Time for a Pugliese rant. ;-) Y'all that have been here for as long or longer than I can ignore! My obsessive-compulsive fixation on fascists and Stalinists and credulous leftists like Lysander Zimmerman just got vented. This is mostly for the newbies here. Michael Pugliese ----- Original Message ----- From: Michael Pugliese To: LAMZ at sympatico.ca ; TO Anti-Racist Action ; Stop the WTO ; Rad Green ; mob4glob at dojo.tao.ca ; no_to_nato at flora.org ; Mac Quebec Group ; London Action Family ; Anarchist Information ; Hamilton Action for Social Change ; Friendly Anarchists League ; bus10 at yahoogroups.com ; anti-capitalism at yahoogroups.com ; Destroy the IMF Sent: Friday, September 14, 2001 10:09 AM Subject: Re: FINANCIERS WARNED OF IMMINENT ATTACK ON WTC!!
Counterpunch lack of fact checking can be maddening. I'll tell an amusing example from a few yrs. ago in a second.
On the first item below. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2001/09/14/MN92245.DTL
On this, "CNN's videotape of Palestinians, " saw that from Marcio A.V. Carvalho, on the Israeli Indymedia website yesterday morning. Not more than about a dozen more posts down was this,
http://worldtribune.com/wta/Archive-2001/me_palestinians_09_13.html
The NYT on the 12th had this http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/13/international/middleeast/13PALE.html?ex=10 01455886&ei=1&en=67b786c0ae3df047 (URL did not wrap, cut and paste into browser) where Arafat admitted that Hamas militants in Nablus were exultent.
This from a list not known for being a pro-Israeli! http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/msg07982.html
Now the amusing story about factchecking at Counterpunch. A freelancer, from the defunct NYC publication, The Eye, had a piece in Counterpunch that quoted extensively, Bill White, the notorious far right, Buchananite loon with the www.libertariansocialism.com and overthrow domains. Bill White, I wouldn't believe if he said the sky is blue. Sent a few e-mails to Jeff St. Clair, who later that morning said that Alex and he had decided to retract that story and never use the services of that freelancer again.
But, my skepticism of Cockburn had been pricked in the early 80's when in The Nation he disputed the figures of the # of deaths in the Ukranian famine of the early 30's from Robert Conquest, and gave an absurdly low # of "premature deaths in the GULAG in the low hundreds of thousands, not the 2 million that is now the consensus figure. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marxist/message/1436 (Stalinist nutters from PLP on Conquest, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marxist/message/825 http://www.infoukes.com/history/famine/revisionists/ )
Pages and pages of letters followed in a subsequent issue. Recently, Cockburn has cast doubt on global warming. Is friendly with http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/9911/1327.html Gun Owners of America leader, Larry Pratt. Pratt, as this antifa piece relates was up to his ears in links to Guatemalan death squads and attended the meeting in Estes Park, Colorado in '92 addressed by Louis Beam, formerly of the KKK, on a strategy for the then emergent militias, called, "leaderless resistance."
And, on Lysander's previous e-mail, have some skepticism about Emperors New Clothes, both Jared Israel and Michel Chossudovsky. Jared, still denies the 7,000 killed in Srbenica, and disputes that 200,000 were killed in Bosnia. On his website you might still be able to find the hour soundwave file of him debated David Rohde who has written extensively about Srbenica, on the Australian Bradcasting Corp. Chossudovsky, as well, has repeatedly appeared on stages with figures like Srjda Trifkovic, a former publicist for Radovan Karazdic, the Bosnian Serb leader, who had much operational responsibilty, in terms of signing off on massacres of Muslims in Bosnia by Mladic and the paramilitaries of the allies of Milosevic party, the SPS, that were under the control of the far right, neo-fascist, V. Seselj of the serbian Radical Party. Back to Jared> The International Committee for the Defense of Slobodan Milosevic (see their website, "Free Slobo!"), despite a number of e-mails that have been sent to them and allies of theirs like the Tangents website in Europe, still has signatures of support from the French fascists in the Third Positionist party, the PCN. http://www.icdsm.org/activities.htm http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/leninist-international/2001-July/000220 .html "Red-Browns, " and other "National Bolshevik creeps, as well as other more generically right wing forces have supported the Milosevic'es and Karazdic'es. http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/reports/muttamericabelgrade.htm http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/reports/gopbelgrade.htm Michael Pugliese
----- Original Message ----- From: Lysander Zimmerman To: TO Anti-Racist Action ; Stop the WTO ; Rad Green ; mob4glob at dojo.tao.ca ; no_to_nato at flora.org ; Mac Quebec Group ; London Action Family ; Anarchist Information ; Hamilton Action for Social Change ; Friendly Anarchists League ; bus10 at yahoogroups.com ; anti-capitalism at yahoogroups.com ; Destroy the IMF Sent: Friday, September 14, 2001 8:29 AM Subject: FINANCIERS WARNED OF IMMINENT ATTACK ON WTC!!
PLEASE FORWARD TO ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE
The news will never report this!!
From: www.indymedia.org and: www.counterpunch.org
FINANCIERS WARNED! Congress left in the dark about WTC foreknowledge (english) by relayed from counterpunch 4:06am Fri Sep 14 '01
lots of stuff, MOSTLY THAT FINANCIERS WERE WARNED! and Congress left in the dark. Internal memo to Goldman Sachs distributed on SEPTEMBER 10 2001 warning emminent terrorism. Wonder why all the big CEOs they have been reporting were conveniently "out of the office" in the WTC that day? Talk about private and corrupt power, and Congresspeople are saying this.
By Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair CounterPunch.org 9-14-1
* Most revealing reaction
Benyamin Netanyahu, former Israeli prime minister, on being asked what the attack means for relations between the US and Israel: "It's very good."
* Least credible analysis
New York Times columnist William Safire, claiming there was a terrorist mole in the White House, relaying to the kamikaze pilots the whereabouts of the President and the special coordinates of Air Force One. Safire's political mission in that particular column was to explain why the President fled down a SAC bunker in Nebraska. * Least credible news footage
CNN's videotape of Palestinians supposedly dancing in the streets of a West Bank town. CounterPuncher Marcio A.V. Carvalho at the state university of Campinas in Brazil tells us that he and his colleagues had compared this tape with one from 1991 showing Palestinian cheering, and found them to be identical. [a claim--though Canadian news footage shows mourning Arabs; U.S. media shows happy, celebrating Arabs. You put the pieces together on who is the enemy: THE U.S CORPORATE MEDIA!]
America's Greens Rally to Flag, Run for Cover
Hot to present themselves as staunch flag-waggers, some of America's premier environmental organizations have disgracefully ditched their principles.
The Sierra Club, America's oldest green group has abruptly turned off its campaign against the anti-environmental program of the Bush administration. CounterPunch has secured an internal memo in which the club's high command explains to its staff why it suspending its campaigns. "In response to the attacks on America," the memo goes, "we are shifting our communications strategy for the immediate future. We have taken all of our ads off of the air; halted our phone banks; removed any material from the web that people could perceive as anti-Bush, and we are taking other steps to prevent the Sierra Club from being perceived as controversial during this crisis. For now we are going to stop aggressively pushing our agenda and will cease bashing President Bush "
The memo then instructs club staffers on how to respond to the press: "If you are asked about what this terrorism does to the Sierra Club's agenda, please respond simply by saying that right now the public needs to focus on comforting each other and strengthening our national security to deal with the crisis at hand."
Imagine if this craven posture spreads across the public interest movement. We could expect First Amendment defenders to say that they were abandoning efforts to protect the Bill of Rights. We could expect groups defending immigrants to say that henceforth the INS should be given free rein. Fortunately First Amendment defenders and defenders of immigrants have stronger spines and principles than the supposed defenders of the environment at the Sierra Club. Are we now to expect the Club to endorse drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve as necessary "for national security"?
Even groups that we here at CounterPunch have admired are now in pellmell cowardly retreat.
The Berkeley-based International Rivers Network, which has been the main bulwark against the Three Gorges dam in China, now announces that it is suspending its planned nationwide protest against Morgan Stanley, one of the dam's principle financiers. Morgan Stanley had 50 floors of offices in the World Trade Center. IRN has also announced that "out of respect for the victims of this disaster, with understanding of the strategic difficulties in conveying to a shocked media and public our messages regarding the World Bank and IMF, with concern for the integrity of security systems in Washington DC, and for the safety of all, we will refrain from participating in activities surrounding the planned World Bank / IMF this month. We are also sharing our concerns with the leading organizations responsible for planning and coordinating these activities."
The Ruckus Society, the direct action training group involved in many demonstrations at the World Trade Organization has simultaneously announced that it is canceling its training camp, to be held in Middleburgh, Virginia, scheduled as preparation for the next World Bank meeting. This camp was to be cosponsored by the Institute for Policy Studies, Jobs with Justice and Global Exchange. All these organizations have now backed out, saying that now is not the time for such activity.
The Rainforest Action Network, based in San Francisco, has called for the cancellation of the protest and said that in the event it goes forward it will not participate.
Let's get this straight. If all resisters to the Bush political program were to follow this shameful exhibition by these green groups, we would see peace groups declining to protest against nuclear attacks on Iraq and armed invasion of Afghanistan. We would see civil rights sitting on their hands as racial and religious profiling is used to persecute people of Middle Eastern descent. Defenders of Palestinian rights would say that for the time being they wouldn't protest the use of US Apache helicopters against civilians in West Bank towns and villages. What nonsense! Principles are never more important than when it is inconvenient or dangerous to stand up for them.
Big Oil's Kamikaze
Rep. Don Young, the wild man from Alaska, was one of the few members of congress who didn't completely buy into the notion of Osama bin Laden as the mastermind of the attacks on the World Trade complex and the Pentagon. There's some possibility, Young told the Alaska Daily News, that the attacks are linked to the protests against the World Trade Organization, another of which is scheduled for later this month in Washington D.C. "If you watched what happened (at past protests) in Genoa, in Italy, and even in Seattle, there's some expertise in that field," Young said. "I'm not sure they're that dedicated but ecoterrorists --which are really based in Seattle -- there's a strong possibility that could be one of the groups."
Young doesn't believe any of this. But he smells weakness in the environmental movement and, like the old fur-trapper that he is, he is poised to exploit it. Young is not beneath using the carnage of the World Trade Center as a launching ground for his own agenda: oil drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, logging in the Tongass rainforest, passing laws against environmental protest and construction of new missile bases in the Alaska tundra and on the Aleutian Islands.
Chemical War in Manhattan As the environmentalists are putting themselves into a state of suspended animation, the citizens of Manhattan and the thousands of volunteer rescue workers mulling through the rubble at the World Trade Center complex may well be in the whirlwind of a toxic event, which has received little media attention and almost no precautionary aid from FEMA or other federal agencies coordinating.
Early reports from the Environmental Protection Agency described the destruction of the World Trade complex "an environmental catastrophe": the air of Manhattan clotted with asbestos, dioxin and other poisons. Yet, rescue workers found themselves without little more than surgical masks between their lungs and the poisons emanating from the smoldering ruins.
For years, the Pentagon and other terror pundits had been warning of the vulnerability of American cities to attack by biological and chemical weapons, the so-called asymmetrical warfare. These apocalyptic scenarios held that terrorist groups would unleash anthrax or sarin gas attacks in subways, water supplies or mega-office buildings, such as the World Trade Towers. Well, it turns out that the attackers didn't need to pack any chemicals, the buildings themselves proved to be quite toxic enough. The attackers used American planes as missiles and the buildings as chemical weapons.
Built during the height of the asbestos boom, the guts of the World Trade Center may have been one of the world's largest repositories of the carcinogenic fiber, used as insulation in the giant towers.
Underneath the rubble, thousands of tires continue to burn, sending plumes of pitch black smoke down the canyons of Manhattan. This smoke is contaminated with dioxins and assorted other poisons of the petrochemical age.
Early Warnings
Reports keep coming in to us of advanced warnings that an attack of some sort was eminent. San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown was booked to fly from the Bay Area to New York City on the morning of September 11. But Brown says that late Monday evening, a full 8 hours prior to the attack, he received a call from a person Brown described as his "airport security man" telling him that he should be extra cautious about air travel on September 11.
In addition to what we have previously reported about heightened security at the World Trade Center itself in the weeks leading to the attack and at the Picatinny Arsenal in Rockaway, New Jersey, CounterPunch has also learned that an internal memo was sent around Goldman Sachs in Tokyo on September 10 advising all employees of a possible terrorist attack. It recommended all employees to avoid any American government buildings.
That said, according to Rep. David Bonior, the Michigan Democrat, the Congress was the last to know. Even after two planes had struck the World Trade Center towers and another had smashed into the Pentagon, Bonior says congressional officials were not warned by the CIA or any other intelligence arm of the federal government that the 30,000 workers in the Capitol might be at risk of an attack. Bonoir has been one of the few members of Congress to openly question the value of bowing to the demands for more money made by CIA and other intelligence agencies. "If they can't even warn members of Congress about an ongoing attack, you really have to wonder what good they are," Bonior said. CP
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