> My reading of the evidence concerning the Sudanese factory bombing is that
> there probably was a failure in American intelligence, and that the
factory
> was not producing poison gas. I have no problem criticizing the poor
> selection of a target, but I think that the principles which guided that
> selection [1] that it strike directly at the capacity of terrorist
> organizations and states sponsoring terrorism to carry out those tasks,
and
> [2] that it minimize, as much as humanly possible, the loss of human life,
> were absolutely the ones we need to be using now. If you read the New
> Republic piece on the bombing, you will see that they were criticizing
> those principles as unnecessarily restrictive, and not simply the apparent
> failures in intelligence. If the New Republic is arguing that, you can
only
> imagine what position the hard right is taking.
>
> I would not for a moment criticize anyone making a case that the Sudanese
> factory bombing was an ineffective, poorly chosen response to the criminal
> bombing of the embassies, that it was based on poor and wrong
intelligence,
> and that, as a consequence, it caused unnecessary suffering.
>
> But it is an outrageously offensive insult to the memories of those
> hundreds of African and American dead from those embassy bombings, as well
> as the thousands upon thousands entombed in lower Manhattan as we discuss
> this, all dead because of actions specifically designed to kill the
maximum
> number of innocent people, that an action which killed one person in an
> ill-conceived attempt to save many more lives was a greater crime. Chomsky
> and Estabrook know no shame that they would say such a thing at such a
> time.
>
> >That's not fair, Leo. The accusation is that it was not making poison
> >gas--that somebody lied in the process of accumulating the evidence that
> >suggested it was. The accusation is that the U.S. casually knocked out
2/3
> >the pharmaceutical manufacturing capacity of Sudan, with bad consequences
> >thereafter for Sudan's public health.
> >
> >And as best as I have been able to figure out, the accusation is probably
> >true.
>
> Leo Casey
> United Federation of Teachers
> 260 Park Avenue South
> New York, New York 10010-7272
> 212-98-6869
>
> Power concedes nothing without a demand.
> It never has, and it never will.
> If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
> Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men
who
> want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and
> lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.
> -- Frederick Douglass --
>
> .
>
>
>