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Date: 05 Aug 1996 13:04:55
Reply-To: Conference "zamir.chat" 
From: Ivo Skoric 
Subject: Lacking Evidence
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From: "Ivo Skoric" 

Ivo Skoric **************************** iskoric@igc.apc.org

212.369.9197 @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ 1773 Lexington Ave, NYC NY 10029, USA

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Date: 05 Aug 1996 13:06:06
Reply-To: Conference "zamir.chat" 
From: Ivo Skoric 
Subject: Re: Lacking Evidence
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From: "Ivo Skoric" 

Modern psychology is like a man, who never had to use DOS,
after a Windows crash, venturing through the uncharted
territories beyond the world of graphic, quantifiable and
measurable brain functions.  Of course, once we will be able
to build machines that think and feel, but we simply don't
know how this (thinking and feeling) work yet.

Back then in 1968, David Gitelson, a guy who spent his time
in Vietnam as a C.O. with International Voluntary Services
helping Vietnamese to improve their farming, was apparently
killed by CIA (or something related to that entity) for tipping
of senator Kennedy on egregious human rights abuses
American soldiers committed against Vietnamese civilians. 
He actually lived with Vietnamese their way of life rejecting
the western luxury, and he won over more Vietnamese than
American Air Force, that's for sure, enacting the American
primary foreign policy principle of  peace through trade',
which was kind of forgotten during those years of cold war
blinders.

LDK - human rights organization in Kosovo reported that the
HRW activist was arrested and beaten by Serbian police -
erroneously, since he wasn't - but news got to Albanian TV
and to the American Embassy in Belgrade.  The real story
was that Serbian police indeed pulled over the said HRW
person and a human rights activist from Kosovo at village
Vustri, but besides holding them there for some time,
nothing else happened.  LDK, obviously pursuing its own
political agendas, wanted to have something more impressive
had happened, but they just harmed their own credibility.

We should admire Richard Holbroke.  He still has the
courage to go back there, after the road accident in which
his friend and mentor (Fraser) died, after the Ron Brown's
plane crash, after the car bomb that almost killed
Macedonian president Kiro Gligorov following his meeting
with Milosevic and after the TWA plane crash.  He seems to
have a lot of lives.  That however doesn't mean he has any
success with Milosevic, Tudjman and Izetbegovic: Karadzic
for example is not going to be arrested and extradited.  Why?
It is seldomly known that the War Crimes Tribunal is run by
dumb cops who ask whether Banja Luka is a man or a
woman.  But that may be the reason why IFOR is not quite
rushing to arrest Karadzic.  What's the point in arresting
him if The Hague would let him go facing apparent lack of
evidence.  I mean everybody knows... ...but that doesn't work
in court.  O.J. would be long electrocuted if the common
belief had any legal validity.  Oh, btw, the O.J. prosecution's
blood expert went to work for the Tribunal.  Karadzic
reportedly prays for him to be as effective in his trial as he
was in O.J.'s.

And do you know when there will be democracy in Serbia? 
When Milosevic's widow asks Karadzic's orphan at Seselj's
funeral when already will Arkan come out of the prison
[reportedly a B92 joke].  Mladic has no kids, any more, after
his daughter committed suicide, following him drafting her
boyfriend (who died in the battle). And what about Croatia? 
When they cleanse all the Hercegovci back to Bosnia and let
Alija or Haris or Ejup or whomever THERE deal with them. 
But this, unfortunately, is not a joke.  They (Croats from
Hercegovina) apparently believe that it is a structural fault of
democracy if they don't win.  They "contemplate government
as a profitable monopoly, and the people as hereditary
property": which in exact this words was the criticism
American poltical writer Tom Paine addressed to the citizens
of the U.S. in open letters published in the National
Intelligencer in 1802/1803 against the followers of the ideas
of the second U.S. president John Adams and his
administration.  The U.S. at that time had its "sedition law"
which is basically the same law as it is used in Croatia today
to prosecute editors of Feral Tribune for offending the
president.  Yet they just quoted him saying in an interview
how generalissimo Franco was not as bad (for a man who
also used to say that neither Hitler was as bad, this is not
much, really).  Alas, Tom Paine, who devoted all his life to
building, explaining and defending the system of
representative democracy, finally suffered that his fellow
townsmen (New Rochelle = Samobor equivalent) didn't allow
him to vote claiming that he is NOT A CITIZEN .  Yeah, right,
Tom, messy as he was, failed to take care to obtain his
 domovnica' in time, probably.

-/-

If somebody asked you if you would ever go to see the movie,
or more properly - a musical - in which most of the main
roles are played by cockroaches, you might return a scornful
and assertive no.  Yet, Hollywood definitively proved that it
can sell anything to the masses - even cockroaches.  Actors
beware!  There is even a new opening in the industry that I
may consider to look up for, given my extensive hands-on
experience with the issues: assistant roach wrangler.  Or,
one day, even, maybe, hopefully, THE roach wrangler
himself.  Unfortunately, squashed roaches are not quite as
photogenic as dead rodents so I passed them up on my web
site.  However the film is quite educative: it gives me a clear
hint that I should find a way to bump into some senator's
daughter and solve my housing problems.  My cockroaches
don't fly and definitively don't talk, although sometimes they
make some strange hushing sounds, that, when you are
stoned, may be mistaken for speech.  Senators' daughters: I
am single and very available at iskoric@igc.apc.org

Btw I don't live in East Village any more, now I live in East
Harlem which looks now like East Village looked in Joe's
time, when MTV predominantly aired serials about
"improbably cool young people having a blast - in a prime
real estate" (borrowed from http://www.suck.com).  East
Village is now gentrified, i.e. landlords had their way of
getting the old ladies dead and converting buildings to co-ops.  I actually
lived there for four years, while my landlord
kept that space legally vacant, paying a very reasonable rent
in cash for a nice ground floor storefront with a backyard (it
is really wild to have a backyard in a place like East Village
for parties and stuff).  Now the same place rents for 3.5
times more than what I used to pay.  Well, landlord did the
paint job.  He is still particularly unfortunate with old ladies. 
They just don't want to die.  Cheap rent in New York city is
almost like an incentive to live and spite the world.  Life is
unfair.  Low rent is the payback time.

One day I went to see my friend who is just about to move
from East Village to Brooklyn.  He lives just opposite that
first building in the city which offers T1 connections in
apartments for the cybergentry.  I was wondering who
exactly lives in such a building.  Then I saw a young guy,
dressed kind of preppie (well, he definitively stuck out in the
Village) with a wrist brace.  Carpal syndrome, huh, that may
be the clue.  And really - he went straight to that building. 
Obviously, a lot of daily mousing is necessary to pay rent
there.

Earlier generations probably remembered all those annoying barking
dogs and meowing stray cats, in times when the bigger dick issue was
settled by owning a larger and louder dog.  I for example know exactly
which car in my neighbourhood produces what particular loud long-lasting piercingly annoying set of sounds when its alarm is triggered by a
passing bus or a truck.

-/-

Americans kicked Serbs ass in basketball.  Which was
expectable, given the amounts of money that are invested in
basketball in the U.S. (some NBA players are paid a good ten
percents of Yugoslav GNP, perhaps) and the pool of players
available to the U.S. to build a team.  Maybe if Yugoslavia
and Croatia combined teams (as they played before in that
old forgotten times when they were living in peace), the US
team would have a more difficult job.  They'd probably win,
too, but not with such an ease.  They didn't play the entire
first half - they just casually strolled around keeping the
score more or less even.  Then in second half, actually in the
second half of the second half, they just kicked ass for real
and that ended with 95:69, and visibly exhausted Yugoslavs,
while American players looked as they are just about to
warm up, trading jokes and like.

Otherwise, it is very interesting that except the U.S.
basketball giants are rather small countries like Yugoslavia,
Croatia (though they played like total loosers this time,
obviously their sport ministries have more pressing issues
like changing club names, than to train new players) and
Lithuania.  White men don't jump, except maybe former and
some present Yugoslavs, who are on average very tall, too. 
Ottoman Turks destroyed Byzant's capital fortified city
Constantinople (Istanbul from then on) in a way Serbs were
trying to destroy Sarajevo: by strangling off supplies and
long, methodic long-distance artillery bombardment.  The
more interesting is that Ottoman Empire used, for the
purpose of marching into Constantinople, the elite troops
(janjicari) conscripted from their most warlike provinces:
Albania, Bosnia and Serbia.

-/-

Eighties in Europe, particularly in Great Britain and in the
East were years of  restructuring' and  downsizing', pretty
much like nineties are in the U.S. At the end Soviet Union
was downsized to Russia and the Commonwealth of
Independent States, Berlin Wall was restructured to
Germanesque quickly removed pile of ruble, a lot of people
became "new rich" and a lot more people found themselves
on the streets.  The widened gap inevitably lead to social ills
including violence (in some cases even wars...). In the "West"
the most ardent example was Great Britain and the Iron
Lady: the way how she put down the miners strikes and
practically shut down the old production lines in the north
while redirecting support to new industries in the south and
the first generation of YUPPIES who made exorbitant profits
out of thin air.  Money people were nodding in approval and
financial indexes happily bounced up.  The discontent that
engulfed London in late seventies, packed its bags and
departed to Manchester, Liverpool, Scotland, with all those
innumerable punk bands who started touring northern cities
venues finding young unemployed particularly attracted to
their style, while the capital drowned in the dancy Euro-pop
trash like Depeche Mode and the likes.  This is made so
beautifully plain in the Trainspotting, which is btw a film
about heroin addiction which ends with a deal went
wonderfully right.

Not learning from the European example, the U.S. is into
same crap right now: the "Great Society" consistently and
continuously dissipates since 1968 - the poorest fifth already
earn less than 5% of the total U.S. income, while the
wealthiest fifth earn almost 50%, and the gap is widening
more every passing day.  Middle class is more and more
stretched between stagnating incomes and rising debts,
compensating lack of income with going further in debt:
consumer debt already equals to annual GNP of Great
Britain and still rises (4.9% in May).  I, for one, by my own
calculations, have 34 more months to personal bankruptcy
with my current levels of spending and income given that I
continue to make my minimum payments on time
meanwhile.  So, I feel the crisis very personal.

Yet, it is never enough to those who have.  Clinton just said
that he will sign Republican's Welfare bill.  He of course
waited until the end of his first term, so that the 5 years
lifetime limit on benefits will hit hard the first group of
recipients just in time he'd finally be out of office even if re-elected, so
the eventual Republican president will have to
deal with resulting resentment and violence.  By that time
various State legislation would already differ so much that
the Union would become questionable by some, probably by
those who will make more than the rest: for example,
already, and despite all Gingrich's protestations, the "bad
apple" - New York city - gives more in taxes and receives less
in entitlements then it is its lot, while Gingrich's electoral
district rife with subsidized national security defense
industry receives as much in appropriations as those
military cities in Serbia once did. 

The same as bad is to deny benefits to non-citizens.  It is an
open invitation for scams, racketeering, organized crime and
violence.  And all that while they are preaching to us about
their fabled family values.  "He that picks your pocket always
tries to make you look another way.   Look,' says he,  at yon
man t'other side the street - what a nose he has got? - Lord,
yonder is a chimney on fire! - do you see yon man going
along in the salamander great coat?  That is the very man
that stole one of Jupiter's satellites, and sold it to a
countryman for a gold watch, and it set his breeches on fire!'
Now the man that has his hand in your pocket, does not
care a farthing whether you believe what he says or not.  All
his aim is to prevent your looking at *him*; and this is the
case wit the remnant of the Federal faction.  The leaders of it
have imposed upon the country, and they want to turn the
attention of it from the subject." If you just substitute
Republican for Federal in this almost 200 years old Tom
Paines pamphlet, you'd get pretty close to various
Whitewaters.  Send your donations, now.

Economic problems that plague this country are however far
from the ones that faced Great Britain and particularly the
Eastern Europe: here the inflation is still negligible AND
unemployment rate is lower than the last year's (which for
sure beats the Economy 101).  But when those results were
published, DOW took a considerable dive.  Wall Street feels
uncomfortable when the economic data feels to be too good. 
They make money out of economy's instabilities, so if the
economy is too good, they make less money.  They can't pick
our pockets if we don't turn our heads somewhere else. 
That's why they have enough paid congressmen to do just
that: turn our heads.  Abortion rights, anybody?  Flag
burning?  Gays in the military?  Spotted owl?  Movie rating?

This bonanza for the rich can't last forever.  And it usually
ends with a lot of blood.  The occasional terrorist attacks are
just an ugly prelude.  As it is common with terrorist attacks,
victims are random and innocent.  And in the aftermath the
effects are counterproductive, leading to the more of police
state (which again randomly affects mostly those who are
innocent of any wrongdoing).  It is not much different than
the Balkan military chiefs flying their mortars over the heads
of their poor civilians.

What do we have as of now?  We have more than 40 black
congregational churches burned in the "church-burning
belt" of the U.S. The objectives are clear to anybody who
followed mosque and church burning in the Balkans.  Kill
the soul.  Then, we had Oklahoma city bombing and World
Trade Center bombing, where domestic and foreign terrorists
seemed to compete who would make a bigger boom:
foreigner's attack was more symbolic, while domestic was
more deadly.  And the latest we have a reversed story in
which the possibly foreign terrorist attack was more deadly
(TWA crash) while the evidently domestic bomb was largely
symbolic (Centennial park).  The Atlanta bomb was so
childishly designed, placed and exploded (as the officials
suggested themselves) that it is strange that there was no
arrest made as of yet.

Atlanta bomb actually killed only two people, and the second
one did not die from the blast, but from the heart attack.  It
was an overzealous cameraman rushing to take footage of
people hurt by shrapnels screaming in pain, so that we can
all share the terror.  Overwhelmed by his own avarice his
heart just stopped beating.  Poor fellow.

And even before anybody was sure that the TWA plane was
destroyed by a bomb, just a week after the crash, bomb
detecting devices manufacturers saw their stocks surging
unbelievably upwards: Magal Security Sys. raised 92% in ten
days.  So even plane crashes may be good for business, at
least better than the low unemployment rate.  Officials,
though they say that the TWA plane crash is almost identical
in all subtle details to the PanAm flight 103 crash over
Lockerbie, still did not rule out the technical failure.  Last
weekend I was at Fire Island (which is fairly close to the
Moriches Inlet): at all times there were at least four airplanes
in the sky.  I never saw so rich air-traffic.  It is obviously a
min route between East Coast and Europe.  That rules out
the missile attack - I mean if somebody would be there in a
boat with his stinger missiles, why would he fire just one
when he could have four 747s down in less than ten
minutes?  That would certainly rule out the possibility of
technical failure.

Those two guys that blew up PanAm 103 are still occupying
the highest places at the FBI top ten most wanted list.  The
FBI most wanted list actually gives a nice statistics on crime
in the U.S. as related to ethnic or racial stuff: blacks are
wanted mostly for murder and armored robberies, Hispanics
are overwhelmingly wanted for drug related crimes, those
rare whites there, if they are not involved in some profitable
scam, are wanted for alleged child molestation and Arabs are
there for plane crashes and shooting at CIA buildings.

But did you know that the Navy had maneuvers that day not
far from the L.I. coast?  Could they shoot the plane by
accident?  It is not that American military is devoid of
accidents: just a few weeks ago a 500 lbs bomb *fell* of a
FA18 700 feet away from American military base in Bosnia. 
And this is not the only far-fetched story about the TWA
crash: Serbian Ministry of Information released a
commentary to the Internet linking Bosnian government to
the TWA crash through the Bosnian mujahedins who
participated in Algerian fundamentalists terrorist actions in
Paris (there were a lot of French on the plane they
rationalized), and pledged Americans that after Dharhan and
TWA bombs, they should cease their support for the Islamic
Declaration author, Alija Izetbegovic.  Some people whom I
showed the release came up instantly with an idea that
maybe Serbs blew up the TWA.  After all, the most plausible
explanation of how the bomb came to the plane would be
that somebody boarded the plane with the bomb in carry-on
luggage (which is NOT checked by MRI, but rather with
explosive insensitive metal detectors) in Athens, left the
plane in New York while "forgetting" his bag on the plane,
probably stuffed under the seat above the forward cargo
section near the hull, and took another plane out of the
country, while TWA flight was exploding over Long Island. 
That's probably why FBI was so into the passenger lists. 
And Athens is the stomping ground of Milosevic's agents. 
The less elegant way of how the bomb made its way to the
plane would be some corrupt luggage handler at JFK.

Nobody made such a big deal of ValueJet crash, though. 
The small carriers are expected to go down by technical
failures, and they don't usually carry V.I.P. passengers and
they don't get Vatican condolences the day after the crash.

Recently I watched a film about Bill Clinton, or more
precisely about what "liberals" would like to see in Bill
Clinton, on Pay-Per-View.  First the president is widowed
and the daughter is the one who plays the saxophone. 
Stephanopoulos is named Luis and he doesn't know that it is
Christmas on the Christmas eve despite that he received a
memo specifying that the Christmas is coming that evening. 
Even one Craig Livingstone appears as a guy who rants
about military college women who try to run over football
players.  The point is however in the speech the president
delivers to the press corps just before the state of the union
address: an assertive, decisive speech that tells things
exactly as they are - something that people have been vainly
longing to hear from Billy for a fairly long time.

-/-

Did anybody notice that all political figures of all factions in
former Yugoslavia except for Slobodan Milosevic (Tudjman,
Izetbegovic, Paraga, Seselj, Seks, Arkan, Boban,
Karadzic...even Jansa) were imprisoned for some time
(between less than a year and 3 years) during early to mid
eighties?  Apparently nobody took that too seriously.  The
hypothesis that the collapse of Yugoslavia and the following
bloody massacre of its people was a carefully planned event,
a display of readiness to do EVERYTHING and ANYTHING
necessary to remain in power, is too easily dismissed as a
paranoid conspiracy theory by many.  Yet, facing the end of
its rule, the Yugoslav military and various intelligence
structures, particularly scared of their possible dishonorable
demise following the events in Romania, just might devise a
strategy of having the chaos work for them.  The ethnic
leaders, completely at odds with each other at the first site,
in fact cooperated very well on prolonging the pain and
suffering of their people, and not getting the least hurt
themselves in the process (on the contrary - increasing
immensely their wealth and prestige).  Yet, they were all very
familiar to the pain and humiliation: they were trained to
respond to intimidation, they were trained to see as many
fingers as the O'Brians from Yugoslav counterintelligence
told them to see at each particular time.  Seselj was
conditioned to hate Muslims by being raped by Muslim
inmates in prison. Paraga was conditioned to hate Serbs by
being kept naked in solitary confinement guarded by Serbian
guards.  They are conditioned to want that pain happens to
OTHER people instead of to them and they would do
whatever is asked from them without questioning.

There are always individuals in society that are able to do
outrageous acts under pressure, while otherwise they are
perceived as silent neighbors.  After the second world war,
American psychologist run an experiment to find just how
many people would chose to inflict harm on others in order
to avoid possible harm to themselves.  Individuals were
presented with the electro-shocking device and were
pressured (by shouting, humiliation and ORDERS from
researchers) to apply electro-shocks to a person tied to a
chair.  The electro-shocks of course were not real and the
person tied to a chair was an actor, but the research showed
that a good number of people, and even more telling, a good
number of well educated people, with various humanist
degrees easily applied electro-shocks marked "deadly" to the
tied victim.  If this test would be performed to everybody and
the results made public, we would at least know whom to
fear in a case of the collapse of society.  In Yugoslavia it
seems that the vast intelligence apparatus probed almost
every public figure for that inclination, morbidly choosing the
least stable individuals to run the show. People who did not
respond well (suck into the intimidation) were just let go
from so-called "informational discussions", while those who
shuddered were called back again and again for further
conditioning and are occupying today high positions in the
new regimes, while the information on their little dirty
secrets is still well kept in the Yugoslav Army intelligence
vaults.

Most people in the "West" failed to see how sophisticated is
the Yugoslav police state.  The oppression was much less
visible than anywhere else in the communist world, yet the
control was almost absolute.  Did I tell you about an
American human rights activist who visited Yugoslavia
earlier in eighties and were contacted by an American
embassy clerk at the Belgrade airport.  He gave her his card. 
She didn't want to have contacts with the embassy, knowing
that that undermines her credibility as an independent
monitor, so she threw the card away in a garbage can in a
women's bathroom at the airport.  She found the very same
card waiting for her in her hotel room.  Point well made.  For
my own encounters with Yugoslav intelligence services, you
can browse my web page.

Ivo Skoric