i think one of the british articles mentioned the point. at least i'd heard it somewhere in the last day. but another possibility is they're telling the truth, and 37k packages is simply the first installment ### From: "Trei, Peter" <ptrei@rsasecurity.com> To: cypherpunks@lne.com, "'Matthew Gaylor'" <freematt@coil.com> Subject: RE: US Food Aid Propaganda Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2001 10:16:59 -0400 This is one of those things where you can run the numbers. ...37500 meals dropped on Sunday. The packages don't look like they weighed much more than a pound. Lets be very generous, and say 1 kilo. That's 37.5 metric tons in one night, max. Sounds like a lot? According to the World Food Program website (www.wfp.org), the UN is trying to truck in 52,000 tons a month. Assuming a 30 day month, that's 1733 tons/day. The US bombing shut down the UN aid delivery for a few days, (it's now going ahead again, even under fire, because the need is so critical). The US airdrops replaced, at the very maximum, less then 2.5% of the food whose delivery was prevented by the bombing. I'm reminded of the recent corporate ad from RJ Reynolds, where they made of deal of delivering some amount (less then 10 tons, I think) or aid to Kosovo. That amounted to a single truckload. They then spent many times the cost of the aid on airtime to trumpet their humanitarian efforts. Peter Trei ###