Russian Jetliner Crash; Croatian Attacks Bus Driver (Oct 5, 2001)

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TiM GW Bulletin 2001/10-2

Oct. 5, 2001

September 11 Attack: The Chechen Connection

Israel-Russia Jetliner Crashes

Also, Six Killed in Greyhound Bus Crash after Croatian Assailant Slashes Driver’s Throat; New Détente: Russia Softening Its Opposition to NATO Expansion; NWO Motto: "Perpetual Commerce Through Perpetual War"

MOSCOW, Oct. 4 - Russian President, Vladimir Putin has said “terrorism has not been excluded as the cause” of the crash of a Russian jetliner in the Black Sea, with 77 people on board.

An Armenian airline pilot reported seeing an explosion before the doomed jet plunged into a 3,000-foot deep sea, some 185 kilometers (116 miles) off Russia’s coastline early in the afternoon of Apr. 4. Garik Ovanisian, the pilot of the Armenian An-24, said his plane was at 6,300 meters (20,790 feet) above the Black Sea when the plane above his exploded, according to an Oct. 5 Christian Science Monitor story.

"I saw the explosion on the plane, which was above me at an altitude of 11,000 meters (36,300 feet)," Ovanisian said. "The plane fell into the sea, and there was another explosion in the sea. After that I saw a big white spot on the sea and I had the impression that oil was burning."

The three-engine TU-154 belonging to Sibir Airlines - bound from Israel's Ben Gurion airport to the Siberian city of Novosibirsk - had 66 passengers and up to 11 crew on board. Israel suspended all flights leaving the country following the incident.

NTV television quoted Israeli airport officials as saying that all passengers on board were Israeli citizens. But Israeli television said there were 66 passengers, of whom 51 were Israelis.

Israel is not ruling out "a terrorist act" in the crash, a transport ministry official said. "For the time being we are collecting information but we are not excluding any lead, including a terrorist act," said the spokesman.

Israeli radio said the aircraft had stopped over in Bulgaria, but authorities there said it had not even entered their airspace. Israeli Transport Minister, Ephraim Sneh, set up a crisis cell to deal with the situation, ministry officials said.

TiM Ed. The preceding was the gist of the early reports about the Oct. 4 crash, based on Agence France Presse (AFP) and NPR news. The came the spin - from Washington, of all places, thousands of miles away from the crash site.

But U.S. government sources said that the jet was shot down by a missile supposedly fired by the Ukrainians during military exercises in the Black Sea. The Ukrainian government hurried to deny the claim, saying the missile fired from its vessels wouldn’t have had the range to reach the Israel-Russia plane.

And so, the plot thickens, and a new controversy looms. Which is not surprising given the current turmoil in the world. What is puzzling, however, is the motive behind the U.S. government’s spinning the news to blame Ukraine, especially as even the Israeli authorities acknowledged a possibility of a terrorist attack. And that it did it within hours of the incident that took place thousands of miles away.

Yet even at more peaceful times, Washington has been unable (to put it kindly) to explain the TWA 800 and the Swissair 300 crashes over our own territorial waters that took hundreds of lives, despite its “extensive” multi-year investigations.

So why was Washington in such a hurry to blame Ukraine, and discount the possibility of another terrorist attack, as suggested by Russia and Israel? Well, we don’t know for sure, but we can think of some possible reasons.

(1) Having already committed our armed forces to a fixed set of terrorist windmills in Afghanistan, the Don Quixotes of our foreign policy may have realized that they can not afford to, nor gear up the American public opinion, to fight two simultaneous wars against two sets of windmills thousands of miles apart. So what do they do? Try to pin a tail on another donkey, as that children’s game goes.

We’ll see if it sticks. For, neither Russia nor Ukraine are any dummies when it comes to military intelligence or satellite data, especially so close to their coastlines. On the other hand, their silence and acquiescence can be bought, as Washington has so far proven with our new “ally” - Pakistan.

(2) Another possibility is that Washington was trying to protect Israel’s image as a model of airline security. For, if this were indeed a terrorist action (and one would presume a Muslim terrorist attack, given the preponderance of Israeli citizens on board?), the devastating result would shatter the carefully cultivated aura of Israel’s supposed invincibility from terrorism.

That’s something that we have been hearing ad nauseam from the talking heads on American establishment media channels in the aftermath of the Sep. 11 attack on New York and Washington. So if Israel’s security halo were gone, who would be hold up then as our new model? North Korean or Libyan airlines?

(3) A third possibility is that our government may be right. Maybe some trigger-happy Ukrainian “Rambo” couldn’t tell a civilian jetliner from a fighter jet in his gun sights. In which case Washington had better cough up the proof, and show it publicly pretty fast. For, skepticism is already mounting about our government’s early claims that it had evidence of Osama bin Laden’s culpability for the Sep. 11 attack. Almost a month later, we still only hear of circumstantial data which would not necessarily hold up in a court of law, according to the secretary of state, Colin Powell, and the British prime minister, Tony Blair, among others.

Finally, if it was possible for some trigger-happy Ukrainian officer to snuff out 77 innocent lives, doesn’t that send chills up your spine when you consider that our President has just delegated the authority to two US Air Force generals to order the shoot-down of our civilian aircraft? (if they felt an American city is threatened - see “End of Folly, Not of World” - http://www.truthinmedia.org/Bulletins2001/tim2001-9-3.html).

Given such unpleasant possibilities, no wonder the Black Sea crash that would have been global headline news had it happened in America, is being treated by the U.S. establishment media as if it were some local fire story - well after the top news items.

NEWS UPDATE, Oct. 5, 2001: The following is an excerpt from today's New York Times article on this topic. No further comment is necessary:

"The Ukrainian Defense Ministry adamantly denied any role in the crash tonight, saying that all its missiles hit their intended targets — unmanned airborne drones — and that in any case, the exercises were staged far from the jet's flight path.

Mr. Putin himself seemed to underscore that contention this evening. "The weapons used by the army in the exercises were by their technical characteristics unable to reach the corridor through which the Tu-154 was traveling," he said. He added that he was relying on Ukrainian and Russian accounts which, he said, he had no reason to doubt.

But Pentagon officials who spoke on condition of anonymity, apparently relying on intelligence data, differed almost as strongly. In Washington, one intelligence officer said that the evidence so far suggested the missile might have been an SA-12, a long-range land-based missile fired from tubes mounted atop a tank-like vehicle. That official declined to discuss the nature of the evidence. [...]

According to the Federation of American Scientists, the longest- range version of the SA-12 is guided by radar and can hit targets as far away as 125 miles. Ukrainian officials put the crash site at 150 miles from the exercise zone. [...]

Ukrainian military spokesmen insisted tonight that the missiles fired during today's tests — 40, by their count — could fly no farther than about six miles."

TiM Ed.: Ron Ames, a TiM reader from Houston, Texas, offered another interesting theory about the possible motives the U.S. government in trying to pin the blame for the Oct. 4 incident on Ukraine. Once again upon a time, the phrase “all roads lead to Rome” meant a route to the center of power. Now, all roads to the sources of New World Order’s state terrorism seem to lead to the Balkans:

“Bob, haven't the Ukrainians been openly supportive of Macedonia, funneling attack helicopters and more weapons to the Macedonians? You know Washington hates this in light of the fact that KFRO funnels weapons to the KLA/NLA.”

Indeed Ukraine has been supporting Macedonia, as has been Russia. Regular TiM readers may recall our reports about that in late August (see “Macedonia: NATO Arming Albanian Rebels”, Aug 26, 2001, - http://www.truthinmedia.org/Bulletins2001/tim2001-8-3.html). So Washington had a bone to pick only with Ukraine, but also with Russia, into which orbit Ukraine is slowly falling (see our January 2001 report about that - http://www.truthinmedia.org/Bulletins2001/tim2001-1-6.html). Having flirted with the NWO’s “partnership for peace” program for a while, an impoverished and disillusioned Ukraine is now gravitating back toward Moscow.

And no wonder. Here’s a trivia question for you that reveals how artificial the NWO break-up of the USSR in 1991 has been. Name one of Russia’s former capitals? (in fact, the first). Answer: Kiev. (capital of today’s Ukraine).

PHOENIX, Oct. 7 - The veil of mystery is slowly lifting from the U.S. government efforts to blame Ukraine for the crash of the Tu-154 jetliner, bound for Novosibirsk, Russia, that took the lives of 77 people, most of them Israelis. Washington did it in order to upstage Ariel Sharon’s planned rebuke of the U.S.’s coddling up to the Arabs, according to an Israeli columnist.

And the tactic seems to have produced desired results, notwithstanding the preposterous lies upon which our government’s claim was based. The supposedly tough-minded Israeli prime minister, accused by some of terrible atrocities in Lebanon in 1982, came back to George Bush’s heel like a good puppy. Here’s his apology as quoted in today’s New York Times (Oct. 7):

“Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel apologized tonight (Oct. 6) for what he called a misunderstanding caused by his warning that the United States risked appeasing Arab nations the way Europe appeased Adolf Hitler before World War II.

"Unfortunately, the metaphor in my words was not understood correctly, and I'm sorry about that," Mr. Sharon said in a brief telephone interview, referring to remarks he made on Thursday.

In offering his extraordinary statement of contrition, the prime minister evidently hoped to salve any wounds left by the harshest public exchange between Israel and the United States in decades. In the interview, he expressed regret five times in less than five minutes, capping three turbulent days of some of the strangest diplomacy conducted between the allies.”

As soon the Tu-154 crash occurred on Oct. 4, we became suspicious of the official Washington position and asked the question WHY was our government spinning the news to blame Ukraine, using some far-fetched explanations? We provided four theories of our own, speculating about possible motives (see Item 1 above). One of them did indeed involve Israel and its until now supposedly impeccable airline and airport security.

That is now all but certain. Our government seems to have lied (see the Venik analysis in Item 1b below), in order to prevent Sharon from wrecking the already shaky Muslim support for its anti-Afghanistan coalition. If the truth were to be known, that the Israel-Russia jetliner was probably downed as a result of a terrorist act, the assertion that Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, made the day of the incident, Israel would have to retaliate if it were to stay true to its long-term policy. And Tel Aviv would have to do it in a massive way, given the massive loss of Israeli lives on board of the doomed jet.

Such a response by Israel would have obviously not only escalated the virtual state of war that already exists in the Middle East, but it would have interfered with what we now see are Washington’s first retaliatory strikes against Afghanistan, which are taking place as this comment is being written.

And so, just as Israel was told to hold fire, and did, during the Gulf War, Sharon was told to shut his mouth and apologize, and did, in the preamble to the first U.S. air strikes in Afghanistan. So now everybody knows who is the master in the U.S.-Israeli relations. As for the anti-Zionist theories which alleged that the tail (Israel) was wagging the dog (the U.S.), well, now we can all see how much they are worth when the push comes to shove.

This writer’s immediate concern, however, is not the U.S.-Israeli relations. It is the Washington-America relations. Every American now has good reasons to be outraged and thoroughly disgusted with a government that is prepared to stoop so low as to blatantly lie and deceive the American people (not to mention the world) to achieve its megalomanic geopolitical goals. And that’s the leadership to which we should entrust our lives and that of our children at a time of “war?”

· Those who are willing to do so, please raise your hand, click here, and send us a message to that effect. Thank you.

· Those who are NOT willing to support Washington in a nebulous, Don Quixotic “war” against Islamic windmills, please raise your hand, click here, and also send us a message to that effect. Thank you.

Final comment… the Washington/London cynicism seems to have no bounds. On the eve of the aerial assault against Afghanistan, the Bush administration requested and received from Congress an appropriation of $320 million for food aid to Afghan refugees.

First we make them homeless and bomb them, then we feed them to appease the billion-plus of their Muslim brothers and sisters around the world. It’s a carrot and stick approach that’s as old as war. Or rabbit baiting. Which is why should be an insult to every Muslim’s intelligence. How stupid do the Anglo-Saxon leaders think the Muslims are?

Furthermore, the Washington-London “humanitarianism” is skin deep. It is motivated only by its geopolitical self-interests. Where was food aid or any other kind of aid for the Serb civilians when Washington and London, among other NATO allies, tried to bomb that country into stone age in 1999? Back then, the western aid was offered ONLY to the Albanian refugees. And for the same reason. They were mostly Muslims and NATO allies in a battle against the predominantly Serb Christians, who numbered less than 10 million.

In other words, the Serb lives were unimportant in a geopolitical sense. But don’t take our word for it. More than two years since the bombing, and over a year after Washington managed to install a puppet government in Belgrade, the families of the nearly 2,000 Serb civilians killed by NATO, and of over 5,000 who were injured by the western bombs, have received one fat zero by way of any compensation. From any government, including their own.

Which is why the food aid hailed today by both George Bush and by the British prime minister, Tony Blair, in their evidently carefully coordinated speeches to announce the start of the joint American-British military action against Afghanistan, is yet another cynical gesture by the “humanitarians” of the New World Order.

1b. Israel-Russia Jetliner Crash: Washington Lies to Curtail Israel? (By “Venik”)Oct. 7, 2001

PHOENIX, Oct. 7 - The name “Venik” should be familiar to regular TiM readers from the days of the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999. It is a pseudonym for a Philadelphia-based source whose full name and identity are known to TiM. “Venik” has provided some invaluable intelligence that helped dispel the NATO lies and distortions during its 1999 aggression against Serbia. The same source has come through once again, to help debunk Washington’s lies and distortions regarding the Israel-Russia Tu-154 jetliner crash.

Here’s a “Venik” report which includes detailed maps, which are now available at the TiM web site:

A Russian Tupolev Tu-154M airliner s/n 85693, flight number 1812, operated by the Sibir Airlines, crashed in the Black Sea while flying from Tel-Aviv, Israel, to Novosibirsk, Russia, on Oct. 4, 2001, 180km southeast from the Russian airport Sochi-Adler. The airliner has 66 Israeli citizens and 11 crewmembers aboard.

At 13:30 Moscow time the airliner entered the airspace controlled by the Russian Rostov-on-Don civil aviation ground control center. As required by the procedure, the airliner's crew conducted a standard communication check with the ground control in Rostov-on-Don. At the time of the contact (13:39) the Tu-154M was cruising at altitude of 11 km and the speed of 850 km/h - standard fuel-efficient cruising parameters for the 'M' version of the Tu-154. The crew did not report any problems.

At 13:44 the airliner disappeared from the screen of the Russian "Strela" automated air traffic control and guidance system located in Rostov-on-Don. The air traffic controller in Rostov-on-Don requested other aircraft in the area to report any available information about the missing Sibir Airlines Tu-154M.

The first response came back almost immediately from the captain of an Armenian Antonov An-24 two-engine turboprop plane. The pilot reported that he observed an airliner explode in the air to the left and above his aircraft. The remains of the airliner were seen falling into the sea, where a secondary explosion was observed along with a considerable quantity of burning fuel on the surface of the sea.

At 14:27 a Russian Defense Ministry An-24 and a an Mi-8 helicopter of the Sochi Border Guard service were dispatched to the area of the crash. At the same time two vessels - tugboats "Mercury" and "Captain Buklinichev" - departed from the port of Tuapse and Novorossijsk, respectively. Several minutes later a specially-equipped rescue vessel "Spasatel Prokopchik" left the port of Gelendzhik for the crash site.

On the same day the Ukrainian Armed Forces were conducting training exercises involving surface-to-air missile systems S-300PS, S-200V 'Vega' and other shorter-range ground-based and naval SAM systems. Among the practice targets were Tupolev Tu-143 'Reis' unmanned reconnaissance vehicles. A total of 11 remotely-controlled targets were destroyed by Ukrainian air defenses during the exercises and some 40 SAMs were launched. The target UAVs were flying at very low altitudes to imitate cruise missiles and low-flying naval strike planes. The maximum altitude attainable by the Tu-143 UAV is less than 5,000 meters. The exercises were supervised by Russian military representatives, including the Russian Air Force commander, Col. Gen. Kornukov.

The Ukrainian ground-based SAM missiles were launched from the 31st naval weapons proving ground located on the Cape Apouk located on the eastern coast of the Crimean Peninsula. The Russian airliner crashed some 334-374 kilometers east of the Cape Apouk. This exceeds the maximum range/altitude of all ground-based or naval SAM systems currently in Ukrainian service.

Almost immediately after the crash of the Sibir Airlines Tu-154M, the U.S. press published reports, based on anonymous statement by U.S. military sources, indicating that the Russian airliner was shot down by a Ukrainian missile. This information was soon reprinted by major U.S. newspapers with remarkable agility, becoming the de-facto official position of the U.S. government on the issue.

The technical aspects of the Tu-154 crash are relatively easy to understand: the airliner crashed well beyond the maximum range of any ground-based SAM systems in Crimea. Before the crash the airliner was cruising at 11,000 meters - well above the maximum altitude of any naval SAM system in Ukraine's service, which is limited by 4,000 meters attainable by the 20 Gecko-type missiles of the upgraded SA-N-4 low-altitude SAM system aboard the 'Krivak III' class "Hetman Sahajdachniy" patrol frigate.

The political aspects of the incident, however, are far more difficult to sort out. Why would the U.S. be so quick to blame Ukraine - one of its closest allies among the former Soviet republics - without any hard evidence against the country? American claims of satellite photographs showing the Tu-154 destroyed by a SAM so far are not supported by facts. Many military experts have strong reservations regarding the possibility of existence of such images. Why?

It is entirely possibly for a satellite imaging system to detect a SAM launch in either infrared or visual bands. This is especially true for large SAMs such as S-200 and S-300, which have relatively high IR and visual signatures during launch. However, following the missile's launch a satellite imaging system will become ineffective in visually tracking the missile's trajectory: due to the missile's very high speed, it's IR trail becomes quickly dissipated. Finally, to show that the SAM is likely to intercept an aircraft, it would be required to know the position of the aircraft and the trajectory of the SAM at no more than 30 second before the intercept for these types of SAMs. This is due to the very high speed of the missile.

It is highly unlikely that any satellite could have recorded a SAM and the Tu-154 less than 30 seconds before the possible intercept. It is important to understand that this is not so much due to the capabilities of the satellite imaging systems as it is due to control aspects of satellite reconnaissance. This completely discredits claims by anonymous American military sources that they have evidence of an intercept of the Russian airliner by a Ukrainian SAM.

Following the terrorist acts in the U.S. on September 11 media self-censorship became a commonplace occurrence in the U.S. media. It is highly unlikely that information from "unnamed Pentagon sources" could have been accidentally leaked and published by the nations leading newspapers at a time when good relations between Russia and Ukraine are so important for the U.S. anti-terrorist efforts.

However, perhaps there is something even more important, such as response of Israel to the loss of such a great number of its citizens in what appears to be a terrorist attack. At a time when the U.S. is trying to achieve greater cooperation with the Arab world in its war against terrorism, any response by Israel to such a massive terrorist attack against its citizens may completely ruin the chances of American diplomats in the Middle East, leaving the U.S. without much-needed support of the Arab countries.

TEL AVIV, Oct. 6 - We received the following article from Uri Avnery, an Israeli columnist, via his associates at Gush Shalom (Israel Peace Bloc):

“Ariel Sharon has declared war on the USA. It can’t be defined any other way.

He has not declared war on the Palestinians, because that is not necessary. The military confrontation between Israel and the Palestinian people has already been going on for a long time, and nothing has changed this week. But in Israeli-American relations there has been a dramatic change.

Thursday (Oct. 4), a plane flying from Tel-Aviv to Siberia was brought down. When the terrible news arrived, Sharon at once ordered a press-conference to be called at prime television time, to be broadcast live on all Israeli television and radio stations. As usual, the media stood to attention and followed orders.

Sharon was sure that the plane was brought down by terrorists (who else?) and intended to exploit the incident for a dramatic indictment of Arafat, “bin Laden’s twin brother.” But the bad Americans spoiled the performance out of sheer spite: at the very last moment they announced that the plane was actually shot down by a Ukrainian missile.

But Sharon was already on his way to battle. When this happens to him, no force on earth can stop him. Like a bull, he charges forward.

This time he had prepared something special. “He has written the speech himself,” his assistants announced proudly. And, indeed, nobody else could have, except the loonies of the extreme right.

Addressing the “Western democracies, headed by the United States,” Sharon compared the present situation of Israel to that of Czechoslovakia in 1938. The comparison is obvious: Arafat is Hitler, “the Arabs” (all of them) are the fascist axis, George Bush is Neville Chamberlain, the Americans are about to sell Israel down the river in order to appease the Arabs. Munich 2001.

Pedantic historians could point to some faults in this comparison. At that time, Germany was a mighty military power facing little Czechoslovakia. While in today’s Middle East the situation is the opposite: Israel is the mighty military power and the Palestinians are a small and weak people. Furthermore, Germany was not living under a Czech occupation. Bush is not waving an umbrella, like Chamberlain, but a sword. He is building a great coalition for starting a war.

But Sharon does not pretend to be a historian. Like his companions and partners, he lives in the world of his own images, cut off from international reality. He does not care two hoots about America’s geopolitical considerations, particularly when they are trying to build a coalition with the Arabs and other Muslims. To make this possible, the Americans must bring about an end to the Palestinian uprising, which inflames the masses in all Arab countries. They must prove that they are striving for a peace that will satisfy the national requirements of the Palestinians.

Because of this Bush declared that the Palestinian state is a “vision”, and Colin Powell is preparing a peace plan for the Middle East, after consulting with the Saudi prince.

Israeli peace activists see this as a positive development. They know that at this point in time only foreign intervention can put an end to the violence and promote the peace. The daily bloodbath, the calls for vengeance on both sides and the mutual lack of confidence prevent an Oslo-style face-to-face Israeli-Palestinian dialogue without intermediaries.

But for Sharon, any such intervention would be a disaster. It would lead to a cease-fire that would compel him to stop all the settlement activity that is so close to his heart and is also the basis of his government coalition. These days, thinly disguised new settlements are being set up at a frantic speed, dozens of others were set up in the last few months under the auspices of the IDF.

In this situation, Sharon must choose between two options: either to be flexible and then quietly sabotage the American initiative, or to stand up and fight the Americans. Shimon Peres, his close associate, counsels him to choose the first option. After all, since 1948 there have been dozens of American “peace plans” and all of them were buried by Israel with the help of the Jewish lobby, the members of Congress and the American media. So why not now, too?

But Sharon is made of different stuff. He is starting a head-on attack on the Bush administration, at a time when the Jewish lobby does not dare to open its mouth and Congress, as well as the media, are marching obediently behind the President.

One thousand eight hundred and sixty nine years ago, the Jewish leader Bar-Kochba declared war on the Roman Empire and brought about the total destruction of the Jewish people in Palestine. Now the new Bar-Kochba challenges the American empire. It will be interesting to see what the result will be this time.”

TiM Ed.: We already know (“what the result was this time”). Sharon backed down. He will be not be new “Bar Kochba.”

Uri Avnery is an Israeli columnist whose articles can be seen at the Gush Shalom web site - http://www.gush-shalom.org - among other places.

MOSCOW, Oct, 12 - Russian investigators said on Friday a stray missile blew a Russian passenger jet out of the sky over the Black Sea last week, and Ukraine admitted its forces may have been to blame, local news agencies reported, according to an Oct. 12 Reuters report.

Ukraine, which had earlier firmly denied any responsibility, said the missile could have come from its military's live rocket firing exercises on the Crimean Black Sea peninsula at the time the Sibir airline crashed.

"The investigating commission has found that the TU-154 disaster resulted from a strike by the warhead of an anti-aircraft missile,'' Vladimir Rushailo, head of Russia's advisory Security Council, was quoted by Itar-Tass news agency as saying.

He was speaking at a joint news conference in Russia's Black Sea resort of Sochi called to present crash investigators' preliminary findings.

"The cause may have been an accidental hit from an S200 rocket fired during Ukrainian exercises,'' Evhen Marchuk, his Ukrainian counterpart, was quoted as saying by RIA news agency.

TiM Ed.: And so, there you have it… our third alternative - that our government was right - turned out to be true. Which doesn’t say much about the credibility of the Ukrainian government and its military.

TENNESSEE, Oct. 3 - Six people were killed in a Greyhound bus crash Wednesday (Oct. 3) in central Tennessee after the vehicle's driver had his throat slashed by a passenger who spoke with a foreign accent and carried a Croatian passport. The assailant was among the killed, as he was thrown through the windshield after the bus crashed into a ditch along the Interstate-24 near Chattanooga.

Greyhound suspended services across the United States for several hours following the incident, which the Justice Department spokesperson thought was not related to last month's terror attacks on New York and Washington. Survivors of the crash, believed to number about 40, received treatment at local hospitals.

The driver was treated for a cut to his neck and was stable after surgery, said Coffee County Medical Examiner Dr Al Brandon. Dr Brandon said the driver had told him that one passenger on the bus, who spoke with a foreign accent and is said to have been carrying a Croatian passport, got up from his seat and spoke to him several times before the attack.

After attacking the driver, the man grabbed the steering wheel, forcing the bus into the oncoming lanes of the highway before it left the road and tipped over onto its right side. Here's what the New York Times had to say about the assailant on Apr. 4:

TiM Ed.: So much for the relative safety of road vs. air travel. And for assuming that only the Muslims have it in for us. Yet, notice the careful word games being played by the FBI and the New York Times? When some Muslims take innocent American lives, they are immediately labeled as "terrorists." But when a Croat does it, he is merely an "assailant." Because Croatia is supposedly a Washington ally, while Afghanistan is a foe?

NEWS UPDATE, Oct. 5: The following is an excerpt from today's New York Times article on this topic:

TiM Ed.: This area of eastern Croatia has been indeed the site of "the most brutal fighting in the civil war in Croatia in 1991." But what the New York Times neglected to point out was that the Croatian "Ustashe," the name of the Nazi puppet regime troops in WW II that many Croatian military units (re)adopted in 1991, were notorious for slashing their prisoner's throats. The TiM editor has some video tapes of their confessions to that effect, filmed in 1991 in eastern Croatia.

Here's also a photo of the Ustashe insignia painted on the St. Sava church as someone desecrated this Serb Orthodox place of worship in Phoenix in August 1996. The local authorities and the FBI "investigated" the incident, but have done nothing further about it (see the TiM GW Bulletin report about it, "Serbs: The White Niggers?").

Putin's adviser claims some terrorists that struck the U.S. trained in Chechnya

MOSCOW, Oct. 2 - Despite the warmongering rhetoric by President George Bush and some of his military advisors, Secretary of State, Gen. Colin Powell, said that the U.S. has “pretty good information” that links bin Laden and the Sep. 11 hijackers. But he cautioned not to see it in terms of “that’s going to trial in a court.” In other words, the evidence would probably NOT stand up in court (see today’s New York Times - http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/03/international/03DIPL.html).

Well, Moscow, which has always had excellent military intelligence contacts, especially in the Muslim world, now seems to be coming to Washington’s rescue. A President Putin’s advisor has said this week that some of the terrorists that struck the U.S. trained in Chechnya, a predominantly Muslim secessionist Russian republic.

For years, the Chechen terrorists kept blowing up apartment buildings and subways in Moscow and other Russian cities, killing hundreds of innocent civilians. For years, the West, led by Washington, kept ignoring the mounting civilian death toll, and criticizing the Russian government for its supposedly harsh handling of the Chechen “freedom fighters.” Some even went as far to allege the Russian government’s complicity in the terrorist attacks (see “A Game of NWO War Dominoes: Yesterday Kosovo; Today Dagestan; Tomorrow Taiwan? Whom to Bomb Now?” - http://www.truthinmedia.org/Kosovo/Peace/ps30.html , and “NWO Retools, Stirs Up Trouble in Russia, Indonesia” - http://www.truthinmedia.org/Bulletins99/tim99-9-4.html).

The same, of course, is true of the West’s handling of the Albanian “freedom fighters,” the notorious Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) terrorists, whom the West, again led by Washington, trained and equipped to commit murderous acts against Serb civilians in Kosovo (see “NATO’s War and Peace” - http://www.truthinmedia.org/Kosovo/war-peace.html).

Now that the tables have turned, and the shoe is on the other foot, the West, again led by Washington, is singing another tune. Now that Washington has not been able to produce conclusive proof of bin Laden’s responsibility for the Sep. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, its criticism of Moscow’s handling of Chechnya has all but vanished, replaced by gratefulness for the newfound Russian cooperation in fighting Muslim terrorism.

Here’s an excerpt from an Associated Press report about is, as carried by Boston.com:

''Russia has experience in fighting the terrorism which the West still lacks,'' he said in a reference to Chechnya.

Putin has urged Chechen rebels to sever all ties with Osama bin Laden, the main suspect behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

The United States and other Western nations have tempered their criticism of the Russian military campaign in Chechnya amid evidence that some rebels in Chechnya had links with bin Laden. They welcomed Putin's recent offer to Chechen rebels to start negotiations on disarming.

Putin's envoy for talks with rebels, Viktor Kazantsev, voiced confidence that rebels would be quickly defeated now that ''the West has stopped helping and coddling the bandits.''

''The Americans have finally started to distinguish who is who,'' he said in an interview published Tuesday in the weekly Moscow News.

Meanwhile, just as American people feel about Bush right now, Putin enjoyed widespread support from the Russian population for his tough stance vis-à-vis the Chechen terrorists. In fact, it would be fair and accurate to say that he owes his being elected President to it.

So, as you can see, sometimes differences can become similarities. And lead to friendship and cooperation between former enemies. Check out the next story about Russia’s softening opposition to the NATO expansion to its borders.

4. New Détente: Russia Softening Its Opposition to NATO ExpansionOct. 3, 2001

MOSCOW, Oct. 3 - Remember the old days of “détente” between the Soviet Union and America? Well, such happy days are here again. Russia’s president Vladimir Putin said today that Russia would reconsider its opposition to further NATO expansion if Moscow were more involved in the process.

Russia has until now been fiercely opposed to the inclusion of the three former Soviet Baltic states in the 19-nation Western alliance when NATO considers its next wave of enlargement next year.

"As for NATO expansion, one can take another, an entirely new look at this...if NATO takes on a different shade and is becoming a political organization. Of course we would reconsider our position with regard to such expansion if we were to feel involved in such processes," President Putin told a joint news conference with European Union leaders.

In his most conciliatory comments so far, the Russian leader said it was essential to find a joint mechanism for Moscow and the 19-nation Western alliance to fight the common threat of terrorism.

"They keep saying that NATO is becoming more political than military. We are looking at this (and) watching this process. If this is to be so, it would change things considerably," he said.

So it’s a tit-for-tat. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Russia is helping the U.S. with its intelligence on Muslim terrorists, while Washington and Brussels are starting to mellow in their exclusionary stance vis-à-vis Russia.

Remember the old saw, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend?” Well, looks like the Arab terrorists are succeeding in what the heads of state had failed in - to join some strange bedfellows together, the old Cold War foes that now seem united in their fight against Muslim terrorism.

PHOENIX, Oct. 8 - A Salon magazine reporter’s question today about this writer’s Feb. 1, 1998 column in the Washington Times, “Profiting from the Game of Nation Building”, brought back into focus some of our old observations and predictions.

Among them was the motto of the New World Order, “Perpetual war through perpetual commerce” (Chronicles, Aug. 1998), not the “world peace through world trade” mantra that the NWO media are feeding us. After Kosovo, Sudan, and Afghanistan (twice), that is even more evident that it was nearly four years ago, when that Times column was published.

And then, there was the sub-motto: “First you knock them down, then you build them up.” Either way, the “death merchants” and other corporate war profiteers make out. As do the countries’ GDPs - both that of the hunter and of the hunted (eventually).

Furthermore, this old article VERY EXPLICITLY states WHY so many people around the world hate us, and WHAT our government needs to do to prevent that. The 6,000 or so Americans and other nationals killed on Sep. 11, and their families, can certainly rue that such warnings fell on death ears in Washington. And since this column ran in the nation’s capital, the “I didn’t know”-excuses don’t wash.