mornin, mum!

0914

Only Second generation white trash enjoy Smoked Salmon with MAYO!

U must be a 300pound beast!

LOL...

FAKE AMERICAN GROSS PIG FARIS HOMOUD:

once again you are totally WRONG....
she's a pretty lady.

i guess you're bummed that she disregarded your
pathetic little-boy attempt to hit on her last
month.

do you insult and/or attack every woman who wont
give you the time of day?

yeah, i bet you do, CREEP.

SSSlime crawled outa his own hole as predicted, L'menexe. Only a slimeball would try to sell an impounded gas-guzzler on a politics message board, claim to be an American and try to pass himself off as defending his Palestinian "brothers". All in the space of three weeks.

As they say elsewhere,"can't hear ya cause ya mouth's fulla sh't",SSshitebreath.

Hi, Kim!
Which side? If it is in general - it is open for opinions; if it is in particular - all against one all-american stars&stripes;o)
* Did someone call for UN peace-keepers?
Arafat did. Israel is contra. We have "some" distrust in the UN, since they did and still do nothing (except waisting forests on paper, their reports are not worth of) on the Lebanese border. By the withdrawal (which those Hezbolla morons hail as, lol, victory) Israel fulfilled the UN blah-blah, and inexperinced Barak thought it was over, but, no, - the morons need to sustain themselves by some other moronic "cause"- this time - a "liberation" of a patch of land (which, technically, doesn't belong to Lebanon) of Jews, and etc.. The UN is silent on Hezbolla bombs, snipers, rocket launches. (Today a worker was shot at the border, three rockets hit our territory.) The Arabs, that were foaming about UN withdrawal demands, now suddenly do not remember, what the UN is, a fit of a collective selective amnesia. The UN is impotetnt, scared of the terrorist bombing, aimed at them. Arafat & Co. Inc. would provide for "peace-keepers" to get our fire for the World to shout about "evil Israel".
There is one funnily positive outcome of this mess, - with the closure of the green line the percentage of car thefts gone down 93(!) %.
Bagels? All right.

I doubt the UN can afford to go against the US anyway. I wonder where Condoleeza and Powel will decide American interests lie. Seems only our homegrown allamerican is on the underdog's side.
Did that German-built nuclear submarine arrive yet?

Maybe Serbia can send Milosovich to "help" the palestinians retain their territory. The underdog helping the underdog, wotya Bacon.

And so the world keeps turning....
Sigh and no offense intended to you, K'san

Newspaper Highlights USA Concerns about Russia-Iran Relations

Jan 3, 2001 -- (BBC Monitoring) Text of report by Iranian newspaper Afarinesh on 3 December.

While the fate of the American presidential elections remains uncertain, Washington's diplomatic aggression against Iran aimed at preventing the establishment of good relations with its neighbors in the region has reached a new chapter. News sources in Moscow stated that a high-ranking American delegation from the American Defense Ministry (the Pentagon) intends to head to Moscow this week in order to warn this country's officials in regard to the need to remain bound to previous promises and agreements between Moscow and Washington concerning stopping arms sales to Iran.

In 1995 American officials signed an agreement with Kremlin leaders based on which Russia would refrain from selling conventional weapons to Iran.

At that time, in an agreement, whose scope and dimensions have remained unrevealed and hidden, Al Gore, the American Vice President, and the incumbent Prime Minister of the Soviet Union [presumably Russia] reached an agreement on Moscow halting the dispatch and sale of arms to Iran. To date it is not clear what the Kremlin has received in return for this commitment, but whatever it is the Russians intend to ignore this agreement and act independently. Meanwhile, the interesting reports are first that the Russian Defense Minister is due to travel to Iran within the next two months, in order to learn of Iran's purchase orders and second, a high-ranking Russian general, who is the head of the parliamentary defense committee of this country said that his country is prepared to send arms to Iran in order to assist this country in repelling attacks by rebels and their infiltration operations on the border with Afghanistan and Pakistan and to be able to defeat the smugglers.

These friendly comments between the two neighboring countries of Iran and Russia has sharply disturbed and distressed the Americans. By resorting to public criticism of Russia for ignoring past agreements they have openly threatened this country with imposing marked economic sanctions should they send military shipments to Iran. On the one hand, in order to assess this new Russian stance and being informed of the reasons for the establishment of the new situation in relations between Russia and Iran, the Americans are due to send a delegation to Moscow at the end of the current week in order to review this issue closely. After receiving the report by this delegation high-ranking American officials will issue the permit for imposing sanctions against Russia.

There is no doubt that in cases where Iran is involved, the Americans start acting provoked by the Israelis, and unfortunately they endeavor to rely on their political prestige and credibility to take action in favor of the Zionist regime and provide for this regime's interests and expediencies, for the Tel Aviv regime wants to continue to maintain its absolute monopoly in possessing the advantage of arms superiority in the region and to prevent the region's countries from acquiring access to effective and capable arms.

Now, despite America's endeavors to prevent the establishment of political relations between Russia and Iran it must be pointed out that the warming of relations between Tehran and Moscow can result in the formation of a new anti-imperialist front in the region and this is a matter that the Americans are strongly afraid of, for this reason the disobedience of the Russians and the disregard of their commitments to America must be welcomed and we should consider it as preparing the ground for Moscow and Tehran relations.

---

Russia Reportedly Seeking Strategic Axis, Military Production Cooperation
No score for this post January 3 2001, 3:49 PM

Russia Reportedly Seeking Strategic Axis, Military Production Cooperation

Jan 3, 2001 -- (BBC Monitoring) Excerpt from report by London-based newspaper Al-Sharq al-Awsat on 29 December.

Moscow: An Iranian source close to the Defense Ministry has told Al-Sharq al-Awsat that Russian Defense Minister Field Marshall Igor Sergeyev's talks in Tehran, which ended yesterday, were not limited to discussing Russian military sales to Iran but also dealt with strategic issues. These include the creation of a strategic axis between Moscow, Tehran and New Delhi, with stations in Dushanbe (capital of Tajikistan) to the east and Yerevan (capital of Armenia) to the west; and the repartition of sovereignty in the Caspian Sea; and Russia's participation in several major industrial projects in Iran, foremost among them the project to manufacture helicopters as well as Sukhoy-7 and Sukhoy-25 fighters.

The source said that Sergeyev's visit to the Aerospace Industries Organization's Ya Mahdi complex - one of the most advanced military industrial complexes and so closely guarded that, thus far, with the exception of Saudi Second Deputy Prime Minister, Aviation Minister and Inspector-General Prince Sultan Bin-Abd-al-Aziz, who toured part of the complex during his visit to Tehran, no other foreign official has visited it. This shows how much the Iranian military establishment trusts Russia and relies on its technology. Al-Sharq al-Awsat has learned that the Russian defense minister, who was accompanied by his Iranian counterpart Ali Shamkhani and a senior Iranian Military Intelligence official, Brig-Gen Ahmad Vahidi, who was recently given the task of running the complex while retaining his post in the intelligence service, which answers to Iranian revolution guide Ali Khamene'i, visited the complex the morning of the day before yesterday and spent over three hours there.

During Sergeyev's visit to the complex, some missiles produced by the complex with the help of Russian technology and equipment were on show. These include the Tufan anti-tank missile - a copy of the Russian Sagger missile - and also air-defense systems derived from the SAM-2 and SAM-6 systems...

Unseen Perils in a Russian Squall

By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 3, 2001; Page A01


The gun-toting Russian security agents who burst into Edmond Pope's hotel room in Moscow last April videotaped his arrest on suspicion of espionage, catching the retired U.S. Navy captain in slack-jawed astonishment.

Pope, 54, a businessman who scoured Russia for promising technologies, is said to have remained baffled for the eight months he spent in the 18th-century Lefortovo Prison. Charged with stealing state secrets and tried behind closed doors this fall, he became the first American to be convicted of spying in Russia in 40 years. Though sentenced to 20 years in prison, he was pardoned by President Vladimir Putin on humanitarian grounds Dec. 14 and is now back at home in State College, Pa.

Why Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), successor to the Soviet KGB, arrested Pope is a tangled affair still shrouded in secrecy. A former Navy intelligence officer, he was operating in a dangerous gray area when he sought to buy Russian technology that could be useful to the Pentagon.

But sources knowledgeable about U.S. intelligence said Pope fell afoul of an intelligence operation in which he was not involved: an effort by the Canadian government to buy a handful of Russia's advanced Shkval (or Squall) torpedoes from a defense plant in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan.

Middlemen working for the Canadians -- and indirectly for the United States, which sources called a "junior partner" in the operation -- were on the verge of landing the weapons last year.

But the deal fell through, for reasons that are not entirely clear. It may be that Russian authorities learned of the impending sale and pressured Kyrgyzstan to stop it. Another version is that the middlemen failed to make the huge payoffs that certain officials expected.

Either way, the FSB turned its full fury on Pope. He had been researching the Squall for years and was in the process of buying technical information about it. But he thought his purchase had been approved by the Russian government, and he was completely unaware of the simultaneous Canadian operation, the intelligence sources said.

The Canadian deal has not been revealed publicly before now. Cmdr. Kevin Carle, a spokesman for Canada's Department of National Defense, acknowledged Ottawa had sought "a legal and authorized business transaction to acquire that torpedo." But, he added, "there's no connection between Mr. Pope" and the Canadian effort.

Pope is planning a book about his experience and has declined requests for interviews. Friends say he is still puzzled by his arrest.

Lightning Stab

The Pope case centers on the Squall, a fearsome weapon that has fascinated western military officials for years. It screams through the water at up to 300 mph, five times the speed of other torpedoes. One Russian submarine designer, resorting to braggadocio in an essay, compared a Squall attack to "the lightning stab of a dagger."

Unique in maritime history, the 27-foot-long torpedo can go so fast because at top speed its oddly shaped nose creates a vapor bubble around its entire length. Water does not touch its metal skin, so drag is dramatically reduced.

Hoping to reverse-engineer the torpedo to learn how to defend against it, the Pentagon and its allies have tried for years to lay hands on the Squall. Some British arms experts were deported from Russia several years ago after asking questions about it.

At his trial, Pope's lawyers hammered on the point that one version, the Squall-E, has been described in books and magazines, and has even been marketed at defense expositions. But despite attempts by various governments to buy it, only one deal is known to have been consummated: China bought as many as 40 Squalls in the mid-1990s.

The Russians who distributed glossy marketing brochures about the Squall were from the Russian defense lab that developed it, called Region. Though based in Moscow, it has a fabrication plant and testing facility on a large lake in the impoverished nation of Kyrgyzstan, which gained independence from the former Soviet Union in 1991.

Region, whose torpedo plant has almost no business and whose employees routinely go unpaid, has been desperate for sales. But it was free only to promote the Squall for sale, not actually to sell it. Top officials of the recently renamed Russian arms export agency, Rosvooruzhenie, insist that only they, and not far-flung defense plants such as Region, control most weapon sales.

Nobody who knows Ed Pope imagined he would play on this field of global politics.

An all-American boy from a town in Oregon, Pope joined the Navy in 1969. He was described by friends as a gung-ho patriot, aggressive in accomplishing tasks and promoting his agenda. He had a blustery manner of presenting his ideas in Russia, though he knew little Russian, friends said.

As an intelligence officer, Pope specialized in Soviet bloc weaponry, and worked closely with the Office of Naval Research. Federal staff directories in the early 1990s listed Pope as that office's "intelligence adviser and director of security."

Pope had long been fascinated by the Russians' novel and even elegant solutions to technical quandaries. One example he often cited: In battle, U.S. soldiers lug huge amounts of water and purification gear, while Russian soldiers carry special straws. When thirsty, they drop to the ground and suck up mud puddles.

After retiring as a Navy captain in 1994, Pope worked for three years at Pennsylvania State University's Advanced Research Lab, which has close ties to the Office of Naval Research. In this job, he set up collaborations between Russian and U.S. engineers to study technologies and weapons. He remained a consultant to the lab after leaving in 1997 to enter business.

Prospecting

On his dozens of trips to Russia in the 1990s, Pope easily persuaded Russian engineers and plant directors to describe their technologies, some quite sensitive. The collapse of communism had left factories and labs flailing for business.

"Ed would have a meeting with a group of engineers, and five others would show up for a show-and-tell, and others would line up out the door," said a close friend. "Ed was trying to get as much exposure to the technology as possible. . . . His message was, 'You lift your skirt, and I'll lift mine.' "

But Pope also engendered some hostility among the Russians because, after speaking of all the Navy money he could direct to their projects, he rarely came through, said some who dealt with him.

"A lot of Russians got mad at Pope because he was a big talker and waved money around, but then wouldn't deliver," said a man who observed his activities. Pope, through intermediaries, declined to comment; his friends contend that his intentions were good, but that such deals can take years to develop.

Even after he had left the military, Pope was asked by officers in Navy intelligence and research to report on details he gleaned about the Squall and other Russian technologies, sources said.

Eventually Pope was doing research about the Squall under a mishmash of overlapping contracts, some with the U.S. government and some, ostensibly at least, private. Region discussed the possibility of Pope advising it on marketing the Squall to foreigners.

He also signed a 1999 contract with Region to commercialize various technologies used in the Squall. The other participant in this deal was a Russian government export agency called Russian Technologies. At his trial, Pope's lawyer cited this contract to show he had official permission to explore the technology.

"He thought everything was open" with the Squall, said Keith McClellan, Pope's partner in the firm doing that work.

Pope also had a $178,000 contract with the Office of Naval Research to study possible applications for the commercial ferry industry of the Squall's propulsion system, which spews tiny gas bubbles from its nose, sheathing the torpedo in an air pocket.

Moreover, in connection with work for the Penn State Advanced Research lab, Pope paid $30,000 to a Moscow academic who had worked on the Squall. Pope was seeking information about the motor in one of the torpedo's new variants, as well as its new fuel, partly made of a powdered metal.

These were sensitive areas, and western intelligence officials learned recently that for months before his arrest, Pope had been on a list of a dozen U.S. and European defense experts whom the FSB had targeted for criminal charges if they persisted in their activities.

"As far as I was concerned, Ed Pope was a businessman and not a spy," said Rep. John E. Peterson (R-Pa.), who represents Pope's hometown and worked for months to free him. "But he was dealing with some significant Russian technology. . . . I don't know the real story. If I didn't know whether he was a spy, I could go over and say he wasn't."

Worrisome Encounters

Pope had unsettling encounters on his last visits to Russia. For the first time in years, he was tailed. Strangers who appeared to be either security officials or mobsters visited him and demanded fees if he wanted to keep doing business.

"They wanted a cut," Peterson said. "They persisted, but he kept saying no. . . . He wasn't scared."

U.S. intelligence sources said they think these men were under the mistaken impression that Pope was connected to the Canadian attempt to buy Squalls. With U.S. and British naval intelligence acting as junior partners, Ottawa had retained some European middlemen to buy at least five torpedoes as well as testing equipment, blueprints and the like. Russian and Kyrgyz officials knew the middlemen represented buyers from the West, but little else.

The price tag for the entire deal was between $6 million and $10 million, with the middlemen retaining a handsome fee. After dragging on for two years, the deal seemed close to fruition earlier last year.

At the last moment, U.S. intelligence sources said, Rosvooruzhenie and the FSB stopped the sale. That was possible because the Russian and Kyrgyz security services have close ties, Russia still holds some sway over the smaller nation, and Region is based in Moscow.

In part, Rosvooruzhenie was angry that an upstart former republic would sell off a Soviet military treasure without clearing it with Russia, U.S. sources said. Western intelligence sources also said the middlemen and the sellers from Region had not paid Rosvooruzhenie officials the fees they demanded. Such fees are often hazy; exactly who pockets them is seldom clear.

Another factor is that Russia's resurgent secret police have appeared eager to display their new power since the election of Putin, a former KGB officer.

FSB director Nikolai Patrushev said the Pope case shows that "in Russia's murky waters, foreign businessmen-spies have worked freely, buying technologies created by thousands of people for mere kopeks. With Pope, Russia showed this has ended."

On April 3, weeks after cancellation of the Canadian deal, FSB agents rushed into Pope's hotel room. They detained him and two other men: Daniel Kiely, a U.S. citizen and an underwater propulsion expert from the Pennsylvania lab, and Anatoliy Babkin, a Moscow scientist who had worked on the Squall.

The FSB forced Kiely and Babkin to sign confessions that they had trafficked in state secrets. Kiely was released. Babkin initially testified against Pope, then recanted and said the American had done nothing wrong. Babkin also gave Russia's independent NTV television network a tape recording of FSB agents threatening to send him to "Siberian prison camps" unless he stuck to his original confession.

Pope, meanwhile, was pacing and doing push-ups in his tiny cell, where he often felt dizzy and got blinding headaches. His wife, Cheryl, feared it was a result of his serious thyroid ailments or even a recurrence of his bone cancer.

Some intelligence sources contend that, with the Canadian deal pending, naval intelligence officials should have warned him to stop his work on the Squall.

"They should have said to Pope, 'Things are too hot right now, so stay away from Squall,' " said an intelligence source with experience in Russia. "He was involved in a dangerous situation, but they didn't warn him."

Added another man who buys weapons overseas for U.S. agencies, "Ed is a techie, an engineering officer, not an intelligence officer" trained to spot danger. "They had a guy over there [working on sensitive Navy contracts] with no business being there."

U.S. Navy officials rebuffed these criticisms. "To our knowledge Ed Pope was a businessman who occasionally did work on a contract basis with our Navy research lab" and was not a spy, so he was in no need of any warning, said Adm. Stephen Pietropaoli, the Navy's spokesman.

A U.S. government official said that with the Canadian deal dragging on for years, the Navy could not have warned all Americans to avoid inquiring into Russian maritime matters all that time. "The Canadians never provided real-time tactical information" about where their effort stood, the official said.

In the end, Canada never got its Squalls. Canadian defense spokesman Carle declined comment except to say, in a reference to the hunt for the Squall: "We're continuing that activity."

Correspondent David Hoffman contributed to this report from Moscow.

BTW, Is it Sharon(sp?)'s turn next?

Russia Moves Nuclear Weapons to Baltic Sea Port

WASHINGTON, Jan 3, 2001 -- (Agence France Presse) Russia is moving tactical nuclear weapons into a its Kaliningrad enclave on the Baltic sea in an apparent effort to step up military pressure on NATO, The Washington Times reported Wednesday.

Citing "U.S. intelligence officials," the newspaper said the movement of the new battlefield nuclear arms to Kaliningrad, a Baltic Sea port located in a Russian enclave between Poland and Lithuania, was detected in June.

However the movement was not reported in an internal US Defense Intelligence Agency report until December, the newspaper said, citing the same unidentified officials.

The Pentagon declined to comment on the reports, the newspaper said.

The U.S. intelligence officials said the weapons movement was "a sign Moscow is following through on threats to respond to NATO expansion with the forward deployment of nuclear weapons," it said.

"The precise type of new tactical weapons could not be learned," it continued. "Some defense officials said they are probably for use on a new short-range missile known as the Toka. A Toka was test-fired on April 18 in Kaliningrad."

The missile has a range of about 70 kilometers (44 miles), according to the newspaper.

Russia and the United States announced in 1991 and 1992 a non-binding agreement to reduce arsenals of tactical nuclear weapons.

The Soviet and Russian governments announced in 1991 and 1992, respectively, that all tactical nuclear weapons were removed from Eastern Europe to more secure areas in Russia. It was not clear whether that included nuclear weapons based in Kaliningrad.

Cuts in US and Russian tactical nuclear arsenals are due to be discussed in new US-Russian negotiations on a START III arms treaty.

Some analysts believe that the admission of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to NATO in 1999 has provoked Moscow, which is now responding with this deployment, the Washington Times said

---

Russia transfers nuclear arms to Baltics
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES


Russia is moving tactical nuclear weapons into a military base in Eastern Europe for the first time since the Cold War ended in an apparent effort to step up military pressure on the expanded NATO alliance, The Washington Times has learned.

The transfers of battlefield nuclear weapons to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad followed threats several years ago to position such weapons outside of Russia's territory in response to expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Kaliningrad is a Baltic Sea port located between Poland and Lithuania, and a major military base for Russian ground and naval forces, including the headquarters of the Baltic Fleet.
The movement of the new battlefield nuclear arms was detected in June and is a sign Moscow is following through on threats to respond to NATO expansion with the forward deployment of nuclear weapons, according to U.S. intelligence officials familiar with reports of the activity.
The precise type of new tactical weapons could not be learned. Some defense officials said they are probably for use on a new short-range missile known as the Toka. A Toka was test-fired on April 18 in Kaliningrad. It has a range of about 44 miles.
Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon declined to comment on intelligence reports of the movement of tactical nuclear weapons to Kaliningrad.
However, Mr. Bacon said in an interview: "If the Russians have placed tactical nuclear weapons in Kaliningrad, it would violate their pledge that they were removing nuclear weapons from the Baltics, and that the Baltics should be nuclear-free."
Russia and the United States announced in 1991 and 1992 a non-binding agreement to reduce arsenals of tactical nuclear weapons.
In 1991, President George Bush ordered the military to unilaterally cut U.S. arsenals of tactical nuclear arms. Weapons were removed from ships and from many overseas bases.
The Soviet and Russian governments announced in 1991 and 1992, respectively, that all tactical nuclear weapons were removed from Eastern Europe to more secure areas in Russia. It was not clear whether that included nuclear weapons based in Kaliningrad.
Some U.S. tactical nuclear arms remain in Europe and Moscow has continued to demand their withdrawal in arms talks with U.S. officials.
Moscow also has refused to discuss the status and deployment of its tactical nuclear weapons with the United States, despite the Clinton administration's provision of millions of dollars in U.S. aid to Russia to help eliminate its nuclear arms or protect them against theft, according to defense officials.
Clinton administration arms-control officials suggested the tactical nuclear arms in Kaliningrad may be part of an attempt by Moscow to test the incoming administration of President-elect George W. Bush.
Cuts in U.S. and Russian tactical nuclear arsenals are supposed to be discussed in new U.S.-Russian negotiations on a START III arms treaty.
The forward deployment of new tactical nuclear arms is viewed by many defense officials as a worrisome sign Moscow is beefing up defenses against NATO.
Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic were admitted to NATO in 1999, angering Moscow, which fears encroachment by what it views as a Cold War alliance against the Soviet Union.
There also has been talk of some or all of the Baltic states — Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia — joining the alliance.
Defense Secretary William S. Cohen said during a visit to Lithuania in June that it is "possible" the Vilnius government could join the alliance in the future. "We have indicted that the door to NATO remains open," Mr. Cohen said at the time.
In June 1998, Russian military officials stated that if the Baltic States joined NATO Moscow would base tactical nuclear arms in Kaliningrad.
Russia already has deployed its most advanced air-defense missiles, the S-300, in Kaliningrad, a sign that it plans to protect the enclave from attack.
Defense officials said Russian military exercises in the summer and fall of 1999 called Zapad-99 or "West-99" simulated a NATO attack against Kaliningrad. During the maneuvers, Russia's forces resorted to use of nuclear strikes and carried out air-launched cruise missiles against targets in Europe and the United States.
One official said the intelligence information about the new tactical nuclear arms was discovered in June but withheld from most policy-makers until last month, when it was first reported in the Military Intelligence Daily, the Defense Intelligence Agency's main intelligence report.
An intelligence official, however, said Kaliningrad nuclear reporting was not suppressed.
The Kaliningrad nuclear arms are part of an estimated 4,000 to 15,000 low-yield nuclear weapons in Russia's stockpile. They include artillery shells, short-range missile warheads, nuclear air-defense and ballistic missile defense interceptors, nuclear torpedoes and sea-launched cruise missiles, and nuclear weapons for shorter-range aircraft.
Russian military officials in the past have denied any nuclear arms are stored at the military facilities in Kaliningrad, although U.S. intelligence agencies suspected some nuclear arms, particularly naval weapons, are still there.
The sharp decline in Russia's military forces since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 has increased Moscow's reliance on tactical nuclear weapons.
Defense analysts said the Russian military views these tactical weapons as war-fighting arms, in contrast to its strategic nuclear weapons that serve primarily as deterrent forces.
Russia's government announced in 1999, following NATO air strikes in Yugoslavia, that nuclear forces would remain the key element of military power.
At the time, Vladimir Putin, who later became President Boris Yeltsin's successor, announced that Mr. Yeltsin had signed three decrees outlining the development of Russia's nuclear weapons complex, including a new concept for developing and using nonstrategic nuclear weapons.

Ahh stick a sock in it chorny, god forbid anyone should get in the way of Russia's arms deals.
When isn't Russia angered by something.
Tell you what take the whole of farking Europe, if you guys will just stop whinging and see the world for what it is.

FUUCK YOURSELF YOU ARXSEHOLE

LORD ALDINGTON: DEAD, BUT NO R.I.P.
by Srdja Trifkovic
Lord Aldington, 86, a former British trade minister and Conservative Party vice chairman who filed one of Britain's most famous libel cases against a man who labeled him a war criminal, died of cancer Dec. 8 at his home in Kent, southern England. In 1989, Lord Aldington was awarded $2.2 million in damages after winning a libel suit against historian Count Nikolai Tolstoy, a distant relative of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, had written a pamphlet accusing Lord Aldington of war crimes. As a British army officer in Austria at the end of World War II, Lord Aldington -- then known by his given name, Toby Low -- oversaw the repatriation of thousands of Cossack and Yugoslav refugees. Many were subsequently killed or interned in prison camps. At the libel trial, Lord Aldington agreed that the refugees’ fate was ‘ghastly’ but said he had not known that many faced execution if returned to their homelands (The Washington Post, December 9, 2000).

An obituary sometimes begs a thousand words. Well worth doing in this case, especially since it’s been over a decade since we wrote about Aldington, Tolstoy, and one of the greatest untold tragedies of World War II (cf. “Writing in the Tolstoy Tradition” by Sally Wright, Chronicles, April 1989). This is a story of heinous crimes that went unpunished and establishmentarian conspiracies to cover them up, of miscarriage of justice, of one man’s quixotic efforts to tell the truth and another’s quiet campaign to keep it suppressed.

The story starts at Yalta in February 1945, when the return of all Soviet citizens that may find themselves in the Allied zone was demanded by Stalin -- and was duly agreed to by Churchill and FDR. Accordingly, hundreds of thousands of Soviet POWs liberated by the Allies were sent back home, regardless of their wishes, and regardless of what Stalin had in store for them. In addition, in May and June 1945 tens of thousands of refugees from Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union -- unarmed civilians escaping communism, as well as anticommunist resistance fighters and assorted collaborationists -- were rounded up by the British in Austria, and forcibly delivered to Stalin and Tito. Most of them were summarily executed, sometimes within earshot of the British. Forced repatriations were known as Operation Keelhaul -- the “last secret” of World War II, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn called it. Men, women, and children were forced into boxcars headed for the Soviet zone in the east, or for Slovenia in the south.

Non-Soviet and non-Yugoslav citizens and Serbian royalists were supposedly exempt from the deportation order, but key military officials in the British chain of command surreptitiously included them, too. As a result émigré Russians waving French passports and British medals from the World War I were all rounded up and delivered to Stalin.

There was panic in the camps when the inmates realized what was going on. The British lied to some that they were to be taken to Italy, or some other safe haven; if the subterfuge didn’t work they used rifle butts and bayonets as prods. Some refugees committed suicide by sawing their throats with barbed wire. Mothers threw their babies from trains into the river. To its credit one British regiment, the London Irish, refused: they went to war to fight German soldiers, they said, not to club refugee women and children. (Americans proved willing to open the gates of refugee camps and look the other way as the desperate inmates fled.)

In late June 1945 the original policy of screening the would-be deportees was reinstated, but it was too late: most of them were already dead, or in the depths of the Gulag. The tragedy would have remained little known outside obscure émigré circles were it not for British historian Count Nikolai Tolstoy, who has dedicated his life to exposing the truth and identifying those responsible. This great-grand-nephew of Russia’s famous novelist -- and heir to the senior line of the family -- has written three books on forced repatriations, each more revealing than the previous one, as more suppressed information came to light. In 1977 his Victims of Yalta was published, followed by Stalin's Secret War in 1981, and then his most controversial book, The Minister and the Massacres (1986).

In his books Tolstoy argued that refugees not covered by the Yalta agreement -- émigré Russians and royalist Yugoslavs -- were forcibly repatriated because Harold Macmillan, “minister resident” in the Mediterranean and later prime minister, wanted to advance his political career by appeasing Stalin. He persuaded a British general whose 5th Army Corps occupied southern and eastern Austria to ignore a Foreign Office telegram ordering that “any person who is not (repeat not) a Soviet citizen under British law must not (repeat not) be sent back to the Soviet Union unless he expressly desires.”

Enter Lord Aldington, then a politically well-connected 30-year-old brigadier called Toby Low, who was the Fifth Corps chief of staff. He was also an aspiring Tory politician, hopeful of being nominated as a candidate at the forthcoming general election in Britain. Low had no qualms about acting upon Macmillan’s suggestions. On May 21, 1945 he issued an order to 5th Corps officers as to how to define Soviet citizenship: “Individual cases will NOT be considered unless particularly pressed . . . In all cases of doubt, the individual will be treated as a SOVIET NATIONAL.” The émigrés’ fate was thus sealed. Tolstoy named Aldington in his last book as the chief executor of the policy of forced repatriation on the ground, the man who went way beyond the call of duty in carrying out Macmillan’s instructions, and who did so in contravention of orders.

The charges were serious, by British standards quite scandalous in fact, but Aldington was reluctant to sue Tolstoy over the book. He did sue one Nigel Watts instead, however, an obscure property developer who distributed a pamphlet -- written by Tolstoy -- in which Aldington was called a war criminal. The pamphlet included the following statements:

As was anticipated by virtually everyone concerned, the overwhelming majority of these defenceless people, who reposed implicit trust in British honour, were either massacred in circumstances of unbelievable horror immediately following their handover, or condemned to a lingering death in Communist gaols and forced labour camps. These operations were achieved by a combination of duplicity and brutality without parallel in British history since the Massacre of Glencoe. . . The man who issued every order and arranged every detail of the lying and brutality which resulted in these massacres was Brigadier Toby Low, Chief of Staff to General Keightley’s 5 Corps, subsequently ennobled by Harold Macmillan as the 1st Baron Aldington . . . The evidence is overwhelming that he arranged the perpetration of a major war crime in the full knowledge that the most barbarous and dishonourable aspects of his operations were throughout disapproved and unauthorised by the higher command, and in the full knowledge that a savage fate awaited those he was repatriating… a major war criminal, whose activities merit comparison with those of the worst butchers of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia.

As the author of the text Tolstoy felt honor-bound to include himself as Watts’ co-defendant. At the trial Aldington freely acknowledged signing the repatriation orders, but claimed that there was “no way” he could have known the refugees would be killed: “We were told that international law would be obeyed.”

His mission in Austria accomplished, Brigadier Low returned to England on some unknown date in May 1945 to be selected as the Conservative MP for Blackpool -- the beginning of the slow rise that would see him ennobled (by Macmillan!) and ushered into the boardrooms and elite gentlemen’s clubs of Britain. The exact date of his return is highly significant: Tolstoy argued that Low did not leave Austria until after the key order on indiscriminate deportations was issued, and therefore it was he who -- contrary to the orders issuing from Yalta -- was personally responsible for the crime.

When the trial came it should have been possible, easy even, to prove the order of events and name the man who had issued the orders. The British are efficient administrators, and the Public Record Office should have contained the answer. Some of the relevant documents Tolstoy had copied when he researched his books, but when he went back he found that the old boy network had done its work. All key documents related to the case had been sent to various government ministries -- notably to the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence -- and duly “misplaced.” When Tolstoy’s researcher asked for these documents, including reports and signals relating to Aldington, she was told they were “not available.” Only after the trial had started was Tolstoy given a photocopy of the most important of the files, but four-fifths of the contents were missing.

Lord Aldington had no such problem: the files were not only readily available to him, but delivered to his office by government couriers. “Dear George,” he wrote to George Younger, the (then) Defence Secretary, on March 8, 1987, “you are a friend who will understand my distress . . . if the files can be brought to the Westminster area in a series of bundles, that would be very helpful.” “Dear George” duly obliged. Aldington’s mind eventually clarified as to the date on which he had finally left Austria - he gave three dates in three interviews -- but there were no records by which these could be confirmed.

Heavily influenced by the trial judge, the jury found against Tolstoy and awarded Lord Aldington astronomic damages -- a million and a half pounds sterling -- in November 1990. Tolstoy, who declared bankruptcy, was denied the right to appeal. Aware that Tolstoy was penniless after the libel verdict, Britain's High Court ruled that he had no right to appeal unless he came up with almost $200,000.00 in advance to cover Aldington's legal expenses. The court further denied Tolstoy access to a $1m defense fund that had been set up in his name, and to which Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the late Graham Greene had contributed. The British establishment, and in particular to the grandees who were friends of Aldinton -- the man on first-name terms with ministers in every Tory government since the war -- got the desired verdict. As far as they were concerned, a crank -- and a foreign crank at that -- had received his well-deserved comeuppance.

L’affaire Tolstoy proved yet again that British libel laws are flawed. The machinery of the British government seemed to tilt the scales of justice, and the state apparently interfered in a private court case. The Human Rights Court at Strasbourg ruled in a unanimous judgment that the failure to permit an appeal was “unfitting for a democratic society and "constituted a violation of the applicant's right . . . to freedom of expression.”

A recent reminder of the travesty of justice perpetrated under British libel laws concerned two ITN journalists who successfully sued the LM Magazine (see “News & Views,” April 20). Free speech was damaged both times, and -- in the absence of the First Amendment equivalent -- free speech is not so strong in Britain that it can take such damage. But, as Cambridge historian Michael Stenton points out, for as long as the rich have all the legal advantages, the chance of constitutional reform is poor indeed: “When historical truth becomes intensely politicized it is possible to get trapped on the wrong side of the factual fence by sympathies and first impressions. All we can do, and must do, is promise to climb over the fence if the evidence demands it.”

Lord Aldington’s remarkable claim that he had had absolutely no idea what the fate of these people would be was a lie. Everyone knew, and Aldington’s awareness of the draconic nature of his orders was reflected in the official name of the operation -- “Keelhaul.” Keelhauling was a disciplinary measure on English ships in the old days: a seaman guilty of some grave offence would have a loop of a rope attached under his arms, to be thrown into the water and dragged all the way from the stern to the bow of the ship before being hauled out again. (This had the advantage that some of the barnacles would be scraped from the ship’s bottom, but few survived such treatment.)

After Tolstoy’s trial his Minister and the Massacres was banned from British libraries and universities. Although the British government would like to silence Tolstoy and any reference to forced repatriation, the issue will never go away. Ever the idealist, Tolstoy hopes that sooner or later it will have to come clean and apologize for the crimes of its agents in occupied Central Europe in that awful spring of 1945. He recalls that Prime Minister Tony Blair recently issued an apology on behalf of Britain for the 19th century potato blight in Ireland, “though many historians and members of the public found it hard to envisage in what way that tragedy could be regarded as a direct responsibility of the government of the day, let alone its late 20th century successor.” He also points out that the British government “pressed consistently and successfully” for German and Japanese governments to compensate British victims of their wartime atrocities.

Lord Aldington won his court case thanks to the twisted British libel laws and thanks to the Kafkaesque nature of Britain’s power structure, but wherever he is now he may be wondering if it was a victory worth having. That flawed man, disdainful of the suffering of such lesser breeds as Slavs, cynically manipulative and devoid of any capacity for moral distinctions, is beyond human judgment now; but one hopes that a much higher court will take a dim view of his life and times. May his name live in infamy.

Kim why don't you take your head out of your arse and see that is the Yankkks who are the ones that are mad.

Jesus Chorny ur a bonehead!