Count on Us to Let You Down
Hat tip to Tim Blair for this story.
The United Nations has ordered staff in East Timor not to co-operate with Australian Federal Police investigating the massacre of 12 unarmed Timorese officers by renegade soldiers, prompting allegations of a cover-up. An email from the UN's deputy representative in Timor, Pakistani General Anis Bajwa, had been circulated to all staff, including employees evacuated to Australia, directing them not to assist AFP detectives investigating the worst atrocity since the violence of 1999. ...
Earlier today the UN denied the email existed, but UN spokesman Bob Sullivan tonight contacted AAP and admitted a directive had been sent out in an email to all staff. "We made a mistake here," he said. "An email instruction was sent out telling staff to wait for the start of the official investigation. ... But the UN was willing to cooperate when eventually asked to by the East Timor government, Mr Sullivan said.
The massacre of the East Timorese officers occurred after renegade soldiers opened fire on the police as they left their headquarters under a truce brokered by the UN's police commander in Dili, Saif Malik, also from Pakistan. Malik ignored advice that to lead unarmed Timorese police past the guns of the soldiers would lead to a massacre. "He was told by all his advisers not to take them out there, but he would not listen," sources close to the investigation said.
"He kept insisting the presence of the UN could protect them." Instead the police were escorted out behind a blue UN flag and got less than 100 metres from their headquarters when two soldiers opened fire, killing 12 officers and wounding at least 20, including UN police protectors from the Philippines.
The soldiers executed several wounded police at point-blank range, firing shotguns into their heads, sources within the AFP said. "It looks like the UN or Malik or someone wants to bury it all now," one investigator said. Investigators are studying photographs apparently taken during the shootings.
Let's see now. Twelve innocent persons killed by a mistake in judgment, not by a teenaged soldiers, but the senior foreign commander on the scene who ignored the advice of his advisers. This caused an incident that almost threw an entire country into civil war, though there were tensions before that. And what was the foreign response? Don't cooperate with the investigation; then deny you said you wouldn't cooperate with the investigation. The finally cooperate when you've got no place else to run. But oops. This isn't a rogue state -- like America. This is the UN. Look to follow this story on page 55.
Commentary
I can almost imagine those Filipino cops telling that UN Commander in that inimitable accent. "Ser. Let's nat du dis. Its beri dayngerus. Bikos gardemit ser, dey ar guwing to syut us". (This is perfect English spoken a little bit differently.) If there is one thing a Filipino cop has plenty of, it's a highly developed sixth sense called kutob, broadly equivalent to the feeling conveyed in that old Hollywood line. "It's quiet out there. Too quiet."
posted by wretchardthecat at 6/05/2006 06:13:00 PM
37 Comments:
Isn't this the exact same Modus Operendi the U.N. used in Iraq when they got their own asses blown up?
Say that you don't need to take precautions since you are the U.N., ignore advice from the people who know - then skedattle when the predicted inevitable occurs and say that someone else has the place so screwed up not even you can fix it.
Sounds like Hollywood all right but rather the standard sets of scripts from the TV sitcoms of the 60's. Same Stuff, Different Show.
Time for Australia to prefer charges against the UN for conspiring with terrorists.
More countries may provide assistance to East Timor:
New Zealand Defence Minister Phil Goff says more countries have indicated they are prepared to help restore peace and order in East Timor.
Mr Goff says the reconstruction work in East Timor will have to be led by the United Nations.
East Timor's Parliament met on Monday for the first time and endorsed President Gusmao's decision last week to exercise emergency powers giving him sole control of the military for 30 days.
A planned meeting has been postponed between East Timor's new Defence Minister Jose Ramos Horta and rebel leader, Major Alfredo Reinado.
Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has lashed out at embattled East Timorese Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri for suggesting that Jakarta had a role in fomenting unrest in Dili.
More Countries Assisting
The Australian troops are being criticized for rules of engagement that do not allow them to fire on looters. Maybe those ROEs are good; maybe not. But as I've often pointed out, there's always a price for restraint. Those looters are going to get bolder. Disdainful. Arm themselves.
But right now the immediate price is being paid by the Timorese, who must watch their pitiful belongings go up in flames or ripped off as Australians -- watched by the press -- fight under Marquis of Queensbury rules.
Later on we are going to hear about "why didn't you control the looting" when the quarterbacking starts. Does it sound familiar? It does to me. But the quarterbacking will be pompous, puffed up and on page 1. This UN incident will by then have gone to page 73, right next to the announcement of the Walla-walla Boys High reunion.
I hate to tell you anzac guys, but as long as the MSM is watching and the UN is involved, there is no way to police this situation without taking some very serious PR hits.
Next thing you know, there will be allegations of anzac troops murdering Timorese civilians. And it won't matter if the incident really happened. The MSM & UN will ahve gotten their scoop and tried the case with public opinion.
Just ask the Duke LaCrosse team.
I think the Filipino cop had to have his gut shortened by a couple of feet in the ensuing operation. What I want to know is, did his UN commander carry the blue flag? Or did he get old Juan de la Cruz to do the honors.
Juan did it, guarenteeed
Macao collects 60 tons relief goods for Timor-Leste:
International aid agencies estimated that over 100,000 people in the riot-torn Timor-Leste, around 10 percent of its population, may have been made homeless.
The nation and Macao were both former Portuguese colonies.
Macao Collection
If the Australian soldiers did end up shooting looters, the MSM would use pictures of the massacred police officers as evidence of the barbarity of Australain troops.
Non whites killing non-whites.
The Imperial Press can't make money on that story.
Last year it was reported in the German journal Der Speigel that a passenger jet full of Syrian chemical warfare specialists had deployed to the Sudan. It was reckoned they carried stores and weapons smuggled from Iraqi depots in the runup to the U.S. invasion. Along with elements of the Sudanese military, they participated in several operations against the black African Non-Muslim communities the Islamic government in Khartoum finds so annoying.
This sort of field testing of weapons systems is similar to the deployment of the Kondor Legions sent by Hitler to assist Generalissimo Franco’s armies during the Spanish Civil War. It was German aircraft, for instance, that bombed the village Picasso memorialized in his painting “Guernica.”
This was met with resounding silience from the Mainstream Alleged Media in the U.S.
Who was United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees during the Rwanda slaughter, who actually authorized the brave evacuation of U.N. troops in the face of all those awfully sharp garden tools used to chop EIGHT HUNDRED THOUSAND victims. Wasn’t it Mr. Kofi Annan?
Aw, Give the guy some credit. He was, after all the first U.N. bureaucrat to rise through the administrative ranks to be elected to serve as Secretary-General. Previously that office has been filled by some delegate of one of the member thugocracies. Whew. Think about what it signifies to have been so effective at feigning sincerity and the appearance of action to have risen to the top of the cesspool of do-nothing CYA turds. I mean, these guys have been known to steal the silverware from the elegant U.N. staff dining rooms...
Evidently the Oil-for-Bribes program really cemented his place in the hearts of his cronies; He’s in no danger of leaving. So safe in his perch that he has been suggesting it might after all be in the interests of the community for some nation to take unilateral action to intervene in the genocide proceeding in Darfur. (Who could he mean?)
I’ve said it before about our own wonderful Senate and Congress: I don’t begrudge them their fat salaries and all the money they can stuff into their secret bank accounts. Just PLEASE stop making all those stupid laws.
I really believe the world can tolerate paying every sonofabitch UN tick a million dollars a second for the rest of their leperous lives, if they would just take the money and shut up.
Let the rest of us get on with solving the problems.
For about 10 years, when I was younger (MUCH younger) I really BELIEVED IN the UN...
I'm so much younger than that, now.
Its corrupt, its debased, it functions primarily as an anti-American, anti-freedom institution; secondarily as a means of self-aggrandizement and enrichment; thirdly as a rape-child-molesting payoff for UN troops in starving, torn countries.
But I repeat myself: debased.
Australia seeks to end East Timor violence:
On Monday, violence continued in the East Timorese capital Dili, as gangs of easterners and westerners threw rocks at one another and houses were burned. Troops were forced to fire teargas to disperse the troublemakers.
The east-west divide in East Timor first surfaced during the bloody referendum in 1999 to vote for independence from Indonesia. East Timor became independent in 2002.
East Timor
Medved's Stepmother convinced him (and me) that the best term so far is:
ISLAMONAZIS
She points out that their have been other Fascists, like Mussolini, whose plans did not include Mass Deaths/Genocide.
Such does not apply to our Islamic buddies, does it?
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Canada Debates Terror
I drove back from yesterday's news conference at the Islamic Foundation of Toronto in the northeastern part of the city, but honestly, I could have just as easily floated home in the sea of horse manure emanating from the building.
So frequent were the bald reassurances that faith and religion had nothing — nothing, you understand — to do with the alleged homegrown terrorist plot recently busted open by Canadian police and security forces, that for a few minutes afterward, I wondered if perhaps it was a vile lie of the mainstream press or a fiction of my own demented brain that the 17 accused young men are all, well, Muslims.
But no.
I have checked.
They are all Muslims.
Barely two days after the nighttime raids that saw 15 of the accused arrested (the remaining two, in Kingston, conveniently were already in the joint on gun charges), the great Canadian self-delusion machine was up and running at full throttle...
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12:22 AM Karridine:
Everybody's special.
I have probably believed in more false schemes than you, but I can say with some pride, I never believed in this atrocity, and by the time I was in College, believing many foolish things, I had already developed a strong visceral reaction to those espousing the UN and the resulting global enlightenment, peace, and prosperity.
It is but one more well funded organization which buries truth in a sea of excrement and dances joyously on the fetid stage of misery.
Habu_1,
People of all sorts deserve better than the UN. I spent a little time in West Africa and found it puzzling that such nice people could wind up in such hellish nations. Possibly that's because nationhood has little to do with individual virtue. Nationhood is an attribute of culture and nations, such as we know them, with flags, armies, presidents and prime ministers are what arise naturally from the European soil. In other places, there are societies. But not all of them can handle the accouterments of the European nation state.
But that's all academic now. The United Nations, or perhaps more accurately, the United Westphalia-style Nations is dedicated to the proposition that we all should live with those institutions. So for better or worse the world is going to have to make it work. But if so, we are going to need a better vehicle than the tragi-comic institution on Turtle Bay. We wouldn't trust the management of sick cats to the UN, but some sad streak deep down makes it possible for the West to entrust the poorest of the poor to that carnival of parti-clad incompetents, maybe because of the belief that it is possible to entrust people in exotic clothing to bureaucrats in even more exotic clothing.
Kofi Annan must know what Africa wants. Why? Think about it. Why? And once we are free of that prejudice then it follows that only an organization of a very high standard should be allowed to deal with problems which are so hard, so challenging and so ingrained that it would be beyond the powers of the ordinary European bureaucrat. Certainly beyond the capacity of the those who, earnestly but impotently, labor beneath the flag of the UN.
There's a nice CNN interview of Michael Yon on his homepage.
http://www.michaelyon-online.com/
I dare anyone to find a better example of stunted "reasoning" in pursuit of an argument than this gem by Ash:
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wretchard said...
Ash,
I'm saying it again. Australia has taken on three countries in succession without asking for UN support. Or European support. Or US support. Australian has about 13 battalions total strength and a population of about 19 million people. How many men does France have? When trouble recently erupted in Dili, Oz was there in hours. Maybe if Canada were a little closer to Darfur.
1:42 PM
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Ash said...
But we end up with a bunch of different countries engaging in military conflicts based on their narrow interests.
The likely outcome of such an international order would be an renewed arms race with humanitarian concerns taking a back seat in guiding action.
Kind of like urging the states and individuals in the US to revert back to the good ole wild west days.
"He was also concerned at the "creeping jurisdiction" of the ICC whereby British soldiers could become more "vulnerable" to prosecution as war criminals.
There are fears in military circles that the "zealotry" of lawyers has become an unnecessary burden for officers and men and could fatally affect them making split-second decisions on operations."
Human beings have perception boundaries. The same man who will stop his car to allow a turtle to cross a road will tune past a news stories of ten of thousands dead in a far away place. Human beings are numbed by numbers. The sheer volume of people , places and tragedies has outstripped comprehension. It takes a personal intervention such as 911 to get attention and that is the not so secret power to terrorism in our age. It works brilliantly. A few hundred dollars, ten or fifteen dead and media coverage around the world. The UN is uniquely unqualified to address this problem. It is a quaint naive corruption, anachronistic and irrelevevant. The threat the world faces is on a global scale but composed of small identifiable cults and cells. They are overwhelmingly Islamic and blatantly transparent. Armies and national and multi-national organisations are not effiecient to irradicate these people. Think small, get ugly, be quiet, take away the digital cameras, don't talk, give immunity and send them to hell in muffled thumps.
So pre-modern, habu., while we live in a post-modern World.
Tried and true methods, obsolete.
New methods oppossed and stymied by bureaucrats in Uniform.
It's a Brave New World,
this New World Order.
Habu_1 4:13
Are there tribes and nations whose existence should be culled to a minimum number?
Surely from your knowledge of scripture you know how such has been tried and failed. Saul's war with Amelek and his kingship was premised precisely on complete anihilation. Samuel even predicted it would fail, but the people insisted. Understandable too given how Amalekites made war.
Yet the prediction of failure predated even Samuel, for it is in Exodus where it is written: "God will have war with Amalek in every generation." Hence another one of those Biblical metaphors with multiple meaning. Tribe here may well be understood in the Bill Whittle sense. For Amalek himself came from the same stock as the Israelites. He was a great-grandson of Isaac.
And hence the reason the wiping out of the sub-tribe wasn't enough was because the some of the ideas which Amalekites found central had their proponents, a fifth column of acceptable conduct, embedded within the Israelites.
Saul would fail precisely because of that fifth column pressing him to spare the Amalekite sheep (another double-entendre given sheep can be the capital livestock or the more docile members of the tribe).
So the connotation remains. We, today, could try and wipe out all tribes whose members by blood pose the greatest threat. But those among us who find some value in the creed of the bloody tribe would still remain.
Bottom line lesson is: if you don't want to have to fight to end the bloody excesses of some tribes, you must never let us fighting the ideas that lead to growth of and threat from such tribes.
Must never let up fighting the ideas.
That or forget about it.
And we cannot forget about it, can we?
I have never had a problem with the Strategic Goals, it is the tactics employeed for the last two years, that have led US to a "Long War" of attrition against Border Bandits and thugs.
The destination of the Cruise is fine and dandy, but this Course isn't getting US there.
That has been evident for over a year.
I'm not faulting you or DR. Both of you should know my problem with OIF rests with the tactics. I was pretty clear a couple of days ago on that.
But we have a two front war. Is it not the cold war on the 2nd front that ostensibly foists upon our troops the McNamarian conduct of the hot war?
The best way to honor the troops for the sacrifice they offer daily is for us at home not to shirk fighting the cold war. Sure our finding fault with the admin will be played up by the antiwar, antiAmerican forces as anti-Bush. But not finding fault is every bit as bad as the Left claiming they can't agree with defending America because the Bushie's will take that as a green light. IOW, everyone, L,R, or middle, thinks that politics stinks. However, principle always stands tall.
Let principle sustain us, and from us, perhaps a backbone or two may grow where it is most needed.
If only they were, habu.
But that is the underlying truth of this Administration and the Federal Government is that Islam is not the Enemy.
By our lack of effective action in Warizistan, either is aQ.
For what ever the "real" reason for this lack of action is, it makes little difference. aQ has found Sanctuary from which it is staging Operations. We watch, from near and afar, but take little action.
That's a fact, hardly reported.
The State of the Union 2002 address empty rhetoric, at this point.
The unacceptable cascades are not falling down, they're building up.
The KSA recieves $500 Million USD daily in Oil War Premiums.
Iran is funding its Nuclear Program with it's Oil War Premium. Increased tension and time profit the Enemy, directly.
Mr Bush did say that time is not on our side, to bad he seems to have forgotten,
Was it all just rhetoric?
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But then the Candadian bomb builders were not aQ. They never sent their dues, so no membership cards came in the mail.
No need to worry.
These reports, from the Canadian Government, are merely repeated by the Press.
The Press does tend to believe the reports they agree with, more than the ones they do not. When this skeptical attitude is evident, if the viewer is not skeptical, it seems inappropriate. Disrespectful.
But when they parrot the "story" they believe, it's done with enthusiasum, to the skeptic this seems inappropriate.
What does it take to be an aQ member? A card or an belief?
To date, it seems, a membership card is the standard the Canadian Government's set.
Same with US.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/05/30/damon.iraq.btsc/
The link I've provided is to an article by Arwa Damon, a CNN reporter currently assigned to Baghdad.
Astoundingly, the article recounts that she observed first hand the restraint, cool professionalism, and compassion of Marines in their daily operations in 2005 throughout the Euphrates Valley, including Haditha.
It will be interesting to see how long before some other journalists or lefties attempt to smear her and make her out to be a big fat liar.
Presupposed guilt of the "Media"
mf?
But not the Marines?
When a reporter reports the truth, you decry other's reports yet unreported.
Good for the Goose, aye.
Cite a specific, but negative blanket generalities about either the Press or the Troops add up to the same hot air.
These are the "new" RoE's for the MSM, just sent from Mr Rumsfeld's office.
Learn to live with 'em.
bobalharb:
"Herbert Spencer was mostly an oaf and didn't have much right."
What he did get right, and this is major, IMHO, is that as humans, we are finite. We live in a reality that is limited by our finite abilities. But the universe is infinitely large and matter consists of 'stuff' that is infinately small.
His point, and I think he's right on this one, is that there are 'things that exist and that are taking place that are beyond our ability to recognize or understand or explain - even with the best science today - there's a limit to our understanding.
Otherwise, you're right. He was messed up.
Here's the advice for Iraq from a source long on experience, but short on success.
"... We are going to have to make some unpleasant compromises, too. The US very publicly went into Iraq to bring democracy to the region. The western world may support that. But none of Iraq's neighbours do. We may have to subordinate the rhetoric of democracy for the Middle East to the need to find a regional solution for Iraq. ..."
· Paddy Ashdown was high representative for Bosnia-Herzegovina from 2002 until last January
ashdownp@parliament.co.uk
And people wonder why the rumor mill churns in Baghdad and Toronto?
Or is the High Commisioner's Opinion not Newsworthy?
What could an undemocratic Regional Solution possibly look like?
To someone in Baghdad, Ramadi or Badra.
Lavrov: Military Intervention Against Iran Prohibited
Published: Monday, June 05, 2006
zaman
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said possible military intervention against Iran was forbidden according to the agreement signed in Vienna last week.
Making a statement to Nezavisimaya newspaper, Lavrov said they reached a consensus during the meeting, to which foreign ministers of important countries in the world participated, on going to Iran with serious suggestions in Vienna.
Sergei Lavrov noted that they have taken some very serious decisions in order to start the negotiations about the problems concerning suspending Iran’s uranium enrichment activities in the frame of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) decision.
With the UN-organization diplomats have established the perfect credit-grabbing/ blame-shifting organ.
Its absolute disconnect from reality flows from its filtered feedback.
It would be more roundly lambasted but for the fact that most nations are quite satisfied with its role: aegis for tyrants -- pit stop for America.
Why yes siree, that'd be a Regional Solution, habu.
No need for US to stay, that's what they'll all say.
'Cause they already have said it.
Then on to Havana in early Fall for Iran's deal making President.
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