dreamdancer 0 #1 August 24, 2009 an eye for an eye... QuoteThe Sunday Times of London reported in its front-page headline of March 26, 1989, "Pan Am Bombers Identified." The article stated that anonymous intelligence sources knew who was behind the bombing: "the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, led by Ahmed Jibril, a Damascus-based PLO renegade who opposes Yasser Arafat's current peace drive." The paper claimed that PLO sources had told it the group had received $10 million to bring down the plane in retaliation for the downing of an Iranian civilian airline by the American cruiser Vincennes the summer before. (The U.S. claimed the Vincennes thought it was being attacked, and fired in self-defense, a claim which had no basis in reality, despite having been voiced by President Ronald Reagan and Vice President and former CIA director George H.W. Bush. President Reagan refused to apologize to Iran for this tragic mistake.) The Observer reported that, after the shootdown of the Iranian plane, the Iranian chargé d'affaires in Beirut invited Ahmed Jibril and other terrorists to a meeting attended by representatives of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, where plans were made to bring down a plane with a bomb. The final meeting purportedly took place at the Carlton Hotel in Beirut just days before the Lockerbie incident. On Dec. 24, 1989, the Sunday Times reported that white plastic residue found at the Lockerbie crash site matched material in alarm clocks purchased from a couple of Jibril's PFLP-GC associates just before their arrest in West Germany in October 1988, just two months before the Lockerbie bombing. As Bill Blum's report, recently republished at Consortiumnews.com, noted, the Iranian-PFLP-GC conspiracy "was the Original Official Version, delivered with Olympian rectitude by the U.S. government - guaranteed, sworn to, scout's honor, case closed - until the Gulf War came along in 1990 and the support of Iran and Syria were needed." http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/08/23stay away from moving propellers - they bite blue skies from thai sky adventures good solid response-provoking keyboarding Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
dreamdancer 0 #2 August 31, 2009 QuoteWhatever the official response to al-Megrahi, the lack of comment on Calley underscores a longstanding American aversion to facing what the U.S. did to Vietnam and its people during a war that ended more than 30 years ago. Since then, one cover-up of mass murder after another has unraveled and bubbled into view. These have included the mass killing of civilians in the Mekong Delta village of Thanh Phong by future senator Bob Kerrey and the SEAL team he led (exposed by the New York Times Magazine and CBS News in 2001); a long series of atrocities (including murders, torture, and mutilations) involving the deaths of hundreds of noncombatants largely committed in Quang Ngai Province (where My Lai is also located) by an elite U.S. unit, the Tiger Force (exposed by the Toledo Blade in 2003); seven massacres, 78 other attacks on noncombatants, and 141 instances of torture, among other atrocities (exposed by the Los Angeles Times in 2006); a massacre of civilians by U.S. Marines in Quang Nam Province's Le Bac hamlet (exposed in In These Times magazine in 2008); and the slaughter of thousands of Vietnamese in the Mekong Delta during Operation Speedy Express (exposed in The Nation magazine, also in 2008). Over the last decade, long suppressed horrors from Vietnam have been piling up, indicating not only that My Lai, horrific and iconic as it may have been, was no isolated incident, but that many American veterans have long lived with memories not unlike those of William Calley. If you recall what actually happened at My Lai, Calley's more-than-40-years-late apology cannot help but ring hollow. Not only were more than 500 defenseless civilians slaughtered by Calley and some of the 100 troops who stormed the village on March 16, 1968, but women and girls were brutally raped, bodies were horrifically mutilated, homes set aflame, animals tortured and killed, the local water supply fouled, and the village razed to the ground. Some of the civilians were killed in their bomb shelters, others when they tried to leave them. Women holding infants were gunned down. Others, gathered together, threw themselves on top of their children as they were sprayed with automatic rifle fire. Children, even babies, were executed at close range. Many were slaughtered in an irrigation ditch. http://www.alternet.org/story/142312/two_mass_murderers%2C_two_very_different_stories_and_much_hypocrisy__/?page=entirestay away from moving propellers - they bite blue skies from thai sky adventures good solid response-provoking keyboarding Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
kallend 2,150 #3 August 31, 2009 Quotean eye for an eye... "... and soon the whole world is blind." "... But I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also."... The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
