The UK’s Channel 4 has aired a documentary about Sri Lanka’s extermination of the Tamil Tiger rebels, including thousands of the Tamil population. Refugees were gathered into no-fire safety zones, then camps, even hospitals, a strategy it turns out, of concentrating people to more easily target them with artillery fire. Doc is below:
Norway’s AFTENPOSTEN newspaper claims to have received the entire cache of Cablegate diplomatic cables. So far they’ve restricted themselves to releasing correspondence relating to US-Norwegian relations, revealing particular Norwegians doing America’s bidding, from those with “strong pro-US instincts, to another considered by “some very senior U.S. officials” to be “weasily.”
From the cable about weasily Norwegian Ministry of Defense State Secretary Espen Barth Eide who’s played a key role in keeping Norwegian troops in Afghanistan and tried to manipulate his Government to support US machinations in Haiti, these misgivings:
Senior Norwegian officials, with strong pro-U.S. instincts, have also told the Embassy in private that Barth Eide is not to be relied upon to promote U.S. priorities. One key test of Barth Eide´s inclinations will be the MOD recommendation on which fighter plane to purchase, the Joint Strike Fighter or the Saab Gripen.
News as well to Norwegians is a cable about Oslo’s regional governor collaborating with US plans to move/expand its embassy which had been meeting with severe resistance from the public.
Although the AFTENPOSTEN is published in Norwegian, the cables are being reprinted in their original, Here’s a listing of what’s out so far:
Dokumentene fra USAs ambassader
OSLO REGIONAL GOVERNOR OFFERS SUPPORT FOR NEW AMERICAN EMBASSY PROJECT (15.12 2010)
NORWAY: A POTENTIAL HAVEN FOR WAR CRIMINALS?
(15.12 2010)
ESPEN BARTH EIDE, POWER IN NORWAY´S MOD AND RISING STAR IN THE LABOR PARTY (16.12 2010)
RISING NORWEGIAN ANTI-SEMITISM AFFECTING ITS ROLE IN THE MIDDLE EAST? (15.12 2010)
13.2.2009: CONSTRAINTS ON NORWAY´S MIDDLE EAST ROLE? (15.12 2010)
NORWEGIAN LAWYERS SUE ISRAEL FOR WAR CRIMES ABUSES (15.12 2010)
NORWAY WILL NOT PUBLICLY SUPPORT UN 1267 KREKAR DESIGNATION (15.12 2010)
GOJ TO APPROACH DUTCH TO ASK THAT MULLAH KREKAR NOT BE EXPELLED TO NORWAY (15.12 2010)
MULLAH KREKAR CASE: STATE OF PLAY IN JORDAN (15.12 2010)
OSLO NEC – THE HIGH COSTS OF FREEZING THE PROJECT (15.12 2010)
21.5.2003: Tigers issue hard-edged letter demandinginterim structure in north/east (19.12 2010)
11.2.2009: Norwegian FM Stoere: The world at his feet (15.12 2010)
16.6.2003: Tensions notch up over sinking of Tamil Tigership and latest slaying of a Tiger opponent (19.12 2010)
15.7.2003: Tigers still refusing request from monitors tovacate forward base (19.12 2010)
11.8.2003: LTTE base issue; Tigers get ready for Paris meeting (19.12 2010)
4.11.2003: Provoking political crisis, President fires three key ministers and suspends Parliament (19.12 2010)
23.10.2003: President demands removal of chief monitor, but it is not clear how far she wants to push matter (19.12 2010)
5.11.2003: President Affirms Commitment to Negotiated Settlement and Cease-fire (19.12 2010)
12.11.2003: Sri Lanka update: No resolution in “cordial” President-PM meeting; Norwegians here to meet all sides (19.12 2010)
17.11.2004: Possible ways forward in political standoff between Sri Lankan President and Prime Minister (19.12 2010)
6.3.2004: Ignoring orders of LTTE leadership, rebel commander remains ensconced in east (19.12 2010)
9.6.2004: Recent meetings show the way forward for Sri Lanka peace process is troubled (19.12 2010)
15.4.2004: In meeting, Norwegian Ambassador reviews recent discussion with President on peace process (19.12 2010)
17.6.2004: Talks about Talks in Stasis while Norwegians Ponder Next Moves (19.12 2010)
23.6.2004: Norwegian peregrinations for peace (19.12 2010)
20.4.2004: Norwegian envoy Solheim finds GSL and LTTE committed to peace process (19.12 2010)
6.12.2004: “Low key” Norwegian visit to Wanni (19.12 2010)
29.11.2004: Norwegians concerned by JVP-orcheastrated campaign against them (19.12 2010)
23.1.2006: U/S Burns reviews Sri Lankan peace process with Norwegian facilitator Erik Solheim (19.12 2010)
Here’s an excerpt about the US ambassador’s concern about “growing anti-Semitic” criticism of Israel’s attack on Gaza:
4/27/2009 12:55
C O N F I D E N T I A L OSLO 000315 SIPDIS E.O. 12958:
DECL: 04/27/2019
TAGS: PREL, PINR, PHUM, IS, NO
SUBJECT: NORWEGIAN LAWYERS SUE ISRAEL FOR WAR CRIMES ABUSES…
More recently, the Israeli Ambassador formally protested Norwegian Foreign Minister Stoere’s decision to stay in the room at the UN Racism Conference in Geneva during the Iranian President´s speech. The Ambassador also confidently told us that the embassy will likely sue the Norwegian National Broadcasting Company for what they perceive to be very biased news magazine reporting on Hezbollah and the Gaza war.
WHITNEY
COLORADO SPRINGS- When the swine flu hits the fan, contrary to all earlier scaremongering, H1N1 is no scatological disaster. I have an example: Without even looking, we know of two confirmed cases of swine flu in Colorado Springs School District 12. You wouldn’t know it to talk to the school, the city, the newspapers, or County Health. Is that odd?
No one in affluent neighborhoods wants TV cameras at their door, to interview surgical-masked family members in a living room covered in plastic.
In households with a doctor in the family, the afflicted is served Tamilflu and no one is the wiser. In others it’s enough to visit the doctor’s office to hear it’s just the flu for God’s sake. Leave the child in bed to recuperate. No need to keep siblings from going to school. Except from the rumors that will spread, there’s no cause for alarm.
We confirmed the stories from D-12 with phone calls, and so can you. Check with who should or should not be alerting you. Do it. Good grief, think of how many other unreported cases must be out there. Our two cases had to come from somewhere!
Hopefully when the Swine Flu vaccine ramps up, you’ll have seen what H1N1 really looks like up close.
1200 bodies counted, hundreds seriously injured, aerial bombing continues and nobody really cares, do they? More to come. Where are all the Western imperialist liberals who usually wax so eloquent when it comes to giving their precious support to what they always refer to as ‘self determination’? That is when it involves using Western military hardware against ‘the baddies’. Apparently they are asleep in the case of the Tamils of Sri Lanka? It says a lot about where our supposed liberals’ heads are really at?
Do you wonder why US criticism hasn’t been more pronounced, as Sri Lanka’s military keeps bombing the Tamil Tiger rebels in spite of disproportionately high civilian casualties? Collateral Damage is our M.O.! From Afghanistan today come reports of Truckloads of dead civilians after Afghan battle, specifically a US aerial bombardment. As always, US Commander: Afghan Civilian Casualties Not from US Forces.
That was last year’s official response to the 90 Afghan civilian deaths after a US air raid on Azizabad.
The Independent is reporting that the Farah Province civilian casualty is closer to 120 than the US DoD’s reported five. We are left only to check with Google to learn what will turn out to have happened, irrespective of what US-NATO media relations eventually confirms. Google the village of Ganj Abad, in the Bala Baluk district.
Like how the UN Security Council and the US government ONCE hid in the shadows egging on Saddam Hussein-led Iraq and its assault on Iran in previous times, today it is doing the same with the Sri Lanka Civil War. But Saddam Hussein couldn’t get in the death blow against Iran that the Security Council lusted for on behalf of the US in the ’80s. Sinhalese Sri Lanka is though against its Tamil opposition, and now the Security Council has come out of the shadows and is egging the final kill on. See Tamil Tigers urged to surrender (by UN Security Council)
Geopolitical reasons always dictate who the world corporate press declares as being righteous and who is denounces as being villainous in these conflicts. The US and its European allies have definitely tilted towards using India as regional ally against China and Russia, and India wants the end of Tamil rebellion, both inside India itself, and also inside Sri Lanka. That’s enough to spin the conflict as it is being done. While the ‘Security Council’ with the name of the United Nations attached to itself is calling for the Tamil insurrection to lay down its arms, we sincerely doubt that it will ever do anything to protect the Tamil population from slaughter at the hands of Sri Lanka’s government. It certainly hasn’t in the past.
The world once sat by and allowed the United States and its Peruvian puppet, Alberto Fujimori to slaughter off tens of thousands of its indigenous citizens. The excuse was that Sendero Luminoso, the oppositional group, was not a nice enough group of people for liberals and Leftists to campaign to stop the slaughter from occurring. Today the whole world sits by, because they don’t like the Tamil Tigers, and does the exact same thing of allowing the slaughter to go on.
Yet, On this very same day, today Fujimori got convicted and Tamils are demonstrating to stop the same sort of slaughter. The world as a whole though seems to learn nothing? No CHANGE has occurred still.
The role of the US government has been is to simply accept what its ally, India, does in Kashmir and in regard to the ‘Tamil Question?’ India is needed in a US constructed Asian regional alliance against both Russia and China, so this slaughter is just not important enough to the US government to prevent from occurring. The Tamils will simply join others as collateral damage.
The struggle for justice for the Tamil community in both India and Sri Lanka has taken place for many long decades and at a great loss of live, and like the struggle for justice in Kashmir, has seen the entire world hardly take the slightest notice. The Tamil people have failed to create a celebrity cause like Darfur and Tibet have become here in the US.
Instead, they have fallen victim to slaughter by State Terrorism much like the peoples of Kashmir, Peru (with the suppression of the Sendero Luminoso by the US-Peruvian governments), and Colombia (with it s decades long death squad massacres promoted by the US-Colombian government) have also suffered tens of thousands of casualties. And how many peoples in Africa have suffered similarly without anybody batting an eye in either Europe or the English speaking countries? The Tamil have probably lost 100,000 in their struggle for self determination of their communities in Sri Lanka alone.
Now, the world government enablers of the Sri Lanka slaughter have stepped in with their typical show of humanitarianism at the last moment in the ongoing slaughter with pleas to help the civilians! Sri Lanka Tigers urged to end war What a sad situation.
However, these same countries that are ‘urging and end to war’ in Sri Lanka are actively part of the US’s spread of war into Afghanistan, Pakistan, and into possibly the entire Indian sub-continent, if the US manages to heat up more the Pakistan-India conflicts with its so-called Global War on Terrorism, a war against shadows that merely serves to feed the US military-industrial complex’s welfare-guzzling operations.
Though the American population is hardly aware of this fact, the US and Indian governments have been increasingly allying their special interests together against what both governments conceive of as common political enemies in Asia. Neither governments are actually concerned at all about this conflict in Sri Lanka, as long as the slaughter is not of such a proportion as to detract from their goals of aggressively pursuing regional conflicts in other arenas of the area.
India, for example, must have good enough press to be able to quietly fight ‘pirates’ for the US in the Indian Ocean region that extends to Somalia. Tens of thousands of deaths in nearby Sri Lanka certainly will not help things here for India. And certainly might make it look nastier for the US’s military public relation’s team as the Pentagon pops civilians in Pakistan on a weekly basis.
One thing for the world to keep in mind, is that the more slaughter that occurs in the Indian sub-continent region, the more unstable becomes the nuclear caches of India and Pakistan, too. It ups the ante about how much bloodshed could possibly be effective or not in achieving sectarian goals.
Meanwhile, let us wish the best for the Tamil people who are suffering so because the dominant Sinhalese of Sri Lanka so little want to share power with the people they share the land with. In that there is similarity to the Middle East itself, where a dominant and controlling group of people care not the least to share power with their victims either.