Amanda Knox

People who were casting about looking for a good excuse to justify their callousness and cruelty

Some, in truth not enough.

The first intense series of bombings, the Menu campaign on targets
in Cambodia’s border areas—labelled Breakfast, Lunch, Supper, Dinner, Dessert, and Snack by American commanders—had concluded in May,

Ibid

Years after the war ended, journalist
Bruce Palling asked Chhit Do, a former
Khmer Rouge officer, if his forces had
used the bombing as anti-American
propaganda. Chhit replied:

Every time after there had been bombing, they would take the people to see the craters, to see how big and deep the craters were, to see how the earth had been gouged out and scorched . . . . The ordinary people sometimes literally **** in
their pants when the big bombs and shells
came. Their minds just froze up and they
would wander around mute for three or
four days. Terrified and half crazy, the
people were ready to believe what they
were told. It was because of their dissatisfaction with the bombing that they kept
on co-operating with the Khmer Rouge,
joining up with the Khmer Rouge, sending their children off to go with them....
Sometimes the bombs fell and hit little
children, and their fathers would be all
for the Khmer Rouge.
The Nixon administration knew that
the Khmer Rouge was winning over
peasants. The cia’s Directorate of Operations, after investigations south of
Phnom Penh, reported in May 1973
that the Communists were “using
damage caused by B-52 strikes as the
main theme of their propaganda.” But
this does not seem to have registered
as a primary strategic concern.
The Nixon administration kept the
air war secret for so long that debate
over its impact came far too late. It
wasn’t until 1973 that Congress, angered by the destruction the campaign
had caused and the systematic deception that had masked it, legislated a
halt to the bombing of Cambodia. By
then, the damage was already done.
Having grown to more than two hundred thousand troops and militia forces by 1973, the Khmer Rouge captured
Phnom Penh two years later. They went
on to subject Cambodia to a Maoist
agrarian revolution and a genocide in
which 1.7 million people perished.

The Nixon Doctrine relied on the notion that the United States could
supply an allied regime with the resources needed to withstand internal
or external challenges while the US
withdrew its ground troops or, in some
cases, simply remained at arm’s length.
In Vietnam, this meant building up the
ground-fighting capability of South
Vietnamese forces while American
units slowly disengaged. In Cambodia, Washington gave military aid to
prop up Lon Nol’s regime from 1970 to
1975 while the US Air Force conducted
its massive aerial bombardment.

Ibid

Amanda Knox was 'hit by police' until she made false Kercher murder claim
(By Nick Squires, The Telegraph, 06 Oct 2011)

Curt Knox said that during an interrogation lasting several hours, police officers hit his daughter around the head and left her so traumatised that she falsely pointed the blame at Patrick Lumumba, a Congolese immigrant who ran a bar in Perugia where she worked as a waitress.

"Amanda has never been so terrified as she was during that interrogation by the Italian police," he told La Repubblica, an Italian newspaper.

"She was hit. The truth is that they simply wanted to terrify her. There was huge pressure on the police to find the murderer."

Miss Knox, 24, was dramatically acquitted on Monday in a Perugia appeals court of the sexual assault and murder of Miss Kercher, 21, and flew home to Seattle the following day.

One charge against her was upheld – that of defaming Mr Lumumba with the false accusation that he killed the British exchange student, of Coulsdon, Surrey.

The appeal court sentenced her to three years' jail but it was cancelled out by the four years she had already served since being arrested and imprisoned in Nov 2007.

Mr Knox said his daughter had been manipulated into making the false accusation after police repeatedly questioned her about a text message she had sent to Mr Lumumba on the night of the murder in which she wrote "See you later".

He said that in English it was a vague and casual expression, but Italian investigators had interpreted it as a concrete plan for the pair to meet up.

They repeatedly questioned her about it, suggesting that she and Mr Lumumba were part of some sort of plot to kill Miss Kercher.

Her father said she was only 20 when the murder happened and had been naive and overly-trusting when police first focussed on her as a suspect.

"The words she used, her body language...she was a bit too naive. But she was only 20 and she didn't take into account the profound cultural differences between Italy and America."

Mr Knox and Amanda's mother, Edda Mellas, who are separated, were put on trial for defamation after repeating their daughter's claim that she had been physically abused by Perugia police.

The trial continues, despite their return home to Seattle, with the next hearing scheduled for January 24, 2012. They will be tried in absentia.

Miss Knox has arranged for box-loads of letters, which she received in prison from members of the public fascinated by her case, to be sent from Italy back to the US, Mr Knox said.

He said his daughter intended to continue studying Italian – she reached near fluency in prison – and would one day return to Italy, "a country she loves".

He said that now she was over 21 he was looking forward to taking her to a bar and buying her a beer.

Rudy Guede, the only person now behind bars for the murder of Miss Kercher, continues to proclaim his innocence and has called for a retrial in the wake of the acquittal of Miss Knox and her former boyfriend.

“They’ve gone home and Amanda has become a star while I’m still in jail,” Guede told La Repubblica through his lawyers.

Guede was convicted of murder and sexual assault on the basis of strong DNA evidence and the fact that he fled Italy for Germany after the killing. He was sentenced to 30 years in jail at his original trial but it was reduced to 16 years on appeal.

Curt Knox said

In 2008, when I heard that Knox and Sollecito were charged with a "sex game that went bad," I felt that these two people must truly be evil. I started having doubts about the prosecution theory when I learned that Knox was 20 years old and had only been in Italy for about two months. I also learned that Knox and Sollecito had known each other for less than two weeks.

There is no physical evidence that Knox and Sollecito engaged in a sex game with the victim. In my opinion the prosecution theory turned out to be no more than a dirty old man's fantasy.

You base things on age and how long someone has been in a country? That is truly daft. There are plenty of young people who are violent, vicious, lacking in the areas of common decency. Persons in their teens who mug, murder and harm elderly and those with physical and/or mental infirmity . A good number of them show no remorse for what they did and they are younger than Knox was at the time she was charged.

Tell ya what, you should stick to talking about your own beliefs and stop trying to dictate to others and saying they are making 'incompetent suggestions'.

Further, I can make any damn suggestion I want, whether you like it or not and whether it fits into your little window box of what should and shouldn't be.

I know damn well how the case progressed and all the players. I was making a statement based on your nonsense about Miss Knox being young and new in the country. You then follow up with more tripe, babbling about how she didn't fit the profile (regarding young people and 'personal history'). Many criminals appear sweet and innocent and turn out to be anything but that. Knox proved herself less than innocent when she decided to accuse a bartender of the crimes she was being charged with.

And we're talking people who are truly, unequivocally innocent, people who have been devastated by your government, by your tax dollars, by, for too many of you, your avid support for these genocidal actions.