10.9.04

Things you won't hear about Beslan in the Australian media

When Vladimir Putin gave a press conference last Monday, the Australian media almost to an outlet ignored his claim that the Chechen "rebels" responsible for the Beslan massacre are possibly backed by the US. Granted not everything that Putin says deserves notice but you'd think that his extraordinary claim of US involvement would have prompted the Australian media to look into that little theory a bit closer.

But naah mate, we don't want to ruffle any feathers, especially not those of our Lord Protector, the American Eagle. Shame really, otherwise Australians might be aware of this:

[I]n the US, the leading group which pleads the Chechen cause is the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC). The list of the self-styled "distinguished Americans" who are its members is a rollcall of the most prominent neoconservatives who so enthusastically support the "war on terror".

They include Richard Perle, the notorious Pentagon adviser; Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra fame; Kenneth Adelman, the former US ambassador to the UN who egged on the invasion of Iraq by predicting it would be "a cakewalk"; Midge Decter, biographer of Donald Rumsfeld and a director of the rightwing Heritage Foundation; Frank Gaffney of the militarist Centre for Security Policy; Bruce Jackson, former US military intelligence officer and one-time vice-president of Lockheed Martin, now president of the US Committee on Nato; Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, a former admirer of Italian fascism and now a leading proponent of regime change in Iran; and R James Woolsey, the former CIA director who is one of the leading cheerleaders behind George Bush's plans to re-model the Muslim world along pro-US lines.


This and much more in the Guardian. I haven't seen mention of this anywhere in the Australian media - looks like in about 20 years' time (when Chechnya might be a new Afghanistan), everyone will wonder where the "rebels" came from...