Linux
Users Los Angeles
[Lula] eight years ago when Linux was a baby and needed all the
friends it could get. I saw in Linux and it's "free as in 'beer',
and free as in 'speech' philosophy" a tool with vast potential for the
liberation of humanity. I
have been the president of LULA for all of those years and have
helped it grow and strive. My one regret is that more and more it has
become an insular collection of geeks that can get along just fine
without me.
I need someone to chair the next Lula meeting.
I won't be there because I will be showing my new video
Tragedy Of Errors - News Clips From The Iraq War' to the
I personally feel this is more important because most likely while
the two groups are having their simultaneous meetings the United
States of America will be committing mass murder in Fallouja.
The U.S. Marines are doing it now. And Linux is their
little helper. Linux was embedded with the troops before the media
ever knew what
the word meant. There is no cease-fire. We keep helicopters, drones
and aircraft over Fallouja 24/7. U.S. Marine snipers shoot anything
that moves. Hospitals are bombed, ambulances are shot up. Children
are shot in the back. Men who try to leave Fallouja are turned back
Cease-Fire American Style
"But the cease-fire allows the Marines to carry out defensive
operations
within the city, which they define as, among other things, allowing
fire on insurgents who display weapons, break the curfew or move
their forces toward U.S. troops."
LA Times, 4/17/04 p. A6.
So
these are the "cease-fire" rules of engagement. Let's even
allow that as we are bringing them democracy, all Iraqi's lose any
right to bear arms on pain summary execution. And it's a given that
even though we don't yet control Fallouja, we intend to enforce a
curfew by shooting on sight. But please tell me Mr. United States
Marine how can you tell whether it's an unarmed insurgent or an
innocent civilian that is breaking the curfew? And since you have the
city completely encircled, how can the citizens of Fallouja move at
all without moving towards U.S. troops? I guess they can hop up and
down and call it 'Freedom'.
Read the paper. Read between the lines.
"Sniping
experts - there are several here with the Marines - say there may
not have been such a 'target-rich' battlefield since the World
War II battle for Stalingrad." LA Times again. So if from behind
the riflescope Fallouja looks like Stalingrad while the Nazi's lay
siege to it, who does that make the U.S. Marine look like that uses
the sniper rifle?
21 year old Marine says of Fallouja "It's a sniper's dream." LA.
Times again.
Despicable, just despicable!
"The
US Marines have undertaken to subdue Fallujah, west of Baghdad,
apparently without regard for civilian casualties."
The
Independent,
4/15/04
Cease-fire American style just means they aren't using the
artillery; they
aren't dropping
cluster bombs and using
guns from
gunships.
Yet.
Hachim
Hassani, an
Internet entrepreneur from Culver City, CA and member of the Iraqi
Governing Council has been in Fallouja all week trying to negotiate a
peace. [I wonder if he ever came to a Lula meeting.] He's afraid
the Americans are just letting him hold the meetings so they can say
they tried everything before the slaughter.
LA
Times, 4/15/04, A9. His fears are justified.
The truth is that Bush and his Crew were as wrong about the Iraqi
people
Greeting Us as Liberators as they were about Weapons of Mass
Destruction. But that doesn't mean we can just pick up and leave
from where we aren't wanted.
There's
no WMD and there's no more Saddam Hussein but the whole of Iraq is
in revolt against the occupation. Don't believe the story that it
is only 6,000 or so of Sadr's Mahdi Army and "a couple thousand"
"terrorists" "foreign fighters" and "Baathist Loyalists" in
Fallouja that somehow have our well armed force of over 130,000 so
over extended that leaves are cancelled. Don't believe the lies!
See what the new game plan is.
If
they Don't Want Us To Liberate them, We Can Rule Through Terror
Even
if we can't get their telephone system back up and running a year
after we bombed it into oblivion, we can rule Iraq through fear and
terror. So to get the situation under control before the U.S.
presidential elections somebody has to be made an example of. And
that somebody is Fallouja, a city of 300,000 people.
The
CentCom media blitz about the four contractors killed in Fallouja is
just the cover story to prepare the American public to accept the
mass murder they have decided is necessary. They say they just want
the terrorists who killed and mutilated the bodies of the four armed
civilian contractors, i.e. mercenary soldiers. This is a damn lie.
The
Iraqi's who killed and those that mutilated are two separate groups.
The four mercenaries were killed by resistance fighters and left on
the field. Others mutilated the bodies. Not that anything can justify
such behavior, but it could be more easily understood had the press
reported on the massacre of 15 Iraqis by the new sheriff in town, the
U.S. Marines, on that very same street the week before.
The
Marines say they just want a handful of 'bad guys' and for this so
far they have killed over
600
people including at least 46 children under 5 .
But wait. The real slaughter has not yet begun.
Today the 'cease-fire' still holds but we Americans are an impatient
lot.
The Marines warn that this situation can't go on much longer. Soon
negotiations will break down and the Marines will be 'forced' to go
in, guns a blazing. And they will do it with your tax dollars and
your technology and your acquiescence. You will meet and discuss
"Setting
up a compile cluster with distcc"
at 7:00PM Tuesday. It will be morning in Fallouja. They'll be
picking up their dead again.
A
lot of people have been making comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam
as of late. According to Robert F. McNamara, who as Secretary of
Defense from 1960 to 1967 was in a good position to know,
3,400,000
people died in the Vietnam War . So this is the question the
comparison
poses for me:
How
many this time? How many this time?
I
once had high hopes for Linux. I felt sure it could make a real
contribution to the success of humanity, now more and more I have my
doubts. I have a real and growing fear that if the Mr. Smith's of
Linux have their way, in the future they will look back and say
"Wasn't it nice that so many smart people worked to hard for free
to forge their own chains."
I
feel that Lula no longer reflects the vision I have had for it and
has in fact belittled itself as an organization for change and
progress. I cannot attend Tuesday night's meeting, in fact I would be
ashamed to in view of what our country is doing in Iraq. Therefore I
am resigning as the president of Linux Users Los Angeles effective
7:00PM April 20, 2004.
On Rights and the Mailing List
Rights.
You have rights. But you have responsibilities too. And you have no
right to sit on your ass while your country commits atrocities.
Today
we remember the Holocaust. The real shame of the Germans was that
they allowed a bad leader to hijack the very considerable resources
of their country to do some really horrible things while they when on
with user group meetings and such as usual.
Clay
Claiborne
April
19, 2004
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