Creepy Disclosures Weblog- Archive#28
  • HEADLINE INDEX FOR JUNE 21st 2002
  • AL QUAEDA SPOKESMAN: OSAMA ALIVE AND IN GOOD HEALTH
  • Conspiracy flowchart explains everything (via fark.com)
  • Arafat and Ariel Sharon best friends gallery
  • FBI Warns of Attacks with Fuel Tanker Trucks
  • Were Israelis Detained on Sept. 11 Spies?-June 21 (ABCNEWS)
  • FBI makes spy-catching priority, topped only by counterterrorism (washingtontimes.com)
  • FBI COVER-UP OF ISRAELI SPY OPERATIONS IN US (whatreallyhappened.com)
  • TIME MAG POLLS:AMERICANS SEE FOURTH OF JULY TERROR LIKELY
  • Terrorist Threat Warning from fake Ambulances and Police Cars (ABCNEWS.com)
  • FBI Probes Las Vegas Overheard July 4th Threat Claim
  • UPDATE:FBI Deem Vegas Threat "Not Credible"
  • TIME MAG: 'Dirtybomber' Was Trying to Build a Nuke...
  • Radiological attack: 'Manhattan would be uninhabitable for years'...(UKIndependent)
  • Deadly Soviet Caesium Is Missing (NewScientist.com)
  • Bush Gives CIA More Powers To Oust Saddam (Reuters)
  • A History of CIA Atrocities
  • Was Robert Gaylon Ross, Sr. right? Committee to elect Jay Rockefeller as World President?
  • REPOST:THE NEW WORLD DISORDER: Bilderberg group meeting near D.C. -Powerful Secretive organization holds powwow in Virginia-June 6th 2002 (Guardian)
  • REPOST:Who are the Bilderberg Group? (conspiracy-fatalist Robert Gaylon Ross, Sr)
  • Bilderberg Batters Bush; But Unity remains on NWO (Nationalist Americanfreepress.com)
  • Air Cargo Poses Terror Risk
  • FBI searches L.A. coast for al Qaeda crew, cache
  • Over 75 Stowaway Terrorists Sneak Into America By Sea Container (From DEBKA-Net-Israeli Intelligence (disinfo?) website)
  • San Francisco Bay Terror Fears - Suspicious Ferry Boat Surveillance Reported (SFExaminer.com)
  • Major Milk Recall in Bay Area
  • U.S. HOMELAND SECURITY -- THE MAKINGS OF AN AMERICAN GESTAPO?
  • Speculation That Powell May Quit Caps Bad Week For Bush(UKTelegraph)
  • Blimps larger than a football field - carrying radar to detect aircraft, missiles and ships - would soar 13 miles above the Earth under one proposal for improving US homeland defense. (tampatrib.com)
  • PHOTO:Partial Solar Eclipse, New Mexico, USA
  • The Foreign Office is welcoming the arrest of three terrorist suspects said to be planning suicide attacks on British and US warships. (Ananova)
  • Captured al Qaeda Reveal bin Laden Attack Plans (Reuters)
  • Is the FBI Penetrated? -Terrorists' Boston hotel searched on Sept 10th? (by Whitley Strieber -Author of "Communion")
  • They Have Ways of Making Al-Qaida Talk Interrogations must be pretty damn crucial these days. Given advances in science during the past twenty years, how much more sophisticated can CIA methods have become since the 80's? (via Metafilter)
  • Truth Serums & Torture:On U.S. pundit shows this year, a hot topic has been whether captured Taliban fighters and alleged al-Qaeda operatives should be subjected to "truth serums" or physical torture to make them talk( http://www.consortiumnews.com)
  • French arrest 'aides to shoe bomber' (The Guardian)
  • Russians claim to have interviewed Mullah Omar-Argumenty I Fakty claims to have conducted an email interview with the cleric. (Yahoonews)
  • Moroccan Secret Agent 'Predicted New York Attack' (The Times - London)
  • U.S. Says It Halted Qaeda Plot to Use Radioactive Bomb- Suspect initially planned attacks on Hotel Rooms and Gas Stations (NewYorkTimes)
  • Pakistan: More Americans arrested- June 11 (UPI)
  • Bush says manhunt on for dirty bomb plotters
  • IMAGES:could the "dirty bomber" be the missing OKC bomber?
  • The mystery surrounding the death of John O'Neill:The Propaganda Preparation for 9/11-O'Neill, who died in his capacity as head of security for the World Trade Center, was also formerly the New York FBI Counterterror chief responsible for the investigation into Osama bin Laden.
  • Sep 11th Big Ben Attack Foiled (Skynews-June 11 2002)
  • IMAGES:Ideas for WTC memorial (Newsday.com)
  • Will Detrick Worker Ever Be Charged? Scientists Charge FBI Is Hiding Name Of The Anthrax Killer (TheScotsman.com)
  • Soviet hemorrhagic Smallpox Outbreak Report Worries Experts-(Reuters)
  • Smallpox Epidemic Rapidly Spreading In Pakistan Province (Dawn.com)
  • Three Die From Smallpox In Barachatti Village, India -Is smallpox really extinct in the wild? Were the anthrax attacks a controlled exercise in panic to allow mandatory smallpox vacination in US by a worried CDC? (Source: Jeff Rense.com)
  • UPDATE:WHO Terms Pakistan Outbreak Chickenpox Not Smallpox
  • WHO confirms Ebola cases in the Republic of Congo
  • Mysterious Children's Rash Has Now Spread To 27 States
  • Now showing on satellite TV: secret American spy photos -Security lapse allows viewers to see sensitive operations (UKGuardian)
  • Bookies taking bets on the location of the next suicide attack against Israel.-"Betting on Eilat, a Red Sea resort that has not seen any violence during the past 21 months of Israeli-Palestinian fighting, is a long shot at 17-1, while often-hit Jerusalem was given odds of 1.5-1." (UKGuardian)
  • "Israel will respond to acts of terror by capturing PA territory," says Sharon
  • More Than 10,000 Jews Fought For The Confederacy (Rense via Washington Times)
  • Sergei Torop was a traffic cop in the small Russian town of Minusinsk until 1989, when he announced that he was the son of God. Now he commands a following of thousands and rules over a large swath of the Siberian mountains.
  • Astronomers have revealed that on 14 June, an asteroid the size of a football pitch made one of the closest ever recorded approaches to the Earth.
  • An "impact winter" followed by a blistering heat wave killed off the dinosaurs after the Earth was hit by a giant object from space.
  • Volcanoes Loom As Sleeping Threat For Millions By Hillary Mayell (via National Geographic News)
  • A significant number of organisms that survived the five greatest mass extinctions in Earth's history subsequently failed to achieve evolutionary success.
  • New 'T-Ray' Space Camera Also Sees Through Walls, Clothes (Space.com)
  • Robot learns how to escape from exhibition
  • Will British 'tooth phone' take bite out of mobiles?
  • Thought-Controlled Prosthetics Inching Closer To Reality
  • Photo of an MRI Scan showing a brain implant (The Mind Control Forum)
  • Musicians found to have 'more sensitive brains'...(UKIndependent)
  • Serial Killer Caught By His Own Internet Footprint
  • Audiogalaxy moves to filter songs (BBCNEWS)-Bawahhh!
  • Chinese Scientists to Head for Suspected ET Relics
  • U.S. Air Force's Nuclear Flying Saucer (popularmechanics.com)
  • NASA Returning To Nuclear Programs (popularscience.com)
  • Thousands of Mysterious Balls Wash Up On New Hampshire Beach-Scientists Unsure What Spheres Are
  • PHOTO: 'Unidentified Floating Object' Washes Up On Beach-South Carolina Coast Residents Find Silver Orb
  • Long Island beaches closed after half-ton of a strange unidentifed rubbery substance washes shore
  • Is the equator tipping? Above freezing temperatures in Antartica? Hottest temperatures in Jordan for over 40 years.
  • Germans ask: Why doesn't anyone like us? (Reuters)
  • British Dumping Of Nazi Chemical Weapons in North Sea after WWII Threatens Europe
  • Documentary of US Afgan 'war crimes' shocks Europe (aka some German Communists) (South Africa's Independent Online iol.co.za)
  • Argentina Sends 'X-Files' Team to Probe Epidemic of Animal Mutilations (ABCNEWS)
  • There's Life in Old Dog Yet - Thanks to Hero Seal
  • Sea Lion Breaches Security at San Fransisco Airport: Heads for American Airlines Gate
  • Seal Disease Returns to Europe-Threatening thousands (BBCNEWS)
  • Mysterious giant beasts may lurk in the darkest depths of the ocean, making whale-like noises that are baffling scientists, it was disclosed today.
  • L.A. facing driest year on record - local expert says dying trees need human touch (LADailyNews)
  • PAPER: Average temperature has risen 7 degrees over the last 30 years in Alaska... Alaska, No Longer So Frigid, Starts to Crack, Burn and Sag (NYT)
  • Penguins in the Falkland Islands are suffering mass-starvation. Biologists fear that nearly a quarter of the world's population of Rockhopper penguins might have perished. (NewScientist.com)
  • It's faster to ride penguins to work than take some NYC bus routes, says study (Yahoonews)
  • Revealed: How the smoke stacks of America have brought the world's worst drought to Africa (UK Independent)
  • Smoking Vaccine On The Horizon? (AP/CBS)
  • Proposed legislation would let FDA crack down on smoking big time
  • Negative ion fad has Japanese buying up feel-good gadgets
  • Transsexuals Sue Toys "R" Us (Newsday-NY-June 20th)

  • AL QUEDA SPOKESMAN: OSAMA ALIVE AND IN GOOD HEALTH
    (The Associated Press)
    BEIRUT, Lebanon (June 23) - Osama bin Laden and his No. 2 man are both alive and well and their al-Qaida network is ready to attack new U.S. targets, bin Laden's spokesman said in audiotaped remarks aired Sunday. The message also claimed responsibility for a deadly April fire at a Jewish synagogue in Tunisia.
    The Qatar-based Al-Jazeera satellite television network, which has in the past aired videotaped messages of bin Laden and his top lieutenants, said that it received a recorded audiotaped message from Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, the Kuwaiti-born spokesman for bin Laden.
    There was no way to independently confirm the authenticity of the remarks. The Bush administration has said that it does not know whether bin Laden is alive or dead. There was no immediate reaction Saturday from the White House.
    It was not immediately clear when the tape was made or how Al-Jazeera obtained it. No comment from the station was available.
    Similar remarks, purportedly made by Abu Ghaith, appeared days earlier on an Arabic-language Web site that issues daily updates on the war in Afghanistan. The tape and the Web site had some of the same quotes and statements, including that bin Laden would soon make a televised address to the Muslim world.
    ``I want to assure Muslims that Sheik Osama bin Laden ... is in good and prosperous health and all what is being rumored about his illness and injury in Tora Bora has no truth,'' according to excerpts aired Sunday.
    The tape, which was monitored in Beirut, Lebanon, appeared recent. Referring to recent U.S. warnings about imminent al-Qaida threats, Abu Ghaith said the group will choose the right time, place and method.
    The warnings were ``a cover-up for the ugly face of the onslaught by the Democratic Party against the Republican Party after the American president announced he was aware of the Sept. 11 operations and because of the economic problems the American government was suffering from,'' Abu Ghaith said.
    ``I say 'Yes' to what American officials are saying ... that we are going to carry out attacks on America,'' he said.
    ``I want to assure Muslims that Sheik Osama bin Laden ... is in good and prosperous health and all what is being rumored about his illness and injury in Tora Bora has no truth,'' according to excerpts.
    Abu Ghaith said al-Qaida still has ``the capability to threaten America and execute such threats. The few coming days and months will prove to the whole world, Allah willing, the truth of what we are saying.''
    He called the Sept. 11 attacks a ``great historic victory that broke the backs of the Americans, the strongest power in this world,'' and referred to previous successes against the Americans: The 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the 2000 strike against the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen.
    Abu Ghaith also claimed al-Qaida was behind the fuel tanker explosion on the Tunisian island of Jerba, in which 15 people died, 10 of them Germans.
    ``This is an operation that was carried out by the al-Qaida organization (by a man) ... who could not see his brothers in Palestine being killed, slaughtered, their blood spilled and honor violated and he looks around him and sees Jews in the city of Jerba wandering and enjoying and practicing their rituals at will,'' Abu Ghaith said.
    The audiotape included Abu Ghaith denying reports that Ayman Al-Zawahri, bin Laden's No. 2 man in al-Qaida, was hurt in Tora Bora, an eastern Afghanistan mountain region where U.S. and allied forces pursued remnants of al-Qaida and former rulers of Afghanistan, the Taliban.
    ``I can say that 98 percent of the leadership of al-Qaida are safe and are running their affairs perfectly,'' the voice on the recording said.
    An Al-Jazeera presenter quoted Abu Ghaith as saying that fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Omar, who had protected bin Laden, is also alive.
    Abu Ghaith, a former teacher and mosque preacher who was stripped of his Kuwaiti citizenship after the Sept. 11 attacks, also said al-Qaida had been prepared for the U.S. campaign and that its military, security, economic and media network was unaffected.
    Al-Qaida, he said, ``is now monitoring, detecting and observing new American targets other than the targets previously monitored, which we will strike at in a period that is not long.''

  • Conspiracy flowchart explains everything (via fark.com)
  • Sergei Torop was a traffic cop in the small Russian town of Minusinsk until 1989, when he announced that he was the son of God. Now he commands a following of thousands and rules over a large swath of the Siberian mountains.
  • British Dumping Of Nazi Chemical Weapons in North Sea after WWII Threatens Europe
  • Argentina Sends 'X-Files' Team to Probe Epidemic of Animal Mutilations (ABCNEWS)

  • Arafat and Ariel Sharon best friends gallery

  • FBI Probes Las Vegas Overheard Threat Claim
    (The Associated Press)

    LAS VEGAS (June 21) - The FBI said Thursday it is investigating a Nevada man's claim that he picked up a conversation in Arabic on his cell phone during which someone said there would be a ''hit'' on the ''day of freedom.''
    ''We've initiated a full-scale investigation to determine if this constitutes a threat, and if so, what kind of threat,'' said FBI Special Agent Daron Borst in Las Vegas.
    Borst said agents have interviewed the man who reported the conversation, Michael Hamdan, and planned to question him again Friday.
    Hamdan said he was trying to call his wife on his cell phone Saturday when he heard Arabic voices. Hamdan, 54, said he's a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in Lebanon and speaks Arabic.
    ''They said in Arabic, not even a word of English, 'We are in the city of corruption, the city of prostitution, the city of gambling, the city of unbelievers,''' Hamdan told The Associated Press late Thursday. '''We are going to hit them on the day of freedom.'''
    Hamdan said the call lasted about 90 seconds before the line went dead. He said he believes the men were talking about July Fourth.
    ''I was frozen, absolutely cold,'' Hamdan said. ''I was sweating. I couldn't believe what I heard.''
    Hamdan said he reported what he heard to the FBI early Sunday morning.
    Hamdan, who is married and has two children, described himself as a semiretired businessman. He said he moved to the United States in 1976.

  • UPDATE:FBI:Vegas Threat Not Credible
    The Associated Press
    LAS VEGAS (June 22) - The FBI said Friday that a Nevada man's claim that his cellular phone picked up people talking in Arabic about a planned terrorist attack was ``not credible.''
    ``The results of the investigation to date do not substantiate these allegations and the FBI has determined that this information is not credible,'' Ellen Knowlton, special agent in charge of the Las Vegas FBI office, said in a statement.
    FBI Special Agent Daron Borst called the investigation ``substantially complete'' after agents spent 4 1/2 hours questioning Michael Hamdan and giving him a polygraph test Friday. Borst declined to discuss results of the test or elaborate further about the investigation.
    Hamdan, 54, told The Associated Press that he failed the lie-detector test.
    ``They told me everything was OK, but there was some uncertainty about a few things,'' Hamdan said as his wife drove him to their home in suburban Henderson following the test.
    Hamdan, who was born in Lebanon and speaks Arabic, stuck by his story during the interview with the AP.
    He said that on June 15 he overheard Arabic-speaking men say to another, ``We are in the city of corruption, the city of prostitution, the city of gambling, the city of unbelievers.''
    Hamdan said he believed the men were referring to Las Vegas and that one who said, ``We are going to hit them on the day of freedom'' meant a terrorist attack was planned for July Fourth.

  • FBI Warns of Attacks with Fuel Tanker Trucks
    June 21, 2002
    WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The FBI warned on Friday that terrorists could use fuel tanker trucks for attacks in the United States or against U.S. interests overseas, with Jewish schools or synagogues possible targets.
    In the latest of a series of warnings since the Sept. 11 hijacked plane attacks that killed about 3,000 people, FBI officials said the precise targets were unknown. Besides schools and synagogues, fuel depots could be targeted.
    The officials said the FBI sent an advisory to police and law enforcement officers around the country on the possible threat, citing "uncorroborated information" it had received.
    One U.S. official said the information was believed to have come from al Qaeda detainees who are being held at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
    The FBI said law enforcement agencies should "make contact with appropriate Jewish community representatives and officials at trucking and fuel delivery facilities that operate fuel tanker trucks or commercial fueling stations and emphasize the need to report suspicious activity or persons."
    President Bush, speaking to reporters at a seniors center in Orlando, Florida, said of the warning, "Well, any time we get any kind of threat that we think is serious, we'll put it out, and people need to respond accordingly."
    A Bush administration official said people should be more vigilant, but should not avoid schools or synagogues.
    "This is just an effort to let everyone know that we've picked up this information. We're not telling them to change their routine. We're not telling people not to go to synagogues, not to go to schools," the official said.
    'JUST BE VIGILANT'
    "It's telling people these are potential, possible targets, and just be vigilant," the official said. "While maybe the fuel truck driving by didn't merit your attention, it should now, just in case."
    The official added, "I don't think the Jewish community is surprised that they're a target. They've been dealing with anti-Semitism and I think they have security."
    The warning did not change the level of threat in the country, which has remained for months at an elevated level of risk, or yellow on the color-coded scale that rates the severity of threats.
    In New York, Shomrim Patrol, a 200-member citizen's unarmed patrol that monitors Jewish neighborhoods in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Crown Heights and Flatbush, shrugged off the warning.
    "As of my experience, I don't think it's a threat," said Mendel Rosenberg, a long-time dispatcher for Shomrin. The citizen's group works with the New York Police Department.
    "Personally, I don't believe these things anyway. They shouldn't say these things, it gives people ideas," Rosenberg said.
    David Pollock, associate executive director at the Jewish Community Relations Council in New York, said, "We do know -- after 9-11 -- that the bad guys have us on their radar screen and therefore we should be aware and should report things that are of concern."
    Just two days ago, FBI officials said law enforcement agency recently warned its field offices about possible terrorist attacks at July 4 celebrations.
    Last month, the FBI issued a number of warnings, including one on the possible use of scuba divers by terrorists to conduct an attack. It has also warned of possible threats against landmarks in New York, including the Statute of Liberty.
     
  • TIME MAG POLLS:AMERICANS SEE FOURTH OF JULY TERROR LIKELY
    Fri Jun 21 2002 18:13:17 ET
    Half of Americans (57%) surveyed by TIME magazine and CNN believe a terrorist attack on the 4th of July is very or somewhat likely (13% and 44% respectively; 11% say "not at all likely," 27% say "not very likely"). Americans think that overall, the U.S. has risk of a terrorist attack is "high" (39%) or "significant" (29%).
    Americans favor Tom Ridge over Rudy Giuliani to head a new cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security. The current director of the office of Homeland Security gets 39% support, while New York City's former mayor gets 35%. (Nine percent say "neither," 17% are "not sure".)
    Two-in-three (69%) want Congress to create the new cabinet-level department (23% do not). Americans believe the new department would make the U.S. more secure from future terrorist attacks (71% yes, 24%); make them more secure personally (58% yes, 37% no).
    But many fear a new Department of Homeland Security would cost too much (57% yes, 35% no) and create too much bureaucracy (52% yes, 39% no).
    Other poll results include:
    MIDDLE EAST:
     Two-thirds (66%) say Bush should offer his own peace plan (27% say no). Israel's decision to send in troops to re-occupy Palestinian territory
    makes it more difficult to achieve peace, according to 60% (28% said it would not be more difficult).
     Americans are split on whether or not a Palestinian state should be created (40% favor, 35% oppose, 25% not sure).
     They also are split on whether a Palestinian state would make peace more difficult to achieve (40% say yes, 44% say no).
     Equal percentages of Americans consider themselves supporters of Israel (44%) and not supporters; 14% are unsure.
     More say the U.S. provides Israel with the "right amount" of support (45%) than too much (35%).
    U.S. POLITICS:
     Bush's job approval rating is at 70% (down from a one-year high of 89% Oct. 12).
     Important midterm election issues will be domestic, say 54% (30% chose foreign policy).
    WORLD CUP SOCCER:
     3 in 4 Americans are not following the event (72%) v. 26 percent who are following soccer.
    Poll Results will appear in the upcoming issue of TIME, on newsstands Monday, June 24. The TIME/CNN survey was conducted by Harris Interactive by telephone among 1,003 adult Americans June 19-20, 2002. The margin of error for the total sample is plus or minus 3.1%.

  • There's Life in Old Dog Yet - Thanks to Hero Seal
    Thu Jun 20, 7:20 AM ET LONDON (Reuters) - A seal saved an elderly dog from a watery grave after it was swept away by fierce currents in a fast-flowing river in northern England.
    Eyewitnesses said the dog, who appeared to be injured before hitting the water, scampered into the River Tees and tried to swim to the opposite bank -- but the current got the better of him. Suddenly, a seal appeared from the depths and gently pushed the dog, a German Shepherd, into mudflats on the bank. "I've never seen anything like it and I don't think I ever will," eyewitness Chris Hinds told Reuters Wednesday. "This seal just came out of nowhere. It was like the guardian angel came up. Hinds took care of the dog until emergency services arrived after Tuesday's rescue. No owner was immediately tracked down and the dog was being looked after by the RSPCA animal charity. The charity named the dog "Seamo" after David Seaman, the goalkeeper of England's World Cup soccer team "because it was a great save." Seals are not known for friendliness to dogs, but the RSPCA said they were naturally inquisitive creatures and it could have been just playing.
     
     

  • Sea Lion Breaches Security at San Fransisco Airport: Heads for American Airlines Gate
    (kpix.com)
    June 20 2002
    The latest security headache at SFO has fins and a taste for fresh fish.
    A sea lion managed to get through security at San Francisco International Airport, crossing two runways and a concrete tarmac. Officials didn't discover the intruder until it got to a terminal.
    The sea lion is now under care of the Marine Mammal Center in Marin. But the question now is: how safe is the airport? How good is security when a mammal -- as big as a professional basketball player -- can penetrate it?
    "The mammal was very low-profile, had no metal objects on it," said SFO spokesman Ron Wilson. "We do have a ... ground surveillance radar, which will pick up metal objects that are moving about the airfield."
    Radar didn't spot him -- and neither did the people in the towers, who are supposed to keep an eye out there -- as he came out of the bay in the dark, and lumbered across two runways and two taxiways early Tuesday morning. Luckily, there weren't any airplanes out there at the time.
    The sea lion appears hard to miss, at 280 lbs. and close to seven feet long.
    "Perhaps because he was disoriented, when he came out of the water, instead of going back in, he just kept coming inland," said the Marine Mammal Center's Kathryn Zagzebski.
    He was finally detected at American Airlines gate 64.
    "You have to reflect back on security. What if it was a person that tried to do that?" Wilson said. "That is why we are now considering fencing the perimeter of the airport."
    The sea lion is getting medical attention, and it has a new name: Runway.
     

  • Astronomers have revealed that on 14 June, an asteroid the size of a football pitch made one of the closest ever recorded approaches to the Earth.
    BBC News
    20 June 2002
    Astronomers have revealed that on 14 June, an asteroid the size of a football pitch made one of the closest ever recorded approaches to the Earth.
    It is only the sixth time an asteroid has been seen to penetrate the Moon's orbit, and this is by far the biggest rock to do so.
    What has worried some astronomers, though, is that the space object was only detected on 17 June, several days after its flyby.
    It was found by astronomers working on the Lincoln Laboratory Near Earth Asteroid Research (Linear) search programme in New Mexico.
    Catalogued as 2002MN, the asteroid was travelling at over 10 kilometres a second (23,000 miles per hour) when it passed Earth at a distance of around 120,000 km (75,000 miles).
    The last time such an object is recorded to have come this close was in December 1994.
    'Wake up call'
    The space rock has a diameter of between 50-120 metres (160 - 320 feet). This is actually quite small when compared with many other asteroids and incapable of causing damage on a global scale.
    Nonetheless, an impact from such a body would still be dangerous.
    If 2002MN had hit the Earth, it would have caused local devastation similar to that which occurred in Tunguska, Siberia, in 1908, when 2,000 square kilometres of forest were flattened.
    Dr Benny Peiser, of Liverpool John Moores University, UK, told BBC News Online: "Our ever increasing observational capacity is now detecting these close shaves from small objects.
    "The probability is actually quite high that a Tunguska-sized object will hit us in our lifetimes."
    'Bolt from the blue'
    A major issue of concern centres on how late this object was picked up.
    Dr John Davies, of the Royal Observatory Edinburgh, has calculated the orbit of the asteroid from the Linear data.
    He concludes that the asteroid came out of the Sun and was impossible for Linear to see until one hour after its flyby of the Earth on the 14th.
    Dr Davies said: "...if an asteroid were to approach close to an imaginary line joining the Earth and the Sun it would never be visible in a night-time sky and would be quite impossible to discover with normal telescopes. Its arrival would come, literally, as a bolt from the blue."
    Space-based telescopes, such as Hubble and the future European Gaia spacecraft, are the only means of searching for asteroids in the daytime sky.

  • An "impact
    winter" followed by a blistering heat wave killed off the dinosaurs after the Earth was hit by a giant object from space.

  • Volcanoes Loom As Sleeping Threat For Millions By Hillary Mayell (via National Geographic News)

  • A significant number of organisms that survived the five greatest mass extinctions in Earth's history subsequently failed to achieve evolutionary success.

  • Bookies
    taking bets on the location of the next suicide attack against Israel.

  • "Betting on Eilat, a Red Sea resort that has not seen any violence during the past 21 months of Israeli-Palestinian fighting, is a long shot at 17-1, while often-hit Jerusalem was given odds of 1.5-1." (UKGuardian)
  • "Israel will respond to acts of terror by capturing PA territory," says Sharon
  • More Than 10,000 Jews Fought For The Confederacy (Rense via Washington Times)
  • New 'T-Ray' Space Camera Also Sees Through Walls, Clothes (Space.com)

  • Will British 'tooth phone' take bite out of mobiles?
    LONDON, June 18 (Reuters) - British engineers say they have invented a revolutionary tooth implant that works like a mobile phone and would not be out of place in a James Bond spy movie.
    The 'tooth phone', designed by James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau, consists of a tiny vibrator and a radio wave receiver implanted into a tooth during routine dental surgery.
    The implant does not yet have its own microchip installed, but Auger says the technology is tried and tested, and a fully functional phone could be put together in no time at all.
    "With the current size of microchips this is feasible. They are now small enough to implant in the tooth," he told Reuters on Tuesday.
    Sound, which comes into the tooth as a digitial radio signal, is transferred to the inner ear by bone resonance, meaning information can be received anywhere and at any time -- and nobody else can listen in.
    The invention raises the prospects of financial traders receiving the latest stock market bulletins while at the cinema and politicians tuning in to secret briefings from advisers while being quizzed by opponents.
    Despite its similarity to high tech gadgets dreamt up by Bond's faithful sidekick 'Q', the inventors believe the gizmo could become the first in a whole suite of non-medical devices implanted into the human body.

  • Thought-Controlled Prosthetics Inching Closer To Reality

  • Chinese Scientists to Head for Suspected ET Relics
    2002-06-19
    DELINGHA (QINGHAI), June 19 (Xinhuanet) -- A group of nine Chinese scientists will go to west China's Qinghai Province this month to closely examine the relics thought by some to have been left by extraterrestrial beings (ET). It will be the first time scientists seriously study the mysterious site near Delingha City in the depths of the Qaidam Basin, according to government sources with the Haixi Mongolian and Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, where Delingha is located. The site, known by local people as "the ET relics", is on MountBaigong about 40 kilometers to the southwest of Delingha City. On the north of the mountain are twin lakes dubbed as the "lover Lakes", one with fresh water and the other with salty water. The so-called ET relics structure is located on the south bank of the salty lake. It looks like a pyramid and is between 50 to 60meters high. At the front of the pyramid are three caves with triangular openings. The cave in the middle is the biggest, with its floor standing two meters above the ground and its top eight meters above the ground. This cave is about six meters in depth. Inside there is a half-pipe about 40 centimeters in diameter tilting from the top to the inner end of the cave. Another pipe of the same diameter goes intothe earth with only its top visible above the ground. Above the cave are a dozen pipes of various diameters which runinto the mountain. All the pipes are red brownish, the same color as that of surrounding rocks. The two smaller caves have collapsed and are inaccessible. Scattered about the caves and on the bank of the salty lake area large number of rusty scraps, pipes of various diameters and strangely shaped stones. Some of the pipes run into the lake. According to Qin Jianwen, head of the publicity department of the Delingha government, the scraps were once taken to a local smeltery for analysis. The result shows that they are made up of 30 percent ferric oxide with a large amount of silicon dioxide and calcium oxide. Eight percent of the content could not be identified. "The large content of silicon dioxide and calcium oxide is a result of long interaction between iron and sandstone, which meansthe pipes must be very old," said Liu Shaolin, the engineer who did the analysis. "This result has made the site even more mysterious," Qin said."Nature is harsh here. There are no residents let alone modern industry in the area, only a few migrant herdsmen to the north of the mountain." Someone has suggested that the site might have been a launch tower left by ET. The area is high in altitude, with thin and transparent air. Itis an ideal place to practice astronomy, Qin said. In fact, the Purple Mountain Observatory of the Chinese Academyof Sciences has a large radio telescope just 70 kilometers from the site. Yang Ji, a research fellow at the observatory, said the hypothesis of ET relics is understandable and worth of looking into. "But scientific means must be employed to prove whether or not it is true," he added. Enditem Thursday, 20 June, 2002, 16:29 GMT 17:29 UK
    Space rock's close approach

     


  • Serial Killer Caught By His Own Internet Footprint
  • U.S. HOMELAND SECURITY -- THE MAKINGS OF AN AMERICAN GESTAPO?
  • Speculation That Powell May Quit
    Caps Bad Week For Bush
     (UKTelegraph)

  • Audiogalaxy moves to filter songs (BBCNEWS)-Bawahhh!
  • U.S. Air Force's Nuclear Flying Saucer (popularmechanics.com)

  • NASA Returning To Nuclear Programs (popularscience.com)
    NASA may go nuclear again to provide power for both instruments and propulsion to spacecraft flying on deep-space missions. With Sean O'Keefe as its new chief, and the blessing of the Bush administration, the space agency plans to bring nuclear fission reactors back in style.
    Besides getting all the electricity they need from radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), spacecraft propelled by nuclear engines will cut considerably the travel time to distant planets, says Ed Weiler, NASA's chief scientist. "For 40 years NASA has been doing planetary science in the same way. That is, you accelerate for 5, 10, 15 minutes, and then you stop. And you coast, and you coast, and you coast," Weiler says. "That's not the way to do exploration."
    The first to take advantage of NASA's new nuclear trend could be Kuiper Express, a spacecraft designed to take the first closeup look at our solar system's outermost planet--Pluto. Even though the mission was recently killed, it could come back to life as a candidate for nuclear propulsion. The last time NASA launched a nuclear-powered spacecraft was in 1997, when it sent Cassini and 72 pounds of plutonium toward Saturn. Since then, the space agency has let its RTG inventory dwindle down to one.
    Unlike chemical rockets, which burn for only a few minutes, nuclear engines can burn for months. That means spacecraft can go much faster, conceivably turning a round trip to, say, Mars from a 3-year affair into a cruise that would last only about 12 weeks.

  • FBI searches L.A. coast for al Qaeda crew, cache
    By Bill Gertz
    THE WASHINGTON TIMES-(Bush admin's fave newspaper-Moon owned)
    June 18, 2002
    Federal authorities have been searching for a merchant ship carrying a group of al Qaeda terrorists and a large cache of weapons that is believed to be headed for Los Angeles, The Washington Times has learned.
    The FBI has been investigating an intelligence report about the ship and a group of up to 40 al Qaeda terrorists on board for the past several weeks, but it has been unable to find the vessel or any similar plot, according to law enforcement and intelligence officials.
    An FBI official said investigators can not completely dismiss the threat, although they have "worked through this thing pretty well."
    "There's a much greatly reduced concern based on the investigation and the interviews," the official said.
    According to the officials, FBI agents in Los Angeles have been investigating the classified intelligence report since it was circulated within the U.S. government in late May.
    The intelligence report stated that a group of between 35 and 40 al Qaeda terrorists were heading for the United States to carry out a terrorist operation in Los Angeles. The men were aboard a Middle Eastern-flagged freighter that left a port in the Middle East in May.
    The plan called for the ship to unload the terrorists and their weapons near Santa Catalina Island, about 20 miles south of downtown Los Angeles.
    U.S. intelligence officials said the merchant ship was on its way from an unidentified port in the Middle East and was due to arrive sometime during the last week in May.
    The FBI questioned several suspects in the Los Angeles area last week in an effort to find out about the shipment.
    FBI spokesman Mike Kortan said, "At this point, the investigation has not been able to substantiate or otherwise support this information."
    The threat of a terrorist attack in Los Angeles comes amid numerous intelligence reports indicating that Islamic terrorists are planning more attacks on the United States.
    Intelligence officials have said there are heightened concerns in government about attacks against numerous targets, including commercial aircraft, shopping malls, oil production facilities and subways.
    A spokesman for al Qaeda stated in an interview published earlier this month that the terrorist group would strike the United States again.
    The spokesman, Suleiman Abu Ghaith, stated in an article published on an Islamic Web site that al Qaeda is working to "strike against the United States," the Dubai-based Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat reported.
    "What is in waiting for the Americans will not be inferior to what the United States has already gone through," the terrorist spokesman was quoted as saying. "Let America be prepared to fasten its seat belt because, thanks to God, we are going to surprise it in a place where it is not expecting." Abu Gharith has appeared in the past in television interviews with Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader blamed for the September 11 attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center.
    Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday that U.S. military operations against al Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan "instigated a dispersion of these people."
    More than 60 nations are working with the United States to track down the terrorists and are "making life difficult for them," Mr. Rumsfeld said.
    "And that is a good thing," he said. "They would be doing more terrorist acts were that pressure not on them. They would be raising more money, recruiting more people and killing more innocent men, women and children."

  • Over 75 Stowaway Terrorists Sneak Into America By Sea Container
    (From DEBKA-Net-Israeli Intelligence (disinfo?) website)

    6-19-2
    Between 75 and 125 operatives of the fundamentalist terror network, al Qaeda, are known to have illegally penetrated the United States in the last two months, mostly through American ports as stowaways in commercial sea containers. Many more are estimated to have slipped through unbeknownst to US authorities.
    This clandestine traffic was first exposed in DEBKA-Net-Weekly Issue No. 39, November 30, 2001. In its latest issue, DEBKA-Net-Weekly, June 14, 2002, tracks this burgeoning menace, which is making the United States and the world,s shipping industry increasingly susceptible to the threat of terror attack by invaders from the sea. US port authority sources believe penetrations occurred at New York, New Jersey, Long Beach, Miami and Savannah, Georgia, as well as Port Everglades, Florida. Container, oil and bulk ports are especially vulnerable.
    Some of the stowaways arrive complete with arms or explosives, the nature of which - conventional, radioactive, chemical or biological - the US authorities are at great pains to keep dark. However, shipping sources told us witnesses had seen suspect containers appearing to be quarantined after their al Qaeda infiltrators were killed, suggesting the suspected presence of toxic substances.
    The threat applies equally to the international container traffic that carries much of the world,s lifeblood. Experts have opined that a "dirty bomb exploding in a container at sea would stop the world,s container traffic cold until a credible security system for sea-going containers was in place.
    On May 22, 2002, Fairplay International Shipping Weekly reported: "More details have emerged about an apparent infiltration of Islamic extremists through US ports during the past two months." Some of the men slipped through security disguised as stevedores, according to Bob Graham, chair of the Senate select committee on intelligence. He said he had seen reports indicating that some extremists might have been wearing safety jackets and protective helmets to give the appearance of dockworkers. US Coast Guard officials have refused to divulge any information about the reports, but Graham stressed: "The American people have a right to know." He said 25 extremists "entered in a foreign country, hid out in a container and then entered the United States."
    In some of the stowaway containers, US counter-terror authorities were dismayed to find uniforms of American dockworkers and even US Coast Guards, along with the appropriate tags and ID for free access to port facilities, including off-limits sections. Groups of 5 to 7 of these men dressed as port workers have been sighted hurrying over to waiting vans and driving off at speed.
    US Coast Guard, Special Forces and CIA and FBI counter-terror units routinely conduct massive manhunts to fend off the multi-tentacled al Qaeda invasion. Some sources report firefights between hunters and terrorists trapped in sea containers, in which between 15 and 25 terrorists may have died. In Miami and Savanna, containers with secret human burdens were unloaded from incoming vessels. Anti-terror squads shifted the boxes to a quiet corner of the harbor, drilled holes in their sides and filled them with gas and smoke bombs. The stowaways suffocated to death.
    For all their efforts, the US hunters have not apprehended a single live al Qaeda terrorist landing by sea.
    Background checks for seamen and stevedores, heavily armed National and Coast Guardsmen, special FBI and CIA units patrolling American harbors, gamma-ray devices for inspecting cargoes, quarantine areas in large ports, are part of the changing landscape in US docks. On container terror, US and other intelligence services were again slow to pinpoint the danger despite indications from October 2001of al Qeda plans to exploit sea containers - both for secretly transporting terrorists and as an amphibious terrorist weapon. There were no measures in place to prevent the many armed terror cells from fanning out among ports, mainly in Europe, in order to stow away aboard container vessels bound for US harbors.
    DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources learn that Livorno, Italy, is one of those ports. At least two shipping companies unknowingly targeted for this traffic, one a major American firm and another a reputable Middle East shipping line. Investigators have concluded that al Qaeda owes much of its success in planting its operatives in ship,s containers to its links with criminal elements to be found in most of the world,s big container ports.
    In the last two months, hundreds of US agents of all branches of security and intelligence, including Special Forces, have been deployed in ports in Europe and the Far East, where they are developing new security standards and monitoring ocean-going containers before embarkation.


  • San Francisco Bay Terror Fears - Suspicious Ferry Boat Surveillance Reported
    (SF Examiner)
    6-16-2
    A frightening sequence of events and clues gleaned by U.S. intelligence has some in law enforcement believing that a maritime terrorist attack against San Francisco could be imminent.
    Local ferry operators became alarmed last week when someone described as Middle Eastern man boarded a ferry to Alcatraz but did not leave the boat when it reached the island. Instead, the man videotaped boat traffic and used a stopwatch to time the route.
    "He got on the boat to go to the island, but never got off when the other tourists did. Instead, he asked unusual questions about the timing and frequency of the trips, all the while videotaping and using the stopwatch," a source told The Examiner.
    The frequency of suspicious activity in San Francisco became apparent to the feds and local law enforcement in October when three men, described as Middle Eastern, boarded a ferry at Pier 41 for a trip to Alameda.
    The boat's crew became alarmed when one of the men made his way to the upper deck to observe the captain piloting the ferry, another man used a stopwatch to time the route and a third man videotaped the Anchorage 9 terminal, a source said. The crew noted the men did not appear interested in filming standard tourist attractions like bridges or other known sites.
    The report stated in part: "While it is not an overt act of terrorism, it is not (considered) normal passenger activity."
    This was preceded by an alarming incident that occurred in Daly City on Oct. 20. Six Blue and Gold Fleet and Golden Gate Transit uniforms were stolen from a ferry employee's car, in addition to ferry schedules, maritime maps and a copy of the U.S. Coast Guard's Rules of the Road. Anyone wearing the uniforms is automatically granted unlimited access to "all the ferry boats and buses in the Bay Area."
    The employee told authorities the thieves didn't bother to take money or a cache of CDs left inside the car. According to a report of the theft: "Maybe it's nothing, but when you put it all together, it starts to add up," a source said.
    An incident that occurred Oct. 8 still makes Erin Everett cringe with fear. Everett, an employee at the St. Francis Yact Club, was approached by a man she described as Arabic who wanted to rent a large boat "to see the beautiful coast of California." When Everett told the man the club wasn't in the business of renting boats, the man became agitated and insisted money wasn't a problem. He was willing to spend whatever it took, Everett recalled, to rent a large boat. When Everett suggested he try Fisherman's Wharf, he said he never heard of it and abruptly left the office. He returned a few minutes later demanding directions to the popular tourist destination.
    Suspicious, Everett called the Coast Guard and FBI, who sent an agent the next morning to retrieve a security videotape of the man. "He kept saying money wasn't a problem. I don't know what it means, but it was scary," Everett said.
    Recent terrorist alerts by the Coast Guard, the FBI and the California Anti-Terrorism Warfare Center in Sacramento point to growing concerns among those in the intelligence community that a seaborne attack against the country is imminent. The FBI contacted San Francisco Police Chief Fred Lau last week requesting information on The City's dive shops. The feds issued similar appeals to other law enforcement agencies situated near waterways or harbors.
    Ferry operators told the Examiner of efforts to beef up security on their boats plying the Bay, saying crews are on the lookout for suspicious activity and that engine rooms and pilot houses are now sealed to the public. During the summer peak season, 4,000 people travel to Alcatraz every day.
    "We have good reason to believe that something is being planned," said another law enforcement source. "When you begin putting pieces of the puzzle together, it starts to make sense."
    http://www.examiner.com/news/default.jsp?story=n.fbi.0612w

  • Major Milk Recall in Bay Area
    (Yahoonews)
    Friday June 14
    There's a major milk recall in the Bay Area, involving a number of popular brands.
    Berkeley Farms issued the voluntary recall after health officials discovered the presence of antibiotics. So far, there are no reports of illness.
    The recall includes milk sold under the brand names of Berkeley Farms, Smart and Final, Albertsons, Good Day, Best Yet, Dairy Dawn, Ralphs, Mountain Dairy, and Sysco (Wholesale Farms). The packages have the plant codes 06-407 or 06-21, and sell dates between June 24 and June 29.
    Customers who have bought the milk should throw it away or return it for a full refund. For more information, call 1-888-647-3326.

  • Thousands of Mysterious Balls Wash Up On New Hampshire Beach-Scientists Unsure What Spheres Are
    June 17, 2002
    HAMPTON, N.H. -- Mysteriously, tens of thousands of dense, grassy-looking balls have washed up on the beach in Hampton.
    Beachgoers say they have never seen anything like them, and scientists still are trying to figure out what they are.
    Ellen Goethel, a marine biologist who serves on the Hampton Conservation Commission, said at first the balls looked like some man-made material that was rolled up by wave action close to the shore.
    But after talking to some fishermen, she decided the balls could be made up of sea grass.
    They're probably from the fish world cup.

  • Terrorist Threat Warning from fake Ambulances and Police Cars (ABCNEWS.com)
    N E W Y O R K, June 20 — Police and fire officials in New York are being warned that terrorists may be trying to acquire surplus or replica emergency vehicles to use as car bombs that could be planted near government buildings or landmarks without drawing attention.
    A law enforcement source confirmed a report in The New York Daily News today that officials were alerted to the plot when two unidentified Middle Eastern men tried to buy a replica ambulance at a northern New Jersey shop that builds copies of emergency vehicles, police cars and fire trucks.
    The owner of the shop became suspicious when the men tried to pay cash, and the pair fled without leaving any identification, the source told the News
    "This is a real concern. Terrorists have used ambulances to sneak suicide bombers into areas," the souce told the newspaper.
    Among the sites officials fear could be targeted are City Hall, FBI offices, police department headquarters and even fire department facilities.
    Fire department and police investigators have already begun efforts to ensure that unauthorized people cannot gain access to facilities where emergency vehicles are stored or repaired, fire department sources told the News.
    "We've been told to watch our vehicles, all our vehicles," a fire department source said. "It's the vehicles that can get into areas that we are really concerned about. Who is not going to let a patrol car pass, or an ambulance, especially if we are in a state of emergency?"
    The alert comes as the city is gearing up for July Fourth festivities, which generally draw huge crowds to fireworks displays around Manhattan.

  • Robot learns how to escape from exhibition
    (UKIndependedent)
    20 June 2002
    Scientists running a pioneering experiment with "living robots" which think for themselves were amazed to find one escaping from the centre where it "lives".
    The small unit, called Gaak, was one of 12 that are taking part in a "survival of the fittest" test at the Magna science centre in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, which has been running since March.
    Gaak made its bid for freedom yesterday after it had been taken out of the arena where hundreds of visitors watch the machines learning as they do daily battle.
    Professor Noel Sharkey said he turned his back on the drone and returned 15 minutes later to find it had forced its way out of the small makeshift paddock it was being kept in.
    He later found it had travelled down an access slope and through the front door of the centre. It was discovered at the main entrance to the car park when a visitor nearly flattened it with his car.
    Professor Sharkey said: "Since the experiment went live in March they have all learnt a significant amount and are becoming more intelligent by the day, but the fact that it had ability to navigate itself out of the building and along the concrete floor to the gates has surprised us all."
    He added: "There's no need to worry, as although they can escape they are perfectly harmless and won't be taking over just yet."
    Dan Lowthorpe, 27, from Sheffield, the motorist who nearly prematurely terminated Gaak, said: "I came especially to see the new robots. You can imagine how surprised I was when I nearly ran over one on my way in. I knew the robots interacted with each other but didn't expect to be personally greeted by one."

  • TIME MAG: 'Dirtybomber' Was Trying to Build a Nuke...
  • Radiological attack: 'Manhattan would be uninhabitable for years'...(UKIndependent)

  • Deadly Soviet Caesium Is Missing
    (NewScientist.com)
    6-21-2
    Large boxes of powdered caesium 137, a powerfully radioactive substance, are lost in the former Soviet Union. In the hands of terrorists, just one would provide enough "dirty bomb" material to badly contaminate large urban areas, forcing their evacuation and possibly their abandonment.
    These caesium sources are a major reason why the US has committed at least $25 million in 2002 to an urgent effort to track lost radioactive sources in former Soviet states, as New Scientist reported on Thursday.
    Media reports that the caesium was originally spread on fields in secret Soviet agricultural experiments are wrong, says Melissa Fleming,spokesperson for the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, which is helping to coordinate the recovery drive. That would have given rise to vast tracts of contaminated farmland, and probably considerable human exposure.
    But the truth may be worse. The ceasium was in fact enclosed within shielded boxes, and used as a source of gamma rays to irradiate grain, to keep it from germinating in storage, says Abel Gonzales, director of radiation and waste safety at the IAEA. The gamma rays were also used to induce mutations in seeds, a common method for generating improved crop varieties.
    Very lucrative
    But because the caesium was used entirely as a source of radiation, it remained enclosed within the mobile gamma sources. Hence it is all still there, and with a half-life of 32 years, much of it is still very radioactive.
    The project, named "Kolos" after the Russian for an ear of corn, was large. "We have no idea how many of these sources there are," says Gonzales.
    That is bad, because each of them contained 3500 Curies of caesium. "That is very, very big," says Gonzales. By comparison, a caesium source lost from a hospital in Goiania, Brazil in 1987, which killed four immediately and exposed dozens more to heavy doses of radiation held only a few hundred Curies.
    Unlike the solid Strontium-90 in lost nuclear power sources that have been the subject of recent searches in the former Soviet Union, Project Kolos's caesium was powdered, so in theory it would be easy to pack into a "dirty bomb" - or several. These bombs use conventional explosive to scatter radioactive material.
    The sources were housed on trucks. But since the fall of the Soviet Union, the trucks have been diverted, so their potentially very lucrative cargoes could be anywhere, experts fear. US participants in the joint Russian-US-IAEA drive to recover the sources say there will be experts in the field in the next few weeks looking for clues.

  • Bush Gives CIA More Powers To Oust Saddam
    6-16-2
    WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush early this year signed an intelligence order directing the CIA to conduct covert operations to topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, The Washington Post reported on Sunday.
    The covert program included authorization to use lethal force to capture Saddam, the Post said, citing informed sources.
    Senate Majority Leader Thomas Daschle said Congress had been consulted about the move by the administration but expressed some reservations about the timing of any such effort.
    "There is broad support for a regime change in Iraq," Daschle told the "Fox News Sunday" program. "The question is how do we do it and when do we do it."
    Citing the administration's ongoing effort against the al Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden, as well as the continuing efforts to achieve peace in the Middle East, Daschle said, "I think the timing of all this is very important but we want to work with the administration and try to find the best way and the best time to do this."
    The South Dakota Democrat said, however, he was "satisfied with the degree of consultation there has been so far" between Capitol Hill and the White House over the last few weeks.
    Bush has openly declared his desire to remove the Iraqi president, by military force if necessary, but has offered few details of how he plans to accomplish that.
    COVERT ORDERS
    The Post said the presidential order directs the CIA to use all available tools, including:
    -- Increased support to Iraqi opposition groups and forces inside and outside Iraq including money, weapons, equipment, training and intelligence information.
    -- Expanded efforts to collect intelligence within Iraqi government, military, security service and overall population where pockets of intense anti-Saddam sentiment have been detected.
    -- Possible use of CIA and U.S. Special Forces teams, similar to those that have been successfully deployed in Afghanistan since the Sept. 11 airliner attacks. Such forces would be authorized to kill the Iraqi president if they were acting in self-defense.
    Sources said CIA Director George Tenet told Bush and his Cabinet that the covert program alone -- without military action or diplomatic and economic pressure -- had only about a 10 percent to 20 percent chance of succeeding, the Post said.
    One source said the CIA covert action should be viewed largely as "preparatory" to a military strike so the agency can identify targets, intensify intelligence gathering on the ground in Iraq, and build relations with alternative future leaders and groups if Saddam is ousted, the Post said.
    "It is not a silver bullet, but hopes are high and we could get lucky," the Post quoted another source as saying.
    A CIA spokesman declined to comment, the Post said.
    House Democratic leader Richard Gephardt this month endorsed the use of force to oust Saddam, who has been accused by the administration of backing international terrorism and trying to make chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
    But Arab and European allies in the war on terrorism generally have argued against U.S. military action in Iraq.

  • A History of CIA Atrocities

  • FBI makes spy-catching priority, topped only by counterterrorism
    By Bill Gertz
    June 17, 2002
    THE WASHINGTON TIMES
    The FBI is stepping up efforts to catch foreign spies in the United States as agents from China, Russia and other countries are increasing intelligence activities here, according to the FBI's top counterspy.
    David W. Szady, the new FBI assistant director of the counterintelligence division, said in an interview that training is being improved and new squads are being formed to go after foreign spies.
    "Espionage hasn't changed today," Mr. Szady said. "In fact, if anything, it's getting worse. The threats are now asymmetrical. They are coming at us from all angles. Our friends spy on us, our enemies spy on us, and we're not sure who's who right now in many instances."
    Counterterrorism efforts are the FBI's No. 1 priority, but Director Robert S. Mueller III has made spy-catching the agency's second most important job.
    A major effort is under way to change attitudes about counterintelligence within the FBI, Mr. Szady said. "Counterintelligence in the FBI has to be recognized as the No. 2 priority by all of us within the FBI," he said.
    Shortcomings in FBI counterintelligence were highlighted by the case of Los Alamos nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee and by FBI turncoat Robert P. Hanssen, Mr. Szady said.
    In the Lee case, a nuclear spying suspect was mishandled through a combination of poor fieldwork and mismanagement from FBI headquarters, he said.
    Lee was investigated for passing nuclear warhead secrets to China but was convicted of the lesser charge of mishandling sensitive nuclear data.
    "Everything that was wrong in the FBI came together in counterintelligence over Albuquerque in one place," Mr. Szady said.
    Hanssen, an FBI agent, spied for 22 years for Moscow without being caught, highlighting poor FBI internal security.
    The FBI has set up a counterespionage section to handle spy cases better, and new squads around the country will be devoted exclusively to issues such as foreign spying and internal security.
    Training, currently limited to 16 hours for new agents, will be increased sharply, and all senior agents will receive advanced training in such areas as the use of electronic and other surveillance, interview techniques and double-agents operations, Mr. Szady said.
    Additionally, the FBI is setting up joint task forces with other government agencies, including the Pentagon, CIA and Customs Service, to track spies.
    The first task force will be a joint FBI-Defense Department program in Washington. A later task force will be added to San Francisco to deal with Chinese spying, Mr. Szady said.
    "Why don't we have a counterintelligence task force in San Francisco working the Chinese counterintelligence issue that consists of the FBI, CIA, Commerce, Customs, the military, INS working together in order to solve a particular problem?" Mr. Szady said. "This is something we're looking at doing."
    The joint task forces will seek to combine the expertise of various security agents in one place, he said. "We would like to have joint operations, not only as force multipliers but also so their mission [of other agencies] is brought in with what we're trying to do," Mr. Szady said.
    FBI counterspies also will be used to support the units working to track down terrorists.
    "You can't separate, necessarily, the work of Iraq, Iran, Syria, Sudan — their intelligence services — from acts of terrorism that may take place and the support that those intelligence services give to terrorism, while at the same time they're trying to steal nuclear secrets or biological secrets or R&D secrets and things of that sort," he said.
    Mr. Szady also said foreign spies are seeking to plant agents inside U.S. intelligence agencies, embassies and corporations, where they can gather a variety of government or private-sector secrets.
    Foreign intelligence services use a variety of techniques to recruit Americans as spies, ranging from threats to relatives overseas to financial incentives.
    Intelligence officials in China will approach resident Chinese Americans here and threaten to withhold state-sponsored support for their relatives living in China.
    "They knock on the door and say, 'If you want them to get the help they need, then why don't you give us the documents that we need?' It's a very tough situation and a tough one to turn down," Mr. Szady said.

  • Were Israelis Detained on Sept. 11 Spies?
    (ABCNEWS)
    June 21 — Millions saw the horrific images of the World Trade Center attacks, and those who saw them won't forget them. But a New Jersey homemaker saw something that morning that prompted an investigation into five young Israelis and their possible connection to Israeli intelligence.
    Maria, who asked us not to use her last name, had a view of the World Trade Center from her New Jersey apartment building. She remembers a neighbor calling her shortly after the first plane hit the towers.
    She grabbed her binoculars and watched the destruction unfolding in lower Manhattan. But as she watched the disaster, something else caught her eye.
    Maria says she saw three young men kneeling on the roof of a white van in the parking lot of her apartment building. "They seemed to be taking a movie," Maria said.
    The men were taking video or photos of themselves with the World Trade Center burning in the background, she said. What struck Maria were the expressions on the men's faces. "They were like happy, you know … They didn't look shocked to me. I thought it was very strange," she said.
    She found the behavior so suspicious that she wrote down the license plate number of the van and called the police. Before long, the FBI was also on the scene, and a statewide bulletin was issued on the van.
    The plate number was traced to a van owned by a company called Urban Moving. Around 4 p.m. on Sept. 11, the van was spotted on a service road off Route 3, near New Jersey's Giants Stadium. A police officer pulled the van over, finding five men, between 22 and 27 years old, in the vehicle. The men were taken out of the van at gunpoint and handcuffed by police.
    The arresting officers said they saw a lot that aroused their suspicion about the men. One of the passengers had $4,700 in cash hidden in his sock. Another was carrying two foreign passports. A box cutter was found in the van. But perhaps the biggest surprise for the officers came when the five men identified themselves as Israeli citizens.
    ‘We Are Not Your Problem’
    According to the police report, one of the passengers told the officers they had been on the West Side Highway in Manhattan "during the incident" — referring to the World Trade Center attack. The driver of the van, Sivan Kurzberg, told the officers, "We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem." The other passengers were his brother Paul Kurzberg, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner and Omer Marmari.
    When the men were transferred to jail, the case was transferred out of the FBI's Criminal Division, and into the bureau's Foreign Counterintelligence Section, which is responsible for espionage cases, ABCNEWS has learned.
    One reason for the shift, sources told ABCNEWS, was that the FBI believed Urban Moving may have been providing cover for an Israeli intelligence operation.
    After the five men were arrested, the FBI got a warrant and searched Urban Moving's Weehawken, N.J., offices.
    The FBI searched Urban Moving's offices for several hours, removing boxes of documents and a dozen computer hard drives. The FBI also questioned Urban Moving's owner. His attorney insists that his client answered all of the FBI's questions. But when FBI agents tried to interview him again a few days later, he was gone.
    Three months later 2020's cameras photographed the inside of Urban Moving, and it looked as if the business had been shut down in a big hurry. Cell phones were lying around; office phones were still connected; and the property of dozens of clients remained in the warehouse.
    The owner had also cleared out of his New Jersey home, put it up for sale and returned with his family to Israel.
    ‘A Scary Situation’
    Steven Gordon, the attorney for the five Israeli detainees, acknowledged that his clients' actions on Sept. 11 would easily have aroused suspicions. "You got a group of guys that are taking pictures, on top of a roof, of the World Trade Center. They're speaking in a foreign language. They got two passports on 'em. One's got a wad of cash on him, and they got box cutters. Now that's a scary situation."
    But Gordon insisted that his clients were just five young men who had come to America for a vacation, ended up working for a moving company, and were taking pictures of the event.
    The five Israelis were held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, ostensibly for overstaying their tourist visas and working in the United States illegally. Two weeks after their arrest, an immigration judge ordered them to be deported. But sources told ABCNEWS that FBI and CIA officials in Washington put a hold on the case.
    The five men were held in detention for more than two months. Some of them were placed in solitary confinement for 40 days, and some of them were given as many as seven lie-detector tests.
    'Plenty of Speculation'
    Since their arrest, plenty of speculation has swirled about the case, and what the five men were doing that morning. Eventually, The Forward, a respected Jewish newspaper in New York, reported the FBI concluded that two of the men were Israeli intelligence operatives.
    Vince Cannistraro, a former chief of operations for counterterrorism with the CIA who is now a consultant for ABCNEWS, said federal authorities' interest in the case was heightened when some of the men's names were found in a search of a national intelligence database.
    Israeli Intelligence Connection?
    According to Cannistraro, many people in the U.S. intelligence community believed that some of the men arrested were working for Israeli intelligence. Cannistraro said there was speculation as to whether Urban Moving had been "set up or exploited for the purpose of launching an intelligence operation against radical Islamists in the area, particularly in the New Jersey-New York area."
    Under this scenario, the alleged spying operation was not aimed against the United States, but at penetrating or monitoring radical fund-raising and support networks in Muslim communities like Paterson, N.J., which was one of the places where several of the hijackers lived in the months prior to Sept. 11.
    For the FBI, deciphering the truth from the five Israelis proved to be difficult. One of them, Paul Kurzberg, refused to take a lie-detector test for 10 weeks — then failed it, according to his lawyer. Another of his lawyers told us Kurzberg had been reluctant to take the test because he had once worked for Israeli intelligence in another country.
    Sources say the Israelis were targeting these fund-raising networks because they were thought to be channeling money to Hamas and Islamic Jihad, groups that are responsible for most of the suicide bombings in Israel. "[The] Israeli government has been very concerned about the activity of radical Islamic groups in the United States that could be a support apparatus to Hamas and Islamic Jihad," Cannistraro said.
    The men denied that they had been working for Israeli intelligence out of the New Jersey moving company, and Ram Horvitz, their Israeli attorney, dismissed the allegations as "stupid and ridiculous."
    Mark Regev, the spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington, goes even further, asserting the issue was never even discussed with U.S. officials.
    "These five men were not involved in any intelligence operation in the United States, and the American intelligence authorities have never raised this issue with us," Regev said. "The story is simply false."
    No ‘Pre-Knowledge’
    Despite the denials, sources tell ABCNEWS there is still debate within the FBI over whether or not the young men were spies. Many U.S. government officials still believe that some of them were on a mission for Israeli intelligence. But the FBI told ABCNEWS, "To date, this investigation has not identified anybody who in this country had pre-knowledge of the events of 9/11."
    Sources also said that even if the men were spies, there is no evidence to conclude they had advance knowledge of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11. The investigation, at the end of the day, after all the polygraphs, all of the field work, all the cross-checking, the intelligence work, concluded that they probably did not have advance knowledge of 9/11," Cannistraro noted.
    As to what they were doing on the van, they say they read about the attack on the Internet, couldn't see it from their offices and went to the parking lot for a better view. But no one has been able to find a good explanation for why they may have been smiling with the towers of the World Trade Center burning in the background. Both the lawyers for the young men and the Israeli Embassy chalk it up to immature conduct.
    According to ABCNEWS sources, Israeli and U.S. government officials worked out a deal — and after 71 days, the five Israelis were taken out of jail, put on a plane, and deported back home.
    While the former detainees refused to answer ABCNEWS' questions about their detention and what they were doing on Sept. 11, several of the detainees discussed their experience in America on an Israeli talk show after their return home.
    Said one of the men, denying that they were laughing or happy on the morning of Sept. 11, "The fact of the matter is we are coming from a country that experiences terror daily. Our purpose was to document the event."


  • FBI COVER-UP OF ISRAELI SPY OPERATIONS IN US (whatreallyhappened.com)
    The task was simple, deny the evidence, cover-up the embarrassing arrest of two Israelis with an explosives-tainted truck, and give the media a reason to return to the mantra of "all terror is caused by Muslims" But what started as a simply attempt to spin the news away from the Israelis arrested in Washington State has backfired on the Bush administration in a big way. In conducting the classic "limited hangout" of admitting to foreknowledge of the attacks of 9-11 in order to reassert the link to Osama bin Laden, Bush has handed opponents of his administration and opponents of World War the most damning proof yet that the reality of 9-11 is not what the US Government and media have been telling the American people it is.
      The arrested Israelis posed a problem. History records in the
    Lavon Affair that Israelis willingly use bombs and lay false trails to Arabs for political gain. And it wasn't too long ago that JDL Chairman Irv Rubin was arrested for plotting to blow up a US Congressman who refused to toe the Israel party line. Then there were the two Mossad agents arrested inside the Mexican Congress with guns and explosives shortly after 9-11.  As the battered World Trade Towers collapsed, the very first suspects arrested, caught cheering as the towers fell, were Israelis, later identified as Mossad agents.
    The arrested spies worked for Urban Moving Systems, whose Israeli owner promptly fled the nation.

    Still other espionage suspects posed as art students trying to get into federal buildings, while others held cover jobs in mall kiosks selling "Zoom Copters", kiosks that sat empty when their entire staffs were thrown into jail on suspicion of espionage.


    All told, the Israeli spy ring, which had been partly uncovered prior to 9-11, was the largest spy ring ever uncovered in the United States. In California, the ADL was convicted of running a massive spy operation on American citizens .
     Coupled with the spies themselves was the discovery of a massive phone tapping operation carried out by yet another Israeli company contracted to place phone tapping equipment on the US phone system to aid US law enforcement authorities. However, those same authorities began to suspect that Israelis were using that very same system to listen in on the phone calls of Americans when high profile drug investigations into Ecstasy rings (run by the Israeli organized crime) were derailed using information only obtainable from police phone calls.  In the Kenneth Starr report, it is reported that Bill Clinton was aware that an unnamed foreign power had made recordings of his phone sex sessions with Monica Lewinsky.  In the end, three Israeli companies with deep penetration of the American communications infrastructure were implicated in the phone and internet tapping scandal. One of these companies, Odigo, had an office near the World Trade Towers, and received a two hour advance warning of the impending attack. Two hours means the warning was sent before the planes that eventually  crashed into the World Trade Towers had even left the ground on their final flights! Someone knew of the plan, someone who decided they needed to warn Israelis working for a company linked to Israel's spying operation.
      Taken together, there is probable cause to investigate just what connection the Israeli spying operation had with 9-11. Such an investigation should have happened, but instead, something very odd took place in the investigation! According to a government official quoted in Carl Cameron's story on the spy ring, the US Government classified the evidence that links the arrested Israeli spies to 9-11. Rather than treat the arrested spies as Jonathan Pollard had been treated, the US Government hurried to get the arrested Israelis out of the country as quickly as possible, in one case releasing and deporting one Israeli even though he
    failed his polygraph examination! Pollard had been just one spy. Here was the largest spy ring ever uncovered in the United States and the United States itself was trying to cover it all up! The media went along by downplaying the Rubin story, ignoring the Mexican incident and actually spiking Carl Cameron's four part story on the spy ring.
      As quiet as the media was about the evidence pointing towards Israeli involvement in 9-11, the media was quite the opposite when it came to claims of proof linking ex CIA agent Osama bin Laden with the crimes. The reason was obvious. Long before the attacks on the World Trade Towers the United States had been planning for a war in Afghanistan to create a climate more favorable for American oil companies . John Marcesca, as part of a UNOCAL working group on the Afghanistan pipeline project, had gone before Congress and stressed the necessity of replacing the Afghanistan government before a pipeline from the Caspian sea to the gulf of India could be built. The Bush White House admits that a plan to attack Afghanistan existed BEFORE 9-11. Following 9-11, the US did replace the government of Afghanistan, and the
    pipeline is under construction. One  member of the UNOCAL working group, Hamid Karzai, is the President of the new government in Afghanistan. Another UNOCAL group member, Zalmay Khalilzad, is the US special envoy to Afghanistan. A cozy relationship to be sure!
      But there was a problem with the "Osama did it" story. As much evidence as existed suggesting Israeli involvement in 9-11 (certainly enough to justify being classified by the US Government), there was none at all to support the official story.
      The 19 names of suspected hijackers released by the FBI don't point to Afghanistan. They come from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, United Arab Emirates; all across the middle east without a focus in any one region. Indeed, even as the FBI was admitting that its list of 19 names was based solely on identifications thought to have been forged, Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister Prince Saudi Al-Faisal insisted that an investigation in Saudi Arabia showed that the
    5 Saudi men were not aboard the four jet liners that crashed in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania on September 11. "It was proved that five of the names included in the FBI list had nothing to do with what happened," Al-Faisal told the Arabic Press in Washington after meeting with U.S. President George W. Bush at the White House. A sixth identified hijacker is also reported to still be alive in Tunisia, while a 7th named man died two years ago!
      The 19 names of suspected hijackers released by the FBI don't even appear on the passenger lists of the hijacked planes. The FBI list of alleged hijackers Crew and Passenger lists for the hijacked planes. None of the Hijacker names appear on them. CNN reported that the men who hijacked those aircraft were using phony IDs, using the names of Arabs. A total of 7 of the men named by the FBI as suspected 9-11 hijackers are still alive!  And the 
    FBI Admits it has no actual evidence linking the 19 Arab suspects to 9-11
    In another development, the BBC reported that the transcript of a phone call made by Flight Attendant Madeline Amy Sweeney to Boston air traffic controls shows that the flight attendant gave the seat numbers occupied by the hijackers, seat numbers which were NOT the seats of the men the FBI claimed were responsible for the hijacking!
     FBI Chief Robert Mueller admitted on September 20 and on September 27 that the FBI has no way to prove the true identities of the hijackers. Yet in the haste to move forward on the already planned war in Afghanistan, our government and the FBI (which does not have the best record for honesty in investigations to begin with, having been caught rigging lab tests, manufacturing testimony in the Vincent Foster affair, and illegally withholding/destroying evidence in the Oklahoma Bombing case) are not taking too close a look at evidence that points away from the designated suspect, the people living over the oil fields.
      Yet another problem lies with the described actions of the hijackers themselves. We are being told on the one hand that these men were such fanatical devotees of their faith that they willingly crashed the jets they were flying into buildings. Yet on the other hand, we are being told that these same men spent the night before their planned visit to Allah drinking in strip bars, committing not just one, but two mortal sins which would keep them out of Paradise no matter what else they did. Truly devout Muslims would spend the day before a suicide attack fasting and praying. Not only does the drinking in strip bars not fit the profile of a fanatically religious Muslim willing to die for his cause, but the witness reports of the men in the bars are of men going out of their way to be noticed and remembered, while waving around phony identifications.
    Because of the facts of the phony identifications, we don't really know who was on those planes. What we do know is that the men on those planes went to a great deal of trouble to steal the identities of Muslims, and to make sure those identities were seen and remembered, then to leave a plethora of planted clues around, such as crop dusting manuals, and letters in checked baggage (why does a terrorist about to die need to check baggage?) that "somehow" didn't get on the final, fatal, flight. This abundance of dubious evidence pointing to Arabs is the pattern previously established in the
    Lavon Affair.
      More than an absence of proof linking 9-11 to Osama, the proof exists of a deliberate attempt to frame Arabs for terror attacks in the United States.  The claimed proofs have all been dismissed as deliberate mistranslations bordering on frauds and in one case a (poorly) faked video tape. The
    Anthrax letters , written to look like they were from Arab Muslims are actually from a non-Arab source. This proves the existence of a deliberate plot to frame Arabs
      And yet the US Government is not interested in looking at any evidence that does not support the desired outcome.
      The public is well aware of the facts that suggest deception on the part of the US Government. Documents declassified in 1994 prove beyond a doubt that Roosevelt not only knew Pearl Harbor would be attacked but that he encouraged and allowed it to happen to get the United States into a war they did not want. The public is well aware that the present government is as eager to get the US into a major war for the oil wealth of central Asia and the Middle East as Roosevelt was to get the nation he ruled into the war against the Axis. The public is well aware of "Operation NORTHWOODS" , a previous plan by the US (spiked by JFK ) to stage fake terror attacks to ignite a war against Cuba. The public is well aware that government throughout history have used fake terror against their own people as a tool of domestic policy.
      In such a climate the arrests earlier this week of two Israelis in a truck that tested positive for explosives was sure to attract notice.The FBI moved quickly to quash the story, as protective of these Israelis as of the spy ring itself. Despite the fact that the story had taken almost a week to make the news, it was only after the story broke that the FBI rushed in to conduct their own tests and claim that the bomb dog, and the test sued by the local authorities were all wrong, there were no explosive traces, everyone had been fooled by residue from a cigarette lighter. Given the FBI's documented frauds in the Vince Foster , OK City , and TWA 800 cases (not to mention the despicable history of COINTELPRO , including the Black Panther Coloring Book ,the smearing of actress Jean Seberg , the spying on celebrities , etc. ),it should come as no surprise that the companies that make the tests used to detect TNT and RDX report that neither tobacco nor butane will false-positive the tests they manufacture. So again the US Government was lying to protect Israelis, the public was aware of this lie, and this set the stage for the current debacle.
      No sooner had the FBI given the official "pooh pooh" to the arrested Israelis and explosives-tainted truck than a distraction appeared. In order to remind the public that it is Arabs they are supposed to suspect for 9-11 and nobody else, the White House, knowing that another simple declaration of Osama's guilt would gain no more traction, decided to create a "confession" of knowing in advance that the correct villain was behind 9-11 ahead of time, hoping that the public would find this "confession" more believable.
     There certainly was cause to suspect government foreknowledge. Setting aside Odigo's warning, San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown had received a warning not to fly on 9-11, and Ashcroft had changed from commercial to much more expensive charter planes in July 2001.
      But Bush's attempt to steer public suspicion away from Israel and back onto the designated fall guys has backfired. The admission that there had been advance warning flies in the face of
    Ari Fleischer's statement that there had been no warning at all just after the attacks In addition, the claim that there was advance warning contradicts Bush's claim, repeated twice, to have initially thought the first plane hitting the tower was an accident caused by a bad pilot, a statement that in hindsight appears to have been a (poorly acted) attempt to sell the idea that 9-11 was a Pearl Harbor style surprise attack, even though it clearly was not.
      The public, already aware it is being lied-to, is angry at the idea that government knew the 9-11 attacks were coming and like Roosevelt, may have allowed them to happen to further a pro-war agenda. Bush and his cronies, realizing they have hung themselves, are back peddling furiously, claiming now that while the warnings were sufficient to finger Osama bin Laden as the 9-11 villain, that the warnings were simply far too general in all other aspects to prevent the attacks. Yet Ari Fleischer's briefing after the attack claimed to have detailed and specific information regarding the targets,. Dick Morris, in a Fox TV Interview, revealed that Bush had detailed records of financial transactions by all Muslims groups in the US dating back to 1993, used to justify seizure of their funds. Again, someone is lying!
      Even worse, in trying to use this "limited hangout" to shift suspicion away from Israel and back to Osama, Bush has, probably without realizing it, sent a message round the world that the United States is weak, and that even with advance warning the US Government was totally outclassed by a small group of terrorists.
      Bush and company are struggling to reaffirm the official story, that the US was caught by surprise, just as it was at
    Pearl Harbor , and the same Air Force that was able to intercept Payne Stewert's plane just couldn't seem to get off the ground while four hijacked planes wandered out to Ohio before heading back to hit their targets on the East Coast, and all the work if a tiny group of Arab fanatics.
    And if you believe that, I have a watch to sell you.

  • Captured al Qaeda Reveal bin Laden Attack Plans (Reuters)

  • Was Robert Gaylon Ross, Sr. right? Committee to elect Jay Rockefeller as World President?
    (source:http://www.bankindex.com/read.asp?ID=825)
    What will happen after the year 2000?
    1. Since Clinton won the 1996 election for president (with just 24% of the eligible votes, and 31.9% of the registered voters), you can expect rapid and numerous changes prior to the 2000 elections. By law, he cannot run for the office of president again, so he will not have to check with focus groups or news media polls to decide what to do to be re-elected again. This means that the Elite will be counting on him to accomplish their goals and objectives during his lame-duck term. Most of the appointed positions in Clinton's remaining administration will be filled by the Elite. They do not need to spend their money to lobby our public officials, because they own them, lock, stock and barrel.
    2. N.A.F.T.A. will be rapidly expanded. Chile will be the next nation included, then Argentina, then Brazil, and then the rest will join in rapid succession, because their goal is to create the AMERICAN UNION by the year 2005, and much is to be done in order to reach this goal. During the second week of October, 1997, Clinton toured South American countries preparing them for the Union of the Americas, or American Union.
    3. Starting in mid-2000, thousands of unsafe Mexican trucks, with triple trailers, and with Mexican drivers will flood over the border, and travel all over the US and Canada, as stipulated in N.A.F.T.A. This is how the Elite transport their illegal drugs into this country, and they must drug the citizens into submission in order to take control. The Elite owned banks, such as Chase, Citibank, Morgan Guarantee Trust, American Express, and others launder their drug money through their branches in Mexico, so expect the flow of drugs and laundered money to greatly increase. Billions of dollars will be spent on an enlarged NAFTA highways between Mexico and Canada. As these trucks cross the border, few will be stopped and inspected, so massive amounts of illegal drugs will freely fan out over the United States.
    4. The C.I.A., F.B.I. and B.A.T.F. will secretly stage numerous bombings and public threats in order to give the president the excuse to declare Marshall Law, and to outlaw private ownership of personal firearms. They will have great difficulty taking over completely as long as the citizens are so well armed. Clinton and past presidents have signed Executive Orders instructing F.E.M.A. to take over absolute control of every critical function in this nation. The president has exclusive authority to declare Marshall Law under severe economic conditions or critical national security reasons. The killer is that the president is the only one authorized to make this determination, and when it happens, we will be immediately under control of a Dictatorship rather than a Constitutional Republic. One very probable severe economic condition that could trigger Marshall Law is very likely to be another Federal Reserve System imposed depression, exactly as they did in the 1929 crash.
    5. The de-industrialization of the United States will accelerate, which will cause jobs to be scarce, incomes to drop, more homeless people on the streets and on welfare, and crime to grow rapidly, because the unemployed people will do whatever is necessary to survive.
    6. Illegal and legal immigration will climb to new heights, so as to increase the demand for jobs, as the number of jobs available decline rapidly due to de-industrialization. The purpose is to completely eliminate the middle-class in the US. The Elite of the Soviet Union could not install communism in their union 70 years ago as long as there was a middle class. The answer was that Joseph Stalin murdered somewhere between 28 and 66 millions of the middle-class citizens in the USSR, with the resulting creation of a two-class system, the Elite and the peasants. We are headed for the same results in this country without the Elite having to fire a single shot.
    7. There is a steady movement to require all those on welfare to get a job within the next two years, or lose all benefits. This will cause riots, and social unrest will increase rapidly during the next four years due to the above, which is just what the Elite want to happen, so that they can be justified in the outlawing of personal firearms, and the unrest will be one of the excuses used to declare Marshall Law. The end result will be a US Dictatorship. Will our new Dictator be Bill Clinton or Al Gore? Not likely. The best bet is that they will be forced from office, and possibly indited on a number of charges. The best bet is Gov. George W. Bush, who is now backed by the Elite to become the next president. Possibly, unless he is also indited, as well. Madeline Albright cannot move up to president because she is not a natural born citizen of the US. It could be someone like Jay Rockefeller!!!! Stay tuned. Nelson A. Rockefeller almost made it by devious means, when the Elite manipulated Congress to change the order of succession by passing the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution. Fate took his life before he made it into the White House. Is it now Jay's turn to make his play for the office of DICTATOR???? And, reporting directly to the Czar of the Global Union, his brother, David Rockefeller!!!!!
    Troubled times are just ahead.
    "Today Americans would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow they will be grateful! This is especially true if they were told there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all people of the world will plead with world leaders to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well being granted to them by their world government." - Henry Kissinger in an address to the Bilderberg meeting at Evian, France, May 21, 1992. Transcribed from a tape recording made by one of the Swiss delegates.
    Robert Gaylon Ross, Sr
    One wonders if there is a Robert Gaylon Jnr being primed to take over this publishing business.
     
  • REPOST:THE NEW WORLD DISORDER: Bilderberg group meeting near D.C. -Powerful Secretive organization holds powwow in Virginia-June 6th 2002 (Guardian)
  • REPOST:Who are the Bilderberg Group? (conspiracy-fatalist Robert Gaylon Ross, Sr)

  • Bilderberg Batters Bush; But Unity remains on NWO (Nationalist Americanfreepress.com)

  • Is the equator tipping? Above freezing temperatures in Antartica? Hottest temperatures in Jordan for over 40 years.

  • Transsexuals Sue Toys "R" Us
    (Newsday-NY-June 20th)

    The trouble started in the Barbie aisle at a Toys “R” Us in Brooklyn.
    While shopping, Donna McGrath and two other self-described transsexuals, Tanya Jinks and Tara Lopez, claim employees greeted them with a chorus of laughter and insults. On a second excursion a week later, they say, it got worse: Two employees threatened them with baseball bats.
    The experience “made me feel like I was garbage,” McGrath, 28, told a jury in Brooklyn federal court.
    McGrath was testifying in support of a sexual discrimination lawsuit brought by herself, Jinks and Lopez seeking $300,000 each in damages from Toys “R” Us. The toy giant denies any wrongdoing.
    The trial, which began Monday in federal court in Brooklyn, was expected to last about a week.
    In opening statements, plaintiff attorney Tom Shanahan described the dispute as a “very, very important case” mixing issues of sexual identity, civil rights and corporate responsibility.
    The customers were not mere cross-dressers, but victims of a tormented fate, the lawyer explained. Each “were born males and during those formative years when they were growing up, they came to understand that their outward gender we know as male or female was not in conformity with their psychological gender,” he said.
    The lawyer accused Toys “R” Us — the country’s second-largest seller of toys — of ignoring its own anti-discrimination policies by not disciplining any workers.
    Employees are required to sign an internal policy stating that Toys “R” Us, as a “worldwide authority on kids, families and fun,” strictly prohibits harassment of employees and customers, Shanahan said.
    Despite the policy, the plaintiffs “were chased out of that store by those employees who mocked them, demeaned them, threatened them,” Shanahan said.
    Toys “R” Us attorney Nicholas Goodman accused the plaintiffs of distorting the facts. He insisted there were not threats of violence.
    The plaintiffs “were free to shop in that store and no one ever asked them to leave,” Goodman said.
    Wearing heels, a short skirt and her blond hair in a bun, McGrath told the jury that she considers herself a woman. She said she has undergone hormonal therapy, gotten breast implants and married a soft drink delivery man.
    McGrath testified that in December 2000, while shopping for a life-size “Butterfly Barbie” with the other plaintiffs at Toys “R” Us in the Bensonhurst section, a female employee referred to them as “faggots” and “transvestites.”
    “I felt humiliated,” she said. “I am not a transvestite.”
    The plaintiffs complained to the manager. He apologized and gave McGrath half off on her purchase of a Barbie Bungalow Beach House and other toys, she said.
    A week later, with the plaintiffs back in the store to finish up some Christmas shopping, two male employees appeared carrying bats, the plaintiffs said. The employees allegedly blocked their way, and “offered to meet them outside,” Shanahan said.
    McGrath testified she overheard one worker say to the other, “If one of them passes me, I’m going to hit them with the bat.”
    The plaintiffs later filed a written complaint with the store, and also with the city Human Rights Commission. Their lawyer said they decided to sue after rejecting a proposed settlement from the Toys “R” Us: 100 “Geoffrey Dollars” — a gift certificate named for the toy store mascot — for each plaintiff.
    Goodman has countered the accusations by citing an employee report alleging the plaintiffs “came into the store loud and boisterous ... flirting with employees, giggling at employees and laughing at employees.”
    The lawyer also suggested that the plaintiffs’ appearance invited scorn, however unfortunate.
    “It’s not the way things should be in the world, but given who they are and what they look like, comments get passed to them in the rough-and-tumble world of walking around the streets of New York and going about their business,” he said.

  • The mystery surrounding the death of John O'Neill:The Propaganda Preparation for 9/11-O'Neill, who died in his capacity as head of security for the World Trade Center, was also formerly the New York FBI Counterterror chief responsible for the investigation into Osama bin Laden.

  • Will Detrick Worker Ever Be Charged: Scientists Charge FBI Is Hiding Name Of The Anthrax Killer
    TheScotsman.com
    6-16-2
    American investigators know the identity of the killer who paralysed the US by sending anthrax in the post but will not arrest the culprit, according to leading US scientists.
    For several months the Federal Bureau of Investigation has claimed it has few leads and little evidence about the group or individual who targeted politicians and media organisations.
    Their failure to arrest a suspect has compounded other failures of the American security agencies to take action which could have prevented the September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.
    This week, the FBI and John Ashcroft, the attorney general, were at the centre of controversy when they claimed that they had apprehended an American citizen intent on detonating a ''dirty bomb'', a conventional bomb which would contaminate a large area with radioactive material. Both were forced to admit that there was no evidence that Jose Padile had done little more than associate with suspected al-Qaeda agents in Pakistan.
    Last week scientists at Fort Detrick, the US Army's top secret biological warfare research centre at Fort Detrick, Maryland said the FBI had looked at ways in which anthrax could have been smuggled out of the complex.
    At a time when the Bush administration is beefing up America's Homeland Security defences any indication of progress by the FBI should be good news, but one prominent and well-respected biowarfare expert believes the FBI has not only known the identity of the terrorist for months but has conspired with other branches of the US government to keep it secret.
    Dr Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, director of the biological warfare division at the Federation of American Scientists, first accused the FBI of foot-dragging in February with a scathing investigation that included a portrait of the possible perpetrator so detailed that it could only match one person.
    Rosenberg said she knows who that person is and so do a top-level clique of US government scientists, the CIA, the FBI and the White House.
    "Early in the investigation," Rosenberg told Scotland on Sunday, "a number of inside experts, at least five that I know about, gave the FBI the name of one specific person as the most likely suspect. That person fits the FBI profile in most respects. He has the right skills, experience with anthrax, up-to-date anthrax vaccination, forensic training, and access to the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (AMRIID) and its biological agents through 2001."
    Rosenberg's profile suggests that the suspect is a middle-aged scientist with a doctoral degree who works for a CIA contractor in Washington DC. She adds he has to know or have worked closely with Bill Patrick, the weapons researcher who holds five secret patents on how to produce weapons-grade anthrax, that he suffered a career setback last summer that embittered him and precipitated his campaign and that he has already been investigated by the FBI.
    Most crucially, she believes the suspect has in the past actually conducted experiments for the government to test the response of the police and civil agencies to a bioterror attack.
    "It has been part of the suspect's job to devise bioterror scenarios," Rosenberg said. "Some of these are on record. He is known to have acted out at least one of them, in hoax form, perhaps as part of an assignment to test responses. Some hoax events that have never been solved, including several hoax-anthrax events, also correspond to his scenarios and are consistent with his whereabouts."
    The question she wants the FBI and the Bush administration to answer is, why it has taken so long to arrest this man? In the unlikely event that the government divulges all it knows about what she now believes to be a full blown cover-up, Rosenberg said responsibility can be expected to fall on a number of government agencies, all with a vested interest in shielding the truth.
    "Either the FBI is under pressure from the Pentagon or CIA not to proceed because the suspect knows too much and must be controlled forever from the moment of arrest," she said, "or the FBI is sympathetic to the views of the biodefence clique or the FBI really is as incompetent as it seems."
    Rosenberg's analysis suggests a combination of all three. The American defence establishment guards its secrets well and given the suspect's covert work on their behalf their reluctance to see him publicly exposed appears natural.
    Equally there is evidence that some of the suspect's colleagues are not unhappy with the fallout from his terror attacks. Rosenberg cites David Franz, a former commander of USAMRIID who earlier this year said of the anthrax campaign: "I think a lot of good has come from it. From a biological or a medical standpoint, we've now five people who have died, but we've put about $6bn in our budget into defending against bioterrorism."
    As for FBI incompetence there are few in America today who have any doubt that the venerable agency made a serious of terrible errors before 9/11 and has conspicuously failed to conduct a solid investigation since.
    Earlier this week, congressmen questioned George Tenet, the director of the CIA, about the arrest of Padile and the claims made about his mission. The congressmen were concerned that the attorney general was unduly alarmist about the nature of the plans Padile had made.
    It appeared that Padile's arrest was announced to bolster the image of the FBI and emphasise the continuing threat to the US. Instead the announcement raised questions about why Padile was arrested on arriving in the US rather than being watched to establish the identity of his associates and the source of the radioactive material he would need for a dirty bomb.
    George Soros, the billionaire financier, accused the Bush administration of deliberately manipulating the aftermath of September 11 and the arrest of Padile to promote an authoritarian agenda.
    '"I feel that what happened was that Ashcroft (the attorney general) basically detonated a 'dirty bomb' plot. The plot is his. The detonation is his. The Bush administration is exploiting the terrorist threat for its purposes, to generate fear and to overcome constitutional constraints on the use of force,'' he said.
    http://www.news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=655812002

  • The Mind Control Forum

    Brian's Brain Implant - MRI Scan border=0>
    Robert Naeslund's Brain Implant being surgically removed.
    Robert Naeslund, showing wound from implantation width=134 border=0>
    Jay Kats'implants


    Left-An MRI Scan showing a brain implant
    Middle - Robert Naeslund;A brain implant being removed; R.N. after implantation.
    Right - Ed Kats and Family:Two implants in Jay Kats' brain.
    Introducingthe Mind Control Forum

    Maintained by
    Heart

    Heart

    I would like to introduce myself. I'm Heart and I am getting the
    privilege and honor to maintain this web site. The MTC Online Forums founder has added an explanation about the changes that have been going on within the foundation. MTC Online Forums will still be the supervisor of this site I just have the responsibiliy to mainatain this web site. So they handed over the privilege to maintain and update this site to me.

  • Musicians found to have 'more sensitive brains'...(UKIndependent)

  • Germans ask: Why doesn't anyone like us? (Reuters)
    Sunday June 16
    By Erik Kirschbaum
    BERLIN (Reuters) - Germans may make great cars, brew delicious beer and give the world stunning fashion models, but they still feel unloved and unwanted.
    Sixty years after World War Two, Germans find themselves still disliked across Europe. They feel personally blamed for two world wars or rude behaviour by German tourists, or sense they are envied because of their country's prosperity.
    The latest round of introspection emerged after a blind German singer, who had been tipped as a favourite to win last month's Eurovision Song Contest, ended up a dismal 21st in a field of 25.
    "Was it just the song or was it because people in other countries just don't like us?" asked Bild newspaper columnist David Blieswood, summing up the nationwide distress. "Corinna May's performance was great, but why did we lose?"
    Germany's best-selling daily was filled the following week with letters from readers complaining that Germans will never win contests like Eurovision because they are so loathed abroad.
    "It's pure malice against Germans," wrote Jochen Schreiner from Munich. "That's the image of Germans in Europe."
    And Markus Schorn, from the southern town of Hohenthann, added: "We all know how unloved we are in Europe."
    RESENTMENTS LINGER
    Despite huge efforts to improve their standing and put behind them the image of dangerous belligerents whose armies trampled through many countries in the 20th century, Germans regularly encounter lingering resentment across Europe:
    In Austria Germans are referred to derogatorily as "Piefke" and disliked for buying up Alpine holiday flats. In Britain, they're known as "Krauts" and World War Two references appear in media reports and advertising slogans.
    In Spain, millions of German tourists armed with towels and beer bottles have conquered sandy beaches and turned parts of the country in virtual German colonies. In Poland, which lost a fifth of its population during World War Two, historic enmity is never far below the surface.
    Dutch, Swiss, Danes, Norwegians, Czechs, Belgians and French all report varying degrees of German-bashing, even though there are without doubt many who know and like Germans.
    "Germans may be admired in many places but not often liked," said Lutz Erbring, a professor for media studies at Berlin's Free University who lived for more than 20 years in Britain and the United States.
    "The stereotypes of Germans range from 'unpleasant people' to 'arrogant'. Germans abroad get treated the way they behave and some are indeed very arrogant. But stereotypes are often badly outdated. Germans are considered to be hard-working. In reality Germans are the laziest people in Europe."
    Erbring, a German who spends four months a year at a holiday home in southern France, admits avoiding his compatriots there.
    "I spend enough time with Germans when I'm in Germany," he said. "When I'm in France, I'd rather be not be around them."
    The British newspaper the Guardian recently cited a Europe-wide survey which asked people to score each country out of 10 according to how much respect and love they had for each other. Germans came in second to last, just ahead of the British. The Irish were ranked as the most popular.
    "This latest soul-searching seems mostly to be in reaction to worries about rising populism in Germany and doubts about Germany's chances at the World Cup among others," said Anne-Marie Le Gloannec, a French political scientist at Berlin's Marc Bloch centre and researcher for Paris's Science Po.
    "The French ask similar questions about themselves but formulated entirely differently -- are we still as great as before? Are we still the most handsome? The German self-reflection, like the French, is born of history. They ask 'does anyone like us?' because of the shadow of Nazism. It's the same question, just formulated differently."
    ENVY?
    Germany has Europe's most powerful economy and wages are generally among the highest on the continent. Germans also have the longest annual holidays -- six weeks -- and spend more time abroad than any other national group in Europe.
    Their Mercedes, BMWs, and Porsches are considered to be among the finest cars in the world. Their beer is exported around the globe. And models such as Claudia Schiffer, Nadja Auermann and Heidi Klum are known on catwalks and magazine covers everywhere between New York and Milan.
    The purchasing power of Germans combined with their sometimes high demands for luxury in less prosperous countries leads inevitably to tension. Germans are known to expect waiters and car rental agents in holiday regions to speak their language.
    The loud, aggressive and sometimes barbaric behaviour that some intoxicated Germans display abroad has contributed to the image of the "ugly German".
    But without doubt the central reason for the poor standing of Germans in parts of Europe is the country's destructive past -- even though the vast majority of Germans alive today were born after 1945.
    In Britain, German-bashing is considered to be politically correct and is part of mainstream advertising.
    Playing to that World War Two chord, a beer known as "Spitfire" calls itself "the bottle of Britain" in adverts. The Kent-based brewery also once ran a slogan saying: "Downed all over Kent, just like the Luftwaffe". Another campaign poster for the beer read: "Goering, Goering, gone."
    ROOTS OF GERMAN BASHING
    "There are two aspects to it (German bashing)," said professor Michael Billig, a social psychologist and expert in nationalism at Britain's Loughborough University.
    "First, obviously there is the historical aspect of the two world wars. Second, because we are such a politically correct society, people often take great delight in prejudices that they view as sanctioned by society.
    "Prejudice against Germans has been socially sanctioned because of the heritage of the two world wars," Billig added. "There is no taboo against it."
    In Poland, popular hostility towards Germans has centred recently on the rivalry between world champion ski jumpers Adam Malysz of Poland and German Sven Hannawald.
    Polish fans pelted Hannawald with snowballs and bottles while he was riding the ski lift at an event in the Polish resort of Zakopane earlier this year.
    Poland suffered immensely during World War Two. Most Nazi death camps were in Poland and millions of Polish Jews died.
    In the Netherlands, the Dutch are generally seen as disliking Germans, who represent the biggest group of tourists to the country. Dutch refer to German television networks seen in their country as "Mof1" (Kraut 1) or "Mof2" (Kraut 2).
    Last month Dutch police arrested two men suspected of firing an air rifle at a passing train packed with German soccer fans travelling to an international soccer match in Rotterdam.
    In Switzerland, Germans are considered rude and pushy, known for butting into queues on ski lifts. Foreigners who speak German are advised to speak English to avoid the cold shoulder.
    "They are snobbish and think they are the best," said a Zurich housewife. "They go abroad and if they can't get their own food - sauerkraut - they are unhappy."


  • Proposed legislation would let FDA crack down on smoking big time
    Scripps Howard News Service
    June 14, 2002
    WASHINGTON - The federal government would have unprecedented authority to regulate the sale and marketing of cigarettes and other tobacco products under news legislation aimed at stopping the industry from targeting young consumers.
    All new tobacco products would be subject to approval by the Food and Drug Administration, which for the first time would be able to review the health risks associated with such products.
    Stronger warning labels would be required on all cigarettes and smokeless tobacco products, and cigarette makers would be required to disclose all ingredients, including additives, that are contained in their products. The FDA would have the power to order that hazardous ingredients be reduced or removed.
    "With this bill, we are not just saying, 'Buyers beware.' We are saying, 'Tobacco companies, be honest,' " said Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, one of the leading sponsors of the legislation unveiled Friday.
    DeWine and other supporters noted that Philip Morris Companies Inc., owner of Kraft Foods Inc., is required by law to list on box labels the ingredients of food products such as macaroni and cheese but is not required to disclose the ingredients on a pack of Marlboro cigarettes.
    The Supreme Court ruled two years ago that the FDA doesn't have authority under current law to regulate the marketing of tobacco products. The proposed legislation would give the FDA those regulatory powers.
    "We cannot in good conscience allow the federal agency most responsible for protecting the public health to remain powerless to deal with the enormous risks of tobacco, the most deadly of all consumer products,'' said Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., another of the bill's sponsors.
    Cigarette makers spent a record $9.57 billion marketing their products in 2000. Critics say much of the marketing is aimed at children, violating the spirit of the 1998 national tobacco settlement in which the industry agreed to stop targeting the youth market.
    Every day, nearly 5,000 people under age 18 try their first cigarettes, according to anti-smoking groups. And another 2,000 who had been smoking become daily smokers.
    All states prohibit the sale of cigarettes to children under 18, but surveys show that those laws are rarely enforced and frequently violated. The legislation would give the FDA the power to limit the sale of cigarettes to face-to-face transactions in which the age of the purchasers can be verified by identification.
    "There are Americans that are going to smoke, and we understand that," Kennedy said. "...But what we are committed to doing is to try and reduce the extraordinary efforts that are being made by the tobacco industry to addict, effectively, the children in this country."
    Philip Morris, which broke ranks with other cigarette makers a couple of years ago and said it could support some federal regulation of tobacco, said it favors many of the proposals outlined in the bill, including new warning labels and tougher marketing and manufacturing regulations.
    "Where there are differences, they are in degree only,'' spokesman Michael Pfeil said.

      

  • Soviet hemorrhagic Smallpox Outbreak Report Worries Experts-(Reuters)
    Sunday, June 16, 2002
    WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Experts said on Saturday they were worried by a leaked report that describes an outbreak of smallpox in the Soviet Union -- one they say may point to the testing of a smallpox biological weapon.
    Seven people became ill in the 1971 outbreak and three died of what appeared to be the more fatal, and more rare, hemorrhagic form of the infection, said Dr. Alan Zelicoff of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, one of the authors of the report.
    "Someone has successfully disseminated smallpox as an aerosol," Zelicoff said in an interview.
    "It has been talked about and it has been rumored about but no one has ever actually done it," he added. "It is real, it has happened and it works. We have to live with it."
    Zelicoff described the report at a meeting on Saturday of policymakers, bioterrorism experts, emergency response officials and others at the Institute of Medicine in Washington. The experts are helping to put together U.S. policy on whether and when to vaccinate against smallpox.
    Smallpox was declared eradicated worldwide as a disease in 1979, but the former Soviet Union, and perhaps other countries, continued to develop the potentially deadly virus as a biological weapon.
    Experts are considering whether to vaccinate Americans now that, after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, a biological attack is considered more likely than ever before.
    Vaccination in the United States stopped in 1972 and doctors say it is unlikely more than a small fraction of those who were vaccinated have any useful immunity left.
    Dr. D.A. Henderson, who led the fight to eradicate smallpox through a global vaccination campaign and who advises the government on bioterrorism issues, said he was not especially worried by the report.
    "We do know the Russians were engaged with weaponizing the virus. We do know they were fiddling with the virus," he told the meeting. "I see nothing new."
    The outbreak was in Aralsk, a port on the Aral sea in what is now Kazakhstan, Zelicoff said. He says he believes it originated from a field test of a smallpox biological weapon.
    FIELD TESTING CITED
    "There were a total of three deaths from hemorrhagic disease," he told the meeting. "Anyone who was not vaccinated, that is, the three people, died from the disease," he said.
    The others, who had all been vaccinated, contracted smallpox but did not die.
    According to the New York Times, which reported on a leaked version of the report in Saturday, it mentions an interview with General Pyotr Burgasov, a former official in the Soviet germ weapons program. He was quoted in November by the Moscow News as saying the outbreak was caused by field testing of 400 grams, or a little less than a pound, of the virus.
    The report said at the time, Soviet health officials rushed to contain the outbreak, disinfecting homes, stopping travel to and from the area and vaccinating 50,000 people.
    "I've never seen anything quite so disturbing as this," said Zelicoff, who is also a smallpox expert at the Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.
    He said he interviewed one of the survivors, a woman who was on a ship in the Aral Sea at the time of the outbreak. The most likely way she became ill, he said, was through breathing in aerosolized smallpox.
    Henderson cast doubt on this but Zelicoff said he has factored in the time smallpox can live in the air, the winds on the Aral Sea, and the fact that no one below deck on the ship became infected.
    The United States is working with vaccine makers to produce enough vaccine to cover everyone in the country in case of an outbreak. Henderson said existing stocks of the vaccine could be delivered within 12 hours.
    "In the short term I don't think this changes the need for the acquisition of vaccine to cover everyone," Zelicoff said. "All things being equal, look, the vaccine worked pretty well. What it says is that we shouldn't stop here. We almost certainly need to look at antiviral drugs."
    Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said tests were underway on an antiviral drug called tenofovir, now used against a herpes virus, which has shown promise against pox viruses in animals.
    He said scientists were developing oral versions of the drug that appear to be even more potent than current intravenous forms.

     

  • Smallpox Epidemic Rapidly Spreading In Pakistan Province
    Dawn.com
    6-9-2
    SWABI, Pakistan - The smallpox epidemic is rapidly spreading in these parts of the province, but the district health department has failed to take any step to contain this deadly disease, Dawn learnt here on Saturday.
    It has been reported from different parts of the Swabi district that a large number of children have suffered from smallpox, but the authorities concerned have failed to take any action to prevent this disease or immunize the people against it.
    Smallpox is a fatal disease which causes high fever, leaves permanent marks on the skin and spreads very fast. Timely treatment and precautionary measures are vital for controlling this malady.
    A health official said that the dilemma of the people was that they were not aware of the danger aspects of this ailment as the children suffering from it have neither been kept in isolation nor properly treated. And this resulted in the spread of the virus.
    In most of the cases, the children of a family or those living close to each other, contract it at one and the same time.
    The residents of Naro Banda, a rural area in the district, told this correspondent that a majority of the children in the village had suffered from smallpox a few years back. "My two brothers, Shams and Akhtar, have been afflicted by smallpox and I have appealed to the officials concerned, but they did not bother either to visit the area or take steps for controlling it," said Mukhtaj Ahmad of Naro Banda.
    The mother of a sick child said she had informed the lady health workers about the spread of the disease four days ago, but no action was taken.
    It was also noticed that most of the parents of the sick children were uneducated. They had either approached the quack living nearby, or the self-made homeopath doctors to treat the children, but no visible improvement could be seen in the health of the children.
    If the district health department delayed taking steps for containing the disease, the epidemic may spread to other areas in the vicinity, or the whole of the district, for that matter.
    The suffering people have appealed to the NWFP governor, district government bosses and health officials to send in special teams to extend necessary health cover to the children.

  • Three Die From Smallpox In Barachatti Village, India (?)-Is smallpox really extinct in the wild? Were the anthrax attacks a controlled exercise in panic to allow mandatory smallpox vacination in US by a worried CDC?
    (Source: Jeff Rense.com)
    Dainik Jagran Bodhgaya News
    6-11-2
    BARACHATTI June 4 - In Patiauna village of Vinda Council in Barachatti block a dreadful outbreak of smallpox is raging. Due to the smallpox so far three children have died and about a dozen children are in its grip. So far, in order to treat and cure the smallpox so far no steps have been taken by the medical department due to which the villagers are angry.
    Gaya District Equality [Party] chairman Indradev Pasvan has asked the DM to not delay in distributing appropriate medications to the effected children and asked for suitable measures to be taken for protection from this sickness, so that the remaining children may be saved. Mr Paswan said that if this sickness was not quickly brought under control then it might turn into an epidemic. Related Links
    Gaya Stories
    http://www.bodhgayanews.net/News2002/2002_06_05.htm
    Comment From Patricia Doyle, PhD
    [email protected]
    6-11-2
    Hi Jeff,
    One of the regular posters to my message board wrote to the CDC. She got an interesting response, and of course, a denial that Smallpox was a problem.
    The CDC claimed the last case was in 1978, a lab "accident." Hum? I thought that neither the Russians nor the US was working with smallpox at that time. By 1978, Smallpox was declared "dead." We know that the Govt. would NEVER be involved in bioweapons development, so how did it come to pass that smallpox infected a lab worker?
    Prior to this admission, I was under the impression that the last case of smallpox was that of a civilian in Africa.
    At this point in time, "methinks" the CDC doth talk with forked tongue.
    I am not sure that the CDC had been called in by the Pakistanis. The case of a mystery "black" disease killing people in a small isolated village near Moro on the Indus River was to be investigated by a Japanese group. So, after all of this time, why are there NO lab test results to quiet the rumors?
    The first case of smallpox that I had been aware of was that of two Smallpox cases in Pakistan. (Tando Bago) It was dated April 2001. There never was closure with that case. I wrote to the doctor who treated the patients at Taluga Hospital and never received a reply from him. At that time, I had notified a colleague at Ft. Detrick USAMRIID, whom I thought was a friend and whom I believed I could trust. As soon as I notifed USAMRIID, all news of the smallpox cases ceased.
    It these reported cases are not smallpox, then why are we not shown test results? Last year, 20001, smallpox cases in Tando Bago should have been diagnosed and test results available. As for this years cases, there should be preliminary test results by now. Promed tried to claim that Ergot was the cause of the mystery "black" disease on the Indus. Ergot is quite easy to identify. Yet, a month later, no test results.
    I, now, understand WHY anthrax was sent through the mail. It was Plan B. Time line:
    April 2001, Smallpox suspected in small village, Tando Bago, Pakistan.
    Smallpox verified??? (thoery)
    US, CDC goes into panic. April 2001, decide to implement a Smallpox Simulation exercise.
    Dark Winter June 2001.
    Result of Dark Winter: US totally unprepared for Smallpox
    At this time, however, bioterrorism is not front and center on the Congressional agenda. The public also is a problem, in as much as the public will not want to do all that must be done if Smallpox is to be contained. also, very unpopular model Public Health Laws would need to be in place.
    Plan B or as I call it: Light Summer:
    A plan was developed that would sufficiently scare the public and Congress into action. This plan, which according to William Patrick III's risk assessment would be of minimal risk to the general public, but would scare the public and Congress into action. The plan, send Anthrax through the mail to designated Congressmen and to the major media. In other words, a bioterrorist event on US soil that really would not harm or kill, but would publicize the risk of bioterrorism. In actuality, the Smallpox cases may or may not have been bioterrorism, but bioterrorism would afford the goal of containing a Smallpox outbreak.
    It is my opinion that Smallpox, may be in the environment once again. Of course, it could be a mutated form, or even caused by smallpox vaccination testing. Whatever the cause, is irrelevant. The fact is that Smallpox may be with us again.
    Whether or not, there is ONE way to prove it, that is: Show us some test results that either affirm or deny Smallpox. Thus far, I am not getting any information and no test results are being made public.

  • UPDATE:WHO Terms Pakistan Outbreak Chickenpox Not Smallpox
    From Patricia Doyle, PhD
    (from Rense.com)
    6-15-2
    Hello Jeff - According to Promed the WHO has confirmed that the outbreak of vesicular disease in the Northern frontier of Pakistan, and involving children, is Chickenpox.
    They are awaiting lab results, but because children are involved, it appears to be chickenpox.
    This does NOT however, answer my question and that of the Pak Journalist, Mr. Talpur, regarding the suspected smallpox cases in adults last year, April 2001 as well as the vesicular disease that caused blackening of hands and feet in the area of Moro on the Indus river this year, April 2002.
    I have written to Promed, CDC and WHO about those cases and have not received satisfactory determination. Promed said that they did not have followup on last year's suspected smallpox cases. No confirming or denying.
    As you know, I have put a timeline together based on the suspected smallpox cases and our Dark Winter exercises and anthrax attacks.
    Mr. Talpur and myself have received no information from the doctor who cared for the suspected smallpox cases last year, and no information on the Moro cases of black disease.
    As you may note the children's cases of chickenpox in Pakistan and India have been diagnosed, lab results to follow. So, why is there NO denial of smallpox in the April 2001 cases of adult illness? Over a year? Where are the labs? As for the Moro case of 10 dead and 25 ill, also, by now there should be lab test results. Where are they? No denial of Ebolapox or associated illness?
    I expect to hear that the suspected cases of smallpox in children in Kurdish town are also chickenpox.
    There is still no diagnosis on the Turkish vesicular mystery illness. I believe that both children and adults are ill.
    Will keep you posted.
    Well there's a misplaced malapropism or is there something more maladroit about this mislabeled malady?

  • WHO confirms Ebola cases in the Republic of Congo
    14jun02
    A NEW outbreak of ebola fever has been confirmed in the Republic of Congo, with six people already affected.
    (heraldsun.news.com.au)
    The latest outbreak is in the republic's northwest, on the border with Gabon, the World Health Organisation said.
    It was first detected on May 17 in the Mbomo district near the Gabonese town of Ivindo.
    Today's statement from the WHO confirms earlier information from the Congolese health ministry.
    The Republic of Congo is the western neighbour of the much larger Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
    WHO official Lamine Cisse Sarr said investigators in Mbomo reported "the epidemic returned on May 17 after the dismemberment of a chimpanzee found dead in a forest by two hunters".
    An earlier epidemic, between December and April, claimed 42 victims.
    Five men and a woman have been taken to hospital in the latest outbreak, the WHO representative said.
    The last outbreak of the disease was brought under control by joint teams from WHO and the Congolese health ministry.
    Ebola is one of the most virulent diseases known to man, and often causes death by massive haemorrhaging in which blood pours from the victim's skin like sweat.
    The disease is spread through contact with body fluids, including saliva. Early symptoms are similar to those of the flu.
    There is no known cure once the disease has reached a developed stage. But patients can survive if they are treated early enough.

  • Mysterious Children's Rash Has Now Spread To 27 States
    6-21-2
    (HealthScoutNews) - Federal health officials are scratching their heads over a mysterious set of rashes now afflicting schoolchildren in 27 states. An initial report issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in March reported outbreaks in 14 states: Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Mississippi, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia.
    Since then, another 13 states have joined the list, says the CDC. The new states are: Alabama, Alaska, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, and New Jersey. Similar rashes have also been reported in Canada.
    Although the number of reported rashes is growing, "there's still no evidence for a common cause for all of the reports," CDC spokesman Mike Groutt says. "Investigations have identified causes for some of the rashes occurring in some of the schools. Regardless of the cause of the rashes, including those of unknown origin, reports indicate that they are self-limiting and affected children have few if any accompanying signs or symptoms."
    No single cause has been identified, and the CDC emphasizes there's no evidence that all of the rashes are linked. Officials have also been quick to point out that rashes are common among schoolchildren and can be caused by a variety of factors. They include medications, dry or sensitive skin, eczema, allergies, viral infections and environmental factors.
    However, the recent spate of rashes have raised concern because they've occurred simultaneously in various locales across the nation. They also began in the wake of Sept. 11 and subsequent anthrax attacks.
    Between October 2001 and May 2002, rashes were reported among groups of schoolchildren at about 110 U.S. elementary, middle and high schools. The number of children affected at each school ranged from five to 274 (or less than 1 percent to 47 percent of the student population). Girls accounted for varying proportions of the affected -- from 33 percent to 100 percent.
    The rashes themselves also had varied characteristics. Most children reported an itchy, sunburn-like rash on the cheeks and arms, a burning sensation on the skin or a hive-like reaction that moved from one part of the body to another. They tended to go away on their own, either within in an hour or sometimes not for more than a month.
    Some states have managed to track down a cause. In New York, an outbreak among 242 elementary and middle-school students (representing 7 percent of the population of their school district) between January and April was determined to be the result of parvovirus B19, which causes fifth disease, an infection of red blood cells. Alaska, Illinois, Kentucky, Minnesota, and Mississippi have also had cases associated with parvovirus B19.
    Other outbreaks might be psychogenic -- a response to seeing another child with a rash.
    For the meantime, the CDC seems to be playing it cool, emphasizing the rashes do go away on their own and that most children don't have any other, more disruptive symptoms. The organization "is continuing to monitor reports of groups of schoolchildren with rashes and is providing technical assistance to state and local health departments," the researchers report in tomorrow's issue of the CDC publication Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
    http://www.healthscoutnews.com/view.cfm?id=507760


  • Sep 11th Big Ben Attack Foiled
    (Skynews-June 11 2002)
    Suicide hijackers targeted Big Ben on September 11 but were thwarted after flights out of London were grounded following the US attacks, it has been claimed.A group of al Qaeda operatives were at Heathrow Airport waiting to take over a jet and slam it into the Houses of Parliament when British air space was closed,according to author Rohan Gunaratna.
    The plan was intended to show the international reach of al Qaeda, he said.
    Airborne suicide attack
    "This team assembled at Heathrow Airport on 9/11 to conduct an airborne suicide attack on the Houses of Parliament," Mr Gunaratna, author of Inside al Qaeda, told CBS News in the US.
    But the al Qaeda operatives had not expected flights in the UK to be grounded after the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, and left Heathrow without accomplishing their mission.
    The alleged would-be Big Ben attacker, Afroz Muhammed, was arrested in India. Security agents in India showed documents to CBS that indicated he had confessed to the London hijack plan. Afroz has since retracted his confession.
    Mr Gunaratna said Afroz attended flying schools in Britain, Australia and the US, and received money from al Qaeda-connected sources.
    "In terms of who recruited him, how he was recruited, where he was sent for training, it very clearly demonstrates that he was an al Qaeda member and this was his intention."
    Intelligence documents
    Mr Gunaratna said he studied intelligence documents and had access to serving and former members of Osama bin Laden's terror network when writing the book.
    He said his study revealed that al Qaeda had a "lose and learn" doctrine.
    The terror group was prepared to lose operatives like Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the 1993 World Trade Centre bomber, in order to learn how to carry out such an attack successfully the next time.
    "The Americans should have known that the terrorist organisation that was behind Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, that trained him, that supported him - this organisation would never abandon that idea," he told CBS.
    Sky's political editor Adam Boulton said the Government remains sceptical on the claims: ''This comes from one source - the author; the confession was retracted and at the moment, like the dirty bomb allegation - there is little material evidence.''

  • Now showing on satellite TV: secret American spy photos -Security lapse allows viewers to see sensitive operations
    June 13, 2002
    The Guardian
    European satellite TV viewers can watch live broadcasts of peacekeeping and anti-terrorist operations being conducted by US spyplanes over the Balkans.
    Normally secret video links from the American spies-in-the-sky have a serious security problem - a problem that make it easier for terrorists to tune in to live video of US intelligence activity than to get Disney cartoons or new-release movies.
    For more than six months live pictures from manned spy aircraft and drones have been broadcast through a satellite over Brazil. The satellite, Telstar 11, is a commercial TV relay. The US spyplane broadcasts are not encrypted, meaning that anyone in the region with a normal satellite TV receiver can watch surveillance operations as they happen.
    The satellite feeds have also been connected to the internet, potentially allowing the missions to be watched from around the globe.
    Viewers who tuned in to the unintended attraction on Tuesday could watch a sudden security alert around the US army's Kosovan headquarters, Camp Bondsteel in Urosevac. The camp was visited last summer by President Bush and his defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.
    A week earlier the spyplane had provided airborne cover for a heavily protected patrol of the Macedonian-Kosovan border, near Skopje. A group of apparently high-ranking visitors were accompanied by six armoured personnel carriers and a helicopter gunship.
    Nato officials, whose forces in former Yugoslavia depend on the US missions for intelligence, at first expressed disbelief at the reports. After inquiring, a Nato spokesman confirmed: "We're aware that this imagery is put on a communications satellite. The distribution of this material is handled by the United States and we're content that they're following appropriate levels of security."
    This lapse in US security was discovered last year by a British engineer and satellite enthusiast, John Locker, who specialises in tracking commercial satellite services. Early in November 2001 he routinely logged the new channels.
    "I thought that the US had made a deadly error," he said. "My first thought was that they were sending their spyplane pictures through the wrong satellite by mistake, and broadcasting secret information across Europe."
    He tried repeatedly to warn British, Nato and US officials about the leak. But his warnings were set aside. One officer wrote back to tell him that the problem was a "known hardware limitation".
    The flights, conducted by US army and navy units and AirScan Inc, a Florida-based private military company, are used to monitor terrorists and smugglers trying to cross borders, to track down arms caches, and to keep watch on suspect premises. The aircraft are equipped to watch at night, using infrared.
    "We seem to be transmitting this information potentially straight to our enemies," said one US military intelligence official who was alerted to the leak, adding: "I would be worried that using this information, the people we are tracking will see what we are looking at and, much more worryingly, what we are not looking at.
    "This could let people see where our forces are and what they're doing. That's putting our boys at risk."
    Former SAS officer Adrian Weale, who served in Northern Ireland, told BBC Newsnight last night: "I think I'd be extremely irritated to find that the planning and hard work that had gone into mounting an operation against, for instance, a war crime suspect or gun runner was being compromised by the release of this information in the form that it's going out in."

  • French arrest 'aides to shoe bomber'
    June 13, 2002
    (The Guardian)
    French anti-terrorist police hunting for the support network behind the British man accused of trying to blow up a transatlantic flight using explosives packed in his shoe yesterday arrested five people: two Pakistanis and three North Africans.
    The suspects are believed to have helped Richard Reid during a stay in Paris before he allegedly attempted to detonate his explosive-packed trainers on an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami on December 22.
    Three guns, one with a telescopic sight, and Islamist literature were discovered in yesterday's dawn raids on addresses in Mantes-La-Jolie and Evry in the Paris suburbs. The arrests followed weeks of surveillance.
    According to the newspaper Le Monde, the police were following a tip-off provided by seven Pakistanis arrested in April. They claimed they had seen Reid with the suspects eight months before his arrest.
    Reid, 28, has been in custody in the US since December. He has pleaded not guilty to nine charges against him, including attempted murder and destruction of an aircraft. On Tuesday a Boston judge threw out one of the charges.
    Ever since the unexploded shoes were found to contain TATP, a highly volatile primer and PETN, a military explosive that can be moulded into any shape, British and US intelligence have been convinced that Reid had been aided by an explosives expert.
    Files found in a computer obtained by two Wall Street Journal reporters in Kabul further indicated that an al-Qaida operative known as Abdul Ra'uff travelled from Europe to Israel, Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan, in an itinerary similar to Reid's just before the attempted attack.
    A US intelligence source confirmed to the Guardian that Reid allegedly was Ra'uff and that he had been identified by Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who ran al-Qaida's Khalden training camp in Afghanistan, where Reid was given instruction in using explosives.
    Last week US officials told the Washington Post that Reid may also have been working for another Islamist group like Hamas. Investigators are keen to discover any such links .
    L'aides de le chausseur-beumber?

  • Russians claim to have interviewed Mullah Omar-Argumenty I Fakty claims to have conducted an email interview with the cleric.
    June 13, 2002
    The Guardian
    The vanished Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar says that Osama bin Laden is alive inside Afghanistan and has threatened further terror attacks on the US, according to a Russian weekly newspaper.
    Argumenty I Fakty claims to have conducted an email interview with the cleric. In its latest edition it said that it had only just received answers from Mullah Omar after forwarding questions via former Taliban officials and Arab intermediaries in the spring. Negotiations for the interview began last August.
    Asked about the fate of Bin Laden, Mullah Omar report edly said: "He's alive and in Afghanistan. Osama helped us during the war with the Russians and he won't leave us now."
    The newspaper provided no information on Mullah Omar's whereabouts nor did it indicate whether it had verified that the replies were indeed from him. He is not known to have given an interview before to any media from non-Islamic countries.
    "We have suffered minimal casualties and are still combat ready despite the American propaganda that we have been destroyed," he is quoted as saying. "I don't think the Taliban have been defeated _ The holy war has just begun."

  • Moroccan Secret Agent 'Predicted New York Attack'
    The Times - London
    6-12-2
    A MOROCCAN secret service agent says that for two years he successfully infiltrated al-Qaeda before breaking cover last summer to warn his bosses that the terror group was plotting "something spectacular" in New York.
    Hassan Dabou has told of meetings at which Osama bin Laden vented his fury at al-Qaeda's failure to demolish the World Trade Centre in 1993 and proclaimed his desire for revenge.
    Mr Dabou was not sure what the target was to be, only that it would be a "large-scale operation in New York in the summer or autumn of 2001".
    Secret service chiefs are said to have taken seriously the tip from one of its veteran informants and immediately passed on the details to Washington.
    While the agents were not sure what bin Laden was planning, they knew from Mr Dabou's reports that al-Qaeda had sympathisers in place in several Moroccan cities.
    Mr Dabou, who claims to have first worked as an informer for the secret service in the slums of Casablanca, was posted to Algeria and Iran. He says that he infiltrated the terror group after his employers sent him to Afghanistan, where he posed as an Islamic radical on the run from authorities in Morocco.
    Reports from Casablanca say that Mr Dabou was flown in secret to Washington, where he was co-operating with US intelligence agents when the hijackers struck.
    Growing evidence of al-Qaeda's Moroccan links was not followed up by Western agencies last summer. Informers and minor figures arrested in Europe had revealed their associations with a number of Moroccans allied to radical Islamic groups, but the pattern was ignored.
    Just 48 hours before the September 11 attack, the first link was established when Ahmed Shah Masood, leader of the Northern Alliance resistance to the Taleban in Afghanistan, was killed by a Moroccan and an accomplice.
    In their frantic security sweeps since September 11, intelligence services in Britain, France, Italy, Spain and The Netherlands have arrested a large number of Moroccan nationals with alleged terrorist connections.
    Morocco, being close to Europe, was an ideal base for bin Laden. His agents could move around the moderate Islamic country easily and use well-established smuggling routes into Spain.
    Bin Laden's agents are thought to have been in place in Moroccan cities for several years. The three Saudis being held as part of an alleged suicide bomb plot on American and British warships were all working in Casablanca and Rabat and two had followed the al-Qaeda instruction to marry local women. Al-Qaeda also found in the slums of Casablanca plenty of willing local recruits, who were moved to Europe to await their instructions.
    Some of the volunteers were simply used as couriers. Some would be involved in counterfeiting credit cards and other scams to raise money, while a few were picked for terrorist operations.
    Among them was said to be Zacharias Moussaoui, the former South London university student accused of being the would-be twentieth hijacker. He was born and raised in Morocco before moving to France and then Brixton.
    Another volunteer was said to be Djamel Ajouaou, who was among the first group of eight suspected Islamic militants rounded up by British police last December and jailed in Belmarsh top-security prison under emergency laws introduced by David Blunkett, the Home Secretary. No reason was ever given for their arrest. Western security agencies were stunned when Mr Blunkett agreed that Mr Ajouaou could be sent to Morocco in January this year, even though his alleged terrorist links were detailed in court.
    During a bail hearing, the former London hotel worker, who had lived in Britain for ten years, was described by Ian Burnett, QC, counsel for the Home Secretary, as "an active supporter of various international terrorist groups, including those directly engaged in terrorism and those with links to Osama bin Laden". Protesting his innocence, Mr Ajouaouo was flown out of London in secret and was not allowed to take his British wife and four-month-old daughter with him.
    One of the Britons being held at Camp X-Ray in Cuba, Tarek Dergoul, 24, a former East London care worker, is the son of a Moroccan baker. When Spanish police broke up an al-Qaeda cell, known as the "Soldiers of Allah", they discovered that one of the ringleaders was a 35-year-old Moroccan, Najib Chaib Mohammed.
    Two more of the suspects imprisoned at Camp X-Ray - Hamed Abderrahman Ahmed, 27, and Reswad Abdulsam, 30 - are Moroccans who were living in Spain before they went to Afghanistan. A gang of four Moroccans were arrested in Rome in February this year for allegedly trying to poison the water supply in the area near the US Embassy.
    Another Moroccan, L'Houssaine Kherchtou, told a US court that he was sent on flying lessons in Kenya by al-Qaeda.
    He became bin Laden's personal pilot, but was puzzled when the al-Qaeda leader insisted that he learn to fly crop-dusters. US Intelligence believes the group was planning to use crop dusters for chemical attacks, with Kherchtou as one of the pilots.
    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-324191,00.html

  • Pakistan: More Americans arrested
    WASHINGTON, June 11 (UPI) -- As many as a half-dozen men "of U.S. origin" have been captured in the tribal areas of Pakistan near Afghanistan and handed over to U.S. authorities in an ongoing operation to root out al Qaida terrorists and Taliban extremists, Pakistani sources told United Press International Tuesday.
    The men, whose identities were not revealed, were taken prisoner by the Pakistani army following tip-offs by tribal chiefs, sources said.
    "Yes, we confirm it," Zamir Akram, deputy chief of mission at the Pakistan Embassy in Washington, said when asked about the arrests. "It is an ongoing operation.
    "We have been arresting people and handing them over to the Americans," he said.
    It was not known if the five or six men were already in the United States. The definition of "American origin" was also unclear.
    The FBI, when asked about the handover, referred all questions to the Justice Department. The Justice Department was not immediately available for comment.
    U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, together with FBI and Department of Defense officials, announced Monday the arrest and detention of New York-born Jose Padilla. Padilla, who allegedly received bomb-making training from al Qaida and was part of a conspiracy to plant a radiological bomb somewhere in the United States.
    Al Qaida, the terror network of Osama bin Laden, is accused of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington that killed about 3,000 people, and of earlier terror strikes, including the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen and the bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania
    Padilla, who adopted the name Abdullah al Muhajir, was arrested at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport on May 8 as he returned to the United States from Pakistan in a helter-skelter route that took him twice to Zurich, Switzerland, and once to Egypt.
    U.S. officials Tuesday said Padilla was shadowed on his odyssey to Chicago by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials who even traveled on the same aircraft with him.
    A Pakistani security official, speaking by telephone from Islamabad, told UPI "Padilla went to Europe where he met several of his contacts while FBI agents were watching him. They might have made some arrests in Europe too, but we don't know."
    News reports indicate the journey took place over 1 1/2 weeks, but a U.S. intelligence source told UPI Tuesday it "was closer to a month."
    "We have captured a known terrorist who was exploring a plan to build and explode a radiological dispersion device, or 'dirty bomb' in the United States," Ashcroft said Monday.
    "He traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan and on several occasions in 2001, he met with senior al Qaida officials. While in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Padilla trained with the enemy, including studying how to wire explosive devices and researching radiological dispersion devices."
    Officials said Padilla, who is believed to have visited Switzerland to get money for his operation, was coming to the United States on a reconnaissance mission, scouting out possible targets for the conventional bomb that would spew radioactive materials into the air.
    Pakistani officials said they tipped the United States off to Padilla.
    U.S. authorities said his alleged connection to al Qaida was gained through information provided by captured al Qaida operations chief Abu Zubaydah and other al Qaida captives and a checking of an FBI database.
    Padilla, 31, is an ex-convict and street gang member who grew up in Chicago, converting to Islam while in prison.
    He is believed to have traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan in 1998.
    Although news of his arrest and detention was only released Monday, it is believed members of the Senate and House Select Intelligence Committees were informed earlier.
    "I understand the intelligence committees were given information about Padilla within the last several weeks," a U.S. government source said on condition of anonymity, "but I don't know how much detail they went into."
    A Western European diplomat told UPI his embassy had been informed of Padilla's capture last week.
    Padilla, being held as an "enemy combatant," is the third American detained in connection with al Qaida and its Afghan protectors, the extremist Taliban regime deposed late last year by U.S.-backed Afghan forces.
    John Walker Lindh, 20 at the time of his capture in Afghanistan by anti-Taliban forces last December, faces trial in Alexandria, Va., on charges ranging from providing support to a terrorist organization to conspiracy to kill U.S. citizens abroad.
    Yasser Esam Hamdi, 22, is being held at a U.S. Navy brig in Norfolk, Va., but has not yet been charged with any offense. Hamdi, born in Louisiana but raised in Saudi Arabia, was also captured fighting with the Taliban.
    A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Monday that no formal charges had yet been lodged against Padilla.
    U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, currently in the Persian Gulf, said Tuesday Padilla may not be charged.
    "... Our interest in his case is now law enforcement," Rumsfeld said, after noting Padilla could possess valuable information. "It is not punishment because he was a terrorist or working with terrorists.
    "Our interest at the moment is to try to find out everything he knows so hopefully we can stop other terrorist acts.
    "We're not interested in trying him at the moment. We're not interested in punishing him at the moment. We're interested in finding out what in the world he knows, " Rumsfeld said.
    The holding of a U.S. citizen as an enemy combatant is allowed under law and Supreme Court precedent made in 1942 in regard to two U.S. citizens engaging in sabotage for Nazi Germany.
    Padilla was detained on his arrival in Chicago under a material witness warrant and sent to a federal facility in New York, where he was questioned. He reportedly had more than $10,000 in cash on him at the time of his arrest.
    Reports said he was uncooperative, and the decision was made to transfer him to military custody as an "enemy combatant," since it would allow authorities to hold him longer and under tighter control.
    Padilla was sent Sunday to the Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, S.C.
    The facility, a Level II medium security prison with special high security capacity, currently holds 260 prisoners from all U.S. military service branches.
    It has 400 cells and is considered one of the top high-tech U.S. military detention facilities.
    Pakistani and U.S. sources said Padilla was detained by the Pakistani's in early April over an immigration matter, but then released. The two Pakistanis detained with him are said to still be in custody.
    Pakistani security sources said U.S. officials were told of his detention and he was let go at their behest and then followed.
    U.S. officials Tuesday could not confirm they requested Padilla's release, but did say he was closely monitored by U.S. and local authorities from then on as he traveled from Pakistan to Zurich, to Egypt, back to Zurich and then to Chicago.
    "It was a combination (of U.S. and local police)," said an American official who requested anonymity. "We had eyes on him the entire time.
    "Our guys had him in their sites always."
    A Pakistani intelligence official said Monday the operation to capture al Qaida and Taliban remnants in Pakistan's tribal areas, to which they fled from Afghanistan to escape U.S. and coalition forces, would continue.
    He also heralded the capture and operation as a sign of Pakistan's cooperation with the United States in combating terrorism.
    "We're doing much more," he said. "Some things will be known, much more will never be known."
    Asad Hayauddin, the Pakistani Embassy spokesman in Washington, added: "We have been working with the Americans ever since the war on terror began. It's their equipment and our men."

  • Bush says manhunt on for dirty bomb plotters
    (June 10th-Jang)
    WASHINGTON: Nine months after the Sept 11 attacks, President George W Bush reassured Americans on Tuesday that he had launched a full-scale manhunt for al Qaeda operatives after authorities captured one "bad guy" accused of planning to set off a "dirty bomb".
    Abdullah al Muhajir, an American of Puerto Rican descent born in New York as Jose Padilla, was detained by the FBI in Chicago on May 8, when he arrived from Pakistan. After Bush declared him an "enemy combatant" on Sunday he was transferred to a naval prison in South Carolina.
    The FBI said the idea of exploding a dirty bomb in the United States had not got past the planning stages, although there had been "substantial discussions" about it. A dirty bomb involves combining a conventional bomb -- even dynamite -- with radioactive material. "We will run down every lead, every hint," Bush told reporters after a meeting with Congressional leaders at the White House.
    "This guy, Padilla, is a bad guy. He is where he needs to be -- detained ... And there's just a full-scale manhunt on." Bush side-stepped a question on whether any of Muhajir's co-conspirators were in custody, saying: "As we run down these, you know, killers or would-be killers, we'll let you know."
    "The coalition we put together has hauled in over 2,400 people, and you can call it 2,401 now," he said. The president declined to specifically answer a question about media reports that the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has catalogued 107 reports of lost or stolen radiation sources in the United States in the six months ending March 31.

  • Documentary of US Afgan 'war crimes' shocks Europe (i.e. some German Communists)
    June 12 2002
    (South Africa's Independent Online iol.co.za)
    By Clive Freeman
    Berlin - American soldiers have been involved in the torture and murder of captured Taliban prisoners, and may have aided in the "disappearance" of up to 3 000 men in the region of Mazar-i-Sharif, according to Jamie Doran, an Irish documentary film-maker.
    Doran's latest film, Massacre At Mazar, was shown on Wednesday in in the Reichstag, the German parliament building in Berlin, and there were immediate calls for an international commission to be set up to investigate charges made in the documentary.
    Andrew McEntee, a leading international human rights lawyer, who has viewed the film footage and read full transcripts, believes there is prima facie evidence of serious war crimes having been committed by American soldiers in Afghanistan.
    'The Americans did whatever they wanted'
    McEntee, who was in Berlin for Wednesday's special screening, said war crimes had been committed not just under international law but, also, "under the laws of the United States itself".
    Much of the footage shown in Doran's 20-minute documentary was taken secretly, and although witnesses were said to be living in fear of reprisal from within Afghanistan itself they had all agreed to appear at any future international war crimes tribunal to give evidence, it was claimed.
    One witness in the film claimed he had seen an American soldier break an Afghan prisoner's neck and pour acid on others. "The Americans did whatever they wanted. We had no power to stop them," he alleged.
    Sometimes prisoners who were beaten up and taken outside had "disappeared", he said.
    In other sequences witnesses, among them two men, claimed they had been forced to drive into the desert with hundreds of Taliban prisoners.
    The living were then summarily shot while 30 to 40 American soldiers purportedly stood by, it was alleged. The prisoners had been taken there on the orders of the local American commander, according to the documentary.
    In the film, an Afghan witness admitted to killing prisoners himself, and another officer, allegedly a senior officer in the army of deputy defence minister Dostum's forces, was said to have gone into hiding following threats to his life.
    The far-left Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) arranged for the special showing of Massacre At Mazar in the Reichstag. Party chairman Roland Claus was cautious regarding its content but did spoke of its attempt at "authenticity."
    Andre Brie, a PDS member of the European Parliament, concerned by reports of ill treatment of Taliban prisoners, said he would be in favour of an international commission looking into "disturbing" questions raised by the film.
    At a press conference Brie said he had known of Doran's dangerous film activity in Afghanistan, and had helped to support him financially.
    The PDS party faction had wanted to obtain authentic footage of the war in Afghanistan, he said.
    The film was due to be screened at the European Parliament in Strasbourg later on Wednesday evening. - Sapa-DPA

  • Mysterious giant beasts may lurk in the darkest depths of the ocean, making whale-like noises that are baffling scientists, it was disclosed today.
    London
    (theage.com.au)
    June 13 2002
    Mysterious giant beasts may lurk in the darkest depths of the ocean, making whale-like noises that are baffling scientists, it was disclosed today.
    Researchers have nicknamed the strange unidentified sound picked up by undersea microphones ``Bloop''.
    While it bears the varying frequency hallmark of marine animals, it is far more powerful than the calls made by any creature known on Earth.
    In 1997, Bloop was detected by sensors up to 4,800 km apart, New Scientist magazine reported.
    That meant it had to be much louder than any recognised animal noise, including that produced by the largest whales.
    One suggestion is that the sound is coming from giant squid, which live at extreme depths of up to four km.
    Although dead giant squid have been washed up on beaches, and telltale sucker marks have been seen on whales, there has never been a confirmed sighting of one of the elusive cephalopods in the wild.
    The largest dead squid on record measured about 18 metres including the length of its tentacles, but no one knows how big the creatures might grow.
    However Phil Lobel, a marine biologist at Boston University in Massachusetts, US, doubts that giant squid are the source of Bloop.
    ``Cephalopods have no gas-filled sac, so they have no way to make that type of noise,'' he said.
    ``Though you can never rule anything out completely, I doubt it.''
    Nevertheless he agrees that the sound is most likely to be biological in origin.
    The system picking up Bloop and other strange noises from the deep is a military relic of the Cold War.
    In the 1960s the US Navy set up an array of underwater microphones, or hydrophones, around the globe to track Soviet submarines.
    The listening stations lie hundreds of metres below the ocean surface, at a depth where sound waves become trapped in a layer of water known as the ``deep sound channel''.
    Here temperature and pressure cause sound waves to keep travelling without being scattered by the ocean surface or bottom.
    Most of the sounds detected obviously emanate from whales, ships or earthquakes, but some very low frequency noises have proved puzzling.
    Scientists believe many of these - given names such as Train, Whistle, Slowdown and Upsweep - can be explained by ocean currents, volcanic activity , or the movement of Antarctic ice. Bloop, however, remains a tantalising mystery.

  • 'Unidentified Floating Object' Washes Up On Beach-South Carolina Coast Residents Find Silver Orb
    June 14, 2002

    ISLE OF PALMS, S.C. -- Officials in a South Carolina beach town said that they are puzzled by a giant silver orb that washed up on shore this week.
    The smooth, metallic ball is about 3 feet in diameter and weighed several hundred pounds.
     There are numbers on the surface, but no other clues.
    Police, firefighters, an Air Force bomb squad, the Coast Guard and the state Department of Health and Environmental Control all examined the orb on Wednesday, but none could identify it.
    Officials contacted NASA and the National Weather Service, but none claimed ownership.
    Isle of Palms Fire Chief Ann Graham says officials are calling it a UFO, "unidentified floating object."
    Isle of Palms is on the Atlantic Ocean, just north of Charleston, S.C.
    Marie Segneri said that the ball washed up in front of her rented beach house Monday night.
    The Tampa, Fla., woman said that the ball appeared to have been at sea for some time.

  • Long Island beaches closed after half-ton of a strange unidentifed rubbery substance washes shore
    June 14, 2002
    The Suffolk County Department of Health Services reopened town, village and county ocean beaches yesterday after tests showed that the unknown substance that washed up on shores this week wasn't a threat to public health.
    Officials had closed the beaches Wednesday after nearly a half-ton of the rubbery substance washed up on shore from Moriches Inlet to Smith Point County Park. Robert Nuzzi, director of the Suffolk County Bureau of Marine Resources, said that although test results showed that the substance "was benign," officials still are uncertain of its origin.
    A similar incident in September 1999 puzzled New Jersey officials when between 5 tons and 7 tons of a rubbery substance washed up on the beaches between Atlantic City and Strathmere in Cape May County. "No source was ever identified in New Jersey either," said Lt. Kirsten Codel, assistant supervisor of the Coast Guard's Marine Safety Field Office in Coram who was involved with the New Jersey investigation.
    "The only thing we knew was that it was some type of raw, liquid latex that solidified when it came in contact with the water for an extended period of time," said Mary Helen Cervantes, assistant commissioner of communications for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.
    On Long Island, the dank weather has expedited clean-up efforts, according to Suffolk County Parks Commissioner Peter Scully. "In light of the potential of conflict between clean-up activities and beach-goers, we're lucky for [Wednesday's] weather," Scully said yesterday. "We'll be scrambling to get as much as we can get done today, so there won't be any real threats for the weekend."
    Scully said he believed the substance was "a commercial or industrial material that came from an ocean vessel."
    After the substance was deemed "no threat to public safety," the Coast Guard halted efforts to find its source. "Because it isn't a hazardous material, we no longer have jurisdiction," Codel said. "What we need first is to identify what it is before we can do anything."
    No new deposits of the substance were found yesterday morning, Scully said. "We're guessing what we saw Tuesday and Wednesday is the extent of it," he said.

  • Ideas for WTC memorial (Newsday.com)

  • Blimps larger than a football field - carrying radar to detect aircraft, missiles and ships - would soar 13 miles above the Earth under one proposal for improving US homeland defense.
    (tampatrib.com)
    Jun 11, 2002
    TAMPA - Blimps larger than a football field - carrying radar to detect aircraft, missiles and ships - would soar 13 miles above the Earth under one proposal for improving homeland defense.
    In another, the Air Force would reopen sites in North Florida and two other states where it operated a different radar-balloon system intended to detect drug smuggling aircraft and other low-level intruders.
    The airborne radar initiatives are part of the heightened interest in rethinking North American Aerospace Defense Command resources since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
    The new radar network would place 10 unpiloted airships at an altitude of 70,000 feet along the periphery of the coastal United States, said U.S. Air Force Maj. Ed Thomas, a spokesman in Colorado Springs, Colo., for NORAD, a joint U.S.-Canadian defense organization.
    The blimps would be deployed from Maine through Florida and California to the state of Washington. Canada is exploring the project, although radar in its far northern reaches provides lengthy advance warning of intruders.
    The Federal Aviation Administration operates the U.S. radar system and shares data with the military from the FAA's coastal sites.
    But its radar reaches only about 200 miles, and low-level surveillance is limited.
    The radar on the high-flying airships would range farther - about 325 miles - and correct the low-level deficiencies, Thomas said.
    The airships would be solar- powered and kept aloft for more than a year well-above weather systems.
    ``This would enhance NORAD's radar capability, but it would be an intermediate- term solution,'' Thomas said. ``Space-based radar is the long-term solution, but we are not there yet.''
    NORAD has not specified how much the project would cost.
    NORAD would like a private contractor to build a two-third scale prototype.
    The operational airship could be more than 500 feet long and 150 feet in diameter.
    If the concept works, NORAD would immediately seek funding for full-scale operation, possibly as soon as 2005, Thomas said.
    Better Surveillance Of The Gulf
    Two airships would cover the vast majority of Gulf of Mexico airspace, Thomas said.
    That could help solve the problem of a 60,000-square- mile radar gap over the Gulf, which aviation officials say restricts the number of flights in an area where air traffic is becoming busier.
    The Gulf of Mexico Work Group did not include a high- altitude radar platform in its FAA proposal last year to fill the radar gap and improve air safety.
    But it said the concept is a viable alternative, albeit one whose disadvantage is that it is unproven.
    The new system would be more analogous to a low-altitude satellite than a balloon system, Thomas said.
    But unlike a satellite, the airship could more easily be moved into positions and retrieved for maintenance and upgrades.
    ``The military has a history with airship programs, and the Army has been looking at this for [battlefield] cruise missile defense for the past five to six years,'' said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a nonprofit group in Arlington, Va., that studies defense policy.
    The Air Force program likely stands a better chance of being included in next year's budget than in the past, Pike said.
    Airplane and cruise missile threats are not new, but they have received little attention since the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s.
    Pentagon and defense industry experts have warned - without much luck - that cruise missiles are inexpensive, easy-to-build weapons that terrorists could fire toward the United States from ships or aircraft.
    But since Sept. 11, air defense initiatives have drawn greater interest.
    Filling The Low-Level Gap
    Now the Air Force, which designates units for NORAD operations, has taken another look at a radar-balloon network it operates from seven southern U.S. sites and one in Puerto Rico.
    The U.S. Customs Service started the program in 1984, but the Air Force took it over in the early 1990s.
    It grounded three balloons in a 1999 budget crunch, leaving a low-level surveillance gap in West Florida and between Houston and New Orleans.
    Military and congressional sources have questioned the performance of the ``tethered aerostats,'' helium-filled balloons twice the size of the Goodyear Blimp that fly about 15,000 feet high and are fastened to the ground with a thick cable.
    The main problem is they must be brought down during bad weather. But it's been the only low-level surveillance available, beyond random flights by Air Force E-3 Sentry aircraft equipped with long- range radar atop the fuselage.
    In March, the Air Force awarded Lockheed-Martin a $79 million contract to upgrade the low-level system.
    And the Air Force is thinking about reactivating the three sites it closed, including one in Horseshoe Beach, in Florida's Big Bend region.
    ``Recommendations are being made at certain levels looking at reemploying those aerostats, but no decisions have been made,'' NORAD's Thomas said. ``It's in flux. I can't go beyond that.''
    The Air Force grounded the balloon at its 33-acre Horseshoe Beach site nearly three years before its lease expired. Gulf Coast Supply, a Horseshoe Beach metal roofing and fabricating company that employs 20 people, bought the property from an investment company last year.
    ``We took over the site on Sept. 11, ironically, and the Air Force came and asked if we could hold off changing things until January because of the events that day,'' said John Sherrill, the company's co- owner.
    The Air Force moved out by year's end.
    Sherrill hopes the Air Force would find other land if it returns.
    ``This is a thriving business for the local economy,'' Sherrill said of his supply business. ``But there's lots of vacant land around here.''

  • An Unusually Beautiful Solar Eruption-June 10, 2002 (cosmiverse)

     Today the ESA/NASA SOHO satellite captured this image of a huge spectacular eruptive prominence escaping the Sun. Prominences are loops of magnetic fields with hot gas trapped inside.
    Sometimes, as the fields become unstable, the they will erupt and rise off of the Sun in just a few minutes or hours. If eruptions like these are directed toward the Earth they can cause a significant amount of aurora and other geomagnetic activity. This one stretches about 50 Earth-diameters from one end to the other.

  • PHOTO:Partial Solar Eclipse, New Mexico, USA

  • The Foreign Office is welcoming the arrest of three terrorist suspects said to be planning suicide attacks on British and US warships.
     8:20am Tuesday, 11th June 2002
    (Ananova)
    The Foreign Office is welcoming the arrest of three terrorist suspects said to be planning suicide attacks on British and US warships.
    Moroccan police say they have broken up a terrorist cell with links to Osama bin Laden's al Qaida network.
    A Foreign Office spokesman said: "We welcome the arrests if they involve individuals who may have been planning terrorist attacks against UK assets."
    One Moroccan official said the arrests had been made with the help of intelligence services of "several friendly countries". It was not immediately clear whether British intelligence was involved.
    The men, who were arrested last month, were said by Moroccan officials to have been plotting operations against British and US naval vessels patrolling the Strait of Gibraltar.
    The announcement came as US authorities arrested an American national for allegedly conspiring with al Qaida to build and detonate a radioactive "dirty" bomb, possibly in the US capital Washington DC.
    Abdullah al Muhajir, who was born in New York and changed his name from Jose Padilla, was detained by the FBI in Chicago when he returned to the US from Pakistan last month.
    Round up the usual suspects.

     

  • Is the FBI Penetrated? -Terrorists' Boston hotel searched on Sept 10th?
    (by Whitley Strieber -Author of "Communion")
    May 25th, 2002
    A terrifying and sobering group of news stories has appeared in recent days that suggest that individuals within the FBI had prior knowledge of 9/11 and suppressed it, both for personal gain and, in one case, because of horrific and apparently willful incompetence so great that it could even mask sympathy with terrorist elements.
    If so, this will become the worst single scandal in the history of the US government. Hopefully, it will encourage Congress and the Administration to carry out the radical reforms that we need to rehabilitate the dysfunctional family that the FBI has become, and get rid of an apparently large number of truly terrible human beings who have infested this essential element of US government power. Some of these people are merely incompetent. But that isn’t the case with all of them. Some of them are traitors.
    I first became aware of the fact that something was wrong on September 13, when a friend who had been staying at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston on the nights of September 10 and 11 told me that the FBI had cleared the hotel on the morning of Monday, September 10, at about four AM, and had searched it. After the disaster, of course, they returned to Copley Plaza in search of bomb making materials.
    The FBI’s presence at the hotel on Monday was never reported, and apparently known only to guests at the hotel. Nevertheless, it means that the FBI almost certainly had, and was acting on, some sort of knowledge connected to the September 11 attack on September 10. At the very least, the FBI agents who were at the Copley Plaza on Monday morning need to be found and called to testify before the joint panel of Congress that is being convened to investigate these matters.
    Now, a series of news stories, some of them reported in general news columns and others in financial news, suggests that elements of the FBI not only knew about 9/11 in advance, but that the institution as a whole was prevented from acting on what they knew by silence on the part of some agents and manipulation of the proper flow of information to the organization’s leadership by others.
    There were two critical information flows that were interrupted, from Minneapolis and Phoenix, and there is additional evidence that FBI agents were involved in stock profiteering off the disaster in the weeks before it happened.
    There has been a substantial amount of news coverage of the problems with memos from Minneapolis and Phoenix, and I will discuss those shortly. Before I turn to that issue, however, I would like to address some recent disclosures about stock market manipulations, and some that have gone unnoticed.
    On Friday, May 24, a federal prosecutor alleged that a San Diego stock adviser who is accused of bribing an FBI agent to give him confidential government information may have had prior knowledge of 9/11. According to assistant United States attorney Kenneth Breen, the adviser, Amr Ibrahim Elgindy, tried to sell $300,000 worth of stock on September 10 and told his broker the market was about to drop. Mr. Eglindy and four other people, including one current and one former FBI agent, were charged on Wednesday with using confidential government information to manipulate stock prices. Mr. Elgindy has recently moved $700,000 to a bank in Lebanon. So far, there is no hard evidence that Mr. Elgindy had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, and, while Mr. Eglindy is active in Muslim causes, there is no evidence linking him to terrorism. However, according to the Los Angeles Times, his father, Ibrahim Elgindy, led a 1998 protest on behalf of Muhammed Salah, whose assets were seized after he was linked to the radical Palestinian group Hamas.
    After 9/11, there was evidence of profiteering in airline puts and calls (options to purchase or sell stocks at a fixed price on a later date), but this was eventually discovered to be apparent coincidence. It is not clear, however, that evidence of similar activities involving insurance stocks was innocent, and, if this is being investigated, there is no public knowledge of it.
    What has gone little remarked in the press was a dramatic spike in trade volume on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in the days prior to 9/11. (Futures Magazine, Nov. 2001, Vol. 30, No. 14, p.12) This is where futures on the NASDAQ and Standard and Poor’s stock averages are traded, and would be a prime target of profiteers if anybody had extensive knowledge of 9/11. On September 7, the last trading day before 9/11, (Monday was a holiday) CME trading volume spiked to its highest point in months, ending a week of exceptionally high volume. This could have been explained by the fact that Monday was a holiday, but the trading spike is much more dramatic than is usually observed before holidays.
    This has not been investigated, and it should be. Firms that cleared an unusual volume of trades on the CME in the week prior to 9/11 need to be questioned as to the origins of those trades. There should be special concentration on the activities of Solomon Smith Barney, which is active in the CME’s futures markets, and which was also Mr. Elgindy’s stock broker.
    If manipulation of financial markets for gain preceded 9/11, then somebody had to have prevented the US government from interrupting the attack, and the only way to do this would have been to make certain that responsible officials never became aware of it.
    There are two cases presently in the news that suggest that this is exactly what happened. Chillingly, both of these cases involve the same counterterrorism supervisor at FBI headquarters in Washington. It is at this point that the question must be asked: is the FBI penetrated by terrorists? And, more specifically, is this particular supervisor a terrorist, or are there terrorists working under his supervision and manipulating the flow of information to him and from him?
    The first is the case of the Phoenix memo. Last summer, an FBI agent in Phoenix warning about terrorists receiving instruction at area flight schools was forwarded to him. Erich Lichtblau and Josh Meyer, writing in the Los Angeles Times on Saturday, May 25, state, “for unknown reasons, the supervisor apparently never saw this memo, officials said.”
    It is not acceptable that those reasons remain unknown. The fact that they are still unknown is critical to our national safety, because the same person or persons who were responsible for ‘losing’ this memo are still in the exact same jobs they were in before 9/11. To begin with, this supervisor and his entire staff should be placed on leave and investigated until the precise reason for this lapse is known, understood and dealt with.
    But maybe it was all a mistake. Memos get lost, even important memos.
    The rest of this story makes it impossible to believe that. A recent letter from Coleen Rowley, the chief lawyer in the FBI’s Minneapolis office, to FBI Director Robert Mueller alleges that FBI headquarters staff manipulated the presentation of evidence in a crucial memo sent by Minneapolis agents, removing facts critical to their request to get a warrant to search the files of alleged terrorist Zacharias Moussaoui. Senator Chick Grassley, (R. Iowa), said on Friday, “this letter documents exactly what headquarters knew and when, and how mid-level officials sabotaged the Moussaoui case before the attacks.”
    That is one of the most damning statements about government officials made in the history of the United States, and the officials involved must be held accountable to the public. In fact, the whole operation of the FBI must now be brought under public scrutiny, because if, as appears to be the case, this organization is either fantastically flawed or monstrously corrupt, it needs to be repaired effectively and fast, before it allows the next 9/11 to happen.
    We have just received another spate of vague terrorism warnings. The Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge are supposed to be targets. Railroads are supposed to be targets. We have not captured Osama Bin Laden. Al Quaeda still functions and CIA officials admit that they have been unable to stop the flow of money or personnel within the organization. Have they not only been ineffective, but also actually impeded from within, by traitors at FBI headquarters? And what of CIA? Do we know for certain that it isn’t penetrated as well? Perhaps allegations that CIA officers visited Osama Bin Laden in a hospital in Dubai last July should be examined more closely by Congress and the Administration. But, at the moment, most of the truly horrific evidence points to traitors within the FBI, and it is the FBI that should come under scrutiny first.
    We are at war, and that war is being fought inside the United States, as any of the 9/11 survivors will tell you. But where are the real front lines? Are they really in our streets or is that just where the horror unfolds? Is the real front line, where the terrorists manipulate our system to make certain that it cannot serve in our war, behind the walls of the Hoover Building in Washington?
    FBI officials, in defending the bureau, have been maintaining for weeks that the Phoenix and Minneapolis cases were handled by different parts of the headquarters staff, and that the problem was largely a lack of communication. However, this is not true.
    In fact, Phoenix FBI agent Kenneth Williams sent his memo about terrorists in flight schools (the memo that was supposedly lost) to David Frasca, the head of the FBI’s Radical Fundamentalist Unit in Washington on July 10. Frasca was also the key liaison in Washington for the Minnesota FBI field office in its failed effort to get permission to search Zacharia Moussaoui’s computer. Rowley has alleged that Frasca rewrote the Minnesota office’s warrant applications, removing crucial intelligence about Moussaoui’s terrorist connections, thus insuring that the legal office to which the requests were sent would reject them for insufficient evidence.
    This does not look like incompetence. It looks like a very competent act, one that was designed to derail the Moussaoui investigation in the crucial months before 9/11. Combined with the claimed loss of the memo from Phoenix, it is appalling. It suggests that the FBI’s Radical Fundamentalist Unit is either run by a traitor or controlled by traitors. If that is not the case, and there is some other explanation for the lapse, then the problem that caused it needs to be corrected immediately, because this country is in immediate danger and Mr. Frasca’s office is right out on the front line of our defense.
    Mr. Frasca has a great deal to explain, as do the officials who have made incorrect statements about how the Minneapolis and Phoenix reports were being handled within the FBI. They said that the information was flowing through different areas of the organization, when in fact the same office, and the same man, were directly and primarily involved in both problems. Officials who maintained this fiction should be investigated as possible traitors themselves. Certainly they, like Mr. Frasca and his entire staff, should be immediately relieved of their duties pending a full investigation.
    The FBI has been failing America profoundly for many years. We have endured scandal after scandal, from the FBI crime lab being revealed as a ‘black hole’ of incompetence and drunken negligence to the incredible Robert Hanssen affair, where a murderous spy was able to carry on his evil work under the noses of his superiors for years without detection.
    And now it appears that FBI agents and officials not only suppressed investigations that might have given the honest parts of the agency a chance to thwart 9/11, they may have profited from this knowledge as well.
    In my memory, this is by far the most dreadful and terrifying instance of failure of the US government that I have known about. What is so frightening about it is that it means that right now, terrorists may be freely planning more agony for the American people, secure in the knowledge that their sympathizers within federal enforcement and investigative organizations are ‘containing’ any investigation that may lead to them.
    Apparently, Mr. Frasca is still actively supervising the Radical Fundamentalist Unit. His staff is still in place, and still responsible for what are arguably the most crucial investigations the FBI is now conducting.
    It’s no wonder that our government’s terrorism warnings are always so vague.


     

  • L.A. facing driest year on record - local expert says dying trees need human touch
    (LA DailyNews)
    June 12, 2002
    Los Angeles' glorious eucalyptus, ravaged by a predatory bug, now face another foe: the driest year on record. City parks stand to lose half their eucalyptus trees in the next few years, park officials say. Other varieties are also stressed by lack of rain.
    "Too many things are happening at the same time," said Teresa Proscewicz, chief forester for the Los Angeles Recreation and Parks Department. "They are attacked by psyllids, then other bugs.
    "But this drought is really a disaster."
    Weather watchers say Los Angeles is on course for its driest year in history. With no more rain by the end of month, downtown will get 4.41 inches -- 29 percent of normal and 0.44 of an inch less than the 1960-61 record.
    While unirrigated trees, especially those in city parks, are struggling, those along most sidewalks get enough to drink.
     Tree Surgeon Rigo Rodriguez uses a chainsaw to take down a 50 foot dead Eucalyptus along Balboa Blvd. (Andy Holzman / Daily News)
    "I would say that, in general, they're doing pretty good because they're irrigated," said Ronald Lorenzen, assistant chief forester for the Los Angeles Public Works Street Services Department. "With an extended drought, you'd probably see some stress."
    Trees in Griffith, Elysian, Balboa and other parks, however, are dropping fast, parks officials said. Of the park system's roughly 30,000 eucalyptus trees, 2,000 sick ones have been removed from picnic areas and park entrances.
    Nearly half the remainder are dying or dead.
    "We were hoping some of the trees would recover, but they're not pulling out of it," Proscewicz said. "You can see it's almost a dead forest -- it's sad."
    For the stately Australian imports planted nearly a century ago, the chief culprit is the redgum lerp psyllid, an aphidlike bug blamed for the death of thousands of eucalyptus throughout California since 1991.
    The psyllid damages the leaves by drawing sap, which defoliates the trees and can lead to its death. Lack of rain compounds stress and can speed its demise.
    For other trees, the scant rainfall is also taking its toll.
    "It's the drought," said Arthur Flores, a parks tree surgeon whose crew cut down a 50-foot eucalyptus at Balboa Sports Center in Encino on Tuesday. "It stresses out the root system, the scaffolding branches die back, and the tree dies."
    To replace their lost canopy, park officials are looking to plant 5,000 sycamores, oaks, ashes and cottonwoods by 2005, paid for through various grants.
    It will cost about $100,000 in equipment and an additional $200,000 in labor to sow the 15-gallon trees, Proscewicz said, an expense yet to be approved by the city.
    Jennifer Scott-Lisland, an arborist for the Beverly Hills-based Tree People, said trees need love, too.
    "All the trees I know need some help these days," she said. "Urban trees in concrete indents are malnourished and underwatered."
    Scott-Lisland, who offers summer class on tree care -- for more information, call (818) 623-4841 -- recommends watering trees with a slow hose for about an hour each week.
    "And smile while you do it," she suggested. "Touch it, touch a tree ... make that tree feel like it's helping us out."

  • PAPER: Average temperature has risen 7 degrees over the last 30 years in Alaska... Alaska, No Longer So Frigid, Starts to Crack, Burn and Sag
    (NYT)
    ANCHOR POINT, Alaska, June 13 — To live in Alaska when the average temperature has risen about seven degrees over the last 30 years means learning to cope with a landscape that can sink, catch fire or break apart in the turn of a season.
    In the village of Shishmaref, on the Chukchi Sea just south of the Arctic Circle, it means high water eating away so many houses and buildings that people will vote next month on moving the entire village inland.
     In Barrow, the northernmost city in North America, it means coping with mosquitoes in a place where they once were nonexistent, and rescuing hunters trapped on breakaway ice at a time of year when such things once were unheard of.
    From Fairbanks to the north, where wildfires have been burning off and on since mid-May, it means living with hydraulic jacks to keep houses from slouching and buckling on foundations that used to be frozen all year. Permafrost, they say, is no longer permanent.
    Here on the Kenai Peninsula, a recreation wonderland a few hours' drive from Anchorage, it means living in a four-million-acre spruce forest that has been killed by beetles, the largest loss of trees to insects ever recorded in North America, federal officials say. Government scientists tied the event to rising temperatures, which allow the beetles to reproduce at twice their normal rate.
    In Alaska, rising temperatures, whether caused by greenhouse gas emissions or nature in a prolonged mood swing, are not a topic of debate or an abstraction. Mean temperatures have risen by 5 degrees in summer and 10 degrees in winter since the 1970's, federal officials say.
    While President Bush was dismissive of a report the government recently released on how global warming will affect the nation, the leading Republican in this state, Senator Ted Stevens, says that no place is experiencing more startling change from rising temperatures than Alaska.
    Among the consequences, Senator Stevens says, are sagging roads, crumbling villages, dead forests, catastrophic fires and possible disruption of marine wildlife.
    These problems will cost Alaska hundreds of millions of dollars, he said.
    "Alaska is harder hit by global climate change than any place in the world," Senator Stevens said.
    Scientists have been charting shrinking glaciers and warming seas in Alaska for some time. But only recently have experts started to focus on what the warming means to the people who live in Alaska.
    The social costs of higher temperatures have been mostly negative, people here say. The Bush administration report, which was drafted by the Environmental Protection Agency, also found few positives to Alaska's thermal rise. But it said climate change would bring a longer growing season and open ice-free seas in the Arctic for shipping.
    "There can no longer be any doubt that major changes in the climate have occurred in recent decades in the region, with visible and measurable consequences," the government concluded in the report to the United Nations last month.
    It does not take much to find those consequences in a state with 40 percent of the nation's surface water and 63 percent of its wetlands.
    Here on the Kenai Peninsula, a forest nearly twice the size of Yellowstone National Park is in the last phases of a graphic death. Century-old spruce trees stand silvered and cinnamon-colored as they bleed sap.
    A sign at Anchor River Recreation Area near this little town poses a question many tourists have been asking, "What's up with all the dead spruce trees on the Kenai Peninsula?" The population of spruce bark beetles, which have long fed on these evergreen trees, exploded as temperatures rose, foresters now say.
    Throughout the Kenai, people are clearing some of the 38 million dead trees, answering the call from officials to create a "defensible space" around houses for fire protection. Last year, two major fires occurred on this peninsula, and this year, with temperatures in the 80's in mid-May, officials say fire is imminent. "It's just a matter of time before we have a very large, possibly catastrophic forest fire," said Ed Holsten, a scientist with the Forest Service.
    Joe Perletti, who lives in Kasilof in the Kenai Peninsula, has rented a bulldozer to clear dead trees from the 10 acres where he lives.
    "It's scary what's going on," Mr. Perletti said. "I never realized the extent of global warming, but we're living it now. I worry about how it will affect my children."
    Mr. Perletti, an insurance agent, said some insurers no longer sold fire policies to Kenai Peninsula homeowners in some areas surrounded by dead spruce.
    Another homeowner, Larry Rude, has cut down a few trees but has decided to take his chances at the house he owns near Anchor Point. Mr. Rude says he no longer recognizes Alaska weather.
    "This year, we had a real quick melt of the snow, and it seemed like it was just one week between snowmobiling in the mountains and riding around in the boat in shirt-sleeve weather," Mr. Rude said.
    Other forests, farther north, appear to be sinking or drowning as melting permafrost forces water up. Alaskans have taken to calling the phenomenon "drunken trees."
    For villages that hug the shores of the Bering, Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, melting ice is the enemy. Sea ice off the Alaskan coast has retreated by 14 percent since 1978, and thinned by 40 percent since the mid-1960's, the federal report says. Climate models predict that Alaska temperatures will continue to rise over this century, by up to 18 degrees.
    Kivalina, a town battered by sea storms that erode the ground beneath houses, will have to move soon, residents say. Senator Stevens said it would cost $102 million, or $250,000 for each of the 400 residents.
    The communities of Shishmaref, Point Hope and Barrow face a similar fate. Scientists say the melting ice brings more wave action, which gnaws away at ground that used to be frozen for most of the year.
    Shishmaref, on a barrier island near the Bering Strait, is fast losing the battle to rising seas and crumbling ground. As the July 19 vote on whether to move approaches, residents say they have no choice.
    "I'm pretty sure the vote is going to be to move," Lucy Eningowuk of Shishmaref said. "There's hardly any land left here anymore."
    Barrow, the biggest of the far northern native villages with 4,600 people, has not only had beach erosion, but early ice breakup. Hunters have been stranded at sea, and others have been forced to go far beyond the usual hunting grounds to find seals, walruses and other animals.
    "To us living on the Arctic coastline, sea ice is our lifeline," Caleb Pungowigi testified recently before a Senate committee. "The long-term trend is very scary."
    A 20-year resident of Barrow, Glenn Sheehan, says it seems to be on a fast-forward course of climate change.
    "Mosquitoes, erosion, breakup of the sea ice, and our sewage and clean-water system, which is threatened by erosion as well," he said. "We could be going from a $28 million dollar sewage system that was considered an engineering model to honey buckets — your basic portable outhouses."
    The people who manage the state's largest piece of infrastructure — the 800-mile-long Trans-Alaska Pipeline — have also had to adjust to rising temperatures. Engineers responsible for the pipeline, which carries about a million barrels of oil a day and generates 17 percent of the nation's oil production, have grown increasingly concerned that melting permafrost could make unstable the 400 or so miles of pipeline above ground. As a result, new supports have been put in, some moored more than 70-feet underground.
    "We're not going to let global warming sneak up on us," said Curtis Thomas, a spokesman for the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company, which runs the pipeline. "If we see leaning and sagging, we move on it."
    North of Fairbanks, roads have buckled, telephone poles have started to tilt, and homeowners have learned to live in houses that are more than a few bubbles off plumb. Everyone, it seems, has a story.
    "We've had so many strange events, things are so different than they used to be, that I think most Alaskans now believe something profound is going on," said Dr. Glenn Juday, an authority on climate change at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. "We're experiencing indisputable climate warming. The positive changes from this take a long time, but the negative changes are happening real fast."

  • Penguins in the Falkland Islands are suffering mass-starvation. Biologists fear that nearly a quarter of the world's population of Rockhopper penguins might have perished.
    14:50 14 June 02
    (NewScientist.com)
    Penguins in the Falkland Islands are suffering mass-starvation. Biologists fear that nearly a quarter of the world's population of Rockhopper penguins might have perished.
    "Something weird is going on in the Falkland's this year. The Rockhoppers haven't moulted properly and the Magellanic chicks have all starved to death," says Andrea Clausen, a marine biologist with the charity Falklands Conservation.
    The cause of the deaths is unclear. But researchers point out that melting Antarctic ice has left deep waters near the Falkland Islands 1-2°C cooler than usual this year. This could be disrupting plankton production, reducing the amount of food available.
    Mike Bingham, of the Environmental Research Unit of the Falkland Islands, counted 2,067 dead adult Rockhopper penguins on Saunders Island this May - more than a quarter of that colony. It seems the adult penguins did not have enough energy to leave the islands after their moulting season, forcing them to stay on land and die of starvation.
    About the same number of dead birds probably washed away uncounted, Bingham estimates. If this death tally is representative of the islands as a whole, half of the Falkland's Rockhopper population - and almost a quarter of the world's - might have died.
    Breeding season
    A similar mass killing happened in 1986, when the Rockhopper penguin population stood at 2,500,000 breeding pairs. By 1987, the population had halved, and it continued to decline to a total of about 300,000, about five years ago. The numbers then remained fairly stable until the recent deaths, biologists think.
    The Rockhopper species is already classified as "vulnerable". "It wouldn't take much to push them into another category," says Andrea Clausen, a marine biologist with Falkland Conservation.
    Clausen says it is too early to tell if the starvation will be as severe this year as it was in 1986. Her organisation plans to conduct a survey during the breeding season in November to assess the situation.
    Squid fishing
    A count of Magellanic penguins in the Falkland Islands in 2000 put the total at 150,000. It will take some time to establish how many chicks died this year, local biologists say.
    Bingham suspects that fishing in the area may be exacerbating the penguins' problems. Magellanic penguins in particular feed on commercially valuable species like squid, making them vulnerable to over-fishing.
    But the impact of the fisheries is proving tricky to unravel. Rockhopper penguins feed mainly on non-commercial species like krill, so should not be directly affected. But Bingham points out that Rockhopper populations in nearby Chile and Argentina, where a no-fishing-zone is in place, have not suffered in recent years the same way as the Falkland Island colonies.
    On the other hand, another penguin species that relies on squid, the Gentoo, has done remarkably well in the Falkland's, nearly doubling its population between 1995 and 2000.
    For those who scoff at global warming, here it is in black and white.


  • It's faster to ride penguins to work than take some NYC bus routes, says study
    (Yahoonews)
    June 10
    In a city where buses often seem to move at a snail's pace, the M96 is the slowest crawl of 'em all.
    Inching along 96th St. between the upper East Side and upper West Side, buses on that route plod at an average midday speed of just 4.3 mph, according to a new report by two transportation advocacy groups.
    "If I had a dollar for every time the buses made me late, I could afford to take a taxi," said deli worker Omar Handu, 39, as he rode the M96 Friday.
    For being the slowest of the slow, the M96 and 24 other city bus routes have earned newly created Pokey Awards — symbolized by a snail on a golden pedestal.
    "Pokey buses waste time and fray nerves," said Gene Russianoff, a lawyer for the Straphangers Campaign, which conducted the survey with Transportation Alternatives.
    Citing Transit Authority data for 2000, the report said the worst slowpokes in the other boroughs were:
    The Q32, between Jackson Heights, Queens, and Penn Station, traveling at an average of 5.6 mph.
    The Bx35, between Longwood, Bronx, and Washington Heights, at 5.9 mph.
    The B63, between Bay Ridge and downtown Brooklyn, at 6 mph.
    The S42, between New Brighton, S.I., and the St. George ferry terminal, at 8.5 mph.
    The Causes
    Traffic, of course, is the major obstacle, but other causes of Pokey buses include vehicles blocking bus stops, construction and a dearth of bus lanes, transit advocates said.
    In hopes of improving performance, the city Transportation Department, the Transit Authority and the police have bolstered coordination efforts, Russianoff said.
    For example, TA bus officials are taking part in so-called police TrafficStat meetings to help identify areas crying out for crackdowns.
    Officials from the various agencies also have taken joint field trips to see whether street improvements would enhance on-time performance.
    Other options being studied include increasing the length of bus stops so more than one bus can load and discharge passengers at the same time, increasing the number of bus lanes and installing plastic cones to keep other vehicles out of bus lanes.
    In a test, the TA also will soon install cameras on a handful of buses to record the license plates of vehicles traveling in bus lanes.
    "We think we're going to see some real progress," said Butch Seay, the TA's senior vice president in charge of bus operations.
    The DOT recently held a bus rapid transit summit, and Commissioner Iris Weinshall was in London last week reviewing operations there, a department spokesman said.
    In London??!! What are they too fast or something? Perhaps he should visit Dublin next.

  • Revealed: how the smoke stacks of America have brought the world's worst drought to Africa
    (UK Independent)
    13 June 2002
    To those who live there, it is as if the rich have stolen the rain. For more than 30 years, the Sahel region of Africa has suffered the longest sustained droughts in the world. In some places, rainfall has fallen by between 20 and 50 per cent.
    As a consequence, crops have failed on a huge scale; in the worst years, between 1972 and 1975 and between 1984 and 1985, up to a million people starved to death.
    However, for President George Bush, who has only recently accepted that global warming and climate change are the result of human influences – such as the burning of fossil fuels – the idea of a cause involving the developed world is unwelcome.
    But new research indicates that pollution from factories and power stations, especially in North America and Europe, has exacerbated drought in countries south of the Sahara.
    Researchers have little doubt that the two are connected and also that the effect of the drought will last long after any clean-up.
    There are also warnings that growing industrialisation in India and China is likely to create the same problems on the Indian subcontinent – with potentially disastrous effects for millions more people.
    According to a report in New Scientist magazine today, climate modelling studies by scientists in Australia and Canada have fingered the clouds of sulphur poured out by vehicles and power stations when they burn fossil fuels for pushing the Saharan rain-belt south.
    The effect is complex, which is why it has only just emerged from the analyses. New Scientist explains that Leon Rotstayn of CSIRO, the national research agency in Australia, and Ulrike Lohmann, of Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, created a computer model that simulated the interactions between sulphur dioxide emissions from power plants and other sources and cloud.
    A key element here is that those emissions create huge volumes of "aerosols" – tiny particles about one micrometre across that can remain floating in the atmosphere for days. They are very efficient at scattering light and forming clouds, which reflect sunlight; both effects tend to cool the atmosphere and the Earth below.
    The vast amount of aerosols produced especially in the 1980s lingered over the northern hemisphere and tended to cool it down, say the researchers. But it is the final step – to the shifting fortunes of the rain clouds that should linger over the Sahel – which is the subtle one.
    David Roberts, the head of the aerosol modelling group at the Meteorological Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, said: "It's an effect of the thermal balance between the two hemispheres. There has to be a rough balance between the north and south hemispheres – you can't have spare energy in one place or the other. If the Earth was completely symmetrical, then the point of thermal equilibrium, where the total energy on either side of a line was equal, would be the Equator. But because the Northern hemisphere isn't the same as the south [because of the vast energy reservoir of the Pacific, which retains energy more efficiently than land] we find that the Northern hemisphere is warmer than the South."
    However, aerosol-driven cooling of the Northern hemisphere pushes that point of thermal equilibrium south – and with it go the rainclouds that people depend on for their crops in the Sahel.
    The historical evidence tends to back up the findings.
    One key change that the researchers point to is that in the 1980s, improvements in emission laws meant that sulphur emissions in particular dropped – because they were blamed for acid rain, which was noticed far more keenly in the industrialised countries than droughts in sub-Saharan Africa.
    Dr Rotstayn and Professor Lohmann said that droughts have become less severe during the past few years. But that does not mean that they have disappeared. Far from it; the whole of southern Africa is facing a "regional food crisis", according to a recent report that notes that a total of six countries in southern Africa have roughly 11 million people who need emergency food assistance. Ironically, the note came from the United States Agency for International Development.
    But the cleaning of the air in the US and Europe (and the closure through economic failure of many of the worst polluters in eastern Europe) does not mean that the threat is over. If anything, it could get worse.
    Although Dr Roberts says he is "cautious" about taking the interpretation of the link between aerosols in the northern hemisphere and the weather in the Sahel as gospel, he says that if it is correct, then there are other areas around the globe that could be threatened by a new wave of fossil-fuel burning.
    "The emissions from China and India are rising," he said yesterday. "And that could affect, for example, the monsoon season in India, which would have an important regional impact. If it weakens the monsoon, then that would be a concern. The subcontinent is very dependent on it; it would be of serious concern to them if that moved. But the aerosols would alter the balance between north and south in the same way."
    What is unclear is how the world would cope with change like that. In the Sahel, drought is becoming ingrained: without water, vegetation dies, and the the dry land and the dust thrown up from it into the atmosphere both reflect heat, keeping the thermal equilibrium point in its southerly place. And when it does rain, the lack of plant life means that water just runs away.
    "It's a vicious cycle, a land degradation issue," Habiba Gitay, an ecologist who worked on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change told New Scientist. And the blame for starting the cycle turning appears to lie with the developed world. The problem, though, is that nobody knows quite how to stop it and bring back the rain to the places that need it.
    Some people think that the first signs of the thermal changes caused by the increasing industrialisation of the developing countries are already being seen. In a worrying echo of the situation in the Sahel, northern China has had unusually dry summers in the past few years, notes New Scientist – while the south has had a notably wet time.
    The new theory about the connection between aerosols and rainfall also means that the world will have to expand the sophistication of its understanding of climate change. Because aerosols cool the Earth, it had been thought that they might in some way be beneficial in easing the warming caused by carbon dioxide. But now it can be seen that they also contribute to changing weather patterns in ways that are potentially disastrous for millions of people, as surely as rising sea levels caused by simple global warming.

  • Air Cargo Poses Terror Risk
    June 10 — As the government rushes to tighten security for airline passengers and luggage, a government report warns that cargo loaded on passenger planes may now be the easiest target for terrorists.
    The Department of Transportation's inspector general said in a draft report that cargo security on passenger planes is "easily circumvented."
    The Washington Post , which obtained an internal cargo security document from the Transportation Security Administration, quoted that document as saying the agency needs to "improve [cargo] security and reduce risk as soon as possible. "
    TSA spokeswoman Mary Kay Eder said cargo security is a matter of concern and attention within the TSA, and the agency is beefing up training of airlines and shipping company employees to help them recognize suspicious cargo. She offered no specifics on the increased training.
    Eder also said the agency does unannounced spot checks on shippers to ensure everything is in order.
    Cargo security was tightened after the Sept. 11 attacks. The Federal Aviation Administration, which was then in charge of aviation security, banned all but "known shippers" from sending cargo on airplanes. These are companies with a track record of shipping cargo by air. Companies send their packages to a freight forwarder, which consolidates packages into a large shipment for the airlines.
    Cargo is an important source of money for airlines, accounting for 12 percent to 15 percent of their total revenue. Airlines say revenue from cargo was down 10 percent in 2001 to $13 billion. Part of that reduction is due to the increased restrictions on cargo after Sept. 11.
    Less than 4 percenrt of the cargo shipped on passenger planes is screened. An internal FAA report done before the September attacks said that screening all cargo would be an extreme measure that would halt virtually all cargo shipments.
    The Air Line Pilots Association says it is very concerned about cargo vulnerabilities.
    Capt. Doug Webb says the known-shipper program is based on trust, and on verifying a label.
    "Quite frankly, terrorists are not honest people," Webb said. He added that anybody can construct and place a label on a package that can get by the program, echoing the DOT inspector general's report.
    Those representing freight forwarders insist their security is tight, and that they are very careful in choosing from whom they accept shipments.
    The inspector general's final report will make a number of recommendations to increase cargo security. The TSA says it agrees with all those recommendations, although neither agency would give specifics on what those recommendations are

  • U.S. Says It Halted Qaeda Plot to Use Radioactive Bomb- Suspect initially planned attacks on Hotel Rooms and Gas Stations (NewYorkTimes)
    WASHINGTON, June 10 — The Justice Department announced today that they had broken up a plot by Al Qaeda to detonate a radioactive bomb inside the United States with the arrest of a Brooklyn-born American citizen in the case.
    "We have captured a known terrorist who was exploring a plan to build and explode a radiological dispersion device, or `dirty bomb,' in the United States," Attorney General John Ashcroft said in a televised announcement from Moscow where he was meeting with Russian official on unrelated matters.
    Mr. Ashcroft identified the suspect as Abdullah al-Muhajir, 31, a former Chicago gang member who American officials said was born Jose Padilla and raised as a Roman Catholic but who later converted to Islam and changed his name.
    Mr. Padilla has been in custody since May 8 when he was arrested on a sealed material witness warrant at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago as he arrived on a flight from Zurich.
    Senior government officials said Mr. Padilla had discussed the bomb plot with top al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan and Afghanistan, among them Abu Zubaydah, the Osama bin Laden lieutenant who was captured in Pakistan in March and later told United States officials about the plan. But they also said the suspect had not obtained the materials to make such a device.
    Mr. Zubaydah, the most senior Qaeda leader in custody, told his American interrogators that several al Qaeda members had come to him late last December with a proposal to acquire and detonate a radiological device, a so-called "dirty bomb."
    Mr. Zubaydah did not identify Mr. Padilla by name, but provided enough information about him to allow the Central Intelligence Agency to check with other sources — including documents seized in Afghanistan — to narrow the search to Mr. Padilla, officials said.
    "We were able to figure out who Zubaydah was talking about, and then screen him and follow him," said one American intelligence official.
    In New York City, where Mr. Padilla was held after his arrest until being transferred on Sunday to a military jail in South Carolina, a law enforcement official described Mr. Padilla as someone who tried to make inroads with terrorists after his conversion to Islam.
    Other officials said that before he left Pakistan, Mr. Padilla was told by Al Qaeda leaders to fly to the United States to conduct reconnaissance for several possible plots, including the possibility of blowing up hotel rooms and gas stations.
    But the plot outlined by United States officials today centered around a plan to carry out an attack using a bomb that uses conventional explosives to spew potentially lethal radioactive material across a wide area.
    American intelligence officials cautioned that the plot was still in its initial planning stages and no time for the operation had been set. They said that there was also no evidence that Mr. Padilla or any other al Qaeda operatives had actually obtained any radiological material or other materials needed to construct a dirty bomb.
    "They didn't seem to think they would have trouble getting radiological materials, but they didn't have any of it," said one official.
    Donna Newman, Mr. Padilla's lawyer in New York, said that federal authorities had given her little information about the allegations against Mr. Padilla. She also expressed dismay that the government had suddenly transferred him to the military jail in South Carolina.
    American officials said that al Qaeda's leadership was apparently intrigued by the fact that Mr. Padilla was an American citizen and so might have an easier time of gaining entry to the United States than other al Qaeda members.
    The announcement of the arrest seemed to suggest that the Bush Administration had succeeded in executing the kind of aggressive preventive action that officials say they have concentrated on since Sept. 11.
    The announcement could also prove a lift for the F.B.I. and C.I.A., which have been under heavy criticism in Congress for missing potential warning signs last year that might have disrupted the the hijacking plot.
    F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents picked up Mr. Padilla's trail after he and two other men were detained by Pakistani authorities on a passport violation in April, officials said. Mr. Padilla left Pakistan in early April and then traveled from Switzerland to Egypt and then back to Switzerland.
    F.B.I. agents secretly boarded his flight from Zurich to the United States to keep him under surveillance. But worried that their suspect might disrupt the Chicago-bound flight, agents asked airline security personnel in Zurich to inspect his luggage carefully and his personal effects, including his shoes.
    "They checked to make sure his shoes weren't funky," said one official, referring to Richard Reid, a Briton who also converted to Islam, who was charged with a terrorist act after he attempted to detonate a shoe bomb on a Paris-to-Miami flight last December.
    Mr. Padilla was arrested as soon as the flight touched down, officials said, because agents hoped to obtain his cooperation. A search revealed that he was carrying about $10,000 in cash.
    However, the New York law enforcement official said Mr. Padilla had been uncooperative during his month in detention at the Metropolitan Corrections Center in downtown Manhattan.
    The decision to make an immediate arrest appeared to be part of the shift away from lengthy covert surveillance operations after Sept. 11 to intervention to prevent further terrorist attacks.
    Today, Mr. Padilla was being held in a high security jail at the Charleston Naval Weapons Station in South Carolina. Bush Administration officials said that Mr. Padilla had been declared an enemy combatant, a status that makes it easier for the government to detain him without having to bring a criminal charge or being forced to disclose sensitive intelligence sources.
    Federal prosecutors said they announced the arrest today because they had faced a hearing scheduled for Tuesday when they could have been forced to charge him formally with a crime.
    The plot as explained by authorities seemed to follow the outlines of a scenario that counterterrorism experts have long feared. They have predicted that a radioactive bomb would be easier for terrorists to obtain than a nuclear device.
    Officials said Mr. Padilla met with Mr. Zubaydah in Afghanistan last December and raised the possibility of a dirty bomb attack on the United States with him then.
    Mr. Padilla then traveled to Pakistan, where he received al Qaeda training in the wiring of explosives, intelligence officials said.
    Mr. Padilla stayed at a Qaeda safe house in Lahore, Pakistan, for a time, and while he was staying there did research on radiological devices on the Internet, officials said.
    At Mr. Zubaydah's behest, Mr. Padilla also traveled to Karachi to discuss several possible plans, the officials said.
    A senior administration official said that Mr. Zubaydah was not the only Al Qaeda member in custody who led them to find Mr. Padilla. "Abu Zubaydah was one of the sources, but not the only one," the official said. "It's a rather impressive variety of sources."
    The official said that Mr. Padilla "has left an amazing number of tracks around."

  • INTERNET RUMOR:could the "dirty bomber" be the missing OKC bomber?

    Perhaps he's also the Upper East Side rapist? Have you noticed how the "UNAbomber look" is the latest celeb thing. Brad Pitt, Rivers Cuomo and Eel.

  • Smoking Vaccine On The Horizon?
    LONDON, June 14, 2002
    (AP / CBS)
    "You're going to be giving this to healthy people, so the data will have to be squeaky clean."
    analyst Sam Fazeli.
     (REUTERS) A British biotech firm said on Friday that early tests on an anti-smoking vaccine showed it was safe and successful in producing antibodies to fight one of the biggest causes of preventable disease.
    Xenova said the first ever clinical trial of an anti-smoking vaccine in man showed its product, code-named TA-NIC, generated antibodies that bind to nicotine, the highly addictive ingredient in tobacco.
    The firm, which is also developing a vaccine against cocaine addiction, believes that if it can stop nicotine from reaching the brain, it can solve smokers' addiction.
    According to the World Health Organization, there are around 1.25 billion smokers in the world. The habit directly causes around 430,000 deaths per year in the United States and costs the U.S. taxpayer around $50 billion a year in medical bills.
    Existing drugs to help smokers give up mostly rely on giving a shot of nicotine and have a poor success rate.
    "Around 80 percent of people who quit smoking are back on the habit within a year," Xenova Chief Executive David Oxlade told Reuters.
    The 60 smokers and non-smokers who took part in the Phase I clinical trial were given an injection of TA-NIC every two weeks, Oxlade said.
    But he stressed the product was a long way from hitting the market, with 2006 the earliest realistic date. Drugs have to pass three phases of clinical trials before they are approved for sale by regulators.
    Sam Fazeli, an analyst at Altium Capital, said further trials would be tough. "You're going to be giving this to healthy people, so the data will have to be squeaky clean," he said. But he agreed the vaccine had great potential

       
     

  • Negative ion fad has Japanese buying up feel-good gadgets
    Thu, Jun. 06, 2002
    TOKYO (AP) - Gadget-loving Japan is hooked on a new fad -- hairdryers, air conditioners and other electronic goods that some buyers swear deliver the soothing mood lifts of negative ions, those invisible bits of matter swarming under waterfalls and trees.
    Whether it's solid science or simply bunk doesn't matter to Kimiko Ishikawa, who recently bought an air purifier from Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.
    The 39,800 yen ($320) machine not only freshens up her home with a regular filter, it also comes with a special feature that fills the air with feel-good negative ions, or electrically charged atoms.
    ``When I get mad at my kid, she tells me the negative ions don't seem to be working,'' the 46-year-old housewife said. ``But if I hadn't bought it, I'm sure I'd have regretted it, wondering what te ions were like.''
    These days, negative ions are popping up everywhere you go.
    Jewelers are pushing necklaces of tourmaline, a stone believed to release negative ions. A scalp-cleansing brush promises to wipe out dandruff with negative ions. A public bath in Osaka, central Japan, offers a tub brimming with negative ions to get blood circulation going strong.
    Believers say negative ions do everything from boosting your car's gas mileage to guarding against muscle fatigue.
    Scientists are less sold on the fad.
    ``It's similar to a cult religion,'' said Hisakuni Sato, a professor of analytic chemistry at Yokohama National University. ``A waterfall feels good because the air is clean, trees are nearby, the temperature is cool -- the total environment of nature.''
    There are simply no empirical data to back up any positive health effects of negative ions, Sato said.
    But that hasn't stopped Japan's electronics makers from coming out with an array of gadgets singing the virtues of negative ions.
    Three of the top five best-selling air purifiers in May carry the negative ion feature, according to GfK Marketing Services Japan, which monitors nationwide product trends.
    Akihiko Oiwa, spokesman for Sanyo Electric Co., which makes fans and air conditioners that scatter negative ions, said manufacturers feel pressured to add the latest features to woo consumers.
    ``We don't know the effects of negative ions for sure. But they aren't harmful,'' Oiwa said. ive ions are molecules with an extra electron that gives them a negative charge, and positive ions are those with an electron missing. Ions are formed when an energy source such as light rays, a strong waterfall or a thunderstorm knocks off electrons.
    Positive ions are associated with bad things, like dust and pollution, while negative ions are plentiful in refreshing places like a waterfall.
    There's nothing natural about the negative ions that emanate from the new gadgets. They are usually produced by running a strong electric current through a thin piece of metal, which sends charged atoms into the air.
    Kazuhiko Zushi, supervisor of marketing at Matsushita, stresses that his company only tells buyers the machines release negative ions, which are plentiful in natural settings, but stops short of claiming health gains.
    ``We are not selling a medical product,'' Zushi said. ``If scientists one day prove health benefits, then that would be different, but we are not pushing that now.''
    The fad has yet to be exported from Japan. But the ionizers are catching on fast in this conformist nation where each new year brings an accompanying fad -- Pokemon, pet robots, bottled Chinese tea, skin-whitening soap.
    For its part, Toshiba Home Technology Corp. is selling fans and dehumidifiers with the negative-ion feature. Hitachi Home & Life Solutions sold 100,000 negative ion hairdryers in the first five months since they went on sale, about four times the company's ta Hitachi and Matsushita are planning a negative ion vacuum cleaner.
    Tokyo electronics store Yamagiwa has set up a special display section, complete with a water-filled pot and bamboo ladle, to showcase negative-ion products, including a 450 yen ($3.60) back massager.
    Risa Ogi puts negative ion rocks by her bed to sleep better and believes the popularity of negative ions shows how overworked people are worried about their health.
    ``Of course, you can't ever tell if it's really working,'' said the flight attendant, who just bought a negative ion hairdryer.

  • They Have Ways of Making Al-Qaida Talk Interrogations must be pretty damn crucial these days. Given advances in science during the past twenty years, how much more sophisticated can CIA methods have become since the 80's? (via Metafilter)

  • Truth Serums & Torture:On U.S. pundit shows this year, a hot topic has been whether captured Taliban fighters and alleged al-Qaeda operatives should be subjected to "truth serums" or physical torture to make them talk
    By Martin A. Lee
    (http://www.consortiumnews.com)
    June 4, 2002
    Hundreds of captured Taliban and al-Qaeda belligerents have been grilled, but apparently little useful has been gleaned. Frustrated U.S. interrogators have complained that Afghan battlefield prisoners employ aliases, deceit and other tactics to withstand interrogations.
    In debating how to extract more information, cable-TV commentators and other pundits generally have treated "truth serum" as a softer means of extracting information compared to more traditional torture, with commentators weighing the pros and cons of the two approaches. But beyond the question – does "truth serum" work? – is a long history of practice that blurs the moral lines between the use of interrogation drugs and more overt methods of torture.
    Former CIA and FBI director William Webster put the "truth serum" issue into prominent play in April when he urged use of drugs to loosen the tongues of suspects, such as Osama bin Laden's aide Abu Zubaida and captives held in cages at Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
    The debate soon spread to cable-TV talk shows. On Fox News' "The O'Reilly Factor," for instance, retired Marine Lt. Col. Bill Cowan said he doubted "truth serum" would work but hoped Webster's suggestion would lead the Bush administration to try torture. "Maybe it'll be an entrée to take us to the next step," Cowan said. "I kid around with people about plugging them up to a 110-volt outlet and flipping the switch if they don't want to talk."
    Guest host John Kasich demurred that many experts don't see torture as an effective interrogation technique either, "and I'm not talking about somebody who's worrying about being politically correct," but even "people inside of some of our best intelligence organizations."
    Cowan disputed the view that torture is ineffective. "I'll be honest by saying that I served a lot of time in Vietnam, and in some cases where I worked on prisoner operations, we did go a little bit beyond what normal interrogation techniques would give you, and we got phenomenal information," he said. [Fox News, April 26, 2002]
    Wish List
    Yet, U.S. spymasters – knowing that torture subjects may simply tell an interrogator what he wants to hear – have long yearned for a drug that could pull reliable information out of an unwilling subject.
    A sure-fire truth drug has been high on the wish list of U.S. intelligence agencies at least since 1942, when scientists working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the CIA’s wartime predecessor, were asked to develop a chemical substance that could break down the psychological defenses of enemy spies and POWs, thereby making it easier to obtain information from them.
    After testing several compounds, the OSS scientists selected a potent extract of marijuana as the best available "truth serum." The cannabis concoction was given the code name TD, meaning Truth Drug. When injected into food or tobacco cigarettes, TD helped loosen the reserve of recalcitrant interrogation subjects.
    The effects of the drug were described in a once-classified OSS report: “TD appears to relax all inhibitions and to deaden the areas of the brain which govern an individual’s discretion and caution. . . . [G]enerally speaking, the reaction will be one of great loquacity and hilarity.”
    In the end, marijuana didn’t fit the bill as the ultimate "truth serum," but it proved to be a gateway drug that set U.S. military and espionage scientists on a path to creating more powerful and dangerous chemicals. After World War II, American intelligence stepped up efforts to find a more effective "truth serum."
    In 1947, the U.S. Navy launched Project Chatter, which included experiments with mescaline, a hallucinogenic drug derived from the peyote cactus (with effects similar to LSD). Mescaline was studied as a possible speech-inducing agent after the Navy learned that Nazi doctors at the Dachau concentration camp had used it in mind-control experiments. The Nazis concluded that it was “impossible to impose one’s will on another person, even when the strongest dose of mescaline had been given.”
    Twilight Zone
    The CIA also embarked upon an extensive research program geared toward developing unorthodox interrogation techniques. Two methods showed promise in the late 1940s. The first involved narco-hypnosis. A CIA psychologist attempted to induce a trance state after administering a mild sedative.
    A second technique relied on a combination of two different drugs with contradictory effects, which were injected intravenously into both arms of an interrogation subject. Flick the switch and a heavy dose of barbiturates would knock a person out, and then a stimulant, usually some type of amphetamine, was administered through the other intravenous feed to wake a person up. As the subject started to emerge from a somnambulant state, he or she would reach a groggy, in-between condition prior to becoming fully alert.
    Described in CIA documents as “the twilight zone,” this semiconscious limbo was considered useful for special interrogations. But keeping a person suspended in the twilight zone was not a precise science, and the results were not always satisfactory.
    The CIA was still searching for a viable "truth serum" – the Holy Grail of the cloak-and-dagger trade – when it initiated Operation Artichoke in the early 1950s and began utilizing LSD during interrogation sessions. Odorless, colorless, and tasteless, LSD was hailed as a "potential new agent for unconventional warfare," according to a classified CIA report dated Aug. 5, 1954. But even a surreptitious dose of LSD, the most potent mind-bending drug known to science, could not guarantee that an interrogation subject would spill the beans.
    Perhaps the concept of a "truth serum" was a bit farfetched, for it presupposed that there was a way to chemically bypass the mind’s censor and turn the psyche inside out, unleashing a profusion of secrets. After much trial and error, the CIA realized that it doesn’t quite work that way.
    Eventually, CIA experts figured out the most effective way to employ LSD as an aid to interrogation. They used its terrifying effects on some prisoners as a third-degree tactic. A skillful interrogator could gain leverage over prisoners by threatening to keep them in a crazed, tripped-out state forever unless they agreed to talk. This method sometimes proved successful where others had failed. LSD has been used for interrogations on an operational basis – albeit sparingly – since the mid-1950s.
    U.S. Army interrogators also employed EA-1729 (the code for LSD) as an intelligence-extracting aid. Similar to the strategy of their CIA counterparts, Army interrogators used the drug to scare the daylights out of people who were zonked and terror-stricken on acid.
    Documents pertaining to Operation Derby Hat record the results of several EA-1729 interrogations conducted by the Army in the Far East during the early 1960s. One subject vomited three times and stated that he “wanted to die” after he had been slipped some LSD. His reaction was described as “moderate.”
    After another target absorbed triple the dose normally used in such sessions, he kept collapsing and hitting his head on a table. “The subject voiced an anti-communist line,” an Army report noted, “and begged to be spared the torture he was receiving. In this confused state he even asked to be killed in order to alleviate his suffering.”
    International Standards
    In calling for use of "truth serums" on Taliban and al-Qaeda captives, Webster said any information extracted from the prisoners should be used only "for the protection of the country." He said legal safeguards should be in place to prevent prosecutors from turning admissions against the detainees.
    The former CIA and FBI director also opposed use of torture on the prisoners. That distinction, however, misses the point that the application of drugs during interrogations often has become a form of torture.
    Amnesty International maintains that employing "truth serums" for espionage purposes could violate international treaties and the Convention Against Torture that the United States had signed. But neither the CIA nor the military has renounced the use of LSD as an interrogation weapon.
    “It’s a slippery slope,” admits Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA chief of counterterrorism. “Once you’ve used [truth drugs] for national security cases, then it becomes a standard. Sodium pentothal is not that effective, and so you have to use something stronger. It’s a short skip and a hop to LSD, or something worse.”
    Martin A. Lee is the author of Acid Dreams and The Beast Reawakens.

  • Dark heart of the American dream:Behind the Bushes-It's the most polluted state in the planet's most powerful country. Ed Vulliamy goes into George Bush's backyard to reveal how big oil got in bed with big politics and the price paid by the American people
    Sunday June 16, 2002
    The Observer
    There is a perverse beauty to the landscape arraigned below the iron bridge where Highway 255 strides the Houston Ship Channel: great towers of light and fire as far as the eye can behold; sinewy steel piping, plumes of smoke and flame twinkling into a Texas twilight coloured by a shroud of pollution hanging from the sky. The awesome prepotency of this smokescape is no illusion, for this is an epicentre of power, oil capital of the Western world and the most industrialised corner of the United States. It is also the capital of a power machine perfected in Texas, elevated to rule the nation and now unchallenged across the planet. A machine that operates in perpetual motion - an equilibrium of interests - between industry and politics. LaNell Anderson, former Republican voter, businesswoman and real-estate broker who lived many years in this land of smokestacks and smog, calls it 'vending-machine politics: you puts your money in and you gets your product out'.
    'We don't see ourselves as a dynasty,' said George Bush Sr as his son launched the election campaign that won him the current presidency, raiding father's Rolodex to do so. 'We don't feel entitled to anything.' And yet at no point in the past 50 years - the half-century since 1952 which defines the modern age - has there not been a Bush in a governor's mansion (in Texas or Florida), on Capitol Hill or in the White House - and usually more than one of those at a time. The 'vending machine' is a single family whose tango with the powers which illuminate this endless horizon of light and flame is a dance around every corner in the labyrinth of Texan and now national - indeed global - politics. 'Everything they learned when they started out in west Texas,' says Dr Neil Carman, once a regulator of pollution in the state, 'they applied to the governor's mansion, the nation and the world... Power in America is not so much about George W Bush, it's about the people from Texas who put him there.'
    This is the dynasty's throne, the state whose highways are lined with the spirited advice 'Don't Mess With Texas' (originally the slogan of an anti-litter campaign). As if litter would make much difference: Texas counts the worst pollution record in the US, top in the belching of toxic chemicals and carcinogens into the air, top in chemical spills, top in ozone pollution, top in carbon-dioxide emissions, top for mercury emission, top in clean-water violations, top in the production of hazardous waste. Houston overtook Los Angeles for the coveted title of 'most polluted city' in the early 90s.
    'You are looking at the biggest oil refinery in the world,' indicates LaNell Anderson. She refers to the edifice that is the 3,000-acre Exxon Mobil plant at Baytown, near Houston, producer of 507,800 barrels a day. Here begins a story of both dynasty and destiny, for it was on this spot in 1917 that the Bush family's oil connection was forged - where the Humble Oil company, which struck black gold in the Houston suburb of that name, took root, later to be- come the Exxon behemoth. Humble's founder, William Stamps Farish, went on to become president of Standard Oil. His daughter became a friend of George Bush Sr and his grandson William Jr was taken in 'almost like family' (said Barbara Bush) while campaigning for George Sr's entrée into Washington Senatorial politics in 1964. Farish Jr claims to have been the first man to whom Bush Sr confided his ambition to be president one day, and was last year named US Ambassador to London.
    At first, Anderson welcomed the benefits to a community of the 200 oil-related industries relocated to the Houston area by the time she and her second husband set up home in a suburb wedged between Exxon and the Lyondell chemical plant. Neither she nor he had any history of disease in their families. But in 1985, her husband's daughter gave birth to a girl, Alyssa, with a rare liver disease - she died aged six months. In 1986, Anderson's mother became ill and died of bone cancer a year later. The following year, Anderson and her sister were diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, as was a granddaughter in 1992, and an older sister with Crohn's disease. In 1991, her father died from emphysema; a year later the mother of Alyssa gave birth to a son immediately diagnosed with severe asthma. Anderson connects the litany of disease with mishaps by her industrial neighbours. She paraphrases their attitude thus: 'If someone doesn't like it, they can sue us if they can - and since we have more money than God, we will win.'
    A thumbnail sketch of politics and the environment in the United States today depicts oil as the lifeblood running through every vein of an administration forging ahead with its energy policy. The White House has just been forced to disclose (after being faced with a Congressional subpoena) that it drew up a national energy plan based on increased production without regard to the environment or conservation, having failed to consult with anyone other than its friends among the producers themselves, notably the disgraced Enron. This despite the fact that an energy crisis in California last summer caused most analysts to draw the opposite conclusion, stressing the need to curb a gas-guzzling America.
    At the hub of this turning wheel of influence is Vice President Dick Cheney, fresh into office from his post as chief executive of Halliburton, the world's second-largest oil-drilling services company, where he netted a personal fortune of $36m in the year before leaving, with help from contacts accumulated while serving under George Bush Sr. Just last week, however, Halliburton joined Enron in coming under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for the same system of publishing inflated revenues - 'aggressive accounting' - for which Enron has become a synonym for shame. These alleged misdeeds took place during Cheney's directorship. The company also faces a floodtide of civil lawsuits over asbestosis_ unless a model can be found (as has been established in Texas) to make such resort to the law nigh impossible for anyone without money.
    The entwinement of the Bush dynasty with the energy barons of Texas has apparently humble beginnings, in the Lone Star State's wild west, on the plains around Midland and Odessa. This is barren land across which dust devils fly and trains rumble like iron snakes. This is where George Bush Sr was sent by his father, Senator Prescott Bush, to a trainee job with the International Derrick and Equipment Company, a subsidiary of Dresser Industries, controlled by the Bush family and selling more oil rigs than anyone in the world. (Dresser later became absorbed by Halliburton.)
    The world first heard of Odessa on that fateful day in December 1998 when Bush Jr was governor of Texas and the sky turned black after an 'upset' at the Huntsman chemical plant literally on the wrong side of the railroad tracks it shares with poor housing, where Mexicans and blacks live. (An 'upset' is an unplanned accident releasing pollution, not part of the plant's normal running procedure, and which does not count in its regulatory tally.) Lucia Llanez, who lives in this tightly knit community of bungalows between plant and railroad, will never forget this one: 'It was dark all over; cars on the Interstate slowing down and putting their lights on because they couldn't see, though it was day. There was a rumbling like trains that rattled the windows, and people were going to hospital for watering eyes, allergies and problems breathing. The cloud stayed two weeks.'
    The story of Huntsman goes back to the days of Bush Sr's arrival, when Odessa was a town of what retired fireman Don Dangerfield calls 'wildcatters'. In the 40s, the US Air Force bombed deep holes in the giant Permian oil basin in a search for oil which then attracted a stampede of speculators (including those from Humble) who would, recalls Dangerfield, 'spend the nights in a hotel, the End of the Golden West, and gamble their lots in rooms so thick with cigar smoke you could hardly see'. Among them was a man he remembers well: John Sam Shepherd, a former attorney general of Texas and member of the White Citizens Council - a political wing of the Ku Klux Klan - disgraced by a land scandal and come to seek his fortune out West by setting up the El Paso Products company, later Huntsman.
    George Bush landed in this mayhem but quickly decamped 20 miles north to Midland, where new millionaires like him established a country club, a Harvard and a Yale club, met at the Petroleum Club and played golf on irrigated lawns. Midland was, recalls Gene Collins, a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Odessam 'one of two towns in America with a Rolls-Royce dealership and more millionaires per head than anywhere'. This was where Bush Sr built his oil fortune, launched a political career on its shoulders and raised his son George W Bush in the art and language of power he now feigns not to speak. The story of how Bush Sr constructed his empire is well known, as is that of how his son George W was groomed to follow in his footsteps. Less widely broadcast, however, are the depths and intricacies of a system the Bush family built in bonding with the energy industry, as the dynastic machine elevated its methods from Odessa to the Senate, the governor's mansion in Austin, the oil centres of Houston and Dallas, the White House and thereafter the globe.
    Neil Carman has a professorial air to him that belies the sharpness of the surgical blade with which he tries to operate on 'Toxic Texas'. Originally a plant biologist, he was an investigator for the Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission (TNRCC), responsible for issuing permits for agreed levels of pollution and enforcing environmental law. In 1989, he took on the General Tire and Rubber Company for 'systematic violations'.
    The firm hired a lobbyist, Larry Feldcamp, from the Baker Botts law firm whose senior partner, James Baker III, was secretary of state to then president George Bush Sr and who later, as an attorney, secured the delivery of the state of Florida for Bush Jr during last year's election recounts. Baker Botts advertises itself as a 'full service firm', counting Shell, Mobil, Union Carbide, Huntsman, Amoco on its books. The other law firm indivisible from the energy lobby and the Bush fiefdom is Vinson & Elkins, which acts for both Enron and the Alcoa aluminium giant, whose former chief executive Paul O'Neill is now US Treasury Secretary. Between these law firms and the regulatory body supposed to face them down, says Dr Carman, 'there's a revolving door. Feldcamp's place was taken recently by the most active attorney on the oil scene, Pamela Giblin - one of the TNRCC's first appointees.'
    Carman resigned because 'all they had to do was hire people like Feldcamp and you were off the case. They did not deny permits - they must have issued 50,000 permits for air pollution during my time and refused only two, on occasions when the public raised hell. And they don't revoke them - it's not like drunk driving: if you get caught, they just keep reissuing. They used to refer to these places as "industrial areas", as if that meant they were outside the law. I called them "sacrifice zones".'
    There is another problem, unique to Texas: the 'grandfathering' rule. Grandfathering dates back to the Texas Clean Air Act of 1971, exempting existing installations from compliance with new regulations. The idea was that they would be modernised or become obsolete and close. In the event, firms found that not being obliged to spend on pollution control gave them a competitive edge, and nearly three decades later, grandfathering accounted for more than 1,000 plants and 35 per cent of all pollution in Texas. Nevertheless, in the early 90s, the TNRCC began to toughen its stance in accordance with a more aggressive federal approach to pollution by the new Clinton administration. Then, in 1994, Texas went to the polls to elect a new governor - 'And when Bush took over,' says Carman, 'everything changed.'
    Two groups based in Austin - Texans for Public Justice (TPJ) and Public Research Works (PRW) - crunched the statistics on the wave of money on which George W Bush sailed into the governor's mansion. It was what Andrew Wheat of the TPJ calls 'something unheard of in Texas or anywhere else: $42m on two campaigns'. Grandfathered polluters poured $10.2m into the campaign coffers between 1993 and 1998, led by what PRW calls the 'dirty 30', including Exxon, Shell, Amoco, Enron and the Alcoa aluminium giant. Bush himself received $1.5m from 55 grandfathered companies, led by Enron, with a handsome $348,500 top-up from the man he calls Kenny Boy - Kenneth Lay, the company's chief executive, currently under criminal investigation.
    Wheat's analysis of the new governor's 'personal time' shows a revolving door for campaign donors and the energy industry. Andrew Barrett, Bush's in-house environmental policy advisor, began daily visits to the TNRCC in preparation for the appointment of new commissioners: Ralph Marquez, lobbyist for the Texas Chemical Council and former executive of the Monsanto chemical firm, and Barry McBee, attorney with the law firm Thompson & Knight, a major contributor to Bush funds with a host of oil-industry clients.
    Legislation based on the notion of 'self-regulation' followed: a law enabling companies to audit their own pollution records provided they reported them, in exchange for which there would be absolute protection from public disclosure. Big oil was delighted, as a memo obtained by an environmentalist group, the Texas SEED Coalition, illustrated: a record of a gathering in June 1977 at Exxon in Houston by 40 representatives of the Texas oil and gas industries - written by one of their number - said 'the "insiders" from oil and gas believe that the governor's office will persuade the TNRCC to accept whatever program is developed between the industry group and the governor's office'.
    It was not until Bush became president that, in its 2001 state legislature, Texas finally decided to rein in the 'grandfathered' plants. A bill gave them until 2007 to come into line with federal law or shut down. Even then, there was a legal challenge to the TNRCC's science from the Houston Business Partnership, recently entrusted with millions in federal money to clean up the Gulf coastline. The partnership is a high-octane chamber of commerce, throwing up a few familiar names: Exxon, Conoco, Enron, James Baker's law firm Baker Botts - and George Bush Sr.
    Most important of all - and best hidden - was Bush's programme for Tort Reform. It was this that his father's advisor Karl Rove (dispatched to steer Bush's presidential campaign and now the White House itself) insisted the new governor make his hallmark, and this is potentially the dynasty's greatest gift to big oil. Put simply, Tort Reform means making it harder for citizens to sue corporations. TPJ calculated that business interests specifically isolating Tort Reform on their political agenda poured money into Bush's gubernatorial campaigns. Soon after being elected governor, says Andrew Wheat, Bush declared Tort Reform an 'emergency issue'.
    This meant appointing a judge to the Texas supreme court whom President Bush is tipped to bring aboard the Supreme Court in Washington (to which, some say, he owes his presidency). Alberto Gonzalez wrote a decision soon after his appointment to the Texas court which made it all but impossible for citizens to bring class actions. 'The result,' says Shawn Isbell, a lawyer working on environmental cases, 'is that it will simply be too expensive to bring cases against the corporations.'
    Another ruling, says Sandra McKenzie, the lawyer who fought a long and bitter battle against the Formosa Plastics firm, stipulates that 'anyone trying to prove a personal chemical injury had to show that other people in a similar situation had suffered the same reaction, according to a study in a published journal'. The new precedents, says McKenzie, 'changed the laws to establish a no-compromise, "take no prisoners" approach by the Bushes'.
    In 1989, George Bush presented the Governor's Award for Environ mental Excellence to the Valero chemical refining company. Foremost in the minds of the proud executives at the ceremony in Austin's luxury Four Seasons Hotel was their 'refinery of the future' at Corpus Christi, on the Gulf, at the far end of the coastal strip that runs through Houston to the Louisiana border.
    Alfred Williams gets a better view of the refinery of the future across the freeway from the garden of his mobile home than Governor Bush did from the Four Seasons. He can smell it better too - the inimitable stench on the muggy delta air that signifies the cooking up of cheap crude-oil 'feed stock' to produce its chemical by-product and treating the neighbourhood to a dose of sulphur dioxide.
    When Williams, an ex-Vietnam Marine, moved here in 1972, 'this was all farmland'. He now delivers an impassioned requiem for his garden, with its peach trees dead or buckling over. The light of a quicksilver moon catches the plume of sulphur along what they call Refinery Row.
    'I'm in my golden years,' he reflects. 'But I can't sell my house because no bank will give a loan without 40 per cent down. And they won't relocate me, as I'd do if they offered.
    'It started with having to wipe residue from off of my car. Then the iron on my rooftop here started to get corroded, and the trees were dying. Sometimes I have to come inside because my eyes are burning.'
    Williams filed a civil suit against Valero, steered by attorney Shawn Isbell. The court in Corpus denied Williams class action status in accordance with the zeitgeist, but Isbell managed to discover how the refinery of the future was so poorly crafted that Valero had (unsuccessfully) sued the companies which had built it. She also found out how the Texas system of overlooking 'upsets' works. Since 1994, Valero had suffered more than 480 'upsets', but the TNRCC records each set of emissions separately - for example, Valero's sulphur-dioxide emissions for 1977 show up on the commission's website as 166.4 tons, while the reality including 'upsets' is closer to 700 tons. Nevertheless, says Isbell, 'I've seen the TNRCC go harder after a pig farmer than I have after these kinds of companies.'
    Williams keeps a notebook by his phone to record the 'upsets' over the road. He reports them to the TNRCC. But, he says, 'I call them rainbows: they are shut at night and on the weekend when the sulphur is released, and they only come when the storm has come and gone.'
    Cornelius Harmon is a cab driver in Corpus, and takes a drive along Refinery Row, down a road he calls the 'buffer zone'. It divides a wasteland of former housing - where those relocated because of pollution by another plant, Koch, once lived - from the mostly black and Hispanic community of Hillcrest. 'Are you gonna tell me,' posits Harmon, 'that the hand of God Almighty drew a line down this road and He says: "Over yonder side is contaminated and this side is fit for folks to live ?" And what have we got here? Well, I'll be doggone if it's not a school, with children playing in the smell. The people who run these things, they give our kids a new pair of sneakers and go to church and think they're going to heaven. But at the pearly gates, they're going to find St Peter in his Afro saying: "Whassup cuz? Seems like you're trying to get into the wrong place."'
    Time came for destiny to fulfil itself, for the son to stand for the high office in Washington which the Bush dynasty and its backers saw as having been usurped by Bill Clinton. The story of what carried George W Bush to the White House is well known: the most ruthlessly efficient campaigning machine ever assembled - by Karl Rove - with all the family's best connections filling a treasure chest that broke all records. As they returned to number-crunching in Austin, Texans for Public Justice and Public Research Works found little to surprise them save the machine's speed and efficacy. Within a month, Bush had raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, with Enron leading the field and two law firms giving $146,900 - most prominently Vinson and Elkins, attorneys to Enron and the Alcoa aluminium giant, and James Baker's company, lawyers to the oil industry.
    When Bush came to pick his cabinet, almost all pivotal positions went to Bush Sr's inner sanctum, apart from the posts of commerce secretary (Don Evans, longtime buddy of Bush Jr's and a fellow Midland oil man) and treasury secretary (Paul O'Neill, currently touring the globe with Bono of U2, and former chief executive of Alcoa, the world's biggest producer of aluminium).
    Alcoa held a stockholders meeting to send O'Neill off with a torrent of eulogies and an annual pay packet worth $36m, but three speakers spoiled the party. Two were trade unionists from O'Neill's troubled plant at Ciudad Acuna in Mexico, challenging the chief executive's claim that conditions at their factory were so good 'they can eat off the floor'. The third was the soft-spoken Texan Ron Giles, drawing attention to the biggest of the state's 'grandfathered' polluters - the Alcoa smelting plant at Rockdale. If the Rockdale plant were a single state, it would count 40th for pollution among the 50 in the union, belching more than 100,000 tons of toxins in 1997.
    The smokestacks of the largest aluminium smelter in North America fit incongruously into the pastoral ranch land northeast of Austin. And they seem especially odd as backdrop to the 300-acre ranch where Wayne Brinkley's family has raised cattle since the late 1800s, but over which hangs a stench wafting across the moonscape of Alcoa's lignite mine.
    Brinkley looks as much the Texan as President Bush in his boots and Stetson - 'Only difference is,' he says, 'I am one, and Bush is not.' In his office is a hog, stuffed and mounted, and an awesome collection of vintage knives and firearms. On his desk is a survey by the independent Research Analysis Consultations group showing that concentrations of magnesium, calcium and aluminium register 'very high' around Brinkley's barn, and sodium and titanium over his fields. 'My son had cancer when he was just a young kid,' he says in a voice like sandpaper. 'They tried to buy us out. They keep offering various deals saying I can't talk to anyone about this for 35 years, and then they changed it to forever. But why should I leave? My family's been here 100 years; they've been here 50. They should do it by the book, and keep it clean for the rest of us.'
    Alcoa continues regardless, feted by Wall Street for 'dazzling' returns. But in the last light of a warm evening, quiet rebellion stirs in the community room of a little town called Elgin. A group of local people, Neighbors for Neighbors, have obtained records that show Alcoa to be cheating, making improvements to its production plant worth some $45m without parallel investments in pollution control. As a direct result of the Neighbors' exposé, the company was investigated by a TNRCC with no place to hide this time.
    Neighbors for Neighbors, enjoying statewide coverage and acclaim for its pluck, is itself suing the company. Billie Woods, Neighbors' president, says that Alcoa has responded by pressing ahead with its plans for a new lignite mine that would carve up 15,000 acres of farmland. The company has also made court applications to enter and search the homes of Neighbors activists. The request was denied, but the matter moved the usually conservative Daily Texan newspaper to demand: 'Stop the Alcoa Gestapo!'
    Yesterday Texas, today Washington, tomorrow the world. With Bush family business back home in the US presidency, it now moves, in the form of the father, to the apex of global finance. The Carlyle Group defines the next phase of power: a Washington-based private equity fund with a difference. It is headed by Frank Carlucci, former CIA director and defense secretary under Ronald Reagan and lifelong friend of George Bush Sr. Bush (also once director of the CIA) sits next to Carlucci on the board with a portfolio specialising in Asia and does not hesitate to communicate with his son on concerns of regional relevance to Carlyle such as Afghanistan or the Pacific Rim. Bush Jr was once chairman of a Carlyle subsidiary making in-flight food.
    On Carlucci's other flank is the ubiquitous James Baker III. Chairman of Carlyle Europe is John Major. The group's new asset management is headed by Afsaneh Beschloss, former treasurer of the World Bank. Carlyle has grown quickly to be worth some $12bn, specialising in energy and defence, with particular attention to the oil-producing Gulf states. Among its most eager investors is Prince Bandar, Saudi ambassador to Washington and his father Prince Sultan, the kingdom's defence minister. The group's most spectacular recent coup was to reap $400m in a stock sale of its subsidiary United Defence Industries, maker of the Crusader artillery system which most military experts argued was redundant, but which won $470m in development money from the Pentagon and whose future in the US arsenal still hangs in the balance after a series of recent meetings between Carlucci and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Within a month of 11 September last year, Carlucci was meeting with Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, and 10 days later offered an assessment which exactly predicted the endless-war scenario: 'We as Americans,' he said, 'have to recognise that terrorism is more or less a permanent situation.'
    'What's the secret?' chided William Conway, a co-founder of the group. 'I don't think we have any secrets. We are a group of businessmen who have made a huge amount of money for our investors.' 'I never bought into this conspiracy theory about the Bush family, the energy companies or the Carlyle Group,' says Michael King, seasoned political editor of the Austin Chronicle , who has observed the phenomenon for decades. 'It is perfectly clear what they're aiming at from what they do in public: managing the global economy to their own advantage, and doing a pretty good job of it.'
    On 11 September, while Al-Qaeda's planes slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Carlyle Group hosted a conference at a Washington hotel. Among the guests of honour was a valued investor: Shafig bin Laden, brother to Osama.

  • A War Against the Peacemaker-The US wants to depose the diplomat who could take away its pretext for war with Iraq
    (George Monbiot-UKgGuaridan)
    16th April 2002
    On Sunday, the US government will launch an international coup. It has been planned for a month. It will be executed quietly, and most of us won't know what is happening until it's too late. It is seeking to overthrow 60 years of multilateralism, in favour of a global regime built on force.
    The coup begins with its attempt, in five days' time, to unseat the man in charge of ridding the world of chemical weapons. If it succeeds, this will be the first time that the head of a multilateral agency will have been deposed in this manner. Every other international body will then become vulnerable to attack. The coup will also shut down the peaceful options for dealing with the chemical weapons Iraq may possess, helping to ensure that war then becomes the only means of destroying them.
    The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) enforces the Chemical Weapons Convention. It inspects labs and factories and arsenals and oversees the destruction of the weapons they contain. Its director-general is a workaholic Brazilian diplomat called Jose Bustani. He has, arguably, done more in the past five years to promote world peace than anyone else on earth. His inspectors have overseen the destruction of two million chemical weapons and two-thirds of the world's chemical weapon facilities. He has so successfully cajoled reluctant nations that the number of signatories has risen from 87 to 145 in the past five years: the fastest growth rate of any multilateral body in recent times.
    In May 2000, as a tribute to his extraordinary record, Bustani was re-elected unanimously by the member states for a second five-year term, even though he had yet to complete his first one. Last year Colin Powell wrote to him to thank him for his "very impressive" work. But now everything has changed. The man celebrated for his remarkable achievements has been denounced as an enemy of the people.
    In January, with no prior warning or explanation, the US State Department asked the Brazilian government to recall him, on the grounds that it did not like his "management style". This request directly contravenes the Chemical Weapons Convention, which states "the Director-General ... shall not seek or receive instructions from any government." Brazil refused. In March, the US government accused Bustani of "financial mismanagement", "demoralization" of his staff, "bias" and "ill-considered initiatives". It warned that if he wanted to avoid damage to his reputation, he must resign.
    Again, the US was trampling the convention, which insists that member states shall "not seek to influence" the staff. He refused to go. On March 19th, the US proposed a vote of no-confidence in Mr Bustani. It lost. So it then did something unprecedented in the history of multilateral diplomacy. It called a "special session" of the member states to oust him. The session begins on Sunday. And this time the US is likely to get what it wants.
    Since losing the vote last month, the United States, which is supposed to be the organisation's biggest donor, has been twisting the arms of weaker nations, refusing to pay its dues unless they support it, with the result that the OPCW could go under. Last week Bustani told me, "the Europeans are so afraid that the US will abandon the convention that they are prepared to sacrifice my post to keep it on board." His last hope is that the United Kingdom, whose record of support for the organisation has so far been exemplary, will make a stand. The meeting on Sunday will present Blair's government with one of the clearest choices it has yet faced between multilateralism and the "special relationship".
    The US has not sought to substantiate the charges it has made against Bustani. The OPCW is certainly suffering from a financial crisis, but that is largely because the United States first unilaterally capped its budget and then failed to pay what it owed. The organisation's accounts have just been audited and found to be perfectly sound. Staff morale is higher than any organisation as underfunded as the OPCW could reasonably expect. Bustani's real crimes are contained in the last two charges, of "bias" and "ill-considered initiatives".
    The charge of bias arises precisely because the OPCW is not biased. It has sought to examine facilities in the United States with the same rigour with which it examines facilities anywhere else. But, just like Iraq, the US has refused to accept weapons inspectors from countries it regards as hostile to its interests, and has told those who have been allowed in which parts of a site they may and may not inspect. It has also passed special legislation permitting the president to block unannounced inspections, and banning inspectors from removing samples of its chemicals.
    "Ill-considered initiatives" is code for the attempts Bustani has made, in line with his mandate, to persuade Saddam Hussein to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention. If Iraq agrees, it will then be subject to the same inspections -- both routine and unannounced -- as any other member state (with the exception, of course, of the United States). Bustani has so far been unsuccessful, but only because, he believes, he has not yet received the backing of the UN Security Council, with the result that Saddam knows he would have little to gain from signing.
    Bustani has suggested that if the Security Council were to support the OPCW's bid to persuade Iraq to sign, this would provide the US with an alternative to war. It is hard to see why Saddam Hussein would accept weapons inspectors from UNMOVIC -- the organisation backed by the Security Council -- after its predecessor UNSCOM was found to be stuffed with spies planted by the US government. It is much easier to see why he might accept inspectors from an organisation which has remained scrupulously even-handed. Indeed, when UNSCOM was thrown out of Iraq in 1998, the OPCW was allowed in to complete the destruction of the weapons it had found. Bustani has to go because he has proposed the solution to a problem the US does not want solved.
    "What the Americans are doing," Bustani says, "is a coup d'etat. They are using brute force to amend the convention and unseat the director-general." As the Chemical Weapons Convention has no provisions permitting these measures, the US is simply ripping up the rules. If it wins, then the OPCW, like UNSCOM, will be fatally compromised. Success for the United States on Sunday would threaten the independence of every multilateral body.
    This is, then, one of those rare occasions on which our government could make a massive difference to the way the world is run. It could choose to support its closest ally, wrecking multilateralism and shutting down the alternatives to war. Or it could defy the United States in defence of world peace and international law. It will take that principled stand only if we, the people from whom it draws its power, make so much noise that it must listen. We have five days in which to stop the US from bullying its way to war.

  • White House promises to pay debts for countries which vote against Brazilian diplomat.
    (translated via kuro%hin.org from O Estado de São Paulo, a very respectable Brazilian newspaper and news agency.)
    (April 22nd):
    The Hague - The 145 countries which are members of the OPCW shall vote, between today and tomorrow, the ousting of Brazilian José Maurício Bustani as the entity's head as per the United States' request. Despite Brazil and Bustani's resistance, Americans are using all means at their disposal to dismiss the director.
    Example: in a secret [note: do they mean "secret" or closed?] meeting which took place this Friday, in The Hague, White House representatives called upon more than 25 Americans which work at the OPCW to explain the situation and to orient them.
    One of the meeting's participants disclosed to O Estado the White House's plans, but preferred not to identify himself. According to him, American authorities threatened those who denounce Washington's intentions, which clearly disrespect multilateral rules and international law.
    During the meeting, the United States admitted they could pay other countries' OPCW fees if they would vote for Bustani's ousting.
    According to the rules of the organization, countries which do not pay their fees lose their voting rights. The White House would have proposed for debtors -- mainly from Asia, Central America and Africa -- to liquidate their debt in exchange for votes.
    Americans are so certain of Bustani's dismissal that they have already begun to search for a substitute. The White House offered Brazil a chance to propose a new director, which the Ministry of Foreign Relations turned down.
    Still during Friday's meeting, White House envoys admitted that because Bustani's doesn't end for 3 years, the new director should come from Latin America. But that doesn't seem to worry Washington.
    During the meeting, American diplomats classified the Latin-american governments as "incompetents", which would never agree on a common name to be recommended as a future director.
    One of the White House's options would be to recommend one of OPCW's vice-directors, the australian John Gee, for the office. But in The Haghe, commentary is that Gee would bee a clear ally to the US, which doesn't please other countries. In Malaysia, for example, Gee is deemed persona non grata for his work supposedly in the name of the OPCW.
    One of the Americans which were present supposedly questioned Washington's diplomats about what would've been done if the next director decided, as Bustani did, to act independently from American interests. The answer: "if that ever happens, fuck the OPCW".

  • American pressure ousts Bustani from the OPCW
    (April 23rd)
    (translated via kuro%hin.org from O Estado de São Paulo, a very respectable Brazilian newspaper and news agency.)
    The Hague - José Maurício Bustani couldn't resist American attacks. Yesterday, in The Hague, the Brazilian diplomat was voted out of office as the organization's director. Two months after the start of the White House's campaign against him, the results reflected Washington's influence: 48 votes against, 43 abstentions (most from Latin-american countries) and only 7 votes for the Brazilian: China, Russia, Mexico, Iran, Belarus, Cuba and Brazil. The US needed 66% of the votes to depose Bustani and actually got 87%.
    "It was a lynching. I was easily butchered", he admitted. He was surprised by the vote's swiftness. "I am disappointed. There wasn't even a legal debate over my ousting. This is the effect of the US' steamroller."
    According to him, countries voted "cornered and terrified".
    Between the abstentions was surprisingly France, which didn't follow the orientation of other European governments to support the US. "The Europeans asked me to leave", said Bustani.
    At the end, Bustani was applauded by the delegations while he left the conference room, with the exception of Washington's diplomats. "I don't regret any of my actions", he stated.
    To the US, Bustani's actions had led the OPCW to financial chaos, leading to the White House's distrust of the ambassador. To Bustani, however, the true reasons were his refusal to accept the White House's orders and the unilateral style adopted by John Bolton, one of the American diplomats in charge of disarmament issues.
    "They (the Americans) wanted to boss me around regarding employees and the OPCW's finances. I replied I wouldn't accept that."
    Another factor in Bustani's evaluation was his attempt to establish dialog with Iraq. "I sought for dialog with those countries which supposedly were part of the 'Axis of Evil'. But do the US really wish to destroy the axis?".
    On Bustani's evaluation, the OPCW's crisis will not affect relations between Brazil and the US. During the last few days, Brazilian diplomats made sure to show their support by negotiating with other countries in order to prevent his ousting. To OPCW employees, however, this was too little too late and some say Brazil acted as the US intended.
    Today, representatives will still gather in The Hague to decide on a substitute for Bustani. The task, however, will not be easy. To the White House, several candidates refused the office because of the OPCW's financial issues. But Bustani has another opinion: "Who shall ever desire this position while knowing that if he doesn't follow Washington's determinations, he will be dismissed? This person will have to prove day after day he is not an envoy from Washington. I wouldn't like to be in his place".

  • US Said Planning Attack On Iraq For August-White House observers say Bush has been studying his father's blueprint to attack Iraq from his term of office in the White House.


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