Man Overboard!
Globe-Intel Exclusive (affiliated with right-wing CIA-friendly Newsmax.com)
3-16-2
Porton Down, Britain's bio-defence centre, has become the focus of a $4 million FBI hunt for the terrorist who has terrified the United States with an unprecedented wave of anthrax attacks.
The FBI are today urgently examining if the milled weapons-refined anthrax the terrorists used in the United States is a strain of anthrax from Porton Down code-named "Ames."
Scientists working with the FBI say "Ames" was sent from Porton Down in 1997 to America's most secret germ manufacturing plant.
The decision to send "Ames" to the plant was part of the still ongoing bio-defence exchanges between the U.S. and Britain.
The U.S. plant is known as Camp 12. It is sited in the depths of the high-security Nellis military range in Nevada.
The area is guarded by armed troops and state-of-the-art detection equipment. Until now the plant has been a closely-guarded secret - its existence repeatedly denied.
But now the FBI has focused on the plant's contact with Porton Down, President Bush spokesman, Ari Fleischer, has confirmed:
"Camp 12 is created to mimic steps a rogue state like Iraq would take to create a bio-arsenal.It is designed to protect our servicemen and women from such weapons."
The FBI have not ruled out a scientist with a grudge may have worked at Camp 12 - and obtained quantity of the milled Ames strain from Porton Down to create the fear and panic still ongoing in America.
Professor Martin Hugh-Jones of Louisiana State University, a world-ranking authority on anthrax, said: "The attacks have all the signs of being done by an expert microbiologist working in the bio-defence industry. Ames would be virtually impossible to be used by terrorists."
Yesterday another expert in bio-defence research, Dr. Barbara Sternberger, who in Washington, D.C. monitors work going on at Fort Detrick, America's other bio-chemical research complex, claimed: "The FBI have a short list of people. They have all been interviewed. But suspicion and proof are two different things."
This coming week those suspicions may harden as MI5 report to the FBI on its investigation into the trail that sent the deadly anthrax spores flying out in lead containers from Porton Down some 5,000 miles to Camp 12 in Nevada.
The FBI believe this evidence will enable them to establish if their chief suspect learned some of his expertise in Porton Down.
There are regular exchange visits between the establishment and scientists from Fort Detrick and Camp 12.
FBI psycho-profilers - the real life version of Clair Stirling who tracked down Hannibal Lecter in the movie - have concluded:
"Our prime suspect is a loner. His lab equipment probably costs no more than £2,000. But he is not the traditional 'mad scientist' with long hair and a crazed laugh. He's going to turn out to be the classic member of his community. But he's unlikely to be married. If he was, his wife or kids would have turned him in by now," a profiler at Quantico said this week.
Any link to recent violent deaths of UK based Microbiologists is totally spurious. I love that word.
makes the world go round. (WashPost via Metafilter)
The Senate yesterday defeated an effort to increase fuel efficiency standards for cars, sport utility vehicles and pickup
trucks by 50 percent over 13 years, voting instead for a measure backed by the auto industry.
Fuel efficiency = less oil you see.
As the drumbeat grows louder for a possible attack on Baghdad, we ask arms inspectors and military and foreign affairs
experts: is Saddam as dangerous as the US makes out, and what would be the consequences of war?
March 17, 2002
What Karl, Rummy, Condi and Vice have been telling President Bush about the Evil One,
Iraq and the struggles in the key battleground states.
THE PRESIDENT: Deep in my heart, I know the man is on the run, if he's alive at all.
(Karl says we have to low-ball expectations on Evil. Karl says we must never talk about the Evil One and the One-Eyed One, so my approval ratings won't depend on whether we get their scalps.)
Who knows if he's hiding in some cave or not? We haven't heard from him in a long time.
(Rummy says the Evil One — I mean, the One Formerly Known as Evil — and a lot of the top Al Queda commanders vamoosed from Tora Bora to Pakistan in December. Rummy says we blew it and should never have trusted those double-dealing Afghan varmints to seal the borders and check the caves. But Rummy says it's not a mistake if you don't admit it.)
And the idea of focusing on one person is — indicates to me people don't understand the scope of the mission.
(Karl says that if I repeat this mumbo jumbo often enough, people will buy it and forget all that Wanted Dead or Alive junk.)
Terror is bigger than one person.
(Karl says we'll all be terrified if one person — the Democratic nominee in 2004 — can make the argument that we've been spending $2 billion a month on a manhunt without catching any of the 9/11 villains.)
And he's just — he's a person who's now been marginalized.
(Karen says we have to marginalize Osama or we'll be marginalized.)
His network, his host government has been destroyed. He's the ultimate parasite who found weakness, exploited it and met his match.
(Vice says the Ultimate Parasite may have already leeched onto another host country — Yemen, the Philippines or maybe Somalia — where he could be e-mailing terror orders to his friends from his Mac.)
You know, I just don't spend that much time on him, to be honest with you.
(I can't stop thinking about it. Dad says I should pretend he didn't slip through our fingers. Dad says if he hadn't compared Saddam to Hitler, people wouldn't have gotten so riled at him when he let Saddam stay in power. Gee, I wish Rummy would hurry up and get Osama. Anyway, Daschle hasn't caught Osama either.)
I'm more worried about making sure that our soldiers are well supplied, that the strategy is clear.
(Karl says we should use the war to help us in the midterm Congressional elections this fall, but we should do it in a way no one notices.)
There's going to be other struggles like Shah-i-Kot, and I'm just as confident about the outcome of those future battles as I was about Shah-i-Kot.
(Rummy says the reason there'll be other struggles like Shah-i-Kot is that everybody keeps escaping. Karl says I have to concentrate on raising a million bucks a week for the struggles in the key battleground states of North Carolina, Minnesota, Missouri and Iowa.)
We are showing the world we know how to fight a guerrilla war with conventional means.
(Condi says we have to have lots of little nukes, just in case.)
Well, as I say, we haven't heard much from him.
(Tom says he's got all those psychedelic color-coded gizmos, just in case.)
I truly am not that concerned about him. I know he is on the run.
(Vice says Osama can't run Al Qaeda on the run, but he never ran Al Qaeda any other way. I asked Vice, "Vice, haven't Osama and his bombs always lived out of a suitcase?" But Vice told me not to overdo the psychoanalytic bit.)
We're working closely with other governments to deny sanctuary, or training, or a place to hide or a place to raise money.
(Vice called me today and said the sheiks aren't shakin' and bakin' with our plans to vaporize Iraq. What is their problemo?)
And we've got more work to do. . . . This is going to be a long struggle.
(Karl says all the way to 2008. He says we're plenty hot because the Dems have no recession, no soft money and no war.)
And I can assure you, I am not going to blink.
(Karl and Karen and Rummy and Vice and Condi and Tom say even if we don't catch Osama, I'm a rock star. Hey, I hang with Bono.)
During the selection process, Reid met with a number of immans in a room in North London. One of them was Ahmed Bilal who had been Reid’s imman in Feltham Young Offenders Institution in West London.
Reid has described the North London room with walls inscribed with verses from the Koran. There were also paintings of birds flying in a purple sky. Reid says he was reminded the birds carried the souls of martyrs to Allah.
He spent weeks in the room undergoing lectures on martyrdom.
He was also asked to sign “a religious document” that he was over 18, that he was unmarried, not the family breadwinner and acting “on my own free will under the guidance of Allah.” The document was witnessed by one of his imman instructors.
During this stage, Reid told the FBI he began intensive periods of praying. To avoid drawing attention, he visited several mosques. He says he knew every move he made had to be reported to the immans who met with him in the North London room.
There he was then given the same assurance. On the Day of Judgement he would face no reckoning for what he had been chosen to do.
He would be allowed, upon entering Paradise, to choose seventy of his relatives to join him.
He has told his FBI interrogators that he only chose his father, Robin, to join him.
The last assurance he received every week was that, once he entered Paradise, he would have at his disposal the 72 houris, the celestial virgins who dwelled there.
In June this year, Reid has told his interrogators, the immans in London decided he was ready to go for further instructions.
To test his resolve, Reid says he was asked to “fly with the enemy” – the El Al plane that took him to Israel for a ten-day holiday.
From there he travelled to Cairo. There he met with an imman attached to the al-Qaeda group.
Reid has revealed he spent almost a month in a room near a mosque in the Helipolis quarter of the city.
There, he says, he was given two “assistants”. Older men, steeped in religious dogma, he has said it was their function to make sure he did not waver in his readiness to die.
An FBI source has said that Reid was told “that Paradise lay beneath my thumb. When the time came, all I must do is ignite the fuse.”
He then flew to Istanbul and prayed in the Great Mosque there. He has told the FBI that all suicide bombers try to go there to pray before a mission.
He then travelled to Pakistan. There he met another imman linked to bin Laden.
“The imman told me that all my earthly debts had been settled by al-Qaeda,” Reid told the FBI.
Then the imman performed a ceremony in which Reid was invested with the title of “al shaeedmal hayy” – the living martyr.
He was then sent back to Europe. Waiting for him at Brussels airport were one of the immans he had originally met in that North London room.
Reid says he was given money to renew his British passport and for living expenses in Paris.
Afterwards he met a man he still only knows as “my instructor”.
This man showed Reid how to assemble his shoe-bomb at the airport.
On the day of his botched mission, Reid had performed a ritual ablution and dressed in clean clothes. He knelt and offered a traditional Islamic Prayer before battle – and asked Allah to forgive his earthly sins and bless his mission.
To protect him on his way to Paradise, Reid placed a copy of the Koran in his left shirt pocket over his heart. Then he put on his lethal shoes, boarded the American Airlines flight to Miami.
Hours later the shoes failed to explode.
However, he has managed to infuriate British intelligence chiefs with his claim to FBI interrogators that MI5 tried to recruit him.
While the claim has been roundly refuted by MI5, it has done little to reduce the embarrassment the service feels at failing to spot Reid as a would-be terrorist.
MI5 blame Britain’s Special Branch who are also responsible for surveillance of terrorists for failing to spot Reid.
But Special Branch sources still insist that “all the evidence we had before he tried to destroy the American Airlines plane indicates he was a Walter Mitty type of personality, a loner whose only relaxation was watching spy film videos.”
It was that assessment which made it hard for FBI investigators to fill in the background of the shoe bomber – and his claim to have been asked to spy for Britain.
That claim was discovered by some of the 60 Middle East refugees recruited since September 11 by MI5 to infiltrate radical Islamic groups in Britain.
Known as “infils” to their controllers, the refugees say Reid told members of the Brixton mosque he attended that he had hand-delivered a letter to MI5 headquarters last June declining the offer to spy.
MI5 sources say there is no record of the letter – or of any attempt to recruit Reid.
Shortly after Reid claimed to have delivered his letter, he flew to Israel. He checked in for a ten-day stay at Herzlia, a coastal town north of Tel Aviv. It is where Mossad has its training school.
He finally arrived in Pakistan on board a Pakistan Airlines flight to Islamabad.
The CIA are now checking a claim made by John Walker – the 20-year-old Californian who joined the Taliban before being captured by U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan – that he met Reid in Pakistan.
Intelligence sources say Walter and Reid have significantly similar backgrounds.
Both were late converts to Islam. Both have admitted their “bible” was “The Authority of Malcolm X”. Both say they wanted to join an intelligence service (Walter wanted to enter the CIA; turned down, he spent a year in Yemen on what he called “my spiritual reawakening”. Reid has told his interrogators in America that he experienced a similar feeling when he became a Muslim.
While intelligence sources on both sides of the Atlantic reject any possibility that Reid or Walter would ever have been accepted, they do not discount the possibility that Reid may have been attracted by MI5 advertisements placed in Muslim newspapers in Britain for linguists and academics to study intelligence reports for the service’s G-Branch at its Millbank offices in London.
However, MI5 insist that all recruits are checked to weed out Islamic radicals in a process called “developed vetting”.
A source said: “There is always a risk for any intelligence agency that terrorists may apply to join. But we believe our vetting process is second to none.”
Meanwhile, as the war against terrorists is set to escalate, the search for language experts to work with British and U.S. intelligence services continues.
In the New Year, Worldwide Languages Resources, a U.S.-based company continues to search for: “Non-U.S. citizens for posts as language instructors, interpreters, translators and analysts; human intelligence experts, transcription technicians and interceptors.”
Another U.S.-based organisation, All World Language Consultants, is seeking “language experts with secret security clearances.”
Richard Reid, a petty criminal like his father, Robin, would never have qualified. Initial checks by his FBI interrogators show he has little knowledge of the Koran or of Islamic history. And his language skills are described as “almost zilch.”
Shouldn't the state keep track of people like this? And hand the list over to the Jehovah's witnesses?
15 March 02
Rejection can dramatically reduce a person's IQ and their ability to reason analytically, while increasing their aggression, according to new research.
"It's been known for a long time that rejected kids tend to be more violent and aggressive," says Roy Baumeister of the Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, who led the work. "But we've found that randomly assigning students to rejection experiences can lower their IQ scores and make them aggressive."
Baumeister's team used two separate procedures to investigate the effects of rejection. In the first, a group of strangers met, got to know each other, and then separated. Each individual was asked to list which two other people they would like to work with on a task. They were then told they had been chosen by none or all of the others.
In the second, people taking a personality test were given false feedback, telling them they would end up alone in life or surrounded by friends and family.
Aggression scores increased in the rejected groups. But the IQ scores also immediately dropped by about 25 per cent, and their analytical reasoning scores dropped by 30 per cent.
"These are very big effects - the biggest I've got in 25 years of research," says Baumeister. "This tells us a lot about human nature. People really seem designed to get along with others, and when you're excluded, this has significant effects."
Baumeister thinks rejection interferes with a person's self-control. "To live in society, people have to have an inner mechanism that regulates their behaviour. Rejection defeats the purpose of this, and people become impulsive and self-destructive. You have to use self-control to analyse a problem in an IQ test, for example - and instead, you behave impulsively."
Bollocks. Be a sheep why don't you. The outcast scores less than average? Or the man who doesn't play by the rules fails the test?
Saturday March 16, 2002
(The Guardian)
The co-pilot of , which crashed off New England in 1999, killing 217 people, deliberately crashed the plane as an act of revenge, according to a source close to the investigation.
Gamil el-Batouty had earlier been reprimanded for sexual misconduct and the executive who told him he would not be allowed to fly US routes again was on board the plane.
The report by the National Transportation Safety Board is due to be published shortly. It will conclude that el-Batouty forced the New York-to-Cairo plane down. The report will not attribute motives to him as to why he took the action nor will it suggest that he deliberately crashed the flight.
However, sources close to the investigation paint a picture of el-Batouty as a man facing ruin in the light of a series of allegations of sexual misconduct, including exposing himself to teenage girls, propositioning hotel maids and stalking female hotel guests.
On board the doomed flight was Hatem Rushdy, the chief of EgyptAir's Boeing 767 pilot group, who had just reprimanded el-Batouty. He told him that as a result of his sexual activities he would not fly transatlantic routes - which carry extra pay - again.
"Rushdy told him 'this is your last flight' and el-Batouty's attitude was 'this is the last flight for you too'," the former EgyptAir captain Hanofy Taha Mahmoud Hamdy told the Los Angeles Times.
A high-ranking member of the US team agreed. He said: "It was more revenge against Rushdy than just a suicide."
The blackbox recordings indicate that Rushdy had left his first-class seat and entered the cockpit. But as soon as he left, el-Batouty, who was supposed to fly the second five-hour section of the flight, entered the cockpit and ordered a younger first officer out of his chair.
Saying "I rely on God", he switched off the auto-pilot and pushed the plane into a dive.
Captain Ahmed el-Habashi, who had been out of the cockpit managed to struggle back in, and shouted: "What's happening, Gamil? What's happening?" El-Batouty said again "I rely on God," and shut down the fuel to both engines.
Habishi shouted: "What is this? Did you shut the engines?" and grabbed the controls. "Pull with me! Pull with me!" he screamed.
The plane, which had been in a nosedive, then soared back up to 24,000 feet, but lost all power and broke up from the stress.
"I think [el-Batouty] had been looking at the door, looking at the moment when Rushdy is out of the cockpit," Mr Hamdy said. "This is the most suitable moment to fulfil what he is going to do."
The claims are likely to exacerbate already tense American-Egyptian diplomatic ties.
Remarkable UFOs Captured On NASA Open Broadcasts (via Rense)
15 March 02
One of the largest asteroids known to have approached the Earth zipped past about 450,000 kilometres away on March 8 - but nobody recorded it until four days later.
The object, now called 2002 EM7, was hard to spot because it was moving outward from the innermost point of its orbit, 87 million km from the Sun. When it passed closest to the Earth - just 1.5 times the distance to the Moon - it was too close to the Sun to be visible.
Asteroids approaching from this blind spot cannot be seen by astronomers. If a previously unknown object passed through this zone on a collision course with Earth, it would not be identified until it was too late for any intervention.
Astronomers have made numerous calls in recent years for more funds to catalogue near-Earth objects and refine their orbits. This would reduce the number of unknown objects that could catch us unaware, and give early warning of potential future collisions.
An asteroid-hunting telescope operated by the MIT Lincoln Laboratory first recorded the new asteroid on March 12, as it moved away from the Earth and more of its bright side came into view.
Further observations allowed Timothy Spahr of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics to calculate its orbit. He found that it has a 323-day orbit that takes it as far as 188 million km from the Sun.
Invisible to the unaided eye, 2002 EM7 is too small to be classed as a "potentially hazardous asteroid". But it is probably between 50 to 100 metres across, making it larger than the object that exploded in 1908 over the Tunguska region of Siberia, flattening trees over 2000 square kilometres.
The approach puts it among the 10 closest known approaches by minor planets, says Brian Marsden of Harvard-Smithsonian. More ominously, only one of the 10 closest objects was larger. This was 1996 JA1, which passed only slightly closer to the Earth on 19 May 1996.
The discovery adds to the list of asteroids which are long shots to hit the Earth in the next century. Preliminary calculations indicate 2002 EM7 has Several chances to hit the Earth in that period, with odds of one in six million to one in a billion.
We can expect the chances of a celestial body as large as 500 mt colliding with Earth to be rather high, in the range of several collisions each 100.000 years period. The majority of these collisions is caused by a class of celestial bodies named by astronomers "Apollo objects", that is a class of asteroids whose perihelion lies inside the orbit of the Earth.
The effects of a collision with an Apollo-like object are devastating. Gehrels estimates that a one-kilometre-wide object, colliding with the Earth at a speed of 20 kilometres per second, would liberate an energy equivalent to ten billions of Hiroshima-type nuclear bombs.
These effects, however, although disastrous, are not even comparable with the destruction brought about by an instantaneous shifting of the poles. Following is a short analysis of what could happen.
Suppose the Earth has been hit by an asteroid and that the conditions for a shift of the poles have been met. On the basis of the adjustments necessary to re-shape the equatorial bulge around the new axis of rotation, and the consequent re-establishment of the isostatic equilibrium of the crust, we can predict what the phenomena would be.
Some areas of the Earth's crust would be driven to move upward, others downward. The up and down movements necessary to re-shape the bulge, would be different from site to site of the Earth . For a shift of 20o the movements would be of 3 or 4 kilometres at the most. Very small, compared with the diameter of the Earth, but nonetheless of great consequence on the surface. We know that the mechanisms which maintain the isostatic equilibrium of the crust are very effective; there is no doubt that after a while the equilibrium would be re-established around the new axis of rotation, with poles and equator in different positions.
It is important to evaluate how long it would take for this to happen. We know that the layers of the crust, when subjected to a force over a certain limit, break suddenly, causing an earthquake. In the situation we have hypothesised, at the beginning only sea water would be displaced, with a very slow and gradual increase of the speed of rotation around the new axis. When the rotational speed reaches a certain critical value, sudden adjustments of the crust would begin to happen and from that moment the process would be sharply accelerated and the re-shaping of the bulge would be completed in a very short time.
How short? days or hours? Impossible to say. A simulation with a mathematical model should give reliable results. The process of re-shaping the equatorial bulge should follow a course of exponential type: after the initial sharp peak, it should decrease very quickly. Adjustment phenomena, however, are expected to continue for a long time, as the isostatic equilibrium is re-established more and more accurately.
Obviously, readjustments of that size of the equatorial bulge cannot happen without causing extensive fractures of the crust, which would provoke earthquakes of such a tremendous magnitude as to dwarf the most devastating known today. A sudden incredibly strong burst of volcanic activity in all areas subjected to strain would also be inevitable.
The beginning of adjustments of the crust would start not only earthquakes and volcanic activity, but even a dreadful hurricane all over the continents, with violent winds and torrential rains. A gigantic water avalanche would devastate the valleys and plains of the world. On the whole the oceans' water and the atmosphere follow the rotational movement of the Earth, but they are not tied to it. If the Earth should suddenly change the direction of its rotation, they would, at first, thanks to their inertia , keep up their previous motion; only after a while the attrition with the Earth's surface would force them to follow the new movement.
The continents would be swept by hurricane force winds, reaching speeds of hundreds of kilometres per hour. The water of the oceans would play a much greater destructive role.
If we abruptly change the movement of a bowl full of water, we see the level of the water rising on one side and getting lower on the opposite. Something like this would happen on Earth. We must expect wide fluctuation of sea levels in many parts of the world. Presumably an enormous tide, dozens, or even hundreds of meters high, would slowly move around the globe.
The same reasoning applies where the core of the Earth is concerned. It being liquid it would at first continue on its motion, naturally undergoing a strong attrition in the core-mantle boundary region. Obviously, after a certain time the core would adopt the same rotational motion of the mantle, but the attrition would create a turbulence which might have important effects. According to the last theories, the liquid core is the site of electrical currents, that are responsible for the magnetic field. This turbulence could influence the behaviour of the magnetic field, and it could break the balance, thus provoking perturbation on the magnetic field that might lead even to an inversion of the magnetic poles.
An important element in order to evaluate the climatic conditions following a shift of the poles, is the inclination that the new axis of rotation will assume with respect to the ecliptic. This has a tremendous effect on the climate. According to the mechanism we have spelt out so far the axis of rotation that the Earth would acquire at the moment of impact should be parallel to the direction of the hit. It is impossible to predict which would be the actual direction of the new axis once stabilised. It is certain that it would not be the same as the previous one, except for a fortuitous chance. Therefore, following a shift of the poles the course of the seasons would very likely be different .
For example, in the hypothesis that the axis of rotation is almost vertical with respect to the ecliptic, there would be an enormous growth of ice at high latitudes and altitudes, with subsequent lowering of sea level. On the other hand the climate would be much more stable then it is today, with very limited (or non-existent) seasonal climatic differences and an uninterrupted vegetation's growth. This would bring about the disruption of today's climatic barriers, with subsequent spreading of tropical species towards northern regions and viceversa. There would also be the maximum possible development of ecological communities.
This appears to be exactly the existing situation in the Pleistocene era, when formidable ice caps covered North America and North Europe, and there were enormous glaciers on all mountains. In the immediate surroundings of these masses of ice one of the most impressive zoological communities of all times thrived. Millions (more than 40 millions, according to F.C. Hibben) of mammoths roamed Siberia and Alaska, large animals the size of which can be found today only in tropical regions, or in those areas where the supply of fodder is guaranteed all the year round.
It's against common sense that precisely during the ice age, one of the largest zoological communities since the dinosaurs existed in those very areas which are today reputed, due to their extreme climatic conditions, as the most hostile on Earth. With the mammoths there were dozens other animal species, the majority of which are extinct today. Of these species we have a great number of skeletons, several complete animals that have been perfectly preserved in the permafrost, and many wonderful paintings in Palaeolithic caves. The oldest amongst them is the "Chauvet" cave, in France, which is believed to have been painted 30.000 years ago, precisely in the middle of the ice age. They are pictures of breathtaking beauty. The unknown artists, with a few strokes, have represented to perfection animals which at the time were living in the plains of central Europe (and at the same time in Siberia and Alaska) . But the beauty of the paintings makes the zoologist wonder in more than one way: how could such a varied assembly of animals coexist? To what a bizarre ecological environment could such a motley fauna belong? We find the rein-deer next to rhinoceros, the mammoth, with its woolly mantle, near the hippopotamus, bears with lions, the leopard and Brezalwski horses. There were also giant beavers and sloths, big horn deers, camels, sabre teeth tigers, buffaloes, aurochs bulls and many more.
It's an incredible mixture which leaves us puzzled and astonished. Arctic and tropical fauna together, on the same plain, in perfect balance with the environment! Such an extraordinarily varied and numerous animal community disagrees with whatever current opinion we might have on climatic conditions during the ice age. And definitely such a community couldn't exist anywhere on Earth today.
This community suddenly disappeared at the end of the Pleistocene era, when, according to today's theories, the climatic conditions were supposed to have become milder.
A shift of the poles occurred 11.600 years ago, with all its related destructive phenomena, could explain completely and coherently the climatic situation before that date, and the situation brought on after that date.
New Photo Of Bigfoot In Oregon
3-16-2
I was out planting trees in the liquid sunshine that we have here in
Oregon. I cought something out of the corner of my eye. When I turned
around I saw this guy watching me. He was just hunkerd down next to a
winter lagoon. I grabbed my camera and snapped a few pics, and then quietly
moseyd away. Neither the dog nor the horse were bothered by him in the
least! -Marsha
¥ Why was the US military preparing war plans against Afghanistan months before the September 11 attacks? Were they just looking for some event to propel the normally disinterested American public into a war, as in the past?
¥ How could paper documents incriminating bin Laden be found intact at the WTC, but the planes' "black box" flight recorders--designed to withstand crashes--were damaged beyond use?
¥ Even days and weeks after the WTC attack, why were news cameramen prevented from photographing the ruins from certain angles, as complained about by CBS correspondent Lou Young, who asked, "What are they afraid we're going to see?"
¥ Why has the NYPD liaison to the FBI been sent packing as a "security risk", as reported in the October 16 New York Times? Whose security is at risk? The FBI's? What is it that the Bureau does not want NYPD to know?
¥ How could an obviously sophisticated terrorist plan, involving perhaps as many as 100 persons and in the works for five years, escape the notice of our intelligence services, especially the FBI and CIA? And why, instead of cashiering those responsible for this intelligence failure and totally restructuring these agencies, are we doubling their budgets?
¥ Why did the WTC South Tower collapse first, when it was not as extensively damaged as the North Tower which burned for almost an hour and a half before collapsing?
¥ Why did many witnesses claim to hear further explosions within the buildings? And why did the destruction of the towers appear more like a controlled implosion than a tragic accident?
¥ Why did FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledge that the list of named hijackers might not contain their real names? Doesn't everyone have to show a photo ID to claim a boarding pass? Where was the normal security?
¥ Why was there a discrepancy of 35 names between the published passenger lists and the official death toll on all four of the ill-fated flights? Internet columnist Gary North reported that "the published names in no instance match the total listed for the number of people on board". Why the discrepancy?
¥ As none of these listed passengers had an Arabic-sounding name, how did the government know which ones were the hijackers?
¥ Why did the seat numbers of the hijackers, given in a cellphone call from Flight Attendant Madeline Amy Sweeney to Boston Air Traffic Control, not match the seats occupied by the men the FBI claims were responsible?
¥ Since Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister claimed five of the proclaimed hijackers were not aboard the death planes and in fact are still alive, and a sixth man on that list was reported to be alive and well in Tunisia, why are these names still on the FBI list?
¥ Why were no names of the named hijackers on any of the passenger lists? If they all used aliases, how did the FBI identify them so quickly?
¥ Why did one of the named hijackers take luggage on a suicide flight, then leave it along with an incriminating note in his car at the airport?
¥ As for the overall investigation into the September attacks, by late October US authorities conceded that most of their promising leads for finding accomplices and some of their long-held suspicions about several suspects have unravelled, according to the New York Times. Since more than 800 people have been arrested and more than 365,000 tips have been received from the public, why has nothing substantial been forthcoming in the largest US criminal investigation in history?
¥ Why, of the nearly 100 people still being sought by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is none seen as a major suspect?
¥ Why are we bombing Afghanistan, when apparently no listed hijackers were Afghans but instead Arabs from various Middle Eastern nations? Since Iraq was implicated in the 1993 WTC attack, why are we not bombing that "rogue" nation?
¥ Why does the heavy drinking and searching for hookers by some of the hijackers in Boston, as reported by Reuters news service, sound more like mercenaries carousing before a mission than pious religious fundamentalists about to meet their maker?
¥ How did the terrorists obtain top-secret White House and Air Force One codes and signals--the excuse for hustling President Bush all across the country on September 11? Was this evidence of an inside job, or was it, as reported by Fox News, evidence that former FBI employee and double agent Robert Hanssen had delivered an updated version of the purloined Promis computer software to his Russian handlers who passed it along to bin Laden? Does this software, which was stolen from a US company during the Reagan administration by Justice Department officials under Attorney-General Ed Meese, allow outsiders carte blanche entrée to our top-security computers? (Hanssen's last job before being arrested as a spy was to upgrade the FBI's intelligence computer systems.)
¥ If United Airlines Flight 93 crashed as the result of a struggle between heroic passengers and the hijackers, why did witnesses tell of a second plane which followed it down, falling burning debris, no deep crater and crash wreckage spread over a six-mile area, indicative of an aerial explosion?
10:13 08 February 02
Your chances of developing schizophrenia depend on how sunny it was months before you were even born, suggests new research.
Evidence is accumulating to support the theory that vitamin D deficiency during pregnancy, caused by a lack of sunlight, can alter the development of a child's brain in the womb. The data for a link with schizophrenia is still controversial, but potentially worrying because vitamin D deficiency is so common.
Vitamin D's role in building healthy brains had been largely ignored, until researchers began to spot some curious epidemiological trends. People who develop schizophrenia in Europe and North America are more likely to be born in the spring. And they are roughly four times as likely to be born to Afro-Caribbean immigrants living in England as they are to have parents of other ethnic origins living in the same areas.
The body needs sunlight to make vitamin D, and people with darker skin need more than paler-skinned people. So such observations led John McGrath of the Queensland Centre for Schizophrenia Research in Wacol to propose that a lack of vitamin D during early development tips the balance towards schizophrenia in genetically susceptible people.
Now McGrath has completed studies on rats that add experimental meat to the epidemiological bones. With neurobiologist Alan Mackay-Sim of Griffith University in Queensland, McGrath has found that - just like humans with schizophrenia - adult rats deprived of vitamin D from conception are more startled than normal by a loud noise preceded by a soft noise.
Ventricles in the brains of vitamin-deprived baby rats are also unusually large, a feature seen in people with schizophrenia, they told the International Society for Developmental Neuroscience meeting in Sydney last week.
The researchers also used "gene chips" to look at the activity of thousands of genes in the brains of adult rats deprived of vitamin D during gestation. The chips revealed many genes had become less active, including three for brain receptors, and several that code for proteins involved in building nerve synapses.
It's an exciting lead," says Fred Mendelsohn, director of the Howard Florey Institute for experimental physiology and medicine in Melbourne. But he and others point out that the new findings are a long way from decisively showing that a lack of vitamin D during pregnancy helps trigger schizophrenia.
McGrath agrees, but says the rat studies clearly show that too little vitamin D "does something nasty to the brain". He argues that we urgently need to find out exactly what that is, because vitamin D deficiency affects 12 per cent of women of childbearing age, according to a large US survey.
"This should be a big wake-up call. We should find out quickly because [low vitamin D] could impact general intelligence, and have a whole range of neurological outcomes," says McGrath.
But he warns pregnant women not to take additional vitamin D until more is known about its role in development - too much of the vitamin may cause birth defects.
Wouldn't like half of all Eskimos be nuts?
The suicide rate in Seoul increased in proportion to the amount of sunshine last year, the Seoul Fire and Disaster Management Department said in a report yesterday.
The suicide rate was lowest in the winter but gradually increased in the spring, when there is more sun, and reached its peak in the summer, according to the report.
The number of suicides and suicide attempts increased to 2,610 cases last year from 2,517 in 2000. But those dead declined to 136 people from 152, whereas casualties rose to 2,321 from 2,110.
By season, the number of suicides and suicide attempts increased in March (241 cases), peaked in July (263 cases), conspicuously declined in October (191 cases) and hit the bottom in December (154 cases).
The suicide rate by season in 2000 showed a similar trend with that of last year, the department said. The trend corresponds to the recent report by Harvard University, which stated that sunshine induces suicide, it said. The university obtained this result after comparing the suicide rate in some 20 countries with the amount of monthly sunshine.
The decline in the number of dead people despite the increased suicide cases is attributed to the drop in the number of people who fell off bridges into the Han River, which decreased to 137 from 154.
On the other hand, the rate of suicide committed inside homes increased. Hanging and cutting arteries declined, whereas drug poisoning increased to 1,229 cases from 1,008.
By sex, women committed more suicides than men, as in 2000, accounting for 1,401 cases compared with 1,209 cases.
By age, suicide rate of female teenagers was more than twice that of male teens, while the suicide rate of women in their 20s greatly exceeded that of their male counterparts.
But the gap in suicide rate narrowed between women and men in their 30s, and the suicide rate of men in their 40s outpaced that of women of the same age.
The year 1998, when Korea was hit by a financial crisis, saw the highest number of suicide attempts at 3,003. With the recovery of the domestic economy in 1999, the figure plunged to 2,402, but has been on the rise since 2000.
(Independent UK)
17 March 2002
Sperm counts are falling dramatically across Britain and the rest of industrialised world, and scientists are increasingly convinced that pollution is to blame.
Studies around the world have shown that average sperm counts in men have dropped by more than half over the past 50 years – from about 160 million per millilitre of semen to 66 million.
The Medical Research Council reports that the fertility of Scottish men born since 1970 was 25 per cent less than those born in the 1950s, with sperm counts continuing to drop by two per cent a year.
Other research by the US Government's Environmental Protection Agency shows that, proportionately, a man now produce only about a third as much sperm as a hamster.
Scientists increasingly blame a whole class of hormone-disrupting chemicals. Evidence suggests that they cause cancer and damage the immune system, as well as impairing fertility. And they are ever more ubiquitous.
DDT and other pesticides disrupt hormones, as do PCBs, used in countless products worldwide, from plastics and paint to electrical equipment.
Other components of plastics have been found to leach hormone-disrupters including phthalates, which have been found in a wide range of foods including baby milk.
Furthermore, an investigation by the BBC's Countryfile and The Independent on Sunday has revealed research, to be published this month, that shows that artificial oestrogens, used in contraceptive pills and emitted through sewage works, appear to be changing the sex of half the fish in Britain's lowland rivers.
Scientists and environmentalists fear that the powerful chemicals are getting into drinking water and affecting human fertility. One third of Britain's drinking water comes from rivers; most of it is taken from below sewage works.
The Environment Agency denies that there is any danger. Water UK, which represents the water companies, says that no hormone-disrupting chemical has ever been detected in British drinking water, and that fish placed in the water to test it did not become feminised.
But some scientists say that the chemicals may not have been detected, because there is no routine testing for them in drinking water, and because the equipment used in Britain is not sensitive enough.
Research at the University of Ulm, in West Germany, using more sophisticated techniques, found small amounts in four out of every 10 samples tested. And environmentalists fear that effects in people may occur over much longer periods than those used to test the fish.
Dr Susan Jobling of Brunel University, who led the research, says: "Unlike in fish, it is going to take 20 years to see if my children have been affected by developmental exposure to this same cocktail of chemicals."
A deliberate ploy to reduce the 'limey' population?
(NewScientist)
14 March 02
A polio outbreak in Haiti and the Dominican Republic in 2000 was caused by mutant forms of the vaccine virus that may have regained the ability to spread from person to person by swapping genes with viruses in the gut.
The weakened form of the polio virus used for the oral vaccine has about 50 changes in its RNA compared with the disease-causing form, which make it both less dangerous and less likely to spread. It is known that random reversals in just two to five RNA bases can make it deadly again - which means there is a one in a million chance that the vaccine itself can cause polio.
But the latest study raises the frightening possibility that the vaccine strain can also regain the ability to spread between people more easily than thought. "It demonstrates clearly that the vaccine virus can spread from person to person," says Olen Kew from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia.
The outbreak was exacerbated by the fact that Haiti had relaxed its polio vaccination program more than five years earlier. "It's a warning that you need to have good coverage to prevent vaccines from running away like this," Kew says.
The study also shows how difficult it will be eliminate polio entirely. For this to be achieved, natural polio would first have to be wiped out through stringent use of the oral polio vaccine. Then all countries could simultaneously stop vaccinating or switch to a different vaccine - injectable, dead polio virus.
This method does not confer as much immunity as the oral vaccine, but it cannot revert to a disease-causing form. This vaccine is already used in the US and much of Europe.
"There's lots of debate going on there," says Paul Fine, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He warns that switching to the injectable vaccine immediately would pose huge logistical problems and be horrendously expensive.
Kew's team analysed the mutant forms of the vaccine virus that caused the outbreaks. The analysis suggests that they all stem from a vaccine given to a child in Haiti in 1998 or 1999.
The weakened virus began circulating among non-vaccinated people, reaching the Dominican Republic by 2000. At some point a few of the viruses became more virulent, with the result that during 2000 and 2001, 21 people developed polio and two died.
The mutant forms were found to have swapped RNA sequences on several occasions with related viruses, called enteroviruses, which also infect people. But the researchers cannot be sure if this gene swapping was the cause of the outbreaks.
"This is a very difficult thing to test," says Andrew Macadam, a virologist from the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control in Hertfordshire, UK.
What if this virus cross-mutates with the local Puffa toxin fish used in the voodoo zombie ceremonies? I'm heading to the nearest mall.
March 15, 2002
HARWINTON - Local health department officials are saying there is no need to panic after 70 students and two teachers at Harwinton Consolidated School contracted a rash that will close the school Friday.
The rash, similar to others reported elsewhere in Connecticut and throughout the nation, developed quickly, Superintendent Dr. Evan Pitkoff said Thursday.
"It had a quick onset and the number of cases climbed to 70 by the end of the day," Pitkoff said.
Both the Torrington Area Health District and the Connecticut Department of Public Health were called in to investigate the outbreak, with the Torrington district handling the investigation.
James Rokos, Director of Health at the Torrington Area Health District, said his office would perform "a very complete inspection of the entire building" Friday, and emphasized that there was no reason for parents to panic.
"We are about as positive as we can be this is not any kind of bio-terrorism or anything like that," Rokos said. "It's a mystery, a complete mystery. We did a thorough inspection (Thursday) and didn't find anything unusual."
While the health department did not mandate the school closing, Pitkoff said he and other officials determined closing the building for a day to give the health district three days to investigate was the proper decision.
The first reports of an infection came in Wednesday when a student complained of a rash. The same student returned to school the next day with a very obvious skin condition and was sent home. By the end of the day both students and teachers had some sort of skin rash.
The affected students were sent home Thursday and will not be permitted to return to school until they have received clearance from a medical doctor, preferably a dermatologist Pitkoff said.
This is not the first mysterious rash to hit Connecticut or the nation. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports similar incidents in 14 state, including Indiana, Mississippi, Oregon and Georgia in addition to another outbreak in Connecticut.
The first reported incident occurred in Indiana on October 4, 2001. That report was followed by others in Virginia and then in January and February.
Rashes have been primarily limited to elementary schools, although there have been reports of rashes among a few middle and high school students and a number of teachers.
Officials are investigating the cause of the rash outbreaks, though diagnoses thus far have included eczema, chemical exposure and poison ivy.
Fifth Disease has also been blamed in several cases.
Pitkoff said the school was expected to reopen on Monday.
When Courttv.com called Miss Cleo's Mind and Spirit Psychic Network, our "psychic" reader
offered us predictions on everything from property to pregnancy. But as this package shows,
the reader's advice was actually pulled verbatim from a prewritten script containing a
selection of stock tarot readings.
3-13-2
US NAVAL OFFICER WHO WROTE ADVANCE WARNINGS OF 9-11 ORDERED FREED ON BAIL WHILE LAWYERS NOT PRESENT, JUDGE MAKES PUBLIC THE ADDRESS WHERE MIKE VREELAND WILL BE LIVING AND ORDERS CURFEW HOURS - THE SAME ORDER IN 1986 LED TO THE PUBLIC EXECUTION OF INTELLIGENCE OPERATIVE AND DRUG SMUGGLER BARRY SEAL
TORONTO/LOS ANGELES (FTW) - Less than two hours ago, a man who claims to be a US Naval officer and who, as acknowledged by Canadian authorities, wrote an advance warning of the September 11 attacks, was ordered released on bail by Toronto Superior Court Justice Hamilton. At the time the judge ordered bail, in response to a previously filed bail-request motion filed last month by Vreeland, he entered into public record and announced in open court the address of a Toronto apartment belonging to Vreeland's mother where Vreeland is ordered to reside. Curfew hours were set between 7 P.M. and 7 A.M.
Vreeland's attorney, Paul Slansky was not present when the judge rendered his decision.
FTW Canadian correspondent Greta Knutsen was present in the courtroom and stated that the judge was stern with Vreeland and indicted that he did not have much faith that Vreeland would successfully complete the terms of bail.
The judge's opinion may have more than one meaning.
In 1986, U.S. drug dealer and acknowledged intelligence operative Barry Seal was released on bail from federal custody in Baton Rouge Louisiana and ordered to reside at a halfway house, the address of which was made public. Within days he was gunned down in a hail of bullets outside the halfway house by an assassination team, members of which were subsequently linked to Iran-Contra figure Oliver North and Colombian and CIA covert drug operations.
FTW is currently attempting to reach either Vreeland, whose immediate whereabouts are unknown, or his attorneys.
Yesterday, the prestigious publication 'The UN Observer' contacted FTW Publisher/Editor Mike Ruppert, asked for and obtained permission to reprint our earlier stories on the Vreeland case. Vreeland's assertions, based upon documentary evidence and continuing court proceedings have steadily been gaining credibility in spite of unfounded and meritless attacks by U.S. media that have failed to address any of the specific documentation in the case.
3-14-2
WASHINGTON -- NewsMax.com has learned that active FBI Special Agent Robert Wright is about to blow the whistle on his superiors for hindering investigations that might have prevented the terrorist attacks of September 11.
Judicial Watch, the public interest law firm, scheduled, then postponed, a press conference for Wednesday where Wright, cloaked in anonymity until now, was going to tell the whole story.
The shocking details should be out in a few days.
Wright complains that when he tried to continue and pursue certain terrorist investigations, he met with retaliation from his bosses and from the Justice Department who made it clear that they wanted the probes to go no further.
Prior to putting off the news conference, Judicial Watch said that "based on the evidence, the FBI Special Agent believes that if certain investigations had been allowed to run their course, Osama bin Laden's network might have been prevented from committing the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks which resulted in the deaths of nearly 3,000 innocents."
Insiders believe after this full story breaks, Wright's career will be toast. Only public outrage can save him.
Meanwhile, Judicial Watch, which is representing Wright, is requesting a full independent investigation.
Assisting the law firm in this case is none other than David Schippers - the same Schippers whose quiet, methodical and damning leadership in the Clinton investigation led to the then-president's impeachment.
LAWeekly discovers a new way for young filmmakers to show their work — on the sides of buildings.
Everything it takes to stage a guerrilla drive-in fits neatly into the back of a Honda Civic: a VCR, a video projector, an FM receiver and a generator. The only other things you need are a film and a wall.
A Russian company has unveiled the prototype of the world's first reusable spaceship, aimed at space tourists. C21 is fully automatic, and the idea is that even with very little training, one of the passengers could sit at the controls
It expects the real thing to be ready for its first commercial flight by the end of 2004.
The ship can take three passengers at an expected cost of around a $100,000 for each ticket.
The makers of this new spaceship believe there is a huge untapped market of would-be space tourists - ordinary people willing to pay for the holiday of a lifetime.
At the moment, space travel is out of reach for all except professional astronauts, or multi-millionaires.
Dennis Tito, the world's first space tourist, spent about $20m for his package deal with the Russians, to travel to the International Space Station (ISS).
This new ship would change all that, charging significantly less for a much shorter flight.
The prototype, called the C21, looks like a small aeroplane, and has room for just three people.
It is fully automatic, and the idea is that even with very little training, one of the passengers could sit at the controls.
The spacecraft would be attached to a special aeroplane that would launch it into space - the lowest orbit would be just over a 100 kilometres above the Earth's surface.
That would give passengers the chance to experience the thrill of space, although only briefly, with three minutes of weightlessness in a black sky, looking down at the blue planet below.
Then, the spacecraft would descend back to Earth, landing itself on an airport runway.
It may sound like science fiction, but the company making the module already has western backing for the $10m needed to make the first working model.
It also has 250 potential space tourists already signed up. These people have even put down their deposits for the holiday they hope will be out of this world.
PASSENGERS EXPOSED: NEW SECURITY MEASURES STRIPPED TO THE BONE.
A test scan of is shown during a demonstration of new screening devices at the Orlando International Airport in Orlando, Florida March 14, 2002. The screen shows a scan from the Secure 1000, a low-energy full body x-ray scan. Airport spokesperson Carolyn Fennell said the devices should be in use for passengers on a voluntary basis in several days. REUTERS
Did they have to use Dick Cheney?
Tuesday March 12, 2002
The US has been secretly sending prisoners suspected of al-Qaida connections to countries where torture during interrogation is legal, according to US diplomatic and intelligence sources. Prisoners moved to such countries as Egypt and Jordan can be subjected to torture and threats to their families to extract information sought by the US in the wake of the September 11 attacks.
The normal extradition procedures have been bypassed in the transportation of dozens of prisoners suspected of terrorist connections, according to a report in the Washington Post. The suspects have been taken to countries where the CIA has close ties with the local intelligence services and where torture is permitted.
According to the report, US intelligence agents have been involved in a number of interrogations. A CIA spokesman yesterday said the agency had no comment on the allegations. A state department spokesman said the US had been "working very closely with other countries - It's a global fight against terrorism".
"After September 11, these sorts of movements have been occurring all the time," a US diplomat told the Washington Post. "It allows us to get information from terrorists in a way we can't do on US soil."
The seizing of suspects and taking them to a third country without due process of law is known as "rendition". The reason for sending a suspect to a third country rather than to the US, according to the diplomats, is an attempt to avoid highly publicised cases that could lead to a further backlash from Islamist extremists.
One of the prisoners transported in this way, Muhammad Saad Iqbal Madni, is allegedly linked to Richard Reid, the Briton accused of the attempted "shoe bomb" attack on an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami in December. He was taken from Indonesia to Egypt on a US-registered Gulfstream jet without a court hearing after his name appeared on al-Qaida documents. He remains in custody in Egypt and has been subjected to interrogation by intelligence agents.
An Indonesian government official said disclosing the Americans' role would have exposed President Megawati Sukarnoputri to criticism from Muslim political parties. "We can't be seen to be cooperating too closely with the United States," the official said.
A Yemeni microbiology student has also been taken in this way, being flown from Pakistan to Jordan on a US-registered jet. US forces also seized five Algerians and a Yemeni in Bosnia on January 19 and flew them to Guantanamo Bay after the men were released by the Bosnian supreme court for lack of evidence, and despite an injunction from the Bosnian human rights chamber that four of them be allowed to remain in the country pending further proceedings.
The US has been criticised by some of its European allies over the detention of prisoners at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. After the Pentagon released pictures of blindfolded prisoners kneeling on the ground, the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, was forced to defend the conditions in which they were being held.
Unsuccessful attempts have been made by civil rights lawyers based in Los Angeles to have the Camp X-Ray prisoners either charged in US courts or treated as prisoners of war. The US administration has resisted such moves, arguing that those detained, both Taliban fighters and members of al-Qaida, were not entitled to be regarded as prisoners of war because they were terrorists rather than soldiers and were not part of a recognised, uniformed army.
More of the international black market swops of covert ops. It's like "Strangers on A Train" for the security services.
Thu Mar 14, 6:13 AM ET
TULKARM, West Bank -- A leader of the largest Palestinian terrorist group spearheading suicide bombings and other attacks against Israel says he is following the orders of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat
''Our group is an integral part of Fatah (news - web sites),'' says Maslama Thabet, 33, a leader of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. Fatah, headed by Arafat, is the largest group in the Palestinian Authority (news - web sites), the government of the autonomous Palestinian territories.
Thabet spoke from the Tulkarm refugee camp, where he was holed up with about 300 of his heavily armed followers as hundreds of Israeli soldiers swept through the town. Over the past two weeks, Israel has launched massive incursions into Palestinian towns and refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza in search of terrorists.
''The truth is, we are Fatah itself, but we don't operate under the name of Fatah,'' he said in a recent interview. ''We are the armed wing of the organization. We receive our instructions from Fatah. Our commander is Yasser Arafat himself.''
Spokesmen for Arafat give differing responses when asked about his ties to Thabet and the brigade. Nabil Abu Rudeineh, Arafat's chief spokesman, says he has never heard of Thabet. ''The president has nothing to do with these things, he has nothing to say about this issue,'' Rudeineh says.
But Mohammed Odwan, Arafat's foreign media spokesman, confirms that the brigade is ''loyal to President Arafat.''
''They are working for the interests of the Palestinian people,'' Odwan says. ''They are fighting because they think these kind of operations -- and I agree -- will push forward their independence and their dream of freedom.''
Israeli security officials concede Arafat is not involved in directing the on-the-ground operations of militant groups, but they say his regular calls for holy war against Israel's occupation have been taken up as a directive by the extremists.
In a televised address Saturday, as Palestinian terrorists launched suicide attacks in Netanya and Jerusalem, Arafat urged Palestinians to ''sacrifice themselves as martyrs in jihad (holy war) for Palestine.''
''When Arafat stands in front of a crowd and calls for millions of martyrs to march on Jerusalem and holy war against Israel, he is giving a clear directive to his followers,'' says Reserve Col. Eran Lerman, former head of research for Israeli Military Intelligence and now the Jerusalem director of the American Jewish Committees. ''Marwan Barghouti (secretary-general of Fatah in the West Bank) and the local leaders below him take that directive and transform it into actions. . . . Arafat does not personally approve individual operations, but he provides the money for Barghouti's terrorism.''
Barghouti, who often is on the guest list at dinners with Arafat in the Palestinian leader's compound in Ramallah, confirmed last week that one of his lieutenants who was killed in an Israeli assassination was a member of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.
The link between the brigade and Arafat signals a turning point in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It means the Palestinian leadership has openly allied itself with a terrorist group. Palestinian officials openly say dealing in death, not diplomacy, is the only viable way to achieve their end: an independent Palestinian state.
As the Palestinians have ramped up their attacks on Israeli targets, Israel has escalated its response. The result has been some of the worst violence the region has seen in decades. More than 200 people have died -- 163 Palestinians and 59 Israelis -- since the beginning of March. More than 1,500 people have been killed in the past 18 months, more than 1,000 of them Palestinians. Israel's incursions into Palestinian territory reached a new level this week: 20,000 troops were deployed, and they searched house-to-house for terrorists and weapons. It has been the biggest Israeli military operation since its invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
The emergence of a radical young branch of Arafat's Fatah faction comes as no surprise to Mahmoud Muhareb, a Palestinian professor of political science at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem. ''They are under siege, under blockade and almost at the edge of starvation,'' he says. ''When you dehumanize the life of human beings, they end up feeling their life is not worthy. Five years ago, you might find one suicide bomber in an entire city. Today, it is different. There are many, because they feel there is no meaning to their lives.''
Palestinian Authority officials say most members of the brigade receive salaries from the authority. For example, the leader of the brigade in Nablus, Nasser Awes, is a salaried officer in the Palestinian National Security Force, which is one of 14 armed police and security services that report to Arafat.
In the past two weeks, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade has claimed responsibility for attacks that include:
* A suicide bombing March 2 in Jerusalem that killed 10 Israelis and injured 44.
* A sniper ambush on a West Bank checkpoint March 3 that killed 10 Israelis and wounded four.
* The shooting attack on a seaside hotel late Saturday in Netanya, north of Tel Aviv, that killed two Israelis and injured dozens.
* An ambush in northern Israel on Tuesday in which gunmen wearing Israeli army uniforms killed six Israelis before soldiers shot two of the attackers dead.
Israeli police say they thwarted a string of other planned attacks by the group in recent weeks.
The brigade, unknown until a year ago, has become the largest armed Palestinian group operating in the West Bank, Gaza and Israel. Unlike two other major Palestinian militant groups, the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the brigade is secular. The group grew out of the Fatah youth movement known as the Tanzim. Under the 1993 Oslo peace accords that stated only Palestinian security services may bear arms, Tanzim is an illegal militia of about 10,000 armed young men headed by Barghouti.
As the terrorist wing of Arafat's Fatah faction, the brigade has the support of the largest political and military faction in the Palestinian Authority. Hussein A-Sheikh, a Fatah political leader in the West Bank, seems insulted when asked whether the brigade is under Arafat's control. ''Of course, there is control,'' he snaps. ''What do you think? That we are just a bunch of gangs?''
The Israeli army says Fatah, fueled by the brigade's lethal activities, has surpassed Hamas in Israeli fatalities. Hamas killed 100 Israelis in 2001 and Fatah killed 45, the army says, but since the start of 2002, Fatah has killed 57 Israelis while Hamas has killed 27. The brigade also introduced a lethal twist to its attacks: female suicide bombers. A woman killed an elderly man and wounded 50 people in a suicide attack Jan. 27 in Jerusalem. Another woman blew herself up at a West Bank army checkpoint Feb. 27, injuring two soldiers.
Thabet, who commands the brigade in Tulkarm, attained notoriety a year ago when, with his friend Raed Karmi, he kidnapped and executed two Israeli restaurateurs who had stopped in Tulkarm for lunch. Karmi, founder of the brigade in Tulkarm, died in an explosion in January in a suspected Israeli assassination. Palestinian security forces arrested Thabet last year. He was released, as were dozens of other suspected terrorists.
''Our struggle is against the Israeli occupation,'' Thabet said. ''We are prepared to fight to the last fighter against (Israeli Prime Minister Ariel) Sharon and his war machine. . . . Israel must pay a heavy price for the atrocities and massacres which they are perpetrating on a daily basis against the Palestinian people.''
And who does USATODAY's orders come from?
RUSSIA made clear yesterday that it would not pull out of the American-led coalition against terror even if the United States launched a unilateral strike against Iraq.
According to the journalist Thierry Meyssan, no plane would have fallen on September 11 on the Pentagon and the whole of the American official version on the attacks would be whimsical. A thesis supported particularly well in its last work, " the Appalling imposture ", which comes out this week to the Carnot editions.
In reading Thierry Meyssan, one would believe oneself in full novel of policy-fiction. For this defender of the personal freedoms, principal stimulating of the Voltaire Network, the attack on the Pentagon of last 11 September would be a setting in scene, Oussama bin Laden an active member of the CIA acting as a banker and recruiter of the organization, Mohammed Atta, appointed head of the commando, a member of the secret service Pakistani and George Bush a puppet with the hands of a group of conspirators eager to reinforce the American military arsenal.
Delirious? On the contrary. The work of investigation shows evidence to the support the majority of the assertions which precede. For example, the photographs taken with the Pentagon by the service of press of DoD itself, little after alleged the crash are free from remains of Boeing. However such a machine would not have had the physical place to strike the frontage of the building without its wings not being embedded there. " the plane disintegrated under the shock " affirms your in Washington. " Ridiculous ", rétorque Thierry Meyssan for whom the rare direct eyewitnesses are highly suspect because of their official functions. No serious remains apart from the black box and of a headlight indeed could be found. And even the testimony of the firemen, published on the site of the Pentagon, does not make it possible to accredit the official version. Strange.
Very also disturbing, the fabric of " evidence " made public by the FBI little after the events, based on papers identities found miraculeusement intact in the remains of Twin Towers like on video cassettes resulting from the luggage of the appointed head of the terrorists. A rather cumbersome surplus when one wishes to commit suicide remark with irony the author. In addition, of the radio hams would have collected beacons little before the impacts of the planes in Manhattan ensuring them not to miss their targets. Not need, therefore, of course of piloting...
Other mystification, according to the author, the tracking against bin Laden, put in scene of all parts whereas concordant sources relayed by the French press affirm that on September 10, the public enemy number one of Washington east under dialysis in a Pakistani hospital and receives the visit of the head of local office of the CIA. We are far from the cave of the Afghan mountains. Without speaking about the rocambolesque escape of Mollah Omar to Mobylette under the eyes of the American satellites. A whole of elements becoming limpid if it is considered that the billionaire saoudien actually works for Washington with the fight against the Soviet influence in Central Asia and Africa, under cover of international terrorism. A scapegoat finally ever worried truly.
In the absence of asséner a final, the investigation of Thierry Meyssan, verifiable truth point by point by links towards official Internet sites or various medias, throws a serious discredit upon the official thesis of the United States, which undoubtedly will have to be expressed. Behind these events disturb would be dissimulated " a particular clan of the US Air Force wishing to develop a space weapon " as fourth weapon after the marine, the Army and the Air Force. A conclusion far from being whimsical in comparison with the last quarrelsome advertisement of George W Bush evoking of possible strike nuclear eight designated enemies of Washington. Perhaps will be necessary it to add of it a ninth with the author of " Appalling imposture ".
In the methodological plan, this last affirms to have worked with a mysterious team of a score of people of which it wishes to preserve anonymity for their security. Because the meticulous work presented in the work is of course not " not that of a man alone ". S.il received threats because it professes opinions against certain interests, it also profited from certain supports, including in the United States, coming from interests different from those of Washington. To follow.
Philippe Blanchard ©Digipress 2002
3-13-2
"It is inexcusable when document mismanagement leads to a breakdown of this magnitude." --Attorney General John Ashcroft
CBS) -Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered an investigation Wednesday of "disturbing failures" by immigration officials in the delivery of student visas for two of the Sept. 11 hijackers six months after they crashed into the World Trade Center.
"It is inexcusable when document mismanagement leads to a breakdown of this magnitude," Ashcroft said of the delivery to a Florida flight school of approved visas for two men whose names and pictures have been widely published.
"Individuals will be held responsible" and Immigration and Naturalization Service practices will be reformed, he said.
President Bush "wants it fixed," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan. "This is unacceptable."
The president ordered Ashcroft, whose department includes the immigration service, and homeland security director Tom Ridge to "get to the bottom of this immediately," McClellan said.
On Monday, exactly six months after the attacks, a Florida flight school recng our counter-terrorism goals is a problem... and we have to fix that problem."
CBS News Chief White House Correspondent John Roberts reports it's no secret that dozens of previous recommendations for INS reform have died at the agency's front door.
According to Michael Bromwich, former Justice Dept. Inspector-General, "there is a real inability or unwillingness to act on those suggestions and recommendations and make those changes."
On Capitol Hill, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle called the hijacker visas "one of the most embarrassing incidents since 9/11" and called again for Ridge to testify before Congress on issues involving his office.
Daschle, D-S.D., said he was "absolutely shocked" about the visas. He noted that a Democratic homeland security proposal had included $25 million to improve computer monitoring of foreign students in the United States.
"It's a recognition that we still have a lot of work to do," Daschle told reporters.
Bergeron, security."
"I am astonished that while the INS is fixated on detaining and rounding up countless Arab-Americans without any justification, it has failed to take basic steps to ensure that visas are not issued to known terrorists," said Conyers, D-Mich.
Atta and Al-Shehhi were cleared to stay in the United States until Oct. 1, 2001, according to the forms, which were provided to The Associated Press by Rudi Dekkers, owner and president of the flight school.
"When they hit the buildings they were approved to be here," Dekkers said.
U.S. authorities believe Atta, 33, was aboard American Airlines Flight 11, which struck the north tower of the trade center, and that Al-Shehhi, 23, was aboard United Airlines Flight 175, which struck the south tower 17 minutes later.
Dekkers said Atta and Al-Shehhi completed the paperwork on Aug. 29, 2000, just before they began their six-month flight instruction program at the school.
You'd think if the CIA/CFR were behind the whole shebang that they would have insured their "agents" would at least have fast-tracked the documentation say what? This whole thing weighs sorely on the side of Major Balls-up (versus International Shadow Conspiracy).
Zurich: More than 33,000 people died in natural and man-made disasters in 2001, costing property insurers $US34.4 billion ($A66.7 billion), over half due to September 11, according to the insurance company Swiss Re.
The insurance industry is also facing liability and life insurance losses related to the US attacks of an estimated $US16.5 billion to $US39 billion ($A32 billion to $A75.6 billion), the reinsurance company said in a statement.
"This event confronted the insurance industry with an entirely new loss dimension," it said.
Until 2001 only natural catastrophes had run up losses of $US20.2 billion ($A39.15 billion), it said.
"The terrorist attack has brought to light a new dimension of threat to the insurance industry, bringing terrorism covers into question," Swiss Re added.
Of the 33,000 deaths, the estimated toll for the January earthquake in Gujarat, India, alone was 15,000, while 3,000 people lost their lives in the terror attacks in the United States.
Storm-related losses totalled $US7.2 billion ($A13.95 billion), while losses arising from earthquakes amounted to $US600 million ($A1.16 billion), the company said.
Major fire and explosion losses, excluding those resulting from the terror attacks in New York and Washington, came to $US3.7 billion ($A7.17 billion).
By Otto Pohl in Nairobi
As dawn breaks, Linnette Otieno leaves her small house on Nairobi's outskirts and walks eight kilometres to market. On her head is a load of firewood she plans to sell, weighing about 30 kilograms. She hardly sweats.
"I've been doing this since I was six," she says as she hoists the wood onto her head. When she was growing up a village in western Kenya, she had to walk even further to gather firewood - up to eight hours a day. By now, aged 35, she says long journeys with heavy loads are second nature.
Scientists have long wondered how women like Ms Otieno are able to carry so much so easily. In a study to be published shortly, two researchers from Europe describe the trick in detail: women from certain African tribes unconsciously modify their gait to walk using less energy. The energy they save is applied to carrying the weight.
The study, which follows two previous articles in the journal Nature, is the first documentation of humans improving the economy of walking.
"Every person and every animal that we have yet tested has roughly the same walking economy, except for these African women," said an author of the study, Norman Heglund, a physiologist at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium.
R.McNeill Alexander, an expert on biomechanics, said the study could be an important step to understanding how to improve the human walk. Using the results, "we might be able to teach hikers with rucksacks and soldiers with heavy packs to save similar amounts of energy".
The research began when Dr Heglund was working in Kenya in 1977.
It later showed African women have a secret weapon: as they transfer their weight, they transfer at least 80 per cent of their forward energy to the next step.
Only 20 per cent must be replaced by the muscles, leaving plenty of energy in reserve to carry the weight on their heads.
It must be handy being desgned to carry all that extra weight. I could do with developing this technique to save my back from carrying the little one on my shoulders. Some sort of counterbalance might be handy as well.
Reason: Foreign object contamination.
Distribution: Nationwide.
Reason: Label fails to comply with the requirements of Federal Motor
Vehicle Safety Standard No. 213.
Distribution: Nationwide.
It's the stuff of science fantasy, but a respected American surgeon says that, within five years, he will be able to graft wings and tails on to human beings.
(Guardian)
Monday March 11, 2002
The TV sketch show Smack the Pony recently featured a hilarious scene in which a woman turned up at a plastic surgeon's clinic bearing a picture of a wolf. "I want to look like this, please," she explained, and people chuckled in living rooms across Britain. Across the Atlantic, however, there is a respected plastic surgeon who really is working on plastic-surgery techniques which could make us resemble animals in ways we can't even imagine today.
Dr Joe Rosen is not a quack. He works at the acclaimed Dartmouth Medical Centre, and has been a scientific advisor to Nasa. He is fond of making statements such as: "Human wings will be here. Mark my words." He believes in all seriousness that within five years he will be able to graft wings on to a human being's body. This is possible because our brains adapt to create neural maps for new body parts. When we have a limb amputated, our neural map of that limb gradually fades away; and if we gain a body part, our neural map expands accordingly.
"If I were to give you wings, you would develop, literally, a winged brain. Our bodies change our brains, and our brains are infinitely mouldable," Rosen has said.
Surgical techniques already in existence can be used to stretch torso fat and rejig rib bones to create a wing. Although no human would be able to fly, they would resemble angels and have full sensation in their new hanging, boned flaps of flesh. Rosen has designed blueprints. This is the new world of radical plastic surgery, where Rosen is Moses. He would not be content to settle merely for wings either. He has been working on cochlear implants to enhance human hearing (a procedure which the US military has shown interest in, raising as it does the prospect of super-human soldiers), and even tails.
In a conference speech last year, Rosen asked: "Why do we only value the average? Why are plastic surgeons dedicated only to restoring our current notions of the conventional, as opposed to letting people explore, if they want, the possibilities?" He says it is only our "Judaeo-Christian conservatism" that is holding us back.
If the medical-ethics board allowed it, Rosen insists he would carry out these procedures. And, as the case of Severino Antinori, the Italian doctor hell-bent on cloning a human, shows, once the technology and the will to experiment exist, it is very hard for even the most overwhelming ethical qualms to block these actions. Sooner or later, Rosen's plans will be put into action: just like the mouse with an ear on his back, one day soon a winged human will force us to re-examine the fundamentals of human life.
So it's time that we started to ask serious questions about the people who will be the guinea pigs in the radical plastic-surgery revolution. Put bluntly, who the hell would want wings or a tail? We can perhaps find answers by looking at people today who have already changed their bodies in radical and seemingly unnatural ways. Jim Rose, the head of a gross-out travelling circus or "freak show", has considerable experience of people who drastically alter their bodies. A former colleague of his known as Enigma now has horns. Seriously.
Enigma's horns are implanted deep into his skull. They are made of coral, which is recognised by the body as similar to bone. Each year he has progressively larger coral implants because it is taking time for his skin to stretch. He only gave up on his dream of having jewelled eyebrows embedded into his face when doctors told him forcefully that having transdermal implants near hair follicles was extremely dangerous.
So Rose's friends and colleagues such as Enigma are exactly the kind of people who will be first in the queue for Rosen's new operations. He says that, "Rosen is talking their language. I've worked with people with split tongues because they want to be like lizards, people who want to look like cats. I've lived with these people on the road for years, and believe me, they're very interested in operations that could give them tails or wings."
He has interesting insights on the psychology of people drawn to this kind of procedure. "If there's one thing that the outrageously altered have in common, it's an incredible need for attention. Most of them in their past have felt overlooked, usually by a parent. That gives them a mindset that's like, 'I will not be ignored.' Because of their desperate need for attention, they're usually happier after they've been altered [for example, by being covered with tattoos]." But the attention they receive "almost always causes this unbearable kind of egocentricity. I'd like to buy those guys for what they're worth and sell them for what they think they're worth - I could retire on that."
This raises the obvious concern that people longing for these procedures are ill. Some social scientists argue that we are seeing in the west a "global pandemic" of Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD), a condition which causes victims to feel their bodies are imperfect and must be corrected, often with surgery. The best-known manifestations of BDD are eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia and, notoriously, individuals who have healthy limbs removed because they view them as ugly or extraneous.
But BDD expert Katherine Phillips of Brown University, Rhode Island, says the disease could take the form of trying to acquire extra body parts. However, it is unlikely to enhance their lives. She is conducting research into individuals with BDD who manage to persuade surgeons to give them the operations they want. "For most of them it doesn't help at all, it makes no difference. About 7% do get better, but for a small number, they get drastically worse and become very angry. They can attack their surgeons or kill themselves."
There are complex ethical questions about whether cosmetic surgeons should do what an apparently sane patient requests, no matter how abnormal it might seem. A recent case in New York City highlighted this. A female patient sued her plastic surgeon for malpractice because the doctors failed to take on board that she had a severe obsession with her body image. She claims that her mental state made her unfit to consent to more than 100 operations, including lyposuction, a tummy tuck and a nose job.
If problems like this arise even with normal cosmetic surgery cases, what will happen with the radical kind proposed by Rosen? Could any doctor operate to give somebody a tail or wings without being open to the accusation that they, too, were taking advantage of unstable or irresponsible patients?
Many plastic surgeons strongly disapprove of Rosen. Distinguished US plastic surgeon Dr John Hugill, for example, says that Rosen "is way too far out, totally beyond mainstream medicine or mainstream cosmetic surgery. No plastic surgeon I know would do anything of this sort, and nor should he. He should be ashamed."
This forces us, however, to confront what has become mainstream in plastic surgery. Surgical techniques have developed so quickly that we have begun to think it normal that 2 million people slice their flesh open each year in Europe and America simply to improve its appearance. Fifty years ago, facelifts - which, after all, involve dragging the flesh on your face back behind your ears - were seen as monstrous. Yet today we don't even bat a botoxed eyelid at the once-beautiful face of Cher, now drained of all expression in the desperate quest for a wrinkle-free face. If Cher and Michael Jackson have the right to disfigure themselves and yet still nudge their way into the mainstream, should Enigma and his horns be given the same rights?
Mar 11 2002
An uncanny knack of knowing when to pack an extra woolly without seeing the weather forecast might be down to more than chance, a North-East psychologist believes.
For one in four of us might have a special gift for predicting the twists and turns of chaotic systems like the weather, claims Professor Richard Heath, of Sunderland University's Business School.
His latest research had volunteers being shown two sets of temperature figures for the previous eight days and asked to predict the results for the next four days. One set of figures was similar to real weather patterns, while the other set was random.
Built-in controls ensured they couldn't cheat.
A quarter of those involved correctly predicted for the next two days, amazing Prof Heath, whose work has earned recognition by the New Scientist.
Now he is hoping to continue his work on Wearside to find out whether the theory could be applied to decide whether some people might be better at predicting how to make their fortune in the financial markets, or to help managers chose suitable employees.
"The results were quite unbelievable. We still have some work to do to understand what is going on in these people's heads but the results are very promising," said Professor Heath.
"We are not talking about people being psychic. But if someone was to say that people can't predict the future I would say I think they can."
He added: "In the Sunderland Business School I am hoping to continue it to study the implications for the money market and investment divisions. It might be that some people have more intuition for the markets.
He added: "I don't think it's going to help us predict things like the lottery or the racing results."
3-13-2
US physicists studying the El Niño and La Niña climate effects believe that these phenomena may simply be short-term fluctuations in a longer-lasting 'super-Niño' event. David Douglass and colleagues of the University of Rochester and David Clader at the State University of New York at Geneseo have shown that climate data collected on El Niño and La Niña since 1967 closely fit a 'resonant function' with a period of about 15 years. The researchers hope their discovery will help climate experts to identify the geophysical mechanisms that underpin El Niño and La Niña (arXiv.org/abs/physics/0203016).
El Niño and La Niña are alternating hot and cold periods in the atmosphere and ocean of the Pacific, each lasting about six months. These effects are monitored by the 'sea surface temperature anomaly' - the deviation in the temperature of a certain region of the Pacific ocean from its average temperature. El Niño and La Niña are defined as a difference of more than 0.4 degrees centigrade that lasts at least five months. The 'southern oscillation index' - the difference in atmospheric pressure between certain points in the Pacific - is also closely linked to El Niño and La Niña.
Climatologists had previously noticed that adjacent El Niños and La Niñas had similar intensities. This prompted Douglass' team to study these effects over a longer period, and they gathered measurements of the sea surface temperature anomaly and the southern oscillation index spanning more than 30 years.
The researchers showed for the first time that the intensities of both El Niños and La Niñas went through a cycle lasting about 15 years, which consisted of a large peak and two successively smaller peaks. Douglass - whose background is in condensed matter physics - and co-workers realised that this pattern very closely matched a so-called Landau-Lifshitz function, an equation that describes many damped resonant systems in physics.
The Landau-Lifshitz function predicted many features of the super-Niño event detected in the climate data, together with some that have not been seen yet. The physicists - who point out that they are not climate experts - believe that climatologists could use these results to establish the nature of the force that drives the oscillations, and to predict forthcoming El Niños and La Niñas.
Douglass and colleagues based their study on data collected up to July 2000, and initially estimated the error of their model to be between 30% and 50%. But they have been encouraged by more recent data collected while they were writing their research paper, which closely fits their original predictions.
The physicists became involved in the study of El Niño while they were investigating how changes in the output of the Sun affect the Earth's temperature. "The El Niño effects are 'noise' that has to be removed," Douglass told PhysicsWeb. "What was understood about El Niño was not good enough for us so we advanced the understanding ourselves."
The Mother of All El Nino's?
by James Higdon
It's been several months since the posting of part III of this series, "Borking the Fairness Doctrine" (parts I through III can be found in the archives at Onlinejournal.com). I thought it might be time for a brief follow-up.
The province and the responsibility of the Federal Communications Commission is to defend and enforce FCC rules and regulations. Under the stewardship of Michael Powell, the FCC has clearly joined the other side. Powell has worked
tirelessly with corporations that already own too sizable portions of the national media and with the Republican right wing, to overturn regulations that limit the share of the media market that individual corporations may own. And he is now succeeding in getting Republican appointed appellate court judges to play along. A US Court of Appeals recently sided with the corporate right wing in allowing a single corporation to own essentially 50% of the voice in a given market. While the case now moves to the Supreme Court, what happened on December 12, 2000 (the disenfranchisement of the entire American electorate) has proven that there are five Supreme Court justices (a voting majority) who are a purely owned subsidiary of the Republican party. My prediction is that Powell will succeed in fully disrobing the FCC.
Regulations that limit ownership of the media were put in place for much the same reason as the Fairness Doctrine (eliminated by the Reagan administration in the mid 1980s, aided by the questionable ethics of Justices Scalia and Bork). Both were designed to insure a diversity of voices and viewpoints over national airwaves owned by the people of the United States. Since the creation of these regulations, technology has created cable, satellites, the internet, and cellular phone frequencies. Initial regulations surrounding these technologies sought to restrict an individual entity from ownership of all sources of information communication, but much has been overturned, allowing individual corporate ownership of several types, or all of broadcast and print media formats.
The specious Republican logic used to attack these regulations is that since technology has created cable, the internet, and supplied numerous additional frequency ranges, there is sufficient opportunity for a wide range of voices to be heard without regulation. The simple answer to this idiocy is that an octopus may have eight arms, but all eight are still controlled by only one brain. As of this writing, six corporations or their subsidiaries own the entire spectrum of what is referred to as "the mainstream media" in this country.
All six are major contributors to the Republican party. All six spend vast fortunes to lobby for further deregulation, and to limit campaign finance reform. All six (either directly or through their subsidiaries) have lucrative contracts with the federal government. For the sake of larger profits, all six have abandoned, in full or in part, journalistic standards and ethics, and
turned their newsrooms over to the entertainment divisions. Make no mistake. Broadcasters have been handed a cash cow at the expense of the American people, the electorate, national discourse and, ultimately, democracy itself for the quid pro quo to the corporate right wing of serving as a ministry of propaganda.
Broadcasters are severely limiting, or eliminating their budgets for investigative journalism. Foreign offices are being closed or downsized and, in spite of the fact that this is a nation at "war," broadcast news divisions seem to have absolutely no interest in bringing Americans any story other than those directly approved and faxed to them by the White House or the Pentagon. Hard news from overseas, common place reports in Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia, are ignored in our home press because they directly contradict American made conventional wisdom. We are at war, the American people are blind and deaf, and we have a national leader who is concerned with creating a world environment amenable to war profiteering rather than one that builds an opportunity for all people to live and breath free.
As Dick Cheney and the White House refuse to release even the most innocuous of information for public and/or congressional oversight, the national media refuses (for the most part) to ask any question to which Ari Fleicher may take
offense. Any reporter asking questions that make the White House uncomfortable is likely to face being black balled from asking further questions, or from being given timely information-at best-or worse, being removed from their assignment or fired altogether after a well placed phone call from someone on the White House staff. On the other hand, vigorously reporting that the Emperor is not naked, but wears the finest of silk suits will lead to greater wealth and advanced information (so long as the information paints the Bush administration in a positive light), ahead of fellow journalists. Tim Russert doesn't mind being known as Jack Welch's bitch, so long as his contracts contain seven digit figures. And these days he can insulate himself from whispered criticism with plenty of like-minded people when visiting the corporate water cooler. No worries. The corporate CEOs have instructed their broadcast newsrooms to throw out any self-imposed code of ethics.
By the year 2004, the work of the 1984 version of news will be nearly completed by right wing nutcases, such as Ann Coulter, who have managed to finance their way into the mainstream. By the end of Bush's first court appointed term, there
will be little that passes for hard information other than what can be learned and successfully disseminated on the internet. Thank you, Al Gore, for leading the way in congress to leave us with one of logic's few effective weapons.
Take heart, free thinkers! With only that one tool we have made some impressive progress. It is doubtful that we will ever again have a free press, or a democratic government unless we continue showing the concern we've shown since November, 2000 with the accompanied activism. But all the same, the neo-conservative movement, emboldened by the theft of an election, has shown every inclination to over-reach. Progressive websites that have made it their patriotic duty to draw public attention to Republican and corporate power lust, are finally creeping into the mainstream.
How do I know that we are making a difference. Michael Moore, running overtime for a book signing at a school auditorium in San Diego, was shut down by a swarm of angry police, threatening arrests unless the crowed vacated the premises.
When was the last time you heard of police in California closing down a lawful assembly? You'd have to go back to the war protests of the 1960s I'd imagine. Running overtime was not the issue. A book signing that runs overtime is simply not a police matter, unless the school administrators had requested that Moore finish up, and he then patently refused.
On March 11, Marc Perkel, the producer of Bartcop.com was arrested at the Los Angeles airport, returning to the country after a visit to Australia, and is currently being held without bail. The charge? "Fugitive from justice, warrantless arrest."
I guarantee you that this is a charge that has Ashcroft's fingerprints on it. That bible thumping Nazi, who has calico cats removed from his path because they are in league with the devil, who anoints himself with oil whenever taking on a new
post, who covers up the naked breast of lady Justice because he views it as pornography, runs the only office that would post such an alert and have it be enforced.
There is simply no such thing, under the Constitution of the United States, as being a fugitive without a warrant, unless said fugitive is in the act evading pursuit. The only justification of a warrantless arrest is when there is no time to obtain one before the suspect escapes, destroys evidence, or places the public in danger. I'd point out again that Perkel was on his way back into the country, not on his way out. If authorities had the time to post a border stop on Perkel, they had time to obtain a warrant for arrest, and to state a specific charge.
What I'm trying to get at here is that we are dealing with an administration who undoubtedly has an enemies list, and the people on it are watched very carefully. Harassment of those on that list has begun to take place.In other words, this administration is now afraid of the damage that voice and activism are inflicting. You do not protest this administration alone. There are many out there who fight fascism by your side, whether or not it is reported by the pundits.
Part of the egotism of the current punditry class, willing to sell their souls to the devil for more wealth than they had once imagined, requires that they be viewed as "players" in power politics. Yet with agonizing regularity, web sites such Media Whores Online and The Daily Howler, hammer so often and loudly at precarious egos (with the letter writing aid of their friends and supporters) that these web sites are slipping into the back door of the mainstream without any corporate sponsorship from advertising, via grass roots osmosis.
Whether they make sense in their response or not, pundits are beginning to answer the e-mailed, telephoned and written complaints of their hundreds, sometimes thousands, of critics. Don't stop now! As Bartcop would say, "Grow the hammer higher." Americans can insure that we have a free election in November, and again in November of 2004. But we will have to prove, perhaps every day of our lives, that we have cast off the shackles of complacency. When we have, we can restore needed regulation in the broadcast media and free the Fourth Estate.
March 12, 2002
A powerful group of neo-conservatives is launching a new public relations campaign in support of President George W. Bush's war on terrorism.
At a Tuesday gathering of the National Press Club, members of the new Americans for Victory Over Terrorism (AVOT) declared their intention to "take to task those groups and individuals who fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the war we are facing."
Those groups and individuals, AVOT claims, need to be resisted both here and abroad. A full-page AVOT advertisement carried in the March 10 Sunday New York Times pointed to radical Islam as "an enemy no less dangerous and no less determined than the twin menaces of fascism and communism we faced in the 20th century." At the same time, the $128,000 ad lambasted those at home "who are attempting to use this opportunity to promulgate their agenda of 'blame America first.'"
"Both [internal and external] threats," the ad continues, "stem from either a hatred for the American ideals of freedom and equality or a misunderstanding of those ideals and their practice."
To expose the internal "threats," AVOT has compiled a sample list of statements by professors, legislators, authors and columnists that it finds objectionable. The strategy appears similar to an earlier, much-criticized effort to monitor war dissidents by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), a group founded by Lynne Cheney, the wife of Vice President Dick Cheney, and neo-conservative Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman.
AVOT's list of speakers it considers threatening include:
- Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who said, "Some of us, maybe foolishly, gave this president the authority to go after terrorists. We didn't know that he, too, was going to go crazy with it."
- President Jimmy Carter, who assailed Bush's use of the phrase "axis of evil," arguing that it was "overly simplistic and counter-productive."
- Congressman Dennis Kucinich, who accused the president of "canceling, in effect, the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments" and called the war "the patriot games, the lying games, the war games of an unelected president."
- American Prospect editor Robert Kuttner criticizing "Bush's dismal domestic policies" and his "dubious notion of a permanent war."
- Lewis Lapham, the editor of "Harper's Magazine," who in a recent editorial said that Washington itself has used terrorist tactics during the 1990s, including the bombing of civilian targets in Baghdad and the Balkans.
Who exactly is behind AVOT's efforts? The newly-formed organization is headed by a formidable array of right-wing luminaries. At the top of the list is former Secretary of Education and drug czar William Bennett, AVOT's chairman. The group's Senior Advisors include former CIA director R. James Woolsey; former Reagan Pentagon official Frank Gaffney; William P. Barr, attorney general under George Bush, Sr; and mega-political donor Lawrence Kadish. AVOT is a project of Empower America -- also co-chaired by Bennett -- whose principal members include conservative political operatives Jeane Kirkpatrick, Jack Kemp, Vin Weber and William Cohen.
During the press conference, Bennett insisted that, "We do not wish to silence people," adding that for now, AVOT plans to hold teach-ins and public education events, particularly on college campuses.
In response to AVOT's criticism, Harper's Lewis Lapham said Bennett is a "wrong-headed jingo and an intolerant scold." He added that AVOT appeared to be a new "front organization for the hard neo-con (neo-conservative) right," which has gained unprecedented influence in the Bush administration, particularly among the top political appointees in the Pentagon and Dick Cheney's office. "This is the war-monger crowd," he said.
Indeed, AVOT is being initially funded primarily by Lawrence Kadish, chairman of the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) and a top donor to the Republican Party. Kadish, a real estate investor in New York and Florida, was cited by Mother Jones Magazine as one of the country's top individual donors, having given $532,000 to the GOP. His RJC has long tried to build links between the Republican Party, including its Christian Right component, and American Jews.
Bennett, Gaffney, and Woolsey are all veteran members of a neo-conservative network of groups with overlapping boards of directors that have long championed rightwing governments in Israel and, among other things, urged strong U.S. action against both Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, the Islamic government in Iran, as well as Palestine Authority President Yasser Arafat.
Both Gaffney and Bennett, for example, were two of about three dozen mainly neo-conservative signers of an open letter sent to Bush in the name of the "Project for a New American Century" nine days after the Sept. 11 attacks. It called not only for the destruction of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, but also to extend the war to Iraq, and possibly to Iran, Syria, Lebanon and the Palestine Authority unless those nations ceased their alleged support of terrorist groups opposed to Israel.
Woolsey, meanwhile, was sent by the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board to Britain in late September to gather evidence that could link Iraq to the Sept. 11. He and has since become one of the most visible commentators in the media in favor of extending the war to Baghdad. Woolsey is also on the board of the Jewish Institute for National Security, a hawkish pro-Israel group.
AVOT is also linked through many channels to Richard Perle, chair of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board (which sent Woolsey on his Iraqi quest). Perle, like Jeane Kirkpatrick, perches full time at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a neo-con think-tank that has emerged as the hub of an "axis of incitement" -- a small but potent network of like-minded, ultra-hawkish officials, analysts and opinion-makers. It appears that AVOT is the latest institutional offspring of that network, which is united by a passionate belief in the inherent goodness and redemptive mission of the United States; the moral cowardice of liberals and European elites; the existential necessity of supporting Israel in the shadow of the Holocaust and in the face of Arab hostility; and the primacy of military power.
These beliefs came through clearly at Tuesday's press conference. Woolsey, for example, told reporters he agreed with those who are "calling the war we're in now World War IV." But Gaffney was the most strident of the speakers at the event, saying that we should be skeptical of our "new-found friends" in the war on terror.
"[We must] pay special attention to friends like Saudi Arabia and Egypt whose ongoing use of media are creating problems for our allies," (implying Israel), Gaffney said. Any criticism of the administration's conduct of the war, he added, could be "interpreted in such a way as to hurt national resolve...(and) embolden the enemy."
Jim Lobe writes on international affairs for Inter Press Service, Oneworld.net
Glenn Milne: 'All is forgiven, Pauline'
By Glenn Milne
March 11, 2002
THE departure of Pauline Hanson from politics was welcomed by both the legitimate Left and Right in Australia as a vindication and a blessing. That response may now have to be re-thought.
The kinds of political activists who are taking over within One Nation make Pauline look positively mainstream.
Senator Len Harris is One Nation's only federal parliamentary representative. In an Upper House where neither main party has the numbers in its own right, Harris's vote is important, along with those of the Democrats, Greens Senator Bob Brown and the two independents, Brian Harradine and Labor defector Shane Murphy. The balance of power in the Senate becomes even more precarious after July 1, when the term of the Democrats' Vicki Bourne finishes and she is replaced by Kerry Nettle, the NSW Greens' Senator and Bob Brown ally.
As yet, Harris has had limited impact in the Senate. He strikes you as naive and amiable. One senses he relies heavily on advice. Which raises the question, who is providing that advice?
Harris has recently appointed to his staff a Queenslander by the name of Susan Bryce. Harris's office confirmed the appointment in response to a call last Friday. She is described as "doing the senator's media".
Before joining Harris's staff, she was well known in Queensland as a contact point for Hanson, when Hanson still "controlled" her own party. A self-styled "investigative journalist", Bryce is a contributor to the New Age conspiracy magazine, New Dawn.
Published six times a year and available online, New Dawn was established in 1991 with the involvement of figures linked to the Libyan Australian People's Congress and Libyan Arab Cultural Association.
Like other related groups, New Dawn believes in the "New World Order-One World Government" conspiracy, publishing details of their supposed meetings and describing the methods by which the New World Order exerts control, revealing how antenna towers (which are relay stations for cellular phones) actually emit low frequency waves designed to affect behavioural patterns.
A manifestation of the New World Order for the New Age conspiracy theorists is the UFO, which features in New Dawn.
Like other far Right groups, New Dawn features Jews as the source behind the New World Order.
The publication has direct contact with some of the world's worst rogue regimes, including Libya and Iraq, claiming: "Fighting for Australian national independence means supporting all national revolutionary forces in the world who are fighting for freedom, justice and dignity. For it is one common struggle against a common enemy," which is the New World Order.
In her several articles for New Dawn, Bryce has promoted, among other ideas, conspiracy theories regarding the family of US President George W. Bush, and the "killing" of princess Diana.
She has also stated that the Libyans found guilty of the Pan Am Lockerbie bombing were actually innocent, and that Libya had nothing to do with it.
No wonder then, that when Hanson responded to the September 11 attacks on the US, it was to criticise the US declaration of war on global terror and Australia's decision to contribute troops. Hanson's press release at the time had Bryce's name on it. This "Lunar Right Meets Loony Left" position has, as its common denominator, the One World Order and the so-called Jewish global conspiracy. Since the Arab states are opposed to Israel and its prime sponsor, the US, then they must be supported, and the US and its supporters – including the Australian Government – must be condemned.
Sympathy for Osama bin Laden, at least as yet another enemy of the New World Order, is to be found in the online newsletter published by Neil Baird, the One Nation treasurer in NSW. After last year's illegal migrant boating tragedy, in which more than 300 drowned, Baird declared Australians were lucky because, otherwise, they would have come here and raped our daughters.
Bryce herself has charming fellow travellers. She has addressed forums (What Have They Done to Our Food?), sharing a platform with other speakers on such topics as Port Arthur – Deceit and Terrorism; The Disruption of Patriotic Organisations; and the Decline and Fall of the White Race.
Get the picture?
At the same time, over in Western Australia, which has emerged as One Nation's new powerhouse state, Edward Joseph Wall, a lawyer who has represented two Holocaust deniers, has been elected the party's West Australian vice president.
According to the Jewish Anti-Defamation Commission publication, B'nai B'rith: "Wall, of the Perth legal firm, EJ Wall and Associates, has acted as the Australian solicitor representing UK-based Holocaust denier, David Irving, in his ongoing attempts to overturn the Australian Government's ruling, refusing him an entry visa.
"Wall also acted on behalf of Frederick Toben of the Adelaide Institute, during Toben's 1999 incarceration in a German prison for Holocaust denial. At that time, Wall wrote to the Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, arguing that Toben's imprisonment was 'an infringement of human rights', and that the German law against the Holocaust was merely used to 'stifle free speech in relation to enquiry about the Holocaust'.
"Wall has also spoken at forums of the (anti-Semitic) Australian League of Rights."
The JADC notes: "Wall joins a range of individuals in leadership positions in the One Nation Party who are linked to organised racist groups. Following the departure of Pauline Hanson as the leader of One Nation, and the growth of the party's power-base in Perth, it is likely that these individuals will seek to broaden their positions of power."
Come back, Pauline.
Glenn Milne is chief political correspondent for the Seven network. His column appears in The Australian each Monday.
Mar 13 2002
LONDON (Reuters) - London will go green on Sunday when it celebrates Ireland's St Patrick's Day for the first time, but the plans have got English patriots seeing red.
Thousands of Londoners are expected to join a parade from the Roman Catholic Westminster Cathedral through the heart of the capital and climaxing in a festival of Irish music and dancing in Trafalgar Square.
It aims to mirror the celebrations in Ireland where it is the annual highlight of the calendar. Last year 1.3 million Irish took part in St Patrick's Day festivities in the capital Dublin and almost a third of the population attended events or watched them on television.
Despite its huge popularity across the Atlantic in the United States -- where Irish-Americans don clothes of vibrant green to celebrate their ancestral origins and New York alone has had parades for 240 years -- the festivities had failed to travel the short distance across the Irish Sea to Britain.
"One of the things we miss out on in London is the festivals and street entertainment that our major European neighbours take for granted," London mayor Ken Livingstone told Reuters at a news conference on Wednesday, flanked by two supporters wearing giant inflatable costumes depicting pints of Irish stout.
"We are hoping year by year it will build up until it is something more like the huge parade they have in New York."
The plans will delight the London's 400,000 Irish, the capital's largest single minority community.
But angry English patriots are looking on green-eyed.
Despite years of campaigning they have failed to win any widespread support to celebrate the day of English patron St George on April 23.
"We are appalled. We cannot believe it," Arthur Naisbitt, vice-chairman of the Royal Society of St George, told Reuters.
He said the society, which boasts 100 branches worldwide, had been rebuffed by Livingstone when it asked for 10,000 pounds towards a ceremony at London's main war memorial, the Cenotaph.
"The English are the silent majority. We don't need to make much great display of our patriotism and perhaps that's something we ought to rectify," Naisbitt said.
Livingstone, who said there was support from all Britain's political parties for Sunday's party, said he would back a St George's Day festival -- but no one had ever done one before and no one was really interested.
Ironically, St Patrick may himself have been an Englishman: he was captured from Britain by pirates in 400 AD and sold into slavery in Ireland.
THE odds on hard evidence proving the existence of a monster in Loch Ness shortened yesterday, with the announcement that a new video revealed something lurking in the depths.
Bobbie Pollock, a postman from Glasgow, claimed the footage he shot could hold the key in debunking the cynics who say Nessie is nothing more than a marketing myth.
The three-and-a-half minute video was made by Mr Pollock, 45, as he walked at Invermoriston Bay with his wife, Catherine, 41, and son Robert, three.
Mr Pollock claims he saw a black creature rise about 5ft out of the loch .
The video has won him £500 from the bookmaker William Hill for the best recent Nessie "sighting". The Official Loch Ness Monster Fan Club administers the annual award on behalf of the bookies.
Mr Pollock said: "We stopped at a place called the stone seat overlooking Invermoriston Bay for our lunch and I saw an object floating on top of the water and it started moving off towards Fort Augustus at quite a pace."
He added: "You could say that it was a seal or a deer in the water, but I’ve seen things like that in the water and it definitely wasn’t one of them.
"I’ve never seen anything like this in 12 years."
Mark Stewart, the curator of marine mammals at the Scottish Sea Life Sanctuary in Oban, Argyll, studied the video 30 times.
He said: "Sometimes it looked like a seal, sometimes it did not look anything like a seal.
"It was moving quickly - I felt too quick for a seal."
It emerged that Mr Pollock did not release the footage, shot in August 2000, sooner because he "feared ridicule".
Odds on definite proof of Nessie’s existence have now been cut from 500-1 to 250-1.
Despite scientific searches, sonar sweeps and countless sightings, the only real certainties which perpetuate are the lucrative tourist spin-offs the fabled monster has spawned.
I see she still has the same terrified look on her face at the sight of an American photographer.
Tue Mar 12, 9:24 PM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush (news - web sites) told college sports champions Tuesday that the Sept. 11 attackers must have gotten an idea of the United States as a weak nation from watching "The Jerry (news - web sites) Springer Show."
The television show, featuring Jerry Springer, is a daily free-for-all sometimes with wild on-stage brawls. According to the show's Web site (http://www.jerryspringer.com), it features topics such as "first time fantasies," "angry lovers attack," "bring on the bisexuals," and "scorned lovers fight back."
"They didn't think we were a nation that could conceivably sacrifice for something greater than our self, that we were soft, that we were so self-absorbed and so materialistic that we wouldn't defend anything we believed in. My, were they wrong. They just were reading the wrong magazine, or watching the wrong Springer show," said Bush.
Bush was speaking at a White House East Room event celebrating national championships won by seven National Collegiate Athletic Association teams.
This is funny we we're just talking last night about Fox's new 'Celebrity Boxing' show featuring Paula Jones/Tonya Harding and Danny Bonaduce and some other fekking micro-celebs and thinking the exact opposite how they should show that to the terrorists to show what America's really like. But maybe it's not their pity we really want.
12-Mar-2002
(NIH/National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism)
David Corn, AlterNet
March 1, 2002
Please stop sending me those emails. You know who are. And you know what emails I mean ... Okay, I'll spell it out -- those forwarded emails suggesting, or flat-out stating, the CIA and the U.S. government were somehow involved in the horrific September 11 attacks.
There are emails about a fellow imprisoned in Canada who claims to be a former U.S. intelligence office and who supposedly passed advance warning of the attack to jail guards in mid-August. There are emails, citing an Italian newspaper, reporting that last July Osama bin Laden was treated for kidney disease at the American hospital in Dubai and met with a CIA official. There are the emails, referring to a book published in France, that note the attacks came a month after Bush Administration officials, who were negotiating an oil deal with the Taliban, told the Afghans "either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs."
Get the hint? Washington either did nothing to stop the September 11 attacks or plotted the assaults so a justifiable war could then be waged against Afghanistan to benefit Big Oil.
One email I keep receiving is a timeline of so-called suspicious events that "establishes CIA foreknowledge of [the September 11 attacks] and strongly suggests that there was criminal complicity on the part of the U.S. government in their execution."
I won't argue that the U.S. government does not engage in brutal, murderous skulduggery from time to time. But the notion that the U.S. government either detected the attacks but allowed them to occur, or, worse, conspired to kill thousands of Americans to launch a war-for-oil in Afghanistan is absurd. Still, each week emails passing on such tripe arrive. This crap is probably not worth a rational rebuttal, but I'm irritated enough to try.
It's a mug's game to refute individual pieces of conspiracy theories. Who can really know if anything that bizarre happened at a Dubai hospital? As for the man jailed in Canada, he was being held on a credit card fraud charge, and the only source for the story about his warning was his own word. The judge in his case said, "There is no independent evidence to support his colossal allegations." But a conspiracy-monges can reply, wouldn't you expect the government and its friends in Canada to say that?
So let's start with a broad question: would U.S. officials be capable of such a foul deed? Capable -- as in able to pull it off and willing to do so. Simply put, the spies and special agents are not good enough, evil enough, or gutsy enough to mount this operation. That conclusion is based partly on, dare I say it, common sense, but also on years spent covering national security matters. (For a book I wrote on the CIA, I interviewed over 100 CIA officials and employees.)
Not good enough: Such a plot -- to execute the simultaneous destruction of the two towers, a piece of the Pentagon, and four airplanes and make it appear as if it all was done by another party -- is far beyond the skill level of U.S. intelligence. It would require dozens (or scores or hundreds) of individuals to attempt such a scheme. They would have to work together, and trust one another not to blow their part or reveal the conspiracy. They would hail from an assortment of agencies (CIA, FBI, INS, Customs, State, FAA, NTSB, DOD, etc.).
Yet anyone with the most basic understanding of how government functions (or does not function) realizes that the various bureaucracies of Washington -- particularly those of the national security "community" -- do not work well together. Even covering up advance knowledge would require an extensive plot. If there truly had been intelligence reports predicting the 9/11 attacks, these reports would have circulated through intelligence and policymaking circles before the folks at the top decided to smother them for geopolitical gain. That would make for a unwieldy conspiracy of silence. And in either scenario -- planning the attacks or permitting them to occur -- everyone who participated in the conspiracy would have to be freakin' sure that all the other plotters would stay quiet.
Not evil enough. This is as foul as it gets -- to kill thousands of Americans, including Pentagon employees, to help out oil companies. (The sacrificial lambs could have included White House staff or members of Congress, had the fourth plane not crashed in Pennsylvania.) This is a Hollywood-level of dastardliness, James Bond (or Dr. Evil) material.
Are there enough people of such a bent in all those agencies? That's doubtful. CIA officers and American officials have been evildoers. They have supported death squads and made use of drug dealers overseas. They have assisted torturers, disseminated assassination manuals, sold weapons to terrorist-friendly governments, undermined democratically-elected governments, and aided dictators who murder and maim. They have covered up reports of massacres and human rights abuses. They have plotted to kill foreign leaders.
These were horrendous activities, but, in most instances, the perps justified these deeds with Cold War imperatives (perverted as they were). And to make the justification easier, the victims were people overseas. Justifying the murder of thousands of Americans to help ExxonMobil would require U.S. officials to engage in a different kind of detachment and an even more profound break with decency and moral norms.
I recall interviewing one former CIA official who helped manage a division that ran the sort of actions listed above, and I asked him whether the CIA had considered "permanently neutralizing" a former CIA man who had revealed operations and the identities of CIA officers. Kill an American citizen? he replied, as if I were crazy to ask. No, no, he added, we could never do that. Yes, in the spy-world some things were beyond the pale. And, he explained, it would be far too perilous, for getting caught in that type of nasty business could threaten your career. Which brings us to....
Not gutsy enough. Think of the danger -- the potential danger to the plotters. What if their plan were uncovered before or, worse, after the fact? Who's going to risk being associated with the most infamous crime in U.S. history? At the start of such a conspiracy, no one could be certain it would work and remain a secret. CIA people -- and those in other government agencies -- do care about their careers.
Would George W. Bush take the chance of being branded the most evil president of all time by countenancing such wrongdoing? Oil may be in his blood, but would he place the oil industry's interests ahead of his own? (He sure said sayonara to Kenneth Lay and Enron pretty darn fast.) And Bush and everyone else in government know that plans leak. Disinformation specialists at the Pentagon could not keep their office off the front page of The New York Times. In the aftermath of September 11, there has been much handwringing over the supposed fact that U.S. intelligence has been too risk-averse. But, thankfully, some inhibitions -- P.R. concerns, career concerns -- do provide brakes on the spy-crowd.
By now, you're probably wondering why I have bothered to go through this exercise. Aren't these conspiracy theories too silly to address? That should be the case. But, sadly, they do attract people.
A fellow named Michael Ruppert, who compiled that timeline mentioned above, has drawn large crowds to his lectures. He has offered $1000 to anyone who can "disprove the authenticity of any of his source material." Well, his timeline includes that Canadian prisoner's claim and cites the Toronto Star as the source. But Ruppert fails to note that the Star did not confirm the man's account, that the paper reported some observers "wonder if it isn't just the ravings of a lunatic," and that the Star subsequently reported the judge said the tale had "no air of reality." Does that disprove anything? Not 100 percent. There's still a chance that man is telling the truth, right? So I'm not expecting a check.
Conspiracy theories may seem more nuisance than problem. But they do compete with reality for attention. There is plenty to be outraged over without becoming obsessed with X Files-like nonsense. Examples? There's the intelligence services's failure to protect Americans and the lack of criticism of the CIA from elected officials. Or, General Tommy Franks, the commander of military operations in Afghanistan, declaring the commando mis-assault at Hazar Qadam, which resulted in the deaths of fifteen to twenty local Afghans loyal to the pro-U.S. government, was not an intelligence failure. (How can U.S. Special Forces fire at targets they wrongly believe to be Taliban or al Qaeda fighters, end up killing people they did not intend to kill, and the operation not be considered an intelligence failure?) More outrage material? A few months ago, forensic researchers found the remains of people tortured and killed at a base the CIA had established in the 1980s as a training center for the contras. The U.S. ambassador to Honduras at the time is now the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte.
There are always national security misdeeds to be mad about. They may not be as cinematic in nature as a plot in which shady, unidentified U.S. officials scheme to blow up the World Trade Towers to gain control of an oil pipeline in Central Asia. But dozens of dead Hondurans or twenty or so Afghans wrongly killed ought to provoke anger and protest. In fact, out-there conspiracy theorizing serves the interests of the powers-that-be by making their real transgressions seem tame in comparison. (What's a few dead in Central America, compared to thousands in New York City? Why worry about Negroponte, when unidentified U.S. officials are slaughtering American civilians to trigger war?)
Perhaps there's a Pentagon or CIA office that churns out this material. Its mission: distract people from the real wrongdoing. Now there's a conspiracy theory worth exploring. Doesn't it make sense? Doesn't it all fit together? I challenge anyone to disprove it.
David Corn is the Washington editor of The Nation.
While many people remain wary of tall buildings in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York's World Trade Center, a London council has
approved plans to build Europe's tallest building. (Reuters Graphic)
The 1,004-foot tower, dubbed the "Shard of Glass," will rise 66 storeys above the River Thames in London's borough of Southwark, stealing the title of Europe's tallest building by 23 feet from Frankfurt's Commerzbank AG Tower.
Researchers link human lymphomas to polio vaccine
tainted with monkey virus.
Did Joey Ramone leave his body to medicine? I was thinking rather than having that daft sub-Tussauds "Rock circus" or even Tussauds itself, there could be money to be made to start pickling newly dead celebs for display. Look at the people that lined up to see Lenin.
Tuesday, 12 March, 2002, 16:11 GMT
Almost eight million people have seen the exhibition
A controversial exhibition of human corpses and body parts is "hugely educational" and "utterly fascinating", according to a European Parliament member who has seen it.
Body Worlds, which features 175 body parts and 25 corpses, has been described as "shameful" and "ghoulish" by two Conservative MPs at Westminster.
It is due to open in London later this month after already being seen by almost eight million people around the world.
Professor von Hagens created the show to "democratise anatomy"
Chris Davies, Liberal Democrat MEP for the North West England, said the two Conservative MPs "haven't seen it so they don't actually know what they're talking about".
"I've been there with my wife and 10-year-old daughter amongst the hundreds of thousands of people in Brussels who went to see it," he told BBC News Online.
"Everyone came away feeling that they had learned a lot about the human body. It is basically an anatomical exhibition."
Some 5% of the Belgian population - 505,000 people - saw it in Brussels, with five-hour queues to get in.
Chris Davies MEP said the show was not gruesome but "very medical"
In it, the corpses are shown with their skin stripped off and a variety of body parts, such as arteries and nerves, on view.
It includes a pregnant woman with her womb opened to reveal a seven-month old foetus and two people riding a horse, also stripped of its skin.
Mr Davies, a member of the European Parliament's public health committee, said it was not gruesome but "very medical" and "the most fascinating anatomical exhibition of all time".
He and his family learned a lot about the body, he said, adding that he hoped that the blackened lungs on show would put his daughter off smoking.
Whatever the sensational elements of the exhibition, it is without doubt hugely educational
Chris Davies MEP
The people who donated their full bodies knew they would be part of the exhibition, while the owners of the individual body parts had donated their bodies to medical science or education.
"If people gave their body for educational purposes, then I think their wishes have been fully respected," Mr Davies said.
"Whatever the sensational elements of the exhibition, it is without doubt hugely educational."
Conservative MPs Sir Teddy Taylor and Anthony Steen had condemned the show as "unacceptable in a civilised society".
The show has already been a hit around the world
"While there may be some merit in looking at a corpse in an Egyptian tomb for historians, I really feel it is appalling to have art galleries used for such things," Sir Teddy said.
"This will appeal only to ghoulish groups in our society."
The government has said organisers may face legal action if it contravenes the 1832 Anatomy Act, which deals with the dissection of human bodies.
The exhibition has been created by Professor Gunther von Hagens, of the University of Heidelberg in Germany.
He has said he wants to "democratise anatomy" and let people see things that only professionals had been able to view before.
The exhibition is due to open at the Atlantis Gallery in Spitalfields, east London on 23 March.
Hmm, I dunno mebbe it's me but there's something about Germans fiddling around with and gawking at corpses that I find a wee bit creepy. The queues of Frankfurters I saw in a report lining up to see the show was uncannily reminiscent of Russ Meyer's Early work at the end of WWII.
By Robert Fisk, Special to Arab News
BEIRUT, 12 March — The secrets of the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian camp massacres in 1982 have gone to the grave with yet another former Phalangist militiaman, the third Lebanese to die mysteriously in little more than two months.
Michael Nassar, who was a former associate of Elie Hobeika — the Phalangist leader murdered in a car bombing in Beirut in January — was shot dead in Brazil by a man firing a pistol equipped with a silencer. His young wife, Marie, was shot down beside him. A Belgian court has postponed a decision over whether to indict Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, for his role in the massacres — he was held “personally responsible” by an Israeli commission of inquiry — while lawyers for the survivors produce more evidence. But the vital evidence that may lie in the memories of those involved with the killers, who were allied to Israel at the time, is disappearing almost by the week as the death list grows.
Nassar grew immensely wealthy from the Lebanese civil war, selling former Phalangist weapons to Croatian militias during the Balkan conflict. One of his ships ended up in the hands of the Serb navy, which sent Nassar a warehouse bill after the guns were impounded. He fled Beirut in 1997 after a Lebanese court demanded he explain his wealth, put at 70 million pound sterling.
Nassar was apparently already worried when he pulled his car into a petrol station in the suburbs of Sao Paolo on Friday; he had used his mobile phone to tell a friend that he was being followed by men in a car. He made a second call — telling his friend that his pursuers seemed to have vanished — just before the gunman fired five bullets into his body and another seven into his wife.
Israel has denied that Hobeika, who had agreed to testify against Sharon less than 24 hours before he was killed, was murdered by its own death squads. The Lebanese authorities say the opposite. Nassar — a nephew of the former Gen. Antoine Lahd who commanded Israel’s one-time proxy, the “South Lebanon Army militia” — might have been the victim of a Brazilian mafia killing. Certainly, robbery was not the motive.
The first former right-wing Christian to be struck down was one of Hobeika’s old colleagues, Jean Ghanem, who drove his car into a tree on New Year’s Day. He died after being in a coma for two weeks. Then came Hobeika’s murder and now Nassar’s.
Other former Phalangists live in fear of their lives, either from Israel or from Palestinians seeking revenge for the 1982 massacre in which up to 1,700 Palestinian civilians were slaughtered.
One of them recently said that dozens of Palestinians who survived the massacres were executed at a former barracks near Jounieh, north of the capital, after being held in containers for two weeks.
The prisoners had been handed over to the Phalangists, he said, by Israeli troops at the ruined sports stadium in Beirut.
1-31-02
Today, The Washington Post ran the fifth segment in its series on what transpired within the Bush Cabinet in the aftermath of September 11. Of particular interest is what CIA Director George Tenent brought to the table at Camp David last September 15. According to the article by Bob Woodward and Dan Balz, when Tenent produced a Top Secret "Worldwide Attack Matrix" that specified targets in 80 countries around the world, he sought unprecedented authority to simply assassinate foreign terrorists directly or though allied intelligence services. The CIA even prepared a "Memorandum of Notification" which would allow the agency to have virtual carte blanche to conduct political assasinations abroad.
This Memorandum trumped previous mechanisms by which the President would authorize intelligence actions (but not assassinations) through individual Presidential Findings. The fail safe mechanisms established under the administrations of Presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton were simply erased at the urging of Tenent. In light of these revelations, what was authorized by the President may have led to the assassinations of a umber of human rights and ethnic leaders not connected in any way with Al Qaeda but did represent bothersome roadblocks to a number of U.S. military and corporate interests.
It now seems likely, given the unprecedented "license to kill" President Bush granted to the CIA, there was U.S. complicity in the murders of the following individuals. Human rights commissions and war crime tribunals in Belgium and France should take a close look at these likely criminal misadventures:
1. Theys Eluay. Today, the Indonesian army chief, General Endriartono Sutarto, confirmed in Jakarta that West Papuan independence leader Theys Eluay was assassinated by Indonesian Army units after he was kidnapped last November 11. The assassins were members of KOPASSUS, a special operations unit trained by U.S. Special Forces and CIA personnel and was involved in massacres in East Timor during the Indonesian occupation of that country. In 1969, West Papua was formally handed over to Indonesia by the United Nations after a referendum, now widely recognized as rigged, determined that the non-Indonesian population wanted to be Indonesian. Eluay was a thorn in the side of Freeport McMoran, a Louisiana-based mining company that has pillaged West Papua's natural resources and has been accused by local activists of propping up local Indonesian army and KOPASSUS officers with bribes and favors. Henry Kissinger serves as a Director Emeritus on the board of directors of Freeport and former Louisiana Senator J. Bennett Johnston, recently identified as a lobbyist for Enron, serves as a full member of the board.
2. Abdullah Syafii. On January 22, 2002, Indonesian army troops assassinated the military commander of the Free Aceh Movement, Abdullah Syafii. The Free Aceh Movement demands independence for Aceh, a region in northwest Sumatra, and is a member of the non-violent Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO), an international organization headquartered in the Netherlands. It has also been at loggerheads with ExxonMobil, which has extensive drilling and refining operations in the territory. Aceh's Governor Abdullah Puteh, who is claimed by local activists to be on the payroll of ExxonMobil, had written a letter to Syafii inviting him to attend peace talks with the government. Syafii's lieutenants claim that the letter contained a small microchip that permitted Indonesian KOPASSUS troops to track him down and ambush him. The operation has all the earmarks of the CIA, which can rely on National Security Agency (NSA) satellites to track such microchip transponders.
3. Elie Hobeika. Elie Hobeika was the head of the Lebanese Forces militia, a right-wing Christian army that was allied with Israel during its 1982 occupation of Beirut. Although Hobeika was in charge of the Christian forces that massacred hundreds of Palestinian men, women, and children at the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps that year, he had irrefutable evidence that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had authorized the mass murder in his role as Israeli Defense Minister. An official Israeli commission of inquiry found Sharon indirectly responsible for the massacres. Hobeika was going to testify against Sharon at an upcoming Belgian war crimes tribunal which has already indicted Sharon for the war crimes. It was that testimony that resulted in Hobeika being silenced by a Mossad car bomb that exploded near his SUV near Beirut. The bomb killed Hobeika and his bodyguards. The CIA, now closely allied with Mossad, is said to have given its approval for the action.
4. Chief Bola Ige. On December 23, 2001, Chief Bola Ige, the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Nigeria, was assassinated in the bedroom of his home in Ibadan by unknown gunmen. Ige was a leader of the Yorubas, a largely Christian ethnic group that has championed the cause of southern Nigerian Christian tribes like the Igbo, Ogoni, and Yoruba that maintain grievances against exploitative Western oil companies that have spoiled their lands with pollution and pocketed most of the oil revenues for themselves and corrupt Nigerian politicians. Ige was the presidential candidate of the pan-Yoruba Alliance for Democracy but lost to the current President Olusegum Obasanjo, a former general who is thought by many Nigerians to be in the hip pocket of western oil companies, including Chevron and ExxonMobil. A lucrative CIA and Pentagon front operation, the private military contractor MPRI, has been training special units of the Nigerian armed forces. These forces have been active in putting down anti-oil industry protests by Igbo, Ogoni, and Yoruba tribal peoples along the Nigerian coast. Michael J. Boskin, the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Bush I is a member of the Exxon Mobil board, while current National Security Adviser Condolleezza Rice served on the board of Chevron. Currently serving on Chevron's Board is Bush I trade representative Carla Hills and former Louisiana Senator Johnston, who also serves on the board of Freeport McMoran.
In all likelihood all of these assassinations were likely known to the CIA and allowed to take place unhindered. The killings all directly benefitted the interests of the US military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower so poignantly warned us about some 40 years ago.
****
I more or less predicted the Indonesian murders a few months ago (just after Tenent received authorization to conduct assassinations of "terrorists") during an interview with Radio Singapore International. The transcript of that broadcast follows:
CIA assassination missions - a look into the implications of this US Foreign policy
Source: Augustine Anthuvan, Newsline, Radio Singapore International Broadcast date: 30 October 2001
Wayne Madsen, a former Intelligence Officer at the National Security Agency in Washington with this comment.
When Senator Frank Church had a committee in the Senate that found out that the CIA was conducting assassination missions against foreign leaders and they passed very stringent laws against the CIA to prevent any abuses. And now what we're hearing is that the late Senator Church went too far. Well Senator Church was responding to some very severe abuses of authority by the CIA. And now we're hearing basically history is being changed on us here and we're hearing that Senator Church went too far in what he did.
And I think its very important now to understand that these things are all in context and what people like Senator Frank Church did in the 1970s really still applies today."
If CIA assassination missions are taken beyond the present operations in Afghanistan to other countries where terrorists are known to be operating, what sort of repercussions will this present for country to country relations? A concern I posed to Wayne Madsen.
"Especially in countries in South East Asia, we have a President who is very much in it with the US multi-national companies. What if they decide that West Papua independence movement in Irian Jaya - West Papua - could be a terrorist organization. And they could decide well we're going to target their leadership for assassination because they happen to be against the interests of Freeport McMoran - one of the biggest mining companies in West Papua. Or what if they decide that the Aceh movement in Northern Sumatra happens to be ÖÖ. to the interests of Exxon Mobil corporation, and they decide to target their leadership for assassination. I think this is the problem with this type of wide sweeping authorization to assassinate foreign leaders. We may find ourselves assassinating people because they just so happen to be against US interests."
LONDON, March 13 (Reuters) - Students of European history may be surprised -- France was Britain's greatest ally during the 1982 Falklands conflict against Argentina, according to Britain's defence secretary at the time.
As U.S. President Reagan tried to talk Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher into a compromise, France lent a more helping hand in the form of secret information that enabled MI6 agents to sabotage Exocet anti-ship missiles desperately wanted by the Argentines.
In memoirs serialised in the Daily Telegraph on Wednesday, then Defence Secretary Sir John Nott revealed that Thatcher's French counterpart Francois Mitterand -- with whom the 'Iron Lady' clashed repeatedly over European matters -- was more understanding over the Falklands.
"In so many ways, Mitterand and the French were our greatest allies," Nott wrote.
Immediately after Argentina's invasion of the tiny South Atlantic British colony in April 1982, British fighter pilots were allowed to train against French Mirage and Super-Etendard aircraft, used by the Argentine military.
More importantly, Paris passed on top secret files on the French-built Exocet missiles. Fired from over the horizon, the missiles were responsible for heavy British Navy losses, and threatened to wreak havoc on the Task Force fleet stationed near the Falkland Islands.
But the information allowed British secret agents to thwart Argentine attempts to get hold of any more of the weapons.
"A remarkable worldwide operation then ensued to prevent further Exocets being bought by Argentina," Nott said.
"I authorised our agents to pose as bona fide purchasers of equipment on the international market, ensuring that we outbid the Argentinians, and other agents identified Exocet missiles in markets and rendered them inoperable."
Nott was also fiercely critical of Reagan's attempts to push Britain towards a face-saving compromise deal, saying it showed up the trans-Atlantic "special relationship" as a sham.
"For all Margaret Thatcher's friendship with Ronald Reagan, he remained a West Coast American looking south to Latin America, and west to the Pacific. Sometimes I wondered if he even knew or cared about where Europe was," Nott wrote.
U.S. Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger may have supported Britain but the State Department in Washington was "dominated by Latinos," according to Nott's memoirs.
Zut alors!
6 March 2002
A beam of neutrinos could be fired nearly ten thousand kilometres through the Earth in an experiment proposed by Fritz DeJongh at Fermilab. DeJongh hopes to persuade Japanese particle physicists to build a new detector at the SuperKamiokande site to analyse a beam of neutrinos sent by a powerful generator currently under construction at Fermilab in the US. Passing through so much matter should alter the beam in a way that makes it possible to establish the masses of the three different types of neutrino, and to study 'charge-parity violation' (arXiv.org/abs/hep-ex/0203005).
Neutrinos are difficult to study because they have very little mass and interact only weakly with matter. They also 'oscillate' between three possible 'flavours' - electron, muon and tau - each of which has a different mass. Previous observations of these oscillations have revealed the differences between these masses, but have not established the masses themselves.
But DeJongh believes that a 'long-baseline' experiment in which beams of neutrinos and anti-neutrinos are sent through the Earth could be combined with existing results to determine the masses of the three flavours. By travelling the 9300 kilometres from Fermilab to the SuperKamiokande detector in Japan, the beams would pass through enough matter to increase by a factor of 20 the number of oscillations in either the neutrino or the anti-neutrinos.
The amplified signal would also allow physicists to compare the different oscillation behaviour of neutrinos and anti-neutrinos. Earlier 'short-baseline' experiments have been unable to produce this effect because the beams passed through too little matter.
Such an experiment would also give fresh insights into 'charge-parity violation', a phenomenon proposed to explain why particles are not exact opposites of their anti-particles. Charge-parity violation could help to explain why there is more matter than anti-matter in the universe when the big bang is thought to have produced equal amounts of each.
According to DeJongh, construction of a new detector in Japan would need to begin around 2006 to coincide with the completion of the new beamline at Fermilab. He has already presented his idea to physicists in Japan, and is optimistic about the project although an agreement has yet to be reached. He concedes that particle physicists are likely to be sceptical until he provides more details.
"Our community as a whole is going through a process of considering the future," DeJongh told PhysicsWeb, "and I think this is an exciting possible element of our roadmap".
The SuperKamiokande site has already detected neutrinos from the KEK particle physics lab some 250 kilometres away, although the detector recently suffered an accident and is currently out of commission. There are also plans to send neutrino beams from the CERN particle physics lab in Geneva to the Gran Sasso underground lab 730 kilometres away in Italy, and from Fermilab near Chicago to the Soudan experiment, 710 kilometres away in Minnesota.
Is this really a good idea? To beam unknown rays thru the earth?
Dr. Andrew Pakhomov isn't kidding when he says 50 millionths of a second can seem like "an eternity" in his lab at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH).
Most of the time, when he, Dr. Don Gregory and their graduate students conduct laser propulsion experiments, they measure laser pulses and the reactions that the lasers cause in from a millionth or a few billionths of a second.
So 50 whole millionths of a second is, well, it’s just an e-t-e-r-n-i-t-y.
That's why Pakhomov and graduate student Shane Thompson were so surprised when lasers firing into a lead target produced a powerful explosion exactly 50 microseconds after the initial blast of ionized particles went away.
Every time.
"This is really a mysterious thing," says Pakhomov, an assistant physics professor at UAH. "Now we are writing a detective story."
As part of a NASA-funded research project, UAH's Laser Propulsion Group is studying what may become a new type of rocket engine. They use powerful lasers firing pulses that last only tenths of nanoseconds -- tenths of billionths of a second -- at a wide range of target materials.
When the laser hits, the target absorbs some of the laser's energy. Electrons fly away from energized atoms, turning them into ions which explode off the face of the target material.
Voila. Now you have a rocket.
And for every pound of fuel, the laser rockets might be 20 to 40 times more efficient than the most efficient chemical rockets, Pakhomov says.
Part of the research involved testing different materials to see which gives the most thrust over the longest time. Lead was one of the materials to be tested. The experiment used two sensors a few inches apart to measure the speed at which ionized plasma flies away from the target face.
"But there was a second wave form 50 microseconds after the first," said Thompson. "That's an eternity to us. And it was hitting both sensors at the same time, which meant it had to be light instead of plasma."
"We decided it would not be a bad idea to look at the target 50 microseconds after the shot, so we got a camera," said Pakhomov. "At first we saw only darkness. It kept Shane here for a long night.
"Then we saw it, a phase explosion. The lead goes through some kind of a phase transfer."
It takes about one microsecond for the ionized lead plasma to leave the target surface -- at about 20 kilometers per second. Then, like clockwork, exactly 50 microseconds later, the surface of the lead target explodes with a burst of particles which emit high energy ultraviolet light.
"But what does the energy do for 50 microseconds?" Pakhomov asks. "Where does (the energy) go? It seems to disappear. We cannot see where it goes. What form does it take? It’s hard to believe there was anything there."
While they have verified that the explosion is real, the UAH scientists are just beginning to sort through the theories of why it happens and why it happens so precisely.
Sorting through this unexpected discovery is a secondary concern. The main goal is testing different materials under different lengths and strengths of laser pulses to see what might give the most efficient result.
Earlier experiments in laser propulsion used powerful laser pulses in the microsecond time range to heat air under a metal shroud to the point that it exploded like lightning, forming a plasma and a shock wave that pushed against the shroud.
The system works, but it isn't very efficient and it requires that there be air inside the shroud. This could be a problem once a spacecraft leaves the atmosphere.
Pakhomov and others realized early that firing the laser at the shroud or some other metallic target and peeling off, or ablating, the target one layer of ions at a time could be more efficient than firing it at the air.
"Three billion watts of energy per square centimeter can create a breakdown of the atoms that are in the air," he said. "In metals, you need only a few millions of watts per square centimeter, a thousand times less energy. They already have free electrons, so you need much less energy to create an ablative breakdown. And that means you can deliver it over longer distances."
Distance is important if the heavy laser system is on the ground firing at a target on a spacecraft that is moving away at high speed, which is what you want a spacecraft to do. Early tests of ablative systems, however, didn't yield the thrust that NASA needs. Those tests used lasers firing microsecond-length pulses.
Pakhomov's proposed solution is laser pulse lengths measured in the tenths of nanoseconds -- or less.
"It takes a couple of picoseconds (trillionths of a second) to form a plasma cloud," he said. "The problem is that when you have a long pulse, that plasma reflects the rest of the laser. You create this cloud of highly ionized material that absorbs your energy."
At this point, Pakhomov and the UAH team think the most efficient system might be to fire a picosecond laser blast, then wait around twiddling their thumbs for a microsecond while the plasma gets out of the way, then fire another blast. Wait and repeat.
"By using short pulses, when one pulse comes the plasma from the previous pulse is already gone," said Pakhomov. "It also appears that short pulses are much more efficient in the atmosphere. The pulse is so short it just has no time to react with the air."
Thompson's newest experiment involves splitting a laser beam and putting half of the beam in a holding pattern for a few hundreds of picoseconds, maybe as much as a nanosecond.
"We're probing the reflectance of the second pulse, looking at the kinetics and how it all develops so we can see when to add more energy," Pakhomov explained. "We want to know the best time periods to use for the length of the pulse and between pulses."
Early results of their experiments are so encouraging that Pakhomov thinks ablative laser propulsion systems might be in service within a few years. The research at UAH is being supported by a $500,000, two-year NASA research grant.
The first laser rocket systems might use powerful lasers mounted on the ground to give spacecraft a boost during launch, when a spacecraft has to fight through the thickest layer of the atmosphere and overcome inertia. A similar system aboard the space shuttle might help to boost satellites or probes out of low Earth orbit.
A third potential use might employ ablative plates and small lasers mounted aboard a satellite or interplanetary probe as a weight-efficient replacement for the less efficient, caustic chemical rocket steering and pointing systems that are used today.
"I believe this field will be developing," Pakhomov said. "I'm expecting to see some in-space applications soon. With development, I think we could look for orbiting laser systems. And on the moon, where there is no atmosphere to deflect the beam, it will be much easier to do such launchers." - By Phillip Gentry
My first book was entitled "Hidden Stories of the Childhood of Jesus", which was strictly the historical accounts of the childhood of the most famous man who ever lived. This is the greatest non-fiction book for Christmas ever. At the time I always wondered why more people didn't know about the rest of the life of Jesus. I had studied the early life of Jesus after meeting two priests in South America who were in a sort of exile from the Vatican Security Force. They would tell me of manuscripts and histories that lay buried in the seventeen miles of vaults beneath the Vatican around a poker table. The book is the real Christmas Story beginning with the great grandfather of Jesus and ending with the death of Jesus' father Joseph when Jesus was about fourteen years old.
The "Hidden Story of the Childhood of Jesus" comes directly from the records written by Jesus' two brothers. They were included in the body of documents called the "Only Rule of Our Faith", which was the original Bible before the Bible. The first half of the book is a historical explanation of the ancient texts and the second half of the book contains the actual story of the family of Jesus translated from the ancient manuscripts themselves. The book is deliberately a very small. At the time I felt one of the reasons more people didn't know about the histories of Jesus' life was because they were buried in huge ponderous anthologies and unintelligible scholarly texts. The scholarly historians, who have verified the ancient manuscripts, have largely been atheists and therefore not credible to believers. The Believers have shut the doors to Extra-Biblical documents and therefore haven't looked for additional history for themselves. This book is purely historical, and though I am a believer, it allows "the cards to fall where they may".
WHY HAVEN'T WE HEARD OF THESE THINGS BEFORE?
The ancient Jews from 300 BC began the exclusion of ancient manuscripts. They invented the word "heresy" and from the time of the Macabean movement all the books outside the five books of Moses were banned from synagogues. The Christian Old Testament came in 73 BC when a council of 84 Priests had to travel to the great Library of Alexandria in Egypt to retrieve copies from the 740,000 scrolls that were there before the great fire in 63 BC. Amazingly the Old Testament was located in Palestine at the time. They had to travel to get copies of the Old Testament because of the ban on the rest of history. However, that delegation left the majority of Jewish and Christian history on the table at that time. That is why the Bible refers to some 84 ancient books that are not included in the Bible.
The Christians largely came from the population of Jews who already were accustomed to banning books. There were more fragmented Christian Churches after the crucifixion than there are today. Each little town had their own collection of writings and traditions. The reason for the Nicene Council was to stop the warring factions of the church and vote of the most popular of the documents found among the local churches. Books that were left out include but are not limited to:
The rest of the letters of Paul that were not so popular.
Most of the books written by the brothers of Jesus.
There was a large conflict between the churches of Rome and Greece and the church of Jerusalem where His brothers lived and governed. This included the original Bible called the "Only Rule of Our Faith" and the Gospel of Thomas recently rediscovered.
The second half of the Gospel of Mark.
The three apocalyptic books written by James.
All the books written by women, including the Gospel of Mary Magdalene.
The books that contained the birth, life and marriage of Joseph and the Virgin Mary.
All the books written by Jesus, that largely came from societies that were still foreign to early Christianity.
Rome knew of the great Druid University where Jesus lived and taught for a short time. There were many leaders in Rome, including Pontius Pilate, who were educated in England and knew about additional ancient works of Jesus.
Jesus' grandmother "Saint Ann" was born in England where her family (Joseph of Arimathea) owned a large interest in the tin and lead mines.
The writings of the Essene movement, from which we get the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Essenes were communal societies who were far too liberal for the conservative churches after Jesus.
The Gnostic scriptures, which came from a group that by the third century AD of the Bible were in disarray and had fallen from the respect of their peers. The Gnostics left us in the second century AD the magnificent Nag Hammadi Library on the banks of the Nile River.
The Roman stories of Jesus, which came from the converted members of the Roman Army at the time of the death of Jesus. We have great copies of the writings of Nicodemus from these texts.
The Nicene Council was designed to resolve the conflict between great Arius who advocated and investigation of the extensive number of books still left in local churches and libraries, and the second and third generation apostolic fathers who advocated a very conservative position with very few books.
The second book is "Hidden Politics of the Crucifixion", which is the amazing account of the real Pontius Pilate, Caesar, Herod and the three men who were responsible for the actual death of Jesus. This book contains the letters of Pilate to Rome at the death of Jesus, the letters between Herod and Pilate over the death of Jesus and excerpts from the writings of Nicodemus who chronicled the story of Joseph of Arimathea during the events of the crucifixion. Joseph of Arimathea had been the "acting father" of Jesus by Jewish law after the Virgin Mary's husband Joseph had died. These letters will shock the world. They tell the whole world that Rome and Herod knew a great deal more than we have credited them with. This book has not yet been released from the press, but will be in the next 45 days.
My new book will be called the "Hidden King" or the real story of King Arthur. I could spend days telling you BANNER HEADLINES about that one. King Arthur was the first of the Princes of Wales from which we derive European and Asian royal bloodlines. This second King Arthur was a direct descendant of the family of Jesus. He continued the great mining tradition of the family of Jesus from England.
My research has appeared on the Discovery Channel, Arts and Entertainment Channel (Ancient Mysteries of the Bible) and on the Learning Channel. They have even shown the cover of my first book. I have been feeding them research for a couple of years through David Stirland.
I have a new web site "ancientmanuscripts.com, which will eventually house a portion of the five million ancient manuscripts on this subject. At this moment the site is the home of the Ancient American Magazine, which chronicles the most recent of the archeological discoveries in the country. Most archeology takes 20 years to come to the attention of the public and longer to get into our textbooks. The discoveries of this year are amazing. That is a subject for many completely different shows. That web site is only a month old and is still in the creation phase.
I have been the guest on 50 radio shows around the country in the last year including CBS nationwide with Elliot Stein. I have just begun to get exposure in television with the syndicated program on KUSK out of Arizona with Tanya Mock.
It is important to note that we are really talking about a huge--diverse group of histories and interests of Ancient Manuscripts and myself. The first are the Christmas stories of the childhood of Jesus and His family, contained in my first book "Hidden Stories of the Childhood of Jesus". The second is the Easter story of the politics surrounding the crucifixion. The third is the great story of King Arthur. The forth are the stories of Archeology in the Americas from the Ancient American Magazine.
BANNER HEADLINES
How many Extra-Biblical documents exist in the modern world of discovery? (There are millions)
What year was Jesus born and what was the Star of Bethlehem? (seven BC)
Who are the Magi and what was implied by their visit to the birth of Jesus?
Who were the grandparents of Jesus and where were they born? (Saint Anna born in England,
Jesus' great Uncle Joseph of Arimathea born in Marorica Egypt)
Was Jesus really a poor Carpenter? (No. He came from the heirs to the throne of David who
were extremely rich. Later in His life his guardian father, Joseph of Arimathea, was the third
wealthiest man in the ancient world)
Why do we think Jesus' father was a poor carpenter and who was he really?
The Immaculate Conception was really the story of the birth of the Virgin Mary. That story is
incredibly interesting and is included in the book.
Tell us how Joseph and Mary really met?
When and where did Jesus' parents die? (Joseph in Palestine when Jesus was about fourteen or
fifteen and Mary in England in 48 AD.)
Who escaped Jerusalem with the Virgin Mary in the Exodus of the Faithful in 36 AD?
Are there stories about the life of the baby Jesus in Egypt? (Yes and they are in the book)
Who were Jesus' childhood friends?
Are their stories of the child Jesus?
Jesus played with the child Judas who eventually betrayed him.
Jesus met the two thieves who were crucified with him on the cross as a child.
How smart was Jesus? (The stories and accounts of Jesus' education and interaction with the
teachers when he was a child.)
Was are traditional Christmas story accurate, or is there more (There is a lot more)
What happened to Jesus after the death of his father Joseph?
What evidence is there that Jesus did any traveling in his life and where did he go?
Who was Joseph of Arimathea? (a great ending topic which has enormous ramifications)
This should fill two hours with fascinating conversation and not even begin to cover the topic.
SECOND SET OF QUESTIONS TO BE EXPLORED
These questions come from my new book "Hidden Politics of the Crucifixion"
Who was Pontius Pilate? (A huge story with amazing headlines)
Who was Pilate's wife Claudia Procula?
Did Tiberius Caesar know about Jesus? (Claudia Procula, Tiberius' granddaughter kept him well
informed)
Did Pilate want to meet Jesus and why? (Yes, Tiberius had an illness and sent a letter to his
granddaughter to bring Jesus to Rome)
Tell us about the BLACKMAIL in the life of Pontius Pilate. (The biggest banner headline in the
second book)
Did Pontius Pilate ever know Jesus before the crucifixion? (They both attended the same
university and exchanged passwords at the time of the crucifixion from the University Debates. In
addition Jesus' family was famous at the great Druid University because they owned the great
mines in that country.)
Is this one of the reasons why Pilate didn't want to crucify Jesus? (there is a whole story
connected with that answer)
Tell us about the Dream of the wife of Pilate just before the crucifixion? (a well recorded
prophetic dream)
Tell us about Claudia Procula?
Was Claudia Procula a convert prior to the death of Jesus?
What happened during the three days after the death of Jesus? (Huge story about the earthquakes that happened not only in Palestine, but also in Rome that frightened the superstitious
Tiberius out of his mind.)
What did Pilate do just after the crucifixion? (The second banner headline of the book. Pilate takes fifty armed guards out into the streets and meets the resurrected Jesus face to face and speaks with him. The conversation is recorded by scribes in my book)
What happened to Pilate after the death of Jesus? When did he die? (Pilate dies at the hands of Tiberius for killing Jesus before Jesus could be brought to Rome)
Is there any evidence that Pilate converted to Christianity? (An enormous story of early Christian celebrations for Pilate that the eventual sainthood of Pontius Pilate.)
What happened to the powerful Joseph of Arimathea during the crucifixion? (From the writings of Nicodemus Joseph's best friend and eyewitness to the crucifixion events. Nicodemus and Joseph actually took Jesus from the cross and laid him in the family tomb.)
Tell us the story of the arrest of Joseph of Arimathea at the time of the crucifixion.
Where were the apostles at the time of the crucifixion?
What is the real story of Judas?
What happened to the church after the death of Jesus and how were the early ministries financed?
What happened to John Jesus' best friend? (The mysterious story of the travel of John to the Far
East)
Tell us about the trials the night of the crucifixion.(There were four)
Who really killed Christ? (Three men who had the blackmail on Pilate. Annas was angry with the
family long before Jesus reached adulthood)
Was there a difference between the Sadducees and the Pharisees in the crucifixion? (Day and
night difference)
Who was the Sanhedrin and what role did they play in the death of Jesus?
What happened to the faithful followers of Jesus after the crucifixion? (Huge story ending with the Virgin Mary in England and others around the world. The brothers of Jesus stayed in Palestine.)
Tell us about the Forty-Day Ministry of the resurrected Jesus? (Forty is a key number for
Christians because Jesus was actually forty when he died.)
Did the resurrected Jesus appear anywhere else? (Huge story that extends into every culture of the world)
What happened to those who were responsible for the death of Jesus?
Why are our calendars off by seven years? What is the real date today? (We really live in the year 2005 which has implications around the world to this day)
Hmm, can you libel the resurrected? Seems like everyone including adam and his wife had a book contract in those days. And somehow the idea of the Disciple Babies seems kinda cute. I reckon next time we rewrite the 'bible' we should make Jesus a kid and like set it in a high school.
Traditions of a mys- terious, bearded visitor from overseas have been current across our continent since pre-Columbian times. The universal image of this man, depicted as an influential religious leader, has fascinated me for twenty years, during which time I conducted my investigations among every Native American willing to discuss his or her tribal history with me. Through them I learned that the mythic memory of this light-skinned (often referred to as white-skinned), robed man occurs in ancient myth among numerous Indian peoples.
But his story is found most frequently in North American legends, which reveal more infor- mation about his appearance and the nature of his arrival. In Middle and South America, he was known respectively, as the "Feathered Serpent" (the Mayas' Kukulcan and Aztec Quetzalcoatl), and "Sea Foam", Kon-Tiki- Viracocha, to the Incas. North of the Rio Grande River, he is generally referred to as East Star Man, Peace Maker, Pale One, Dawn Star, etc.
Native accounts tell of his arrival from the direction of the rising sun, after which he set up a priest- hood among his followers, known as the "Wau-pa-nu" (the spelling is phonetic). They were said to have healed the sick and instituted new laws. Blood sacrifice was for- bidden and replaced by the use of tobacco, today an important element in all traditional Native American ceremonies. Among many eastern tribes, East Star Man is regarded as the son of the Great Spirit, the Creator.
I first learned of this Son of the Great Spirit from Ricardo Baeza, an Ojibwa medicine man in Golden Valley, Minnesota. He approached me after my lecture about the Michigan Plates. Collectively, they were associated with Daniel Soper and Father Savage, early preservers of a large group of cop- per artifacts and stone tablets unearthed from numerous mounds throughout the state of Michigan, beginning in the late 1800s. The objects, today scattered across the United States and Canada in mostly private collections, feature portrayals of familiar scenes from mostly the Old Testament and three or more, undeciphered, written scripts, together with depictions of what appear to be persons from Europe or the Near East in hostile interaction with Native Americans.
Although condemned out of hand as fraudulent by the archaeologists, the so-called "Michigan Plates" or "Soper Savage Collections" continue to intrigue independent antiquarians, who believe the artifacts were made by an Old World religious community in the upper Midwest during the 4th Century A.D or earlier. In the 1950s, Henrietta Mertz was the first researcher to identify the "tribal mark or mystic symbol" which commonly appears throughout the collection.
Following my Golden Valley slide presentation of the Michigan Plates, Mr. Baeza told me that he could actually read some of the glyphs that appeared on the Soper-Savage tablets, explaining that their symbolic meaning was part of his tribe's sacred tradition. He added that the so-called "mystic symbol" represented the name of the Creator's son, pronounced in the Ojibwa tongue (reading the cuneiform characters from right to left) as "Yod-hey-vah". This name, he said, really has an additional syllable, but the fourth is pronounced only once a year in a sacred ceremony, and then only by a tribal holyman in the great lodge. Mr. Baeza's explanation sparked my memory of an article by Ancient American author, David Deal, in Ancient American's Stone, Clay, Copper, Archives of the Past, March/April, 1994 issue #5, entitled, "The Mystic Symbol Demystified".
In his investigation of the Michigan relics, Deal was able to convincingly translate from the quasi-Hebrew script the name of two sons of a deity-figure featured on the tablets as "Son-of-the-Right-Hand" and "Son-of-the-Left Hand." The tablets' internal evidence unquestionably demonstrate
two opposing groups of people represented by two individuals, one good, the other evil. Both of these individuals carry identifi- cation marks which appear on many but not all of the plates' biblical scenes. These well- known moments from the Old Testament clearly identify each sons' proper role.
For example, on the so-called "creation tablet," where Adam is apparently brought to life, the Son-of-the-Right-Hand's mark is included as part of this positive event. But on another plate, where he and Eve seem to be ejected from the Garden of Eden, the Son-of-the-Left-Hand's mark floats above them, suggesting calamity. This simple but lucid marking of "good and bad," or "righteous and evil," is recurring throughout much of the Michigan collection.
On page 18 of his article, Deal writes,
"Of course the two sacrifices,one for Yahweh and the other for Azazel (Leviticus
16), are indicative of the two brothers, as well. The stories throughout the Bible of the two brothers from Cane and Able, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Essau, Mannaseh and Ephraim, etc., all point to the same allegory. The fact that the Michigan Christians of the Fourth Century A.D. were aware of this angelic conflict and modern Christians are not, is the major point to ponder.
"The modern doctrines would not allow such an interpretation. Of course, not many Christians actually use the name Yahweh in their worship either, but when the New Testament says that the accuser is before the Father daily, making accusations, and that the Messiah is seated again at the right hand of the Father, acting as an advocate, they should, perhaps, reconsider this concept. The point isn't about to become embroiled in a theological discussion, but to realize that the doctrine pictured on these tablets, does not conform to any Christian religion of this day and age (including 1874). Therefore, the possibility of fraud is he Michigan relics came to public attention in 1879 when they were reported in a state newspaper. But for thirty one years before, Father Soper had been collecting them throughout the state. From 1848 to 1920, the relics continued to be accidentally uncovered by local people clearing forests and building roads. Over the course of more than seventy years and across twenty seven counties, thousands of slate, clay and copper tablets continued to emerge. Written testimonies and sworn affidavits accompanying many of the discoveries were officially recorded, mostly by farmers who plowed them up while working their land, and not by trained archaeologists, who were neither available nor open-mindedly disposed enough to even give their authenticity the benefit of a doubt. They claimed then, as they still do, that the Michigan tablets must necessarily be fake, because no one from the Old World could have arrived in America before Christopher Columbus.
Their fossilized mind-set was examined in Ancient American Volume 2, Issue Number 9, May/June 1995, page 31, by Kenneth Moore. He addresses the claims of hoaxing these artifacts by citing the work of two brothers named Scotford, who probably faked a few of their own reproductions of the Michigan tablets. But Moore also points out that although it is reasonable to expect some forgeries with any collection of this size, it must be remembered that when fraudulent duplicates of this kind are made they are usually copied from original artifacts. More revealingly, the first Michigan plates to be found, already in the many hundreds, at least, were already being collected before the Scotford brothers were even born!
y 1920, the scholars of the day had academically crucified several men and women who would not stand down concerning these artifacts. Some colleges and private museums actually destroyed their Michigan tablet collections by casting them into local dumps. In the decades following that wholesale destruction, the Soper-Savage discoveries lapsed into almost total obscurity, and might have been utterly forgotten, save for the independent research of two American writers, Henrietta Mertz and Milton R. Hunter.
The books of Henrietta Mertz continue to be prized by readers inter
ested in pre-Columbian arrivals in the New World by overseas visitors. Her Pale Ink, an examination of possible Chinese contacts in British Columbia 2,000 years ago, and The Wine Dark Sea, re-thinking Jason and the Argonauts as transatlantic voyagers in quest of a South American Golden Fleece, are still sought after by diffusionists. But Mertz was a professional trained in forgery identification, and it was in this capacity that she was challenged to either prove or disprove the authenticity of the Michigan tablets.
After 30 years of research, her conclusions were about to go into print, but she passed away unexpectedly before publication. A few years later, her nephew released Henrietta's Mystic Symbol, Mark of the Michigan Mound Builders. The book argues that the Michigan relics are largely authentic, and urges their preservation as genuine relics from a lost American civilization. During her long years of research, Mertz was able to track down a large number of artifacts originally collected by the Catholic priest, Father Soper. After his death, they had been sent to Notre Dame University for storage.
In all, some 4,000 such items were shipped to Notre Dame in poorly packaged cracker barrels. About 2,500 objects, more than half the collection, were badly damaged in transit to the university. Originally made of brittle clay, many fractured and broke, often crumbling to pieces. Henrietta requested permission to examine their surviving collection with an eye to its ownership. She was allowed to research the artifacts in the company of a Catholic priest, but university officials were reluctant to give them up for purely academic purposes.
In the midst of her investigation, the Father with whom she had been working on the Michigan tablets was coincidentally contacted by missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, commonly known as Mormons. Aware of their second scriptural book (the Book of Mormon) that testified to the presence of Christ in America, the priest invited them to inspect the Soper-Savage collection. Intrigued, the missionaries wasted no time in contacting Milton R. Hunter of Salt Lake City, Utah, a researcher of American antiquities.
After several months of communication and visits to Notre Dame, the school officials chose to turn over the collection to Hunter rather than Henrietta. She was nonetheless afforded enough time with the artifacts to complete her research for The Mystic Symbol. Elliot Soper, son of Daniel Soper, offered his father's collection to Hunter after having learned of Notre Dame's transference of its artifacts.
Hunter's expanded collection of Michigan plates and related items is today warehoused in the historical archives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, in Salt Lake City, Utah. Their historical department recently allowed Ancient American staff and Triple A Productions to photograph Mr. Hunter's collection in its entirety for continued study.
Enter Burrows Cave
In 1982, a discovery apparently unrelated to the Michigan tablets was alleged to have been made by Mr. Russell Burrows of Olney, Illinois. He claims to have found a cave in the southern part of his state loaded with the treasures of foreign visitors who crossed the seas from the Near East, Europe and Africa about 2,000 years ago.
He claims the site is also a rich repository of stone records belonging to some unknown people who possessed a high level of culture. I have known Mr. Burrows since 1993, and compiled a photographic library of some of his items, which number over 2,000 such stones. I personally examined about half of them, and have concluded they are authentic artifacts. Although he refuses to divulge the location of his cave, the sheer number and sometimes fine workmanship of the artifacts he allegedly took from the site tend to support their identification as genuine artifacts.
Even so, many of my fellow diffusionists have condemned the Burrows Cave finds as part of a hoax. Admittedly, the tangle of frustrating obstacles, legal and otherwise, preventing any kind of access to the location's whereabouts have disenchanted very many investigators. But the full story of Burrows Cave, while yet to be told, is gradually unfolding with the gradual release of objects never before seen, and someday we may learn everything there is to know about this site. There may be a parallel here with the Dead Sea scrolls, discovered in 1948. Even now, a complete accounting of this find has still not been disclosed to the public.
Mr. Burrows telephoned me two years ago to say that he had purposely withheld some inscribed stones from sale because of the imagery they featured; namely, identifiably Christian scenes, mostly Old Testament. He was uncomfortable with these items, because he feared critics would use such obvious themes to further debunk his discovery. Mr. Burrows knew some Indians had knowledge of Old World traditions and Old Testament stories. But what concerned him was, as he put it, "the Jesus stones."
At my request, he sent me photographs of them, and I was able to compare their images of evidently Old Testament themes with similar representations found on the Michigan tablets. I was astonished to notice that both sets not only featured scenes of Jesus Christ, but also the same "Mystic Symbol ." The same symbol appears in southern Illinois 62 years after the last published information concerning the Michigan mound builders using this identical mark. Approximately 20,000 to 30,000 Michigan artifacts were excavated from 1848 to the 1920's, compared with the 6,000 to 7,000 Burrows Cave stones of southern Illinois removed between 1982 and 1986. These fundamental facts render any possibility for either collection being a hoax extremely remote, if not impossible.
The predominant glyph found on the Burrows Cave objects is the so-called "Helios symbol," coined by epigrapher, Paul Shaffranke. Even this important character is found in conjunction with the Michigan symbol to suggest some type of inter-action between these two otherwise distinct groups. Maybe these glyphs have the same meaning. There appear to have been vital differences between these two groups of ancient Americans: non-Christian imagery dominates the Burrows Cave stones.
Still, there are legitimate doubts among our own diffusionist supporters concerning these "Christ stones," due largely to some relatively minor variations in the placement of glyphs, together with the anomalous appearance of a particular symbol on the Michigan objects (see page 39). Clearly, much work still needs to be done in any comparisons of these two diverse collections. But the evidence of the Michigan Tablets and Burrows Cave stones suggests that some fundamentally important culture-bearer visited our Western Hemisphere in pre-Columbian times. Was it actually Jesus himself?
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