(LasVegasWeekly)
An unexpected fallout from the collapse of the Soviet Union was the opening of former state secrets, including KGB files and now, it seems, video footage of UFO encounters in space.
Then, of course, there's the alien baby corpse.
Author Michael Hesemann brought videotape of both to Laughlin. A week before the Congress, Hesemann, of Duesseldorf, Germany, purchased the tape from the grandson of a former Soviet military leader who had died. The tape included many shots of lights moving around the Mir space station. Hesemann also had interviews with three- and four-star generals readily testifying about military encounters with UFOs.
"It was a cover-up," said one general. "We were again and again confronted (by UFOs) and it was always covered up."
The military men revealed that the UFOs became so common around Russian nuclear facilities that they had developed a "conditional relationship" with the craft: They knew that all they'd have to do was move or fiddle with a nuke and the UFOs would appear.
Hesemann also showed KGB footage taken from stationary cameras affixed to an American space shuttle. Against the black-on-black of space, tiny white lights hovered around the Mir space station in 1997.
"But you don't know it, because they don't want you to know it," Hesemann said, admonishing his audience. "I had to come all the way from Germany to show it, and they should show it to you. You paid for the shuttle, didn't you?"
People clapped. Hesemann quieted them. Then he rolled the alien corpse tape.
Hesemann--his crisp accent reminiscent of Mike Myers' German "Dieter" character on "Saturday Night Live"--said on June 3, 1996, a 79-year-old woman living in the mountains of the Republic of Georgia came upon a baby "creature" in the middle of the road. It appeared sick, so the woman took it home and nursed it. All it would eat were sweets. Three weeks in, the woman became sick and saw a doctor, who told her she probably had cancer. Though she complained that she had to get home--"Oh, I have the creature and I have to take care of it," Hesemann mimicked--she remained hospitalized for six weeks.
When authorities finally decided to check her home, they found the creature dead.
The videotape shows local police, half-smirking and looking dumbfounded, holding the blackened thing with bare hands and measuring it with a metric ruler. There are five bone plates to its head, fused together to form a pointed ridge down the middle from forehead to the back base; and a right-angled ridge is formed along the base, making it look somewhat like a helmet (go to www.michaelhesemann.com for pictures). Like most people there, I was swept up by Hesemann's presentation, wishing it to be real--but thinking it looked a bit like a homemade prop for a Halloween costume. I didn't laugh, though. No one did.
Hesemann vows the footage is authentic--not the phony stuff that became the basis of a cable TV special last year. He's putting his footage where his mouth is: He's asking scientists to take a look.
"I want the research community to be involved with this because I want their opinion," he said.
These carvings might symbolize a 5300-year-old solar eclipse.
WELLINGTON, New Zealand (CNN) -- Former New Zealand Prime Minister David Lange has claimed that ex-U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle threatened to have him "liquidated" over his country's anti-nuclear policy in the 1980s.
The extraordinary allegation was first made in an interview with New Zealand's One News broadcast Tuesday night. Quayle rejected the claim. In an e-mail from Quayle's Phoenix, Arizona, office, Quayle said Lange's allegation was "complete and utter nonsense -- it's so ridiculous it deserves no further comment."
The report also was described as "preposterous" by the U.S. Embassy in Wellington.
"We would hate to challenge the memory of a former prime minister, but the suggestion that former vice president Quayle threatened to kill him is preposterous," a spokeswoman told CNN.
In the One News interview Lange said the apparent death threat was made by Quayle during a meeting with the Australian cabinet.
"There were veiled threats and there were specific threats," he said. "It was announced at one stage to the Australian cabinet that I would have to be liquidated."
After being informed of the alleged threat -- it is unclear by whom -- Lange said he then asked New Zealand's Security Intelligence Service to investigate.
"I enquired of our security sources and was told I shouldn't regard it as a credible threat because the vice president wasn't regarded as credible."
U.S. nuclear armed and nuclear powered vessels remain banned from New Zealand
As prime minister from 1984 to 1989 Lange brought in legislation banning U.S. nuclear powered and nuclear armed warships from New Zealand.
The move, which he says was galvanized by French nuclear testing in the South Pacific, sparked an angry reaction from Washington, which stripped New Zealand of its ally status, halting military cooperation and intelligence sharing.
Lange said at the time many people felt aggrieved at New Zealand's anti-nuclear stance and he faced extraordinary pressure to drop the policy, which remains in effect.
The revelation coincides with a visit to the U.S. by current Prime Minister Helen Clark.
On Tuesday she held talks with U.S. President George W Bush, for whose father Quayle was vice president.
She also met with Secretary of State Colin Powell and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz both of whom confirmed disagreements persist over the nuclear ban.
"Disagreements between close friends are not that unusual," Powell said, adding that nonetheless New Zealand remained a " very, very, very close friend" of the United States.
Clark's office has made no comment on Lange's allegations against former vice president Quayle.
'I didn't feel at risk'
Former Vice President Dan Quayle made a failed bid for the U.S. presidency in 2000
In subsequent remarks made to the Evening Post newspaper Wednesday, Lange said he never felt intimidated by Quayle's alleged threat.
"He wasn't taken seriously by his own folk, that was the tragedy," the paper quotes him as saying.
"I didn't feel at risk from the U.S. Navy because they didn't come here anyway, and I certainly wouldn't be at risk from a chap who couldn't spell tomato," he added.
The comment was an apparent reference to a campaign blunder when Quayle made a schoolboy add the letter "e" to the end of the word "potato" during a school photo opportunity.
Quayle has largely retreated from U.S. political life after a failed bid for the Republican presidential nomination in the 2000 campaign.
28 March, 2002
WWF-UK has called for immediate government and industry action to tackle oestrogens and other endocrine-disrupting chemicals in light of new evidence from the UK Environment Agency about their negative impacts on fish in England and Wales.
Research released yesterday demonstrates that tiny amounts — less than 1 nanogram per litre — of a potent synthetic hormone used in the contraceptive pill, 17alpha -ethinyl oestradiol, causes effects in a range of fish including two native UK species, the roach and the gudgeon. For example, affected male fish are less able to reproduce, with potentially serious implications for fish populations — and the effects are widespread. The research suggests over 100 sewage treatment works may discharge steroids at concentrations that could cause reproductive effects on fish, which may explain why fish stocks in some UK rivers are lower than expected.
According to WWF-UK’s Toxics Policy Officer, Matthew Wilkinson: "This is clear evidence that the water industry needs to improve the sewage treatment processes in order to remove these hormones. Without action from the industry and support from the regulator OFWAT for investment in sewage treatment works that deliver environmental improvements, the Environment Agency’s excellent research will be rendered useless."
Wilkinson added: "This is tip of the iceberg stuff — oestrogenic steroids are only one group of a range of pharmaceuticals and endocrine disrupting chemicals that are discharged into the environment through our sewage treatment works every day."
A new national survey of rivers and effluents in the US*, due to be published later this month, also demonstrates the presence of over 80 substances, including antibiotics, steroid hormones, and other pharmaceuticals.
"On the back of these results, it is vital that the UK government increases its efforts to investigate the occurrence and causes of increasing rates of reproductive abnormalities in humans, such as testicular cancer, hypospadias and low sperm counts. The commitment to research adverse effects in humans has so far been extremely disappointing," Wilkinson concluded.
MIAMI — A mysterious, gargantuan blob of black-tinged water is drifting west of the Florida Keys.
Now a zone of dying sponges and coral off Key West suddenly has elevated the formation dubbed "black water" from scientific puzzle to major environmental concern.
The mass was first spotted in late January off Marco Island by a fisherman who described it as a large area of "black water with gelatinous blobs at the surface."
Since then, it has slowly drifted from the Gulf of Mexico across Florida Bay.
Devastated sponges were observed last weekend in the northwest channel off Key West by Ken Nedimyer, a member of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary's advisory council who collects specimens for the aquarium trade.
"The water was a creepy green at the surface, and by the time I got to the bottom it was really creepy and dark," Nedimyer wrote in an e-mail sent to the sanctuary and several scientists studying the curious discoloration.
He noted six species of rope sponge as the hardest hit, with 50 to 75 percent wiped out, as well as a number of other sponges dead or dying.
Brain coral and starfish also seemed to be suffering. Fish in the area seemed healthy, although curiously unhungry.
"There's a real meltdown occurring down there right now," Nedimyer wrote.
The sanctuary planned to dispatch divers to survey for more widespread damage.
While the mass described as the color of sewer water is breaking up and shrinking, it spanned several hundred miles at one point.
While scientists still were sorting through water samples, satellite images, weather reports and historical studies and observations, the sponge die-off is another strong indicator that the culprit is an explosion of some sort of microscopic plankton, said Brian Keller, the sanctuary's science coordinator.
During a series of algae blooms that plagued Florida Bay in the mid-1990s, sponges, which feed by filtering water, were among the first organisms to go, in vast acres, followed by seagrass beds.
Those blooms did not kill fish, like red tide does, but fish do avoid the areas during outbreaks and lose forage and shelter until the areas recover, which can take years.
"The fact that it appears to be a fairly selective mortality indicates to me that it's not like some general toxin in the water column that would kill everything," Keller said.
But Keller agreed it would take more study to issue a definitive word.
Beverly Roberts, research administrator at the Florida Marine Research Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., said it could be caused by anything from pollution to some sort of decaying plant material, perhaps flushed to sea from land.
Scientists at the institute, the Mote Marine Laboratory in the Keys and Sarasota, and the University of South Florida were all analyzing data.
Water samples have shown medium to high levels of two types of phytoplanktons, tiny plants so essential to the marine food chain that they're called "the grass of the sea," Roberts said.
"It's eaten by a lot of smaller stages of the fishes," she said. They're normal in seawater, but plankton or a variety of them can cause problems in high concentrations.
The samples also detected low concentrations of another bottom plankton that produces ciguatera, a toxin that can sicken people who eat fish with high levels.
But Roberts deemed it unlikely it played a major part.
Copyright © 2002 The Seattle Times Company
March 26, 2002
PHILLIPS — The search continues in Phillips for the cause of the mysterious itching rash that closed the school for two days last week.
On Monday, an indoor environmental expert from the state Bureau of General Services was at Phillips Middle School to look at ceiling tiles and carpeting, and brought back air-filters and vacuum cleaner bags used during fumigation for possible lab analysis.
"The rash has faded away. Everything is back to normal," Superintendent Quenten Clark of School Administrative District 58 said Monday.
According the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, 14 states have reported investigations of school children who developed short-lived rashes since last October. Characteristics vary but the onset is marked by severe itching on the face, neck, hands or arms. There are no other symptoms and the condition lasts from a few hours to two weeks.
Phillips Middle School is the only one in Maine to report such a rash outbreak. Maine's Bureau of Health, along with health agencies from other states, is working with the CDC to find a common cause but so far, there does not seem to be one, said Dr. Philip Haines, the state's deputy health director.
"We are in regular contact with the CDC, and while there are many outbreaks of rashes, they are not all the same," he said. "We are asking parents to fill out a questionnaire and we have a few blood samples taken by medical practitioners last week that we will test if the CDC requests it."
Under state Department of Education guidelines, schools are responsible for dealing with local medical concerns, Haines said. If the condition had continued to spread and worsen, there would have been an immediate state response and remediation costs incurred by the district would be reimbursed.
"We feel that is a responsible approach for something that did not appear to be life-theatening and is self-limiting," he said.
Clark said he was amazed to learn of the scope of rash problems across the nation but he said he got more information from a superintendent from Erie, Pa., than he got from health officials in Maine.
"It was a small rash, so insignificant you would never go to a doctor if you got it. Probably a thousand kids have a rash like this around Maine on any given day. But when you have a lot of kids coming down with it at the same time, you need a plan on the shelf, a fact sheet, to tell someone like me what to do immediately and what to tell parents," he said.
Clark said school officials used common sense when they segregated the children, sent them home on separate buses, disinfected and cleaned the classrooms, collected air filters and cleaning bags in plastic bags, and closed the school. But he worried about serious allergic reactions that can start with a rash.
"This was not a horrible thing, but it should be a wake-up call. I had expected the state's medical SWAT team to come up to take a look, or have someone take skin scrapings or at least tell us that the kids should wash their hands," Clark said.
January 20, 2002
(Hartford Courant)
Lab specimens of anthrax spores, Ebola virus and other pathogens disappeared from the Army's biological warfare research facility in the early 1990s, during a turbulent period of labor complaints and recriminations among rival scientists there, documents from an internal Army inquiry show.
The 1992 inquiry also found evidence that someone was secretly entering a lab late at night to conduct unauthorized research, apparently involving anthrax. A numerical counter on a piece of lab equipment had been rolled back to hide work done by the mystery researcher, who left the misspelled label "antrax" in the machine's electronic memory, according to the documents obtained by The Courant.
Experts disagree on whether the lost specimens pose a danger. An Army spokesperson said they do not because they would have been effectively killed by chemicals in preparation for microscopic study. A prominent molecular biologist said, however, that resilient anthrax spores could possibly be retrieved from a treated specimen.
In addition, a scientist who once worked at the Army facility said that because of poor inventory controls, it is possible some of the specimens disappeared while still viable, before being treated.
Not in dispute is what the incidents say about disorganization and lack of security in some quarters of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases - known as USAMRIID - at Fort Detrick, Md., in the 1990s. Fort Detrick is believed to be the original source of the Ames strain of anthrax used in the mail attacks last fall, and investigators have questioned people there and at a handful of other government labs and contractors.
It is unclear whether Ames was among the strains of anthrax in the 27 sets of specimens reported missing at Fort Detrick after an inventory in 1992. The Army spokesperson, Caree Vander-Linden, said that at least some of the lost anthrax was not Ames. But a former lab technician who worked with some of the anthrax that was later reported missing said all he ever handled was the Ames strain.
Meanwhile, one of the 27 sets of specimens has been found and is still in the lab; an Army spokesperson said it may have been in use when the inventory was taken. The fate of the rest, some containing samples no larger than a pencil point, remains unclear. In addition to anthrax and Ebola, the specimens included hanta virus, simian AIDS virus and two that were labeled "unknown" - an Army euphemism for classified research whose subject was secret.
A former commander of the lab said in an interview he did not believe any of the missing specimens were ever found. Vander-Linden said last week that in addition to the one complete specimen set, some samples from several others were later located, but she could not provide a fuller accounting because of incomplete records regarding the disposal of specimens.
"In January of 2002, it's hard to say how many of those were missing in February of 1991," said Vander-Linden, adding that it's likely some were simply thrown out with the trash.
Discoveries of lost specimens and unauthorized research coincided with an Army inquiry into allegations of "improper conduct" at Fort Detrick's experimental pathology branch in 1992. The inquiry did not substantiate the specific charges of mismanagement by a handful of officers.
But a review of hundreds of pages of interview transcripts, signed statements and internal memos related to the inquiry portrays a climate charged with bitter personal rivalries over credit for research, as well as allegations of sexual and ethnic harassment. The recriminations and unhappiness ultimately became a factor in the departures of at least five frustrated Fort Detrick scientists.
In interviews with The Courant last month, two of the former scientists said that as recently as 1997, when they left, controls at Fort Detrick were so lax it wouldn't have been hard for someone with security clearance for its handful of labs to smuggle out biological specimens.
Lost Samples
The 27 specimens were reported missing in February 1992, after a new officer, Lt. Col. Michael Langford, took command of what was viewed by Fort Detrick brass as a dysfunctional pathology lab. Langford, who no longer works at Fort Detrick, said he ordered an inventory after he recognized there was "little or no organization" and "little or no accountability" in the lab.
"I knew we had to basically tighten up what I thought was a very lax and unorganized system," he said in an interview last week.
A factor in Langford's decision to order an inventory was his suspicion - never proven - that someone in the lab had been tampering with records of specimens to conceal unauthorized research. As he explained later to Army investigators, he asked a lab technician, Charles Brown, to "make a list of everything that was missing."
"It turned out that there was quite a bit of stuff that was unaccounted for, which only verifies that there needs to be some kind of accountability down there," Langford told investigators, according to a transcript of his April 1992 interview.
Brown - whose inventory was limited to specimens logged into the lab during the 1991 calendar year - detailed his findings in a two-page memo to Langford, in which he lamented the loss of the items "due to their immediate and future value to the pathology division and USAMRIID."
Many of the specimens were tiny samples of tissue taken from the dead bodies of lab animals infected with deadly diseases during vaccine research. Standard procedure for the pathology lab would be to soak the samples in a formaldehyde-like fixative and embed them in a hard resin or paraffin, in preparation for study under an electron microscope.
Some samples, particularly viruses, are also irradiated with gamma rays before they are handled by the pathology lab.
Whether all of the lost samples went through this treatment process is unclear. Vander-Linden said the samples had to have been rendered inert if they were being worked on in the pathology lab.
But Dr. Ayaad Assaad, a former Fort Detrick scientist who had extensive dealings with the lab, said that because some samples were received at the lab while still alive - with the expectation they would be treated before being worked on - it is possible some became missing before treatment. A phony "log slip" could then have been entered into the lab computer, making it appear they had been processed and logged.
In fact, Army investigators appear to have wondered if some of the anthrax specimens reported missing had ever really been logged in. When an investigator produced a log slip and asked Langford if "these exist or [are they] just made up on a data entry form," Langford replied that he didn't know.
Assuming a specimen was chemically treated and embedded for microscopic study, Vander-Linden and several scientists interviewed said it would be impossible to recover a viable pathogen from them. Brown, who did the inventory for Langford and has since left Fort Detrick, said in an interview that the specimens he worked on in the lab "were completely inert."
"You could spread them on a sandwich," he said.
But Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a molecular biologist at the State University of New York who is investigating the recent anthrax attacks for the Federation of American Scientists, said she would not rule out the possibility that anthrax in spore form could survive the chemical-fixative process.
"You'd have to grind it up and hope that some of the spores survived," Rosenberg said. "It would be a mess.
"It seems to me that it would be an unnecessarily difficult task. Anybody who had access to those labs could probably get something more useful."
Rosenberg's analysis of the anthrax attacks, which has been widely reported, concludes that the culprit is probably a government insider, possibly someone from Fort Detrick. The Army facility manufactured anthrax before biological weapons were banned in 1969, and it has experimented with the Ames strain for defensive research since the early 1980s.
Vander-Linden said that one of the two sets of anthrax specimens listed as missing at Fort Detrick was the Vollum strain, which was used in the early days of the U.S. biological weapons program. It was not clear what the type of anthrax in the other missing specimen was.
Eric Oldenberg, a soldier and pathology lab technician who left Fort Detrick and is now a police detective in Phoenix, said in an interview that Ames was the only anthrax strain he worked with in the lab.
Late-Night Research
More troubling to Langford than the missing specimens was what investigators called "surreptitious" work being done in the pathology lab late at night and on weekends.
Dr. Mary Beth Downs told investigators that she had come to work several times in January and February of 1992 to find that someone had been in the lab at odd hours, clumsily using the sophisticated electron microscope to conduct some kind of off-the-books research.
After one weekend in February, Downs discovered that someone had been in the lab using the microscope to take photos of slides, and apparently had forgotten to reset a feature on the microscope that imprints each photo with a label. After taking a few pictures of her own slides that morning, Downs was surprised to see "Antrax 005" emblazoned on her negatives.
Downs also noted that an automatic counter on the camera, like an odometer on a car, had been rolled back to hide the fact that pictures had been taken over the weekend. She wrote of her findings in a memo to Langford, noting that whoever was using the microscope was "either in a big hurry or didn't know what they were doing."
It is unclear if the Army ever got to the bottom of the incident, and some lab insiders believed concerns about it were overblown. Brown said many Army officers did not understand the scientific process, which he said doesn't always follow a 9-to-5 schedule.
"People all over the base knew that they could come in at anytime and get on the microscope," Brown said. "If you had security clearance, the guard isn't going to ask you if you are qualified to use the equipment. I'm sure people used it often without our knowledge."
Documents from the inquiry show that one unauthorized person who was observed entering the lab building at night was Langford's predecessor, Lt. Col. Philip Zack, who at the time no longer worked at Fort Detrick. A surveillance camera recorded Zack being let in at 8:40 p.m. on Jan. 23, 1992, apparently by Dr. Marian Rippy, a lab pathologist and close friend of Zack's, according to a report filed by a security guard.
Zack could not be reached for comment. In an interview this week, Rippy said that she doesn't remember letting Zack in, but that he occasionally stopped by after he was transferred off the base.
"After he left, he had no [authorized] access to the building. Other people let him in," she said. "He knew a lot of people there and he was still part of the military. I can tell you, there was no suspicious stuff going on there with specimens."
Zack left Fort Detrick in December 1991, after a controversy over allegations of unprofessional behavior by Zack, Rippy, Brown and others who worked in the pathology division. They had formed a clique that was accused of harassing the Egyptian-born Assaad, who later sued the Army, claiming discrimination.
Assaad said he had believed the harassment was behind him until last October, until after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
He said that is when the FBI contacted him, saying someone had mailed an anonymous letter - a few days before the existence of anthrax-laced mail became known - naming Assaad as a potential bioterrorist. FBI agents decided the note was a hoax after interviewing Assaad.
But Assaad said he believes the note's timing makes the author a suspect in the anthrax attacks, and he is convinced that details of his work contained in the letter mean the author must be a former Fort Detrick colleague.
Brown said that he doesn't know who sent the letter, but that Assaad's nationality and expertise in biological agents made him an obvious subject of concern after Sept. 11.
Wed Mar 27
ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO -- Make way for the ultimate high-rise project: the space elevator. Long viewed as science fiction "imagineering", researchers are gathering momentum in their pursuit to propel this uplifting concept into actuality.
Still, the mental picture needed to grasp the elevator to space idea…well, you can't be weak of mind.
Forget the roar of rocketry and those bone jarring liftoffs, the elevator would be a smooth 62,000-mile (100,000-kilometer) ride up a long cable. Payloads can shimmy up the Earth-to-space cable, experiencing no large launch forces, slowly climbing from one atmosphere to a vacuum.
Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, Venus, the asteroids and beyond - they are routinely accessible via the space elevator. And for all its promise and grandeur, this mega-project is made practical by the tiniest of technologies - carbon nanotubes.
Seen as an engineering undertaking for the opening decades of the 21st century, the space elevator proposal was highlighted here during the 2002 Space and Robotics Conferences, held March 17-21, and sponsored by the Aerospace Division of the American Society of Civil Engineers.
Thought experiment
Science fiction writers have been deploying space elevators for years.
Space visionary, Arthur Clarke, centered his novel of the late 1970s, The Fountains of Paradise, on the notion. Also, among other writers, Kim Stanley-Robinson's Red Mars noted the soaring splendor of an elevator to space. Furthermore, the scheme has bounced around technical journals for decades. Some call it a "thought experiment", but others point out that space exploration B.C. -- "Before Cable" -- will pale contrasted to what's possible within ten to fifteen years.
"Even though the challenges to bring the space elevator to reality are substantial, there are no physical or economic reasons why it can't be built in our lifetime." That's the matter-of-fact feeling of physicist, Bradley Edwards of Eureka Scientific in Berkeley, California, but carrying out heavy lifting design work in Seattle, Washington.
Edwards told SPACE.com that he's been wrapped up in space elevator work for some three years, supported by grants from NASA (news - web sites)'s Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. "I'm convinced that the space elevator is practical and doable. In 12 years, we could be launching tons of payload every three days, at just a little over a couple hundred dollars a pound," he said.
"In 15 years we could have a dozen cables running full steam putting 50 tons in space every day for even less, including upper middle class individuals wanting a joyride into space. Now I just need the $5 billion, Edwards added.
And so it grows
For a space elevator to function, a cable with one end attached to the Earth's surface stretches upwards, reaching beyond geosynchronous orbit, at 21,700 miles (35,000-kilometer altitude). After that, simple physics takes charge.
The competing forces of gravity at the lower end and outward centripetal acceleration at the farther end keep the cable under tension. The cable remains stationary over a single position on Earth. This cable, once in position, can be scaled from Earth by mechanical means, right into Earth orbit. An object released at the cable's far end would have sufficient energy to escape from the gravity tug of our home planet and travel to neighboring the moon or to more distant interplanetary targets.
Putting physics aside the toughest challenge has been finding a super-strong cable material. "That's what has kept this idea in science fiction for 40 years," Edwards said. But the right stuff in terms of cable material is no longer thought of as "unobtainium", he said.
The answer is carbon-nanotube-composite ribbon. Small fibers of the material are set down side-by-side, then interconnected to form a growing ribbon.
Stronger than steel
The hurdle to date, Edwards said, has been the commercial fabrication of carbon nanotubes. Both U.S. and Japanese firms, among others, are ramping up production of carbon nanotubes, with tons of this now exotic matter soon to be available. "That quantity of material is going to be around well before five years time. It's not going to take long," he said.
Given the far stronger-than-steel ribbon of carbon nanotubes, a space elevator could be up within a decade. "There's no real serious stumbling block to this," Edwards explained.
"The making of carbon nanotubes is moving very quick," said Hayam Benaroya, a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Rutgers in Piscataway, New Jersey. "We're moving from the scientific stage of just developing them to actual commercial entities producing them in ton-like quantities," he said.
"Perhaps within our lifetimes we might actually see real designs of skyhooks and space tethers, these kinds of things. They may be feasible at reasonable cost," Benaroya said.
Next page: Reel world high-wire act
Reel world high-wire act
Getting the first space elevator off the ground, factually, would use two space shuttle flights. Twenty tons of cable and reel would be kicked up to geosynchronous altitude by an upper stage motor. The cable is then snaked to Earth and attached to an ocean-based anchor station, situated within the equatorial Pacific. That platform would be similar to the structure used for the Sea Launch expendable rocket program.
Once secure, a platform-based free-electron laser system is used to beam energy to photocell-laden "climbers". These are automated devices that ride the initial ribbon skyward. Each climber adds more and more ribbon to the first, thereby increasing the cable's overall strength. Some two-and-a-half years later, and using nearly 300 climbers, a first space elevator capable of supporting over 20-tons (20,000-kilograms) is ready for service.
"If budget estimates are correct, we could do it for under $10 billion. The first cable could launch multi-ton payloads every 3 days. Cargo hoisted by laser-powered climbers, be it fragile payloads such as radio dishes, complex planetary probes, solar power satellites, or human-carrying modules could be dropped off in geosynchronous orbit in a week's travel time," Edwards said.
Using a laser beam to boost the climbers into space is doable, said Harold Bennett, president of Bennett Optical Research, Inc. of Ridgecrest, California. "If you do it right, you can take out 96 percent of the effect of the atmosphere on the laser beam through adaptive optics," he said. The strength of the pulsed laser beam is less than the intensity of the Sun, so birds, airplanes, or human eyes wouldn't be affected, he said.
Return on investment
Eric Westling, a Houston, Texas-based consultant on the space elevator, is bullish on the concept. Spending billions on a space elevator is small change for a big purpose.
"Other than the invention of some Buck Rogers engine, the space elevator is the only system for accessing space that is subject to the economics of scale. It's a true return on investment enterprise. The cost of space travel has to become an incidental part of the overall cost of what we're trying to get done," Westling said.
"It will change the world economy. It's worth what ever it costs to put it up," Westling said. An initial elevator, he added, is sure to give birth to even larger systems, capable of handling larger loads of up and down traffic.
"I'm looking at a business plan that shows some investor could triple his or her money in about 6 years, and the initial investment could be as low as $5 billion," Edwards said.
Building the impossible
The elevator to space concept does entail aggressive research work. As example, Edwards said he is looking into the environmental impacts stemming from elevator operations. Being studied too is impact of lightning, wind and clouds on an Earth-to-space cable system. Space elevators for use on other worlds, like Mars and the Moon are receiving attention as well.
One thing to keep in mind. Building the impossible is done here on Earth routinely, Edwards said.
Take for instance the $13.5 billion Millennium Tower envisioned for Hong Kong Harbor. This incredible skyscraper would be 170 stories tall. Elevator traffic within its walls is estimated at 100,000 people per day.
Edwards also points to the Gibraltar Bridge project. It would span the Straits of Gibraltar, linking Spain and Morocco at a projected cost of $20 billion. The bridge would use towers, twice as high as the world's tallest skyscraper. Roughly 1,000,000 miles (1,600,000 kilometers) of wire cables would be utilized in the project.
"I think those projects are a lot harder than what I'm talking about," Edwards said.
I remember the book, more of sc-fi disaster movie than 2001
Natural disasters claim globally nearly 250,000 lives every year. Weather- and climate-related disasters were responsible for 90 percent of those deaths in the 1990s with another 200 million people effected each year by natural disasters - seven times the number of persons affected by armed conflict. The global annual costs for property damage lay between 50 to 100 billion US dollars. Asia has been the continent most frequently hit by hydro- meteorological disasters, accounting for 43 per cent of the total number of events and 80 per cent of the people killed during the last decade.
Geneva - Mar 23, 2002
Global statistics continue to highlight an increasing number of people who are affected by weather- and climate- related disasters while records show a corresponding increase in the number of such hazards, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) on the occasion of Friday's World Meteorological Day.
"This worrying trend is counterproductive to a sustainable way of life for all world populations", says WMO Secretary General Prof. Godwin O. P. Obasi.
Natural disasters claim globally nearly 250,000 lives every year and for example over the decade 1991-2000, more than 90 percent were killed by weather- and climate-related disasters. Over the period, the events affected more than 200 million persons per year, which is seven times the number of persons affected by armed conflict.
The global annual costs for property damage lay between 50 to 100 billion US dollars. Asia has been the continent most frequently hit by hydro- meteorological disasters, accounting for 43 per cent of the total number of events and 80 per cent of the people killed during last decade.
With the theme for World Meteorological Day 2002, "Reducing vulnerability to weather and climate extremes", WMO wishes to draw special attention to the devastating impact of weather- and climate- related disasters, the increased vulnerability of humankind and the need for better response mechanisms; assessments of such vulnerability depend on the availability of climate data.
Prof. Obasi: "In the onger term, sustainable development will be determined to a large extent by projected climate change and its impact on sea-level rise, agriculture and water resources and associated natural disasters.
It is projected, for example, that climate change will lead to an intensification of the water cycle, causing increased droughts in some places and floods in others."
While well-established communities have built up their infrastructures and prospered within a general pattern of local climate to which they have adapted, extreme events with intensities outside this range can cause catastrophic failure in environmental, economic and social terms.
Severe thunderstorms with related phenomena such as tornadoes, lightning, hailstorms, strong winds, dust- and sandstorms, waterspouts and downpours can be short-lived but extremely violent.
Other phenomena and associated events that are responsible for loss of life and property damage include tropical and mid-latitude cyclones, monsoons, heat waves, cold spells, blizzards and El Nino/La Nina.
The consensus among meteorologists that the odds of a new El Nino event occurring this year are higher than they have been since the El Nino of 1997/98, is broadly based upon increasingly accurate seasonal predictions which are prerequisite for preparations and effective action in good time.
There is some evidence that the signal of El Nino events can be seen in the rainfall and temperature records across southern Europe or the reported recent flooding in Ecuador and Peru, but there are no data yet allowing the formulation of views on the likely intensity of an El Nino, should one develop.
"We are very aware of the fact that we do not automatically benefit by progress in science. It depends on how we use the resulting knowledge and tools", adds Prof. Obasi.
"Through WMO, there is a global availability of real- and near-real-time weather and climate information, which is essential for vulnerability assessment, developing natural disaster reduction strategies and early warnings.
WMO's commitment is to translate all of these advances in sciences and technology into useful products for the safety and well being of society."
Thursday, March 28, 2002; 2:09 PM
WOODSTOCK, Ga. –– The Hickory Flat Elementary salad bar is filled with dark little flecks these days – spinach and other greens are being mixed in to make the iceberg go further.
Want romaine at the Ruby Tuesday restaurant a few miles away? It's on "request only" status.
Lettuce is in short supply nationwide, with prices quadrupling in some spots. Blame it on freezing weather in lettuce-growing areas of Arizona and California, where quality and quantity have taken a dive this year.
The sticker shock is showing up at school cafeterias and restaurants, where lettuce is a staple not easily replaced.
"We're trying to stretch it as far as we can," said Faye Lynn Sams, the cafeteria manager at Hickory Flat, where some 950 students and teachers plow through 200 pounds of iceberg each week. The school is paying $62 per case – $2.58 a head – nearly four times the usual price.
"I haven't looked at the numbers this week – I'm scared," said Clint Shackelford, chief financial officer of Souper Salad, a chain of all-you-can-eat soup and salad restaurants in 16 states that buys $1 million worth of iceberg each year.
"It's the highest we've ever seen it. We're used to paying in the teens and now we're looking at $50 a case," he said. "It will definitely have an effect on our profitability."
For many Americans, salad means iceberg lettuce, the industry behemoth even though a host of more exotic varieties has found a niche in supermarkets and restaurant salad bars.
Americans eat more than three times more iceberg than other kinds of lettuce – about 25 pounds per year per person – according to researchers at Arizona State University.
The shortage began with freezing weather that cut per-acre yields by more than half in parts of California, where more than half the nation's supply is grown. At the same time, many farmers grew less lettuce, fearing a drop in demand after Sept. 11 because many people dined out less.
The result has been high prices. In some parts of the country, iceberg lettuce has topped $3 per head at grocery stores, up from the regular $1 to $2.
Prices are expected to drop to their usual levels in the next two to three weeks as new supplies catch up to demand, said Ashraf Zaki, a market price reporter for the Agriculture Department in Forest Park, Ga.
"But right now it's pretty darn expensive," Zaki said.
Lucy Campbell, a stay-home mom in suburban Atlanta, said she stopped buying lettuce last month to help the budget.
"I will not buy it when it's $3 a head," she said, adding that other green vegetables can fill in for lettuce. "If bread were $5 a loaf we'd still have to buy it. But lettuce is not that important in our family."
Souper Salad has raised its salad bar price a dime, to $5.09. The company also increased drink prices by 10 cents because of the lettuce crunch and began mixing more spinach and romaine into the iceberg bins, Shackelford said.
Many schools are trying to get by without raising prices.
"We're just taking the hit for right now," said Carol McCann, president of the Texas School Food Service Association and a food service director in Glen Rose, Texas. "A lot of them really count on (salad) being their lunch."
At Colquitt County High School in Moultrie, cafeteria manager Jane Barwick stopped buying iceberg two weeks ago when her $24.90 case of 24 heads soared to nearly $60.
Leaf and romaine now serve as the lettuce, with robust portions of spinach, carrots and radishes tossed in. Colquitt High's "pizza day" now comes with fruit instead of lettuce salad.
"I've been assured by my produce man that it's probably only a six-week problem," Barwick said.
Jean Davis, a retiree in High Point, N.C., said each week seems to bring a hike in lettuce prices at the local store.
"It's not quite $5 yet, but that's what they're saying," Davis said. "I'll go back to it if it goes back down, but not if it stays like this. It's the principle of it. I just don't think (lettuce) is that necessary."
FTW, November 2, 2001 – 1200 PST -- On October 31, the French daily Le Figaro dropped a bombshell. While in a Dubai hospital receiving treatment for a chronic kidney infection last July, Osama bin Laden met with a top CIA official - presumably the Chief of Station. The meeting, held in bin Laden’s private suite, took place at the American hospital in Dubai at a time when he was a wanted fugitive for the bombings of two U.S. embassies and this year’s attack on the U.S.S. Cole. Bin Laden was eligible for execution according to a 2000 intelligence finding issued by President Bill Clinton before leaving office in January. Yet on July 14th he was allowed to leave Dubai on a private jet and there were no Navy fighters waiting to force him down.
In 1985 Oliver North – the only member of the Reagan-Bush years who doesn’t appear to have a hand in the current war - sent the Navy and commandos after terrorists on the cruise ship Achille Lauro. In his 1991 autobiography “Under Fire,” while describing terrorist Abu Abbas, North wrote, “I used to wonder: how many dead Americans will it take before we do something?” One could look at the number of Americans Osama bin Laden is alleged to have killed before September 11 and ask the same question.
It gets worse, much worse. A more complete timeline listing crucial events both before and after the September 11th suicide attacks, which have been blamed on bin Laden, establishes CIA foreknowledge of them and strongly suggests that there was criminal complicity on the part of the U.S. government in their execution. It also makes clear that the events which have taken place since September 11th are based upon an agenda that has little to do with the attacks.
One wonders how these events could have been ignored by the major media or treated as isolated incidents. Failing that, how could skilled news agencies avoid being outraged, or at least even just a little suspicious?
1. 1991-1997 – Major U.S. oil companies including ExxonMobil, Texaco, Unocal, BP Amoco and Shell directly invest almost $3 billion in cash bribing heads of state in Kazakhstan to secure equity rights in the huge oil reserves in these regions. The oil companies further commit to future direct investments in Kazakhstan of $35 billion. Not being willing to pay exorbitant prices to Russia to use Russian pipelines the major oil companies have no way to recoup their investments. [Sources Testimony before the House International Relations Committee 2/12/98]
2. December 4, 1997 – Representatives of the Taliban are invited guests to the Texas headquarters of Unocal to negotiate their support for the pipeline. Subsequent reports will indicate that the negotiations failed, allegedly because the Taliban wanted too much money. [Source: The BBC, Dec. 4, 1997]
3. February 12, 1998 – Unocal Vice President John J. Maresca – later to become a Special Ambassador to Afghanistan – testifies before the House that until a single, unified, friendly government is in place in Afghanistan the trans-Afghani pipeline needed to monetize the oil will not be built. [Source: Testimony before the House International Relations Committee.]
4. 1998 - The CIA ignores warnings from Case Officer Robert Baer that Saudi Arabia was harboring an al-Q’aeda cell led by two known terrorists. A more detailed list of known terrorists is offered to Saudi intelligence in August 2001 and refused. [Source: Financial Times 1/12/01; See No Evil by a book by Robert Baer (release date Feb. 2002).
5. 1998 and 2000 - Former President George H.W. Bush travels to Saudi Arabia on behalf of the privately owned Carlyle Group, the 11th largest defense contractor in the U.S. While there he meets privately with the Saudi royal family and the bin Laden family. [Source: Wall Street Journal, Sept. 27, 2001. See also FTW, Vol. IV, No 7 – “The Best Enemies Money Can Buy,”
- http://www.copvcia.com/members
/carlyle.html. ]
6. January, 2001 – The Bush Administration orders the FBI and intelligence agencies to “back off” investigations involving the bin Laden family, including two of Osama bin Laden’s relatives (Abdullah and Omar) who were living in Falls Church, VA – right next to CIA headquarters. This followed previous orders dating back to 1996, frustrating efforts to investigate the bin Laden family. [Source: BBC Newsnight, Correspondent Gregg Palast – Nov 7, 2001].
7. Feb 13, 2001 – UPI Terrorism Correspondent Richard Sale – while covering a trial of bin Laden’s Al Q’aeda followers - reports that the National Security Agency has broken bin Laden’s encrypted communications. Even if this indicates that bin Laden changed systems in February it does not mesh with the fact that the government insists that the attacks had been planned for years.
8. May 2001 – Secretary of State Colin Powell gives $43 million in aid to the Taliban regime, purportedly to assist hungry farmers who are starving since the destruction of their opium crop in January on orders of the Taliban regime. [Source: The Los Angeles Times, May 22, 2001].
9. May, 2001 – Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, a career covert operative and former Navy Seal, travels to India on a publicized tour while CIA Director George Tenet makes a quiet visit to Pakistan to meet with Pakistani leader General Pervez Musharraf. Armitage has long and deep Pakistani intelligence connections and he is the recipient of the highest civil decoration awarded by Pakistan. It would be reasonable to assume that while in Islamabad, Tenet, in what was described as “an unusually long meeting,” also met with his Pakistani counterpart, Lt. General Mahmud Ahmad, head of the ISI. [Source The Indian SAPRA news agency, May 22, 2001.]
10. June 2001 – German intelligence, the BND, warns the CIA and Israel that Middle Eastern terrorists are “planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture.” [Source: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 14, 2001.]
11. July, 2001 – Three American officials: Tom Simmons (former U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan), Karl Inderfurth (former Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian affairs) and Lee Coldren (former State Department expert on South Asia), meet with Pakistani and Russian intelligence officers in Berlin and tell them that the U.S. is planning military strikes against Afghanistan in October. A French book released in November, “Bin Laden - La Verite´ Interdite,” discloses that Taliban representatives often sat in on the meetings. British papers confirm that the Pakistani ISI relayed the threats to the Taliban. [Source: The Guardian, September 22, 2001; the BBC, September 18, 2001.The Inter Press Service, Nov 16, 2001]
12. Summer 2001 - According to a Sept. 26 story in Britain’s The Guardian, correspondent David Leigh reported that, “U.S. department of defense official, Dr. Jeffrey Starr, visited Tajikistan in January. The Guardian’s Felicity Lawrence established that US Rangers were also training special troops in Kyrgyzstan. There were unconfirmed reports that Tajik and Uzbek special troops were training in Alaska and Montana.”
13. Summer 2001 (est.) – Pakistani ISI Chief General Ahmad (see above) orders an aide to wire transfer $100,000 to Mohammed Atta, who was according to the FBI, the lead terrorist in the suicide hijackings. Ahmad recently resigned after the transfer was disclosed in India and confirmed by the FBI. [Source: The Times of India, October 11, 2001.]
14. Summer 2001 – An Iranian man phones U.S. law enforcement to warn of an imminent attack on the World Trade Center in the week of September 9th. German police confirm the calls but state that the U.S. Secret Service would not reveal any further information. [Source: German news agency “online.de”, September 14, 2001, translation retrieved from online.ie in Ireland.]
15. June 26, 2001 – The magazine indiareacts.com states that “India and Iran will ‘facilitate’ US and Russian plans for ‘limited military action’ against the Taliban.” The story indicates that the fighting will be done by US and Russian troops with the help of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. [Source: indiareacts.com, June 26, 2001.]
16. August 2001 – The FBI arrests an Islamic militant linked to bin Laden in Boston. French intelligence sources confirm that the man is a key member of bin Laden’s network and the FBI learns that he has been taking flying lessons. At the time of his arrest the man is in possession of technical information on Boeing aircraft and flight manuals. [Source: Reuters, September 13.]
17. August 11 or 12 – US Navy Lt. Delmart “Mike” Vreeland, jailed in Toronto on U.S. fraud charges and claiming to be an officer in U.S. Naval intelligence, writes details of the pending WTC attacks and seals them in an envelope which he gives to Canadian authorities. [Source: The Toronto Star, Oct. 23, 2001; Toronto Superior Court Records]
18. Summer 2001 – Russian intelligence notifies the CIA that 25 terrorist pilots have been specifically training for suicide missions. This is reported in the Russian press and news stories are translated for FTW by a retired CIA officer.
19. July 4-14, 2001 – Osama bin Laden receives treatments for kidney disease at the American hospital in Dubai and meets with a CIA official who returns to CIA headquarters on July 15th. [Source: Le Figaro, October 31st, 2001.]
20. August 2001 – Russian President Vladimir Putin orders Russian intelligence to warn the U.S. government “in the strongest possible terms” of imminent attacks on airports and government buildings. [Source: MS-NBC interview with Putin, September 15.]
21. August/September, 2001 – The Dow Jones Industrial Average drops nearly 900 points in the three weeks prior to the attack. A major stock market crash is imminent.
22. Sept. 3-10, 2001 – MS-NBC reports on September 16 that a caller to a Cayman Islands radio talk show gave several warnings of an imminent attack on the U.S. by bin Laden in the week prior to 9/11.
23. September 1-10, 2001 – In an exercise, Operation “Swift Sword” planned for four years, 23, 000 British troops are steaming toward Oman. Although the 9/11 attacks caused a hiccup in the deployment the massive operation was implemented as planned. At the same time two U.S. carrier battle groups arrive on station in the Gulf of Arabia just off the Pakistani coast. Also at the same time, some 17,000 U.S. troops join more than 23,000 NATO troops in Egypt for Operation “Bright Star.” All of these forces are in place before the first plane hits the World Trade Center. [Sources: The Guardian, CNN, FOX, The Observer, International Law Professor Francis Boyle, the University of Illinois.]
24. September 7, 2001 – Florida Governor Jeb Bush signs a two-year emergency executive order (01-261) making new provisions for the Florida National Guard to assist law enforcement and emergency-management personnel in the event of large civil disturbances, disaster or acts of terrorism. [Source: State of Florida web site listing of Governor’s Executive Orders.]
25. September 6-7, 2001 – 4,744 put options (a speculation that the stock will go down) are purchased on United Air Lines stock as opposed to only 396 call options (speculation that the stock will go up). This is a dramatic and abnormal increase in sales of put options. Many of the UAL puts are purchased through Deutschebank/AB Brown, a firm managed until 1998 by the current Executive Director of the CIA, A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard. [Source: The Herzliyya International Policy Institute for Counterterrorism, http://www.ict.org.il/, September 21; The New York Times; The Wall Street Journal.]
26. September 10, 2001 - 4,516 put options are purchased on American Airlines as compared to 748 call options. [Source: ICT – above]
27. September 6-11, 2001 - No other airlines show any similar trading patterns to those experienced by UAL and American. The put option purchases on both airlines were 600% above normal. This at a time when Reuters (September 10) issues a business report stating, “Airline stocks may be poised to take off.”
28. September 6-10, 2001 – Highly abnormal levels of put options are purchased in Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, AXA Re(insurance) which owns 25% of American Airlines, and Munich Re. All of these companies are directly impacted by the September 11 attacks. [Source: ICT, above; FTW, Vol. IV, No.7, October 18, 2001, http://www.copvcia.com/members/
oct152001.html. ]
29. It has been documented that the CIA, the Israeli Mossad and many other intelligence agencies monitor stock trading in real time using highly advanced programs reported to be descended from Promis software. This is to alert national intelligence services of just such kinds of attacks. Promis was reported, as recently as June, 2001 to be in Osama bin Laden’s possession and, as a result of recent stories by FOX, both the FBI and the Justice Department have confirmed its use for U.S. intelligence gathering through at least this summer. This would confirm that CIA had additional advance warning of imminent attacks. [Sources: The Washington Times, June 15, 2001; FOX News, October 16, 2001; FTW, October 26, 2001, - http://www.copvcia.com/members/
magic_carpet.html; FTW, Vol. IV, No.6, Sept. 18, 2001 - http://www.copvcia.com/members/
sept1801.html; FTW, Vol. 3, No 7, 9/30/00 - www.copvcia.com/stories/
may_2001/052401_promis.html.
30. September 11, 2001 – Gen Mahmud of the ISI (see above), friend of Mohammed Atta, is visiting Washington on behalf of the Taliban. [Source: MS-NBC, Oct. 7.]
31. September 11, 2001 – Employees of Odigo, Inc. in Israel, one of the world’s largest instant messaging companies, with offices in New York, receive threat warnings of an imminent attack on the WTC less than two hours before the first plane hits the WTC. Law enforcement authorities have gone silent about any investigation of this. The Odigo Research and Development offices in Israel are located in the city of Herzliyya, a ritzy suburb of Tel Aviv which is the same location as the Institute for Counter Terrorism which breaks early details of insider trading on 9-11. [Source: CNN’s Daniel Sieberg, 9/28/01; Newsbytes, Brian McWilliams, 9/27/01; Ha’aretz, 9/26/01.].
32. September 11, 2001 - For 35 minutes, from 8:15 AM until 9:05 AM, with it widely known within the FAA and the military that four planes have been simultaneously hijacked and taken off course, no one notifies the President of the United States. It is not until 9:30 that any Air Force planes are scrambled to intercept, but by then it is too late. This means that the National Command Authority waited for 75 minutes before scrambling aircraft, even though it was known that four simultaneous hijackings had occurred – an event that has never happened in history. [Sources: CNN, ABC, MS-NBC, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times.]
33. September 13, 2001 – China is admitted to the World Trade Organization quickly, after 15 years of unsuccessful attempts. [Source: The New York Times, Sept. 30, 2001.]
34. September 14, 2001 – Canadian jailers open the sealed envelope from Mike Vreeland in Toronto and see that is describes attacks against the WTC and Pentagon. The U.S. Navy subsequently states that Vreeland was discharged as a seaman in 1986 for unsatisfactory performance and has never worked in intelligence. [Source: The Toronto Star, Oct. 23, 2001; Toronto Superior Court records]
35. September 15, 2001 – The New York Times reports that Mayo Shattuck III has resigned, effective immediately, as head of the Alex (A.B) Brown unit of Deutschebank.
36. September 29, 2001 – The San Francisco Chronicle reports that $2.5 million in put options on American Airlines and United Airlines are unclaimed. This is likely the result of the suspension in trading on the NYSE after the attacks which gave the Securities and Exchange Commission time to be waiting when the owners showed up to redeem their put options.
37. October 10, 2001 – The Pakistani newspaper The Frontier Post reports that U.S. Ambassador Wendy Chamberlain has paid a call on the Pakistani oil minister. A previously abandoned Unocal pipeline from Turkmenistan, across Afghanistan, to the Pakistani coast, for the purpose of selling oil and gas to China, is now back on the table “in view of recent geopolitical developments.”
38. Mid October, 2001 – The Dow Jones Industrial Average, after having suffered a precipitous drop has recovered most of its pre-attack losses. Although still weak, and vulnerable to negative earnings reports, a crash has been averted by a massive infusion of government spending on defense programs, subsidies for “affected” industries and planned tax cuts for corporations.
39. November 21, 2001 – The British paper The Independent runs a story headlined, “Opium Farmers Rejoice at the Defeat of the Taliban.” The story reports that massive opium planting is underway all over the country.
40. November 25, 2001 – The Observer runs a story headlined “Victorious Warlords Set To Open the Opium Floodgates.” It states that farmers are being encouraged by warlords allied with the victorious Americans are “being encouraged to plant “as much opium as possible.”
41. December 4, 2001 – Convicted drug lord and opium kingpin Ayub Afridi is recruited by the US government to help establish control in Afghanistan by unifying various Pashtun warlords. The former opium smuggler who was one of the CIA’s leading assets in the war against the Russians is released from prison in order to do this. [Source: The Asia Times Online, 12/4/01].
42. December 25, 2001 – Newly appointed afghani Prime Minister Hamid Karzai is revealed as being a former paid consultant for Unocal. [Source: Le Monde.]
43. January 3, 2002 – President Bush appoints Zalamy Khalilzad as a special envoy to Afghanistan. Khalilzad, a former employee of Unocal, also wrote op-eds in the Washington Post in 1997 supporting the Taliban regime. [Source: Pravda, 1/9/02]
44. January 4, 2002 – Florida drug trafficking explodes after 9-11. In a surge of trafficking reminiscent of the 1980s the diversion of resources away from drug enforcement has opened the floodgates for a new surge of cocaine and heroin from South America. [The Christian Science Monitor, January 4, 2002.
45. January 10, 2002 – In a call from a speaker phone in open court, attorneys for “Mike” Vreeland call the Pentagon’s switchboard operator who confirms that Vreeland is indeed a Naval Lieutenant on active duty. She provides an office number and a direct dial phone extension to his office in the Pentagon. [Source: Attorney Rocco Galati; court records Toronto Superior Court.]
46. February 9, 2002 – Pakistani leader General Musharraf and Afghan leader Hamid Karzai announce their agreement to “cooperate in all spheres of activity” including the proposed Central Asian pipeline. Pakistan will give $10 million to Afghanistan to help pay Afghani government workers. [Source: The Irish Times, 2/9/02]
(Ananova)
An ET fan who has watched the film 773 times has now bought a month-long cinema pass for unlimited viewing of the new version.
Sian Thurkettle says she was watches the film on video at least once a fortnight at her home in Rugby.
The 25-year-old says the re-cut version is better than the original because of it's superior graphics.
The graphic designer told The Sun: "People think I'm mad, but I just can't get enough of ET. I still bawl my eyes out every time I see it.
"It's just a marvellous film with a magical storyline that never gets boring."
She has 80 ET figures and 300 items carrying his face at the home she shares with her husband, George, who she has forced to watch the film 100 times.
"ET's enjoyable, but I much prefer James Bond," he said.
I always hated this film. With this stupid bloody mutant muppet that I always thought resembled a starving african child-a real alien creature to the suburbs of america. To me it was the begining of the end for Speilberg and real culprit in the stupidisation of hollywood. After the promise of Sugarland Express, Jaws, Close Encounters and the wonder of Raiders this-the one that finally made him a household name. I remember reading an interview with him that stated his ultimate ambition was the make a movie that would cause the entire audience reach orgasm simultaneously. Whatever happened to that project? Remember the end of 'Duel' where the devil creature is seen in the fire and smoke? Is that what they call a "speilbergian touch"? And where's Dennis Weaver? I used to like Macullum as a kid.
In December of 2000, journalist Hal Herring revealed in High Country News that "the sale of velvet antler from domestic elk in North America is estimated by its proponents to be a $3 billion industry. Korea is still the primary destination for most velvet products, but promoters have created a demand in the U.S. alternative medicine and nutritional supplement market." This lucrative business of grinding up elk antlers and selling them as nutritional supplements amounts to a world-wide uncontrolled experiment in transmitting CWD (also called 'mad deer' or 'mad elk' disease) to humans. Research scientist Dr. Bruce Chesebro told Herring that taking elk antler supplements is "playing with fire. ... It's basicaly the same thing we do in the lab with mice" to infect them experimentally. Yet no agency is warning consumers, much less banning such dangerous experimentation, and sales of velvet elk antler supplements are just a mouse click away.
(The Boston Globe)
MONTREAL -- The early disappearance of ice in Canada's Gulf of St. Lawrence, which some scientists believe is linked to global warming, is wreaking havoc on harp seals - which give birth on the floes - and causing economic hardship for hard-pressed fishermen who depend on the controversial spring hunt.
Hundreds of drowned seal pups have already washed up on the shores of Newfoundland after their mothers gave birth in open water, apparently unable to find ice. The final death toll of pups may be in the hundreds of thousands.
Meanwhile, the club-wielding fishermen who normally take to the ice in a hunt that has drawn international criticism since the 1970s are remaining in port, with no icebound seals to harvest for fur, vitamin-rich oils, and, lately, sex organs for the Asian aphrodisiac trade.
Environmentalists from the International Fund for Animal Welfare, a Massachusetts-based group that for three decades has campaigned to save the seals, believe this year's near-absence of ice floes in birthing regions of the gulf may cause a catastrophic loss of newborns. Harp seals give birth on the floes, and pups need at least 12 days on the ice before they complete nursing and can take to the sea on their own.
At this time of year, ice packs normally stretch from Quebec's Magdalen Islands south to Prince Edward Island. By late March, the floes should be teeming with hundreds of thousands of seal mothers and their pups.
A TALE OF TWO STORIES
STEPPING BACK FROM the horrific headlines, it is clear that the conflict over Israel/Palestine is all about competing narratives. Both sides inflict inhuman cruelties on one another. Both sides blame the other for forcing them to do so. The Israelis kill far more Palestinians than vice-versa, with far more deadly and effective weapons; but the Palestinians, unlike the Israelis, deliberately target innocents for murder. The Israelis say the conflict will end when the Palestinians renounce their commitment to terrorism and accept Israel’s “right to existence.” The Palestinians claim it will end when Israel ends its illegal occupation of Palestinian lands and compensates the millions of refugees it created, either by returning them to their homes or giving them the funds necessary to build new ones.
In most of the world, it is the Palestinian narrative of a dispossessed people that dominates. In the United States, however, the narrative that dominates is Israel’s: a democracy under constant siege. Europeans and other Palestinian partisans point to the fact that the Israel lobby in America is one of the strongest anywhere, and Jewish individuals and organizations give millions of dollars to political candidates in order to reward pro-Israel policies and punish those who support the Palestinians. Another reason, however, is the near-complete domination by pro-Israel partisans of the punditocracy discourse.
Some Jewish groups in America like to harass news organizations like The Washington Post or National Public Radio for what they believe to be coverage insufficiently sympathetic to Israel’s plight. But even Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu would not be able to complain about the level of support their actions typically receive from the members of the punditocracy.
For reasons of religion, politics, history and genuine conviction the punditocracy debate of the Middle East in America is dominated by people who cannot imagine criticizing Israel. The value of this legion to the Jewish state is, for better or worse, literally incalculable, particularly when push — as it inevitably does in the Middle East — comes to shove. Here’s a list I made in trying to measure the immeasurable.
COLUMNISTS AND COMMENTATORS WHO CAN BE COUNTED UPON TO SUPPORT ISRAEL REFLEXIVELY AND WITHOUT QUALIFICATION:
George Will, The Washington Post, Newsweek and ABC News
William Safire, The New York Times
A.M. Rosenthal, The New York Daily News, formerly Executive Editor of and later columnist for, The New York Times,
Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post, PBS, Time, and The Weekly Standard, formerly of the New Republic.
Michael Kelly, The Washington Post, The Atlantic Monthly, National Journal, and MSNBC.com, formerly of The New Republic and The New Yorker.
Lally Weymouth, The Washington Post and Newsweek
Martin Peretz, The New Republic,
Daniel Pipes, The New York Post
Andrea Peyser, The New York Post
Dick Morris, The New York Post
Lawrence Kaplan, The New Republic
William Bennett, CNN
William Kristol, The Washington Post, the Weekly Standard, Fox News, formerly of ABC News
Robert Kagan, The Washington Post and The Weekly Standard,
Mortimer Zuckerman, US News and World Report (Zuckerman is also Chairman of Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations ).
David Gelertner, The Weekly Standard
John Podhoretz, The New York Post and The Weekly Standard
Mona Charen, The Washington Times
Morton Kondracke, Roll Call, Fox News formerly of The McLaughlin Group, The New Republic and PBS
Fred Barnes, The Weekly Standard, Fox News, formerly of The New Republic, The McLaughlin Group, and The Baltimore Sun
Sid Zion, The New York Post, The New York Daily News,
Yossi Klein Halevi The New Republic,
Sidney Zion, The New York Post, formerly of The New York Daily News
Norman Podhoretz, Commentary,
Jonah Goldberg, National Review and CNN
Laura Ingraham, CNN, formerly of MSNBC and CBS News
Jeff Jacoby, The Boston Globe
Rich Lowry, National Review
Andrew Sullivan, The New Republic
Seth Lipsky, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Sun, formerly of the Jewish Forward
Irving Kristol, The Public Interest, The National Interest and The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page
Chris Matthews, MSNBC
Allan Keyes, MSNBC, WorldNetDaily.com
Brit Hume, Fox News
John Leo, US News and World Report
Robert Bartley, The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page
John Fund, The Wall Street Journal OpinionJournal, formerly of The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page
Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page,
Ben Wattenberg, The Washington Times, PBS
Tony Snow, Washington Times and Fox News
Lawrence Kudlow, National Review and CNBC
Alan Dershowitz, Boston Herald, Washington Times
David Horowitz, Frontpage.com
Jacob Heilbrun, The Los Angeles Times
Thomas Sowell, Washington Times
Frank Gaffney Jr, Washington Times
Emmett Tyrell, American Spectator and New York Sun
Cal Thomas, Washington Times
Oliver North, Washington Times and Fox News, formerly of MSNBC
Michael Ledeen, Jewish World Review
William F. Buckley, National Review
Bill O’Reilly, Fox News
Paul Greenberg, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette,
L. Brent Bozell, Washington Times
Todd Lindberg, Washington Times
Michael Barone, US News and World Report and The McLaughlin Group
Ann Coulter, Human Events,
Linda Chavez, Creators Syndicate
Cathy Young, Reason Magazine
Uri Dan, New York Post
Dr. Laura Schlessinger, morality maven
Rush Limbaugh, radio host
PUBLICATIONS THAT, FOR REASONS OF OWNER OR EDITORSHIP CAN BE COUNTED UPON TO SUPPORT ISRAEL REFLEXIVELY AND WITHOUT QUALIFICATION:
The New Republic (Martin Peretz, Michael Steinhardt, Roger Hertog, Owners)
Commentary (American Jewish Committee, Owner)
US News and World Report (Mortimer Zuckerman, Owner)
The New York Daily News (Mortimer Zuckerman, Owner)
The New York Post (Rupert Murdoch, Owner)
The Weekly Standard (Rupert Murdoch, Owner)
The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page (Peter Kann, Editor)
The Atlantic Monthly (Michael Kelly, Editor)
COLUMNISTS LIKELY TO CRITICIZE BOTH ISRAEL AND THE PALESTINIANS, BUT VIEW THEMSELVES TO BE CRITICALLY SUPPORTERS OF ISRAEL, AND ULTIMATELY, WOULD SUPPORT ISRAELI SECURITY OVER PALESTINIAN RIGHTS:
Thomas Friedman, The New York Times,
Richard Cohen, The Washington Post and New York Daily News
Avishai Margolit, The New York Review of Books
David Remnick, The New Yorker
Eric Alterman, The Nation and MSNBC.com
The New York Times Editorial Board
The Washington Post Editorial Board
COLUMNISTS LIKELY TO BE REFLEXIVELY ANTI-ISRAEL AND/OR PRO-PALESTINIAN REGARDLESS OF CIRCUMSTANCE:
Robert Novak, The Washington Post
Pat Buchanan, WorldNetDaily.com, formerly of The Washington Times and CNN.
Alexander Cockburn, The Nation and New York Press
Christopher Hitchens, The Nation and Vanity Fair
Edward Said, The Nation
HOW FRIENDS CAN BEST HELP
As can be seen from this list of lists, the entire anti-Israel contingent of the punditocracy does not add up to a single George Will or William Safire, much less a Wall Street Journal or US News. It remains to be seen whether unqualified support for all of Israel’s actions is really in that tortured nation’s best interest in the long run. Sometimes the bravest and most valuable advice a trusted friend can give is: “STOP.” Someone is going to have to stop first if this unending catastrophe is ever to end.
Eric Alterman is a columnist for The Nation and a regular contributor to MSNBC.com.
There's something clarifying about Eric Alterman and Edward Said simultaneously deciding and writing that a key problem for the Middle East and for American democracy is that most commentators are blindly, reflexively, unalterably defenders of anything Israel does. Here's Alterman's exquisite formulation:
For reasons of religion, politics, history and genuine conviction the punditocracy debate of the Middle East in America is dominated by people who cannot imagine criticizing Israel. The value of this legion to the Jewish state is, for better or worse, literally incalculable, particularly when push — as it inevitably does in the Middle East — comes to shove.
Notice the escape clause - "and genuine conviction." Without that phrase, Alterman, who believes a lone blogger is a dangerous force for McCarthyite censorship, would be accusing a whole swath of writers of having dual loyalty, or simply refusing to think or exercise their own conscience or judgment with regard to the Middle East. Most of the people cited are also Jews. The term Alterman uses is: "COLUMNISTS AND COMMENTATORS WHO CAN BE COUNTED UPON TO SUPPORT ISRAEL REFLEXIVELY AND WITHOUT QUALIFICATION." Then he provides a list - a black-list, you might call it - of all the offending journalists. Here's Said, who chimes in on the same theme:
The worst misrepresentation of all is that in the 54 years since 1948, never has a narrative of Palestinian heroism and suffering been allowed to emerge. We are all depicted as violent fanatic extremists who are little more than the terrorists that George Bush and his cabal have imposed on the consciousness of a stunned and systematically misinformed population, aided and uncritically abetted by an entire army of commentators and media stars -- the Blitzers, Zahns, Lehrers, Rathers, Brokaws, Russerts, and their ilk. The Israeli lobby is scarcely needed with such faithful disciples trailing happily in its ranks.
So here Said is also naming names of journalists lobotomized by blind support for a tiny country. Now why should such people be so blinkered? If it isn't out of conviction, what could it be? This is fodder for the usual anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and it's helpful to see Alterman reinvigorate the trope. I wouldn't call him dangerous or a threat to the republic. But it strikes me that someone publishing blacklists of journalists controlled by the Jews might be a little circumspect about labeling others McCarthyites.
Thanks to the reputation of the man it is said to have covered, there is always likely to be controversy over the origins of the Turin Shroud. The "negative" image of the bearded face will forever be associated with the popular image of Jesus Christ. Radio-carbon dating identified the cloth as medieval more than a decade ago, but, desperate not to lose the Shroud’s religious significance as one of the world’s most potent relics, many people continue to challenge this scientific evidence.
One of the most recent explanations of the Shroud’s history, however, does not question the findings. The claimants agree that the fabric, with its curiously imprinted image, is medieval. Where they differ from all the previous research, however, is over the identity of the Shroud’s former occupant, and their conclusions are bound to provoke heated debate.
Bradford University lecturer Robert Lomas and colleague Christopher Knight claim they can link science and history to prove that the face on the shroud is that of a priest whose followers helped Scotland to win independence from England in the 14th century.
"The scientific facts leave me in no doubt," says Dr Lomas, a physicist who now lectures in Information Systems. "The cloth was used to wrap Jacques de Molay, the leader of a monastic order known as the Knights Templar and whose followers were given refuge by Robert the Bruce."
The idea, he says, might sound far fetched, but he’s confident it would stand up in court against the original claim.
"For a start, the radiocarbon dates fit. Also, de Molay was neither dead nor resurrected. The person in that shroud had to be alive to produce the image."
The image on the Turin Shroud is, it seems, only on the surface of the fabric and has been described by independent sources as "a series of tiny scorch marks".
Lomas maintains the image on the shroud was created through a process known as the Volckringer effect, where heat, sweat, acids and oxygen-free radicals scorch the cloth. A paper recently published by Dr AA Mills from Leicester University appears to back up this theory. It shows how extreme conditions, such as a body under torture, force oxygen atoms apart to give off pinpricks of atomic energy.
"In stable conditions oxygen atoms are bonded in pairs," says Lomas, "but lactic acid being released from muscle tissue under extreme stress would cause an unstable reaction. The marks on the shroud are pixelated - thousands of dots scorched on the cloth."
This, he says, causes an image like a photographic negative - although he stresses that forms of primitive photography using chemicals like silver nitrate are not an issue here, despite some well-publicised theories involving the creative genius of Leonardo da Vinci.
"Apart from the fact that the shroud was first publicly displayed 100 years before da Vinci was born, any photographic-type image of a full length body would produce a foreshortened result, and the figure on the shroud is distorted the opposite way, with strangely long arms."
But what if Christ himself wasn’t dead? argue those who might concede a death and resurrection scenario but point out that a potion to slow down metabolism and simulate death might have been administered through the wine/vinegar said to have been given to Christ on the cross. Theories suggest that because death during crucifixion comes about through asphyxiation - the lungs can’t inflate - the hole pierced in Christ’s side was to relieve the fluid pressure building up in his chest and keep him alive as long as possible.
"Nope," says Lomas. "We spent a lot of time on that one, too, and the blood flow doesn’t fit with the Roman style of crucifixion. We carried out experiments ourselves and had the help of notes and illustrations from an early 20th-century Parisian surgeon. He had a shroud fixation and had plenty of access to methods of proving blood flow theories which were denied us."
It appears that the victim in the shroud had been nailed up with his right arm over his head and his left arm thrown out sideways. According to the blood flow on the lower arms of the image, and a dislocated thumb and right shoulder (which have been verified by medical experts), Lomas has worked out that the victim in the shroud was crucified by nailing him to a door which was slammed open and shut, causing excruciating pain. On the point of death, when he was taken down, soaring temperature and sweat would have produced metabolic acidosis - with lactic acid causing a fibril yellowing reaction on the cloth.
An intriguing theory expounded by Dr Mills is that the initial energy release would have set in motion an extremely slow chain reaction. If the cloth were kept in a dark place with a good oxygen supply that reaction would continue to darken the affected fibrils until it had run its course, after which the image would begin to fade (also very slowly). Rumours of the shroud mysteriously fading have been circulating recently, though no source will confirm it.
"Interesting to see that where there were blood clots, the linen had been protected from that yellowing reaction," notes Lomas, who agrees with those who say the cloth was a sophisticated weave unknown at the time of Christ (and bearing traces of European holm oak). It should, he reckons, be virtually an open and shut case even without the radiocarbon dating results arrived at by three independent laboratories.
But QED is not likely to follow this particular mathematical equation - it is simply too passionate an issue to be brushed off by pragmatists. Serious doubts on the validity of the carbon dating have been expressed by a team from the University of Texas led by Dr Leoncio Gardez-Valdez, who held the chair of microbiology at the university’s Health Sciences Centre. They say the samples used for dating were contaminated by a microbe build up which created a form of bioplastic coating on the fibres of the shroud. The contamination has been proved, they claim, to be completely resistant to the cleansing methods used by the three laboratories who did the carbon dating. The end result? Such a gross distortion of results that the age and authenticity of this relic is still open to question.
Others query the analysis of the cloth and support forensic tests on the threads which claim the material was woven in the Middle East (the presence of a particularly specific cotton - gossypium hebaceum - is significant here).
Conspiracy theories surrounding the radiocarbon dating are still rife 12 years on. A particularly interesting argument lobs the ball back to the Church with accusations that discrediting the authenticity of the shroud is in Christianity’s own interest because the results prove Jesus was still alive when he was taken down from the cross.
Knight and Lomas are not for turning. They dismiss any notion that three academic laboratories with worldwide reputations would put these at risk, then they trash the bioplastic coating argument.
"The microbe build-up is only on some parts of the shroud," says Lomas "and we’re not asking anybody to take our word for it, so I’ll quote Professor Harry Grove, the co-inventor of the accelerator mass spectrometry method of radiocarbon dating, who says, ‘It may be that the bioplastic coating will change the shroud date somewhat. My bet is that it is unlikely to do so by more than 100 years or so."
And Lomas is not content to let sleeping dogs, priests or messiahs lie. His latest task has been assimilating all the information available on the bioplastic coating and using new calibration methods based on dendrochronology (tree ring data) to calculate the growth and death rates of the microbes and subtract them from the thickness of the coating. He says the net result shows the flax was living between 1013 and 1143 AD.
"It’s not old enough to be anything but a medieval artefact, so QED it damned well is, as far as I’m concerned."
Knight, who studies social behaviour and belief systems, says the shroud would have been de Molay’s own. "Templars were part of the pre-Christian Jerusalem Church which carried out symbolic death and resurrection ceremonies. Priests in the order would carry shrouds for this purpose." When they were denounced as heretics by Pope Clement in 1307, hundreds of Templars in France were rounded up and tortured by the Paris Inquisition.
"De Molay was accused of denying the divinity of Christ so it’s logical that they would have subjected him to a re-enactment of the suffering of Christ - including a copycat crucifixion," says Lomas. "The final act of mockery would have been to use his own shroud."
Meanwhile, so legend has it, many Templars fled to Scotland, where Robert the Bruce gave them refuge. The Scottish warlord had been excommunicated by Pope Clement in 1305 because when Bruce’s rival John Comyn had run into a church to seek sanctuary, he hadn’t let that interfere with his primary purpose and summarily dispatched him in front of the altar.
In 1309, Templar vessels are said to have landed on the Isle of May in the Firth of Forth, not far from Bruce’s stronghold near Stirling. Remains found in the 1990s during excavations on an ancient monastic settlement on the island, included a skeleton with a cockle shell placed between the teeth. The cockle shell was a secret symbol showing membership of the Knights of Santiago - an order formed at the time of Templar persecution in France. Former Templars were affiliated to the new order by swearing allegiance to the Spanish crown. The ships landing at the Isle of May were said to have sailed from Portugal, another safe haven.
In 1314, three months after de Molay was finally put to death, Bruce made his stand at Bannockburn. Tradition has it that towards the end he was heavily outnumbered when a fresh force of horsemen appeared and routed the English. Several versions of the story tell of the "Beauseant" (the Templar war banner) flying as they charged.
According to family records of the St Clairs of Roslin, William de St Clair was part of that charge. He went on, it is said, to become leader of the Scottish Knights Templar after Bannockburn and one of his titles - again according to family records - was "Knight of the Cockle".
As for de Molay, there is no recorded mention of the shroud until it was publicly shown for the first time in 1357 in the French town of Lirey by the widow of Geoffrey de Charnay. His uncle had been a Templar and had been burnt to death together with Jaques de Molay in 1314. "Coincidental or what?" says Lomas.
Monday, March 25, 2002 (SFGATE)
Science magazine dropped a bombshell earlier this month: The prestigious journal published a paper by a team of researchers at Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratory who say they have discovered evidence of what looks like nuclear fusion taking place in a relatively inexpensive tabletop device.
The findings bear striking similarities to the controversial cold-fusion claims made by chemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann in 1989, although the particular experiment is different.
There is considerable controversy surrounding the purported discovery, as well as the magazine's decision to publish the Oak Ridge team's findings. Many members of the mainstream scientific community, physicists in particular, contend that tabletop fusion is physically impossible and a violation of the basic laws of nature.
The stakes are enormous. On the one hand, if the carefully documented experiment described in Science is successfully replicated elsewhere, related technologies may one day provide humanity with a long sought-after and much-needed new form of renewable, decentralized, nonpolluting energy. On the other hand, if the results are disproved, cold-fusion researchers will suffer a very significant setback.
Like earlier cold-fusion claims, the Oak Ridge team's results also threaten to undermine public support for conventional hot-fusion research programs, including the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories' roughly $4 billion National Ignition Facility, which has been plagued by cost overruns and performance problems.
Not surprisingly, thanks to efforts aimed at preventing its publication, the controversial research paper almost never saw the light of day.
When the dust settled, however, news of the research ended up being splashed across four articles in the March 8, 2002, issue of what many regard as the world's premier peer-reviewed journal of scientific research.
One of the articles details how senior managers at Oak Ridge tried to squelch publication of the research paper despite the fact that it had passed Science magazine's rigorous, nearly yearlong peer-review process.
In a highly unusual though not unprecedented step, a few weeks before the publication date, the government lab's top officials contacted the magazine's editor, former Stanford president and biologist Donald Kennedy, and told him that a subsequent experiment conducted by others at the lab had uncovered errors in the original experiment that rendered the fusion findings null and void. They asked that the article be pulled.
To mollify their superiors, the Oak Ridge research team, led by R. P. Taleyarkhan, agreed to include a mention of the subsequent experiment, which was not peer reviewed and which used different equipment, in their final paper.
But Taleyarkhan's team also stood by their original conclusions, saying more experiments should be done to uncover the reasons for the discrepancies between the data.
Kennedy made the final call on publication.
"We see no good reason for abandoning our plans to publish the paper, and we can see no merit whatsoever in the efforts to discredit it in advance," he explained in an editorial he wrote in the same issue of the magazine.
He stood up to a considerable amount of pressure. At the last moment, top Oak Ridge officials had pulled out their biggest gun. Government labs routinely grant scientists permission to publish their research findings unless the work involves classified information. But in this case, they tried to formally withdraw the routine government permission they had previously granted to Taleyarkhan to publish his paper, according to Science magazine.
They were joined in that quest by William Happer, a physicist at Princeton University who headed the U.S. Department of Energy's science office for two unproductive years in the early 1990s. According to Kennedy, Happer, along with several other senior federal energy scientists, also wrote letters discouraging him from publishing the Taleyarkhan paper as submitted. For his part, Happer says he was only trying to protect Science magazine from the embarrassment of publishing work that would later prove false.
"There was certainly pressure from Oak Ridge to delay, if not to kill, the paper," Kennedy told Science magazine's own news reporter. "I'm annoyed at the intervention, and I'm annoyed at the assumptions that nonauthors had the authority to tell us we couldn't publish the paper."
The notoriously pugnacious Robert Park, director of public information for the American Physical Society (one of the nation's premier physics associations), who for years has made a practice of ridiculing scientists, journalists and others who pursue tabletop-fusion theories and applications, also vigorously criticized Kennedy's decision.
Park wrote scathing editorials attacking Science magazine's editor both before and after the Taleyarkhan paper hit the newsstands.
One of Park's other frequent targets is Eugene Mallove the former chief science writer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who wrote the first articles revealing MIT's reliance on doctored data in its key study that discredited the original Pons-Fleischmann cold-fusion findings.
Mallove resigned from MIT in protest and for the last decade has been publishing the iconoclastic Infinite Energy magazine, which has kept the cold-fusion torch burning (and which has featured reports of experiments remarkably similar to the one recently published in Science).
"Perhaps Science magazine covets the vast readership of Infinite Energy magazine," Park sniped in the column he writes for the physics group's Web site, which appeared after word began circulating that Science was about to publish the Taleyarkhan paper.
As the world's leading debunker of tabletop fusion, Park has put himself at the center of the controversy. If he's right, historians will look back on him as a sane voice in a wilderness of wild claims. If he's proven wrong, though, his fall from grace will have come many years too late. Few, if any, American scientists have done more than Park to discourage the pursuit of tabletop forms of nuclear fusion.
In his editorial, Kennedy says it should be left to the open scientific process to determine whether Taleyarkhan and his colleagues got it right.
"Our mission," Kennedy wrote, "is to put interesting, potentially important science into public view after ensuring its quality as best as we possibly can. After that, efforts at repetition and reinterpretation can take place out in the open. That's where it belongs, not in an alternative universe in which anonymity prevails, rumor leaks out and facts stay inside."
The Experiment Behind the Firestorm
At the root of all of this are the details about the latest experiment. The work builds on previous cold-fusion research, even though many researchers have dropped that much- maligned term and now prefer to call it "tabletop fusion" or "sonofusion."
By any name, though, what is being described remains something most physicists think is impossible. Conventional physics theory holds that nuclear fusion can occur only under massively extreme pressures and temperatures of the sort found at places such as the center of the Sun.
The Oak Ridge team drew some critical lessons from the earlier Pons-Fleischmann experiments. For starters, they did not rely on the often unstable combination of platinum wire, palladium metal and deuterium oxide in which the chemists had first claimed to observe their unexpected fusion finding, but which later proved difficult to replicate.
Instead, Taleyarkhan's team took some of the same basic concepts and applied them to the long neglected field of sonoluminescence, which was first discovered by scientists at the University of Cologne in 1934. Put simply, sonoluminescence means that bubbles excited by sound waves can emit flashes of light. Until quite recently, the intriguing phenomenon wasn't very well understood or controllable, but advances in sonoluminescence made the Oak Ridge team's apparently more reliable approach to creating tabletop fusion possible.
The scientists discovered that with a few extra tweaks (including bombarding a deuterated acetone solution with high-speed neutrons), they could create bubbles that would grow to about 1 millimeter across. Then, in a fraction of a second, they could implode the gas inside the bubbles to just a few nanometers (or billionths of a meter) in diameter.
It's like taking a small building and instantaneously squishing it to the size of a rock.
"The catastrophic collapse ... heats [the solution] to the point at which deuterium atoms collide and fuse, the authors argue," explains Science writer Charles Seife in an article that accompanies the Taleyarkhan report. The claim that fusion is taking place is bolstered by measurements of two known markers of nuclear reactions, tritium-decay activity and neutron emissions.
It was the absence -- or at least inconsistent presence -- of those fusion markers that helped create much of the widespread derision about the original Pons-Fleischmann experiment within mainstream physics circles.
Those are the measurements that Taleyarkhan's bosses say he and his colleagues got wrong. Taleyarkhan's response is that his team has repeated the experiment many times with the proper controls in place and that any contrary results should in all fairness be subjected to the same peer-review process that was applied to the publication of his article.
Science magazine's decision to publish the paper promises to take the cold-fusion debate to an even more fevered level. What happens next is not hard to imagine.
Leading members of the mainstream physics community will in all likelihood continue to try to discredit the new research findings. After all, everything they have stood for -- and most of the money they get from the federal government -- is now at stake.
That's one reason we will probably see stepped-up criticisms of the Oak Ridge team, including the type of unfair personal attacks that damaged the careers of several noted scientists whose work supported the original Pons-Fleischmann cold-fusion claims (such as John Bockris, a former distinguished professor of physical chemistry at Texas A&M University and co-founder of the International Society for Electrochemistry, and former Stanford Professor Bob Huggins). Science editor Kennedy may also come under continued fire.
The long knives are coming again out not only because of the controversial nature of the research but also because some very considerable sums of money are involved.
The National Ignition Facility hot-fusion project, for example, is the single most expensive item in the Department of Energy's research budget. The project, which seeks to use superpowerful lasers to create fusion, has been a scientific scandal virtually from the start. Its first director, Michael Campbell, was forced to resign after admitting he didn't have the Ph.D. from Princeton he claimed he had earned. The as-yet-unsuccessful effort he led is now significantly over budget and years behind schedule.
The cause of good science will be aided by Science magazine's courageous decision to publish the full details of the latest tabletop-fusion research. It's possible, of course, that the claims made by Taleyarkhan and his colleagues will be successfully debunked by others, in which case humanity will gain a better understanding of the best ways to measure and identify nuclear reactions. But it's also possible that Taleyarkhan's work will finally unleash the physics revolution that Pons, Fleischmann and so many others tried but failed to touch off.
If that happens, we may see the era of fossil fuels at long last begin to draw to a close. Imagine being able to buy little cold-fusion reactors, which would free humanity from our dependence on centralized, polluting forms of energy, as well as the despotic governmental regimes that control them. Big government budgets for hot-fusion programs would likely take a hit, but the global economy would eventually get an invigorating supply of new cheap and clean energy in return.
Taleyarkhan and his colleagues have pledged to work with other scientists to share their methods so their work can be replicated. The critical question now is whether fair and open investigations of their claims will take place here in the United States.
The organized high-level campaign against the publication of Taleyarkhan's paper is a reflection of how much is at stake.
04/01/2002
(SF Examiner)
Locked in a nondescript computer database, a shadowy operative named Roy Bullock kept file upon file on liberal San Francisco Jews who disagreed with Israeli policies.
The files included Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, addresses, phone numbers and group memberships. Some of the information was sold to foreign governments, including Israeli and South African intelligence groups.
Shockingly, Bullock was in the employ of a civil rights group whose motto is "fighting anti-Semitism, bigotry and extremism": the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. Numerous targets of the ADL -- who drew parallels to COINTELPRO, the FBI's tainted domestic surveillance program -- say the profiling and covert activities continue to this day.
"They are continuing to gather facts," said Abdeen Jabara, a Manhattan attorney and former president of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. "That, of course, is a euphemism for what we say is private spying."
Not only were liberal Jews a target, but information also was kept on labor unions, pro-Palestinian organizations, anti-apartheid groups, American Arabs and anti-Semites. After the Federal Bureau of Investigation broke the case in 1993, a number of these targets filed suit against the ADL. The last lawsuit was recently settled.
The settlement in February marked the first time any of the organization's victims were allowed to speak out. Usually, the ADL demands plaintiffs keep quiet as a condition of any settlement.
Without those constraints, victims Jeffrey Blankfort, Steve Zeltzer and Anne Poirier are revealing the underbelly of an organization that previously had successfully shielded itself from condemnation. They are using the ADL's own spy as a fulcrum.
Bullock's relationship with Blankfort and Zeltzer began when he infiltrated a pro-Palestinian group started by the two, both of whom are Jewish. Once inside, Bullock collected and sold information about the two men to the ADL and, possibly the Mossad, the foreign arm of Israeli intelligence.
Although Bullock never met Poirier, he may have sold information on her organization to the South African government. The woman, who lives in Berkeley, ran a scholarship program for South African exiles in the early 1990s. During the course of her lawsuit against the ADL, she discovered the ADL's operative had sold confidential information to a South African agent in San Francisco for $15,000.
Poirier had never done any work relating to the Middle East, and she was astounded when she found out that the ADL had kept tabs on her. During her nine-year court fight with the group, she found out more than she needed to know about its operation, and now nothing much surprises her.
"They gathered information on anti-apartheid activities," she said, "anyone the organization felt, by definition, would be against Israel because they were too left-wing."
A few files, so what?
The fact the ADL has a file on a group doesn't imply clandestine activities, said San Francisco regional director Jonathan Bernstein. He resents the implication of the word spying, saying it implies people were being followed around and trailed. That simply wasn't the case, he said, though he acknowledged he never met Bullock.
"We have files on the NAACP because we've done collaborative projects with them," he said. "They probably have files on the ADL, too."
In Bernstein's eyes, the group's fact-finding operations are one of its most important missions.
Much of the time, the "missions" are nothing more than gleaning information from media reports, he said. People employed by the ADL do attend public meetings to keep an eye on people, just as other journalists do.
The area's top boss, however, repeatedly sidestepped questions on whether fact-finders employed subterfuge to get information. The fact that some of the people being watched by the ADL were Jewish was immaterial, Bernstein said.
Other civil rights groups, such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, do similar things on a limited scale, he said.
A representative of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is headquartered in Birmingham, could not be reached for comment.
Because the ADL has 30 regional offices, the organization is much better equipped to ferret out anti-Semitism and other racist behavior.
"It can help us to respond to hate activity before someone gets hurt," Bernstein said. "That's the ultimate objective."
But are there times when fact-finding becomes a civil rights violation?
The San Francisco office of the American Civil Liberties Union, a group one might expect to have a dim view on the tactics employed by the ADL, refused to comment on the group's fact-finding activities. Nor would spokeswoman Rachel Swain give a reason for the silence.
Ongoing complaints
Groups have been saying for years that the ADL isn't the civil rights organization it claims to be, but no one has been listening. Mostly, it's because those groups have been thinly-veiled anti-Semites, such as the Liberty Lobby, or hate groups such as White Aryan Resistance and the KKK.
But, as vile as some of these groups are, there is a significant amount of evidence that their vitriol is not unfounded. For at least four decades, the ADL continuously has tracked and spied on groups it considers not only a threat to the Jewish community, but to the state of Israel.
Hussein Ibish certainly thinks so. Ibish is the spokesman for the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee -- an organization that is, in many ways, the Arab counterpart to the ADL. Though certainly at odds with many Israeli policies, the ADC is not anti-Semitic, and plays a rather moderate role.
"Was the ADL spying on people?" asked Ibish, quickly answering his own question. "Certainly in San Francisco they were. We know they were engaging in illegal activities to gain information. They, and their operatives, were working hand-in-glove with South African intelligence and Israeli intelligence."
Meet Mr. Spy
By his own admission, Bullock had been working off the books as a fact-finder for the ADL since the mid-1960s. He would infiltrate not only openly anti-Semitic groups, but also pro-Palestinian and anti-apartheid organizations, usually under false pretenses. Bullock, who is not Jewish, would then pass that information along to the ADL.
He received information about his targets from former San Francisco Police Inspector Tom Gerard, who fled to the Philippines after being indicted in 1994 for illegal use of a police computer. Gerard's current whereabouts are unknown.
Bullock, who no longer does undercover work for the organization, declined to be interviewed for this article.
Nobody could have known about the extent of Bullock's surveillance, if police had not seized his computer database in April 1993. It contained thousands of files on liberal Jewish San Franciscans, Arab-Americans, anti-apartheid activists, anti-Semitic groups, and plain ol' white racists.
On April 8, 1993, armed with this information, police in San Francisco and Los Angeles searched the ADL offices in those two cities. In San Francisco, roughly 10 banker's boxes of information -- 75 percent of which officers said was illegally obtained -- were seized.
A majority of data in those boxes confirmed police suspicions that it had come from Bullock's computer. On that computer was information on 9,876 people, including 1,394 driver's licenses. The files were divided into five categories: "Pinko," "Right," Arabs," "Skins," and "ANC," the last standing for African National Congress.
Bullock also told the FBI that he had information on various labor groups. These groups included: the San Francisco Labor Council, the Oakland Educators Association, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Irish Northern Aid, the International Indian Treaty Council and the Asian Law Caucus.
Lawsuits galore
After the SFPD raid on the ADL offices, then-District Attorney Arlo Smith filed a lawsuit against the organization to stop the spying. The suit was settled that November. Though the ADL acknowledged no wrongdoing, the group agreed to stop using police to get confidential information. The league also agreed to pay $75,000 to a fund used to help stop hate crimes.
On April 18, 1993, 19 people who Bullock kept files on sued the ADL in San Francisco Superior Court. Pete McCloskey, a former Republican congressman from San Mateo County, was the group's attorney. His wife, Helen, was one of the original plaintiffs.
A few months later, in October, the ADC slapped its Jewish counterpart with a similar lawsuit in Los Angeles federal court. The ADC claimed the ADL passed along information on the group to the Israeli government. The ADC's suit was settled in October 1996.
The ADL agreed to pay $175,000 toward the Arab group's legal costs. The ADL also agreed to contribute $25,000 to a foundation, administered by the ADL and the ADC, dedicated to improving relations between Jews and Arabs. The ADL was able to deny all wrongdoing.
Journalistic enterprise?
The McCloskey case, however, would drag on. The main point of contention in that case was whether the ADL could be considered a journalistic enterprise, a point won in court by the ADL.
The ADL publishes hundreds of newsletters, papers and books on a wide range of subjects, attorney David Goldstein said. As with any other journalistic enterprise, it contended it was not required to release its confidential information or sources.
After a 1998 ruling by the 1st District Court of Appeal, giving the ADL journalistic protection, 14 of the remaining 17 plaintiffs -- two had died in the interim -- dropped their cases against the ADL.
On Feb. 22, 2002, the ADL settled with Blankfort, Zeltzer and Poirier.
What held up the process, said McCloskey, was his clients' refusal to sign a confidentially agreement. The three felt they had been viciously wronged, he said, and wanted to publicize that fact.
With the settlement, each of the three plaintiffs received about $50,000. None of the three, or McCloskey, believes the ADL will stop their spying ways.
"It was settled partially out of fatigue," said the attorney. "Everyone figured it might be best if we all just moved on."
Even if the case had continued, said Goldstein, there is a debate over how much the three plaintiffs could prove they had been injured. Most of the contested information consisted of Social Security and driver's license numbers, which are hardly difficult items to find.
Nine years later, McCloskey is still angry about the case and wants the federal government to revoke the group's tax-exempt status.
Since they obviously are working in conjunction with the Israeli government, he said, they should register as such. Referring to themselves as an education group, said the attorney, is simply a sham.
Australian Herald and Weekly Times
03mar02
IT'S out there somewhere, big, brown and dangerous -- and it's heading our way.
It's Planet X, the fabled 10th planet of the solar system.
Noted 19th century English astronomer John Couch Adams was the first to begin plotting its likely position after noticing strange deviations in the orbit of Uranus -- at that time the most distant planet known -- that suggested it was being tugged by the gravity of another body.
Since then dozens of eminent astronomers have followed the same hunch. The search has thus far yielded two further planets -- Neptune (1846) and Pluto (1930) -- but not the supersized "brown dwarf" they still think exists.
Will a 10th be found? There are as many sceptics as believers. If it's out there, says John Anderson at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it has a mass five times that of Earth's, takes as long as 1000 years to orbit the Sun and is so far away its effects on the outermost planets won't be detected again until 2600.
But here's where the mystery thickens. If it does exist and is coming back, what will the effects be for Earth. Could it be that it was Planet X that killed the dinosaurs?
More to the point, if the world's best astronomers do prove its existence and know it is returning, would they tell us?
Australian author Stephanie Relfe is among a band of New Age activists who are convinced there is a conspiracy of silence.
Relfe, whose books include The Mars Records: Biofeedback Meter Sessions Where a Man Regained Hidden Memories of Military Service on Mars and The Dangers of Eating Microwave Food, has amassed a catalogue of evidence that suggests Earth is due for a closer encounter than it would wish with Planet X in late 2003.
Among the claims on her website, www.metatech.org:
NASA discovered and excitedly disclosed the existence of Planet X on December 30, 1983. A Washington Post article the next day quoted space researcher Dr James Houck speculating that the object was as close to Earth as 80 billion kilometres -- "if it really is that close, it would be part of our solar system," he said. Media controllers quickly gagged the scientists responsible. One NASA expert, Dr Robert Harrington, who continued to speak about a strange find, met an untimely death in 1993.
OBSERVATORIES continued to sight the planet last year. To quash concerns, NASA announced it had found "the largest asteroid in history" beyond Neptune.
PLANET X has intentionally been made to sound ridiculous and confusing in a bid to deflect interest.
DRAMATIC changes in weather patterns and an upsurge of earthquakes and volcanoes since the 1990s are a precursor of what's to come. X's mass, magnetism and density is such that it disrupts the surface of every planet it passes.
NASA and US military chiefs are quietly building dome homes to survive the coming cataclysm. "As many know, NASA has covered up evidence of UFOs, ETs and structures on the Moon and Mars for quite some time," writes co-conspiracist Mark Hazlewood at his website, www.prep2003.com. He believes the devastation will wipe out all but a few hundred million people on Earth.
How do we survive? Head for the hills, says www.zetatalk.com, which predicts that Planet X's passing will exert such a dramatic effect on the magnetic poles and tectonic plates of Earth that all but the eastern third of Australia will disappear under the waves.
Michelle Goldberg, AlterNet
April 1, 2002
Between them, the authors of the incendiary new book "Into the Buzzsaw," out this month from Prometheus, have won nearly every award journalism has to give -- a Pulitzer, several Emmys, a Peabody, a prize from Investigative Reporters and Editor, an Edward R. Murrorw and several accolades from the Society of Professional Journalists. One is veteran of the Drug Enforcement Administration and a best-selling author, another is a Nieman Fellow at Harvard.
And most of them are considered, at best, marginal by the mainstream media. At worst, they've been deemed incompetent and crazy for having the audacity to uncover evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors committed by government agencies and corporate octopi.
Edited by ex-CBS producer Kristina Borjesson, "Into the Buzzsaw" is a collection of essays, mostly by serious journalists excommunicated from the media establishment for tackling subjects like the CIA's role in drug smuggling, lies perpetuated by the investigators of TWA flight 800, POWs rotting in Vietnam, a Korean war massacre, the disenfranchisement of black voters in Bush's election, bovine growth hormone's dangers and a host of other unpopular issues.
Borjesson describes "the buzzsaw" as "what can rip through you when you try to investigate or expose anything this country's large institutions -- be they corporate or government -- want to keep under wraps. The system fights back with official lies, disinformation, and stonewalling. Your phone starts acting funny. Strange people call you at strange hours to give you strange information. The FBI calls you. Your car is broken into and the thief takes your computer and your reporter's notebook and leaves everything else behind ... The sense of fear and paranoia is, at times, overwhelming."
The majority of the eighteen pieces in Borjesson's book are about hard-working mainstream journalists, dedicated to the ideals of their profession, who stumble into the buzzsaw and have their careers and reputations eviscerated. Though the subjects and personalities involved are wildly diverse, the stories echo each other in disturbing ways. Journalists are sent by their bosses to do their jobs -- in the case of Borjesson, to investigate the crash of TWA Fight 800 as a producer for CBS news. Sometimes what they find is impolitic, other times it brings threats of corporate lawsuits. Suddenly, editors kill the story, or demand changes. In some instances, like that of TV reporter Jane Akre, who was investigating the use of Monsanto's Bovine Growth Hormone, reporters are ordered to insert outright lies in their pieces or face firing. Other times, like with Gerard Colby's book about the Du Pont family and Gary Webb's San Jose Mercury News series about the CIA's role in the crack epidemic, the bosses are spooked after the fact and withdraw their support from work already published, hanging reporters out to dry.
In the aftermath of Enron, plenty of journalists came forward to publicly wring their hands about the press's failure to catch the story before it destroyed the life savings of thousands. Since then, though, there's been little sign of renewed vigilance towards malfeasance at other companies, even though many have written that Enron's business practices weren't particularly unusual. Without addressing Enron directly, "Into the Buzzsaw" makes it pretty clear why this is by showing how journalists who took on companies like Monsanto and Du Pont were abandoned by their own editors and publishers and embroiled in lawsuits.
When they speak out, buzzsaw victims are usually treated as paranoid conspiracy theorists. Competing outlets valiantly defend the status quo -- The New York Times, The Washington Post and the LA Times launched concurrent attacks on Gary Webb's series, eventually derailing his career and causing his paper to print a retraction (though not of any specific facts mentioned in the story). Writing of this episode in is book "Whiteout," Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair said, "From the savage assaults on Webb by other members of his profession, those unfamiliar with the series might have assumed that Webb had made a series of wild and unsubstantiated charges, long on dramatic speculation and short of specific data or sourcing. In fact, Webb's series was succinct and narrowly focused."
Borjesson was subject to similar attempts at character assassination by her former peers. After Borjesson was fired from CBS, she was asked to develop a pilot for a new investigative series to be overseen by Oliver Stone. She gathered over thirty eyewitnesses who disputed the official government story, but before production even started, other journalists started sneering at the project. Newsweek called Stone the "latest conspiracy crank to delve into the mysterious crash." Time Magazine chimed in with an article headlined "The Conspiracy Channel?" The New York Times dismissed Borjesson's reporting simply because government agencies denied its truth (never mind they were the very agencies Borjesson was investigating).
There's something of an X-Files feel to a lot of these stories, though not in the way that condescending guardians of official truth think. Rather, their surreal feeling comes from the first-person experiences of people finding the institutions they've served all their lives suddenly turning on them. As Borjesson writes, "Walk into the buzzsaw and you'll cut right to this layer of reality. You will feel a deep sense of loss and betrayal. A shocking shift in paradigm. Anyone who hasn't experienced it will call you crazy. Those who don't know the truth, or are covering it up, will call you a conspiracy nut."
In fact, that's just what a lot of these writers have been called. Once a journalist has been tossed out of the inner circle, anything they write can be smeared as sour grapes or mere ranting. The media has already branded them unreliable, so their charges are extremely unlikely to be taken seriously.
A similar thing happens to other progressive media critics. It's not that the media isn't interested in media stories -- see the blanket coverage of Tina Brown's foibles at Talk. It's just that few are interested in critiques that challenge the very essence of journalists' romantic dreams of themselves as Robert Redford playing Bob Woodward in "All the Presidents Men." Right-wingers like "Bias" author Bernard Goldberg tend to get much more attention, perhaps because their insights don't threaten most journalists' cherished self-conceptions.
While most alternative press readers are familiar with Noam Chomsky's scrupulous documentation of the way government lies become the media's conventional wisdom and with Robert McChesney (who wrote Buzzsaw's conclusion) and Mark Crispin Millers' analysis of corporate consolidation, they are routinely written off by those policing the perimeters of acceptable debate. They hardly ever appear in major newspapers or on network TV. While not quibbling with their facts, most media people tar them as alarmists or unrealistic utopians.
Indeed, some of the writers in Buzzsaw say that, before their own experiences, they were among the scoffers. Webb writes, "If we had met five years ago, you wouldn't have found a more staunch defender of the newspaper industry than me ... I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests. So how could I possibly agree with people like Noam Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian, who were claiming the system didn't work, that it was steered by powerful special interests and corporations, and existed to protect the power elite?"
But, like most of the contributors to "Into the Buzzsaw," he did his job too well and the powers that be hurled him onto the other side of the looking glass. "And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been," he writes. "The reason I'd enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn't been, as I'd assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job ... The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress."
The routine maginalizing of media critics is one reason "Into the Buzzsaw" is so important. It might be possible to discredit one erstwhile insider, but to argue that more than a dozen veterans of organizations like CBS News, CNN, The AP, The BBC and The San Jose Mercury News are all crazy in exactly the same way would be to engage in conspiracy-mongering more far-fetched than anything these authors are accused of. And while plenty of lefty writers have excoriated media monopolies, rarely has the precise way that corporate ownership and intimidation warp newsroom values been made quite so explicit. The value of these testimonies is largely in their minute accumulation of detail (which occasionally makes for tedious reading but enhances credibility). Borjesson is especially systematic, laying out every meeting, every conversation, every contradiction in government statements.
Some contributors aren't quite so convincing. The book as a whole would have been stronger without April Oliver's self-serving piece about her involvement in CNN's Tailwind debacle and subsequent firing. She doesn't bother to refute the charges made against her or defend the finer points of her work, which makes her essay seem like a self-serving screed. But that's just one weak spot in an otherwise appallingly convincing book, a book that suggests that the truth about our media-military-industrial complex might go beyond even our paranoid imaginings.
Beyond the specifics of each story, "Into the Buzzsaw" is about how the elite sector of the media to bestows the imprimatur of truth on its own interpretations of the world. In the current landscape, of course, these same outlets largely take it upon themselves to determine which books should be deemed serious. It will be interesting to see if "Into the Buzzsaw" gets any play in the outlets it exposes.
Don't count on it.
Michelle Goldberg is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn.
12/31/01 Debka, Israel:
"The shoe bomb case has also sent ripples through US-Israeli relations. DEBKAfile’s sources report the angry tone taken by US officials with Israeli security officers and Sharon himself over the Reid affair. They believe Israeli intelligence services knew six months ago about Reid’s suspected involvement in terrorist activities as well as the real purpose of his Gaza visit – but said nothing. Had Israel spoken up, or at least dropped some hint about Reid, he never would have been allowed to board the American Airlines plane. Washington would have tipped off French authorities, which would have picked Reid up immediately on his arrival in Paris. To make the situation worse, a private security company called ICTS, owned by an Israeli, Ezra Harel, and registered in the Netherlands, was employed at Charles de Gaulle airport to screen passengers boarding US planes. Most of its personnel are ex-Shin Bet officers. The company covers security at Boston’s Logan airport, where the American Airlines plane came down after flight attendants and passengers overpowered Reid. The Americans believe someone at ICTS must have known that Reid planned to take that flight and passed it on to Israel, which withheld information that could have prevented a major air disaster. The Israeli response to US allegations is no less harsh. They admit letting Reid board an El Al flight from Amsterdam to Tel Aviv in July, although an armed sky marshal was ordered to sit next to him. This was a calculated risk in order to find out who Reid’s contacts were in Israel and the Palestinian territories and the only way to cover his movements effectively."
"He is bringing (on) a religious war with all of the Islamic world."
-- An Arab member of the Israeli Knesset
JERUSALEM - The government of Israel may be about to reopen one of the world's most contested holy sites to Jews and Christians.
Jews call the site in old Jerusalem the Temple Mount. It's the holiest place in Judaism, believed to be where ancient Jewish temples once stood.
Ariel Sharon Muslims revere the same site as the Noble Sanctuary. They believe it's where the prophet Mohammed ascended to heaven. The Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa mosque are built on the site, considered to be the third holiest in Islam.
Only Muslims have been able to visit the area since the Palestinian intifada broke out 16 months ago.
Moslems have worshipped at the site for 1,300 years. Jews believe two ancient temples stood on this same site.
The Romans destroyed the last of the Jewish temples in 70 AD, after crushing a Jewish rebellion. Those who survived were expelled by the Romans from their homeland. The beginning of the Jewish diaspora.
It was 16 months ago that now Prime Minister Ariel Sharon walked on the holy ground accompanied by hundreds of armed soldiers. Many say that was the spark that ignited the Palestinian uprising.
The Temple Mount, or Noble Sanctuary, has been closed to all visitors, except Muslims, ever since.
But a recent report from Israel's security agency, Shin Beth, has recommended reopening the site to Jews and Christians.
Israel has had overall control of the area since the 1967 Six Day War. But it gave day-to-day control to local Muslim authorities with the understanding it would remain open to all religions.
Now Sharon is said to favour enforcing that original understanding.
Youval Steinitz, a member of Sharon's Likud Party, supports the move. "There is no reason to close the Temple Mount for non-Muslim visitors - Jews or Christians. If an archeological site, for instance in Canada, would be closed for Jews, I think that we as Jews or the state of Israel, would protest vehemently."
Yet Muslims and Palestinians are just as vehemently opposed to reopening the site now, with the intifada once again gaining momentum. There is a centuries-old fear that the Jews want to fulfill a biblical prophecy and rebuild their temple on the Temple Mount.
Abdulmalick Dahamshi, an Arab member of the Israeli Knesset, suggests Sharon is courting disaster if he approves the move. "He is bringing a religious war with all of the Islamic world," said Dahamshi.
Given the sensitivities and the current political situation even many Jews oppose reopening the Temple Mount now.
The Israeli cabinet is expected to take up the matter soon.
Hmm, what shall we call this? The 'Sharon Temple' conspiracy?
Israeli Patent Of Solomon's Temple Granted
3-28-2
INTERNATIONAL PRESS RELEASE
The State of Israel after a 4 year battle has issued a patent on Solomon's Temple to a scholar from North Pole, Alaska. The scholar Michael Young claims he has re-created a model of Solomon's Temple which originally stood in downtown Jerusalem. He was issued a United States patent relatively quickly. After the U.S. patent # 423,681 was issued he applied for an Israeli patent. It was finally approved and Patent # 30565 was issued in March of 2002.
His website is a detailed study of rabbinical questions regarding various temple models and why he believes his model is the correct version. Temple scholarship is a very narrow field of study. Very few experts on this subject matter exist. In Israel there are various competing groups trying to establish the real model of the Temple of Solomon. According to his views Solomon's Temple was 20 stories tall. It also had 6 outer gates which stood 10 stories tall each. A real twist is he has the Holy Chamber where the Deity resides on top of the gigantic structure up 2 sets of winding staircases. It is three football fields square, 300 x 300 yards. He said, "If a temple scholar is willing to answer a single question which I have posted on my website he will see that he will come to my point of view regarding the size and scope of the Temple in very short time."
With as much innocent blood that has been shed on both sides he claims peace in Israel cannot occur without the rebuilding of the Temple.
A full set of gallery pictures offers a breathtaking view of an ancient temple if in fact it ever did exist? The original builder of the Temple was born from the 27th or 28th wife of the harem of King David. As always Israel provides plenty of political intrige. Such was the case of his son Solomon who at a tender age of about 20 began a blood cleansing which along with certain key priests which put him on the throne. Thus he was established to be the chosen of God. The construction of the original Temple of the Lord took 7 years.
Mike says, "Time is on my side. If the Shekinah is ever to descend it must be on this temple according to Ezekiel" Asked what do you mean by the Shekinah? His reply, "When God materializes on earth he appears with his 4 cylindrical wheels of his throne chariot. The wheels travel independently and look like space ships zooming back and forth across the night sky. For God is surrounded by darkness and his wheels within wheels zoom to and fro out of his descending tornado from the Dark North."
PRIOR TO THE GOG-MAGOG WAR, there likely will be a war in which Damascus is destroyed as described in Isaiah 17: "An oracle concerning Damascus: 'See, Damascus will no longer be a city but will become a heap of ruins. The cities of Aroer will be deserted..." "...and left to flocks, which will lie down, with no one to make them afraid. The fortified city will disappear from Ephraim," "...and royal power from Damascus; the remnant of Aram will be like the glory of the Israelites," declares the LORD Almighty." (Isaiah 17:3 NIV)
"In that day the glory of Jacob will fade;…" (Isaiah 17:4 NIV) 'Jacob' represents the Israelites. This statement indicates that after Damascus is destroyed, world opinion of the Israelites (perhaps including those living among the nations) will apparently plummet. "...the fat of his body will waste away. It will be as when a reaper gathers the standing grain and harvests the grain with his arm— as when a man gleans heads of grain in the Valley of Rephaim. Yet some gleanings will remain, as when an olive tree is beaten, leaving two or three olives on the topmost branches, four or five on the fruitful boughs," declares the LORD, the God of Israel. In that day men will look to their Maker and turn their eyes to the Holy One of Israel. They will not look to the altars, the work of their hands, and they will have no regard for the Asherah poles and the incense altars their fingers have made. In that day their strong cities, which they left because of the Israelites, will be like places abandoned to thickets and undergrowth." (Isaiah 17:4-9 NIV) " And all will be desolation. You have forgotten God your Savior; you have not remembered the Rock, your fortress." (Isaiah 17:9-10 NIV) "Therefore, though you set out the finest plants and plant imported vines, though on the day you set them out, you make them grow, and on the morning when you plant them, you bring them to bud, yet the harvest will be as nothing in the day of disease and incurable pain." (Isaiah 17:10-11 NIV) "Oh, the raging of many nations— they rage like the raging sea! Oh, the uproar of the peoples— they roar like the roaring of great waters! Although the peoples roar like the roar of surging waters, when he rebukes them they flee far away, driven before the wind like chaff on the hills, like tumbleweed before a gale. In the evening, sudden terror! Before the morning, they are gone! This is the portion of those who loot us, the lot of those who plunder us." ( Isaiah 17:12-14 NIV) VISIT Apocalypse Soon
This war will create a world coalition against Israel as Israel so strongly defeats the Palestinians and Syria. The World is strongly against Israel as it is now with daily shootings of Israeli's by terrorists. Most nations do not want Israel to strike back. So when Israel does, look out. The coalition will be built up and then Ezekiel 38 comes into play.
EZEKIEL 38
"Son of man, set your face against Gog , of the land of Magog, the prince of Rosh, Meshech, and Tubal, and prophecy against him, "and say, Thus says the Lord GOD: "Behold, I am against you, O Gog, the prince of Rosh, Meshech, and Tubal. I will turn you around, put hooks in your jaws, and lead you out, with all your army, horses, and horsemen, all splendidly clothed, a great company with bucklers and shields, all of them handling swords. Persia, Ethiopia, and Libya are with them, all of them with shield and helmet; Gomer and all its troops; the house of Togarmah from the far north and all of its troops - many people are with you. Prepare yourself and be ready, you and all your companies that are gathered about you; and be a guard for them. After many days you will be visited. In the latter years you will come into the land of those brought back from the sword and gathered from many people on the mountains of Israel, which has long been desolate; they were brought out of the nations, and now all of them dwell safely." "You will ascend, coming like a storm, covering the land like a cloud, you and all your troops and many peoples with you. Thus says the Lord GOD: "On that day it shall come to pass that thoughts will arise in your mind, and you will make an evil plan: You will say, 'I will go up against a land of unwalled villages; I will go to a peaceful people who dwell safely, all of them dwelling without walls, and have neither bars nor gates' - to take plunder and to take booty, to stretch out your hand against the waste places that are again inhabited, and against a people gathered from the nations, who have acquired livestock and goods, who dwell in the midst of the land."
"Sheba, Dedan, the merchants of Tarshish, and all their young lions will say to you, 'Have you come to take plunder? Have you gathered your army to take booty, to carry away silver and gold, to take away livestock and goods, to take great plunder?' Therefore, son of man, prophesy and say to Gog, 'Thus says the Lord GOD: "On that day when my people Israel dwell safely, will you not know it? Then you will come from your place out of the far north, you and many peoples with you, all of them riding on horses, a great company and a mighty army. You will come up against My people Israel like a cloud, to cover the land. It will be in the latter days that I will bring you against My land, so that the nations may know Me, when I am hallowed in you, O Gog, before their eyes. Thus says the Lord GOD: "Are you he of whom I have spoken in former days by My servants the prophets of Israel, who prophesied for years in those days that I would bring you against them?
AND IT WILL COME TO PASS AT THE SAME TIME WHEN GOG COMES AGAINST THE LAND OF ISRAEL," SAYS THE LORD GOD, "THAT MY FURY WILL SHOW IN MY FACE. FOR IN MY JEALOUSY AND IN THE FIRE OF MY WRATH I HAVE SPOKEN": SURELY IN THAT DAY THERE SHALL BE A GREAT EARTHQUAKE IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL, 'SO THAT THE FISH OF THE SEA, THE BIRDS OF THE HEAVENS, AND THE BEATS OF THE FIELD, ALL CREEPING THINGS THAT CREEP ON EARTH, AND ALL MEN WHO ARE ON THE FACE OF THE EARTH SHALL SHAKE AT MY PRESENCE. THE MOUNTAINS SHALL BE THROWN DOWN, THE STEEP PLACES SHALL FALL, AND EVERY WALL SHALL FALL TO THE GROUND. I WILL CALL FOR A SWORD AGAINST GOG THROUGHOUT ALL MY MOUNTAINS, SAYS THE LORD GOD. EVERY MAN'S SWORD WILL BE AGAINST HIS BROTHER. AND I WILL BRING HIM TO JUDGMENT WITH PESTILENCE AND BLOODSHED; I WILL RAIN DOWN ON HIM, ON HIS TROOPS, AND ON THE MANY PEOPLES WHO ARE WITH HIM, FLOODING RAIN, GREAT HAILSTONES, FIRE, AND BRIMSTONE. THUS I WILL MAGNIFY MYSELF AND SANCTIFY MYSELF, AND I WILL BE KNOWN IN THE EYES OF MANY NATIONS. THEN THEY SHALL KNOW THAT I AM THE LORD."
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GOGINDEX BELIEFS
1. Arab nations truly do not want peace with Israel. They wish to destroy Israel by all means including a
surprise attack.
2. The Palestinians, Iranians, Syrians and Iraqi's believe that they can push the region into a large war against Israel. Thus these nations shall attack Israel at some point. Right now, Bin Laden has made it be known that there will be no peace until Israel is no more. Israel strongly defeats these armies brought against her and causes a World outcry just like Kosovo and Bosnia. Worse yet, Israel
destroys Damascus as prophecised in Isaiah 17 due to the use of chemical weapons against Israeli
troops.
3. A World coalition is built-up against Israel.
4. Russia or even China, in an attempt to reassert global influence shall assist Arab nations in a coalition against Israel.
5. Jerusalem is the key issue that will start such a battle.
6. Israel will be victorious through the miraculous assistance of GOD.
7. Finally, a peace treaty will be signed setting up the Temple sacrifice, and ultimately the Anti-Christ.
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TODAY: PRAY, FOR THE TIME IS SHORT. THIS GENERATION SHALL WITNESS THESE EVENTS STATED BY GOD. "Immediately after the distress in those days 'the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky 27, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.' 28 At that time the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and all the nations of the earth will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, 29 with power and great glory. And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet 30 call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, 31 from one end of the heavens to the other. Now learn this lesson from the fig tree: As soon as its twigs get tender and its leaves come out, you know that summer is near. Even so, when you see all these things, you know that it is near, right at the door. I tell you the truth, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these
things have happened."(Matthew 24:29-34 NIV)
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