From: brian@coombs.anu.edu.au (Brian)
Subject: Re: Ralph McGehee on Grenada
Organization: Computer Services Centre, Australian National University
Date: 15 Apr 92 23:18:07 GMT

mcgredo@bluto.ie.orst.edu (Don McGregor) writes:

>Brian writes
>>
>>>The weapons were almost entirely originated from the soviet bloc.    
>>>AK-47's, Soviet heavy MG's, etc.
>>
>>	According to the US military and the White House.
>>
>Oh, don't be difficult.  This is the same tactic the holocaust revisionists  
>attempt to pull: denial of the validity of sources on a massive scale,  
>including many eye-witnesses.  It's not a very fruitful line of approach.   
>If I demonstrated that the weapons were, beyond a doubt, of soviet/east bloc  
>manufacture, the next step would be to charge they were planted from US  
>stocks captured from a soviet proxy somewhere.  Any sufficiently large  
>conspiracy is indistinguishable from fantasy.

	At the time, Time magazine's correspondant (the only mainstream
news source which dissented BTW) made the point that the weapons were,
"more a hodge-podge of wholesale weaponry than a sophisticated armoury"
(Time, 7 November 1983).

	If Time, which is usually considered the mouth-organ of the US
government was willing to voice a dissenting vote on the matter, I suspect
that there was indeed, "something fishy in Denmark"  WRT to the claims made
about those weapons.

	Considering the other claims made at the same time to justify the
invasion (threatened Cuban takeover, use of the base for Soviet Expansionism,
presence of huge Cuban forces, the call for "help" by the Governor-General,
and the call for "help" from the organisation of CARICOM states) have all
been proven wrong, why should we continue to believe this one Don?

>>	I also find it interesting that you fail to mention that amongst the
>>papers discovered by the US military was a document which was an agreement
>>signed between the Grenadan government and the USSR that no weapon supplied
>>by the USSR could be removed to a third party without permission of the  
>USSR.
>>Exactly the same agreement which the US forces all its clients to sign.
>>
>The end-user agreement.  However, if you accept the captured Grenadan  
>documents as genuine (as you seem to do) you have to accept them _all_ as  
>genuine, now don't you.  You don't get to pick and choose.  Captured  
>political documents revealed that the Grenada government was full of  
>half-baked Marxists who had designs on destabilizing some of the other small  
>island governments in the region.

	What some people might say, and what others actually do mean nothing.
Who would have suspected that the US government would cause the destabilisation
of a friendly government in South America in 1973 Don? If you dig deep enough 
in any government's files you will find memos suggesting all sorts of things 
which never actually occurred but an enemy could claim was being used as plans 
for "designs on.....".  It doesn't necessarily mean that they were actually
going to do it.

	Rather like the US claim that there were thousands of Cuban "Advisors"
on the island.  There weren't.  According to the records there was an
agreement with Cuba to provide 27 (with a possible 40 to follow later) advisors
of which 22 were already on the island.

>>>>Later we came to find out that Cuba 
>>>>had about fifty airport workers on the island, one or two military 
>>>>advisors, but that was after all the information had had its 
>>>>effect. 
>>
>>>The actual numbers were about 650 Cuban army reservists there to work on the 
>>>airport, and a dozen or two military advisors.  It took several days to  
>>>round them all up and get the last snipers flushed out.
>>
>  [list deleted]

>>	Of the 784 mentioned, only 25 could be said to have a specific
>>military function (the advisors from MINFAR).
>>
>Most of the airport workers (650 or so) were also cuban army reservists.   
>Are you going to argue that none of those fought the invasion?  I notice  
>that you didn't quite say that in this post.

	No, just that they were not there as members of the Cuban army.
They were there as construction workers.  Just because they had their military
equipment with them is meaningless IMO.

	Just as the US Army Corps of Engineers is used on a large number of
civilian construction projects in the US so are Cuban army conscripts.

	I note that you deleted the mention of the fact that the prime
contractors for the construction of the new airport was a British construction
company and that they had sub-contracted to the Cuban government, not the
Grenadans.  Can't you answer that particular fact very well Don?



--
Brian Ross__________________________________________________________________
	"If it is dangerous to suppose that government is always right, it
will sooner or later be awkward for public administration if most people
suppose that it is always wrong."______________________________J.K.Galbraith
Newsgroups: alt.activism.d