Posted December 16, 2002

Jolted

I was really jolted by the photo featured on your website recently of a young girl at an antiwar rally holding a sign that said "Thou shalt not kill was not a suggestion". I couldn't care less about what a bunch of Hollywood actors say about the state of the world. I do however think that a massive demonstration under the banner of the Fifth/Sixth Commandment might break through the rhetoric and even give the US president some food for thought.

~ Michael M.

School

Regarding Tony B.'s letter of December 12:

I thank you for calling me wise. However, I go to a fairly respectable school called South Side, which, by the way, is not a private school.

~ Scott E. Crawford

Fine, Important, Useful Site

In political ideology we remain separated by a great gulf, as I am unapologetically left-leaning, but I wish to commend you on running a fine and important website. At the moment, with the rush to war instigated by a conservative US president and his sponsors, it has been all to easy to be convinced that this is something unique to the conservative mindset, and your site provides a forceful reminder that not all conservatives are willing to join in this mad stampede. I am glad, and I hope you feel likewise, (following an earlier column where Mr. Raimondo noted the "loony left" had taken control of antiwar marches. I was very sympathetic to his point of view) that the antiwar movement seems to be more in the hands now of "mainstream" voices, those less easily able to be dismissed as communist, anarchists and the like. It is imperative that no matter what our divide on other issues, the fight against a needless war is a uniting factor. The left has no business seconding it to other matters that concern them.

In short I find your site a useful source of information, and a place where I can believe again that true conservatism still exists, away from the hard-right rabble that are the current US administration. I admire and commend you on your courage to speak out, from a conservative angle, on sensitive and near-taboo topics such as Israel and hypocritical foreign policy, and I hope to see this site continue to grow in size and stature while the need for it remains.

~ Gary Faulds, Sweden

WND

Regarding "Our Sociopathic Foreign Policy" by Justin Raimondo:

You wonder if Farah's news organ is on to a new disturbing trend. But that was in the past. By now you must know that "disturbing" isn't the word for a news organ that purports to support the US Constitution, rails against the police state the US has become, supports any effort to repeal the current system of taxation and the IRS as well as to keep private property rights among other issues, yet also trashes the Constitution by urging President George W. Bush to attack Iraq as soon as possible (no doubt you've read Farah's "Between the Lines" columns as well as 14-year-old Kyle William's call to invade Iraq – and would the kid be willing to back up his words in uniform?) without Congressional declaration of war, and calls for Arabs to be profiled (and Farah's an Arab!), which certainly violates the Constitution. Disturbing isn't the word. Sociopathic? Maybe. Complete, utter, and total hypocrisy with a capital H is more like it. Seems he'll defend the Constitution when a Democrat's in power, but will trash it when there's a Republican. It is amazing that anyone would still consider WorldNetDaily an "independent" news source. It might turn out that the Lebanese Farah was once a Phalangist or in some other pay to Israel (I say that since he claims to be a "Christian" and like Christian-Zionists believes in the so-called Rapture), but we may never know – but he sometimes sure writes as if he was, and it's getting to be that his and WNDs hypocrisy knows no bounds.

~ D. Lagarde

Helen Thomas

Helen Thomas's article ["White House Steps Over the Line"] laments the loss of privacy under the guise of fighting terrorism. Did Helen just wake up? This hasn't happened overnight; it is a culmination of a long process where the American people have been so dumbed down that we are not even capable of critical thinking anymore. The "journalists" also share the blame. They wrote many, many things they knew weren't true. They didn't dig for the facts, the truth. For example, the public still doesn't have the true facts regarding President Kennedy's assassination. I'm glad that Ms. Thomas is finally speaking out. Most major media "journalists" will sell their soul for their paychecks and the glory of belonging to the big time club.

~ Rick O.

U.S.A.P.A.T.R.I.O.T

Regarding "A Slight Detour on the Road to a Police State" by Alan Bock:

A brief flicker of hope from Alan Bock. Maybe the judiciary will save us from a police state, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it.

In any case, he adopts the now conventional "USA Patriot Act" when he should be very careful to use the initials "U.S.A.P.A.T.R.I.O.T" to avoid any confusion with "patriotism." The name of the act Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 was carefully chosen to present a deceptive, and grossly unpatriotic acronym. All who love freedom should go out of their way to stay out of the tentacles of the embracing police state.

~ Thomas S. Duncan, Astoria, Oregon

Trepca Crematoria: Genocide or a Hoax?

Regarding Matthew Hogan's letter of October 28:

Matthew Hogan argued that the Racak Massacre was not a hoax. He argued that exposés of hoaxes are in themselves hoaxes based on partisanship. Hogan exposed the "Hoax" Hoax. But the Trepca Crematoria story is a case of propaganda that can be shown with almost absolute certainty to be a hoax. Is Trepca a hoax? Or is it merely partisanship?

During the NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia in 1999, the Yugoslav forces under President Slobodan Milosevic were accused of incinerating the bodies of 700-750 Albanians at the Trepca Mine Complex in northern Kosovo near the town of Kosovska Mitrovica. British, French, German, and American newspapers and media picked up this allegation to accuse the Yugoslav forces of committing genocide in Yugoslavia on a scale with the Holocaust. The Trepca Ovens were compared to those at the Nazi death camps/concentration camps at Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Treblinka. After the NATO bombing, NATO, the UN, the OSCE, and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) sent investigators to the Trepca mine complex. No evidence whatsoever was found at the Trepca complex. The furnaces, the shafts, and the grounds were inspected and analyzed but no evidence was found for the allegation that Yugoslav/Serbian forces had burned the bodies of Albanians.

What was the origin and purpose for the Trepca story? The Trepca case originated from Albanian sources who claimed to have seen trucks going in and out of the mining complex. The Albanian sources concluded that the Serbs were burning Albanian corpses. This allegation was picked up and developed by NATO. Why? NATO needed a justification for the bombing of Yugoslavia, a sovereign and independent nation recognized by the United Nations. The Yugoslav government of Slobodan Milosevic was engaged in a war against the UCK/KLA, a separatist group that the US State department labeled a "terrorist group" in 1998. The UCK/KLA were murdering Serbian civilians, Albanians civilians, Yugoslav police officers, Yugoslav security forces, and even Yugoslav army troops. The goal of the UCK/KLA was to create a separate country called Kosova by killing and driving out non-Albanians, i.e., Kosovo Serbs, and by destroying the Yugoslav government presence in the province of Kosovo. Thus, the Yugoslav government had a legal and legitimate right under the UN and international law to protect its borders and to safeguard its citizens by engaging the separatist/terrorist UCK/KLA. The only way NATO could overcome the illegality of the NATO bombardment and occupation of Yugoslavia is by alleging that a genocide was about to occur and that NATO was seeking to prevent genocide by intervening.

NATO and the US State Department claimed that up to 500,000 Kosovo Albanians had been murdered in Kosovo in a planned and systematic genocide. But after the bombing, these figures could not be substantiated. A Spanish forensic team under Emilio Pujol found no mass graves. Pujol stated that there was no evidence of genocide. He stated that he came to examine 2,500 bodies but found only 187. All other war crimes investigations could find no evidence of genocide. What was the explanation?

NATO and the US State Department argued that the Serbs had burned the bodies thereby destroying the evidence. This is where the Trepca Crematoria Ovens Hoax enters the picture. The Trepca case was revived by Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) in 2001 in an investigative story entitled "The Promise of Justice" produced by American Radio Works in which it was maintained that the Serbs had indeed incinerated or cremated the bodies of 1,200 to 1,500 Albanians civilians executed during the conflict. The source or evidence for the allegations was hearsay statements made by Serb "fighters" who had been part of "a secret army" called Frenkies Boys. The MPR report, broadcast on National Public Radio (NPR), presented no evidence at all. The only source was hearsay.

Immediately following the MPR/NPR story, the OSCE reported that it had investigated the Trepca Complex and furnaces and found no evidence of the incineration of any bodies. A French team had determined that the Trepca Complex had been closed since late March, shortly after the NATO bombing began, and had never reopened. So the Trepca Complex never even operated during the bulk of the Kosovo bombing by NATO! Moreover, Benjamin Works found out that US satellites had infrared heat sensors that could detect heat emissions at Trepca. Works was informed by NATO/US sources that no signs of heat were detected by the satellites. Works was told that Trepca was as "cold as a cucumber." NATO never released this information to the public. The evidence provided by the UN, the OSCE, the ICTY, and French and Spanish forensic teams, showed that there were no burnings of corpses at Trepca.

Trepca is an example of war propaganda, of propaganda of the deed. Trepca was a hoax meant to demonize the Serbian people and the leaders of Yugoslavia/Serbia. Why? All war propaganda ultimately serves the purpose of allowing for the killing of the "enemy."

Who is the ultimate victim or dupe of the Trepca Hoax? Was it the Serbs? The Serbs knew it was a hoax. American citizens were the victims of the hoax. Why? The US government did not want any opposition to the bombing of Yugoslavia. The Trepca hoax silenced dissent and precluded any debate. Who would not support bombing to prevent genocide? The American public was deceived. This is the real danger of propaganda and of manufactured hoaxes. Is there really liberty and freedom in the US when we are the unwitting victims of such blatant hoaxes? This is the question we each have to ask ourselves.

~ Carl Savich

False Witnesses

U.S. demands for the removal of Iraqi scientists for questioning should set off warning signals. How reliable would the information provided be?

The US justice system regularly employs witnesses motivated by offers of reward and threat of harm. They often provide false information. Harvey Matusow falsely fingered Communists for FBI pay, as he stated in his book False Witness, 1955. The "jailhouse snitch" Leslie Vernon White, a convicted kidnapper, robber and car thief, helped the District Attorney of Los Angeles County obtain false convictions in the 1980's. Such snitch testimony helped convict 4 out of 12 Illinois death row inmates who were later exonerated. This incident caused the Illinois governor to suspend all death sentence executions.

If you get enough witnesses under enough pressure some will give the prosecutor the answers needed to support any frame-up. This method is institutionalized by the US state and federal governments. Is it also to be the method of the United Nations?

The Bush administration is hell-bent for war. Our familiar practices should not be for export.

~ Daniel F., Attorney, California