ustxtxb_obs_1985_11_08_50_00007-00000_000.pdf

ANDERSON & COMPANY’ COFFEE TEA SPICES Two JEFFERSON WJAIIII AUSTIN, TEXAS Mal 51.2 453-1533 Send me your list. Name Street City Zip OPEN MONDAY-SATURDAY 10-6 AND OPEN SUNDAY 10-4 WATSON & COMPANY BOOKS Saulnier, authorized spending about half a million dollars for an operation that allegedly was to be limited to investigating Greenpeace. The money came from a secret fund held in the office of Mitterrand’s prime minister, Laurent Fabius. A French secret agent then infiltrated Greenpeace, and eight French secret agents who were trained as “combat swimmers” cooperated to sink the Rainbow Warrior by attaching two bombs to its hull. When the first bomb exploded twelve crew members were on board, having a birthday party. Most of them fled the boat, but then the second explosion killed the photographer, who had gone below to try to save his equipment. France’s bomb could just as well have killed all twelve of these people. Hernu has resigned and the head of the secret service has been fired; according to a public opinion poll, threefourths of the people disapprove of the sinking and half of them believe the President himself is implicated. Yet at this writing the Reagan administration, while instantly and publicly applauding Israel’s raid on Tunis, still stands silent about France’s state-committed terrorism of last summer. President Reagan is correct that we should condemn state-sponsored terrorism. But to sail confidently in these wild waters we must first cleanse our own decks of terrorism, and then we must hold all nations, left and right, foes and allies, to the same high standard that we ourselves observe. Otherwise, we will be blown uncontrollably into the wildest waters of L foreign country with which the retaliating nation is at peace. But when is “counter-terror” simply terrorism for the state, a mask for acts of war? Israel has recently provided a fresh example of a state using military force to kill terrorists abroad. Retaliating, it said, for the murders of three Israelis in Cyprus, Israel sent its planes 750 miles to bomb the PLO -headquarters in Tunis, killing scores of people. Israel was not at war with Tunisia, but by customary standards committed an act of war against it. If the people killed were “the people responsible,” President Reagan said, the U.S. would approve. The PLO promised Israel a death for a death, an injury for an injury. The explosion of the Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior, in the port of Auckland, New Zealand, on July 10, killing a Greenpeace photographer, provides a clear example of a nation on our side committing terrorism. The government of France has been caught bloody-handed in an act of terror against the activist critics of its nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific. This is the minimum meaning of “l’affaire Greenpeace.” France tests its nuclear bombs in a dormant volcano in the Pacific, 12,000 miles away from Paris, French vineyards and French villages, the Cote d’Azur. The Greenpeace organization sails ships into the Pacific to protest the tests. In 1972 a French minesweeper rammed a Greenpeace sailboat in the test area. The next year French marines boarded the same boat and beat up the crew. I have learned from a reliable source in Paris that ten years ago, the mechanics who were servicing a Greenpeace ship were infiltrated by French agents, and in consequence the ship never left port for one of its missions facts that are not known even to this day to Greenpeace. This year, the commander of the French test site forces, Admiral Henri Fages, sent a memorandum to Paris asking for action against the Greenpeace plan to sail a flotilla into the area of the French tests of a neutron bomb, scheduled for this autumn. Fages used the word anticiper to describe the action he desired. Anticiper means “to anticipate something, to forestall someone’s action.” Anticiper sur les droits de quelqu’un means “to encroach on someone’s rights.” In Paris, Defense Minister Charles Hernu twice underlined the word anticiper and passed the memo to the head of the French secret service. In the office of President Francois Mitterand, the military staff director, General Jean all. “As a matter of U.S. policy,” said White House press secretary Larry Speakes, “retaliation against terrorist attacks is a legitimate response and an expression of self-defense. . . . It is a matter of principle that it is legitimate self-defense to respond appropriately to acts of terrorism.” Why does not that policy and principle expose France to retaliation for its terrorist attack on Greenpeace? If the Reagan administration invades Nicaragua, does not the same policy and principle expose the American people to retaliatory terrorism? R.D. 1 ginnys ‘ COPY NC SERVICE Austin Lubbock San Marcos J In a hurry for copies, collating, binding, printing, or word-processing? Call Ginny’s. THE TEXAS OBSERVER 7