Aliens On Earth.com Resources for those who are stranded here Our Bookstore is OPEN Over 5000 new & used titles, competitively priced! Topics: UFOs - Paranormal - Area 51 - Ghosts - Forteana - Conspiracy - History - Biography - Psychology - Religion - Crime - Health - Geography - Maps - Science - Money - Language - Recreation - Technology - Fiction - Other - New Search... for keyword(s)   in Page Titles in Book Title/Author in Contents of Pages ---other searches--- Metacrawler Yahoo FAST Search Google Altavista Dogpile Inference Find Northern Light IWon.com MSN Search Las Vegas Sun Mothership -> UFO -> Updates -> 1999 -> May -> Here

From: Jerome Clark <jkclark@frontiernet.net>
Date: Sat, 08 May 99 10:37:42 PDT
Fwd Date: Sat, 08 May 1999 21:22:55 -0400
Subject: Re: Excerpt from 'Space Aliens From The Pentagon'


>Date: Fri, 07 May 1999 02:49:05 -0600
>To: UFO UpDates - Toronto <updates@globalserve.net>
>From: Don Allen <dona@amigo.net>
>Subject: Re: Excerpt from 'Space Aliens From The Pentagon'

>>To: UFO UpDates - Toronto <updates@globalserve.net>
>>From: Jerome Clark <jkclark@frontiernet.net>
>>Subject: Re: Excerpt from 'Space Aliens From The Pentagon'
>>Date: Thu, 06 May 99 17:33:17 PDT

>>>Date: Thu, 06 May 1999 08:30:10 -0600
>>>To: UFO UpDates - Toronto <updates@globalserve.net>
>>>From: Don Allen <dona@amigo.net>
>>>Subject: Re: Excerpt from 'Space Aliens From The Pentagon'

>>>>Date: Wed, 5 May 1999 08:13:10 -0400
>>>>From: Bruce Maccabee <brumac@compuserve.com>
>>>>Subject: Re: Excerpt from 'Space Aliens From The Pentagon'
>>>>To: UFO UpDates - Toronto <updates@globalserve.net>

>Mr. Clark,

>There are many instances in the world in which tyrants have run
>free without so much as any kind of provocative action by NATO.
>Congress did not vote on any bombing, until it was well into the
>campaign. Prior to the bombs, the US had the KLA listed as a
>terrorist group with known drug dealing connections. While I was
>a bit sarcastic about some of my examples, the fact is there is
>a basis for looking at what we're told versus what they do.

>Yes, we have been dealing with Milosovic for quite some time and
>no I don't condone what he's done with killing people.

I hope that you will educate yourself on the long, tortured
history of the West's efforts to deal with Milosevic, with whom
we ought to have gone to war long ago, even as the West
frantically sought to avoid that option; meantime, Milosevic's
killers were acting with virtual impugnity as they conducted
mass murder of Bosnians and others. All you can manage to say,
significantly, is that you "don't condone" Milosevic's policy of
slaughter, surely as feeble a criticism as could possibly be
expressed.

>I don't condone the bombing of innocent people, and their
>workplaces, places of worship like NATO has done. They have not
>limited the "precision bombing"  to just military targets. The
>circus regarding the capture of the three soldiers was pure
>propaganda. It's "ok" for "us" to bomb Serbia, but the Serbs had
>better "take care of our POWS".

NATO has gone to extraordinary lengths not to hit civilian
targets, probably to the detriment of its own mission.  When
NATO errs, as sadly is inevitable, it acknowledges its errors
and apologizes for them. Presumably, if this were World War II,
you would be criticizing Allied bombers for killing civilians in
Axis countries, while ignoring, or only grudgingly
acknowledging, the mass murder occurring on the ground in those
murderous societies.

On the other hand, Milosevic, with whom you seem to have only
the slightest of quarrels, continues to deny the very existence
of ethnic cleansing.  According to the best estimates, Milosevic
is responsible for at least 250,000 deaths and the displacement
of hundreds of thousands more of his countrymen.  That you
continue to focus your attacks on NATO, the West, and the United
States in the face of horrors like these tells us much about
your own values, which frankly, for the sake of a better next
century than this one has been, I hope few share.

>There are many documented instances of our government supporting
>dictators for it's own ends. It was our own government that made
>it possible for Saddam Hussein to possess and develop
>biochemical weapons. It was the CIA who has conducted drug
>running operations, carried out mind control on it's own
>citizens under MK-Ultra and other ops. It was factions of our
>govt that traded drugs for arms in the Iran-Contra affair.

And these crimes were exposed by our free press and Congress,
and many of those responsible were either prosecuted or ruined
professionally.

No government, even a free government, is perfect, which is why
the architect of American democracy, Thomas Jefferson, warned
that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.  The difference
between a free society and the unfree ones for which you
apologize is not that the former never does wrong, but that
mechanisms exist for exposure, protest, reform, and prosecution
against these wrongs. Power corrupts in free societies just as
it does in police states. As someone who vigorously and actively
protested U.S. involvement in Vietnam, I am all too aware of how
it works.  The absence of Serbian protest against mass murder in
Kosovo tells us in itself what we need to know about the
distinction between a free society and one ruled by oppression
and terror.

>There is a 1994 Rockefeller report which investigated the
>military's experimentation of dosing it's own members with
>harmful chemicals. You can read about that here -
>http://www.gulfweb.org/bigdoc/rockrep.cfm

Again, the point is not that power is not corrupted even in a
free society, but that these abuses can be exposed and wrongs
can be righted and misguided (or even criminal) policies
changed.  In an unfree society, far worse crimes occur, and
nobody within those unfortunate societies (like Milosevic's) is
free to speak, and those responsible are not held to account.
All societies in the world, even free ones, have, in the course
of their histories, committed acts of which they should be
ashamed or for which they should be criticized.  That's hardly
news.

Look, for example, at the case of peaceable, democratic
Switzerland, whose business and other relationships with Nazi
Germany have come to light in recent years.  Does this make
Switzerland forever a pariah state, or this episode the defining
one in its history?  Of course not.

What I object to is your holding America to some unique account,
while giving far worse regimes, such as the one Milosevic leads,
what amounts to a free pass. Your last posting, frankly, read
like something out of the Serbian Propaganda Ministry.

>It is a documented fact that Clinton has actively solicited the
>Red Chinese dictatorship, for campaign re-election funds. You
>can read ample documentation about this at -->
>http://www.softwar.net

And this fact, of course, has been well documented in our free
press. Those directly culpable will have to answer for their
misdeeds, and Clinton's party (and mine) will likely pay the
price in our next election. Meantime, the Chinese flatly deny
that they were engaged in espionage, massive evidence to the
contrary notwithstanding.  Therefore, in that spirit, I urge
NATO to deny that yesterday its bombs fell on the Chinese
embassy in Belgrade.

>This is the very same regime that ran tanks over the bodies of
>it's citizens at Tiannemen Square; A regime that has brutalized,
>imprisioned, murdered its citizens for the crime of speaking out
>against tyranny. Yet we accord them "most favored" trade status

Are you suggesting that we not deal with China?  That we pretend
it does not exist?  I don't like that regime any more than you
do, but we also dealt with the Soviet Union and all sorts of
other unsavory regimes.  I even think we ought to have normal
diplomatic relations with Cuba.  Recognition does not equate
with approval, just acknowledgement of reality.  This world
would be a far more dangerous place if we engaged in relations
only with countries we like and have no prospect of armed
conflict with.

>while we lecture Serbians on brutalizing Albanians. Our
>hypocrisy is beyond absurd - We train killers at the CIA "School
>of Americas" in Georgia, but we have the gall to lecture other
>countries about "genocide". Unbelievable.

The United States does not "train killers at the CIA School of
Americas."  That's garbage.  If you want to discuss the (often
dismal) history of the Cold War in Latin America, we can do it
off line. Both sides have a lot to answer for here, on the
American side some administrations more than others (i.e.,
Reagan's more than Carter's).

Whatever else might be said (and there is much more to be said;
I said much of it as a left-liberal political activist on the
matter in the 1980s), in the end there is only one surviving
Stalinist state in Latin America, and its days are numbered.
Other societies emerged, with U.S. help, from military
dictatorships and have become (sometimes imperfect) democracies.
Whatever its past faults and worse, the U.S. has become a firm
friend of democracy in Latin America and deserves credit for
that as much as it deserves criticism for its past sins.  I
realize that you'd like it all to be one-sided -- the U.S. as
Great Satan in all its interactions with other nations and its
own citizenry -- but reality and history are not going to oblige
you here, I'm afraid.

Yes, we should lecture other countries about genocide, and you
should stop the America-bashing.  Genocide is a grave business
which should be opposed wherever it occurs, by all civilized
nations. Thank God the United States is out there in front on
this, just as it was in World War II, when my uncle (as well as
a lot of people's friends and relatives from NATO-coalition
countries) died fighting the last episode of genocide in Europe.

>Quite contrary to your assertion that I am "bashing America", it
>would be more accurate to state my position as "anti-corrupt"
>government. There is a very distinct difference.

Not, as far as I can tell, in your overheated polemics. Most of
us manage to oppose corrupt government without becoming de facto
apologists for Slobodan Milosevic.

Let me close with these wise words from Daniel Jonah Goldhagen,
from the May 17 issue of The New Republic:

"To the shame of the world -- particularly the Europeans and the
United States -- no one intervened when the Hutus were
committing genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda.  To the shame
of the United States and its allies, they stood by after
defeating Saddam Hussein and watched him commit mass murder
against the Iraqi Shia.  The cost of inaction in a world where
murderous rulers lead hate-filled people in eliminationist, even
genocidal onslaughts is high enough that even those suspicious
of, and reluctant to use, American or NATO arms should realize
that there is no moral option but to defeat, overwhelmingly and
finally, the genocidal killers of our day.  Otherwise, the
perpetrators will continue to kill and will likely begin to kill
again. And future genocidal killers will think -- as all the
recent ones have -- that they, too, will enjoy immunity."

Jerry Clark