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© Le VE? THE TRUTH ABOUT SOUTH OSSETIA wo months after the brief but bloody war in the Caucasus, which was overwhelmingly blamed on Russia by western politicians and media at the time, a serious investigation by the BBC has uncovered a very different story. The BBC report found strong evidence confirming western-backed Georgia as the aggressor on the night of 7 August 2008. It also assembles powerful testimony of wide-ranging war crimes carried out by the Georgian Army in its attack on the contested region of South Ossetia, which include the targeting of apartment block basements— where civilians were taking refuge—with tank shells and Grad rockets, the indiscriminate bombardment of residential districts and the deliberate killing of civilians, including those fleeing the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali. The report, which also details evidence of ethnic cleansing by South Ossetian paramilitaries, cuts the ground from beneath later Georgian claims that its attack on South Ossetia blown propaganda as Russia turned the tables on the USA's Georgian client regime and NATO expansion in the region. Clear initial evidence of who started the war and Georgian troops' killing spree in Tskhinvali was buried or even denied in a highly effective PR operation from Tbilisi. (Source: The Guardian, UK, 31 October 2008) THE MANCHURIAN MICROCHIP Ihe ~=myth: Chinese intelligence services have concealed a microchip in every computer everywhere, programmed to "call home" if and when activated. The reality: it may actually be true. All computers on the market today —be they Dell, Toshiba, Sony, Apple or especially IBM—are assembled with components manufactured inside the People's Republic of China. Each component produced by the Chinese, according to a reliable source within the intelligence community, is secretly equipped with a hidden microchip that can be activated any time by China's military-intelligence service. "It is there, deep inside your computer, if they decide to call it up," the security chief of a multinational corporation told The Investigator. "It is capable of providing Chinese intelligence with everything stored on your system—on everyone's system— from email to documents. I call it Call Home Technology. It doesn't mean to say they're sucking data from everyone's computer today; it means the Chinese think ahead—and they now have the potential to do it when it suits their purposes." (Source: Robert Eringer, "The Investigator", 18 October 2008, http://cryptome.info/0001/manchu- chip.htm) followed the start of a Russian invasion the previous night. In the wake of the Georgian attack, Russian troops moved into Georgia proper, destroying Georgian military facilities used to mount the original assault and inflicting their own civilian casualties in the process, notably in Gori. Earlier this month October], they pulled back from their Georgian buffer-zone into now nominally independent South Ossetia. At the start of the conflict, western media reporting was relatively even- handed, but rapidly switched into full- ME? T's THE EDITOR oF A MATOR PAIL _ ) PAPER Ar? WE'RE Go THROYEH AL PARTICULARLY BAD PERIOD oF CENSORSHIP. iy ONS rviffe . a some rviffe 6 ¢ NEXUS www.nexusmagazine.com DECEMBER 2008 — JANUARY 2009