Serbian artillery. Inside the
pocket, troops have hit a brick wall - the well-defended village of Junik,
south west of the town of Decani. Beyond Junik is the north-south highway
used to move Serbian troops, and the scene of NATO's erroneous attack on a
refugee convoy earlier this month. Beyond that are more guerrilla units
close to the village of Glodjane.

The KLA says that forming a link would allow it to get refugees out and new
fighters in.

A primitive communications link has now been established between the KLA and
NATO, via a satellite fax/phone operated inside the province. Faxes are sent
to three KLA officials in Brussels, who in turn relay these to NATO.

In the past four weeks NATO has launched several air strikes after being
alerted through the KLA phone link. But the Junik operation would mark a new
stage in their co-operation, with strikes needing some form of ground
observation and lasting several days.

A more daring alternative might be to use the American airborne troops now
arriving in the region to establish a "safe haven" in this area, although it
is unlikely that such an operation would meet NATO's desire for "zero
casualties" among its own troops.

More likely, if NATO agrees, would be that bombers would open the corridor,
and the Apache attack helicopters now in Albania would help keep it open,
fending off Serbian counter-attacks.

The Western alliance may fear becoming air support for the KLA, but it also
fears sending its own ground troops into the province, and may welcome the
chance to let another army do the work.

But first are likely to come the political questions - made harder because
the KLA has yet to speak with one voice. Since it began fighting in late
1997, the KLA has been riven by disputes and disagreements. NATO officers
are worried about the KLA's attitude to its main political rival, Mr Ibrahim
Rugova, elected president in unrecognised elections among ethnic Albanians
last year.

Mr Rugova, since captured and apparently kept prisoner by the Serbs, was
denounced as "worse than a traitor" by KLA spokesman Mr Jakob Krasniqi last
week.

NATO will want assurances that, if victory comes, the KLA will confine its
battles with Mr Rugova to the ballot box.



>From Slate Morning Update

""The U.S. has cited the KLA for provocative acts of violence but has yet to
place the organization on its official terrorist list. "" <>

explainer

Who is the Kosovo Liberation Army?

By Eve Gerber


Members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), who have been lionized
as "freedom fighters," have also been demonized as communists,
narco-terrorists, and Islamic fundamentalists. Who are these folks?
And what are their goals?

The group's origins are murky, and like most guerrilla armies it does
most of its business in secret. But this much is known: The KLA grew
out of independence demonstrations staged in the early 1980s by
Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority. Serb authorities arrested
hundreds of protesters, many of whom called themselves
Marxist-Leninists, in part to secure assistance from their ethnic
brothers in communist Albania. The demonstrators' goal was to rid
Kosovo of Serb rule. During the 1980s many current KLA members,
including future Rambouillet delegates J

[CTRL] Media: Sensational{ism}

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From http://www.fair.org/9901/rolling-stone.html

Extra!
January/February 1999
Drive-By Journalism

Rolling Stone's glam-crime reports misrepresent young people--and America's
violence problem

By Mike Males

Other than ultra-quotable crime experts such as Princeton's John
("adolescent superpredator") DiIulio and Northeastern University's James
Alan ("teenage crime storm") Fox, few individuals have contributed more to
the inflammatory and systematic misportrayal of teenage crime in American
than Rolling Stone magazine's contributing editor Randall Sullivan.

Sullivan's fact-lite, anecdote-laden style specialized in blowing up
extremely rare, bizarre murders by a few upscale kids into an unwarranted
image of modern teenagers as "the most damaged and disturbed generation the
country has ever produced" (Rolling Stone 10/1/98). His language was
panicked ("how truly and terribly lost we are"--9/17/98), his evidence
lacking, his perspective nil.

While Rolling Stone editors gushed that Sullivan's "River's Edge theory of
reporting" is a "tutorial for journalists who want to get to the marrow of a
story about teens" (10/1/98), in fact he was an entertainer profiling
vanishingly uncommon glam-crimes. His worst sin (a plague among
anecdote-loving reporters) was a penchant for asserting terrifying trends
and apocalyptic dementia in an entire generation based on some misfit-
preppie-wastoid slaying that he picked to profile precisely because it was
so oddball.

Sullivan initially sought to train his "discordant" journalism on
privileged, suburban youths he reasoned were the most warped by the Reagan
era's celebration of greed, me-first "bubble of self-deception," and "fusion
of hysteria and hypocrisy." When more "homicides and suicides... took place
among those who were not only young, but white and well off," he summed up,
Reagan's happy-face Morning-in-America cultural bookkeeping (like his
economic schemes) stood arraigned of deceitful "creative accounting."
(Rolling Stone, 6/11/92)

Sullivan's concept was intriguing, but he picked exactly the wrong measures
to illuminate it. He never checked basic facts to see whether the anecdotes
of white, suburban teen dissolution he depicted as "subversive" to the
Reagan cult of hollow selfishness illustrated real trends or kooky rarities.
In truth, consistent figures from California's Center for Health Statistics
(1968-96) and Criminal Justice Statistics Center (1975-97) showed that
suicide and homicide, as well as drug and alcohol abuse, violent and
property crime, and other ills among white teens in California (the race and
state of his youth-gone-wild reports) had plummeted from the early 1970s to
the mid-1980s.

In 1975, 186 white California youths committed suicide or homicide; in 1985,
130; in 1997, 85. By the mid-'90s, white (non-Latino) California youth were
40 percent less likely to commit murder, 50 percent less likely to be
arrested for a serious crime, 30 percent less likely to commit suicide, and
80 percent less likely to die from a drug abuse than those of the mid-'70s.
White teens in New York and California, which tabulate crimes by race and
ethnicity, had lower murder rates than teens in Canada--and only half the
rates of black and Latino senior citizens!

But, like many on the Cultural Left who deployed teenagers as barometers of
growing pop-culture depravity, Sullivan's morality fable of white-teen
apocalypse, that all suburban kids were "lost" to unheard-of savagery,
escalated even as solid evidence showed no such thing was occurring. He was
a founding father of the 1990s abysmal bad-kid-from-good-neighborhood pack
journalism stampede (see People 6/23/97; Los Angeles Times, 7/19/98).

By wildly hyping the sins of rich kids, Sullivan's reporting fit neatly into
the Reagan-Clinton dismissal of rapidly increasing poverty and joblessness
caused by industrial shutdowns and government economic policies which were
the true bases of increased inner-city teenage homicide and violence in the
1980s. In the end, Sullivan's own baseless hysteria and hypocrisy directed
against young people wound up upholding the Reaganism he started out to
subvert.

Sin, not socioeconomics

Sullivan explicitly strove to portray "youth violence" not as a
socioeconomic failing of larger society inflicted on poorer youth, but as a
moral failing that pop culture-corrupted cherubs everywhere were inflicting
on polite society. His breathless September 4, 1997 piece inflated a freak
pocketknife murder among a half dozen wealthy teens from Agoura Hills,
California, into a mass indictment: "Parents don't understand how the world
had changed Good kids today are just a figment of their parents'
imagination." As noted, that slur is garbage--as Sullivan would have found
if he had attempted to substantiate it.

In his recent two-part series on the Springfield, Oregon, school shootings
(9/17/98, 10/1/98), Sullivan depicts "middle-class...white teenagers in
rural communities and 

[CTRL] Balkans: Effects

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

<>


>From Int'l Herald Tribune
Paris, Tuesday, April 27, 1999
Milosevic: Undaunted And Unbowed



By Michael Dobbs Washington Post Service


BELGRADE - NATO warplanes reduced his home to a pile of rubble, put his
television stations off the air and destroyed the headquarters of his ruling
Socialist Party. But President Slobodan Milosevic carries on with what, to
outside appearances at least, is his regular routine. He presides over
cabinet meetings, meets with foreign dignitaries and issues orders for
reconstructing his devastated country.
When NATO began its air campaign against Serb-led Yugoslavia a month ago,
alliance officials expressed the hope that it would cause serious political
strains within the Milosevic regime, perhaps even provoke a revolt by his
senior military commanders. So far, these hopes have not been realized.

If anything, the man whom President Bill Clinton calls ''Europe's last
dictator'' is more solidly entrenched in power now than he was when the
bombs first began to rain down on his country, according to Yugoslav
political analysts.

Associates depict Mr. Milosevic as a man of strong nerves, angry but unfazed
by the bombing of his residence and determined to resist NATO ''aggression''
to the end, even if the alliance attempts to occupy Kosovo with a ground
offensive. ''Imagine your reaction if a criminal came and destroyed your
home,'' said Foreign Minister Zivadin Jovanovic. All the same, he added, Mr.
Milosevic ''is conducting his business as president of the republic and
commander in chief absolutely normally.''

Asked how Mr. Milosevic reacted to the missile attack on his official
residence in the exclusive Dedinje section of Belgrade, Mr. Jovanovic quoted
him as saying, ''It's terrible, but perhaps less terrible'' than if NATO had
attacked a populated civilian area.

Former associates say the Yugoslav president seems to thrive in situations
in which he has his back against the wall. ''He is stimulated by crises,''
said an official who has worked closely with him. ''When everything is
normal, he can't come up with a strategy. He needs conflict. NATO played
right into his hands.''

Given the secrecy that surrounds the inner workings of the Yugoslav regime,
and particularly Mr. Milosevic's own activities, it is virtually impossible
to get independent insights into the Yugoslav leader's present state of
mind.

But the general impression of cool calculation mingled with indignant
self-righteousness is consistent with his behavior during earlier political
crises, including three dramatic months in early 1997 when popular
demonstrations over electoral fraud seemed to have a good chance of toppling
him from power.

Mr. Milosevic rode out that crisis in the same way that he is riding out the
present war with the U.S.-led alliance: through a mixture of stubbornness,
patience and cosmetic concessions.

Many political analysts in Serbia, including Zoran Djindjic, leader of the
opposition Democratic Party, say that the present crisis has strengthened
Mr. Milosevic. The NATO attacks have sparked a nationalistic upsurge that
has seriously undermined Mr. Milosevic's opposition, because it now seems
unpatriotic to be pro-Western.

The buttressing of Mr. Milosevic's political position has not necessarily
made him more popular among ordinary Serbs. Many Serbs, particularly in big
cities like Belgrade, continue to have little affection for a man they
associate with a decade of war and a catastrophic decline in their standard
of living. The present mood is not pro-Milosevic but anti-NATO.

''For most Serbs, Milosevic does not matter any more,'' said a former
associate. ''This is not about him. This is about the country.''

One of the very few political leaders here who has openly espoused political
compromise with the West is Deputy Prime Minister Vuk Draskovic, the leader
of a moderate party who joined the government this year.

In a television appearance Sunday night, he urged the Belgrade government to
accept a compromise on Kosovo that he predicted would be reached with
Russian and UN mediation, and he called on state leaders to ''stop lying to
the people and finally tell them the truth.''

As a statesman, Mr. Milosevic has presided over disastrous setbacks for
Yugoslavia and Serbia. During his 10 years in power, the country has lost
traditional Serb-occupied lands in Croatia and Bosnia. The economy was a
shambles even before NATO missiles began destroying the country's biggest
industrial plants, bridges and power grids.

As a political tactician determined to hang on to power, however, Mr.
Milosevic has few equals. In the opening phase of the present crisis, his
grasp of military strategy and war aims seems to have been superior to that
of his NATO enemies. While Mr. Milosevic apparently had a good idea of the
dama

[CTRL] Dutch Treat

[Alamaine Ratliff]

 -Caveat Lector-

>From wsws.org

WSWS : News & Analysis : Europe

Dutch government rocked by parliamentary report into 1992 El Al air crash
By Peter Reydt
27 April 1999
A Dutch parliamentary investigation into the government's handling of the
1992 El Al crash in Amsterdam, has led to calls for the resignation of Prime
Minister Wim Kok and two of his deputies. A discussion on the 2,000-page
report, which accuses the Labour Party-led coalition of bungling and
misleading parliament over the crash, is scheduled for next month when it
will be decided what ministers, if any, should resign.

The Israeli El Al cargo plane crashed into a high-rise apartment complex in
the poor district of Bijlmer on October 4, 1992, shortly after takeoff from
Schipol Airport. The Boeing 747 ploughed a 150-foot hole through the
11-storey building, killing four crew members and at least 39 people. The
exact death toll is still unknown since the apartment complex contained many
unregistered immigrants.

The government was forced to convene a cross-party parliamentary inquiry
into the crash six months ago, in response to growing public concern at the
unprecedented number of chronic health complaints recorded following the
incident. Some 300 people--mainly rescue workers involved at the crash scene
and local residents--have complained of health problems, including
neurological complaints, severe headaches and nausea.

Questions had already been raised regarding the cargo the plane was carrying
on its route from the United States to Israel. Residents reported
"mysterious men in white suits", going through the wreckage. Concerns that
they were Mossad agents (Israeli secret service) were heightened by the fact
that the plane's "black box" flight recorder has never been recovered, and
El Al would not reveal the cargo manifest providing details of what was on
board.

It was also reported that some 282 kilograms of depleted uranium had been
used as ballast in the plane's wings--only 152 kg of which was recovered.
Finally, the Israeli government admitted last year that the jet had been
carrying 190 litres of the chemical Dimethyl Methylphosphonate (DMPP), used
in the production of Sarin, the deadly nerve gas invented by Nazi scientists
in the 1930s. Twenty times as lethal as cyanide, Sarin kills by effectively
crippling the nervous system. Just a tiny amount can kill scores of people.

The report found that Deputy Prime Minister Annemarie Jorritsma and Health
Minister Els Borst had failed in their duty to protect public health and
keep parliament informed of the dangers. It accused Jorritsma, who was
transport minister from 1994 to 1998, of making only half-hearted attempts
to recover freight documents and misinforming parliament about disparities
in the papers. It also said that it was "incomprehensible" that the Bijlmer
disaster and its aftermath were never discussed at cabinet level, and that
Kok's failure to raise the issue "was not in keeping with his position".
However, the parliamentary committee claims that it found no evidence of a
government attempt to conceal details of the cargo from the public. It
further claims, "The government paid too little attention to public worries,
even those that were based on misconceptions" (emphasis added).

The two ministers had earlier said they would resign if the report found
them guilty of wrongdoing. However, they have subsequently refused to honour
this pledge.

In the immediate aftermath of the crash, Dutch officials claimed the plane
was transporting flowers and perfume. Having been forced to reveal the
plane's cargo, both the Dutch and Israeli governments claimed that the
chemicals on board were "non-toxic".

The parliamentary committee report--which interviewed 80 witnesses and
professional experts--maintains this fiction, describing the plane's cargo
as "mundane". Whilst it acknowledges a "direct link" between the crash and
subsequent health problems in the area, this is largely confined to the high
incident of psychological problems reported, particularly of Post-traumatic
Stress Disorder.

The committee notes that the wreckage burnt for one hour and smouldered for
several hours more, during which toxic substances were formed. Those
identified include gases and smoke particles such as sulphur dioxide, carbon
dioxide, hydrochloric acid, chrome, nickel, asbestos and dioxins. But it
claims that "no chronic health problems" are to be expected for large
numbers of people.

The committee notes that there have been 13 "auto-immune" cases reported by
those in contact with the wreckage, and a further 16 cases have a "possible
link". However, it concludes that it is "unlikely" that large numbers would
have suffered from uranium poisoning, but "wishes to state that it cannot be
ruled out that under specific circumstances some individuals inhaled uranium
oxide and were tainted".

The report's acceptance that depleted uranium was used as ballast is almost
fantastical. This substance has been used in