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May 9, 1999

"We only ask that enough people know
what happened here and how it happened
and why it happened, and that they work
hard to see that it never happens anywhere
again."
- Shinzo Hamai, Mayor of Hiroshima


Missing from today's headlines is reference to the
fact that due to security lapses of incomprehensible
incompetence by America's "intelligence community,"
China has in recent years acquired some of the US's
most vital secrets regarding its nuclear offense technology
and has enough information to be able to duplicate key
parts of it.

And now, in the process of prosecuting a war,
seemingly on behalf of a drug dealing, CIA
supported, terrorist group, the KLA, we have
accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in
Belgrade because...the CIA told the military
that the embassy, a well known, long established
facility in downtown Belgrade, was an ammunitions
depot.

(By the way, thanks to this lapse, we now know,
for the first time, who's been providing NATO
with its extensive and detailed list of targets
for this assault.)

As John Stockwell's book by the same name puts
it so well, the people who control US foreign
policy - the same secret government that conducted
the illegal war in Central America and created the
conditions for the US war in Vietnam - are perpetually
"in search of enemies."

---------------------------------------------------

"In order to bring a nation to support the burdens
of maintaining great military establishments,
it is necessary to create an emotional state
akin to war psychology. There must be the portrayal
of an external menace. This involves the development
to a high degree of the nation-hero, nation-villain
ideology and the arousing of the population to a
sense of sacrifice. Once these exist, we have gone
a long way on the path to war."
- John Foster Dulles

Who profits from war? The military contractors who make
the weapons, the super wealthy who lend to governments
by buying their bonds so they can carry on their wars,
and the press which, in effect, profits by selling tickets
to the show. Then there are all those who benefit from
the country becoming more regimented and alienated
from its own highest principles.

Ted Turner's recent hysteric declaration that we are
(http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WAPO/19990508/V000574-050899-idx.html)
on the verge of nuclear war is as transparent
a demonstration of how all this works as there
can be. For years now, CNN has promoted US
"intervention" around the world and has contributed
mightily towards making sure that Americans are
confused and misled as to the nature of the
assault on Yugoslavia. Now, in an appalling
act of self-serving recklessness, Turner seeks
to boost CNN's ratings even further. (And the
Washington Post did its bit by making sure
his "fuel on the fire" analysis received
the widest possible audience.)

Knowledge of how wars are started used
to be widespread amongst educated, literate
people before WWII. After the First World
War books like "Merchants of Death" and
"The Private Manufacture of Arms" were
best sellers and one author who documented
the process, Philip Noel-Baker, won a Nobel
Prize for his efforts. The latter book is now
so scarce, it can't be found on Bibliofind
*or* Advanced Book Exchange.

"We are in the hands of an organization of crooks.
They are the generals, politicians, manufacturers
of armaments and journalists. All of them are
anxious for unlimited expenditure, and go on
inventing wars to terrify the public and to
terrify the Ministers of the Crown."
- Lord Welby, Britain's principal Permanent
Secretary to  the Treasury, quoted in "The Private
Manufacture of Arms."

Today, this once clearsighted, common sense  knowledge
of the workings and pathology of power is submerged in
a deep media and academia-induced amnesia.

---------------------------------------------------

Concerning the present dilemma with China,
there is no way the Chinese will ever believe
the bombing of their embassy was a mistake and the
government there is reacting accordingly. Little more
than a week ago, an entirely peaceful and politically
well conncected group received  a stern national
rebuke for conducting a quiet and orderly civil rights
protest in Beijing. Now the Chinese media and government
(*obviously* the same thing in China) are openly encouraging
what is, in effect, the taking of the staff of the American
Embassy in Beijing hostage.

It is not inconceivable that China will send
troops to Yugoslavia in order to protect its
remaining citizens there. They've amply demonstrated
that a military action would pose no internal problems
for them and indeed, there are in China the very same
elements as there are here who would stand to gain
much from such a move.

"News shocks" have a way of making people forget
everything that preceded them. It's important to
keep in mind as we go through level after level
of escalation, that this is all being manufactured.
There is nothing accidental - or inevitable - about
any of it.

The group that helped create the conditions for
the war, and created the cover of lies to "sell"
it, is the very same group that left the door
open to our military secrets and directed the
know-nothing military to bomb the Chinese embassy.

There is a cure for the present crisis. Stop the
bombing and expose the currently nameless, faceless
individuals who put the Chinese embassy on Nato's "hit"
list and disclose how it happened. (While they're at it
perhaps they can also explain how the CIA came to tell
the US military and the commander-in-sleeze that a
$100,000,000 pharmaceutical plant in Sudan was a
chemical weapons lab.)

Watch carefully. This simple common sense solution will
not even be proposed.

Think about it: An organization that answers to no one
can bring us to the brink, but its operations are so
protected, so above any law, that we can't even expect
to be given the name of the person or persons who made
the supposed "mistake" or any information as to how
such an inconceivable blunder could have been made.

And, of course, the media isn't probing too hard.
Instead, they'll run inflammatory footage of anti-US
riots and offer speculations on the future of US-China
relations. Apparently this pseudo information is the
best we're going to get as we try to make sense of the
latest US-created madness from Yugoslavia.

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