12.12=2 IC#18; T40 K25: 5/M15. 李登輝：台灣要台灣獨立 應跟美談法定地位. Off "ROC": Chiang/KissingerPino/Saddam. Krbkh. // China over US

李登輝：台灣要台灣獨立 應跟美談法定地位. Former ROC/KMT head: http://tinyurl.com/yl7yh9 Off "ROC", Save Taiwan: http://tinyurl.com/ylzdbo '台灣人拜台灣神...': http://tinyurl.com/y7oa3b #346=US#492=06.12.12=2; 10.22 #12 of 6th's Rally#95 Crisis#40; Capital campaign #58=past:----- ChiangKMT Ma Crisis #25: http://tinyurl.com/sbsmf : TV: http://tinyurl.com/ye3bxr --- / Chiang KMT should on Trial: http://tinyurl.com/ycarqc Kissinger 'Washington Bullets': http://tinyurl.com/y6w692 >#2-1 : Chiang Kai-shek 'Chinese Bullets' of ROC for Taiwan. / Pinochet's death: http://tinyurl.com/wr5xo Fractured identity: >#2-2. : In Chile and In Taiwan. / Saddam on Trial: http://tinyurl.com/yys5ba --------------------------------------------------- FIC#18 http://fic.ic.org/ Community Resources: http://www.ic.org/resources/ Related Links: http://www.ic.org/resources/links.php Assn of Free Countries: http://freecountries.org/ Karabakh voters back sovereignty: http://tinyurl.com/touod Fifth World Council (5WC) (15): http://register.5world.net/ 5WC: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FifthWorld/ Micronational Professional Registry (MPR) (15): http://mpr.cyberterra.com -------------------------------------------------- // China Has U.S. By The Purse : http://tinyurl.com/tq8fa >#1 // // #1. 'China Has U.S. By The Purse', Danny Schechter; December 12, 2006: http://tinyurl.com/tq8fa Danny Schechter edits MediaChannel.org. He is the director of "In Debt We Trust," a new film on the credit crunch, and author of Falun Gong’s Challenge to China. Comments can be sent to dissector@mediachannel.org. "" Who has real power over U.S. decision-making? If you think it is the White House, or even the Congress, think again. There has been a power shift underway for years and, believe it our not, our future and fortune rests in the hands of bureaucrats on the other side of the world. Sorry folks, but our red, white and blue economy is afloat because of members of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party. Yes, the Red Menace that we spent so many years fearing as a military threat now represents a far more serious economic threat. Mao must be turning in his grave with the news that no less than six U.S. Cabinet members are on their way to the Middle Kingdom on Wednesday to beseech, beg, lobby and try to persuade the new mandarins not to sell off their vast reservoir of dollars. '' '' So that’s why it's time to pay attention to the dropping dollar, the China game and the housing “train wreck,” as experts call it. It feeds into the global credit crunch and affects all of us, and we need our media to explain it all more clearly—with less of a big business bias and more of a “who wins and who loses” framework. While we watch one war go up in flames, the matches are being lit for another one. "" © 2006 TomPaine.com ( A Project of The Institute for America's Future ) #2-1. 'Washington Bullets: Pinochet And Kissinger', : http://tinyurl.com/y6w692 BBCWeb: Chinese Bullets: ROC And Chiang Kai-shek. "" The story of the death of General Augusto Pinochet, according to the American media, is the story of justice denied, the story of a man, a murderer, a monster who died without having ever faced justice for his crimes—and worse, without having ever even admitted that his brutal legacy left him anything other than loved and respected by his countrymen. But there is another story: the chance that still remains to bring some of those most directly responsible for the crimes of the Chilean regime to justice. Such as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Readers of TomPaine.com already know that only in the past decade, extraordinary progress has been made in bringing closure to the crimes of Pinochet's rule, which started with a military coup against a democratically elected Socialist president, Salvador Allende and ended with, hopefully, the establishment of the Pinochet Precedent: The big turning point came on October 16, 1998, the day Pinochet was arrested in London on a Spanish court order. ...The British courts stripped Pinochet of his “sovereign immunity” and ruled that Spain could extradite him for torture. Although British Home Secretary Jack Straw intervened and released the aging general after 16 months on “humanitarian grounds,” the case sent a chilling message to other rulers: you no longer sit on privileged thrones above international law. This “Pinochet Precedent” is the crowning global achievement of a 30-year struggle. But American media in general ignored completely the role that the American government had in the crimes of not just the coup, not just the reign of terror which Pinochet's secret police extended around the South American continent and across the globe—including the worst terrorist act on U.S. soil prior to 9/11, the assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffitt in 1976 in Washington, D.C.—but also multiple attempts to overthrow the democratic government of Chile in the years prior to the coup. These efforts were coordinated from the very top of the American government, by President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Neither The Washington Post nor The New York Times, either in their obits, or in each of their respective editorials reflecting on Pinochet's death, mentions the name Kissinger. In fact, the Post is odious enough to claim that in the end, Pinochet (and patron Jeanne Kirkpatrick, who also died last week) were "right" and can be given the credit for Chile's economy and stable liberal democracy now (never mind the fact that before Pinochet, Chile had a history of liberal democracy unbroken since the 1930s and unparalleled by any South American, or even many European countries). '' '' The guns of the coup were filled with bullets sold to the army by Washington. Those bullets gunned down thousands of Chileans, including folksinger Victor Jara, students and teachers thought to have leftist sympathies, and many others who became desaparecidos--disappeared, when their bodies were dumped from airplanes and helicopters into the ocean. Tens of thousands were tortured. Those Washington bullets represented crimes whose primary perpetrator just passed away, but others who were responsible not just walk free, but are honored and feted by all. As Donald Rumsfeld moves from the Pentagon to the courtroom to face his crimes, let us not forget those of Henry Kissinger. "" --Ethan Heitner | Tuesday, December 12, 2006 12:23 PM © 2006 TomPaine.com ( A Project of The Institute for America's Future ) #2-2. Fractured Identity in Chile & Taiwan: 'Pinochet’s death', Jorge Larraín, 12 - 12 - 2006 http://tinyurl.com/y2umu3 Augusto Pinochet introduced a fracture in Chilean identity which remains unhealed, writes Jorge Larraín of Alberto Hurtado University. "" Pinochet has died. He was a traitor, a systematic abuser of other human beings who got immensely rich in office, just like any other prototypical "banana republic" dictator. Therefore I ought to be happy; he is gone for ever. Yet I am not. It is painful to have to accept that he was never convicted by a Chilean court. This, I am sure, will be argued over forever by his supporters in Chile. Not that they are too numerous or politically articulate, but all the same, some of them are powerful and vocal. This is why the death of Pinochet makes me reflect on the weaknesses of our democracy, in particular, the miserable failure of our judiciary. If Pinochet had not been detained in Britain, he would not even have been taken to court or if he had, probably most judges would have dismissed the cases against him. Such was the fear he was able to instil in everybody. Jorge Larraín is a professor in the faculty of social sciences and pro-vice-chancellor at Alberto Hurtado University, Santiago. His books include Identity and Modernity in Latin America (Polity, 2000) Pinochet's rule was marked by fear from the very beginning. He was absolutely ruthless and systematic in his attempts to eliminate all opposition. He took a personal interest in that horrible task, and was implacable even with members of his own army. Many of them, from rank-and-file soldiers to generals, paid with their own lives for criticising or opposing his procedures. He divided Chile between the "patriots" (supporters of his regime) and the "internal enemies" (those no longer considered members of the Chilean community). The latter were savagely tortured and killed; or, if allowed to survive, were exiled and not allowed to return, or denied a passport, or deprived of their nationality. All those who merely supported (or were supposed to have supported) the Unidad Popular (Popular Unity) movement and remained in the country were informed against, watched over, expelled from their jobs, subjected to massive home searches, called "humanoids" (an expression regularly used by Admiral José Toribio Merino, a member of the military junta, to refer to members of the left), and advised to go and live in Cuba. In short, Pinochet introduced a fracture in the Chilean identity which remains unhealed until today. A new element was added to his notorious brutality. With many of the victims of the military regime, a transgression was carried out which went beyond pure exclusion: what was attempted was to make the most material basis of their identity disappear - their bodies. Not only were they killed, but the regime sought to obliterate their very existence from the national historical memory. [[ Also on Chilean politics and the Pinochet legacy in openDemocracy: Geoffrey Bindman, Juan Garces, Isabel Hilton, "Justice in the world's light" (15 June 2001) Roberto Espíndola, "Chile's new era" (16 January 2006) Justin Vogler, "Pinochet: chronicle of a death foretold" (11 December 2006) Alan Angell, "The Pinochet Regime in Chile" (12 December 2006) ]] There can hardly exist anything more dissolving and threatening for a collective identity than this. More terrifying than mere torture and death, said George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, is the possibility of manipulating the past by saying that this or that event never happened. If physical elimination and other forms of exclusion inevitably fracture that imagined community which is the nation, the disappearance of people's bodies achieves more: it prevents that fracture from healing, it makes it last in time until today, it becomes an obstacle to the reconstitution of identity. After sixteen years of democracy and more than thirty-three years from the military coup, one could have imagined some quieting of passions, some sort of forgetfulness, some resumption of normal life. Up to a point, it can be said that this has happened. Some timid steps were taken on both sides to recognise mistakes. People on both sides of the divide have been talking to each other and sometimes cooperating in common enterprises. Even the last commander-in-chief of the army was able to say "never again", and many rightwing politicians have recognised some excesses. But it suffices for one event like Pinochet's death to occur for the semblance of normality to disappear, and for the emerging structures of reconciliation to be shattered. The popular response to Pinochet´s passing has been astonishing: many thousands of people on the streets burning fires, fighting the police, chanting, singing and rioting, nobody knows for sure to what end. Feelings run very high, the old divisions and frustrations resurface. It is an awesome spectacle to see how the dictator, even in his death, continues to divide and traumatise the Chileans. My only hope is that this sudden explosion is just temporary and that the reconstruction of a sense of common identity will be able to carry on. But in order for this to happen, most people need to see that truth has come out and justice has been done. The judiciary still has to deliver in this respect. Sadly, the main culprit will never pay. But at least all the others who hid behind him should be held to account in the near future. Whatever the course of development that Chile democratically decides to follow in the future, its chances of success will partly depend on whether Chileans can overcome that fractured identity which is still present thirty-three years after the military coup, and which has resurfaced with a vengeance on the occasion of Pinochet's death. "" [End of Whole article] Copyright © Jorge Larraín, Published by openDemocracy Ltd. You may download and print extracts from this article for your own personal and non-commercial use only.