Nice find Michael. Thanx.

yikes. thanks for posting this.

Thanks for posting this. I suppose that this is what UWC was referring to when they said that a crackdown on Uyghurs would begin following the start of Ramadan.

I think anyone who knows the region would have a chuckle about 200,000 troops combing the area especially the Commander of the Lanzhou Military Region.
Every year prior to October Day, suspect Uygurs are thrown into the slammer for a month or so. It has nothing to do with Ramadan.

Living in the northern part of Xinjiang, we are fortunately spared the brunt of all that is happening in the capital and over to the west, but the heightened security is still noticeable.

The lines for gas stations reach 100-200 meters long not because everybody needs gas all at once, but because police are personally searching each car, combing through the trunk and looking underneath while dogs perform a sniff-search.

I've actually never heard of this "10-household mutually insured system" over here...although I'm not really surprised by that.

Another sign of colonial-style insurgency, as touched upon by The New Dominion: members of the "resistance" eliminating regime "collaborators".

Ethnic Retribution Possible in Western China Violence
The New York Times
September 3, 2008
By EDWARD WONG

BEIJING — Two police officers who were killed and five who were injured in an ambush in the far west of China last Wednesday were ethnic Uighurs searching for a woman suspected of involvement in earlier violence, a policeman in the village where the ambush took place said Tuesday.

The attackers were also Uighurs, a Muslim Turkic group common throughout the western autonomous region of Xinjiang. Brandishing knives, the attackers set upon a group of unarmed police officers as the officers were walking through a cornfield in Qizilboy village, said the policeman, who was interviewed by telephone, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he had not been given permission to talk to reporters.

The authorities gave few details at the time of the incident; the policeman’s account is the fullest thus far. It suggests that some of the recent violence in Xinjiang could be aimed at Uighurs seen by other Uighurs as collaborators with the ethnic Han Chinese, who make up the leadership of the Communist Party and govern Xinjiang.

Many Uighurs resent rule by the Han Chinese and advocate greater political freedom and economic benefits or an independent Uighur-run nation. But some Uighurs have also benefited from policies put in place by the Communist Party, including many who work in the security forces or in the local government.

Two days after the attack , police officers shot dead six suspects and arrested three during a search near the Silk Road oasis town of Kashgar, also in western Xinjiang, according to a report on Saturday by Xinhua, the official state news agency. The nine were linked to both the Wednesday attack and one on Aug. 12, Xinhua reported. In the earlier incident, attackers armed with knives killed three security officers and wounded one at a road checkpoint in the town of Yamanya, 60 miles east of Kashgar.

Some reports have said the victims of that earlier attack were also Uighurs.

The policeman in Qizilboy village declined to give further details about the woman the police were seeking.

A detailed report last week by Radio Free Asia, a station that promotes democracy and is funded by the American government, identified her as Anargul, 22, and said that she was suspected of aiding the people who carried out the checkpoint attack. The report said that she was the daughter of a woman arrested following that attack, identified as Amangul, 50.

There are other indications that women might be playing a prominent role in the violence unfolding in Xinjiang. On Aug. 10, a 15-year-old girl was wounded while throwing an explosive in the western town of Kuqa, Xinhua reported. That day, a series of assaults and bombings took place across Kuqa, killing two people and injuring five others.

It is unclear whether the violence is part of a larger pattern, or whether separate groups are carrying it out. The Chinese government has not pointed to a specific group as being responsible for the attacks in Yamanya and Qizilboy.

Officials in Kashgar attributed a deadly attack in that town on Aug. 4 on two Uighurs whom the officials said were linked to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, which advocates independence in Xinjiang and supposedly has a base in Pakistan. The group calls itself the Turkestan Islamic Party and issued videos threatening the recent Olympic Games.

The Aug. 4 assault in Kashgar left 16 paramilitary police officers dead and 16 injured after the two men rammed a truck into a large group of officers and then attacked them with homemade explosives and knives.

Outside scholars of Xinjiang and Uighur exiles say the Chinese government is intent on painting much of the recent violence as part of surge in terrorism so that it can carry out a crackdown across Xinjiang. Some scholars say the violence could be rooted in criminal activities or revenge.

Huang Yuanxi contributed reporting for this article.

jacko.

thats true about national day. But it has also been true of the ramadan period over the last few decades. Just depends, where you are, what you hear and what you see. For instance, several years ago hundreds of young Hotanliks (15-18 yrs old it seemed) were rounded up and taken into the Taklamakan at the commencement of Ramadan out of fear that the fasting month would galvanize and incite anti-state feeling among these wahabi oriented and discontented youtjh. I saw them all marched through the bazaar one eveing at dusk in leg chains and clothed in drab prison gear. A scene one will never forget.

my words are like a prophecy, this blog is quickly turning from a terrorists sympathizer page, into a full blown ETIM propaganda page. if you believe what the HK information centre for human rights says about china, then god help you.

however if such a strategy exists, hey, its still not as cruel as what the israelis do, bull doze a suspected terrorist's family member's house down.

let's see how many of malcom x's family members got good job opportunities, or how many black panther party family members got to go harvard.

Could someone explain what "militia" in the report is? Are they something like American National Guard, or are they just a bunch of government-backed vigilantes?

The 15-year-old girl was no woman and it was heinous to drag her in. If Uyghurs are so oppressed, why did they have to make a 15-year-old girl to kill?

I hope that the gov. will go easy on her, she is still a child.

@ cripes

typical inane comments re:

"let's see how many of malcom x's family members got good job opportunities, or how many black panther party family members got to go harvard."

meaning - all Uyghurs are terrorists and see we still let ( some ) of them have jobs and (some) of them go to university. See how great China is.

@siberian tiger

the question rather should be: what on earth is wrong with a place and a system and a governement where fifteen year old girls revert to doing such things? They hardly sound trined by the way seeing one of them blew herself up accidentally.

The twisted bias and distorted viewpoints flood in again from the usual culprits who know nothing of what they talk about.

is it true that these two word HUMAN RIGHTS was to protect the rights for every individual concern?

well,as far as people that belong to the HUMAN RIGHT organization is concern.they will say YES of course.

but the problem is.i never read or hear that the HUMAN RIGHT PRGANIZATION have criticize the WEASTERN POWER who invaded againts the weak nation and committed VIOLATION of HUMAN RIGHTS? hmmmmmm

@chin: Actually, human rights groups protest US actions all the time. Take a look, for instance, at the protests that have been going on in St. Paul for the Republican National Convention. Just because Western countries do bad things doesn't mean we can't criticize China... we prefer to criticize everyone!

@cripes: I never said that I believe the report 100%. This is information that's been put out there in public, and I'm bringing it to your attention for amusement and entertainment!

Beyond comparison are the american atrocities, in Iraq and in Afghanistan where the amerikanans kill innocent peasant common people and children. We hear of these outrages everyday.
Perhaps american people think they are borne to be
above all other people?

Michael: "Collective Punishment"?! LOL! Where you get that idea?! You are living in Xinjiang, why don't you check around instead of quoting a source of "Human Rights and Democracy" in Hong Kong?! Anyone can do the quoting as long as he knows how to use Google, and ..., quoting from a "Human Rights and Democracy" souce? C'mon, Michael! You must be kidding yourself. You can do much better job than that, don't you?!

@tctdh

correction your tag should conclude with 'can't you?!'

these arguments are so tired and predictable.

the bottom line is atrocities do and are happening against the Uyghur at the hand of the CCP in the western paradise known as Xinjiang.

No matter what happens elsewhere in the world these actions are violations of the UN charter of Human Rights and should be criticized.

Problem with China is as two little old ladies in Beijing recently discovered if you do protest about violations you are prosecuted or imprisoned.

Han commentators who criticize the right of dissent have obviously never been subject to such violations and live either in a fantasy land or are themselves supportive of human rights violations.

@tctdh, collective punishment has long been a strategy of the CCP against Uyghur in Xinjiang, go on a tour and ask questions for yourself. Ooooh, that would be a big brave scary thing to do wouldn't it?

Ejnar: Get your head out of the sand. I believe the American's kill a lot more terrorists than they do the SMALL number of civilians who get caught in the cross-fire. I wonder if the same sources you get your "objective" information from would bother to write about those civilians killed by the insurgents. I guarantee the numbers would kill your argument.

Cripes: So sorry Human Rights organisations happen to fall short of spinning the same regurgitated counter-information the Communist Party love to disseminate. You must write to them and complain. How dare a Chinese Human Rights group comment on, of all things, Human Rights in China!?! ....meh....

@ cripes

we are so fortunate to have a prophet soothsaying to us in his wisdom and sagacity on this blog. We should start up a cult around your figure. Speak to us prophet, tell us wise one, foretell the future, please...

The fact is that in response to many of your inane posts on this blog it has long ago been discussed and proven from many sources and opinions that the ETIM is nothing but a fabricated paper tiger. You along with other fabricators insist on perpetuating the myth and in your case claiming the high ground of omniscience and insightful prescience. Move on... and for your own credibility's sake stop posting what is clear to many as self gratuitous propaganda.

You are not taken seriously, why waste your time - go play with the other boys in front of the screen where the big boy with the stick tells you what t do and say.

for jimba

on the unlikely chance not already accessed:

http://www.idsa.in/publications/strategic-analysis/2003/jul/Abanti-Bhattacharya.pdf

Thx Spec. I will read it tmr.

If you have access to journals, then DL this little gem(if not tell me and I will pass it on):

Clarke, M. China's Internal Security Dilemma and the 'Great Western Development': The Dynamics of Integration, Ethnic Nationalism and Terrorism in Xinjiang, Asian Studies Review

hmmmmmm!!!!The American once againts send their killing machine, intruded and killed 15 innocence people whom they call TERRORIST inside PAKISTAN at will.where are the people they call themself HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST?

hmmmmmm!!!!I hope the HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST should CONDEMN those MURDERER killing innocence citizens of the weak nation not only in IRAQ AFTHANISTAN and now PAKISTAN.

hmmmmmm!!!!lets see if the HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST will DARE or BRAVE enought to SIT DOWN,CHANTING SLOGAN,AND WAVING BANNER in PROTEST at WASHINGTON D.C.as they do at BEIJING, intervening the INTERNAL AFFAIR of CHINA during the BEIJING OLYMPIC.

hmmmmmm!!!!MR/MADAMN HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST.I think you DARE not.hmmmmmmmmmm.

@chin

dont you see, when rich white people (govts) kill civilians or handle them roughly, its called "war on terror" or "collateral damage"

when non white people kill people, its called, terrorism, genocide, ethnic cleansing, human rights violations, you name it.

where ever you go in the english speaking world, you hear the echo of hypocrisy

@spec

(1). "Can't you?!", "Don't you"? So what?! How many languages do you speak? So you want to play English teacher here? Forget it, pal! If you take my classes, I might flunk you even before you know it!

(2). Have you ever been in China?! Or you are just on the "opposite" side of China?

(3). Human Rights? What a joke! You tell me WHICH COUNTRY in this world got HUAMN RIGHTS?! United States? There is no country in this world has violated human rights so much as United States in its short 230 years of history. Give me another "@", I will list the details for you, pal! Or you can find the list if you know how to Google, You DO know how to Google, CAN'T you?!

(4). Terrorism?! Let's face it, pal, in this world, only US government has the connection with these terrorists. Bin Laden was CIA's most favorite "Freedom Fighter" to fight Russia in 80's, and he is the most-wanted terrorist by US today. US supported Saddam Hussein to fight Iran in 80's, US put him to death today. Google "Bin Laden CIA" and "Saddam Hussein Don Rumsfeld". You DO know how to Google, CAN'T you?!

(5) In addition to Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, no one in this world knows how many other connections that US government still has with these terrorists. US government currently has the de-stabilization plan in Central Asia. Uzbekistan evicted US from its Karsgi-Khanabad airbase in 2006 after US State Secretary Condleezza Rice ordered the airlift of 450 Uzbek "freedom fighters" & "democracy activists" to Romania in July 2005. No one knows what they are doing in Romania at this moment. You DO know how to Google, CAN'T YOU?! LOLLL!

(5). WUC? Do you knwo what is WUC and who is behind it? Do you know "Training the Uyghur Leaders of Tomorrow" in May 2007 was organized and funded by who? Google it yourself! Instead of repeating the reports of these CIA front organizations, you DO know how to Google, CAN'T YOU?! Don't just sitting there play English teacher, LOLL!

hmmmmmm!!!! You got my points,cripes. Surely of course, Those people call themself HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST was being employ by the HUMAN RIGHTS ORGANISATION as an actor, to do, what to act and how to shout as a good ACTOR being instructed by the DIRECTOR and PRODUCER of the(HUMAN RIGHTS ORGANISATION).I assume those HUMAN RIGHTS ACTOR you saw at BEIJING during the BEIJING OLYMPIC GAMES act better than JOHN WAYNE.
hmmmmmm!!!! IRAQ AFHANISTAN PAKISTAN and also SOUTH OSSETIA.?????????. People are not IGNORANT about the INTRIQUE of CONQURE, SPLIT and ANNEX.Its like a WAR GAME going on by using the HUMAN RIGHT ACTIVIST as front.Its a SINISTER PLAN
by SATAN????????
hmmmmmmm May HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST play a BETTER ROLE, so PEACE and HARMONY will PREVAIL than CRITICISE and lets the MASTER of EVIL TO conquer against the POOR and WEAK NATION. Stop this NONESENSE. There are so many WIDOWS PARENTLESS CHILDREN ETC ETC because of such TWO WORD :HUMAN RIGHTS:.GOOD NIGHT.GOD SAVE THE WORLD/

@spec:

"Problem in China"?! That's just the problem in your mind, or the problem to “feed your empty stomach”, pal!

China has 55 ethnic minority groups and total 123 million minority people. The total of Tibetans (5 million) and Uyghurs (7 million) is just 12 million or less than 10% of the total minority. Why this less than 10% minority are fiercely suppressed as accused by the Western media while the rest 90% minorities are living happily in China? especially the Korean Chinese minority has the highest college attendance rate and personal income among all the ethnic groups in China?

The “Free Tibet” movement has become a huge complex and INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS with an estimated annual cash flow of $50 million. According to the data provided by the Tibet Government-in-Exile in June, 2007 that there are over 80 Tibetan “associations” and over 300 Tibetan “support groups” around the world. The “Free Tibet” business is there as long as the FREE MONEY is there. There are hundreds, if not thousands, people are making living in this “FREE TIBET” business. These people are non-Tibetan, non-Chinese ethnicities, they know little about Tibet’s history and culture, and know even less about the current situation of Tibet in China, but their life hood is in this business.

If you put that kind of money into Lakota Sioux Indians or Hawaii, I can guarantee you that you have tons of “problems” there, LOL!

“Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples” was adopted by 143 countries at UN on Sept 13, 2007. US was one of the only four countries voted against it (other three are Canada, Australia and New Zealand). The Declaration will eliminate human rights violations, discrimination and marginalisation against indigenous populations around the world. Why US refused to join in? Why don’t you ask your NED, OSI, AEI, or any other CIA front organizations for the reason?

Google it! If you know how to Google!

hmmmmmmm!!!!Michael. I just WONDER why the HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST you mention just went to St.Paul to protest at the Republican National Convention. Instead of going to WASHINGTON D.C.

While the HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST went to Beijing to PROTEST during the BEIJING OLYMPIC GAMES.

Beijing is the seat of the Goverment of CHINA. St Paul is not the seat of the POWERFUL NATION on EARTH call UNITED STATE of AMERICA.

hmmmmmmm!!!! Isnt it very funny for the HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST to CRITICISE CHINA at BEIJING so bravery while the HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST is afraid to go to WASHINGTON D.C.to protest?

ETIC report - "Western development strategy: Disaster in East Turkistan":

http://www.uygur.org/enorg/h_rights/ETIC_REPORT_2008%5D.pdf

anyone interested in introducing the idea 'YY' into English blog-sphere? Fits nicely here.

“YY”?! Americans probably already know what “YY” is, they don’t need any introduction. The problem is they probably thought they are the only people can be “YY”. That's why they stick their noses everywhere in the world.

Looks at these ex-Soviets; after 18 or 20 years of “Democracy” and “Freedom”, you tell me which country is not in a mess?! Which election in the ex-Soviets that the CIA front organizations haven’t got their fingers in?!

China's Wild West - a TV documentary from the Current TV:

http://current.com/items/89221794_china_s_wild_west

Collective punishment is WRONG!
Punishing collective terrorists is RIGHT!

Do eight-year-old children and 10-month old babies constitute "collective terrorists"?

http://uhrp.org/docs/A-Life-or-Death-Struggle-in-East-Turkestan.pdf

Dear CCP crusaders,

Keep in mind that not all of us are American, nor do we support the war on terror; in the right forum… we voice our concerns. Your arguments are all pretty loud, but weak I’m afraid. Comparing the U.S. with China's dismal human rights record excuses them of NOTHING. What’s your point? Russia just annexed Georgia; does that mean Pakistan can now reclaim Xinjiang into Central Asia? I mean, this is your logical, or there lack of. Next.

Oh, terrorism. By all means, attack and defeat terrorists. This is China's right; however, it is not the right of the state (or the Communist Party) to restrict civil and political rights of its ethnic minority as a result. If you don’t believe me then please refer to that little document called the Chinese constitution. If the Communist Party continues to do so, it will further exacerbate ethnic tensions and probably push a few more frustrated Uighur over the edge; it's terrorism a le carte. Maybe the "terrorist" obsessed Wang Lequan could try a different approach, i.e. addressing minority grievances?

What country has human rights? In absolute terms, none. But in this perfectly dysfunctional world it has been quantitatively proven that in those countries that actively support democracy and civil society, human rights violations occur dramatically less than in countries such as China, who are ruled by the whims of its ruling party.

Dear “Human Right” Crusaders:

Keep in mind that please don’t assume anyone to be CCP crusaders. I believe most of us on this forum are not Chinese nationals, and probably have not related to China in anyway. The reason why we have different opinion is some of us have been fed up with the Western aggressiveness and hypocrisy. As I said before, you tell me which country on earth don’t have human right abuses, I will give you the URL links that will say the opposite. OR, you can simply Google it by yourself. This is the age of internet information age, and internet search engine is double-edged sword, it works in anyway you like it to work.

In this particular case, all the academics around the world have praised the minority policy in China. Surely you have the “freedom” to accuse China anything you wanted. BUT, c’mon, no one is stupid as you might think if you are not indeed a sucker yourself who believes everything the Western propaganda accused. I have asked the following question on this forum before. Has anyone made any comment or provided any possible answer to it? This is the purpose of the forum, isn’t it?! I don’t believe this forum has any hidden agenda on one side or another, so let’s communicate and understand where we stand:

-----
China has 55 ethnic minority groups and total 123 million minority people. The total of Tibetans (5 million) and Uyghurs (7 million) is just 12 million or less than 10% of the total minority. Why this less than 10% minority are fiercely suppressed as accused by the Western media while the rest 90% minorities are living happily in China? Especially the Korean Chinese minority has the highest college attendance rate and personal income among all the ethnic groups in China.
-----

If you are talking about Uyghurs, do you know that China is the only country leaves the writing scripts alone to its minorities? All the Turkic minorities in China have been using their Arabic scripts as they have used for centuries. Has any Turkic minority in any other country could have the freedom to do that? I didn’t mention the writing scripts for Mongol or Tibetan minorities in China yet. A citizen in Mongolia has to learn the Mongol scripts from the Mongol minority living in China. That is a joke, isn’t it?! Look around, don’t be ignorant! Turks/Turkics are about 2.4% of the total population in Germany. Has German government spent any government money to have Turkish schools there?! Did any Western country do that for their minority? WHY US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have refused to join the “Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples” that was adopted by 143 countries at UN on Sept 13, last year in 2007? Is indigenous people a minority? Why China didn't have any problem to sign in, why they had problems?!

C’mon, guys! The only way you get a good healthy perspective is to look at China in terms of what is happening in other countries. I can EASILY attack ANY country in the world if I use a microscope to look at it and to look at it alone.

BTW, don’t assume anyone on this forum hasn’t involved with the human rights organization for the past ten or twenty years. Do you know how many different "kind" of human rights orgnizations out there?! Do you know what is the hottest controversy debate inside these human rights organizations since 9-11?!

[quote]test[/quote]

tctdh said:

"In this particular case, all the academics around the world have praised the minority policy in China."

Maybe you'd like to provide us with some links. I would be interested to read such literature.

Thank you for those facts regarding ethnic minorities in China. You're right that the 55 minorities are only 8.5% of China's population. Another fact for you: They are also concentrated in 64.3% of the county's total land area and 90% of China's border regions.

Some of those minorities are culturally accommodating to the Han, i.e. the Hui, but the Uighur are not. Therefore, they pose a security challenge to the CCP. Unlike Korean-Chinese who share a common Confucian ancestry with the Han (and traditionally worship education…oh, and many many Uighurs cannot speak Mandarin, the language of upward mobility in China) The Uighur's are Muslim, a number of them reside in neighbouring Central Asia and the Uighurs have a recent history of attempted separation from the state.

This has the Han, the dominant societal group, worried and increases Beijing's eagerness to ensure Han security. This they do through a series of political, economic and ideological programs; however, it is these same policies that threaten Uighur identity, and may contribute to the development of potential internal "security dilemmas".

So what has the CCP done? Increased Han in-migration and settlement, putting pressures on the land and increasing competition for scare recourses; management and control of religious and cultural expression; implemented language policies that place Uighur at a disadvantage; ensured the Uighur have no real autonomy (as in being ruler of your house, not simply keeping you in it), youhui zhengce policies that are of form rather than substance; the Uighur still have no access to the wealthy recourse industries…. The Western Development Project has increased all of the above and is now viewed by many Uighur as a means to assimilate them more closely to the Han suzerain.

You are moron if you think that just because other countries might violate their citizens human rights then it’s ok for China to do it. To use your words, “C’mon”! Infact, it is a lot easier to defend China’s dreadful human rights record by saying, “Oh oh oh… America…Australia…Iraq…..look look look…”. Sweeping generalisations are as boring as they are easy. Putting a country or a region under a microscope is much more challenging and requires a great deal more knowledge. So unless you can match that knowledge with hard facts, other than those based on dubious internet sources, then I would say you don’t actually have much to contribute to this the topic and I would suggest you go back to playing counter-strike where you can kill as many “westerners” as you like…

hmmmmmm!!!!JIMBA. I think you fail to read what really happen in SOUTH OSSETIA. Georgia attack SOUTH OSSETIA in the first place and RUSSIA PEACE KEEPER FORCE have suffer 18 DEAD on August 08.How many SOUTH OSSETIA civilian casualty? You count for yourself.
hmmmmmm!!!! You better find those NEWSPAPER report or go to YOU TUBE and see for yourself. In the VIDEO.There you can learn the dead soldier of AMERICAN died together with their aggressor GEORGIAN soldier. Is the RUSSIAN was the AGGRESSOR or it is the AMERICAN AGGRESSOR INTRIQUE and SINISTER PLAN? Now the AMERICAN win the CHESS GAME with signing MISSILE AGREEMENT, BASE at POLAND.
hmmmmmm!!!! The HUMAN RIGHT ACTIVIST fail to PROTEST against the BIG BRO AMERICANS not only to ANNEX GEORGIA but POLAND was now INCLUDED in AMERICAN shopping list . PURPOSE is to prepare to THREATEN and HARASS the RUSSIAN.Maybe.....to INVADE RUSSIA.

@Jimba: You can use the "blockquote" HTML tag enclosed in > if you want to quote somebody else.

@jimba:
1. Obviously you didn’t know how well the world academics have praised China minority policy before you opened your mouth. I didn’t accuse you being a "moron", of course. As a matter of fact, it is quite understandable that morons or suckers can be easily fooled under such massive propaganda champion of the de-stabilization plan of US government and its allies in Central Asia. Following are just two URL links to the academic papers, seconds link is a collection of papers from an academic conference. As all the academic papers, there is a references list at the end of the paper that leads you to the further academic sources on the same topic. Anyway, you get plenty references if you are not a moron.

http://sociology.snu.ac.kr/isdpr/publication/journal/30-1/5Choi%20Woo-Gil.pdf
http://www.hku.hk/chinaed/newsletter/2003_1.PDF

If you are not used to read the academic papers, following two may fit you better:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE7DF1331F934A35751C0A964958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/IH16Ad01.html

2. “Culturally Accommodating”?! “Security Challenge”?! Where you get those ideas?! How you define these terms?! Confucianism?! Do you know how much about Confucianism and what is inside it?! The most essential part of Confucianism is respect to elderly or “filial piety”; do you think that such culture is not essential to Uyghurs or Muslims?! Exactly what you are talking about?! Yes, Uyghurs are Muslims, so do Huis! And, remember, Muslim is just a recent event of less than 1400 years. Uyghurs, Huis or Hans were on the surface of the earth long before that.

3. For God’s sake, don’t give me the Han Chinese population migration BS again! Do you know what is “Xinjinag Production and Construction Corps” (“XPCC”) for?! Do you know the tradition of Han Chinese XPCC has been in Xinjiang or other frontier long before Uyghurs migrated to Tarim Basin in 700 or 800AD?! If you are making living in this business, at least you should take the effort to study the history of this region, and you don’t need to be a Han Chinese or Uyghur Chinese to do that! Don’t play idiots like those “Free Tibet” crowd who even can’t find Tibet on the world map. Do you think that is a joke?! Think it again! That is what happening here!

4. Human rights: Obviously you didn’t know what is “human rights”, what is “terrorism”. Go find the definitions in a dictionary then you will have the respects for both of the terms. Does George Bush have human rights?! Does Bin Laden have human rights?! You tell me why Bin Laden could not enjoy the same human rights as George Bush has?!

I said not only “C’MON” in my previous comments, I also said “DON’T BE IGNORANT”. So please take that into your heart, too.

BTW, Don’t assume anyone on this forum is not “Westerner”.

to tctdh:

Are you in China? Do you know even a little about china minority?
Do you really think with your naive innocent brain that only t1bet and uyghurs feel be suppressed?

read more books, you'll find even mongol people korean people don't love ccp.
Their is a website expressed exiled mongol gov.
and if you go to Jilin province ,you'll find so many youth wear T-shirts with "3-korea-union" slogan on it.

3-korea = south korea, north korea and 。。。
So even shared with Confucism, how about that?
That makes han-korean relation better?

Here comes another problem, why some minority is rich in china and meanwhile some others are poor?
Inequality casuses unrest, don't you know?

China's minority policy is lack of flexibility.
Korean minority people has no religion. But muslims has, T1bet people has. but CCP hold his dirty Chinese-maxism tightly, refuse to give muslims and T1bet people enough religion freedom.

AND, more inside, the gov leader in T1bet and Xinjiang is just like landowners, they'd like to get political achievement via suppressing the muslims and T1bet people. Yum,Hu's political steps is from T1bet.

BTW: idiot as you, Jimba called you crusaders because you support suppressing muslims, and you called Jimba back “crusaders”。。。 what surprise me is that why ccp-lovers are so ignorant。

Do you know salah-al-din？

Fu

@ miloservic:

It seems that bashing China has become a fashion to the general public in addition to those who make livings in this business.

First, response to your question: “love CCP”?! You’d better tell me how many people in this world “love” their government? Do Americans love their government? Germans? British? It is understandable that no one likes his government, but you have to remember that: the economic growth that China has achieved in the past 30 years has never been achieved by any country in the world since the economic records have been kept. It’s too easily to say “I don’t like the government” even your living standards have been vastly improved in the past 30 years anyway.

I don’t understand your question about “3 Koreas”. The title of the article can be chosen by the author for the purpose of attracting more readers. I didn’t read the article that gives any hint that the Korean minority in China want to be the “Third Korea” as a political or economic entity. If you read the article carefully, you will find out that Korean minority in China are happy, very satisfied with their life. I hesitate to quote one or two sentences in the article for you. Why don’t you read the whole article before you make any comment on the article?! That article is a gold mine for those who want to find out what the other countries can learn from China’s minority policy.

Remember, the largest minority in China is not Uyghur or Tibetan. The populations of Zhuang, Manchu, Hui and Miao are all much larger than that of Uyghur or Tibetan. The largest Muslim minority population is Hui, not Uyghur.
And, most interestingly, the population of Mongol minority in China is much larger than the ethnic Mongols in Mongolia.

Again, my question is: Why this less than 10% of total minority (Uyghurs and Tibetans) are fiercely suppressed as accused by the Western media while the rest of 90% of minorities are living happily in China? Think about that, especially the academics all over the world are praising the China’s minority policy. Some one has to face the question honestly and academically.

Look around and ask yourself; which government in the West is willing to spend government money to have public TV stations, radio stations, newspapers and magazines in minority languages?! And to have the minority-only schools for their minorities?

Kids, you have to come to United States, Australia, Germany, France, … to see what exactly the “CULTURE GENOCIDE” is, LOLLL!

Chin, you know how China hates it when people try to interfere with their internal affairs... well, South Ossetia is within Georgian sovereign territory; therefore, Georgia cannot technically invade its own territory. Russia however can, and has. Speaking of hypocrisy...

Tctdh, oh my. Where do I start….

1. Thankyou for the links; the first paper was interesting. The Korean minority in China is sparingly discussed, but I must say that it was informative, albeit misplaced in your quest to prove me wrong. The following quote is taken from its conclusion:

…this [China’s Autonomy] policy has erected obstacles for Koreans wishing to enter the mainstream of Han Chinese society. The nature of Chinese Culture and policy has strong assimilative power. The concept of national autonomy as a foundation for Chinese minority policy is based on the assumption that every minority group consists of Chinese people (Zhonghua minzu).

The nature of Han society does indeed have strong assimilative power. But the Uighur have so far rejected it (by-and-large). And if what the author says is true, that “[t]he concept of national autonomy as a foundation for Chinese minority policy is based on the assumption that every minority group consists of Chinese people,” then were does the culturally dissimilar Uighur stand? Here lies the flaw in your discursive argument. Did you even read this journal?

As for the second journal… if that’s your opinion of scholarly work…. Then you need your head checked.

2. You have about three ideas in this one paragraph. Hard to follow. First bit, the terms used, eg cultural accommodation and security challenge, are pretty basic terms and if you applied yourself a little harder in school you might be familiar with them. Secondly…. Confucianism… what on earth are you trying to say…. Thirdly, the Han and Hui have been around a lot longer than Islam….. but that’s a bit of a no-brainer, as I’m sure that many of the Turko-Mongolians who comprise the Uighur of today have been around a lot longer than Confucianism.

3. Han in-migration is a proven strain. Xinjiang has only so much water, food, recourses etc… Because the CCP promote this influx- unlike other parts of China- the Uighur naturally resent Han migration.

The dang zheng jun zuzhi (or XPCC) institutional status is complex: Are they farmers or army? Who controls them, the Central Government or the Xinjiang Government (Obviously the former). This complexity leads to frequent conflicts with provincial authorities and local Uighur farmers. One academic noted:

“Obviously, the promotion of Han colonization is contentious in a multi-ethnic region. Many of the provincial administration are local Moslems, and in order to carry out a rapid build-up of Han to the region, Beijing has by-passed the provincial and local administrations by giving the corps (XPCC) greater autonomy and new initiatives”

Please, spare me your Han-chauvinistic historic revisionism….. “1 billion-trillion years of uninterrupted history…. dui dui dui… haole haole haloe…” *sign

Forth: I’ll trade you my extensive written work on Xinjiang, human rights and terrorism, for your wikipedia searched definitions any day.

As for being ignorant: If it were fatal, you’d be long dead.

please note the sarcasm for point 4...

spec you bastard,

look what you have done in your post to cripes.

His whole entourage of fuck din the head fascist agents begin to again spew out the drivel that has already been spewed out by them countless times before on this blog, same arguments, same potvaliant beijiu slime.

You must have hit a raw nerve. Because these children do not manifest unless their very reason for existence is challenged. So who are they really is a good question I suppose. Waht ar theyy as human beings is an even scarier question to ask. Ignoramuses, blinded bats in the sunlight, firstly. I mean its all propaganda with them and american inmdians and dead Iraqia and this and that. But really none of those arguments whether true or false justify what China has done and continues to do in Xinjiang. Basically youth get fed up with oppressin and racism and poverty and kill. Its that simple there is no ETIM so to speak, not like the CCP represents it.

The Communists have always needed enemies to justify their corrupt and inhumane regime. Look at Mao's words to prove that. Nothing has really changed, ask little old ladies in Beijing. THE LITANY COULD GO ON AD NAUSEUM.

Is there a possibility of moving on?. These above posts are tiring, repetitive and largely nonsensical, hypocritical and basically an orchestrated whitewash of China's culpability of gross human rights abuse by the same idiots who always get on here and spout the same crap. uhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

and by the way
@ spec

@chin

"dont you see, when rich yellow people (govts) kill civilians or handle them roughly, its called "war on terror" or "collateral damage"

"when Uyghur (people) kill people, its called, terrorism, genocide, ethnic cleansing, human rights violations, you name it.

where ever you go in the Chinese speaking world, you hear the echo of hypocrisy"

get real!

Bloggers, please archive these posts for the future as we can look back on them as evidence and examples of mindless Han racism and fascism.

15,000 terrorists on the streets in inner China

AFP
BEIJING (AFP) – China dispatched large numbers of soldiers and armed riot police to quell two major protests, officials and a rights group said Friday, in the latest public discontent to rock the communist nation.

In central Hunan province Thursday, 5,000 soldiers and armed police converged on a furious crowd of up to 10,000 demanding money back from an alleged fundraising fraud, the Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy said.

In a separate protest Thursday, up to 10,000 people gathered around a factory in the eastern coastal city of Ningbo after a young boy was injured apparently after being thrown out of a factory window, the centre said.

The organisation said in both cases violent clashes erupted between angry crowds and authorities, who carried out several arrests and left dozens injured. Local governments did not confirm this.

In Jishou city in Hunan, 50 people were injured in rioting and police arrested 20 people, the rights group said.

The Jishou government said in a statement on its website that armed police were drafted in to disperse the crowd, but failed to mention how many, adding no one was hurt.

Car and rail traffic, which was disrupted during the protests, had returned to normal by Friday, it said.

@Jimba:

I am not sure you are really a “moron” as you suggested in the previous comment or you are just pretending you are an idiot. You claimed you have “extensive written work on Xinjiang, human rights and terrorism.” Oh, Boy-O-Boy, we have a guy who admitted his live hood is in this kind of business, so we shouldn’t worry that you won’t keep us entertained on this forum, HeHeHe!

According to the data provided by the Tibet Government-in-Exile in June, 2007 that there are over 80 Tibetan “associations” and over 300 Tibetan “support groups” around the world. US government and its CIA front organizations have pumped about $50 million each year into the “FREE TIBET” business. You probably know something in this “East Turkistan” business even you are just a R. Would you share with us on this forum so all of us can open our eyes to see exactly what is behind this “East Turkistan” business.

Don’t tell me you are the RM, we all knew RM is just getting the money and do nothing else. You are definitely not the DA because you know too little about Xinjiang or Uyghur. That’s OK, I still don’t mind to teach a R how to read the academic paper so he can put the food on the table to feed his wife and kids. But remember, you owe me!

The First Paper: As any academic paper, you have to know the purpose in the author’s mind when he presents the paper. For this case, it’s very simple. The author said it clearly “Koreans in China, … are beginning to realize their identity in Chinese society and to perceive their differences from Koreans on the Korean peninsula and abroad.” And “This study is a descriptive research of the Korean minority on the change of their identity, and their position and role.” The author also indicated that:

“The population growth rate of Koreans is the lowest among all the 56 nationalities in China, including the Han majority. Their illiteracy rate is the lowest and their college attendance rate is the highest”

Very impressive! Two “lowest’s” and one “highest”! You have to find out WHY this happened only to the Korean minority?! Why the same thing could not happen to the Uyghurs. The key words you have to notice are:

“BIRTH RATE”
“ILLITERRACY RATE”, and
“COLLEGE ATTENDANCE RATE”

If you are not fooling around as a R, then you should already found out how high the numbers are for Uyghurs’ birth rate and illiteracy rate, and low the number is for the college attendance rate.

How you find it out?! Instead of just sitting there and ask “Maybe you’d like to provide us with some links, I would be interested to read such literature” as you said in your previous comment and “Thank you for the links; the first paper was interesting….” in your latest comment on this forum, you should do the dirty work yourself to find it out. If you are really making a living as a R in this business as you claimed, then, this is YOUR JOB! My Goodness, now I understand why these “Free Tibet” business jerks couldn’t find the Tibet on the world map. No wonder!

WORDS GAME: you don’t need to play the words game if you don’t know the answer. Since I understand that you are just a R in this business, I will make easy for you. Tell me is whether there is “cultural accommodation” in the following cases and why you think so:

Hawaii and American
Rebels and Janjaweed in Darfur, Sudan
Unionist and Nationalist in North Ireland

Or, if you prefer to stay in the China minority issue, then:

Zhuang and Han
Manchu and Han
Uyghur and Hui

RESOURCE STRAIN: Boy, this is really a joke, I don’t need to argue with you about this. BTW, no offence but, how old are you?! Have you finish college? I really didn’t know that they need people so badly to hire the person like you. What happened?! Because of the Olympic time?! But still …. Boy-o-Boy!

Does this have anything to with the forthcoming astronautic activity?

kids, want to be a reporter and a CIA agent, and get double pays at the same time?!

CIA recruits journalists

Google "CIA recuits journalists"

or

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FA0711FC385C12728DDDAF0994DC405B8084F1D3

Issue and Debate C.I.A.'s Recruitment of Journalists for Covert Operations; The Background Against Use of Journalists For Use of Journalists The Outlook

The sensitive issue of the use of journalists as intelligence agents flared up again last week when Adm. Stansfield M. Turner, the Director of Central Intelligence, said at a convention of newspaper editors that he "would not hesitate" to recruit a journalist for a covert operation "when it is vitally important to the nation."

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F40E17FA3D5A167493C5AB1789D95F438785F9

C.I.A. Established Many Links To Journalists in U.S. and Abroad; C.I.A.'s Numerous Links With Journalists Differed Widely in Degree and Value

http://www.cpj.org/news/2002/USA02may02na.html

IN U.S. SENATE TESTIMONY,
CPJ CALLS FOR U.S. BAN ON RECRUITING JOURNALISTS AS SPIES

Washington, D.C., May 2, 2002—In Senate testimony today, a CPJ representative argued that the U.S. government should never recruit journalists as spies, and that U.S. intelligence operatives should never pose as journalists.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0518/p06s02-woeu.html?s=widep

German 'CIA' used reporters as informants

tctdh, I applaud you for your persistence, but arguing with you is pointless. You do not want to exchange ideas, you simply want to give me your dogmatic views on minority issues that you've derived by reading all of one journal and one news blog. Not very scholarly I'm afraid. As for your personal attacks, thank you for the laugh; although I do find your writing style quite cryptic - generally hard to read.

So forgive me if I no longer reply to your rants. It's not because I think they're compelling, on the contrary, I just don't want to waste my time with the obvious dunce on this forum.

@ jimba:

We understand you don't want to keep us entertained any longer when you perceived you have been pushed into the corner. That's human nature, we understand.

But I do hope you can take it easy. After all, it is just a job. You can always find a regular normal job, can't you?!

How about watching a video, let all of us get a good laugh:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBwqMo4Dt-I

Enjoy!

@jimba:

Sorry, I missed this. Did you say "cryptic, hard to read"? I thought you are in this business. It seems you really don't know too much, do you?! "RM" is "Rain Maker", "DA" is ... HeHeHe, you figure it out if you really in this business. I don't want to spoil other people's mood on this forum.

Take my advice, go find other job. It will be good for you.

I have enough fun here, I am going to quit.

Behave, kids! or I will be back in no time.

BTW, Are you connected with Mike?! same person? or it's just a computer error?!

to tctdh ：

What are you talking about?
character game at first, then compared to western gov.

I travelled jilin province, I see the 3-korea-union T-shirt in my eyes. As you said korea people has a higher level of life, but they still has political requests.
can you understand this? I mean no matter how the minority's life level, they always have political request, that's about some culture things, religion things etc.

this is a potential resist against the central-power government. Harder suppressed, more dangerous unrest.

I don't care what your "article" said how happy koreas are, I believe what I've seen.
You can go to korean region have a look too.

The 2nd question, muslims.
Hui is also being suppressed, I now live in the west of china, Hui-people is as much as han.
I know what HUI people think, and how their requests are denied.

Additionally, your logic is suck.
As you mean, the western gov do bad to minority,so China should do bad to muslims.
What I can only see, is african-american now has a much better social-status after Dr. king。

back to the start, you admit that nobody truely love their gov. Ok,you are right.
In china, Han hate ccp too.
Uygurs,T1beten hui,mongol,korea... have the right to do the same thing. Just their way of "hate" is different.

btw: don't call me "kid", I'm much older than you think,.may be older than your farther.

Jimba is a good man.

hmmmmm!!!!JIMBA,When TIBETIAN and XINJIANGNIS are singing their own PROTEST song against CHINA. The HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST join in and sing with them in BEIJING out of TUNE.

hmmmmm!!!! If the SOUTH OSSENTIAN singing their own PROTEST song and was ATTACK and MURDER by the GEORGIAN MILITARY and supported by BIG BRO AMERICAN soldier. the HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST say its within the GEORGIAN SOVEREIGN TERRITORY.

hmmmmm!!!! Why BIG BRO AMERICAN soldier JOIN in with the GEORGIAN MILITARY to ATTACK and KILL the POOR and WEAK people of SOUTH OSSETIAN? Why BIG BRO AMERICAN want the MISSILE BASE in POLAND? I tell you why. The BIG BRO AMERICAN wanted more ALLIED in EUROPE for the preparation to INVADE RUSSIA. Then to SPLIT CONQUER ANNEXED all the EUROPEAN NATION step by step.

hmmmmm!!!! Do not forget that TIBET and XINJIANG are under CHINA SOVEREIGN TERRITORY. RIGHT?

hmmmmm!!!! Lets us go back to OSAMA BIN LADEN. The BIG BRO AMERICAN use him to FIGHT the RUSSIAN in AFHANISTAN. After BIG BRO AMERICAN attain his AMBITIOUS GOAL.OSAMA BIN LADEN was proclaim by the BIG BRO AMERICAN as TERRORIST. Isnt it FUNNY?

hmmmmm!!!! Lets go back to IRAQ. BIG BRO AMERICAN say that IRAQ have MASS WEAPONS of DESTRUCTION. The BIG BRO AMERICAN use this REASON to INVADE IRAQ. Did the BIG BRO AMERICAN found the MASS WEAPONS of DESTRUCTION????? Everybody are not STUPID enought to BELIEVE. Because BIG BRO AMERICAN main purpose is to POSSESS the OIL RICH of IRAQ.

hmmmmm!!!! JIMBA. If one day, The RED INDIAN say, You WHITE FAKE AMERICAN go back to EUROPE where you belong. Will the PRODUCER DIRECTOR of the HUMANS RIGHT ORGANISATION send you(HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST) to sing song for the RED INDIAN?

hmmmmm!!!! Do not forget that RUSSIA CHINA and those POOR and WEAK NATION NEVER NEVER NEVER HIRE you or the HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST to SING SONG what we all hear(HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATION).

hmmmmm!!!! Its much better to hear the CARPENTER sing the music SING A SONG than to hear you HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST singing OUT of TUNES.

Chin, human rights activists are not one unified movement like you suggest. Indeed, not all activists sing the same song, nor do many support independence of Tibet or Xinjiang. Personally, I believe independence would be economically disastrous for the Xinjiang minorities, and create ethnic rivalries that would put human rights at greater risk. Greater autonomy, more expansive religious freedoms, and less assimilationist policies would be a great result for human rights in Xinjiang. I don't believe this is greedy at all? Hmmmm, something to ponder….

Thank you for the nice words Milo. It’s water of a ducks back though. I simply ignore naughty children, and I extend the same approach to this funny creature.

Well, time for me to go and watch a couple of James Bond dvds.

@miloservic:

What you are talking about?! 3 Kors T-Shirt?
How about post a picture let us see!
Dalai Lama said "Telling lies is against human nature," you have to keep that in mind!
Back up whatever you said here, kiddo, OR just find a dark room to masturbate yoiurself there!

@Jimba:
You are absolutely right, Jimaba! That looks like you ARE in this business after all! Good job, kiddo! So stop playing dummy here!
It's not just "Human Rights", baby! Everything else is not one unified mess either.

Why not you feed us some insideful look behind the mess of "East Turkistan" or "Free Tibet"?!
HeHeHe! Don't forget to tell us the beauty of this mess is: there is only one string to pull all of these togathers!
C'mon! kiddo, James Bond DVds?! What a trash! You do want to play the real thing, don't you?!
James Bond DVDs???! SH*T! Exactly how old are you??? Damned it!!!
No wonder theses "Free Tibet" idiots can't find the Tibet on the world map! God damned you!

Bloody hands behind ET?!

Have anyone watched that trilogy on YT yet?!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Izs1ULj3GCs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_GyPXYsTKc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaDo4SrrlpQ

And, the bloody hands behind Georgia conflict:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ3D4_txIEM

hmmmmmmm!!!! JIMBA. Please dont lose your temper by calling TCTDH as a OBVIOUS DUNCE.

hmmmmmmm!!!! JIMBA. Please dont lose your senses by calling me NAUGHTY CHILDREN and FUNNY CREATURE.

hmmmmmmm!!!! JIMBA. You can say THANK YOU to ANYONE who that does not contradict your VIEW WORD and OPINION. Surely of course because they are walking in the WRONG direction just like YOU.

hmmmmmmm!!!! JIMBA.Why not be specific enought to understand the WORLD are now UNSAFE and DOOMDAY are near just because of YOU and the HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST.

hmmmmmmm!!!! I LOVE MY COUNTRY AND I LOVE AND OBEY THE LAW OF MY MOTHERLAND CHINA. As for you. You can continue to SING out of TUNE SONG against my Country CHINA. But I will continue to DEFEND THE RIGHT OF MY COUNTRY CHINA. Rest Assure that I will not INSULT you as a SO and SO. Go to CHINA and ENJOJ tha WARM FRIENDSHIP of my MOTHERLAND and my COMPATRIOT. But DONT DONT DONT break the LAW of CHINA.

@chin:
"I LOVE MY COUNTRY AND I LOVE AND OBEY THE LAW OF MY MOTHERLAND CHINA."
kiddo! the whole problem is there is little "LAW and ORDER" in China, that's WHY you have these kind of things happening in China! I really don't understand you Chinese!

LOOK! What is happening in the most democractic and free country such as USA:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/30/AR2006113000912.html

********
"A record 7 million people -- one in every 32 U.S. adults -- were behind bars, on probation or on parole by the end of last year, a Justice Department report released yesterday shows."
********

According to 2007 report of the "International Centre for Prison Studies," King's College of London; US has the highest prison population in terms of both absolute number and the ratio of total population. US has 2.19 million people in prison, China 1.55 million and Russia 0.87 million. In terms of total population ratio, US has put 738 in every 100,000 of national population in prison, Russia 611, England 148, Spain 145, Netherlands 128, China 118, Austria 105, Italy 104, Germany 95, ...

What a shame, China! The numbers of prison population in China is even less than that in UK, Spain, Netherlands!!! No wonder riots happened in Tibet!!! You got lots things to learn from the ol-n-good USA!

Kiddo! You have to put everything you don't like in JAIL in order to maintain your DEMOCARCY and FREEDOM!

@jimba, milo, and anyone else on this board (there are not too many people on this blog! Is this bold got "2007 china BLOG Award"?)

All the CHINA needs is "LAW & ORDER"!

You have to see how much "LAW & ORDER" in the most DEMOCRATIC and FREE USA in order to know how far China is behind!

********
"A record 7 million people -- one in every 32 U.S. adults -- were behind bars, on probation or on parole by the end of last year, a Justice Department report released yesterday shows."
********

Want a link, Jimbby?! Here is your free lunch again! Remember, YOU OWE ME!!!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/30/AR2006113000912.html

Thank you TCTDH. You are absolutely RIGHT. I accept your JUDGEMENT that My Country CHINA should LEARN to be STRICT ENOUGHT and IMPLEMENT the LAW to place those LAWLESS ELEMENT and LOCK them in JAIL. Or EXECUTE THEM if they committed the HEINOUS CRIME.

hmmmmm!!!! hay JIMBA the HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST. Where are you? come and join us. Please DONT GET MAD.

hmmmmm!!!! Look at ME. I accept the JUDGEMENT of TCTDH. Its just like in COLLEGE day when my PROFESSOR told us to ARGUE, DEFEND, SUGGEST thru PEN or ORAL EXPRESSION.

hmmmmm!!!! Hope you come out again to WRITE your POINT OF VIEW. Its not only INTERESTING,EXCITING but to UNDERSTAND one another how we feel and how to LEARN with one another FEELING and KNOWLEDGE.

hmmmmm!!!! Look at TCTDH. HE/SHE send HIS/HER free LUNCH for you instead for me.

hmmmmm!!!! Maybe I am not so LUCKY than you. I am going out now to buy and eat PEKING DUCK. Hope you come out with your PEN and continue to express yourself.

hmmmmm!!!! TCTDH. Hope you buy me for free delicious foods.

Chin, good for you! Please do protect your rights!!!!! They're written in the Chinese Constitution. For example:

Freedom of Religion.
The constitution provides citizens the right to choose or not to choose to practice a faith. But by banning students from worship for instance, this right is essentially cut in half: Citizens have less of a right to choose to worship. It is fair to say that the CCP is afraid that by permitting religious freedom it may lead to nationalities with different religious beliefs, such as in Xinjiang, demanding separation.

Finding an appropriate balance between sovereign interests and ‘protection of religious freedoms’ is a difficult question, but one that needs to be addressed (seriously) if ethnic tensions are to decrease and stability assured. A return to the reform period of the 1980s would be a good start.

Political Rights
Your right to participate in the organisation and administration of the state and society, i.e. the right to stand for election.

Your “rights” to express your views on the political life of the state, including freedom of speech, of press, of assembly, of association and of procession and demonstration is pretty much non-existent. For instance, the two old ladies who have been sent to re-education camp afer applying to protest against having their homes taken away in Beijing only emphasises this point. You want to protect your Mother Country China, well, maybe start by protecting your grandmothers.

You spoke of acknowledging the need for increased “law and order”. The Chinese Constitution, your rights, are not protected by law. Infact, national law is interpreted according to the will of the Chinese Communist Government. Unfortunately, the organisation in charge of creating law and interpreting it (NPCSC), have no real authority to do so, unless they get approval from the CCP. So laws designed to protect citizen’s rights are often not approved. Indeed, increased law would protect those rights.

Ultimately, the biggest challenge you face in protecting your rights is that your leadership, the CCP, cannot be challenged freely. Those who do are met with draconian “order” policies that are often illegal and in violation of your “rights”.

Mate, if you can’t see this, then I am more than happy to bring this to your attention. I have nothing against China, the land, its people. Infact, I love the place and have many many good friends there. I do have an axe to grind against your government though. To be sure, no government is prefect, and it would be churlish not to recognise the many things it has done for the Chinese people, but we can’t measure everything in economic terms. The human factor has been largely ignored and in human rights there has not been much improvement since Deng’s opening up policies; human rights have actually declined since the 1980s.

So, again I say to you: Good on you for defending your country! This is your right, and like all your other rights they should be defended. Jia you!

Eighty-six percent of Chinese are satisfied with the workings of govenment

As for being a CIA agent... are taking the piss or what? What a joke.

I don't know what makes you guys soooo ignorant, but it works; however, Keep talking, the both of you, someday you'll say something intelligent! Geez, what a pair of half-wits.

Ha, now I must go and do some Spy business... pathetic.

hmmmmm!!!! JIMBA. Am happy to see you come back again. Oh by the way. Its SUNDAY. Me will write again after I date my PRETTY SWEETHEART. She have the RIGHTS to command me to be with her every time she WANTED. ESPECIALLY SUNDAY. And to tell you the TRUTH. I lost my RIGHTS since SHE LOVES ME.She kept ORDERING me since the day I met her. HEHE. Thats what my PRETTY SWEETHEART say..... LOVE CONSTITUTION. If she say 1 is equal 2. I will politely obey and reply...YES SWEETHEART. Everything SHE say it. I obey 100 PERCENT.

Jimba baby:

You know you don't have to masturbate yourself online and on this forum. Why don't you find a dark place so no one can see you.

BTW, don't forget to bring a photo of George Bush, that will help you to come faster!

HaHaha! Hehehe! SheSheShe! LOLLLL!

What a retarded idiot!

Oh-Oh! chin has just said the most scaring thing to Jimba's American Daddy. Following is the quote:

"She have the RIGHTS to command me to be with her every time she WANTED. ... I lost my RIGHTS since SHE LOVES ME.She kept ORDERING me since the day I met her. HEHE. Thats what my PRETTY SWEETHEART say..... LOVE CONSTITUTION. If she say 1 is equal 2. I will politely obey and reply...YES SWEETHEART. Everything SHE say it. I obey 100 PERCENT."

Ladies and Gentlemen:

This is HOW China has achieved the economic growth in the past 30 years that no country in this word has ever achieved!

This is also WHY George Bush is so scared, he immediately runs into the dark place and pees in his pants!

Remember, LOVE CONSTITUTION saves the world from the destruction from US evil. LOVE CONSTITUTION brings the HOPE to all the mankind!

LOVE CONSTITUTION is LOVE and HOPE for all the human being!

What a child... ha!

tctdh: must you talk about "masturbation"? By all means call me names to hide your poor skills at discussion, but do try and refrain from using foul language. I know you are nongmin, but for everyone's sake please try and be a little more civil. It looks bad on you. ;)

Jimba baby:

You are even not at the door yet! I don't understand why you are doing this?! for what? just make yourself feeling good?! C'mon, you can do that with a picture of George Bush in the dark so no body can see you. You don't have to do this online.

kiddo, did you watch the YouTube videos that I listed there. Go watch it! They are much heathier than a nude picture of George Bush. Go watch it! especially the "Bloody Hands" trilogy! You come back tell me what you have learnt from that.

You are not Mike! Mike is much better than you. You are just a kid with coo-coo head, that's all!

tctdh: I am not American and if you have ever bothered to read my posts you will find that I am quite anti-Bush. So, what on earth are you trying to prove by your boring personal (ad hominem) attacks?

What do you want to achieve here? Stop behaving like a 12 year old, stop talking about "masturbation" you rude child, and start behaving like someone who claims he is at a higher level of maturity and intelligence.

You say you don't like westerners imposing their liberal democratic views, right? So,
Maybe you would like to argue this by utilising the Asian Values debate; or maybe you could use the ‘communitarian versus neo-liberal’ approach to argue that the West’s version of human rights is neither the best, nor the only approach in improving minority rights? What about finding some more journal articles? Anything, but please stop this silly, childish tit-for-tat squabble. An olive-branch is extended, if you are the superior man you claim to be, then you will accept it.

You’re right, I am not Michael, and by what standards you measure people I don’t know. But I also have respect for Michael and I am not pleased to see his blog get degraded this way.

Chill.

Jimba vs tctdh.

Result: Jimba wins by TKO (Total Knock Out).

China warns of ban on mass prayers during Ramadan

Authorities in China’s Muslim-populated far northwest are seeking to prevent mass prayers and the distribution of religious material as part of a security crackdown for Ramadan, government notices said.

A series of attacks on police in Xinjiang around last month’s Beijing Olympic Games left more than 20 officers and security guards dead, and at least as many attackers killed or arrested, in the biggest unrest there in years.

As the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan began, local governments this week issued orders to clamp down on security in the region and stop its ethnic Muslim Uighur population from using the holy month to foment further unrest.

“Faced with recent violent and disruptive activities by religious extremists, separatists and terrorists, we must … step up ideological education of religious leaders and followers,” a notice posted on Xinjiang’s Zhaosu County Web site said.

The county government prohibited government officials, Communist Party members, teachers and students from observing Ramadan, while warning that “any person caught forcing another to observe Ramadan” would be punished.

“We must warn and stop religious believers from organizing and planning large scale prayer groups and prevent any large crowd incidents that could harm social stability,” said a notice on the Xinhe County Web site.

In Shaya County, patrols were stepped up around mosques and leading officials were urged to remain vigilant around the clock for any incidents that could result in social instability.

“The handing out of religious propaganda in public places by any work unit or individual is banned,” the Shaya government said.

“We must strictly prohibit the playing of any audio-visual tapes, loud speaker announcements and religious drum rituals that could disrupt the Ramadan festival,” it said.

Xinjiang is a vast desert region bordering Central Asia that is home to 8.3 million Uighurs, many of whom say they have suffered decades of political and religious repression under Chinese rule.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2008/09/06/2003422426

hmmmmm!!!! JIMNBA. You lost your HEAD again and again. MASTURBATION is not a BAD WORD. TCTDH is just advicing YOU.

hmmmmm!!!! According to MEDICAL RESEARCH. MASTURBATION can prevent PROSTATE CANCER.

hmmmmm!!!! We are all here now in the restaurant for dinner. And my SWEETHEART just keep laughting. SHE say if you are a GAY. Then its no need for YOU to MASTERBATING. HEHE. You JIMBA just go and SING SONG with your HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST.

Hmmmmmm, my sweet heart is actually a six foot man. Hmmmm, Jimba, maybe you would like to join my boyfreind and I for a threesome... hmmmmmm

Me and tcthd are actually the same person hmmmmm I love cock.

hmmmmmmm!!!! JIMBA.....I am just WONDERLING how and why YOU and your HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST GAYS HATE CHINA and the CHINESE people deeply in your HEART. It seem that, YOU GAYS want to BEHEAD our HEAD.

hmmmmmmm!!!! JIMBA. CHINA have 36 ETHNIC GROUP. MAINLAND CHINA have more than 1.3 Billion CHINESE. TAIWAN have more the 20 Million CHINESE. OVERSEA have more than 30 Million CHINESES.

hmmmmmmm!!!! JIMBA. You can see what TRANSPIRE at the BEIJING XXIX OLYMPIAD. The WATER CUBE was CONTRIBUTED and DONATED by the CHINESE living in TAIWAN and OVERSEAS. Now I tell you that we CHINESE know how to LOVE RESPECT and give HONOR to our MOTHERLAND CHINA.

hmmmmmmm!!!! JIMBA............
Maybe YOU was BORN as a LONER and NOBODY.
Perhaps YOU was BORN as a LOSER with IMPOTENCY.
Thats why you CRITICISE CHINA very DEEPLY with HATRED.

hmmmmmmm!!!! JIMBA. Thats ok for us CHINESE if YOU and the HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST GAY SING SONG againts our COUNTRY. Anyway, We consider YOU and HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST as a GAY..... Doing nothing but DISTURBING WORLD PEACE and HARMONY.

hmmmmmm!!!! Just like I figure it out, why you JIMBA hate the word MASTERBATION. Because you are a GAY who love to suck COCK. hehehe You GAYS really really know how to SING SONG and now using my NAME. My SWEETHEART just LAUGHTING at your STUPIDITY by LEAKING your own SECRET BEHAVIOR and CHARACTERISTIC of a GAY.......WHO LOVE SUCKING COCK.

Hi Chin (tctdh), I am flattered that you would discuss me with your gf (over dinner too). But gee whiz, it doesn't sound like your dinner conversation is very romantic or very interesting. Get a life!

You now sound a bit distressed. Maybe you would like to eplain to me what I have said between our last civil conversation and now that has angered you so much?

Maybe you would like to re-read my post:

Posted by: Jimba at September 7, 2008 07:38 AM

(I have never said anything hateful against China or Chinese... so I am a bit confused? Is it you who infact hates all Xifenren?)

You're personal attacks are beginning to sound very similar to tctdh's. I am suspect. But at the end of the day, people only do so when they feel threatened/ intimidated/ insecure :)

Do you really think your silly comments offend me? All it does is confirm your own insecurities and proves that you have nother very interesting to say. But thanks for the concern. You on the other hand might wanna work on your dinner conversation there sport because talking about your endeavours on internet blogs with your "sweet heart" is not topics for champions, nor do it impress women. A loner you might find yourself very soon ;)

Chin (tctdh)two can play at that game. But I won't. Enough said. Game, set, match.

hmmmmmmm!!!! JIMBA. Why you posted my NAME again and again. My name belong to my SWEETHEART not belong to a GAY like you. hehehe.
Please use your own NAME. JIMBA is a pretty good name for all the MACHO GOOD LOOKING BACHELOR CHINAMAN. hehe.

@jimaba:

Have I ever said that you are an American? I didn't! Don't put words in my mouth, kiddo!

But that doesn't mean you don't have American Daddies. Have you clicked the link that I provided here before?! You have it again here (REMEMBER, YOU OWE ME AGAIN!):

"British plan to build training camp for Taliban fighters in Afghanistan"

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/revealed-british-plan-to-build-training-camp-for-taliban-fighters-in-afghanistan-777671.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1577570/Afghans-claims-UK-planned-to-train-ex-Taliban.html

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2008%5C02%5C05%5Cstory_5-2-2008_pg1_10

You tell me how these Taliban terrorists, or "freedom fighters" as you called it, have British daddies?!

I must apologize if I made any mistake because, it seems, you have both American and British daddies. Is that right?! Don't tell me you have a nude picture of Queen Elizabeth, too!

whoever owns this site should close it down!

@andrea:

Is the game of "freedom of speech" over just because you don't like it anymore? We haven't started it yet, pal!

Can anyone find more information about what's happening to the 450 "freedom fighters" or "democracy activists" that US State Secretary Condleezza Rice had ordered the airlift from Kyrgyzstan to Romania in July 2005? That caused the Uzbekistan to announce the eviction of US from its Karsgi-Khanabad? After 3 years of training in Romania, they probably should be back in central Asia now?

AND ALSO, Does anyone know what exactly happening to Bin Laden now?! With all the high tech military technology, it is difficult to believe that US still can not capture Bin laden in the past nine years. Instead of capturing Bin Laden, American CIA may have a new long term plan for his old faithful partner Bin Laden to de-stabilize the Central Asia. Washington Post reported that CIA decided to disband the unit to hunt for Bin Laden in late 2005.

BTW, for those who is still not aware, Bin Laden was trained by American CIA as the "Freedom Fighter" to fight Russia in 80's. More information just Google "Bin Laden CIA"

Now I have been educated.

According to the master minds: tctdh and chin, all Human rights activity is a plot to divide their motherland by Satan. oh give me a break. Poor cHina is subject agin to the intrigue of conquerors; but thats fine for China to play expansionist colonial games in Xinjiang and further afield in Central Asia.

You would think that paid mouthpieces such as tctdh and chin would do better spending their time trying to learn to write English correctly so as thier perverse and twisted views at least would make sense to the readers of this anglophone blog.

Hats of to Jimba for taking the time deciphering their frantic and maniacal jibberish. Seriously, they are a joke. Write your doctorate jimba and leave these freaks alone. These arguments have all been splayed out here before, time and again. It is because of animals like thee the Uyghur need independence. This is what we learn from these postings.

Michael in days gone by would cut such useless interface; but, note the pattern: criticize certain viewpoints and these same clowns come from behind their bamboo curtains and rain down crap. Its humourous to the maximum degree mainly because the average person cannot understand their sentences. Ive sampled them and tested on a few people. What the fa, does that mean ? is the usual response. I agree, Tripe, dog's dirt in content and best left alone. But for our amusement and for the record we can say these type of idiots are alive and well in China. Thus China has no real hope in the international family of nations until it better educate its half educated "cripes" 'xiao mao' clique and all other self appointed prophets of China's immaculate conception and spotless record of human rights.

Notice cripes' dissapearance from this thread? Note the plagiarism of the idea that Human Rights activists are brainwashed. These idiots dont have an original thought among them. They are little tossers siting in front of the propaganda machine enjoying mutual masturbation out of fear the big boy (chief dunce) will hit them with a stick. Cower, cower, cringe, cringe- be afraid mindless Han. Confucius says so. Haaaaaa haaaa. Hey that feels good cripes says chin, real good, please do it again, big boy says its fine. tctdh got stiffy too, oooh this is good watching the screen, we dont have to think and we can rant and rave and yell playing with our penises. LONG LIVE CHINA , LONG, LIVE CHINA. KILL KILL KILL, TAKE, TAKE, TAKE.

As I said, the real value of this stuff is educational in the sense it informs us that such moronic types are alive and well in China or in the greater Chinese cultural zone: Hong kong, Singapore. Whew its gonna be good when Taiwan finally takes over the mother land again.

The inverted admission of guilt always goes like this remember: You westerners did it so can we. In fact we are doing it now so you cannot criticize us because great grandfather whiteman did it two centuries ago to red indians and maoris, etc, etc ad nauseum. Demented reasoning, genocidal reasoning. Sickening. Two centuries behind the west in reality. Medievalism rules.

Down with American imperialism. Down with Chinese fascism. Down with human rights abuse and official murder in Xinjiang and Tibet. Long live freedom.

re:

"AND ALSO, Does anyone know what exactly happening to Bin Laden now?! With all the high tech military technology, it is difficult to believe that US still can not capture Bin laden in the past nine years."

Taliban exist by using Chinese weaponry - Oh by the way last I heard Bin laden was alive and well in Zhong hai nan employed as an advisor on how to crush the Uyghur terrorists. Thats formidable as the Israeli and Pakistani secret service has long advised the CCP on that same issue. Man those Uyghur knife yielders certainly are persistent against the biggest army in the world and their terrorist advisors. Damn!

hmmmmmm!!!! SPEC another SATAN. Oh GOD!!!! JIMBA GAY and now its SPEC GAY. Hi SPEC. I conceded that my ENGLISH are not as good as you. But can you write MANDARINE as good as me?

hmmmmmmm!!!! SPEC. You look so CHILDISH to me. Its HUMAN NATURE that as a CHINESE I have the RIGHTS to defend my COUNTRY. CHINA belong to ALL CHINESE not you people I call GAYS. Just SING SONG out of TUNES.

hmmmmmmm1111 If I say your MOTHER is a BITCH. WHAT DO YOU FEEL INSIDE YOUR HEART? Anyway you are a GAY that have 2 DADDY and 1 MOMMY. Your answer will be YES OF COURSE. I got 2 DADDY and 1 MOMMY. You really is a UNCIVILIZE SON OF A BITCH.

Its Mandarin not mandarine.

Idiot, imbecile. If you had read my post it mentions this is an anglophone blog. Do you know what that word means? Obviously not. It is not in Chinese it is in English. If you want to use mandarin you use a mandarin speaking /writing blog. But, to inform your ignorance again, this is an anglohone blog. Make sense now? E...N...G..L...I..S...H,

thats right not 'Engerlisha'. OK, lesson one little boy.

Now weird little pig,

my mandarin I'd say is basic but a notch higher than your English, that is why I dont use it - its not good enough to express what I want to say-like your bastardized English but only better.

You revert to gutter language when you feel defeated and maniacally controlled which is quite indicative of your class, education, and socio-economic status - basically buddy you are some loser who should have stayed cleaning out garbage instead of using the rewards the police gave you for spying on your fellow countrymen to advance your way into middle school. You should have studied a while longer is all I can say. Anyway as I previously posted you are tolerable if only as an amusement.

To answer your questions how do I feel. Umm, Im an orphan so I feel fine. You need look back over past posts on this blog to see all of your argumetns have already been discussed, defeated and the commentators moved on. Do you know what boringv means? Tahts B...O...R...I...N...G. Worse than you types, using worse gutter language have also been handled and dealt with on this blog - out to the trash heap. Passe!

BTW, re: defend your country. Your fellow countrymen, many of them will tell you all you do is give your country a bad name. What you are really trying to do is defend your country's human rights abuses, thats a different thing. Is this what you are paid for?

I met quite a few middle aged women who were good in bed when I was last in China, were any of them your mother perchance? Hmmmmmmm...

China guilty of genocidal support in Darfur. Dont forget!

from Australian Financial Review

Since 2003 an estimated 400,000 people have died as a result of the campaign of ethnic cleansing being waged against the people of the Darfur region of Sudan by the military regime of General Omar al-Bashir. As many as 2.5 million people have been made into refugees. The so-called Janjaweed militia, armed and trained by the Sudanese army, has waged a campaign of murder, torture, rape and plunder across the Darfur region, often openly assisted the army and air force.

The groups under attack in Darfur – mainly the Fur, Zaghawa, and Massaleit peoples – are Sunni Muslims, just like those running the regime in Khartoum, but they are ethnically African rather than Arab. Sudan has always been a frontier zone between the Arab and African worlds – the word “Sudan” means “land of the Blacks” in Arabic. Encouraged by pan-Arabist and Islamist ideologists from Egypt and Libya, the Bashir regime, which seized power from an elected government in 1989, has sought to gain popular support from the Arab majority by launching an ethnic war against the African minorities.

Efforts by the African Union and the United Nations either to negotiate an end to the conflict or to put an international peacekeeping force into Sudan have been consistently thwarted by the Sudanese regime. Sudan has tried to paint the issue as one of Sudanese sovereignty versus interfering westerners. Its sadly has been supported by its fellow members of the Arab League. It was pleasing last month to see the African Union reject Bashir’s bid to be elected as the organisation’s president for 2007.

Sudan’s main ally, however, has been China, which has consistently blocked efforts at the UN to have Sudan’s actions classed as genocide, to have effective sanctions put in place, or to have a peacekeeping force with the power to protect the people of Darfur put into Sudan. At first glance, this may seem surprising. What does China care about a squalid ethnic conflict in central Africa? Why is one of the worlds greatest powers indifferent to the genocides in Darfur and the effect on China’s reputation of its sponsorship of Khartoum.

The answer is partly economic self-interest, and partly geopolitics. Sudan’s economy has been a disaster for decades, mainly as a result of mismanagement by successive military regimes. In the 1990s it was the world’s largest debtor to the World Bank and the IMF. But since 2000 major oil discoveries have been made in south and central Sudan. Most major oil companies regard the country as too unstable for investment, but the gap has been filled by China’s state-owned oil giant CNPC, along with companies from Canada and Malaysia.

Today oil is Sudan’s major export, indeed its only major export, and 80% of its oil exports go to China – currently worth more than $US2 billion a year. China is also investing millions in infrastructure, including the pipeline from the oilfields to the tanker terminal at Port Sudan. Chinese labourers are building roads and airfields in the oil-producing regions. Some of these airfields are used by the Sudanese air force to launch air attacks on undefended villages in Darfur.

This oil bonanza for Sudan pays not only for vital food imports, but also for new Chinese military hardware including tanks, fighters, bombers, helicopters, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. China is Sudan’s largest supplier of arms. China is thus a knowing and willing accomplice in the Bashir regime’s genocide in Darfur. Hu Jintao has just been there and in the middle of theis internation humanitarian crisis has pledged that China will build a presidential palace for Sudan’s rulers.

Partly of China’s motivation is an increasingly desperate need for new oil suppliers. Twenty years ago China supplied 90% of its own oil. Now, with domestic consumption surging, China can supply only 40% of its needs from domestic sources. China invested heavily in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, but since the U.S.-led invasion China can no longer count on favourable treatment. In Russia, Japanese companies with deeper pockets have outbid CNPC for access to new Siberian oilfields. Sudan is the answer to China’s energy prayers – poor, but oil-rich, and in need of friends.

China is also playing a deeper game, following a longer term geopolitical strategy. What China’s authoritarian leadership fear more than anything else is the spread of western democratic ideals – “what they call bourgeois liberalism.” They saw what happened to their old comrades in the Soviet Union, and they are determined that no such thing will happen to them. To curb the spread of liberal democratic politics, they are forming new geopolitical alliances, giving diplomatic and economic aid to other regimes which also fear democratic ideas.

Today any country which is in trouble at the UN over abuses of human rights can always rely on a Chinese veto in the Security Council. China is the best friend of the military regime in Burma – one of the world’s most oppressive regimes – and of Robert Mugabe’s bankrupt dictatorship in Zimbabwe.

On a broader canvas, al la George Orwell, China is trying to form a “Eurasian bloc” with Russia, Iran and the states of the former Soviet Central Asia called, Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), would control much of the world’s energy supplies, and by linking these to China’s huge population and dynamic economy could, in time, became a formidable power.

Australia has done very well out of China’s growth and its hunger for energy, selling huge quantities of coal, iron ore and natural gas. Much of our current prosperity has been built on this new China trade boom. This has led the Howard government to adopt a policy of craven silence in the face of the gross abuses of human rights in China, and also to China’s role in propping up nasty regimes in Burma, Zimbabwe and elsewhere. It’s hard to imagine, however, that any Australian government can turn a blind eye to what is now going in Darfur.

It may be said that Sudan is a faraway country about which we can do very little. But there is something we can do. Recently I learned that there are hundreds of Darfur refugees stranded in Cairo, unable to return home and unable to find a country willing to accept them. The Egyptian government, an ally of Sudan, will not allow the UNHCR to help them. Australia has an embassy in Cairo. Mr Downer should tell his diplomats to do something to help these unfortunate people find new homes. It’s the least we can do.

Radio Free Asia
2008-09-06

HONG KONG—China is stepping up restrictions on its Muslim Uyghur population during the fasting month of Ramadan, following a string of violent attacks in its northwestern region of Xinjiang.

Women are being forced to uncover their faces in public by police, while restrictions on teaching Islam to Uyghur children are being intensified, police said.

“We are...checking the identities of those who have beards or mustaches, and women who cover their faces,” an officer who answered the phone at the Charbagh village police station, in Lop county, Hotan prefecture.

“We uncover the faces of veiled women by force if necessary,” he said. “We also arrest anyone teaching religion to children illegally,” he said, adding that police were also helping to enforce a ban on Muslim restaurant closures in Ramadan.

Restaurants run by Muslims are forbidden to close in daytime during the fasting month, as is the custom in other Islamic regions of the world, according to official statements on government Web sites in Xinjiang.

Official decree

In Atush city, in the far west of the remote Tarim Basin, “It was decided after general discussion to produce a document titled ‘Promise to remain open for Atush city’s Muslim restaurants during the Ramadan period’,” according to a statement issued by the municipal commerce and industry bureau.

Officials have been dispatched to count all the restaurants run by Muslims and to “educate” their owners so that they sign the agreement of their own accord, it said. Officials in other parts of the region cited similar measures.

“The new instructions target only Uyghur restaurants,” an official from the Lop county taxation bureau in Hotan prefecture in the far south of Xinjiang said. “We don’t issue such orders for [Han] Chinese restaurants.”

“This is government policy. It covers only Uyghur restaurants. It is only for one month—I mean September. The order came from the prefectural level of government in Hotan,” he said. “In September, all the restaurants must be kept open.”

'We will be punished'

During Ramadan, Muslims who are able should take no food, water, or cigarettes during daylight hours. Restaurants in Muslim countries close during the day, re-opening to break the fast after sunset.

A Uyghur restaurant owner in Hotan’s Keriye county confirmed the policy: “We must keep our restaurant open during Ramadan,” he said. “If we don’t follow government’s orders, we will be punished.”

“The order says that if we close our restaurant during Ramadan, the government will close the restaurant for between six and 12 months as a punishment, and that also we will have to pay a fine,” he added.

Exiled Uyghur groups said Uyghur government cadres throughout Xinjiang had been forced to sign “letters of responsibility” promising to avoid fasting, evening prayers, or other religious activities.

“Leading cadres of townships will be severely punished or investigated in accordance with law if the ban on fasting is violated,” the Germany-based World Uyghur Congress said in a statement signed by spokesman Dilxat Raxit.

Special groups have been set up in schools to educate Uyghur teachers and students not to fast, and to monitor their activities on pain of expulsion from school, Raxit said.

Similar restrictions are in force in Xinhe and Shaya counties [in Chinese, Toqsu county], near Kuqa, where up to 10 alleged Muslim attackers were reportedly killed after assaulting a local police station Aug. 10.

Xinjiang is a vast region bordering Central Asia rich in natural resources with several key strategic borders with China’s neighbors.
China is home to up to 11 million Uyghurs, a Turkic-speaking minority group that formed two short-lived East Turkestan republics in the 1930s and 40s during the Chinese civil war and the Japanese invasion.

Original reporting by Gulchire for RFA’s Uyghur service. Translated by Omer Kanat. Uyghur service director: Dolkun Kamberi. Written for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie and edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.

hmmmmm!!!! SPEC, So sorry that I use that MALICE word that offended your self RESPECT. YOU SPEC is not a GAY like that JIMBA the GAY.And you say you are a ORPHAN.You are so pitiful that you LOST your parents.Im really sorry and hope you FORGIVE ME.

hmmmmmm!!!! SPEC. Its right that my ENGLISH was very low that compare with your ENGLISH woman.But SPEC. Even Im not so good in ENGLISH. But I attend ENGLISH class. Because I love to travel around the WORLD.

hmmmmmm!!!! SPEC. Please lets me explain to you. Its HUMAN NATURE that each difference NATIONALITY love HIS/HER own country. RIGHTS? Its natural that as a CHINESE, I love my COUNTRY and YOU love your OWN COUNTRY.RIGHT?

hmmmmmm!!!! SPEC. Did you ever notice that CHINA and the CHINESE have NEVER NEVER meddle or interfer what the BIG BRO AMERICAN and the BRITISH committed CRIME again IRAQ AFGHANISTAN SOUTH OSSETIA ETC ETC.

hmmmmmm!!!! SPEC. Do you know how many INNOCENT AMERICAN died in the TWIN TOWER because it was an CONSPIRACY of the AMEICAN government. YOU can go to YouTube and see the VIDEO and the BROADCASTER report about the 9/11 CONSPIRACY done by the FANATICS RUTHLESS GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATE OF AMERICA.

hmmmmm1111 SPEC. I will always defend my COUNTRY thru PEN MY FRESH and MY BLOOD. Because WE CHINESE are not a SICK MAN OF ASIA anymore, when in the past. Your forefather BUTCHER US, KILL US and RAPE OUR WOMAN. But at present. BIG BRO AMERICAN and the BRITISH should think TWICE.

hmmmmmm!!!! SPEC. Forget to inform you. On September 14. All the Chinese people from the MAINLAND and OVERSEAS are celebrating the MOON FESTIVAL. I hope if you can come to CHINA. You will ENJOY it. May the MOON FESTIVAL bring PEACE and HARMONY to all MANKIND. May the HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST stop meddling and interfering the INTERNAL AFFAIR of CHINA. CHINA LOVE YOU. ADVANCE happy MOON FESTIVAL. By the way, I want to correct your misconception. Truly speaking, Im not paid for by anybody to PROTECT the RIGHTS of my country CHINA. Im a successful BUSINESSMAN. I and my WIFE are doing ELECTRONICS and COMPUTER BUSINESS. That is why I study SPECIAL ENGLISH CLASS in the evening when Im in COLLEGE.

chin, you are not as good as Jimba. He is not as rude as you. He does not have to say rude things. He knows more about Xinjiang and China than you, and he is always polite about it. Also, I don't think he is "gay". Why you are such a bag language person? Are you educated?
I am also Chinese, and sometime I don't agree with Jimba, but at least he is not rude person.

Ha, no worries BX. And thank you Spec; I'll take your advice. Chin is an embarrassment to Chinese people everywhere. He insults only himself by his toilet mouth.

hmmmmmm!!!! JIMBA. You GAY is the one first to use DIRTY WORD against the CHINESE who was just DEFENDING your BASELESS FABRICATED CRITICISE CHINA HUMAN RIGHTS.

hmmmmmm!!!! JIMBA GAY.Maybe bai xin is your GAY name. JIM(xin)BA(bai). RIGHTS. ok JIMBA. If you are educated enought and not a BARBARIAN. Dont say bad word again. And I will also respect you.

hmmmmmm!!!! bai xin oppppps JIMBA GAY.sorry I used your CHINESE name. PLEASE go to the YouTube and see the VIDEO and listen to the BROADCASTER reporting and analysing that the 9/11 TWIN TOWER tragedy that kill more than 4000 INNOCENT AMERICAN CITIZEN was the work of the FANATICS GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATE of AMERICA. The TITLE of the video is call COMPIRACY 9/11. They become the SACRIFICE LAMP for the FANATIC USA GOVT. They are not REBEL OR SEPERATIS against the STATE. But the RUTHLESS GOVT of USA kill them RUTHLESSLY and BRUTALLY and BLAME OSAMA BIN LADEN then SADAM HUSSEIN. And now how many AMERICAN young man DIED in the fighting what the FANATIC call terrorist.

hmmmmmm!!!! JIMBA GAY.You can also search at the http:engforum.pravda.ru.

hmmmmmm!!!! JIMBA GAY. After your visit at YouTUBE and PRAVDA. you JIMBA GAY and your HUMAN RIGHTS GAY should go to WASHINGTON D.C. to SING SONG. HOPE all of you GAY are BRAVE ENOUGHT. Dont worry if all of you GAY lost your PAYROLL from the PRODUCER DIRECTOR of the HUMAN RIGHTS ORGANISATION. You can find other job than to be a PUPPET of the ........ you know who.......my finger was so tired arguing with you GAYS.

@spec:

Pleeease, "China" is not "cHina"!

If you want to play the game of "English teacher", don't disappoint us! Please pay attention to your spelling, capitalizatin, punctuation and grammer!

Most people on this forum know at least couple of languages. Those who can only speak English because that is his mother tongue, and try to be a English teacher here should hide in the dark, get the nude pictures of George Bush and Queen Elizabeth, and masterbate himeself with how good his Englsih is!

Remember, when your mother gave the tongue to you, she forgot to tell you that when people had great civilizations in Tigris-Euphrates, Nile, Indus and Yellow River regions thousands years ago, your ancestors were still running in nude and fucking in brushes.

@spec:

Have I ever said China is my MOTHERLAND?! What exactly I have said?! Why you always accuse people with different opinion than yours are Chinese, and their MOTHERLAND is China?! If you have learnt something from me and chin as you have claimed, then just admit it! This is not a big deal!

Who is paying you?! We all know US government has pumped at least $50 million each year into "Free Tibet" business. NED has annual budget over $120 million. Your government has pumped the estimated total over $700 million to destablizing other countries. Are they paying you?! Is this how you making living?

Why you haven't responded to the connection of American government with all these terrorit groups?! what you are afraid of?! Some body will cut your Englsh-speaking mother tongue???

tctdh, learn English and shut the fuck up you illiterate ignoramus.

China kills in Darfur and Xinjiang and Tibet that is the bottom line. We are not playing a comparison game here.

You are a total and obvious fuckwit , now piss off.

The blog's moved on mother fucker, hahahaha.

You are a little fuck-stick, arn't you Chin. Go learn English, how to argue without being a total child and while you're there you had better hide your comments from your little girlfriend... because, no one would want to marry a pathetic twerp like yourself. Sad sad sad.

Btw, my GF is Han. A very very pretty one too. Chinese guys hate it, and I am sure she shits all over your little fat nongmin of a "sweet-heart". Maybe you would like to explain to us how you know so much about me? You have a pretty big imagination" Maybe you should use it to learn English a little better? Hmmmmmmmmmm... lol.

hmmmmm!!!! JIMBA the GAY. You talk BAD WORD again. HOW HOW HOW can any ETHNIC CHINESE GIRL be your GF.As for you JIMBA the GAY. Oppppppppps. hehehe. YOU have LIE and LEAK your own BEHAVIOR and CHARACTERISTIC again that we are just LAUGHTING at you. You even DONT have ANY GIRL of your OWN KIND. hehehe. GF means to you is GAY FANTASY. HEHEHE. Even your own KIND will say....oh my GOD JIMBA GAY. Why your LITTLE BIRD sleeping all the TIME. They will just PLAY with your LITTLE BIRD and say HELLO LITTLE BIRDIE.

hmmmmmm!!!! JIMBA GAY. Even 100mg of VIAGRA will not help your LITTLE LITTLE DEAD BIRDIE. hehe. Thats why YOU hate CHINESE because we have a HEALTHY STRONG BIRDIE. You jealous. hah. TELL YOU. After I play and ...... with your real own kind GIRL. SHE ask and say LOVE, when will she met me again. I say anytime. But I told her dont tell anybody.ESPECIALLY JIMBA the GAY. OTHERWISE JIMBA GAY will SING SONG that I have COMMITTED HUMAN RIGHTS.

@ jimba

yure right bud. Got the little pig running now. i love sleeping with Chinese girls, they are so appreciative of a true man. Could you imagine having to lay next to this little shit who calls himself chin. hhahahahahahhahhaaaaaaaaaaa. I want his sister

hahahahahahhha

can you believe the crap above that poured out of the poor little sensitive tweety bird. oh poor chin , oh you poor little boy, your feelings got hurt, and no chinese girl wants you and your inverted homosexuality you fear so much and project onto others is starting to control you. your mind is deteriorating, your hand is being worn numb. poor little chin, poor little fucked up chin.

cripes and gao and tcvd or whatever will come give you cuddle eh. hold your little fella for you, Big boy will not hit you stop crying now, its OK mummy wont tell party on you for being a little cry baby girl, hhahahahahahahhahahhaaaaaaa

little piece of gutter shit! with ya big capital letters everywhere. oHHHHHHHHHHH, BIG, BIG, BIG.

hahahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

give up shitbrains, thats my advice, YOU are a perverse twisted little sod. Stop embarasing yourself globally. Or...keep on doing it, its entertainment for the world, and so good for your country's international image

hahahahahhahaahhaaaa!!!!

hhahahahahahahahhaaaaaa!

Maybe this is why Chin is so angry at the world?

http://i38.tinypic.com/2gtzxxu.jpg

[IMG]http://i38.tinypic.com/2gtzxxu.jpg[/IMG]

hmmmmmm!!!! SPEC. GOOD GOOD GOOD. Congratulation that you have SEX CHANGE. I am right that you are a SON OF A BITCH, CATCH YA HUMAN RIGHTS GAY are all LONER LOSER NOBODY with IMPOTENCY. Thats why you are all LAZY bunch of a SON OF A BITCH. NEVER WORK AND NEVER EARN HARD FOR A LIVING. Just waiting for the EASY COME PAYROLL. hahaha. I think your 7 FATHER are all LAZY like you GAY.. hahehi. HAYYYA.

Ha, now Spec's gay too! Wow, Chin, you are probably the stupidest person I have had the dis-pleasure to come across online.

What is your argument again: Oh, we're all gay. Based on what facts? Nothing, you can't prove anything can you. PATHETIC. You really are a sad human being and I feel sorry for your ancestors: how can they produce such a stupid little man??

Oh, and Chin, it must suck knowing that we all earn more than you. It must also suck to know that you will never be rich enough to travel outside of China. Ouch!

Not to worry though, if you save all your pitiful kuai (then again if you're only earning around 5,000 kuai a month this might be tuff) you can, maybe, one day join one of those over crowded cattle-tours and travel to a miserable destination, such as Dalian (wow, green grass and beaches...I've never seen these before!). Meanwhile, we will all be on an exotic beach somewhere, sipping a cocktail that costs more than your monthly wage, and thank God we don't have to do your boring job, and that our future is bright; your's on the otherhand sucks, and you will always be a poor nongmin. I just feel sorry for your "sweet heart". She will never have the face you would like to give her.

hmmmmmm!!!! Im busy now JIMBA GAY. Because im entertaining a beautiful courteous AMERICAN FAIR LADY asking our product. hehe. She is from MIAMI. Bye Bye LITTLE BIRDIE. hehehe. DRINK more VIAGRA. It was recommended by this COURTEOUS AMERICAN FAIR LADY She saw what you WRITE in my LAPTOP. HAHAHA JIMBA GAY the GAY FANTASY. Even she just laught at YOU.JIMxinBAbai BYE BYE.

@ jimba

yure better off leaving this sick little cunt alone. phew. i feel ill and alarmed but glad the little psycho is locked up in China. Man if people in your country behaved like that - it'd be lithium medicine for them. lets just say china is obviously under-stocked in psychiatric drugs or just lets its loonies run free

HI JIM(xin)BA(bai) SPEC. Tonight the COURTEOUS AMERICAN FAIR LADY will have dinner with us at HOLIDAY INN LIDO.
To tell you the TRUTH, Miss GONZALES advice me to better not to write here anymore. She say she know everything about this world is FULL of INTRIQUE. FRANKLY SPEAKING. She plan to go back to MEXICO, her HOME COUNTRY. But did not say any BAD THINGS against AMERICA. As per her ADVICE, Im going to BACK OUT from this FORUM. Because Im very POOR in ENGLISH.

ADIOS AMIGO, VIVA DE LA CHINE E MEXICO!!!!!!!!!!

HI!!!!! JIMBA SPEC. If you come to BEIJING. I will also invite you 2 for DINNER. Anyway everybody is MI AMIGO.

I will pass by to this SITE and ENJOY what all MI AMIGO write. Its FUN for this PASS few days. Hope no HEART FEELING.

ADIOS MI AMOR AMIGO SENIOR JIMBA and SENIORA SPEC.

VIVA to your COUNTRY too.

¡ya era hora! o ¡por fin!

Twenty-Six Things We Now Know Seven Years After 9/11

By Bernard Weiner
Co-Editor, The Crisis Papers
September 9, 2008

Each year around the anniversary of 9/11, I summarize what we ordinary citizens have learned since that awful day in 2001. This is the seventh annual look backwards, a 2008 update that contains new information and surmisings about those horrific events and what followed.

1. One 9/11 Size Fits All. What we now more fully understand is how the CheneyBush Administration utilized the murderous terrorism of 9/11 as the linchpin justification for their unfolding domestic and foreign agenda, much of it illegal, immoral and impeachable.

By and large, one can sum up that overall agenda as: Amass and control power in the U.S. and much of the world ("full-spectrum dominance"), and, in cahoots with their corporate supporters such as Halliburton and Blackwater, loot the federal treasury. All this was to be carried out secretly, with no accountability.

2. Iraq War Planning Began Before 9/11. We also know more about the nature of the lies (including forged documents) used by the Administration to sell the Iraq War, which attack already was in the planning stages well before 9/11.

The first faked document, by CIA forgers at the behest of White House officials, was a 2005 letter (back-dated 2001) supposedly coming from the then-Iraqi intelligence chief to his boss Saddam Hussein mentioning alleged "facts" that established a tie-in between 9/11, Al-Qaida and Iraq and about Saddam's supposed purchase of uranium. The official, Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, who had been an informant for the U.S. during the run-up to the war, actually had written his CIA handlers at the time, reported author Ron Suskind, that there were no WMD, no 9/11 or Al-Qaida connections; that letter was deep-sixed by the CIA and the official was taken into protective custody, hidden away in Jordan and given $5million for services rendered (which later included his signature on the phony letter).

The second fake document, which was used by the Brits and Americans in the run-up to the war, supposedly was from the African nation of Niger. It was an amateurish botch job (incorrect letterhead, signature of a minister of state who no longer was in that office, etc.) that came from the Italian Secret Service, but the idea for it might have originated elsewhere, perhaps from a clandestine American service. It was designed to bolster the fiction that Iraq was purchasing uranium "yellowcake" from Niger. Since the yellowcake theory was of great value to the CheneyBush plans to bomb Iraq -- as Ambassador Joe Wilson had made plain in his various articles --the tendency worldwide was to believe that the U.S. might well have been involved in having the phony letter written.

3. Domestic Spying Started Before 9/11. Similary, we know more about the illegal and widespread domestic spying ordered by CheneyBush seven months BEFORE 9/11. We still don't fully understand the reasons for this top-secret, massive data-mining, to be carried out without proper legal warrants. But the point is that the CheneyBush Administration, for its own reasons, and long before 9/11, asked the giant communications companies to furnish them with the private records of its customers, which then were passed on to the relevant governmental security departments.

All this new information has made fringe theorists about 9/11 all the more numerous: If CheneyBush did all those illegal things to fool the population -- the forgeries, the lies, the coverups, the deceptions, the police-state tactics BEFORE 9/11 -- how far, they ask, might they have gone to order or carry out or be in some complicit relationship with the 9/11 attacks?

4. McCain and 9/11/Iraq. We also know that one of the two major contenders for the presidency in the 2008 elections swallowed the CheneyBush line about 9/11 and propagandized for the Iraq War and Occupation because, he said, Iraq was tied to the events of 9/11 and to Al-Qaida and to WMD stockpiles. None of those was true, but even though John McCain had problems with how Rumsfeld was managing the war, the Arizona senator placed himself right in the neo-con corner about the necessity for the war. He continues to this day to justify the U.S. Occupation as necessary for a U.S. "victory," whatever that term may mean -- even, he says, if it it takes another hundred years and trillions of dollars more. (His opponent, Barack Obama, is more dedicated to drawing down troops in Iraq, "re-deploying" some of them to the anti-Taliban war in Afghanistan, and sending the rest home.)

So, with that introduction, let's take a look at the rest of the list. Some of what follows has appeared in my previous articles, and some is new or expanded:

9/11 and "the War on Terror"

5. 9/11/Anthrax and Iraq. Let's remember the chronology of how we got here: The Administration's far-right domestic agenda was bogged down in 2001 after Jim Jeffords left the Republican caucus and joined the now-majority Democratic one in the Senate. The murderous terrorism of 9/11 occurred several months later. As did the mysterious anthrax attacks aimed at Congress and the media, which seven years later was blamed conveniently on a single scientist at the Army's Fort Detrick biological weapons lab), who committed suicide a few months ago. Both the anthrax attack and the 9/11 terror attacks had the effect of providing the CheneyBush Administration pretty much a free ride in putting police-state tactics in place. Those tactics were embodied in the so-called "Patriot Act," which superseded Constitutional protections, and which succeeded in greasing the wheels for all sorts of questionable domestic legislation that otherwise might have been bottled up forever.

The planning for an attack on Iraq, as Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill later told us, already had begun at the first cabinet meetings after Inauguration Day in early 2001. After 9/11, those plans proceeded apace, even when the intelligence indicated that it was not an Iraq operation but an al-Qaida terrorist attack, out of Afghanistan.

It appeared that the U.S. military over time would capture or kill Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and effectively wipe out most of al-Qaida, which had attacked America on 9/11. But CheneyBush abruptly pulled the U.S. forces from Afghanistan and sent them to Iraq, a country that was no real danger to the U.S. and its allies. (Addendum: By Fall of 2008, the Taliban regrouped and began mounting more and and more attacks on U.S. and Western coalition forces in Afghanistan and now once again control a good share of the country. If the U.S. troops had not been precipitously pulled out and dispatched to Iraq, instead of taking care of business in Afghanistan, today's reality there might well have been significantly different.)

6. Unanswered 9/11 Questions. There still are numerous unanswered questions about the horrific events of September 11, 2001, mainly centered around: A. Why Bush sat there in the Florida school for seven minutes reading the "Pet Goat" book after he'd been informed by his chief of staff, after the second plane struck the World Trade Center, that "America is under attack," and why the Secret Service, as they are trained to do when the President is believed to be in danger, didn't surround him and get him the hell out of that classroom. The clear implication is that a delay-operation was in progress. B. Why NORAD didn't scramble its fighters in time to do anything. (Same implication). C. Whether World Trade Center Towers 1, 2 and 7 collapsed into their footprints as a result of fire/structural damage or from pre-set demolition charges (there are reputable scientists on both sides of that one). D. How to explain all the "put" options on American Airlines and United Airlines stocks just prior to the attacks, clearly suggesting someone knew which airlines were going to be hijacked and was trying to profit from the pending attacks?

But regardless of whether CheneyBush were complicit in the deaths and destruction that day -- and there is no conclusive proof that they were -- what we do know is that in the months, weeks and days prior to 9/11, red-hot warnings about a planned terrorist attack, using planes as weapons aimed at buildings in New York and Washington, were coming into the White House from a wide variety of other countries.

At the very least then, CheneyBush and a few other key insiders knew that a "spectacular" attack was coming and did absolutely nothing. Bush was presented by the CIA on August 6 with a Presidential Daily Briefing entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the U.S.", which talked about preparations for plane hijackings, suspected terrorists surveilling federal buildings in New York, teams of terrorists being inside the U.S. with explosives. But, even following these dire warnings, there was no heightening of awareness in the Bush Administration, no alerting airlines, no sending out photos of al-Qaida suspects to be on the lookout for, no calling an urgent meeting of counter-terrorism experts inside the White House to coordinate either a way of minimizing the damage or dealing with a post-attack response. Nothing.

One is left with two reasonable alternative explanations:

A: These CheneyBush guys in charge were (and remain) totally over their heads in terms of governance. They simply didn't have a clue what was about to happen and what to do about it. Administration actions during the past seven and a half years supply more than enough evidence that Bush and his crew are total fuck-ups. It's a reverse-Midas syndrome: everything they touch turns to excrement. Total bumblers, screwups, incompetent dolts.

B: They knew something major was about to go down (although 3000 deaths may have been way beyond what they imagined), and did nothing in order to use those attacks as a rallying point to amass power and push their agenda through a Congress that otherwise was antagonistic to them.

7. The Facts of 9/11. We know that the Bush Administration didn't want the public to learn much, if anything, about the events of that day. Bush&Co. had to be dragged kicking and screaming into agreeing to the appointment of the official 9/11 Commission, and they named as the executive director one of their made men, Philip Zelikow, who later would be named a high-ranking Administration official.

As it turned out, the Administration stonewalled many of the Commission's requests for documents. Moreover, Bush would not testify under oath and would deign to appear only with Cheney by his side, (here's my imagined transcript of that testimony.) We later learned that the commission was so angered by the constantly-shifting stories told by the Pentagon/NORAD that they were ready to urge that legal charges be filed against those who testified from those two governmental bodies.

In short, the 9/11 Commission's probe was not exhaustive, leaving many areas of investigation unplumbed, and the documentation provided by the Administration was insufficient and often late in arriving. Conclusion: Even today, many questions remain unsatisfactorily unanswered.

8. PNAC & the Neo-Cons. We know that a FarRight segment of the conservative movement, by and large former Reagan Administration officials in exile from power during the Clinton presidency, was dedicated to using America's sole superpower status to move aggressively in the world while, they believed, no other country or international force could put up much resistance. The key neo-con leaders who were placed in charge of U.S. foreign/military policy after the 2000 election (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bolton, Perle, Khalilzad, et al.) were founders of, and affiliated with, The Project for The New American Century (PNAC), a group that urged the U.S. to use its sole-superpower muscle in creating Pax Americana "hegemony" over key regions of the world.

The Bush neo-cons realized that presidents enjoy enormous patriotic support during wartime, but when the war ends, those leaders lose their compelling luster, as was the case with President Bush#1. Ergo, Bush#2 would become a PERMANENT wartime president, and those who opposed him could then be tarred forever with the smear of "unpatriotic" and "hating America," thus marginalizing their political impact. And it worked: the Democrats cowered and gave Bush virtually everything he wanted, up until relatively recently, when occasionally they remembered that they have spines and stood up and fought as an opposition party should. As they did more of that, and promised to end the war and reign in CheneyBush lawlessness, the public swept them into majority control of the House and Senate in the 2006 elections. (Note: After the election, however, the Democrats continued funding the war, approved the Administration's illegal domestic-surveillance, and took "off the table" the possibility of impeaching Bush and Cheney for their gross abuse of power and of the Constitution.)

We know that Bush&Co. saw, in Condi Rice's apt term at the time, the "opportunity" offered by the 9/11 attacks to move quickly and forcefully with the Administration's foreign and domestic agenda. PNAC talked about its Pax Americana plan for global "benevolent hegemony" using a retooled military. This military transformation would take forever to implement, a PNAC report said, unless a "new Pearl Harbor" changed the equation in the public mind. 9/11 came along and was used as that "new Pearl Harbor." (See "How We Got Into This Imperial Pickle: A PNAC Primer").

We know that after 9/11, Bush seemed to bring the entire country along with him when he launched an attack on al-Qaida and its Taliban-government supporters in their Afghanistan homebase. But there's no oil in that destitute country, and, as Rumsfeld reminded us, not much worth bombing. Thus, no lessons could be drawn by Middle East leaders from the U.S. attack. But, as Cheney's secret energy panel was aware, there was another country in the region that did have oil, and lots of it, and which could be taken easily by U.S. forces. Thus Iraq became the object-lesson to other autocratic leaders in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Iran. If you do not do our bidding, prepare to accept a massive dose of "shock&awe." You will be removed and replaced by democratic-looking governments as arranged by the U.S. Control of Iraq's oil has been at the forefront of U.S. occupation policies in Iraq, and remains so there and elsewhere as oil and gas become even more sought-after energy sources.

These neo-con members of PNAC and similar organizations, such as the American Enterprise Institute and Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, had urged Clinton to depose Saddam Hussein in 1998. But he demurred, seeing a mostly contained dictator there, whereas Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, and those terrorists like him, actually were successfully attacking U.S. assets inside the country and abroad.

But the PNAC crowd had larger ambitions than simply toppling a brutal Iraqi dictator. They were after effective control of energy sources around the globe. To get to that hegemonic point, they developed a philosophy that included: "pre-emptively" attacking countries that were of no imminent danger to the U.S., abrogating treaties when they conflicted with U.S. goals, making sure no other nation or organization (such as the United Nations) could ever achieve power-parity with the U.S., installing U.S.-friendly governments to do America's will, expressing a willingness to use tactical nuclear weapons, and so on. All of these extreme PNAC suggestions, once regarded as lunatic, were enshrined in 2002 as official U.S. policy in the National Security Strategy of the United States of America.

The Iraq Invasion and Occupation

9. Sexing Up the Intel. Given the extreme nature of the neo-con agenda in fomenting support for an invasion and occupation of Iraq, Bush&Co. had their work cut out for them. Therefore, among the first moves by Rumsfeld following 9/11 was to somehow try to connect Saddam to the terror attacks. When the various intelligence agencies reported to Rumsfeld that there was no Iraq connection to 9/11, and since the CIA and the other intelligence agencies would not, or could not, supply the intelligence needed to justify a war on Iraq, Rumsfeld set up his own rump "intelligence" agency, the Office of Special Plans, stocked it with political appointees of the PNAC persuasion and soon was stovepiping cherry-picked raw intel, much of it untrue, from self-interested Iraqi exiles, straight to Cheney and others in the White House. Shortly thereafter, the White House Iraq Group -- the in-house marketing cabal for the war, with such major players as Libby, Rove, Card, Rice, Hadley, Hughes, Matalin, et al. -- went big-time with the WMD and mushroom-cloud scares and the suspect melding of Saddam Hussein with the events of 9/11.

Based on this sexed-up and phony intelligence, Cheney, Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld and the others began warning about mushroom clouds over the U.S., drone planes dropping biological agents over the East Coast (with phony photos shown to members of Congress), huge stockpiles of chemical weapons in Iraq, etc. Secretary of State Colin Powell, regarded as the most believable of the bunch, was dispatched to the United Nations to make the case, which he did, reluctantly, by presenting an embarrassingly weak litany of surmise and concocted allegations. While the U.S. corporate media was unanimous in its opinion that Powell had cinched the case, the world didn't buy it. (Powell, who resigned in 2004, has since lamented his role in this charade.) The opposition to the impending U.S. war on Iraq was palpable and huge: 10 million citizens throughout the world hit the streets to protest, and former allies publicly criticized Bush. Only Tony Blair in England eagerly hitched his wagon to the Bush war-plan, dispatching large numbers of troops, as it turned out over the objections of many of his closest aides and advisers.

10. The Big Lie & the Downing Street Revelations. We know that those advisers warned Blair that he was about to involve the U.K. in an illegal, immoral and probably unwinnable war that would put U.K. and U.S. troops in great danger from potential insurgent forces. How do we know about these inner workings of the Blair government? Because someone from inside that body leaked the top-secret minutes from those war-Cabinet meetings, the so-called Downing Street Memos.

We also learned from those minutes that Bush & Blair agreed to make war on Iraq as early as the Spring of 2002. The intelligence, they decided, would be "fixed around the policy" to go to war, despite their telling their legislative bodies, the mass media, and their citizens that no decisions had been made. In fact, the Bush Administration had let it be known privately that it had decided to attack Iraq a year before the invasion. "Fuck Saddam," Bush told three U.S. Senators in March of 2002. "We're taking him out."

We know that many of Blair's most senior advisors thought the WMD argument rested on shaky ground, and that without specific authorization from the United Nations Security Council, the legality of the war was doubtful. The U.N. inspectors on the ground in Iraq were not finding any WMD stockpiles, but the Bush Administration rushed to war anyway. The haste to begin the war meant that there was little or no proper planning to secure the peace and reconstruct the country after the major fighting. Some weeks later, Bush prematurely declared, under a "Mission Accomplished" banner, that the U.S. had "prevailed" in the Iraq war. The Iraqi "insurgency" was about to blow up in their faces.

The Downing Street Memos make clear that both the U.S. and U.K. were well aware that Iraq was a paper tiger, with no significant WMD stockpiles or link to Al-Qaida and the 9/11 attacks. Nevertheless, the major thrust of Bush&Co.'s justification for going to war was based on these non-existent weapons and 9/11 links. The Big Lie Technique, repeating the same falsehoods over and over and over, drummed those falsehoods into Americans' heads day after day, month after month, with little if any skeptical analysis by the corporate mainstream media, which marched mostly in lockstep with Bush policy and thinking. Wolfowitz admitted later that they chose WMD as the primary reason for making war because they couldn't agree on anything else the public might accept. But frightening people with talk of nuclear weapons, mushroom clouds, toxins delivered to the East Coast of the U.S. by Iraqi drone airplanes and the like would work like a charm in convincing Americans to go to war.

11. Iran Is Beneficiary of U.S. Policy. We know that the real reasons for invading Iraq had precious little to do with WMD, with Islamist terrorists inside that country, with installing democracy, and the like. There were no WMD to speak of, and Saddam, an especially vicious dictator, did not tolerate religious or political zealots of any stripe. No, the reasons had more to do with American geopolitical goals in the region involving oil, control, support for its ally Israel, hardened military bases and keeping Iran from having free rein in the region.

However, as it turned out, the invasion and brutal occupation of Iraq removed the one major buffer against the expansion of Iran's political and military power in the region. In addition, because the U.S. Occupation was so incompetently carried out, it pushed Iraq and Iran into a far closer religious and political alliance than would have been the case if Saddam had been permitted to remain in power. CheneyBush may have sacrificed thousands of American dead, tens of thousands of American wounded, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis as "collateral damage," and now the Administration, which has constantly downsized its definition of "victory," seems quietly willing to accept a stable Islamic government that may well turn out to be more attuned to Teheran than to Washington.

12. Iraq As a Disaster Zone. We know that Bush's war has been a thorough disaster, built on a foundation of lies, and bungled from the start. The 2007 "surge" of U.S. troops has eased the violence in a military sense, but the political reconciliation that could bring peace still has not been made by the warring sects and clans and politicians. In short, peace has not come, and billions of dollars have been (and continue to be) wasted or lost in the corrupt system of organized corporate looting that ostensibly is designed to speed up Iraq's "reconstruction." Indeed, so much has Bush's war been botched that the "realists" in the Administration know the U.S. must get out as quickly as possible if they are to have any hope of exercising their considerable muscle elsewhere in the Middle East. But, so far, the neo-con strategy still rules, and "stay-the-course" remains the operating principle, at least until the new American President is installed.

13. The Stretched-Thin Military. We know that Bush's Greater Middle East agenda also is suffering because the U.S. military is spread way thin in Afghanistan and Iraq, the desertion and suicide rates are high, morale (especially among Reserve and National Guard troops) is way down as a result of the never-ending multiple tours of duty, soldiers are not re-enlisting at the usual clip, recruitment isn't working and deceptive scams are being used to lure youngsters (many of them gang-members, felons, psychologically damaged) into signing up. In short, there are no forces to spare on the ground. There is way too much reliance on air power or from missiles, which merely deliver a message about U.S. superiority in the air but with no successful follow-up possible on the ground. The air attacks result in making the civilian citizens of those countries even angrier at America, and with little likelihood of success in forging U.S.-friendly "democratic" governments in Iran, Syria, et al., since bombed populations tend to support their existing governments. In short, America's failure in Iraq and Israel's failure in Lebanon demonstrate the limits of muscle-bound, high-tech armies in the modern, nationalist-guerrillas world.

14. Hiding Facts from the Public. We know that Bush&Co. made sure that there would be no full-scale, independent probes of their role in using and abusing the intelligence that led to war on Iraq. This is the most secretive Administration in American history, and they want no investigations of any of their mistakes or corruptions of the democratic process.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, then led by Republican Pat Roberts, held hearings on the failures lower down the chain, namely at the CIA and FBI level, and promised there would be followup hearings on any White House manipulation of intelligence. But, following the 2004 election, Roberts said no purpose would be served in launching such an investigation. Likewise, the 9/11 Commission did not delve deeply into how the Bush Administration misused its pre-9/11 knowledge. In short, this secretive administration made sure that everything was done to head off at the pass any investigations whatsoever.

After the 2006 elections, many years too late, the now-majority Democrats eventually began their probe into the Administration's use of intelligence to promote the Iraq War. The committee concluded that the Administration "repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent. As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed." Chairman Jay Rockefeller added: "There is no question we all relied on flawed intelligence. But, there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate."

The Turn to Tyranny at Home

15. Perilously Close to Dictatorship. We know that Bush has no great love for democratic processes, certainly not inside the United States. (On at least three occasions, he has "jokingly" expressed his preference for dictatorship, as long, he said, as he can be the dictator.) He much prefers to rule as an oligarch, but to do that, he had to invent legal justifications that would grant him the requisite power. So he had longtime lawyer-toady Alberto Gonzales, and Cheney's now-chief-of-staff David Addington, devise a legal philosophy that would permit Bush to do pretty much what he wants -- ignore laws on the books, disappear U.S. citizens into military prisons, authorize torture, spy on citizens' phone calls and emails, declare martial law and rule by decree, etc. -- whenever Bush says he's acting as "commander-in-chief" during "wartime."

And, since "wartime" is the amorphous "war on terror," a war against a tactic, there is no end and Bush is home free. There always will be terrorists trying to do anti-U.S. damage somewhere around the globe, or inside America, and the "commander-in-chief" will need to respond. Ergo, goes this logic, Bush (and any successor) is above the law, untouchable, in perpetuity. Bush&Co. also made sure that U.S. officials and military troops would not be subject to indictment by any international court or war-crimes tribunal.

However, even with ultra-conservative Bush appointees John Roberts and Samuel Alito on the bench, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled several times that the Administration has gone beyond constitutional limits with regard to its treatment of suspected terrorist "detainees." But somehow Bush&Co. always manage to postpone and delay implementation or find ways around the court rulings.

16. Torture As Official U.S. Policy. We know that Gonzales, Addington and Pentagon and DoJ lawyers beholden to Rumsfeld devised legal rationales that make torture of suspects official state policy. These Bush-loyalist lawyers also greatly widened the definition of what is acceptable interrogation practice -- basically anything this side of death or terminally abusing internal organs. They also authorized the "rendering" of key suspects to countries specializing in extreme torture. After all this, Bush and Rumsfeld professed shock, shock! that those under their command would wind up torturing, abusing and humiliating prisoners in U.S. care. But the Administration made sure to stop all inquiries into higher-up responsibility for the endemic torture. The buck never stops on CheneyBush's desk. If something goes wrong (and they never will admit to mistakes), it's always someone else's fault. If and when Iraq "falls," the names of scapegoats are being prepared: al-Maliki, Democrats, the "liberal media" and bloggers, Bill Clinton, et al. Never Cheney, never Bush.

17. The Bill of Rights Goes "Quaint." We know that the Bush Administration has been able to obtain whatever legislation it needs in its self-proclaimed "war on terror" by utilizing, and hyping, the understandable fright of the American people. John Ashcroft and Tom Ridge emerged periodically to manipulate the public's fright by announcing yet another "terror" threat, based on "credible but unverified" evidence. As he departed from his directorate of the Homeland Security Department, Ridge admitted that he was required to issue many of those "terror" warnings when there was no justifiable reason for doing so. It has been demonstrated and Ridge seemed to be suggesting that those warnings were activated usually when the Administration was facing an election or when they were having an especially bad-news day. Meanwhile, Congress (shame on you, Democrats!) made most of the Patriot Act laws permanent. Unless those can be repealed, and the juridical tradition of habeas corpus (where a court has to rule on the legality of a suspect's arrest) re-introduced into American jurisprudence, that vote will be a nail into the coffin housing the remains of the Bill of Rights.

18. Outing CIA Agents for Political Reasons. The Bush Administration, for its own crass political reasons, compromised American national security by revealing the identity of two key intelligence operatives. The first was CIA agent Valerie Plame, who had important contacts in the shadowy world of weapons of mass destruction, especially in dealing with Iran's nuclear capabilities. Whoever else also was responsible for the agent's outing, it is clear that Cheney (through Libby) and Rove disclosed Plame's covert identity in an attempt to punish her husband for exposing Bush's lie to the nation that Saddam was seeking supplies of uranium from central Africa. Revealing the identity of a covert CIA agent is a felony. The other outing of a CIA operative, by Condi Rice, apparently to show off how successful the Administration was in its anti-terrorism hunt, was that of a high-ranking mole close to bin Laden's inner circle. This operative could have kept the U.S. informed as to ongoing and future plans of al-Qaida. That's Bush's "war-on-terrorism" at work.

And, no surprise, after Libby was convicted of obstruction of justice and perjury, Bush commuted his sentence just before Libby was to head for prison. As usual, there is no accountability for illegal behavior in the Bush Administration, and miscreants know that if they keep their mouths shut or tell lies to the police and get caught, they have a guaranteed Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card.

19. Do You Know If Your Vote Is Counted? We know that America's vote-counting system is corrupted. Sophisticated statistical analysis along with wide-scale exit-polling, suggests strongly that the 2000 and 2004 presidential election results were fiddled with by the private companies that tally the votes. These companies are owned by far-right Republican supporters, but the same objection would be lodged if Democrats owned the companies. It has been demonstrated publicly that those who control the software or who hack into the easily-penetrated system can manipulate the vote totals without anybody being the wiser.

There are no good reasons to "outsource" vote-counting to private corporations. These are the same companies who make and program the voting machines, who refuse to permit inspection of their software, and whose technicians have behaved suspiciously on election nights in 2000 in Florida, in 2002 in Georgia, and in Ohio and Florida in 2004.

And we haven't even mentioned Rove's dirty-tricks department whose function has been, by hook or by crook, to lower the number of potential Democrat voters, especially minority voters; a favorite tactic is to purge hundreds of thousands of likely Democratic voters from the voting rolls in advance in key states such as Florida and Ohio. (As I write this, the GOP in Ohio is lobbying for 600,000 voters to undergo electoral scrutiny, most of them probably leaning Democratic, with many, perhaps several hundred thousand, to be stricken from the voting rolls.) Various states were concerned enough about touch-screen computer-voting to order significant changes in equipment. But because the same companies control the secret counting of the votes, unless the vote-tabulating system can be changed soon, the integrity of our elections will be suspect into the far future. Even if all the other reforms were implemented for November's federal election, they would mean nothing without the guarantee of honest tabulation.

20. No Privacy Anymore. We also now know that even before 9/11, CheneyBush authorized massive data-mining of Americans' phone calls and emails, along with other domestic spying operations, many of them in clear violation of the FISA law establishing a separate, secret court to rule on requests for eavesdropping warrants. There was a flurry of outrage about citizens' privacy being breached in such an obviously illegal manner, but a few months ago Democrats joined Republicans in giving retroactive cover for such domestic-spying and even gave post-facto immunity to the giant communications corporations who joined in breaking the law.

21. Purging the Body Politic. We now know that CheneyBush, angered by the unwillingness of the intelligence analysts at the CIA and State Department to cook the intel books for political reasons, conducted purges of recalcitrant analysts at CIA and State.

There also were purges in the Justice Department -- including the use of illegal partisan criteria in an attempt to keep independent-minded jobseekers from being hired -- so that only "loyal Bushies" (their term) would be in place, those who would do the bidding of the White House without opposition or questioning. And so the DOJ, under Bush toady Alberto Gonzales, fired at least nine U.S. Attorneys around the country and replaced them with their own guys. They tried to pretend that the firings were the result of poor performance ratings, but that wasn't the case. It was simply partisan, to help guarantee GOP control of the election and indicting process through which the Democratic Party and it supporters could be legally hassled in court or likely Democratic voters kept from the polls. A side-effect of Bush&Co. putting their own U.S. Attorneys in power would be protection for themselves and their supporters from criminal charges.

The resulting public furor got Gonzales canned, but his replacement, Michael Mukasey, continues in the same tradition of representing Bush and Cheney as presidential counsel, rather than representing the Constitution and the American people's interests. In short, not much has changed at the DoJ.

22.There Is No Real Economic Plan. We know that the Bush Administration paid off its backers (and itself) by giving humongous tax breaks, for 10 years, to the already wealthy and to large corporations. In addition, corporate tax-evasion was made easier via offshore listings and by laying off thousands of IRS auditors of high-end returns. All this was done at a time when the U.S. economy was in a sorry state and when the treasury deficit from those tax-breaks was growing even larger from the Iraq/Afghanistan/"war-on-terror" costs. (Those war costs are now closing in on a TRILLION dollars! and Congress continues to grant Bush's requests for several hundred billion more). So far as we know, the Bush Administration has no plans for how to retire that debt and no real plan (other than the discredited "trickle-down" theory) for restarting the economy and creating well-paying jobs for long-time employees, many of whom have had their positions outsourced to foreign lands.

The economy is in such desperate shape in late-2008 that the Administration's and McCain's lack of a plan to turn things around is at the heart of the upcoming election, and the issue could decide the race.

23. Drowning Government In a Bathtub. We know that the HardRight conservatives who control Bush policy don't really care what kind of debt and deficits their policies cause; in some ways, the more the better since, as GOP honcho Grover Norquist has admitted, they want to shrink government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." They want to decimate and starve popular social programs from the New Deal/Great Society eras, including, most visibly, Head Start, Social Security, Medicare (and real drug coverage for seniors), student loans, welfare assistance, public education, etc. Bush's plan to privatize a huge chunk of the Social Security System is still out there as a goal -- McCain is on board -- though Republicans are keeping quiet about it.

24. Privatizing Government Functions. We know that in addition to trying to privatize Social Security and other government programs, CheneyBush have begun privatizing the military, partially through its all-volunteer army and by employing mercenaries ("independent contractors" ) to carry out numerous national-security functions, such as intelligence-gathering. (It's estimated that about 130,000 such mercenaries are on the ground in Iraq, close to the same number as official U.S. military forces.) The corporate army known as Blackwater is used not only in Iraq but was used domestically as well, to police New Orleans after the Katrina disaster. Private corporations built and presumably will run internment centers around the U.S. in the event of a natural or terrorist disaster. Under the ambiguous provisions of martial-law, it is possible that those who too actively oppose government policy could be classified as aiding and comforting "terrorists" and be housed in those camps.

25. Who Cares What You Drink or Breathe? We know that Bush environmental policy (dealing with air and water pollution, mineral extraction, national parks, and so on) is an unmitigated disaster, giving pretty much free rein to corporations whose bottom lines do better when they don't have to pay attention to the public interest. It's the worst sort of grab-the-money-and-run scenario. Perhaps the best worst example of the Administration's attitude toward protecting the public's health can be seen in the EPA giving the green light for residents and workers to safely return to their homes and jobs in Lower Manhattan shortly after the WTC Towers fell seven years ago, even though EPA scientists had determined that the air was grossly polluted and dangerous.

26. It's Faith Over Science, Myth Over Reality. We know that this "my mind is made up, don't bother me with the facts" attitude shows up most openly in how science is disregarded by the Bush Administration in favor of faith-based reasoning. A good example would be the issue of global warming. Some of this non-curiosity about reality may be based in fundamentalist religious, even Apocalyptic, beliefs. Much of Bush's bashing of science is designed as payback to his fundamentalist base, but the scary part is that a good share of the time he actually seems to believe what he's saying, about evolution vs. creationism, stem-cell research, abstinence education, censoring the rewriting of government scientific reports that differ from the Bush party line, cutbacks in R&D grants for the National Science Foundation, etc., ad nauseum. This closed-mind attitude helps explain, on a deeper level, why things aren't working out in Iraq, or anywhere else for that matter. Reality, to them, is an annoyance that is best ignored.

AMERICA OR GERMANY IN THE '30S?

In sum, we know that permanent-war policy abroad and police-state tactics at home are taking us further into a kind of American fascism domestically and an imperial foreign policy overseas. All aspects of the American polity are infected with the militarist Know-Nothingism emanating from the top, with governmental and vigilante-type crackdowns on protesters, dissent, free speech, freedom of assembly happening regularly on both the local and federal levels. (You need look no further than the martial-law behavior of federal, state and local agencies in pre-emptively arresting and disciplining would-be protesters at both the Democratic and Republican conventions in 2008.) More and more, America is resembling Germany in the early 1930s, with group pitted against group while the central government amasses more and more power and control of its put-upon citizens, and criticizing The Leader's policies is denounced as unpatriotic or even treasonous.

The good news is that after suffering through seven-plus years of the CheneyBush presidency, and despite the Bush-compliant corporate mass-media that often disgraces the journalistic profession, the public's blinders are falling off. The Republicans can rely on no more than 35% of the voting population for "base" support. The 2006 defeat of the Republicans in the House and Senate and Tom DeLay's fall from power are good symbols of this, and the true nature of these men and their regime is finally starting to hit home. Cheney is widely acknowledged as the true power behind the throne, and Bush is seen for what he is: an insecure, uncurious, arrogant, dangerous, dry-drunk bully who is endangering U.S. national interests abroad with his reckless and incompetently-managed wars, his wrecking of the U.S. economy at home, and with his over-reaching in all areas.

It goes without saying that had a Democratic president and vice president behaved similarly to Bush and Cheney, they'd have been in the impeachment dock in a minute.

Given all these scandals and more, and the loss of public support for the Iraq war and Republican policies in general, it would seem that the Democrats are in an enviable position to take back the White House in 2008.

DEMS DOING "BUSINESS AS USUAL"

But the Democrats, who were given the majority in Congress by voters anxious and desperate for major change, seem content to fritter away their political advantage by nibbling around the edges of CheneyBush policy but rarely attacking them frontally, especially on the continuing war in Iraq and a possible attack on Iran coming down the pike, and on impeachment. It's more or less business as usual in the nation's capitol.

It's possible that this inaction of Democratic leadership is a result of their own complicity in many of the worst decisions of the past eight years. Or perhaps they believe that because the war is so unpopular and the scandal-ridden GOP is self-destructing from within, the Dems should just keep their heads down and coast to a victory in 2008. In Barack Obama, they have a charismatic candidate who mobilizes millions with his promise of hope and change.

But a lot can happen between now and November that could prove disastrous or wonderful for Democratic chances. It's possible that the positive GOP momentum with Sarah Palin could lead the Republican ticket to victory. Or the never-ending series of scandals in Sarah Palin's political life could help sink John McCain's chances. Or Bush could make some sort of "peace" agreement with Iran. Or he could bomb Iran. Or announce the capture or death of Osama bin Laden. Or Biden or Obama could self-destruct in some embarrassing way. Anything is possible in American politics.

The Democrats are not politically pure, to be sure. Too many (including, to a certain extent, Obama) are beholden to the same interests that have corrupted the Republicans during the CheneyBush years. However, in enough instances that matter -- moving away from the Iraq War, naming less ideological judges to the Supreme Court, paying attention to Constitutional protections of citizens' rights, acting on global warming, beefing up governmental regulation to protect the environment, etc. -- the Democrats would be different enough to start to turn the ship of state away from its reckless, dangerous extremism and back more toward the center and maybe even, on some issues, in the direction of progressive liberalism.

Copyright 2008, by Bernard Weiner

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Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at universities in California and Washington, worked as a writer/editor with the San Francisco Chronicle for two decades, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org). To comment: crisispapers@hotmail.com .

What Really Happened on September 11?

September 08, 2008
by Sam Vaknin
TheConservativeVoice.com

An Interview with David Ray Griffin

On September 11, I entertained a couple of house guests, senior journalists from Scandinavia. I remember watching in horror and disbelief the unfolding drama, as the United States was being subjected to multiple deadly attacks on-screen. I turned to the international affairs editor of a major Danish paper and told her "This could not have been done by al-Qaida." I am an Israeli and, as such, I have a fair "sixth sense" as to the capabilities of terrorists and their potential reach.

Enter David Ray Griffin. I was introduced to him by a mutual acquaintance. He is emeritus professor of philosophy of religion and theology at Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University. He has published over 30 books, including eight about 9/11, the best known of which is "The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Exposé."

On the face of it, his credentials with regards to intelligence analysis are hardly relevant, let alone impressive. But, to underestimate him would be a grave error. Being a philosopher, he is highly trained and utterly qualified to assess the credibility of data; the validity and consistency of theories (including conspiracy theories); and the rationality and logic of hypotheses. These qualifications made him arguably the most visible and senior member of what came to be known as the 9/11 Truth Movement.

In our exchange, he proved to be tolerant of dissenting views, open to debate, and invariably possessed of rigorous thinking. Still, while the 9/11 Truth Movement has succeeded to cast doubts on the official version of the events of September 11 (correctly labeled by Griffin: "the official conspiracy theory"), it failed, in my view, to present a compelling case in support of the alternative conspiracy theory much favored by many of its members: that the Bush administration was behind the attacks, one way or the other. Judge for yourselves.

The Incompetence Theory

A. This administration demonstrated incredible incompetence with Hurricane Katrina, the governing of occupied Iraq, and the subprime mortgage crisis. Why should September 11 and the months leading to that fateful day be any exception?

DRG: It was not an exception: The planning and the execution were terribly flawed, resulting in so many problems in the official story, including both internal contradictions and the obvious contravening of basic laws of physics, that if Congress and the press had carried out even the most superficial investigation, the fact that 9/11 was an inside job would have been quickly exposed. I will give nine examples (in giving these, I cite places in my books where the issues are discussed more fully):

First, President Bush was in a classroom in Florida when the second of the Twin Towers was struck. Although the first strike had been dismissed as an accident, this second one was taken as evidence that America was "under attack," as Andrew Card, Bush's chief of staff, reportedly whispered in his ear. Back in the White House, the Secret Service took Vice President Cheney down to the bunker under the White House. But the Secret Service agents with Bush allowed him to stay in the classroom for another 10 minutes, as shown by a video that was included in Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11." If the attacks had really been, as they seemed, surprise attacks by terrorists going after high-value targets, the Secret Service agents would have feared that a hijacked airliner was bearing down on the school at that very minute. Their failure to hustle Bush away thereby implied that they knew that Bush was in no danger because they knew who was in control of the planes. The White House's apparently belated recognition of this implication was manifested a year later (before the video had emerged on the Internet), when it started telling a different story, claiming that Bush left the classroom within seconds after being told about the second strike on the Twin Towers ("9/11 Contradictions," Ch. 1).

Second, the White House and the Pentagon also later found it necessary to distort the truth about where Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and General Richard Myers were between 9 and 10 AM that morning. Richard Clarke reported in his book, "Against All Enemies" that Myers and Rumsfeld were in the Pentagon's teleconferencing studio participating in his White House video conference, but Myers and Rumsfeld both claimed that they were elsewhere. Although Clarke and Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta reported that Cheney was down in the bunker before 9:20, the 9/11 Commission claimed that he didn't enter it until almost 10:00 (20 minutes after the attack on the Pentagon and just before the crash of Flight 93). And although Clarke reported that he received the shootdown order from Cheney by 9:50 (at least 13 minutes before Flight 93 went down), the Commission claimed that Cheney did not issue this authorization until after 10:15 ("9/11 Contradictions," Chs. 2-7).

Third, much of the evidence that the planes had been hijacked was provided by people who reported that they had received cell phone calls from relatives or crew members on board the planes. About a dozen cell phone calls were reported from Flight 93 alone. But after the 9/11 Truth Movement publicized the fact that cell phone calls from high-altitude airliners had not been technologically possible in 2001, the FBI changed its report, saying that the only cell phone calls from any of the four airliners were two that occurred when Flight 93 had descended to 5,000 feet (at which altitude they would have been at least arguably possible). This change of story meant, among other things, that the FBI, having stated in an affidavit in 2001 that American 11 flight attendant Amy Sweeney had made a 12-minute cell phone call, needed to fabricate a very implausible tale to support its revised claim that she had actually used an onboard phone ("The New Pearl Harbor Revisited" [henceforth NPHR], Chs. 3 & 6).

Fourth, the military's original explanation as to why it was unable to intercept the first three flights before they hit their targets was so obviously problematic that it needed to be changed. Members of the 9/11 Truth Movement had shown that, even if the FAA had been as slow in notifying the military as NORAD claimed in 2001, there had still been sufficient time for the flights to have been intercepted, especially Flights 175 and 77. So the 9/11 Commission in 2004 simply created a new timeline, claiming, wholly implausibly, that the FAA had not notified the military at all about those two flights ("9/11 Contradictions," Chs. 10 & 11).

Fifth, after considerable evidence was publicized by the 9/11 Truth Movement that Flight 93 had been shot down, the 9/11 Commission created a completely new story about it. Although the military had stated that the FAA had notified it about this flight and even that fighter jets were tracking it, the 9/11 Commission claimed that the FAA had not notified the military about Flight 93 until after it had crashed. Also, as I pointed out above, the 9/11 Commission claimed that Cheney did not issue the shootdown order until about 10:15, even though Richard Clarke reported that he had received this order at about 9:50 ("9/11 Contradictions," Chs 12-13).

Sixth, the FBI first told reporters that proof of al-Qaeda's responsibility for the attacks was incriminating material, including Mohamed Atta's last will and testament, that was found in a Mitsubishi rented by Atta and left in the parking lot at the Boston airport. The FBI also reported that two other members of al-Qaeda who were on Flight 11, Adnan and Ameer Bukhari, drove a rented Nissan on September 10 from Boston to Portland, where they stayed overnight and then took a commuter flight back to Boston the next morning in time to catch Flight 11. On September 13, however, the FBI realized that neither of the Bukhari brothers had died on 9/11: one was still alive and the other had died the year before. So the FBI simply changed the story, saying that Atta and another al-Qaeda operative, Abdul al-Omari, had driven the Nissan to Portland. The incriminating materials were now said not to have been found in the Mitsubishi in the parking lot but in Atta's luggage, which had failed to make the transfer from the commuter plane to Flight 11. One problem with this new story, besides the fact that it did not get fully formed until September 16, is that it made no sense, because it implied that Atta had planned to take his will on a plane that he intended to fly into the World Trade Center ("9/11 Contradictions," Ch. 16).

Seventh, the official story about the attack on the Pentagon said that the pilot of Flight 77, which was a Boeing 757, executed an amazing maneuver in order to strike the first floor of Wedge 1. But the authorities also claimed that this pilot was Hani Hanjour, who could not, as was reported by several stories in the mainstream press, safely fly even a single-engine plane. The identification of the incompetent Hanjour as the pilot was evidently a last-minute decision, because his name was even not on the FBI's first list of al-Qaeda operatives on Flight 77 (NPHR Chs. 2 & 6).

Eighth, eyewitness accounts by journalists and Pentagon employees, along with photographs and videos taken right after the attack on the Pentagon, reveal that there was no sign that the Pentagon had been hit by a giant airliner. Although about 30 people claimed to see an airliner strike the Pentagon, their testimonies were often in contradiction with each other and the physical facts ("NPHR Ch. 2).

Ninth, WTC 7 was evidently supposed to come down at about 10:45 in the morning, shortly after the collapses of the Twin Towers. A massive explosion occurred in the basement at about 9:15, which would have been 90 minutes before the explosions that were supposed to bring the building down (which would have been the same time-interval as that between the 8:46 explosion in the basement of the North Tower, as reported by janitor William Rodriguez, and the explosions that brought the building down at 10:28). But evidently most of the explosives that were supposed to go off at 10:45 failed to do so. As a result, the building did not come down until late in the afternoon, at which time the collapse was captured on several videos, which show the collapse to have been identical to typical implosions caused by pre-set explosives. This fact necessitated trying to keep most people in the dark about the collapse of WTC 7 as long as possible: Videos of WTC 7's collapse were never again (after 9/11 itself) shown on mainstream television; the 9/11 Commission did not even mention this collapse; and the National Institute of Standards and Technology repeatedly delayed its report on this building, finally issuing it only late in 2008, shortly before the Bush administration was to leave office.

As shown by these and many other problems, almost every aspect of the 9/11 operation revealed incompetence. If any of the resulting problems had been pursued by Congress or the press, the 9/11 hoax would have been quickly exposed.

WTC7

Q: Did the US Government possess in-house the expertise necessary to control-demolish WTC 7? Surely they didn't sub-contract or farm out the demolition?

DRG: Apart from an investigation, we have no way to know for certain. But the planners probably did hire someone: As explained by ImplosionWorld.com, true implosions, which cause a building to come straight down into its own footprint (as WTC 7 clearly did), are "by far the trickiest type of explosive project, and there are only a handful of blasting companies in the world that possess enough experience . . . to perform these true building implosions" ("Debunking 9/11 Debunking," Ch. 3). If the point of your statement that they "surely" would not have farmed out the demolition is that they would have feared that doing so would result in someone spilling the beans, this is an unrealistic assumption. No one would have been brought into the operation who could not be trusted to keep quiet. And why would someone confess to having participated in a project that killed thousands of fellow citizens?

Q: Why didn't the conspirators wait until a few hours after the attacks and then publicly demolish all three buildings as hazards to the public and for public safety reasons?

DRG: Again, apart from an investigation, in which people are induced to talk by subpoenas and threats of prison, we cannot know why they made the various decisions they made. We can, however, make reasonable guesses in some cases. In this case, the desire to demolish these particular buildings was surely a secondary motive, important to only a few of the conspirators. The main purpose was surely to create a traumatizing spectacle---the planes hitting the buildings and then the buildings coming down shortly thereafter, killing thousands of people---in order to get the American people and Congress psychologically prepared to support attacks on Muslim countries, starting with Afghanistan (against which a war had already been planned), and to accept restrictions on our constitutional rights (the PATRIOT Act). This spectacle could then be replayed endlessly on television to reinforce the public's fury and readiness to support the Bush administration's "war on terror," which could be morphed to attack Iraq (a war against which had also been planned in advance) and, assuming that the wars in those first two countries would go well, some of the other countries on the administration's "hit list," which has been reported by General Wesley Clark and neocon Michael Ledeen (NPHR Ch. 7).

Q: Why was WTC7 targeted and not other WTC buildings which suffered worse damage from debris and fires?

DRG: Again, we could learn the answer to this question easily enough through a genuine investigation, in which the usual types of inducements are used to get people to talk. Because that has not happened, some people have offered theories. One theory is that the building contained records that some authorities wanted destroyed. Another theory is that Giuliani's Emergency Operations Center on the 23rd floor had equipment for drawing the two planes into the Twin Towers, which meant that the building needed to be totally demolished in order to destroy all the evidence. I myself do not speculate about this, as I do not try to develop a complete theory as to what happened that day. I concentrate instead on the various types of evidence that the official story is false, which is all that is needed to point out that another---a real---investigation is in order.

United 93

Q: The conspiracy at the government level, according to the 9/11 Truth Movement, involved a stand-down order: an instruction to the military not to interfere with the hijacked aircraft and to allow them to crash into their targets. If so, why was UA 93 the exception? Why was it shot down (according to the Truth Movement)?

DRG: Let me begin by correcting your first statement. Many, perhaps most, people in the 9/11 Truth Movement do not believe there were any hijackers on board and hence do not believe that there were any "hijacked aircraft" that were simply "allowed" strike their targets. I at least do not believe this (I've explained why at great length in NPHR) and assume, instead, that the whole operation was carried out by the White House and the Pentagon, with Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Myers being three of the central figures.

As to what happened to Flight 93, we will probably never know unless there is an investigation. There is indeed strong evidence that a plane was shot down near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. And this could have been the original plan, in order to have a basis for fabricating the story about the heroic passengers foiling the intention of the evil Arab Muslims to strike another target (such as the White House or the US Capitol building), so that this story could be used by Bush as the beginning of the "war on terror," in which the American victims would strike back against the Muslim terrorists and "the countries that harbor them." But we have no way of knowing for sure.

We can, however, say one thing with certainty: that the official story—according to which there was no wreckage at the site because the plane, headed down at 580 miles per hour, buried itself completely in the ground, although a red headband (like those allegedly worn by the hijackers) and the passport of the al-Qaeda pilot were found on the ground—is not true. For one thing, that description of the plane's descent does not fit what any of the eyewitnesses reported. Also, different eyewitnesses of an airliner flying over the area reported it as going in two different directions, and then two crash sites were cordoned off. From the evidence, therefore, it's very hard to figure out much beyond the fact that the official story is a lie (NPHR Ch. 3).

Q: In your book, "9/11 Contradictions", you accept a purported phone call from the aircraft to a fixed line as a fact (pp. 116-7). Why, then, do you reject the veracity and existence of the other phone calls, allegedly made from other aircraft?

DRG: Actually, you misunderstood. I did not accept the purported call from Tom Burnett as a fact. What I accepted is that Deena Burnett "received a phone call that she believed to be from" her husband, Tom Burnett. The passage to which you refer is from Chapter 12 of "9/11 Contradictions." If you look at Chapter 17, you'll see that I used the calls received by Deena Burnett as a central part of the evidence that the calls were faked. Here's why: She reported that she was certain that the calls were from Tom, because she had recognized his cell phone number on her Caller ID. But when the FBI changed its story to get rid of all claims about high-altitude cell phone calls, it said that the calls from Tom Burnett were made on an onboard phone (even though the FBI report written on 9/11 had cited Deena's assertion that Tom had used his cell phone to make the calls). If one accepts this new FBI report (which was presented at the Moussaoui trial in 2006), how does one explain the fact that Deena reported seeing his cell phone number on her caller ID? Surely, given the fact that she reported this to the FBI that very day, we cannot assume that she was mistaken. And surely we cannot accuse her of lying. But an explanation becomes possible once we become aware of technology that can fake people's phone numbers as well as their voices. The conclusion that these calls were faked is also supported by internal problems in the statements purportedly made by Tom Burnett.

Once we realize that the cell phone calls were faked, moreover, we must assume that calls reportedly made using onboard phones were also faked: If hijackers really surprised everyone by taking over the planes, why would have people been ready to make fake cell phone calls reporting the existence of hijackers on the planes? (NPHR Chs. 3 & 6).

Al-Qaida and Atta

Q: Why would the FBI and the 9/11 Commission endorse a fallacious timeline regarding Atta's whereabouts and activities throughout 2001? They admit that they cannot explain his movements. They do not use this timeline to support the official history.

DRG: I explained above that the FBI did have a reason for giving a false account of Atta's movements on September 10 and 11: The story about two Flight 11 hijackers having driven a Nissan to Portland had become so well known that, when the FBI discovered that the Bukharis had not died on 9/11, it evidently felt that the best solution was to say that Atta had taken the Nissan to Portland. This revised account did become part of the official story.

With regard to the FBI's timeline for Atta in the early months of 2001, part of the motive for saying that he had left Venice, Florida, never to return, was evidently to cover up the fact that during March and April of 2001 he had lived with a stripper, Amanda Keller, which many people in Venice knew (especially the people who rented the apartment to them). Another motive, suggested by investigative reporter Daniel Hopsicker, is that Atta—who, according to Keller, took cocaine, which he would obtain from Huffman Aviation, where he was supposedly taking flight lessons (although Keller reported that he was already an expert pilot)—was perhaps involved in a drug-smuggling operation headquartered at Huffman. In these respects, therefore, the denial that Atta was in Venice in 2001 evidently did serve to support the official story.

In NPHR, incidentally, I reported still more evidence that the FBI timeline on Atta is false. Although this timeline claimed that Atta first arrived in the United States in June 2000, several credible individuals, including a Justice Department official, reported that Atta was in the country much earlier in 2000, as did the military intelligence operation known as Able Danger. It was clearly very important to the authorities to maintain otherwise, as shown by the fact that the Pentagon's inspector general went to great lengths to get Able Danger members to change their stories or, when they would not, to defame them (NPHR Ch. 6). But why it was so important, I do not know. Perhaps the FBI and Pentagon simply felt that, having strongly insisted that Atta did not arrive in the United States until June 3, 2000, they had to stick with it. But it may have also been motivated by the concern to keep his real activities during that period secret.

Q: If al-Qaida were not involved, how do you explain Project Bojinka as well as multiple warnings (by the foreign minister of Afghanistan, various agents, and the intelligence services of countries from Russia to Israel), all of them pointing the finger at Usama bin-Laden? How do you account for multiple intercepted communications that clearly point the finger at al-Qaida and bin-Laden?

DRG: I have never claimed that al-Qaeda was "not involved" at all. I claim only that there is no evidence that al-Qaeda operatives hijacked the planes. They appear to have been involved as paid assets to provide plausible people on whom to blame the "hijackings." The White House and the 9/11 Commission, for example, went to great lengths to cover up the fact that both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia funneled money to them (NPHR Chs. 6, 8).

Q: Everyone al-Qaida operative Abu Zubaydah mentioned in his testimony had died shortly thereafter. Why has Abu Zubaydah survived? How come he hasn't been liquidated as well?

DRG: I would not presume to know. And perhaps this is a good time to respond explicitly to your apparent assumption that, to challenge the official conspiracy theory, one must have an alternative theory of equal specificity, with answers to all the questions that could conceivably be raised about it. But this is not true. Let's say that you were accused by the authorities of murdering Bill Jones. You would assume that, to get the case dismissed, all you and your lawyer had to do was to prove that you could not possibly have killed Jones. But imagine that, after you had done so, the judge then declared: "Sorry, that's not good enough. You must also tell us who did kill Jones, how the murder was committed, and why." You would surely consider that unreasonable. By analogy, the 9/11 Truth Movement has provided abundant evidence that the 9/11 attacks could not have been carried out by al-Qaeda terrorists. We need not also specify exactly who did organize and carry out the attacks, all their motives, and why they handled each part of the operation and the cover-up as they did. So there is simply no need for us to try to explain why Zubaydah was not liquidated.

Q: The removal of Mahmoud Ahmad from office (as head of Pakistan's ISI) - ostensibly in order to silence him - could have actually provoked him to spill the beans and reveal what he knows. Alternatively, if he were being punished, at the behest of the CIA, for his collaboration with the 9/11 hijackers, this would seem to prove that the Bush Administration has not been complicit in the attacks.

DRG: I do not find it plausible that because Ahmad was removed, he would have been likely to spill the beans. People, especially long-time professionals like Ahmad, usually do not, out of spite, confess to participation in mass murder. And he was probably rewarded handsomely to resign quietly.

Government and Other Institutions

Q: Americans are prone to distrust their government and to attribute to it the worst motives, intentions, and conduct (consider, for instance, the conspiracy theories whirling around the Kennedy Assassination). Isn't the Truth Movement another instance of this brand of "anti-establishment" paranoia?

DRG: Like other a priori charges against the 9/11 Truth Movement, this one fails to fit the facts. If this characterization, according to which we joined the movement because we suspected the worst of the Bush administration (rather than because we became convinced by good evidence), were true, most of us would have started calling 9/11 an inside job the very first week. But if you look at the histories of most of the leading members of the movement, they joined much later. I myself first heard the inside-job theory near the end of 2002 and, when the advocate of this theory sent me what he considered good evidence, I did not find it convincing. It was not until I learned of Paul Thompson's "9/11 Timeline" in March 2003 that I started moving in that direction. To give two more examples, Steven Jones, our leading physicist, did not become involved until 2005, and Richard Gage, who started Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, until 2006.

Another consideration is that paranoid people are usually not very good at weighing evidence carefully. If you look at the writings of people such as Kevin Ryan (a chemist formerly employed at Underwriters Laboratories), Rob Balsamo (founder of Pilots for 9/11 Truth), A. K. Dewdney (former columnist for Scientific American), Robert Bowman (former head of the "Star Wars" program), as well as Jones and Gage, you will see that they exemplify careful, empirical observations, not paranoid thinking. The claim that the leading members of the 9/11 Truth Movement are paranoid is a purely a priori charge, not supported by empirical observation.

Q: Previous false flag operations did not take place on American soil and involved a minimal number of casualties. Not so September 11. Why the change in MO? Wouldn't the mere destruction of the Twin Towers (at night, let's say and with explosives) been enough? Why the enormous - and easily avoidable - toll in lives (for instance, in the Pentagon)?

DRG: My answer to this would be much the same as my response to your second question under the WTC 7 (which actually dealt with the Twin Towers as well), namely, that the spectacle of the planes hitting the buildings and then the buildings collapsing (which would be replayed endlessly on television), along with the toll in lives, was surely considered essential to get the American people, and our representatives in Congress, fired up to give the administration carte blanche to do as it wanted.

With regard to your observation that no previous false-flag operation had taken place on American soil, that is true only because President Kennedy vetoed Operation Northwoods. The Pentagon's joint chiefs of staff all signed off on plans to kill American citizens in 1962 in order to have a pretext for a war to regain control of Cuba ("The New Pearl Harbor," Ch. 7).

Q: If not al-Qaida operatives, then who flew the planes? Who were the suicide pilots? Surely not Americans?

DRG: I doubt if anyone was flying the planes that struck the Twin Towers and whatever it was that hit the Pentagon. They were most likely all flown remotely. The evidence suggests that the Pentagon, besides having bombs go off inside, was struck by a missile or some small airplane (which could have been flown by remote control). And the planes that hit the Twin Towers might have been taken out of the pilots' control by means of a technological override. Or, more likely, drones may have been substituted for them when their transponders went off near the Air Force base at Rome, New York (hence exemplifying one of the scenarios suggested in Operation Northwoods). In any case, I do not assume that there were any American pilots who volunteered to commit suicide.

Q: If a missile hit the Pentagon, then where is or was flight 77?

DRG: I have never argued that a missile hit the Pentagon. I reported in my first book (The New Pearl Harbor) that Thierry Meyssan argued this case. But I also mentioned that his main point was that there is no good evidence that a Boeing 757 hit the Pentagon and some evidence that it was a missile or a small military plane. That still leaves, of course, your question: If Flight 77 did not hit the Pentagon, what happened to it?

I never cease being amazed at how many people think that, unless those who deny that Flight 77 hit the Pentagon can answer this question, our claim is discredited. But that is simply the most prevalent example of the assumption that, to provide a convincing argument against the official theory, one must provide a fully detailed alternative theory—in this case explaining what happened to Flight 77. But that does not follow. There are many possible things that could have happened to it. It might, for example, have been the airliner that reportedly crashed on the Ohio-Kentucky border; or it could have been taken to a US Air Force base. But apart from an investigation, there is no way for those of us not involved in the operation to know what really did happen to it. And there is no need for us to have an answer, just as you, to prove you didn't kill Bill Jones, would not have to be able to say who did it and how.

We do, I might add, have strong evidence that the government used deception to convince us that Flight 77 hit the Pentagon. US Solicitor General Ted Olson—who had been instrumental in putting the Bush administration in power by successfully arguing that the US Supreme Court should stop the 2000 vote count in Florida—claimed on 9/11 that he had received two phone calls from his wife, TV commentator Barbara Olson, from Flight 77 shortly before the Pentagon was hit, during which she reported that the flight had been taken over by hijackers armed with knives and boxcutters. This was used as evidence that Flight 77 had been hijacked and that it had not crashed in the Mid-West. When the FBI presented its evidence about phone calls from the planes at the Moussaoui trial in 2006, however, it said this about Barbara Olson: She attempted one call, which was "unconnected," and hence lasted "O seconds." Accordingly, although the FBI is part of the Department of Justice, its report indicates that the story told by Ted Olson, the DOJ's former solicitor general, was untrue---which implies either that Olson lied or that he was duped. In either case, the claim that Barbara Olson gave information about Flight 77 was based on deception. And such deception is one more piece of evidence that the whole story about Flight 77 and the attack on the Pentagon is false (NPHR Ch. 2).

Q. Can you please comment on the role of terrorist attacks in domestic politics in the US?

DRG: Clearly the 9/11 attacks played a major role in the elections of 2002 and 2004, helping the Republicans gain control of the Congress and the White House. This role was not, to be sure, sufficient to keep Bush and Cheney in the White House in 2004, as the Republicans also had to resort to distorting John Kerry's war record and also to stealing the election through various means, most clearly in Ohio (see Mark Crispin Miller, Fooled Again). But there seems to be little doubt that the use of 9/11 to scare people into voting for Republicans played a role (even if irrationally, because the 9/11 attacks, if not either orchestrated or deliberately allowed by the Bush administration, were allowed by its incompetence).

By 2006, the 9/11-based appeal to fear had little effect, and thus far it is still weaker in 2008. This fact has not, however, prevented the Republicans from trying to use it one more time to scare people into voting for them, as the addresses to the Republican convention by Bush, Giuliani, and McCain illustrated.

Many people in the 9/11 community, however, fear that another false-flag attack, perhaps this time employing a nuclear weapon, will come before the 2008 elections, whether to help McCain win or, more fatefully, as a pretext for Bush to declare martial law and cancel the elections, allowing him, by the power he gave to himself in Presidential Directive 51, to assume unilateral control of the federal government. I am not saying that I expect this to happen. But I do not consider the fear unrealistic.

Q. In the days prior to September 11, the volume of put options on the stocks of firms involved in the attacks (mainly airlines and companies whose headquarters were in the WTC) soared. Do we know who bought these options and was it a case of insider trading?

DRG: It does appear to have been a case of insider trading (as I reported in "The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions," citing the careful study by Allen Poteshman, who teaches finance at the University of Illinois).

But the 9/11 Commission, while assuring us that it was not a case of insider trading, refused to tell us who bought the extraordinary numbers of put options on these companies. In illustrating its purported evidence that all the purchases were innocent, it said that "[a] single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda purchased 95 percent of the UAL puts." The Commission thereby employed circular logic. Beginning with the assumption that the attacks were planned and carried out entirely by al-Qaeda, with nobody else knowing about the plans, it argued that unless the put option purchasers were connected to al-Qaeda, the purchaser could not have had any inside information. But that argument begs the basic question at issue, which is precisely whether the attacks were planned by al-Qaeda, with no one else knowing about the plans (NPHR Ch. 5).

By not telling us who the investors were, the 9/11 Commission made it impossible for us to confirm its assurance that the purchases did not reflect insider information. We must simply take it on faith—which is difficult to do, given the dozens of lies of omission and distortion within the Commission's report ("The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions").

Sam, thanks for your questions, which have perhaps allowed me to reach a new audience with evidence that the official story about 9/11 is a lie. This evidence—only a small portion of which I have mentioned here—means that the policies that have been based on the assumption that America was attacked by Muslims on 9/11 need to be reversed. This point is especially germane in the light of Barack Obama's argument that one reason to wind down our involvement in Iraq is to have the troops and resources to "go after the people in Afghanistan who attacked us on 9/11." His position, which was stated repeatedly by speakers at the Democratic convention, is also reflected by the New York Times, which refers to the US attack on Iraq as a "war of choice" but the attack on Afghanistan as a "war of necessity," and by Time magazine, which has dubbed the latter "the right war." If we were not really attacked by Muslims on 9/11, these two wars were equally unjustified (as well as equally illegal under international law).

sorry victim, what has this got to do with collective punishment. Your long-winded post is misplaced, and no one will even bother to read it.

A brief summary of the programme:

The USAF could not prevent the attacks because transponders in the hijacked jets were turned off. Explosives in the twin towers were "debunked" by Popular Mechanics (now there's a joke). The demolition of WTC 7 was also "debunked" by the ever reliable Popular Mechanics. The rest of the programme was dedicated to straw men. Was the Pentagon was hit by a plane? Did Flight 93 crash in Pennysylvania or did it land elsewhere? Did 4000 Jews skip work in the WTC on 9/11? Were the attacks predicted in the pilot of the "Lone Gunmen" TV show? Finally, the programme finished with an irrelevant piece on pre-9/11 warnings which were missed.

The conclusion of the BBC: the evidence doesn't support conspiracy theories.

Okay, let's take a look at a some facts which were "overlooked" by the BBC.

Fact: FEMA was in New York on September 10.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/fematape.html

Fact: Odigo workers received warning of the 9/11 attacks.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/odigo_9-11_warning.html

Fact: There were bombs in the WTC buildings.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/911_firefighters.html

Fact: The Office of Emergency Management issued a collapse warning to a select few people.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/oem_wtc.html

Fact: Giuliani was warned of the collapses.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/wtc_giuliani.html

Fact: Five Israelis danced as the twin towers burned.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/fiveisraelis.html

Fact: 600ºC+ fires did not exist in either of the twin towers.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/wtc_fire.htm

Fact: The core of WTC 1 failed below the third floor.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/wtc1_core_collapse.html

Fact: The BBC stated there were no casualties when WTC 7 collapsed. This is flat out wrong. Master Special Officer Craig Miller of the Secret Service died when the building came down.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/silverstein_pullit.html

Fact: An explosion was reported on Flight 93.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/shootdown.html

Fact: The Secret Service were not concerned about the safety of the President on 9/11.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/9-11secretservice.html

Fact: The President was in no hurry to get out of Booker Elementary School.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/schoolvideo.html

Fact: Eight minutes before the Pentagon crash Flight 77 was tracked by radar as it closed to within 30 miles of Washington, therefore the whereabouts of the plane was known, therefore it could have been intercepted.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/911stand.html

Fact: Dick Cheney left Washington undefended on 9/11.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/usaf_911.html

The BBC briefly mentioned that Flight 77 hit a reinforced section of the Pentagon. What they failed to mention is that reinforcements on this section were completed on 9/11/2001 meaning this section of the building was nearly deserted when the plane hit.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/911_pentagon_renovations.html

Fact: White House staff started taking Cipro on 9/11.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/frameup.html

Finally, why did the BBC report that WTC 7 had collapsed ~20 minutes before the event occurred

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DVD176 - 9/11: Blueprint for Truth:
The Architecture of Destruction DVD

DVD176 - 9/11: Blueprint for Truth:
The Architecture of Destruction DVD

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Price Each $15.00 $12.00 $11.00 $10.00 $9.00
In this stunning multimedia presentation to the University of Manitoba, Canada, SF Bay Area architect, Richard Gage, AIA provides a packed audience with the evidence of controlled demolition using explosives at all 3 WTC high-rise "collapses", including:
near freefall symmetrical "collapse",
evidence of thermite,
tons of molten metal,
ejected steel beams,
and molten iron spheres.
"...courageous and comprehensive work...Richard Gage, AIA has inspired and awakened the very professionals on whose ignorance and silence the cover-up of the 9/11 crime depends." -Jim Hoffman, 911research.com, 911review.com and WTC7.net
"...exposes the 'official' story... highly recommended to all who seek facts and careful analysis of what really happened that day." -Dr. Steven Jones, Physicist
"...a courageous stand... calm, clear and professional approach." -Kevin Ryan, BS Chem., Certified Quality Engineer
Produced by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth
Run time: 2 hours
To order use this SECURE ORDER FORM.
Order form will open in a new window.

today is 9/11. lets us all pray together for all the innocence victim who died at wtc on 9/11/01 to rest in peace.
everybody have the rights to defend their own country and their own internal affair. chin was rights what he wrote about love constitution. as far as i am concern. jimba and spec should understand that world peace is better than war. if war broke out once again. the world in this beautiful planet earth will never be the same again. tctdh also have the rights to defend his beloved country.
thanks you all and lets us pray together hand in hand for those who died at the wtc.

Yes, Spec and I are so evil for defending minority rights... we are true war-mongers... pleeeeaze.

Hi mi amigo jimba y spec. Both of you are neither EVIL nor WAR MONGERS. It just seem to me that both of you are GENTLEMAN with a CONSCIENCE of CHIVARLY.But today many nation have NUCLEAR and CONCEAL WEAPONS and lets say weapon of destruction. Every nation have the RIGHTS to be the governance of this own sovereign territory.
A HOME have its own HOUSE RULE. A NATION have its own LAW and REGULAION. The family should OBEY the RULES of the ELDER. While a NATION citizen should OBEY the LAW of the CONSTITION that means GOVERMENT..Every nation have their own kind of GOVERMENT STSTEM and POLICY. And no CONSTITUTION or LAW are 100 percent perfect.
But the REAL PROBLEM in this WORLD what we all are CORNCERN about is WW3. VICTIM was RIGHTS. Lets hope WW3 will not be ERUPTED. Lets us enjoy this BEAUTIFUL PLANET EARTH where we all are ENJOING now. and PASS ON to our next GENERATION.
The is so BEAUTIFUL and hope lets us NOT to DESTROY it what we call EARTH.To preserve our PLANET EARTH is EASY. My suggestion is let the concern NATION to solve their own INTERNAL AFFAIR. So sorry my ENGLISH is so POOR.
ADIOS MI AMIGO.

Chin, for once I totally agree with you. A NATION'S LAW and REGULATION should be followed by its citizens. And for China, that means the CCP should OBEY too. This is your challenge.

Thanks mi amigo jimba. Thanks for your good advice. Lets pray our beautiful planet EARTH will exist for another century or more. Lets hope all NATION will live with PEACE and HARMONY. Lets us all pray to our almighty GOD that PEACE will be with all of us. Thanks you again mi amigo. Have a nice weekend.

Thanks mi amigo jimba. Thanks for your good advice. graciars

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