This assessment of the Chinese embassy bombing in Belgrade, by Chalmers
Johnson, was originally forwarded by Richard Baum, UCLA and posted on the
chinageography discussion list. - Alan Lew


From: Chalmers Johnson <[log in to unmask] 
Subject: Beijing Embassy Bombing         

Mr. Shekhar Krishnan of the School of Oriental & African Studies,
University of London, raises by far the most plausible explanation of the
U.S. attack on China's Embassy in Belgrade. I believe that in addition to
wanting to sabotage a U.N.-mediated peace in Europe, 'rogue' officials of
the CIA and the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency combined with right-wing
members of the Republican Party want to ruin relations with China and
stimulate a new Cold War in East Asia. Their purpose is to give the
American military-industrial-educational complex a new lease on life, sell
arms to Japan and Taiwan even though they know they are worthless (e.g.,
the Theatre Missile Defense, a new version of Star Wars), and elect George
Bush Jr. as president (note that the CIA buildings in Langley, Virginia,
have just been renamed in honor of Governor Bush's father, former president
George Bush). They saw their chance when they directed a U.S. B-2 bomber to
send three laser-guided missiles into the Chinese Embassy in the Yugoslav
capital. The explanation given by Secretary of Defense William Cohen that
the CIA was using an "outdated map" is almost surely a pathetic lie. Even
the most somnolent intelligence agency would know the location of the
Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, which has been in its present location for two
years. A cover-up of the activities of U.S. military agents provocateurs is
probably underway.

          The modus operandi of these plotters is the release of
out-of-context intelligence photos, false intelligence, and conjectures
about Chinese espionage in the United States. One of the main sources of
such intelligence 'leaks' is Lt. Gen. Patrick Hughes, chief of the Defense
Intelligence Agency, who regularly supplies Congressman Benjamin Gilman
(Republican of New York), chairman of the House International Relations
Committee, with intelligence to support American warmongering in East Asia.
It is Gilman who has said to the press that "North Korea could nuke
Seattle." To take only one of the numerous examples of these fake
intelligence reports from the U.S. government, on February 11, 1999, the
Los Angeles Times quoted unnamed sources at the Pentagon that the "Chinese
government has deployed more than 120 ballistic missiles, and possibly as
many as 200, on its side of the Taiwan Strait. . . . Analysts said the
deployment--at least a doubling of the previous number of missiles massed
on China's southern coast--is sure to fuel calls in the U.S. for including
Taiwan in . . . the TMD [theatre missile defense]."  The following day, in
the same newspaper, a named Pentagon spokesman, Navy Capt. Michael
Doubleday, contradicted this by declaring that "China has not increased the
number of missiles aimed at the island in five or six years . . . and has
not seen any increases since an early 1990s buildup."

          By far the most important case of this sort of provocation via
low-ranking intelligence officials and Republican Congressmen at the
present time is that of Wen-ho Lee, a computer scientist at Los Alamos
National Laboratory, whom the New York Times (actually journalist Jeff
Gerth, who was the Times's lead correspondent on the Clinton Whitewater
matter) daily denounces as a spy even though the FBI, the Justice
Department, and the Department of Energy cannot find that he did anything
more than give a lecture at a scientisifc conferenece in Beijing in 1988
that the LANL explicity approved. The innuendoes of treason against Lee
have an eery
similarity to the case of Captain Alfred Dreyfus in France exactly a
century ago. In that most serious case of anti-Semitic bigotry in Europe
before World War II, French military officers falsely accused Dreyfus of
being a spy for Germany while he was serving on the French Army's General
Staff. He was sentenced to solitary confinement on Devil's Island until the
head of French military intelligence revealed that he had been framed
because he was Jewish in order to protect the real spy, Major Ferdinand
Esterhazy. In 1898 =C9mile Zola wrote J'accuse to denounce the French
government and political and religious establishments for the ease with
which they had condemned a loyal soldier because of his ancestry. Zola's
accusations led to a massive scandal in which Drefyus was ultimately
exonerated and France in 1905 finally separated church and state. There is
today no more of a case against Lee than there was against Dreyfus in 1898.
The contemporary American equivalent of a Jewish officer on the French
general staff is a scientist of Chinese ancestry working at a weapons
laboratory.

          I raise these issues because from a Chinese perspective, the most
important lessons of China's twentieth century experience of international
relations is of out-of-control military establishments doing one thing
while their ostensible governments claimed to be doing something else.
Starting with the Manchurian Incident of 1931, through the invasion of
Inner Mongolia in 1933 and of the whole country in 1937 (an undeclared war
the Japanese called the "China Incident"), the Japanese Government always
covered up the fact that its own army was making independent decisions to
go to war with China. This pattern was repeated during the Korean War when
U.S. General Douglas MacArthur went beyond his U.N. mandate and drove his
armies to the Yalu River in 1950 and claimed he wanted to use nuclear
weapons against China, while Washington was blabbering on about a limited
war. MacArthur, like the Kwantung Army militarists before him, was so
contemptuous of his own government that President Truman in 1951 had to fly
to Wake Island and fire him in a major American constitutional
confrontation. Whether today the U.S. Department of Defense and its Central
Intelligence Agency is actually calling the shots or not, the Chinese have
to think that is the most plausible explanation for the
attack on their embassy. A repetition of what happened to them at the hands
of Japan and the United States during the 1930s, the 1940s, and the 1950s
is not implausible, and it is unlikely that contemporary Chinese leaders
would have forgotten those  precedents.  

                                                Chalmers Johnson 

Japan Policy Research Institute Tel: (760) 944-3950; Fax: (760)
944-9022 web: <<http://www.jpri.org/>>
eudora="autourl"http://www.jpri.org/ email:
<[log in to unmask], <[log in to unmask]>



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