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From: •••@••.•••
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1998 10:07:45 EDT
To: •••@••.•••
Subject: Re: cj#850> KOSOVO: FRAMING THE SERBS
Dear Richard,
I'm very glad you've sent this out, although you're bucking great odds because
the American people and the world have already been irreperably indoctrinated
by one side. The current issue of Covert Action Quarterly, with which I'm
associated, has a long article on the same subject you might be interested in
reading. If I can get it in e-form I'll send it to you if you'd like; if not
I can use snail mail.
If you send out the article again, allow me to make one comment -- it's hard
work figuring out who is the author of which piece; also what TiM stands for.
I think I finally figured it all out, but you could make it a bit easier.
Best wishes,
Bill Blum
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Dear Bill,
Yes please send article if you have it in email form. As for print
version, my CAQ issue should arrive soon.
rkm
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From: "Angelina Markovic" <•••@••.•••>
Subject: [FWD] URGENT, IMPORTANT: NATO PLANS A NEW STAGED ATROCITY --
Plesae, spread this message whereever you can !!!!!
Date: Fri, 9 Oct 1998 02:52:01 +0222
!!! Please, spread this message wherever you can !!!
URGENT, IMPORTANT: NATO PLANS A NEW STAGED ATROCITY
Thursday, 10:15 am East Coast Time
>From reliable source - a member of a Western European
government - we learn that NATO plans to stage another atrocity.
As before, the atrocity will be done by Albanian terrorists,
members of KLA. It would be done so that it could be pinned
on Yugoslav Security forces. The whole purpose would be to
try, once again, to legalize planned NATO attack on sovereign
country of Yugoslavia.
The atrocity and the planned NATO attack are all to happen
within next 48 hours.
Spread messages far and wide. Tell NATO-Nazis that we know.
Tell friend and foe; tell the world about methods Western
"democracies" use to subdue and enslave the planet.
Let us PREVENT one more NATO staged atrocity.
------------------------
CONGRES MONDIAL SERBE
WORLD SERB CONGRESS
WELTKONGRESS DER SERBEN
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Bruxelles -- Heildeberg -- Bonn
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* * * Iustitia regnorum fundamentum * * *
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Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1998
From: Mohamed Trad <•••@••.•••>
Subject: Re: cj#849> E Davidsson: "Definition of terrorism"
To: •••@••.•••
I think we should add to the article that all countries seeking to declare
war on terrorism are not doing so out of ideal principles or motives to
stop the different forms of violence and oppression, but to delete any form
of opposition (to them) in the future. For example, by international law,
any government would be able to "abolish" any local opposition within its
domestic rule just by calling it "terrorist".
This is a new form of terrorism by itself.
regards,
Mohamed
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[from rkm]...
I've got an interesting talk by Noam Chomsky that I'll be posting soon.
For now, I'd like to share two paragraphs which bear on our current
topic...
-rkm
"Whose World Order: Conflicting Visions"
a speech by Noam Chomksy, Sept. 22, 1998
---<snip>---
As a kind of a sidelight to this, I think that, very likely, the latest
terrorist exchange in the last few weeks might well be seen in this
context. I'm referring to the terrorist bombings of the U.S. embassies in
Africa, allegedly by groups who are opposed to U.S. domination of the
major oil producers, and the U.S. missile attacks on Sudan and
Afghanistan. One might ask, why those targets? Well, like the bombings of
the embassies in Africa, the U.S. selected targets that were vulnerable,
not the ones to which the messages were aimed, in either case. The
message for the missile attacks may well have been directed elsewhere, in
this case very likely to Riyadh and Teheran. There have been recent steps
towards rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, historic enemies,
and that's not an appealing prospect for U.S. global managers. It raises
fears, which have been lingering for a long time, of regional groupings
that will get out of control in the strategically most important part of
the world, which holds the greatest material prize in world history -
that's quoting U.S. assessments from the late '40s, which still prevail.
The U.S. missile attacks have been criticized (you've read plenty of
criticisms of them) as being counterproductive (elite opinion has held
that) because of their effects on the Sudan and Afghanistan. Well, it's a
pragmatic judgment, apparently. The same opinion seems to be largely
unconcerned by the fact that, effective or not, there were war crimes
- - that's now partially conceded in the case of Sudan. However, just
keeping to the pragmatic judgment, it might be evaluated in the light of
a secret 1995 study of the U.S. Strategic Command, called Essentials of
Post-Cold War Deterrence, which was released recently under the Freedom
of Information Act. It's an interesting document. It resurrects Nixon's
madman theory, as it was called. It says that the United States should
portray itself as irrational and vindictive with leadership elements out
of control and it should exploit the nuclear arsenal for that purpose.
This madman posture can be beneficial to creating and reinforcing fears
and doubts among adversaries, real or potential. In this case perhaps the
big players in the region, Saudi Arabia and Iran, whose potential
rapprochement, which has been going on now for almost a year, is
doubtless a very frightening prospect in Washington. Well, we don't have
documentary evidence, so that's speculation. But I think it's not
unreasonable.
---<snip>---
------------
rkm:
In case you missed Chomsky's final point above...
The thesis is that the US is _intentionally behaving irrationally, so as to
create more anxiety in "enemy circles" than would be generated by rational
reprisals.
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Date: Sun, 4 Oct 1998
Sender: World Order Conference List <•••@••.•••>
From: Ross Wilcock <•••@••.•••>
Subject: FW: SUDAN: Ramsey Clark Visit
Comments: To: Abolition-Caucus-L <•••@••.•••>
To: •••@••.•••
-----Original Message-----
Date: Sat, 3 Oct 1998 10:27:10 -0700 (PDT)
To: •••@••.•••, •••@••.•••, •••@••.•••
From: Donald Rothberg <•••@••.•••>
Subject: SUDAN: Ramsey Clark Visit
International Action Center
39 West 14th Street, #206, New York, NY 10011
(212) 633-6646 fax: (212) 633-2889 www.iacenter.org
e-mail: •••@••.•••
REPORT ON IAC FACT-FINDING DELEGATION TO THE SUDAN, SEPT. 1998 by Richard
Becker
A six-person fact-finding delegation organized by the International Action
Center (IAC) traveled to the Sudan, Sept. 18-21. It was the first such
delegation to travel to the Sudan since the August 20 missile attack on the
country's capital by U.S. naval forces in the Red Sea.
The delegates were: former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark; Dr. Mohammed
Haque of American Muslims for Global Peace & Justice and past president of
the Islamic Medical Association, from Chicago; Dr. Sapphire Ahmed of Harlem,
New York; Sara Flounders and John Parker from the IAC in New York; and
Richard Becker from the IAC in San Francisco.
The delegation visited hospitals, a university, a displaced persons camp,
communities and marketplaces, and the ruins of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical
plant, destroyed by 16 U.S. cruise missiles in a surprise attack on Aug. 20,
1998. On Sept. 20, we attended a mass rally in the capital, Khartoum,
condemning the attack on the plant. We met with doctors, health officials,
the Ministers of Health, Information and Justice, and President Omar Hassan
al-Bashir, as well as many people in markets, outside mosques and elsewhere.
We visited a terribly burned survivor of the Aug. 20 attack in the Khartoum
Teaching Hospital.
Our group received a detailed briefing from several doctors and health
officials on the role of the Al-Shifa plant in the Sudan's health care
system. The plant, which had its official opening in June, 1997, was
privately owned and partly financed by the Eastern and Southern African
Preferential Trade Association. Al-Shifa was extremely important to the
Sudan: it had raised the country's self-sufficiency in medicine from about
3% to over 50%. It produced 60-90% of the drugs used to treat the Sudan's
seven leading causes of death; malaria and tuberculosis are at the top of
the list.
Al-Shifa produced virtually all of the country's veterinary medicine. The
Sudan has very large herds of camels, cattle, sheep and goats which are
vital to the economy and food supply. The herds are susceptible to treatable
infestations of parasites and other diseases.
In addition, the plant was an important exporter of human and veterinary
medicines to other African and Middle Eastern countries, and was contracted
earlier this year by the United Nations Sanctions Committee (661 Committee)
to ship medical supplies to Iraq, under the "Oil for Food" deal.
"Al-Shifa was really a sophisticated packaging plant," said delegation
member Dr. Mohammed Haque, "it did not even use raw materials, but instead
imported and repackaged processed materials. The loss of the plant is a real
tragedy for them."
Sudanese health officials provided us with detailed documentation of the
plant's history, its machinery and equipment, and the products it packaged
such as tablets, capsules and syrups. As Dr. B.A. Salam, the general manager
of the Central Medical Supply told us: "This was a packaging facility. It
didn't even have equipment to synthesize milk into cheese, much less make
nerve gas."
What made Al-Shifa so vital was that it enabled the Sudan to obtain
medicines at about 20% of the purchase cost on the world market. In this
respect it is irreplaceable for a country that is one of the world's
poorest.
The Sudan, the largest country in Africa, has a gross national product of
about $8.3 billion and a population of approximately 28 million; the GNP is
about $300 per person annually. Importing replacement pharmaceuticals for
what was lost on August 20 is beyond the government's means.
One person was killed and others terribly burned in the missile attack. In
the coming months and years, tens of thousands will die and suffer from the
lack of medicines Al-Shifa would have produced.
U.S. ALLEGATIONS DISPROVED
Immediately after Aug. 20, President Clinton attempted to justify the attack
by calling the plant a secret "chemical weapons facility." Joint Chiefs of
Staff Chairperson Henry Shelton said that the "intelligence community (sic)
is confident that this facility is involved in the production of chemical
weapons agents." Unidentified "senior U.S. intelligence officials" were
widely quoted in the media, saying, "We have no evidence, have seen no
commercial products that are sold out of this facility. It's an unusual
pharmaceutical facility." The same unnamed officials tried to link the plant
to Osama bin Laden.
Our observations, as well as a wealth of other information and testimony,
demonstrate that all of these allegations by U.S. national security
officials, from the president on down, are fabricated and without any
foundation in truth. They are lies, disseminated in the corporate media to
justify an unjustifiable act.
Approaching this "secret facility" in Khartoum North, we began seeing large
"Al-Shifa Pharmaceutical Plant" signs with directional arrows, at least a
mile from the plant gate. Our tour of the Al-Shifa site, which we documented
with video and still photography, lasted for about three hours.
We were allowed to go anywhere on the grounds, even into areas that probably
posed a risk to our own safety, i.e., structurally unsound buildings. What
we saw was new-looking machinery jutting our of the rubble of near-totally
destroyed buildings.
"This was a complex of relatively simple brick and concrete constructed
buildings," said the IAC's Sara Flounders. "A chemical plant, especially one
that made dangerous chemicals, would be far more complex, with airlocks,
piping webs, pressurized containers, cooling and heating units."
We went into what was left of the plant's warehouse: a cruise missile had
come through the corrugated metal roof creating a 15-foot-deep crater in the
floor.
Scattered throughout the wreckage of the plant were thousands upon thousands
of blister packs of anti-biotics, empty glass bottles and plastic containers
filled with veterinary medicines. Names on packages included Amoxonil,
Shifatryp, Shifazole and many others.
THE UNHIDDEN "SECRET" PLANT
International media representatives began arriving on the scene the day
after the missile attack. Some of them, like the reporters from the London
Observer newspaper, spent days examining the site. They were joined by many
Sudanese from surrounding neighborhoods in Khartoum.
In the Aug. 23 Observer, under the headline "The 'secret' chemical factory
that no tried to hide," David Hirst wrote, "There is no sign amid the
wreckage of anything sinister . . . there is no sign of anyone trying to
hide anything either. Access is easy. Much of Khartoum seems to have come to
take a look."
No one has found any evidence that Al-Shifa was anything but what factory
officials and the Sudanese government have said that it was: A
pharmaceutical plant.
Plant designer Henry R. Jobe from the U.S., British technical manager Tom
Carnaffin, who supervised construction from 1992-96, and Jordanian engineer
Mohammed Abul Waheed, who supervised plant production in 1997, have all
testified that it would have been impossible for this plant to have produced
chemical weapons. Italian plant supplier Dino Romanetti, who said he had
full access to the plant during visits in February and May, 1998, said that
it was "absolutely incredible" to claim that the plant could have produced
such weaponry.
The Al-Shifa facility was not only open after the attack, but ever since the
plant dedication as well. The opening ceremony in 1997 was attended by heads
of state, foreign ministers, and ambassadors. Since that time it had been a
frequent stop for visiting dignitaries and groups of Sudanese school
children.
The Sudanese government has asked the UN Security Council for an independent
investigation of the U.S. allegations. The U.S. has blocked any such
investigation, with U.S. Ambassador William Richardson saying, "we don't
think an investigation is needed. We don't think anything needs to be put to
rest."
Both in Khartoum and upon returning to the U.S., Ramsey Clark labeled the
destruction of the Al-Shifa plant "a violation of international law." At a
mass rally outside the Friendship Hall in downtown Khartoum on Sept. 20,
Clark called the attack "a terrible crime against humanity." He added that
"many in the U.S. wish to send their love and solidarity to the Sudanese
people. We can never let this happen again."
In a press conference in New York on Sept. 22, the day the delegation
returned to the U.S., Clark pointed out that even if the U.S. had evidence
that the Al-Shifa plant was producing chemical weapons, it would have been
in violation of the UN Charter and other international covenants to launch
such an attack on a sovereign country.
Clark referred to the 1977 protocol addendum to Article 54 of the Geneva
Convention, making it illegal "to attack an inherently dangerous
facility-nuclear, chemical or biological. Imagine if it had been what they
[U.S. officials] said it was. There are four million people in Khartoum - -
it would be like making an attack on them with nerve gas."
"To say that this was a chemical weapons plant is an attempt to play the
world for a fool," Clark said. He concluded his remarks at the press
conference by emphasizing that, "there couldn't have been a single act more
destructive to the lives and health of the Sudanese people than the
destruction of this pharmaceutical plant."
AL-SHIFA ATTACK: PART OF A WIDER WAR
Everywhere we went in the Sudan, we heard the same question: "Why?" Why had
the world's lone superpower launched a surprise attack on a country with
very meager resources, destroying its main source of medicine?
Some of the U.S. corporate media have also been questioning the attack. The
lead story in the New York Times on Sept. 21 presented the attack as the
result of an "intelligence failure." This "re-examination" is really the
clearest sign that the U.S. case has been totally discredited in most of the
world. But the "intelligence failure" argument leads logically to a call for
"better intelligence," i.e., more money to build up the CIA, DIA, and the
military in general. Besides, its completely false in its assumptions.
The Aug. 20 attack was no mistake. It was a deliberate act of destruction.
There is no conceivable way that the U.S. national security apparatus could
not have known exactly what the Al-Shifa plant was-and wasn't. The Sudan,
after all, has been the target of intense U.S. surveillance for many years.
The attack on Al-Shifa was part of a wider war against that country that has
been going on throughout the 1990s. Delegation member John Parker pointed
out that "the U.S. has become, through Uganda and Ethiopia, the main
military supplier of the south Sudan-based SPLA opposition to the Khartoum
government. Millions of dollars of U.S. weapons are now flowing into the
country to destabilize the government."
We visited a displaced persons camp south of Khartoum, one of many in the
country. It is estimated that more than 10% of the population has been
displaced by the civil war, and are dependent on the already-strapped
government for food, shelter and everything else.
And, the U.S. has imposed sanctions on the Sudan for many years, tightening
them in November 1997. Health officials showed us documentary evidence of
U.S. blocking Sudanese purchases of insulin, sutures, and Factor 8, a
product used to treat hemophilia, in recent months. The insulin contract was
with the U.S.-based Eli Lilly; the sutures and Factor 8 were being purchased
from Austrian and Swiss companies which were taken over by U.S.
conglomerates.
The Sudan is largely surrounded by countries under U.S. domination. Egypt to
the north is the second-largest recipient of U.S. military aid. To the south
and east, Ethiopia, Eritrea and especially Uganda have all been brought into
the U.S. camp.
The U.S. tactics of destabilization, sanctions and war are part of familiar
strategy, one which has been used against Cuba, Angola, Iraq, Nicaragua,
Panama, north Korea, Libya and other developing countries who have had the
audacity to pursue an independent course. The objective is to either bring
to power in Khartoum a government that will take its orders from Washington,
or, if that doesn't work in the short term, to weaken, destabilize and
possibly dismember the Sudan. Either way, the aim is to establish U.S.
control over the resources, labor and territory of this vast country.
It is a vicious and ruthless strategy against a country that is struggling
to develop and bring improvement to the lives of its people.
The Sudan does not have to be a poor country. It is estimated that with its
fertile land watered by the Nile, it could feed the entire continent. Rich
oil discoveries in recent years in the south hold much promise for the
country. A 1,000 mile pipeline is now under construction to Port Sudan. The
U.S.-backed SPLA is threatening to destroy the pipeline.
What the U.S. is doing in the Sudan could well be a new chapter in the late
Walter Rodney's classic book, "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa." The U.S.
strategy toward the Sudan and all of Africa and the Middle East is
profoundly racist and imperialist. It is a policy which seeks to destroy
what it cannot control, taking a toll in human suffering that is impossible
to measure.
It was clear to us that the Sudanese people have no intention of submitting
to the empire. Anger and determination to resist were apparent not only at
the Sept. 20 rally, but in many conversations with Sudanese of all
backgrounds.
We need to stand with the people of the Sudan in demanding:
~ Reparations and restitution by the U.S. government for the destroyed
Al-Shifa plant, including the provision of interim medical supplies until
the plant is rebuilt;
~ An end to the U.S. war and military destabilization of the country;
~ Lift the sanctions against the Sudan;
~ An independent international investigation of the August 20 U.S.
attack.
in Peace Marc Pilisuk, Ph.D. 494 Cragmont Ave. Berkeley, CA 94708
510.526.0876 voice/fax
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the people control their means of communication.
-- Frantz Fanon
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