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Politics : War -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (4115)	9/21/2001 12:27:26 PM
From: Thomas M.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23908

<<< Every year thousands of people, mostly children and poor farmers, are killed in the Plain of Jars in Northern Laos, the scene of the heaviest bombing of civilian targets in history it appears, and arguably the most cruel: Washington's furious assault on a poor peasant society had little to do with its wars in the region. The worst period was from 1968, when Washington was compelled to undertake negotiations (under popular and business pressure), ending the regular bombardment of North Vietnam. Kissinger-Nixon then decided to shift the planes to bombardment of Laos and Cambodia. The deaths are from "bombies," tiny anti-personnel weapons, far worse than land-mines: they are designed specifically to kill and maim, and have no effect on trucks, buildings, etc. The Plain was saturated with hundreds of millions of these criminal devices, which have a failure-to-explode rate of 20%-30% according to the manufacturer, Honeywell. The numbers suggest either remarkably poor quality control or a rational policy of murdering civilians by delayed action. These were only a fraction of the technology deployed, including advanced missiles to penetrate caves where families sought shelter. Current annual casualties from "bombies" are estimated from hundreds a year to "an annual nationwide casualty rate of 20,000," more than half of them deaths, according to the veteran Asia reporter Barry Wain of the Wall Street Journal -- in its Asia edition. A conservative estimate, then, is that the crisis this year is approximately comparable to Kosovo, though deaths are far more highly concentrated among children -- over half, according to analyses reported by the Mennonite Central Committee, which has been working there since 1977 to alleviate the continuing atrocities. There have been efforts to publicize and deal with the humanitarian catastrophe. A British-based Mine Advisory Group (MAG) is trying to remove the lethal objects, but the US is "conspicuously missing from the handful of Western organisations that have followed MAG," the British press reports, though it has finally agreed to train some Laotian civilians. The British press also reports, with some anger, the allegation of MAG specialists that the US refuses to provide them with "render harmless procedures" that would make their work "a lot quicker and a lot safer." These remain a state secret, as does the whole affair in the United States. The Bangkok press reports a very similar situation in Cambodia, particularly the Eastern region where US bombardment from early 1969 was most intense. >>> zmag.org

To: TimF who wrote (4115)	10/18/2001 8:22:20 PM
From: Thomas M.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23908

Anti-Lebanese Plotting In his February 1954 diary entries, Sharett details the strategy sessions where a beginning was made to draft plans that have only come to their full, dire fruition now, many decades later, with Lebanon in its death agonies. The overall framework for the plan was creation of a Lebanese Christian state. This was done chiefly to drive a wedge into the largely Muslim Arab League. Sharett writes: "Then he [Ben Gurion] passed on to another issue. This is the time, he said, to push Lebanon, that is the Maronites in that country, to proclaim a Christian State … It is clear that Lebanon is the weakest link in the Arab League … Now is the time to bring about the creation of a Christian state in our neighborhood … This means that time, energy and means ought to be invested in it and that we must act in all possible ways to bring about a radical change in Lebanon. Sasson … and our other Arabists must be mobilized. If money is necessary, no amount of dollars should be spared … This is a historical opportunity." vho.org Tom