April 20, 2002
ALBANY, N.Y. (Reuters) - A moderate earthquake struck the northeastern United States early Saturday, rattling homes and shaking furniture and nerves from northern New England to Maryland, authorities said.
The United States Geological Survey said the quake struck about 15 miles southwest of Plattsburgh, New York, near the Canadian and Vermont borders at 6:50 a.m. and had a magnitude of 5.1, potentially powerful enough to cause heavy damage in a populated area.
It was felt in New York, Boston and Buffalo, and as far as Baltimore to the south and Ottawa and Toronto to the north.
The quake, which was at a depth of 3 miles, damaged some roads, a bridge and broke water mains in New York's Clinton County, but there were no reports of casualties or major damage.
In a precautionary move to speed any relief effort, Clinton and Essex counties declared a state of emergency and Gov. George Pataki, who felt the earthquake in the governor's mansion in Albany, issued a statewide emergency.
"I was sitting here this morning and all hell broke lose," said state trooper Patty Hackett, who reported at least one aftershock. "People have been calling excited that there has been an earthquake here, while others have been calling panicking and screaming."
Local authorities and residents reported rattled and broken windows in several towns, pictures falling off shelves and damage to chimneys. Residents spent the morning surveying their homes for damage, authorities said.
"Many people reported being woken out of bed," said trooper William Martin. "They said it was an odd feeling."
People said the initial tremor lasted anywhere from 10 seconds to one minute.
"The governor says the situation is under control," said Donald Maurer, a spokesman for the New York State Emergency Management Office. "State and local response plans have been activated and are working to protect health and public safety in the state of New York."
ROADS CLOSED
New York State Police in Plattsburgh said they closed part of County Route 39 after the quake made it impassable, while Clinton County authorities declared unsafe a bridge on Route 22 near Plattsburgh. A 3-foot section of Route 9N collapsed near Clintonville on the edge of the Adirondack Mountains.
Frank Revetta, director of the Seismic Network at the State University of New York in Potsdam, said a quake with the same magnitude was last reported in the area in the 1980s. He called Saturday's quake unusually large for the region, and was more severe because it was deeper in the earth.
Revetta said a quake of this size would likely not be felt in California, where quakes are more common and often larger, but that the geology of the northeast makes a 5.1 quake easy to feel.
President Bush is scheduled to be in the area on Monday to hike with the governor and give a speech in the Adirondacks. The governor and his wife had been scheduled to spend the weekend at the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland.
President Bush wields an axe as he help volunteers work on the trail during a snowfall near the Ausable River in Wilmington, N.Y., Monday, April 22 ,2002, marking Earth Day with a pitch for his air pollution-reduction strategy in New York state's Adirondack Mountains, which are threatened by acid rain.
In late 1968 a small group of men gathered in a rambling old house situated a few miles outside the German city of Munich. The weak afternoon sunlight was starting to fade as they sat down at the polished oak conference table, and despite a roaring log fire in the ornate fireplace there was a noticable chill in the air. These men were of no particular religion, nor were they politicians, bankers, bureaucrats or mainstream military personnel. To use their own self-effacing term they were "no-persons", just a group of intelligent men from all over the world deeply concerned about the looming probability of global thermonuclear war. The American Department of State, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the Russian Kremlin were brimming over with megalomaniacs quite capable of destroying all life on the planet in their blind quest for power, unless they could be persuaded not to do so.
They have one of these next to Manchester Airport, there's also one near Newark. To think I'd assumed they were some sort or Airplane guidance system. Intrigued I decided to do a google on the Munich Group and beside an Alumuni organisation for a London University I found this:
The HEGRA Munich group is located at the Max-Planck-Institut für Physik in Munich . Their main activities involve the research in Cosmic Ray physics.
An important aim of our network is to improve what we would like to call "underground cryogenics". A considerable part of our research activity will be performed jointly in the three underground laboratories where the groups of the network are even presently doing cryogenic experiments or mounting cryogenic apparatus. As mentioned before the need to operate underground is essential in all experiments searching for rare events and three groups of the network (Milan, Zaragoza and Saclay) have already an internationally known expertise in this field. Operation of dilution refrigerators underground present however difficulties much more severe then when they are operated in a confortable laboratory on the surface. We will mention only the need of a good ground connection, the problem of recuperating and liquefying Helium (its presence could jeopardise the performance of scintillators in nearby experiments housed in the laboratory), the presence of electromagnetic interference with different apparatus working in the proximity etc.. Inside the network all necessary and joint expertise in underground physics and cryogenics to overcome these problems are present.
And is that why we're now sending Seef Afreeken Net Boffos? Who will we send next?
Elmo addresses congressional committee.
Wed Apr 24
BEIJING (AP) - And you thought chickens couldn't fly.
Earth's farthest-flung fowl have hatched and are ready to be served up in China — not with lemon sauce, but in a laboratory where scientists will study them for clues on how to push the country's nascent space program forward.
Three chickens that traveled around the planet 108 times as eggs aboard Shenzhou III, China's third unmanned spaceship, hatched Tuesday in a Beijing laboratory, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.
The chickens, one female and two male, hatched from nine eggs that traveled on the seven-day flight, which ended April 1.
The chickens, kept in a laboratory in the China University of Agriculture, belong to a black-boned species native to China's Jiangxi, Guangdong and Fujian provinces.
Scientists chose black-boned chickens because of their pure bloodline, which will enable any genetic variation caused by spaceflight to be easily tracked, Xinhua said, quoting the head of the research team, Yang Ning.
Yang said it was fortunate both male and female chickens were hatched, which he said will allow them to reproduce and extend the research potential. He told Xinhua the project will prove valuable in researching genetic theories and breeding technology — and also could yield economic dividends.
What's more, he said, the chickens' birth also demonstrates the sophistication of the spacecraft's life support systems.
The latest Shenzhou (pronounced "shun-jo") module was aloft for six days and 18 hours. The previous two unmanned Shenzhou vessels were launched in November 1999 and January 2001.
Xinhua didn't say what happened to the remaining eggs.
Let me guess they either became invisible, really stretchy, caught fire or developed super-strength and started proclaiming it "clobbering time"
In February of this year TRW sent a secret project to LAX to be flown to Cape Canaveral. It was loaded on a large flatbed truck and was the size of a house. Much larger than your average satellite. It was guarded by automatic weapon toting marines on the top and round about, and had Department of Justice (DOJ) guards in those black windowed Suburbans, plus who knows how many cops on motorbikes and in squad cars. What was in it? We don't have clue. But passed out during the event were these patches which are very revealing (we apologize for the poor quality of the patch image). On the patch a small earth, an American flag, two orbits, one ending in a blast, one going off the patch. And in the middle of the patch, dominating the scene a fearsome, attacking dragon. It appears to be attacking the Earth and the US in particular. Is the blast an attempt to stop it? Are the stars to signify where the dragon came from? Whatever it is... It doesn't look too good.
(Associated Press)
4-23-2
ATHENS, Greece - Greece's health ministry on Tuesday ordered all schools and universities closed through the end of the week, after 13 more people appeared to be suffering from an unidentified virus that has claimed three lives.
As concern grew, lines of people fearing they might be infected got longer at hospitals and medical clinics as concern. Experts at the ministry's Special Infections Control Center met to discuss how to deal with infections as they awaited the results of tests to identify the virus. They were expected by Wednesday.
The new cases announced Tuesday brought to 32 the number of people believed afflicted since officials began keeping count on April 18. Most have been in Athens, home to nearly half Greece's 11 million people.
All 13 people were reported suffering from inflammation of the heart, known as myocarditis. Other symptoms include high fever, muscle pain and respiratory problems.
One suspect is the common Coxsackie virus. In 1997, myocarditis caused by a strain of the Coxsackie virus was responsible for killing 30 children in Malaysia over the course of three months.
While asking the public not to panic, Health Minister Alekos Papadopoulos encouraged people to avoid crowds in closed spaces and practice good personal hygiene.
Papadopoulos said all educational facilities from preschools through universities would close beginning Wednesday "for purely preventative reasons."
The city of Athens also shut down its day-care centers, though all three of those who have died have been adults.
"Despite the fact that cases among children are few in relation to adults and the danger is reduced, the measure is taken to restrict its possible spread," the minister said.
Schools were preparing to close for the weeklong Orthodox Holy Week in advance of Easter on May 5.
ATHENS (Reuters) - Greece said on Thursday the number of people apparently suffering from a mystery virus blamed for several deaths had risen to 36, but that the incidence of new cases was receding.
"If the rate of reporting of new cases remains over the next few days at the same levels, then we can talk about a decline," the health ministry said in a statement.
Doctors were still trying to identify the strain of virus, which causes high fever, muscle pain, headaches and fatigue and can lead to inflammation of the heart.
Two women on the island of Crete and another in the northern Greek town of Ioannina are thought to have died after contracting the bug.
Of the seven new cases reported on Thursday, one has already been discharged from hospital, the ministry said. Of 29 cases recorded until Wednesday, 22 people were in hospital, with 14 expected to be discharged over the next few days, it said.
A surge in cases on Tuesday prompted the health ministry to close all schools three days before the two-week Greek Easter break.
HEALTH ALERT
Doctors say the virus is transmitted through bodily fluids and stool.
"We don't know with certainty what it is, but we have some indications which group it belongs to," said Takis Panayiotopoulos, director of the surveillance department at the Greek Centre for Special Infectious Diseases (KEEL).
He told Reuters the virus probably belonged to the "enterovirus" group, which infect the intestines and sometimes spread to other parts of the body, particularly the central nervous system.
In addition to the school closure, the ministry advised people to avoid enclosed spaces and practice good personal hygiene.
Authorities put hospitals around the country on alert to deal with an expected increase in people seeking medical assistance.
CHURCH ANNOYANCE
The Church of Greece angrily objected to suggestions in the Greek media that taking holy communion could spread the virus.
"It should be considered blasphemous, to say the least, to consider it possible that epidemic ailments could be transferred through holy communion and endanger human life," the Athens diocese said in a statement.
Holy communion -- the symbolic partaking of Christ's blood -- involves sipping a spoonful of diluted wine from a goblet.
Greek Orthodox church-goers use the same spoon. Expert opinion on whether this was risky was inconclusive.
"Such studies or data don't exist," said one doctor at KEEL.
His colleague at KEEL said she did not fear contracting the virus during Orthodox Easter, which begins on May 2.
"Speaking as a Greek Orthodox, nothing is transmitted through holy communion. I will be taking communion," she said.
Apart from schools, Athens municipality sports and youth centers were also shut while the municipality said it will also close social centers for the elderly until Friday.
The military is also on heightened watch to prevent an outbreak in its camps and bases.
(Post-Dispatch)
04/23/2002 08:38 PM
Maybe it was a student's asthma or allergy or reaction to wasp spray that started the chain reaction, but officials suspect it was the power of suggestion that spread mysterious symptoms through an elementary school in Eureka on Tuesday morning, sending 36 pupils to be checked at hospitals.
"I think we had a few sick kids and the others got scared," said Deputy Chief Randy Gaber of the Eureka Fire Protection District. "We did our best to defuse the situation."
By noon, careful officials sent out a precautionary alert for a mass casualty incident. They shipped out nine pupils by ambulance and 27 later by school bus. Teachers worked to maintain calm and get through the rest of the school day.
By early evening, it appeared that none of the youngsters would be admitted to a hospital.
It was the second day children fell ill at Blevins Elementary, 25 East North Street, but officials said they know of no connection.
Problems started Tuesday when a small group of fourth- and fifth-grade pupils reported breathing symptoms during a physical education class on the outdoor track. Then more students began complaining.
The first to fall ill may have been exposed to a wasp pesticide used on an exterior door Tuesday morning, leading to asthmatic or allergic reactions, Gaber said.
Doctors at St. John's Mercy Medical Center said only one of five children taken there, a girl, 12, had symptoms on arrival. She suffered from hyperventilation, or rapid breathing.
It's not unusual for panic to set in once one or two kids say they're feeling ill, explained Dr. Lisa Etzwiler, a pediatric emergency room doctor who examined the children at St. John's Mercy.
Initially, there was concern that they had been exposed to an insecticide, which can be harmful in high concentrations, Etzwiler said.
"But it became obvious that this was not what was going on," she said. "I think it was a combination of some kids experiencing some mild symptoms - possibly from farm fertilizer applied one to three days earlier - and then anxiety set in and the kids started feeding off each other."
Hyperventilation can set off a chain of physiological events, especially in suggestible children.
"They look in distress, their hearts are beating fast, which worries them even more," said Dr. Donna Eckardt, a doctor of pediatric emergency medicine at St. John's Mercy. "The hyperventilation causes them to get light-headed and their fingers and toes get numb, which are weird feelings to a kid. When they try to describe those things, they can get interpreted as any number of things."
Judith Dungan, president of the Rockwood School Board and parent of a fifth-grader at Blevins, said officials decided that every child who provided any cause for concern should be sent to a hospital.
She said a boy passed out on the soccer field at Blevins on Monday was found to have candy lodged in his throat and was saved with the Heimlich maneuver. Dungan said she now wonders whether he choked first or passed out first, possibly from chemicals sprayed recently by a highway crew working near the field along Highway 109. The boy was examined at a hospital and released.
Inspectors from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources and the St. Louis County Department of Health were investigating all possibilities Tuesday.
As news spread about Tuesday's problem, some parents rushed to pick up their children. Dungan said her son wanted to go home, but she prompted him to stay and set an example.
She said she felt he was safe with the school windows closed and air conditioning on.
Students remained in their classrooms after inspectors determined the air quality inside was safe, said Kim Cranston, spokeswoman for the school district.
Cranston said four other children had complained of feeling ill after the episode on the soccer field Monday.
During Tuesday's scare, Gaber said, paramedics set up a triage station in the school's multipurpose room, checking blood pressures and heart rhythms.
Ambulances took nine children to several hospitals. About 1 p.m., emergency workers gathered 27 pupils to ride a bus to Cardinal Glennon Children's Hospital in St. Louis.
Those students were seen clenching their stomachs and rubbing their eyes while marching out the front doors, past parents and cameras. Once on the bus, some appeared playful, leaping over seats and waving from windows. A few cried.
Some mothers leaped from their cars and scurried into the school office, returning minutes later clutching their children.
Pam Terry said she took her son and daughter out of school after noticing news helicopters hovering overhead. "I don't think there is anything to really worry about," she said. "I'm just being a concerned parent."
April Roberts picked up a neighbor's son, Andrew Jeffress, 8, when she went to the school to retrieve her own kindergartner. Andrew's mother worried because he suffers from asthma.
"We just don't want to risk anything," Roberts said. "You just don't know what chemicals will do to their little bodies."
Andrew said his friends were sharing stories about kids who got sick during gym class. The talk may have spread panic about his peers.
"They are sort of freaking out," he said.
(UKTelegraph)
26/04/2002
THE first three months of this year were the warmest globally since records began in 1860 and probably for 1,000 years, scientists said yesterday.
Dr Geoff Jenkins, director of the Meteorological Office's Hadley Centre, said the record on land and sea was consistent with computer predictions of the effects of man-made global warming.
The three months were about 0.71C warmer than the average for 1961 to 1990, itself the warmest period for 1,000 years according to ice-core analysis, he added.
The record warm period was the more remarkable because there was no sign of the cyclical El Nino in the tropics, which has attended the succession of record warmest years in the past decade.
The global record comes in the wake of observed changes in the British climate since 1900: a lengthening of the growing season for plants by one month in central England, a temperature increase of 1C, and a 10cm sea level rise.
Margaret Beckett, the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Secretary, said: "In recent years more and more people have accepted that climate change is happening and will affect the lives of our children and grandchildren. I fear we need to start worrying about ourselves as well."
She was speaking at the publication of a report, The UK Climate Impacts Programme, a joint venture between her department, the Hadley Centre, and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia.
Scientists, who compiled different scenarios for high, medium and low emissions of greenhouse gases, predicted the following changes in the British climate by 2080:
A rise in average temperature of 2-3.5C, probably with greater warming in the south and east. Generally, the climate will be like Normandy, the Loire or Bordeaux, according to the amount of global emissions.
Hot days in summer will be more frequent, with some above 40C (104F) in lowland Britain under the high emissions scenario.
Summer rainfall will decrease by 50 per cent and winter rainfall increase by 30 per cent under the highest emissions projection.
Snowfall will decrease throughout Britain, by 90 per cent in Scotland according to the highest greenhouse gases scenario.
Sea levels will rise by 26-86cm (10-34in).
The probability of a storm surge regarded as extreme will increase from one in 50 years to nine in 10 years under the high emissions scenario.
A cooling of the British climate over the next 100 years because of changes to the Gulf Stream is now considered unlikely.
Mrs Beckett said some of the predicted impacts were already irreversible, but others could be slowed by international action under the Kyoto climate treaty.
April 25 2002
(AFP)
Egyptian Prime Minister Atef Ebeid said his country would go to war with Israel if Arab countries stumped up $US100 billion ($A186.32 billion) to pay for the confrontation, in an interview published yesterday.
"If you want to undertake an action and be ready to face up to challenges, you need at least $100 billion," he told the Abu Dhabi Government's Al-Ittihad newspaper when asked why Egypt had taken no measures against Israel's military offensive against the Palestinians.
"I told you we want $100 billion," he repeated in response to a question why Cairo had not expelled Israel's ambassador to Egypt.
"Let the Arab world give $100 billion from Arab funds deposited around the world. Let it say to Egypt: 'This is a budget for confrontation. This budget is at your disposal. Undertake confrontation,' " he said.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak accused Israel yesterday of going "beyond all limits" with its military actions in the West Bank, particularly in Bethlehem and Jenin.
Egypt became the first Arab country to make peace with Israel and signed a treaty in 1979. Protesters in Egypt have frequently called for cutting diplomatic ties with Israel and expelling the Israeli ambassador.
The bartering system as applied to world war.
by John Ashton and Ian Ferguson, Mainstream Publishing, 2002,
(WorldSocialistWebSite : Book Review)
24 April 2002
John Ashton’s and Ian Ferguson’s work on the circumstances surrounding the destruction on December 21, 1988, of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland is worthy of careful study. It raises serious doubts, not only regarding the recent conviction of the Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, now incarcerated in Barlinnie jail, Glasgow, but over the entire official presentation of events before and after the crash, from 1988 to the present day. They give indicators as to how the full facts regarding the atrocity which killed 270, perhaps 271, people might be uncovered and conclude with a series of searching questions which any genuinely independent inquiry into the Lockerbie disaster should direct toward various governments, intelligence services, and individuals.
Ashton and Ferguson have followed Lockerbie for years. Ashton worked as the deputy to the late British film maker Allan Francovich, whose film The Maltese Double Cross, examined various alternative scenarios that have been advanced as an explanation for the Lockerbie disaster, favouring that the bombing was a consequence of a CIA controlled drug running operation utilised to spy on Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian armed political groupings and factions.
Ferguson is a journalist, who has written many articles on Lockerbie, and along with Scottish lawyer Robert Black, architect of the Camp Zeist trial, maintains the www.thelockerbietrial.com website.
Writing in the immediate aftermath of the special Criminal Court verdict at Camp Zeist convicting al-Megrahi, Ashton and Ferguson have drawn together the fruits of long research and interviews with a large number of people involved in the disaster, including a number of current and former spies.
The authors do not proclaim that al-Megrahi is innocent. Rather, they review a large body of circumstantial evidence suggesting that responsibility for Lockerbie may lie primarily with the intelligence services of several Western governments, particularly the United States. They are highly critical of the role played by the media in parroting the twists and turns of the official line and note that no major British or US newspaper, radio, or TV channel has had the journalistic independence to undertake a sustained investigation of this most murky aspect of the disaster.
Ashton and Ferguson note that there were many general indications of a possible attack on an American flight in late 1988. After the 1988 American attack by the USS Vincennes on an Iranian Airbus, in which 255 pilgrims were murdered, Iranian broadcasts warned that the skies would “rain blood” in consequence. A Syrian backed Palestinian group with a history of attacks on passenger aircraft was known to be operating in Germany. Many staff at the US Embassy in Moscow altered flight plans to avoid Pan Am over the Christmas period.
More specifically, the authors suggest there may have been prior warnings of an attack on flight PA103. They imply that both the US ambassador to Lebanon, John McCarthy, and the South African Foreign Minister Pik Botha had their travel plans altered at the last minute in order to avoid PA103.
Others, including Charles McKee, a US Army Special Forces Major, and Matthew Gannon, the CIA’s Beirut deputy station chief, uniquely amongst US officials, allegedly changed their plans at the last minute to fly on PA103. McKee had been leading a hostage rescue team in Beirut. One suggestion, and it is no more than that, is that these individuals were the target of a successful assassination attempt in which intelligence agencies themselves played a role.
According to the authors, from as little as two hours after the crash, US intelligence officers were at the southern Scottish site. Over the next days many more arrived. They were not looking for survivors or explanations as to the cause of the crash. They did not cooperate with local rescue services. Instead, they were searching for particular pieces of debris, luggage and particular corpses. Ashton and Ferguson cite finds of large quantities of cash, cannabis and heroin on the flight, as well as intelligence papers owned by McKee, whose luggage was removed and replaced. A report noting the location of hostages held in Beirut was apparently found on the ground. There were reports of helicopter-borne armed groups guarding and then removing a large box, and an unidentified body.
A police surgeon from Bradford, David Fieldhouse, insists that one body was moved, after it had been tagged and its location noted, while another disappeared entirely. Fieldhouse was subsequently victimised. Other concerns were raised by local police officers, some of which phoned Labour MP Tam Dalyell, who then began to take an active interest in the case.
Ashton and Ferguson detail the main alternative theory—that the bombing was carried out by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PLFP-GC). This was also largely the official position until 1991. Ahmed Jibril formed the PFLP-GC in 1968, when he broke away from the PFLP. The authors assert, on the basis of discussions with a number of spies, that the PFLP-GC were recruited by the Iraqi, Iranian, or Syrian governments to attack a US plane. When considering the motivation for such a terror operation, whether on the part of the PFLP-GC or any of their possible sponsors, the book is at its weakest. It gives very little insight into the politics of these governments or of the PFLP-GC, other than to make such observations as support for the PFLP-GC allowing the regime of Hafez Al Assad in Syria to appear to be supporting the Palestinian struggle against Israel.
The authors instead draw attention to the bombing by the PFLP-GC 18 years earlier, in 1970, of two aircraft destined for Israel—one survived with a two foot hole in the fuselage, the other, Swissair 330 to Zurich crashed killing 147 people—and another bombing 16 years earlier, in 1972. The PFLP-GC in 1988 certainly appears to have had a European operation based in Nuess in the Ruhr, Germany, intent on attacking US and Israeli targets. The group eventually blew up some railway lines used by US troop trains, planned an attack on an Israeli sports team, and became the target of a huge surveillance operation by German state security, the BKA. Their operation was hopelessly compromised. Raids by the BKA eventually discovered timers, guns, along with various electrical goods altered to contain explosives. Two PFLP-GC members were eventually jailed in 1991 for the train attacks.
Astonishingly, however, bomb-maker Marwan Khreesat was released on a legal technicality and left Germany. According to Ashton and Ferguson, Khreesat, who built the bombs used in the attacks during the 1970s, had by this time become a Jordanian spy in the PFLP-GC. Jordanian intelligence apparently has a close relationship with the Israeli Mossad and the CIA. Khreesat is still living in Amman, the Jordanian capital, under protection.
Ashton and Ferguson note an interview with Khreesat by the FBI, which was cited at the Camp Zeist trial but never reported in the world’s press, in which Khreesat alleges that one of his bombs went missing after the BKA raid. On this basis, the authors speculate as to whether the CIA had, with the cooperation of other intelligence agencies, played a more active role in allowing the destruction of the plane. They restate the suggestion that this might have been to prevent exposure of the CIA’s drug running operations from the Bekaa Valley, or for other reasons associated with US policy in the Middle East, particularly the aftermath of the Iran-Contra machinations. They suggest that a CIA approved suitcase, loaded with heroin from the Bekaa Valley, might have been swapped for one loaded instead with a bomb intended to kill McKee.
McKee and others had reportedly developed serious reservations about the drug-running operation; it having recently endangered their own lives through an aborted hostage rescue operation. The authors note that PA103 was brought down shortly after the election of ex-CIA chief George Bush, father of the current US president, when exposure of CIA drug running would have been highly embarrassing.
Those who have made allegations of possible CIA involvement include an ex-Mossad spy, Juval Aviv, hired by Pan Am to investigate the destruction of its aircraft, an erratic ex-US spy Lester Coleman, who at one point sought political asylum in Sweden, William Chasey, a Washington DC lobbyist, and Time journalist Roy Rowan.
Ashton and Ferguson trace the development of the official position of blaming Libya for the bombing. Bush called Margaret Thatcher in early 1989 asking for the inquiry to be “toned down”, at a time when Syria and the PFLP-GC were favoured suspects. Just over two years later, on November 14, 1991, simultaneous indictments were brought by the Scottish Crown Office and the US State Department against Libyan airline staff al-Megrahi and Lhamen Fhimah. Days later, Bush announced that Syria, which had acquiesced in the 1991 US attack on Iraq, had taken a “bum rap”. The State Department put out a fact sheet to justify the change of position, claiming that previous pointers to the PFLP-GC and Syria had been cunning ruses by the Libyan government. UK Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd said that no other countries besides Libya were targets for investigation. Four days later, the last Western hostages, including the Archbishop of Canterbury’s special envoy, Terry Waite, were released from Beirut.
The authors thereafter recount the official line that the bomb, equipped with an MST-13 timer from MeBo of Zurich, was loaded in a Samsonite suitcase packed with clothes, which was inserted by Libyan agents onto flight KM180 from Luqa airport in Malta, transferred at Frankfurt to a feeder flight for PA103, and then shuttled to Heathrow, where it was loaded on the fated Boeing 747. This was the case presented in the Camp Zeist trial.
Ashton and Ferguson carefully summarise the numerous problematic aspects of all the prosecution evidence at the trial; the dubious visual identification of al-Megrahi by Maltese shop owner Tony Gauci; the contradictory and bizarre ramblings of CIA spy Abdul Majid Giacka, the so-called “star witness” at Luqa airport whose evidence collapsed in court; the contested luggage records at Frankfurt airport; and the claim by MeBo owner Edwin Bollier that he had been approached by the CIA and encouraged to frame Libya, and that the CIA had had an MST-13 type timer in their possession before 1988.
At Camp Zeist, the trial was in danger of disintegrating. By November 2000 few observers, including the book’s authors, expected anything other than an acquittal, or a not proven verdict which is available under Scottish law. But the verdict delivered on January 2001, which admitted that the prosecution case was full of holes and based on circumstantial inferences, nevertheless found al-Megrahi guilty, while his only alleged accomplice Fhimah, was acquitted.
Ashton and Ferguson by no means completely exonerate Libya or al-Megrahi. They note that his refusal to account for his activities on 20 December 1988 and his visit to Malta using a false passport cannot be dismissed. Trial evidence suggests that al-Megrahi indeed worked for Libyan intelligence and he has, so far, offered no explanation as to why he chose not to take the stand to defend himself. Many aspects of the whole business remain to be uncovered.
What the authors do is to cite 25 questions to which any genuinely independent inquiry must seek answers. These include:
* the circumstances of the warnings given prior to the disaster.
* the circumstances of the booking changes for Pik Botha’s entourage, and McKee and Gannon.
* the drug and cash finds at Lockerbie.
* the possibility of an extra body, the circumstances under which bodies were moved, and the circumstances of wrong police evidence given against David Fieldhouse at the 1989 Fatal Accident Inquiry.
* why Transport Secretary Paul Channon was able to announce that arrests were imminent and why Margaret Thatcher blocked a full judicial enquiry?
* the relationship of the British MI6 to the Iran Contra deals and why was the Foreign office official in charge of liaising with the US on Iran-Contra, Andrew Green, was put in charge of the Lockerbie investigation.
* the role of the CIA and MI6 in hostage deals made after the exposure of Iran Contra in 1986 and 1991.
* why Juval Aviv and others were never interviewed by the investigation authorities about the bombing. What were the circumstances of legal cases brought against Aviv and others?
* why did it take a year for the MeBo circuit board to be discovered, what were the circumstances of its discovery, and what were the connections between MeBo’s Edwin Bollier and the CIA?
* why did the CIA and the Scottish Lord Advocate seek to block access to CIA cables that were helpful to the defence?
Under conditions where the US government is refusing to investigate its own intelligence failures leading up to the September 11 terror attacks, any exposure of a possible CIA role in aircraft terrorism clearly assumes great significance. Earlier this year, al-Megrahi’s appeal against his conviction was thrown out, despite defence evidence that made a strong circumstantial case for the bomb having been loaded at Heathrow airport in London.
Following Tam Dalyell’s question in parliament, on March 26, there is a suggestion that police evidence relating to Lockerbie is being destroyed, and that yet another suitcase owned by another Special Forces member, Joseph Patrick Murphy, was at one point early in the investigation thought to contain the bomb.
Without making wild or unsustainable accusations, and despite serious political limitations, Ashton and Ferguson have provided an essential reference for anyone seeking to understand why a Boeing 747 should explode in mid-air killing hundreds of ordinary air travellers, and yet, more than 13 years later, there is still no generally accepted explanation of why it happened and who was responsible.
Tue Apr 23 2002
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - In most cases, airplanes can sail through lightning storms with little consequence. But according to a recent report, it is possible--albeit highly unlikely--that a person could be struck by lightning while inside an airplane.
The report describes the first known case of a flight attendant who suffered long-term effects after he was struck by lightning while seated in the rear section of the plane. There was no damage to the plane or to other passengers.
"Lightning strikes to commercial airplanes in flight are relatively common, yet passengers and crew are seldom injured," write Dr. Michael Cherington from St. Anthony Hospital in Denver, Colorado, and colleagues. "We believe the case reported here is the first in the medical literature where the occupant of an airplane has suffered long-term effects from a lightning-induced electrical event."
According to the report in The Journal of Trauma: Injury, Infection, and Critical Care, the man felt a tingling throughout his body and then saw a bright flash shortly after take-off. He looked out the window and saw lightning strike the plane. One witness said that a ball of light surrounded the man for a brief period, and sparks of light emanated from his body.
Co-workers noted that the man remained mildly confused as the flight continued. That night he experienced nausea, headache, ringing in his ears and numbness in his left arm. An initial neurologic exam the following day was normal but subsequent visits revealed that he had lost some feeling in his left arm and tenderness in his spine. Ten weeks later the man continued to complain of headaches, insomnia and forgetfulness.
A scan of the patient's brain 4 months later showed some small abnormalities suggestive of nerve damage. Continued testing found moderate memory loss and deficits in attention and concentration. Nearly 2 years after the incident, the flight attendant remained forgetful and continued to be treated for persistent headaches. He was also undergoing cognitive rehabilitation therapy.
About 100 deaths and more than 1,000 injuries are caused by lightning strikes each year in the US, the report indicates. The man's symptoms are typical of patients who are struck by lightning on the ground, Cherington's team points out. However, this case is the first in which a person was affected by lightning while inside an airplane, they note.
SOURCE: The Journal of Trauma 2002;52:579-581.
(ABCNEWS)
April 24 — Federal law-enforcement agents have extracted information from a suspected terrorist about attacks planned against American targets but officials don't know whether Abu Zubaydah is telling the truth.
ABCNEWS has learned Zubaydah told U.S. interrogators that Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terror network plans to attack areas where large numbers of people shop. He also has claimed that al Qaeda has the ability to make a "dirty bomb," mixing conventional explosives and radioactive material.
Zubaydah, one of suspected terror mastermind Osama bin Laden's top three lieutenants, was the source of information that led the FBI to issue a warning last week that banks in the Northeast could be the targets of terror attacks. U.S. officials later said they were not certain the threat was real.
Federal law enforcement officials are asking one question: Is he telling the truth or lying?
"I think it's a high probability that nothing he's saying at this point in time is true," Robert Blitzer, a former chief of the FBI's counterterrorism unit, told ABCNEWS' Pierre Thomas. "He's a committed leader of al Qaeda."
Investigators are finding inconsistencies and, in some cases lies, in Zubaydah's comments, sources said. In some cases, he also appears to be telling the interrogators information he knows the United States already has.
Privately, some U.S. officials fear Zubaydah is toying with them, trying to deplete already stretched U.S. resources.
Thus far, according to sources, he has not provided useful information that U.S. officials really want — the whereabouts of bin Laden. One official said it's going to take a long time to break Zubaydah.
Despite the reservations, the FBI is notifying its regional field offices about Zubaydah's latest claim that shopping areas were to be targeted. The field offices will talk with local police officials about how best to respond. But the FBI is not going to make a public announcement.
U.S. officials told ABCNEWS this week they have been frustrated with the lack of information they have been getting from the al Qaeda suspects being held at the U.S. Naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Officials said the detainees have been offering up very little in the way of intelligence, and the investigators have found they cannot trust what they have been told.
April 24, 2002
(AEDT)
An unidentifiable mucous-like ooze in the Myall Lakes, on the New South Wales mid-north coast, is one of the preliminary findings of an extensive study into recurrent algal blooms in the ecosystem.
The Department of Land and Water Conservation is to host two boat trips as part of a field day this weekend to show community members and interested stakeholders the early results of the coasts and clean seas project.
Resource analysis manager Allan Raine says there are several interesting findings, including high levels of ammonia and strange vegetation.
But he says it is the mucous, dubbed by scientists "the layer", which is generating greatest interest.
"We've sent samples off to international scientists, we've sent a sample off to a chap in Scotland who's a bit of a guru on algae," he said.
"But it's also doing the rounds of Australian scientists and we're still waiting, got to get feedback from those people...it has generated a fair bit of interest."
(thisisleicestershire.co.uk)
24 April 2002
Vets are widening their search for the source of an infection which has led to the slaughter of 11 cattle in Leicestershire.
Cattle from farms surrounding those affected by the bovine form of tuberculosis are to be tested for the disease.
Vets from the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) are carrying out an investigation.
Ten cattle have been slaughtered on a farm near Leicester and one on a farm in Melton. The regional National Farmers' Union believe they are the first confirmed cases in Leicestershire for 10 years.
At the farm near Leicester, the remaining 500 dairy herd cattle have all been tested to see if they are carriers of the disease.
The first two animals to be slaughtered were discovered when they were taken to abattoir for slaughter. The rest were discovered to be carriers after they were tested by vets.
Theresa Phillips, divisional veterinary manager for DEFRA, said it is possible the animals could have picked the disease up from cattle on neighbouring farms.
She said: "These are two separate incidents. On one of the farms, only one animal was affected, but the other was a lot more serious.
"It's unlikely that it will have been spread when the animals were transported. One of the herds did not leave the farm.
"It could be that they caught it through close contact with other cattle over a fence."
Leicestershire's communicable diseases consultant, Dr Philip Monk, said he had ruled out any chance of human infection.
Farmers in Melton, in the area of one of the affected farms, said they were concerned about the outbreak so soon after foot-and-mouth.
Old Dalby farmer Bob Hyslop had 50 cattle slaughtered nearly 30 years ago because of TB but thought it was a disease of the past. He said: "It's concerning. Farmers will be disappointed that with the county being virtually clear for so long, it now seems to be spreading."
Roy Eggleston, who keeps 300 cattle at Long Clawson, said he was very concerned.
"It's something which has been spreading over the country for several years. We had a clear test in February but now there's a case nearby,'' he said.
"I can't believe the country has had BSE, foot-and-mouth disease and no sooner than that's died down, we get this."
He said when he had a suspected case 15 years ago he was unable to sell any of his stock for several months.
20 June 2001
(NewScientist.com)
The outbreak occurred in Siliguri in the Himalayan foothills and killed about 70% of the people infected. Over 100 people are thought to have contracted the illness.
Nihar Ranjan Haldar, a neurologist in private practice in Siliguri, saw the first seven patients. "Most of them had coma, and fever. They went into fits, and started dying. In the beginning they all died, but it slowed down and at the end of five weeks, we saw no more deaths."
Since the deaths stopped, Dr Haldar has been working with other investigators trying to find the cause of the disease. He presented their findings on Tuesday at the World Congress of Neurology in London, UK - and so far, they know very little.
They presume the disease is caused by a virus as they found no sign of parasites or bacteria, and as the symptoms to some degree resemble those of Japanese bee encephalitis. But if it is a virus, it has remained resolutely hidden.
"The local investigations we have done with cerebro-spinal fluid, with blood - everything was negative," Dr Haldar told New Scientist. "So we enlisted the help of several national research institutes. So far they have not found any virus which has already been reported. It could be a new virus."
"It's certainly serious - the mortality rate of 70% puts it level with Ebola or Marburg," says Professor Thiravat Hemachudha, a neurologist from Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand who chaired the conference session. "It's highly contagious, and it must be something unfamiliar to us."
The World Health Organisation and the US Centres for Disease Control have both been involved in searching for answers to this riddle, but Dr Haldar called for more intensive efforts.
The identity of the virus, he said, is only part of the mystery. "We know very little about how it behaves. We tried to track it - but we could not find the vector or the mode of transmission. Also we have no idea about the origin. The people who survived must have antibodies to whatever it is, and we need to study them urgently."
Sunday April 21, 2002
(The UK Observer)
The Ministry of Defence turned large parts of the country into a giant laboratory to conduct a series of secret germ warfare tests on the public.
A government report just released provides for the first time a comprehensive official history of Britain's biological weapons trials between 1940 and 1979.
Many of these tests involved releasing potentially dangerous chemicals and micro-organisms over vast swaths of the population without the public being told.
While details of some secret trials have emerged in recent years, the 60-page report reveals new information about more than 100 covert experiments.
The report reveals that military personnel were briefed to tell any 'inquisitive inquirer' the trials were part of research projects into weather and air pollution.
The tests, carried out by government scientists at Porton Down, were designed to help the MoD assess Britain's vulnerability if the Russians were to have released clouds of deadly germs over the country.
In most cases, the trials did not use biological weapons but alternatives which scientists believed would mimic germ warfare and which the MoD claimed were harmless. But families in certain areas of the country who have children with birth defects are demanding a public inquiry.
One chapter of the report, 'The Fluorescent Particle Trials', reveals how between 1955 and 1963 planes flew from north-east England to the tip of Cornwall along the south and west coasts, dropping huge amounts of zinc cadmium sulphide on the population. The chemical drifted miles inland, its fluorescence allowing the spread to be monitored. In another trial using zinc cadmium sulphide, a generator was towed along a road near Frome in Somerset where it spewed the chemical for an hour.
While the Government has insisted the chemical is safe, cadmium is recognised as a cause of lung cancer and during the Second World War was considered by the Allies as a chemical weapon.
In another chapter, 'Large Area Coverage Trials', the MoD describes how between 1961 and 1968 more than a million people along the south coast of England, from Torquay to the New Forest, were exposed to bacteria including e.coli and bacillus globigii , which mimics anthrax. These releases came from a military ship, the Icewhale, anchored off the Dorset coast, which sprayed the micro-organisms in a five to 10-mile radius.
The report also reveals details of the DICE trials in south Dorset between 1971 and 1975. These involved US and UK military scientists spraying into the air massive quantities of serratia marcescens bacteria, with an anthrax simulant and phenol.
Similar bacteria were released in 'The Sabotage Trials' between 1952 and 1964. These were tests to determine the vulnerability of large government buildings and public transport to attack. In 1956 bacteria were released on the London Underground at lunchtime along the Northern Line between Colliers Wood and Tooting Broadway. The results show that the organism dispersed about 10 miles. Similar tests were conducted in tunnels running under government buildings in Whitehall.
Experiments conducted between 1964 and 1973 involved attaching germs to the threads of spiders' webs in boxes to test how the germs would survive in different environments. These tests were carried out in a dozen locations across the country, including London's West End, Southampton and Swindon. The report also gives details of more than a dozen smaller field trials between 1968 and 1977.
In recent years, the MoD has commissioned two scientists to review the safety of these tests. Both reported that there was no risk to public health, although one suggested the elderly or people suffering from breathing illnesses may have been seriously harmed if they inhaled sufficient quantities of micro-organisms.
However, some families in areas which bore the brunt of the secret tests are convinced the experiments have led to their children suffering birth defects, physical handicaps and learning difficulties.
David Orman, an army officer from Bournemouth, is demanding a public inquiry. His wife, Janette, was born in East Lulworth in Dorset, close to where many of the trials took place. She had a miscarriage, then gave birth to a son with cerebral palsy. Janette's three sisters, also born in the village while the tests were being carried out, have also given birth to children with unexplained problems, as have a number of their neighbours.
The local health authority has denied there is a cluster, but Orman believes otherwise. He said: 'I am convinced something terrible has happened. The village was a close-knit community and to have so many birth defects over such a short space of time has to be more than coincidence.'
Successive governments have tried to keep details of the germ warfare tests secret. While reports of a number of the trials have emerged over the years through the Public Records Office, this latest MoD document - which was released to Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker - gives the fullest official version of the biological warfare trials yet.
Baker said: 'I welcome the fact that the Government has finally released this information, but question why it has taken so long. It is unacceptable that the public were treated as guinea pigs without their knowledge, and I want to be sure that the Ministry of Defence's claims that these chemicals and bacteria used were safe is true.'
The MoD report traces the history of the UK's research into germ warfare since the Second World War when Porton Down produced five million cattle cakes filled with deadly anthrax spores which would have been dropped in Germany to kill their livestock. It also gives details of the infamous anthrax experiments on Gruinard on the Scottish coast which left the island so contaminated it could not be inhabited until the late 1980s.
The report also confirms the use of anthrax and other deadly germs on tests aboard ships in the Caribbean and off the Scottish coast during the 1950s. The document states: 'Tacit approval for simulant trials where the public might be exposed was strongly influenced by defence security considerations aimed obviously at restricting public knowledge. An important corollary to this was the need to avoid public alarm and disquiet about the vulnerability of the civil population to BW [biological warfare] attack.'
Sue Ellison, spokeswoman for Porton Down, said: 'Independent reports by eminent scientists have shown there was no danger to public health from these releases which were carried out to protect the public.
'The results from these trials_ will save lives, should the country or our forces face an attack by chemical and biological weapons.'
Asked whether such tests are still being carried out, she said: 'It is not our policy to discuss ongoing research.
(Chemtrails-over-america)
March 28, 2002
U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich’s Space Preservation Act of 2001, introduced last October seeking a “permanent ban on basing of weapons in space,” specifically banned chemtrails as weapons. Now, in a new version of the bill, the “chemtrails” language has disappeared. The missing words are part of an eyes-wide-open denial that says as much about the cover-up as it does about the spraying that’s plainly visible in the sky.
On March 16, in a front-page story titled “Conspiracy theorists look up,” the Akron Beacon Journal noted that Kucinich’s bill “had been rewritten…and the references to chemtrails and the other types of weapons were quietly eliminated.” The Beacon Journal article, linking chemtrails to conspiracies, resulted from massive local pressure. Michel Massullo of Akron provided Columbus Alive with rolls of photos of plane trails and a sworn affidavit attesting to extensive aerial activity over that city on February 18 and February 24.
Sources close to Kucinich’s new bill, HR 3616, which has been endorsed by some 254 community groups throughout the nation, say the term “chemtrail” was dropped because Kucinich, a Democrat from Lakewood, couldn’t get the Union of Concerned Scientists or the Federation of American Scientists to sign on.
Previously explaining the government’s position, Lieutenant Colonel Michael K. Gibson of the U.S. Air Force wrote U.S. Representative Mark Green in August 2000 and stated, “The term ‘chemtrail’ is a hoax that began circulating approximately three years ago which asserts the government is involved in a joint federal program of covert spraying of the public.”
It’s a classic non-denial denial: Gibson is denying that the Air Force is secretly spraying U.S. citizens. The reality is the U.S. Space Command and other government agencies are involved in ongoing experiments for military and environmental purposes that involve aerial spraying, and the microfibers and other sprayed chemicals inevitably fall to earth, putting the public at risk.
Before you believe Gibson’s and the government’s “denial,” do an Internet search for the following terms: Joint Vision for 2020; weather as a force [multiplier]; owning the weather by 2025; Eastlund; and Edward Teller. Two scientists working at Wright Patterson Air Force Base confirmed to Alive that they were involved in aerial spraying experiments. One involved aluminum oxide spraying related to global warming and the other involved barium stearate and had to do with high-tech military communications.
The U.S. government has a long history of denying inexcusable covert operations. These are the people who told you about the joys of nuclear radiation and Readi Kilowatt, that Agent Orange could defoliate a tropical jungle overnight but was harmless to humans. This is the same government that secretly experimented on its citizens with everything from syphilis to LSD.
The Pentagon would now have you believe that the mass sightings of chemtrails all over North America are collective hallucinations, even though the boys at the government’s Lawrence Livermore experimental lab admit that they’ve discussed all this aerial spraying and run computer simulations on the effects of weather modification for military and peacetime purposes.
A brief history of the chemtrail phenomenon can be traced to a Washington state man who told award-winning investigative reporter William Thomas that he’d become ill on New Year’s Day 1999 after watching several jets make strange lines in the sky. Within six months, Thomas, writing primarily for the Environmental News Service, had detailed over 700 eyewitness reports of chemtrails from 40 states.
Mainstream newspapers have gone out of their way to dismiss these eyewitness accounts. Thomas told the New Mexican newspaper in June 1999, “It’s easier to sell UFOs to major media than a phenomena as close in many cities as the nearest window.”
The New Mexican took a skeptical view of the local Skywatchers group and their account of “unmarked government planes puffing strange white smoke, making cryptic Xs and tic-tac-toe designs, covering the air above as the puzzled populace looks up in fear and confusion.” The photos from Akron that arrived last week show the same patterns in the sky.
A news database search showed that 24 local TV stations from around the country have reported on and dismissed the same phenomenon in the last few years. On January 14, Baltimore’s WJZ-TV report included a visual of “last Thursday morning’s chemtrails seen in the sky.” The story was almost identical to one broadcast by Orlando station WOFL in July 2000.
Last May, the West-Quebec Post spread chemtrails photographs across its front page (the Canadian press has been much more open to investigating the phenomenon). Fred Ryan, the Post’s publisher, reported that his readers had been photographing and comparing the aerial activity for some time.
While the U.S. government is busy with the latest in a long series of covert experiments, and contemptuously attempts to convince eyewitnesses that they’re crazy, non-governmental organizations are quietly circulating a proposed UN treaty titled Permanent Ban on Basing of Weapons in Space; listed under the heading “Exotic weapons” is the term “chemtrails.” This treaty is a direct outgrowth of UN General Assembly Resolution 55/32, passed 138-0 with three nations abstaining (the United States, Israel and Micronesia).
Sooner or later the government will declassify documents, as it inevitably does, showing that it engaged in aerial spraying for military and environmental purposes. Until then, the government will continue to tell us we don’t see what we obviously see.
MORE..
The debate surrounding the federal government’s alleged weather modification experiments has landed in the U.S. Capitol, thanks to Cleveland Democrat Dennis Kucinich. Representative Kucinich introduced the Space Preservation Act of 2001 on October 2 last year, seeking a “permanent ban on [the] basing of weapons in space.”
The bill, HR 2977, specifically outlaws a variety of weapons detailed in the December 6, 2001, Columbus Alive article “Stormy Weather,” which exposed allegations of secret government aerial spraying activities. Kucinich’s bill explicitly outlaws “chemtrails.”
Alive asked Kucinich why he would introduce a bill banning so-called chemtrails when the U.S. government routinely denies such things exist and the U.S. Air Force has routinely called chemtrail sightings “a hoax.”
“The truth is there’s an entire program in the Department of Defense, ‘Vision for 2020,’ that’s developing these weapons,” Kucinich responded. Kucinich says he plans to reintroduce a broader version of the bill later this month. “Plasma, electromagnetics, sonic or ultrasonic weapons [and] laser weapons systems” were among those banned by HR 2977.
Two scientists working at Wright Patterson Air Force Base informed Alive of the ongoing secret experiments, one involving weather modification and the other involving the creation of an aerial antenna using a barium stearate chemical trail. The scientists referred to the work of legendary inventor Nikola Tesla. Before Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (or “Star Wars”), there was Tesla’s vision of high-tech space-based warfare and weather modification.
According to Tesla biographer Margaret Cheney, federal agents seized Tesla’s papers after his death in 1943. “[At] least one set of Tesla’s papers had reached Wright Field [now Wright Patterson Air Force Base],” Cheney wrote. The Aeronautic Systems Division at Wright Patterson admitted it had the Tesla papers but claim they were “destroyed.”
However, Tesla’s dream is embodied in a glossy brochure titled “Vision for 2020” released by the U.S. Space Command in 1998. The brochure states, “The emerging synergy of space superiority with land, sea and air superiority will lead to Full Spectrum Dominance.”
The Space Command spells out its purpose pretty plainly: “Dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect U.S. interests and investment.”
There’s nothing new here, for those who have been paying attention. In the 1970s, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, bluntly stated in his book Between Two Ages, “Technology will make available, to the leaders of major nations, techniques for conducting secret warfare, of which only a bare minimum of the security forces need to be appraised… [T]echniques of weather modification could be employed to produce prolonged periods of drought or storm.”
On January 4 this year, Canadian Professor Michel Chossudovsky, of the Center for Research on Globalization at the University of Ottawa, issued a report noting that weapons have the ability to trigger climate changes. “Both the Americans and the Russians have developed capabilities to manipulate the world’s climate. In the U.S., the technology is being perfected under the High-frequency Active Aural Research Program (HAARP) as part of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI),” Chossudovsky wrote. “Recent scientific evidence suggests that HAARP is fully operational and has the ability of potentially triggering floods, droughts, hurricanes and earthquakes. From a military standpoint, HAARP is a weapon of mass destruction.”
Doubters of the military’s secret plans should refer to George and Meredith Friedman’s The Future of War, Power, Technology and American World Dominance in the 21st Century. The Friedmans, government-touted “arms experts” and favorites of the military-industrial complex, assert that “The American experience of power will rest on the domination of space.”
The U.S. Air Force giddily embraced the Friedmans’ thesis in the 1996 report “New World Vistas: Air And Space Power For The 21st Century.” The Air Force report notes, “In the next two decades, new technologies will allow the fielding of space-based weapons of devastating effectiveness to be used to deliver energy and mass as force projection in tactical and strategic conflict.”
State University of New York Professor of Journalism Karl Grossman, writing in 1999, revealed how the mainstream corporate press virtually ignores the government’s pronouncements while trade journals like Space News, Defense News, Aviation Week, Space Technology and Electronic Engineering Times routinely report on the military-industrial complex’s high-tech breakthroughs.
As for chemtrail skeptics, they might want to consult Rutgers University Political Science Professor Leonard Cole’s book Clouds of Secrecy: The Army’s Germ Warfare Test Over Populated Areas. Chemtrail deniers are apparently happy with the thought that their beloved paternalistic government would engage in aerial spraying over densely populated areas.
U.S. Representative Marty Sabo, a Democrat from Minnesota, denounced “the secret Army program to spray Minneapolis and other cities with chemicals in the 1950s and ’60s,” the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported in September 1994. “The idea that the government would use its own citizens as guinea pigs is appalling, and I condemn it in the strongest possible terms,” Sabo told a House subcommittee investigating the secret spraying, which used fluorescent tracers to mark wind patterns.
As for the Army, it argues that the secret Cold War-era spraying was not “human experimentation” since it didn’t target any specific individuals and the zinc cadmium sulfide used was harmless. But the International Agency for Research on Cancer lists all cadmium compounds as known cancer-causing agents.
Former students of Clinton Elementary in south Minneapolis told an investigating panel from the National Research Council that the Army’s secret chemical spraying adversely affected their health, according to the Star Tribune.
Skeptics who continue to insist the government would never be involved in secret aerial spraying, particularly in Ohio, may want to address their questions to the C-130 aircrews from the 910th Airlift Wing stationed at Youngstown’s Air Reserve Station. In July 2000, an Air Force press release bragged, “Fifteen service members from military installations in Germany and England were at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, 8-12 May, learning how to use chemicals to destroy the enemy… The seven airmen and eight soldiers learned how to plan, execute and oversee the entire process of applying pesticides by air.” The press release said the Youngstown air unit will only be used against “insects with their deadly diseases.”
Apparently insects take many forms. During the Seattle demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in November 1999, CNN reported that a military air unit with pathogen capacity to induce sickness in humans was deployed against the demonstrators.
January 24, 2002
(San Antonio Express via Rense.com)
4-25-2
A former chief of the Strategic Air Command predicted today that it is inevitable that the United States will someday face a terrorist attack using such weapons as a small nuclear bomb.
Retired Gen. Eugene E. Habiger outlined a chilling scenario in which terrorists detonate a 2-kiloton nuclear bomb that kills and injures thousands, cripples the federal government and sows panic across America.
The little bomb in the trunk of a car "is easy to make, is easy to detonate and can cause a lot of damage," said Habiger, who retired from the military in 1998.
"I think it's not a matter of if, it's when," he told the San Antonio Express-News. "It could be anyplace."
Habiger, president of the San Antonio Water System, offered that grim assessment during a luncheon at Fiesta TechNet 2002, an information technology conference that wrapped up today.
His suitcase nuke scenario is unlike any attack yet on the nation, even last fall's strike against the World Trade Center, and it drew quick reaction from a surprised Bush administration official, who said, "I don't know why he would say it."
The White House National Office of Homeland Security wouldn't say if the government could prevent the detonation of a suitcase nuke or a "dirty" bomb - one in which conventional explosives distribute radioactive material.
"We are working to prevent that from happening," agency spokesman Gordon Johndroe said.
In Habiger's vision the small bomb kills tens of thousands in the Washington area. Fallout most likely spreads south from the District of Columbia. Intense fires from the blast leave thousands more within a 2-mile radius of the center with second-degree burns, and cuts and abrasions due to glass and building damage.
All six of the district's Potomac River bridges would be damaged, cutting the city off from Virginia, preventing emergency vehicles from reaching the dead and injured.
Power outages, gas line explosions, water cutoffs, disruption of public transit systems and the federal government itself - including the Pentagon and White House - would ensue, as well as mass panic around the United States.
"The thing that you didn't see in the World Trade Center tower event were thousands of people lying dead in the streets, and with a nuclear device of some kind you're going to see that," he predicted after his speech. "It's going to become much more personal."
(www.edie.net)
Rising temperatures linked to global climate change are thought to be the cause of this accelerated melting.
Scientists from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) have studied topographical maps, aerial photographs and satellite images since 1999. They have revealed that at least 44 glacial lakes in Nepal and Bhutan are growing in size so rapidly that they could burst their banks within as little as five years’ time.
Research is showing that glaciers are melting more and more rapidly and consequently the lakes that are fed by glaciers are growing in size. Combined with this is an associated increase in air temperature. Long-term monitoring in Nepal has shown an average air temperature increase of 1°C since the 1970’s.
The Tsho Rolpa Lake in Nepal is now six times bigger than it was in the late 1950’s. Ten thousand human lives, thousands of livestock, areas of agricultural land and many bridges are at high risk from this lake flooding. An early warning system is being installed to link the lake to villages at risk from floodwaters. Sensors and sirens will hopefully be effective at warning people against an impending flood but this will not save infrastructure or agricultural land. Engineering work is also underway to try to lower the water levels of the Tsho Rolpa Lake by 30 metres. Systems of siphons are used to drain away water in a controlled way, and there are plans for the potential development of hydroelectric schemes powered by this excess water.
To put this into perspective, Glacial Lake Outburst Floods (GLOFs) are not a new phenomenon; they have simply been happening more frequently over the last 30 years. But the damage they can cause is huge. In 1985 a sudden flood from the Dig Tsho Lake in Nepal destroyed 14 bridges and led to US$1.5 million worth of damage to a small hydropower plant.
Surendra Shrestha, Regional Coordinator in Asia for UNEP’s Division of Early Warning and Assessment, warns that solving the problem of GLOFs, “is going to be costly because glacial lakes are situated in remote areas which are difficult to reach”. Much more money is urgently needed to carry out similar work in other areas that may be at risk from these potentially devastating floods.
A UNEP spokesperson told edie that this problem is likely to be globally widespread, including areas in South America and China. Other regions of the Himalayas could not be included in this study due to the sensitivity of working on the ground, for example in areas of Pakistan and India where there are border disputes. Coupled with this, current resources are just not enough to carry out surveys and install early warning systems in all the areas where glacial flooding is likely to be a threat.
The spokesperson pointed out that, “The areas studied in Nepal and Bhutan have mainly small human settlements with relatively small populations. However in other potentially dangerous regions, for example in India and China, there are far larger human populations that could be at risk from glacial lake flooding.”
Rapid melting of glaciers and snowfields may also lead to disruption of water supplies, fisheries and other wildlife. Klaus Töepfer, the Executive Director of UNEP warns that, “If the glaciers continue to retreat at the rates being seen in places like the Himalayas, then many rivers and freshwater systems could run dry.”
This news also arrives during the UN International Year of Mountains. The aim of this year is to promote the conservation and sustainable development of mountain regions and raise public awareness of their global importance.
In October the Bishkek Global Mountain Summit will be held in the Republic of Kyrgystan. The Summit will agree on concrete actions for the sustainable development and management of mountain areas.
The impact of global climate change on natural systems and human populations is also an issue that will be placed under the microscope again at the World Summit on Sustainable Development to be held in Johannesburg this summer.
25 April, 2002
(BBCNEWS)
Most people assume that life in the rat race is bad for your health.
But new research suggests it is men who give up their careers to become house husbands who are more at risk of a fatal heart attack.
The study found that the pressures of staying at home to look after the children can be so stressful that they have a damaging effect on health.
Researcher Dr Elaine Eaker, of Eaker Epidemiology Enterprises in Wisconsin, said the key to the problem was that some men became stressed about the fact that they were performing a role not traditionally associated with them by society.
Men who do stay at home to look after the family tend not to have the same levels of support from peers, friends and family as women who do the same.
The findings are based on a 10-year study of 2,682 people aged between 18 and 77 who lived in the suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts.
Men who described themselves as house husbands had an 82% higher death rate over the period of the study than men who worked outside the home. Heart disease accounted for most of the extra risk.
The finding held good even when other factors such as age, blood pressure, and cholesterol level were taken into account.
Lonely life
Jack O'Sullivan, of the Fathers Direct group, was quoted as saying: "Home dads can be quite isolated.
"Society expects the main carer to be a woman, and society is structured around that.
"Daycare is called 'mother and toddler groups' and some men feel awkward about belonging to those groups."
Professor Cary Cooper, an occupational psychologist at the University of Manchester, said many men were guilty of under-estimating the task of caring for a family.
He said: "Most men think being a house husband will involve popping on a bit of washing, taking the kids to school and then putting their feet up with a cup of coffee.
"They are crazy. Housewives do much more multi-tasking than almost any man ever has to do in the workplace."
It is estimated that men have taken over the main homemaker's role in one in seven homes as increasing numbers of women become the main breadwinner.
The study also found that women in high powered jobs were more likely to develop heart disease than those in more junior positions. For men, that finding was reversed.
The research was presented at a meeting of the American Heart Association.
24 April 02
(New Scientist)
The sexual desire of women is boosted by the odours given off by breastfeeding women and newborn babies, researchers have found. The finding adds to the growing body of evidence suggesting that our natural smell influences other people on an unconscious level, and strengthens the argument that human pheromones exist and still exert a subtle influence over us.
In the study, smells associated with breastfeeding increased feelings of sexual intimacy in childless women volunteers. Why this should be so is a mystery, but the researchers suggest it may be a way that women signal to each other that the environment is a good one in which to reproduce.
Julie Mennella of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia and a team at the University of Chicago asked 26 nursing mothers to wear absorbent pads in their bras and under their armpits. The odours collected on the pads probably came from both the mother and the feeding baby.
Another 45 women, who had never given birth, then spent the next three months undertaking a "sniff challenge". For a month, all the women sniffed control pads with a phosphate buffer on them four times a day.
For the final two months, some women were randomly chosen to sniff pads with the breastfeeding compounds, while others continued with the control scent. Each day the volunteers measured their temperature, took a urine sample and recorded sexual activity.
In 2001, Mennella's group showed that exposure to breastfeeding odours disrupted the menstrual cycles of volunteers: longer cycles got longer and shorter ones got shorter.
The new study reveals a more subtle effect. While the women smelling the breastfeeding compounds did not report increased sexual activity - this behaviour was most obviously influenced by the absence or presence of a partner - they did report significantly heightened and more enduring sexual desire and fantasies.
"The data are pretty striking," says Mennella, who presents her evidence this week to a meeting of the Association for Chemoreception Sciences in Sarasota, Florida.
She concludes that the chemicals encourage other women to reproduce, and that they may have evolved as a signal that the environment is suitable for raising young. In many cultures, newly-wed young women are encouraged to spend time around new mothers to increase their own chances of having children, she says.
"I wonder if these cultures have tapped into something." She is eager to find out if the breastfeeding smell has any impact on fertility.
Richard Brown, a psychologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, notes that these are only preliminary findings. But he points out that breastfeeding women have higher than normal progesterone levels.
"Maybe the high progesterone acts like an androgen," he speculates. "Maybe it's the weirdest of possible things and they're producing male-like odours."
April 26, 2002
(London Times)
NEW YORK was seized by fears of a “dirty bomb” terrorist attack yesterday after an apparently accidental explosion ripped through a commercial building, injuring dozens, at least six critically.
Manhattan hospitals were put on full disaster alert and prepared to decontaminate incoming victims from radiation, with at least one scanning them with a Geiger counter.
Fearing a new terrorist attack, the FBI and the New York bomb squad swooped on the ten-storey building on West 19th Street in response to the blast shortly before noon. The surrounding streets were cordoned off and emergency crews and more than 100 firefighters set up a triage centre on the pavement for dozens of walking wounded.
St Vincent’s Hospital, which treated the injured from the World Trade Centre on September 11, declared its top “Code Three” disaster alert as its safety officer monitored arriving victims for radiation in a decontamination area. Federal officials gave warning recently that al-Qaeda may be trying to develop a radiological device, or “dirty bomb”, for attacks in the United States.
Six people were admitted to the hospital in “very critical condition” with head wounds and burns, after the blast which injured up to 50. Windows along the block were blown out by the force of the explosion and several of the injured were hit by flying glass. More than 100 firefighters were called to the scene.
But Dr Richard Westfal, the associate director of St Vincent Hospital’s emergency room, said: “There was no evidence of any weapons of mass destruction or anything like that. It looked like just an explosion.”
The blast rattled nearby buildings and was initially thought to have occurred in the Apex Technical School on the corner of West 19th Street and 6th Ave. The school was not damaged.
Bill Beek, who lives a half-block away, said: “It was a real giant boom, It sounded like an airplane crashing.”
One eyewitness, Alan Awol, said: “I heard a big explosion. The whole third floor had collapsed. People were stuck on the third floor. They looked like they were hysterical, like they wanted to jump out.”
Scott Bonilla, a student at the technical school, said he was inside the building when it began shaking. “They told us to rush out of the building,” he said. Stuart Markowitz, who runs the school’s education department, said: “It was just a really loud noise. Some of our windows did get blown out.”
Michael Bloomberg, the New York Mayor, said: “At the moment I want to assure that there is absolutely no reason to think this is anything other than a tragic accident, and we hope there is no loss of life.”
Like the jet crash near John F. Kennedy airport late last year, the blast rattled New Yorkers’ nerves and offered another test of the city’s revamped emergency response system.
Nicholas Scoppetta, the New York Fire Commissioner, said that the explosion occurred in the basement of the building, which houses a company that makes signs. He said the company received shipments of volatile materials in 50-gallon drums on Wednesday but could not say if those were the cause of the explosion. According to earlier reports, the New York City building department had received a complaint about unauthorised construction at the site and inspectors had issued a “stop-work” order on Tuesday. Despite the ban, work apparently continued.
January 7, 2002
(Reuters)
NEW YORK - Four Port Authority police officers working at the wreckage of the World Trade Center have been reassigned after tests showed elevated levels of mercury in their blood, said officials.
"They were taken off the site as a precaution," said a Port Authority official. "But its not clear that the mercury came from Ground Zero."
The development underscored concern among the thousands of workers at the wreckage, known as Ground Zero, and nearby residents that the enormous cleanup site in Manhattan's financial district could be a source of hazardous contaminants.
Officials said the four officers who were transferred from the site experienced only mildly elevated mercury levels in their bloodstreams and showed no signs of mercury poisoning - an ailment that can damage the kidneys, brain and lungs.
The Environmental Protection Agency has conducted numerous air and water tests near the World Trade Center site since September, when hijacked planes slammed into the twin towers and caused their collapse, but has turned up no evidence of a public health hazard.
Also, many of the workers at the wreckage site have undergone screening for toxins without positive results.
(alternet.org)
April 19, 2002
In March 1996, the British government announced that 10 people had died after eating beef from cattle sick with "mad cow disease." A month later, talk-show host Oprah Winfrey discussed the topic on national television.
While interviewing guest Howard Lyman of the Humane Society about his belief that American cattle might be at risk for the disease, Winfrey told her audience, "It has just stopped me cold from eating another burger." A group of Texas cattle ranchers sued Winfrey and Lyman for libeling cattle. Four years and over $1 million later, the two were vindicated in court.
Winfrey and Lyman were sued under the Texas False Disparagement of Perishable Food Products Act. Food disparagement laws are a new tool in an old bag of tricks used by corporations to protect their own economic interests at the expense of public discussion. Silencing public debate with frivolous, time-consuming and costly lawsuits has become so commonplace that the technique has its own name: strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPP suits.
Winfrey and Lyman won in lower federal court because the judge ruled that cattle were not "perishable food products." The cattlemen pursued the matter in appellate court. A three-judge panel eventually ruled against the Texas ranchers. But the SLAPP suit achieved its objective by forcing Winfrey and Lyman to spend an enormous amount of time and money defending themselves-and by serving as a warning to the rest of us that saying what we believe to be true may cost us more than we can bear.
Lawsuits, and the threat of lawsuits, are not the only means industry uses to stifle dissent. Industry routinely buys the science that suits its needs (tobacco is a good example) and according to Sheldon Rampton, editor of the newsletter PR Watch, spends at least $10 billion every year on "public relations."
Industry's use of half-truths and intimidation to defend its toxic assault on life is nothing new. But until 40 years ago, when Rachel Carson's book "Silent Spring" was published, one could argue that we -- the people -- didn't know what was going on. "Silent Spring" woke up the nation, creating a national consciousness about the health and environmental consequences of pesticide use. Industry woke up too. Bruce Johnson, a Seattle lawyer, told the New York Times in 1999, "If [food disparagement laws] had been in place in the 1960s, Rachel Carson might not have found a publisher willing to print 'Silent Spring'."
Trying to Silence Silent Spring
Before World War I, about half of the industrial products in the U.S. were made from renewable resources, such as plant-, wood- and animal-based materials. In the 1920s and 1930s, oil and chemical companies like Union Carbide, Shell and Dow expanded their interest in petrochemical manufacturing. The petrochemical industry, strengthened immensely by World War II, replaced renewable materials with synthetic organic compounds made from the byproducts of oil and natural gas: for instance, synthetic rubber replaced natural rubber, chemical detergents replaced animal-based soaps and polyester replaced cotton. In the 1950s and 1960s, the thriving plastics industry accelerated the shift even more. Today, 92 percent of the materials used for U.S. products and production processes are nonrenewable.
In many cases, the processes used to manufacture synthetic products created toxic wastes, and often the products themselves -- either intact or when dissipated into the environment -- were harmful to life. Among the most lethal of these products were synthetic pesticides. Before 1940, most pesticides were made from plants; a few were made from toxic metals like arsenic and mercury. But the synthetic chemicals created for chemical warfare during World War II were found to be highly effective weed and insect killers. So in 1945, with strong government backing, these poisons entered commercial markets. Within 10 years, synthetic pesticides had captured 90 percent of the agricultural pest-control market.
Pesticides such as dichloro diphenyl trichloroethane (DDT), dieldrin and aldrin were dropped from planes. State and federal government agencies blanketed neighborhoods with poisons in an attempt to eradicate pests like gypsy moths and Japanese beetles. Farmers used DDT and other synthetic insecticides on a variety of crops, including cotton, peanuts and soybeans. Suburbanites embraced the new chemicals in their war against perceived nuisances like crab grass and dandelions.
Few people understood the dangers to life that these new chemicals presented. Sickness and death among chemical manufacturing workers were sometimes the first indication that the materials they worked with were toxic. But most people believed that you had to be an industrial worker to get sick. Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" was the first widely read publication to say that everybody was being poisoned.
"Silent Spring" was serialized by The New Yorker in June 1962 and came out in book form that same year. The book was -- and still is -- a devastating testament to the mortal dangers of synthetic chemical poisons. Carson, a wildlife biologist with two bestsellers and a National Book Award under her belt, wrote, "We allow the chemical death rain to fall as though there were no alternative, whereas in fact there are many, and our ingenuity could soon discover many more if given opportunity."
"Silent Spring" was written before big business politics and sophistry were so well versed at setting the terms of discourse about environmental issues. Still, during the four years that Carson spent writing the book, she was well aware that it would unleash the wrath of the chemical industry. Deeply concerned about potential industry attacks and lawsuits, she did what she could to protect herself.
Carson and her literary agent Marie Rodell asked lawyers from Houghton Mifflin, her publisher, to review the manuscript. Carson made sure Houghton Mifflin had libel insurance and she renegotiated a contract with them that put a monetary limit on her personal liability. And building the best defense of all, she meticulously checked her facts and diligently worked on a list of principal sources to document her conclusions.
Carson's concerns were well founded. After The New Yorker serialized parts of the book, the New York Times ran an article with the headline, "Silent Spring Is Now Noisy Summer: Pesticide Industry Up In Arms Over a New Book."
The story began, "The $300,000,000 pesticides industry has been highly irritated by a quiet woman author whose previous works on science have been praised for the beauty and precision of the writing." It quoted the president of the Montrose Chemical Corporation -- a major manufacturer of DDT, a pesticide that Carson discussed at length -- as saying that Carson wrote not "as a scientist but rather as a fanatic defender of the cult of the balance of nature."
Some of the criticism seems laughable now. After the second installment from "Silent Spring" appeared in The New Yorker, a California man wrote to the magazine:
"Miss Rachel Carson's reference to the selfishness of insecticide manufacturers probably reflects her Communist sympathies, like a lot of our writers these days. We can live without birds and animals, but, as the current market slump shows, we cannot live without business. As for insects, isn't it just like a woman to be scared to death of a few little bugs! As long as we have the H-bomb everything will be O.K. P.S. She's probably a peace-nut too."
But industry's attack on Rachel Carson was swift and vicious. The chemical companies banded together and hired a public relations firm to malign the book and attack Carson's credibility. The pesticide industry trade group, the National Agricultural Chemicals Association, spent over $250,000 (equivalent to $1.4 million today) to denigrate the book and its author. The company that manufactured and sold the pesticides chlordane and heptachlor, the Velsicol Chemical Company of Chicago, threatened to sue Houghton Mifflin.
Milton Greenstein, legal counsel and vice president of The New Yorker, was called by at least one chemical company and told that the magazine would be sued if it didn't pull the last installment it planned to run of Carson's book. Greenstein responded, "Everything in those articles has been checked and is true. Go ahead and sue."
John Vosburgh, editor of Audubon Magazine, which published excerpts from "Silent Spring," said pretty much the same thing when Audubon was threatened. According to Carson biographer Linda Lear, Velsicol's lawyers suggested to Vosburgh that printing "a muckraking article containing unwarranted assertions about Velsicol pesticides" might "jeopardize [the] financial security" of magazine employees and their families. Vosburgh was so incensed that he wrote an editorial that appeared with the book excerpts, criticizing the chemical industry's response.
Industry threats did not stop the publication of "Silent Spring," nor did the attacks prevent the book from becoming wildly successful. Carson was a popular writer who had the support of her editors, her publisher and even President Kennedy, who cited "Silent Spring" as a reason to examine the health effects of pesticides. After the book was published, Carson was interviewed by Eric Severeid on national television and she testified before Congress about chemical poisons. She was profiled in Life magazine and featured in the New York Times and the Washington Post. In a review for the Book-of-the-Month Club, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote that "Silent Spring" "is a call for immediate action and for effective control of all merchants of poison," and called the book "the most important chronicle of this century for the human race."
Carson effectively got her message across in part because what she had to say was radically new to the public, because her facts were unassailable, and because industry, though quite capable of attacking her and the publications that featured her work, had not yet learned how to overload the media-and by extension the people-with its own point of view.
Today's Targets
Rachel Carson understood the forces at work in government and industry. Having served on the staff of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for 16 years, she was well aware of government's role in promoting and defending chemical poisons. "The crusade to create a chemically sterile, insect-free world," Carson wrote, "seems to have engendered a fanatic zeal on the part of many specialists and most of the so-called control agencies."
We were living, she said, in an era "dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged. When the public protests, confronted with some obvious evidence of damaging results of pesticide applications, it is fed little tranquilizing pills of half truth. We urgently need an end to these false assurances, to the sugar-coating of unpalatable facts."
This language is too mild to describe what is happening today. Not only has the production of chemical poisons continued, but the chemical industry has become much more skillful at manipulating the media for its own ends. Now we are fed big pills of outright lies, prevarication, and deception. We do not need to see industry's press releases; we hear the corporate viewpoint every day, all the time. Forty years after Rachel Carson tripped the alarm bell, we have been largely conditioned by industry to accept that which is harmful to us and to reject the warning signs of environmental devastation. We have been made ready to believe that a conservation ethic is incompatible with prosperity and that with creature comforts come sacrifices. Many of us want the sugar coating because, to a great extent, we are consumer junkies who believe that, if we demand that industry change its behavior, we will have to change our own.
But of course not everyone wants the sugar-coating, and some people are writing and talking about environmental issues in ways that are as compelling as "Silent Spring." It is just harder to hear them now, harder to unpeel the layers of deception created by corporations and regulators. And when dissenting voices are heard, industry is quick to strike back.
For example, two recent books, "Living Downstream" and "Our Stolen Future," are filled with the kind of critical thinking and meticulous research found in Carson's "Silent Spring." Both deal with the chemical causes and consequences of health and environmental degradation. Both take industry to task. Both were attacked.
Sandra Steingraber's 1997 book, "Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment," is the "Silent Spring" of the post-Baby Boom generation. Viewing cancer through several lenses -- as biologist, cancer survivor, poet, and activist -- Steingraber shows the links between cancer and environmental degradation. The book is beautifully written and powerfully frank. Reviewer Nancy Evans wrote: "The author describes the many kinds of silence that surround cancer issues, personal and political, individual and collective. The silence of scientists who fear loss of funding, the silence that fear imposes on people with cancer and those at risk. She suggests that 'Silent Spring' shows us 'how one kind of silence breeds another, how the secrecies of government beget a weirdly quiet and lifeless world.' "
"Living Downstream" was also reviewed in the New England Journal of Medicine in November 1998. The negative review was signed "Jerry H. Berke, M.D., M.P.H." Trouble is, the journal failed to note Berke's affiliation with the W.R. Grace Company, a notorious environmental polluter.
Berke, director of toxicology for W.R. Grace, began his review with an attack on all environmentalists: "An older colleague of mine once suggested that the work product of an environmentalist is controversy. Fear and the threat of unseen, unchosen hazards enhance fund-raising for environmental political organizations and fund environmental research, he suggested."
Berke called Steingraber's book "biased" and "obsessed with environmental pollution." And like a loyal industry toxicologist, he wrote, "The focus on environmental pollution and agricultural chemicals to explain human cancer has simply not been fruitful nor given rise to useful preventive strategies."
The mainstream media essentially ignored "Living Downstream." No one can say exactly why, but one can guess that the book didn't win any points in the corporate-controlled media by eloquently pressing for prevention and suggesting that people change the way they think about chemicals. The book calls for a "human rights approach," which would recognize that the "current system of regulating the use, release, and disposal of known and suspected carcinogens --rather than preventing their generation in the first place -- is intolerable."
Like "Living Downstream," "Our Stolen Future" -- book about endocrine disrupters (synthetic chemicals that disrupt hormones) -- has also come under fire. When it was published in 1996, "Our Stolen Future" caused an immediate stir. Using a new way to examine the effects of chemical contamination, authors Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski and John Peterson Myers provide evidence that endocrine disruptors are widespread in the environment and are making people sick.
A staggering list of synthetic chemicals, they tell us, interferes with hormones in humans and wildlife. These chemicals are common in the manufacture of pesticides, herbicides, and petrochemicals: they are found in soaps and detergents, flame retardants, and the dioxins produced in pulp and paper mills. In humans, the presence of endocrine disruptors can result in, among other things, severe reproductive tract deformities, declines in sperm count, elevated risk of cancer, and even behavioral changes. "Our Stolen Future" makes a powerful case for caution when using these chemicals.
But industry was having none of it. As Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber point out in "Trust Us, We're Experts!" industry's attack on the book was "instant and vicious." The industry-funded Advancement of Sound Science Coalition held a press conference at which no fewer than ten scientists labeled the book as "fiction." And another industry-financed group, the American Council on Science and Health, "obtained a copy of the book in galley form months before publication and prepared an 11-page attack on it before it even hit the bookstores." Not surprisingly, the Wall Street Journal referred to "Our Stolen Future" as an "environmental hype machine."
One chemical industry leader, the Monsanto Company, has a long record of going after its critics. Monsanto manufactured DDT and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) before they were banned by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in the 1970s. It still makes a long list of synthetic chemicals and aggressively markets genetically engineered products like bovine growth hormone (Posilac) and genetically modified seeds. A billion-dollar company when "Silent Spring" first appeared, Monsanto published a parody of Carson's work, called "The Desolate Year," in the October 1962 issue of Monsanto Magazine. Since then, Monsanto has become a corporate role model in sugar-coating unpalatable facts and silencing dissent.
For example, "Against the Grain: Biotechnology and the Corporate Takeover of Your Food," a book by Dr. Marc Lappé and Britt Bailey, was originally supposed to be published by Vital Health. But the company cancelled publication after receiving a threatening letter from a Monsanto lawyer, who said he believed the manuscript contained false statements about Monsanto's biggest money maker, the herbicide RoundUp. Common Courage Press picked up the book and published it in 1998.
That same year, The Ecologist magazine published a special issue, "The Monsanto Files," which took a critical look at the chemical/biotechnology giant. But The Ecologist's printer, Penwells of Saltash Cornwall (with whom The Ecologist had worked for 29 years), destroyed the 14,000 copy print run without even notifying the magazine. Penwells refused to comment on its decision and Monsanto denied any responsibility for the action, prompting The Ecologist's editor, Zac Goldsmith, to say, "The fact that Monsanto had nothing to do with the decision to pulp is, if anything, more scary than if they had made some kind of legal threat. It goes to show what a powerful force a reputation can be." The magazine was able to line up another printer for the Monsanto issue.
In both cases, Monsanto's critics managed to find other venues for getting their information out to the public. But, like the SLAPP suit waged against Oprah Winfrey and Howard Lyman, the chemical company's actions -- or maybe only its reputation for doing damage -- caused serious disruption along the way. It's all part of a sophisticated set of techniques that industry uses to take the legs out from under dissent.
The Obligation to Act
Forty years ago, Rachel Carson wrote, "We have fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good?" (Perhaps the question mark expresses Carson's wish to be hopeful.)
Today, we are up against an immensely more organized, coordinated and powerful corporate PR machine than Carson or the early environmentalists faced. Although some people have woken up, it is hard not to feel numb when faced with yet another story about environmental degradation and chemical poisoning.
The facts about chemical production today are sobering. The world uses five billion pounds of pesticides every year, with almost half used in the United States. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as many as 500,000 U.S. products pose physical or health hazards and can be defined as "hazardous chemicals."
U.S. industry uses 70,000 different chemical substances, but there is little or no attempt to assess their health or environmental impacts. Each year, over 1,000 new synthetic chemicals are introduced in the United States. But only a small fraction of these are tested for carcinogenity or endocrine disruption, and there is little understanding of how they interact with each other. The list of known poisons is long and troubling. It is as if we have forgotten, or have never known, "that which is good."
It is hard to be hopeful. In a chapter entitled "To the Ends of the Earth," "Our Stolen Future" follows a PCB molecule from its creation in a Monsanto chemical plant near Anniston, Alabama, to its entry into a polar bear in the Arctic. That chemical has now made its way to court, in the blood of thousands of Anniston residents who are suing Monsanto for knowingly dumping PCBs in their community. In January 2002, during opening arguments, a Monsanto lawyer carried on the company's long tradition of denial and deceit: "We would all rather live in a pristine world. We are all going to be exposed to things on a daily basis. Our bodies can deal with it."
We can't address the environmental crisis without going right to industry's door. A good first step is to hold industries accountable for the pollution they generate and the harm they cause. In places like Anniston, people are trying. But the greatest impact will come from fundamentally changing what corporations produce and how. This could be done by making laws based on, for example, the Precautionary Principle, which says that if there is reasonable suspicion that a technology, process or chemical could be harmful, its application should be altered or it should be stopped altogether -- even if some cause-and-effect relationships have not been fully established scientifically.
Moreover, the burden of proof lies with the activity's proponents and not with the general public. This is not a "fringe" idea. The European Commission (the executive body of the European Union responsible for implementing and managing policy) and some nations, such as Sweden and Germany, have adopted the Precautionary Principle as part of a structured approach to risk analysis. In 1997, the state of Massachusetts enacted a law that uses the Precautionary Principle as a guide for preventing toxic pollution.
Carson wrote, "The obligation to endure gives us the right to know." We know much more now than we did 40 years ago. If we are to endure, then we are also obligated to act. Human ingenuity has in it immense resources for good: by making good choices, we can live well without destroying life.
Laura Orlando is executive director of the ReSource Institute for Low Entropy Systems and a member of the Dollars & Sense collective.
Archive#1
Archive#2
Archive#3
Archive#4
Archive#5
Archive#6
Archive#7
Archive#8
Archive#9
Archive#10
Archive#11
Archive#12
Archive#13
Archive#14
Archive#15
Archive#16
Archive#17
Archive#18