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

To: GUSTAVE JAEGER who wrote (10697)	1/5/2002 8:08:11 AM
From: John Carragher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23908

War Phantoms Of the Philippines (book review (barrons ) True horror, vividly portrayed Reviewed by Leslie P. Norton When I was a child in the Philippines, we used to drive from Manila to our family homestead along the MacArthur Highway, which slashed through northern Luzon, passed Clark Air Force Base, then cut over to Bataan or the Lingayen Gulf. Sandwiched between gaudy ads, and grottoes with statues of the Virgin, we couldn't miss seeing the Bataan death-march markers, memorializing that ghastly and infamous moment in World War II; they seemed undersized. After the U.S. surrender of the Bataan Peninsula in May 1942, the Japanese marched thousands of surviving American GIs, for days, to their POW camps. Food and water were scarce and brutality was plentiful. A large number of prisoners died. The march ended at Cabanatuan, where, for two years, as many as 8,000 prisoners of war languished in conditions of utter privation. The Japanese Empire had signed but never ratified the Geneva Convention, though it paid some lip service to its standards. Yet POWs were considered to be less than honorable foes -- and were treated accordingly. Thus, while four out of 100 POWs would die in German and Italian camps, the number was closer to one out of four in the Japanese facilities. War atrocities were rife in the Pacific Theater, which is why current Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi drew fire from his Asian neighbors for visiting Yasakuni Shrine -- where some well-known war criminals, such as the notorious Tojo, are buried. Hampton Sides' Ghost Soldiers is a well-written account of a daring night rescue of 500 POWs from Cabanatuan by a troop of Rangers under General Douglas MacArthur's command in January 1945. U.S. commanders were almost certain that the Imperial Army would slaughter the POWs as U.S. troops advanced -- especially the halt and the sick -- and were determined to act first. Guided by Army Colonel Henry Mucci, the 6th Ranger Battalion and a group of Filipino guerrillas stole by moonlight through rice paddies and slipped across roads choked with Japanese personnel and artillery, finally reaching the outskirts of Cabanatuan. They stormed the camp (to tell you how would give too much away), liberated the prisoners, and led them to safety in carts pulled by oxen -- pursued all the while by the angry Imperial Army. Amazingly, there were few casualties. Sides builds suspense effectively. He holds back nothing about the atrocities, yet includes quite a few examples of kindnesses by Japanese soldiers during the march and in the camps. And he tells a good story, one that covers everything from the slaughter of POWs in Palawan, to the surrender at Bataan and the rescue, to the roles played by the Philippine troops backing the Rangers. Ghost Soldiers also includes a host of memorable characters, including the Imperial "Poet General" Masaharu Homma, the mastermind of the Death March, who was ultimately executed by American forces for war crimes, and "High Pockets," an American night club owner and female spy who passed supplies to the prisoners at Cabanatuan and intelligence to the U.S. command. My stepfather, an adventure-story buff and an aficionado of Philippine history, was mad for the book. I had just a couple of quibbles with it: Calasiao, the town near Lingayen that figures as the place where the Rangers began the mission, is misspelled throughout. (Calasiao, for anyone who cares, is today a center of the illegal numbers racket that brought down the government of President Joseph Estrada.) And I found it curious that most of the sourcing was American. Presumably, Sides interviewed some of the guerrilla fighters who played such an important role during the night of the rescue. Yet the Filipino input wasn't apparent in the book. Sides has a terrific ear for detail and atmosphere. I could almost feel the heavy, dusty heat of the plains of Pangasinan and Nueva Ecija, and could almost see the wrinkled hills of the Cordillera. During the hours I spent reading Ghost Soldiers, I felt as if I were there. E-mail comments to editors@barrons.com

To: GUSTAVE JAEGER who wrote (10697)	1/5/2002 9:09:17 AM
From: goldsnow	Respond to of 23908

The first ever Independent Arab Film Festival sponsored by Al-Jazeera (an Arabic Satellite channel) and in association with SOAS - screened at the University of London from 15-18 April 1999. It was a small initiative but it may be a landmark in the Arabic media market. The idea is the brainchild of the exiled Libyan investigative journalist Mohammed Maklouf."You won’t believe how many of my proposals have been turned down by the big Satellites. They reject any work that will probe into issues that will challenge anything. But I've been thinking we are here in London and we should do something with all this freedom, we shouldn't take it for granted." The thing that sparked it for Maklouf was the 50th anniversary celebration of the birth of Israel. "After all, the birth of Israel meant the loss of the Palestinian homeland and the displacement of thousands of Arabs. Yet there was nothing in the Arabic press or media to commemorate that," Maklouf said. arabscreen.com Filmmaker Azza El-Hassan The films submitted do not just preoccupy themselves with the frustrations of the Arab Israeli conflict. Women in the Sun by Sobhi Zobaidi is a beautifully and sensitively constructed documentary examining the abnormally high rate of female suicide in the Gaza strip. It explores the repressive traditions which constrict women's lives and, suggests that the alarming statistics may not all be suicides - that some cases reported as suicides may in actual fact be 'honor' killings.

To: GUSTAVE JAEGER who wrote (10697)	1/5/2002 6:30:09 PM
From: lorne	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 23908

Gustave. You said.....' The vice president of the flight school, who briefed Minnesota Congressmen James Oberstar and Martin Sabo, said it took four to six phone calls to the FBI to find an agent who would help. The instructor became so frustrated by the lack of response that he gave a prescient warning to the FBI that "a 747 loaded with fuel can be used as a bomb." [snip] _____________________ Now, can you tell me Charley, since when do US airlines charter JUMBO 747s on their DOMESTIC flights?? As I told you, the terrorists' initial mission was to hijack INTERNATIONAL flights... I would like to make a response to the above. Wouldn't the fuel supply of international flights be close to depletion by the time they reached the USA?