(by CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS-Solari.com)
The Departments of Defense (DOD) and Housing and Urban Development (HUD), with Lockheed Martin as their lead contractor, are missing over $3.3 trillion between fiscal 1998-2000. Lockheed’s stock is up over 60% since 9-11, as a result of new War on Terrorism- related contracts
If settlement is not ended once and for all by an unequivocal political decision and in the framework of a comprehensive peace agreement, Jewish settlement in the territories is a process that will continue until the last dunam of land in the West Bank is "redeemed," or until the last of the Arabs who refuses to accept the sentence of Jewish overlordship is thrown out.
"Hundreds of life-size rescue dog statues painted by local artists and celebrities will appear in front of police stations and fire houses and elsewhere in Manhattan this summer, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Tuesday" (DOGNY.org)
Earth's population will be forced to colonise two planets within 50 years if natural resources continue to be exploited at the current rate, according to a report out this week. (The UK Observer)
(LondonEveningStandard)
02/07/2002
This spectacular eruption of superheated gases, shooting a flame hundreds of thousands of miles long into space from the sun, was captured on film by an orbiting satellite.
The solar eruption, which is more than 240,000 miles long, burst from the surface of the sun yesterday as the satellite had its cameras trained on our nearest star.
It occurred at 1319 GMT on Monday and was imaged by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, which sits in space at a gravitational balance point between our star and Earth.
The explosion is what astronomers call an eruptive prominence, a loop of magnetic fields that trap hot gas inside. As the trapped gas becomes unstable it erupts violently into space.
If eruptions like these are aimed at Earth, they can disturb the magnetosphere, the planet's magnetic field, with dramatic consequences.
Past eruptions have knocked out satellites, wrecked television reception and caused power surges and blackouts, but this one was fortunately not aimed at us.
Scientists say the sun is experiencing a solar max, a period of strong activity that happens about every 11 years and lasts for about three or four years.
The eruption is mostly burning hydrogen gas and solar particles which have been flung into space at around 100,000F, eight times the temperature at the core of the Earth, which is up to 13,000F - and hot enough to vapourise our planet should the Earth cross its path.
So much superheated hydrogen was involved in the eruption that although the gas is one of the lightest substances in the universe, it would have had a greater mass and weighed more than Mount Everest, our tallest peak.
The Soho satellite - short for Solar and Heliospheric Observatory - is a joint Nasa and European Space Agency project, orbiting the Sun a million miles from Earth. Its mission is to observe "space weather".
Todd Hoeksema, solar astronomer at Nasa, said: "This was quite a large eruption and they are pretty spectacular.
"The material goes out into space, and if it is heading towards Earth it will hit our atmosphere and disturb the magnetic field.
"It can damage satellites and sometimes means planes flying over the poles have to be re-routed, because it interferes with communications equipment."
by Michel Chossudovsky
(Centre for Research on Globalisation (CRG))
Was it an ‘intelligence failure’ to give red carpet treatment to the ‘money man’ behind the 9-11 terrorists, or was it simply ‘routine’?
On the morning of September 11, Pakistan's Chief Spy General Mahmoud Ahmad, the alleged "money-man" behind the 9-11 hijackers, was at a breakfast meeting on Capitol Hill hosted by Senator Bob Graham and Rep. Porter Goss, the chairmen of the Senate and House Intelligence committees.
"When the news [of the attacks on the World Trade Center] came, the two Florida lawmakers who lead the House and Senate intelligence committees were having breakfast with the head of the Pakistani intelligence service. Rep. Porter Goss, R-Sanibel, Sen. Bob Graham and other members of the House Intelligence Committee were talking about terrorism issues with the Pakistani official when a member of Goss' staff handed a note to Goss, who handed it to Graham. "We were talking about terrorism, specifically terrorism generated from Afghanistan," Graham said.
Mahmoud Ahmad, director general of Pakistan's intelligence service, was "very empathetic, sympathetic to the people of the United States," Graham said.
ON May 16th The New York Post dropped what appeared to be a bombshell: "Bush Knew . . . " Hoping to score politically, the Democrats jumped on the bandwagon, pressuring the White House to come clean on two "top-secret documents" made available to President Bush prior to September 11, concerning "advance knowledge" of Al Qaeda attacks. Meanwhile, the U.S. media had already coined a new set of buzzwords: "Yes, there were warnings" and "clues" of possible terrorist attacks, but "there was no way President Bush could have known" what was going to happen. The Democrats agreed to "keep the cat inside the bag" by saying: "Osama is at war with the U.S." and the FBI and the CIA knew something was cooking but "failed to connect the dots." In the words of House Minority Leader, Richard Gephardt:
"This is not blame-placing. . . . We support the President on the war against terrorism — have and will. But we've got to do better in preventing terrorist attacks." 1
The media's spotlight on ‘foreknowledge' and so-called "FBI lapses" served to distract public attention from the broader issue of political deception. Not a word was mentioned concerning the role of the CIA, which throughout the entire post-Cold War era, has aided and abetted Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda, as part of its covert operations.
Of course they knew! The foreknowledge issue is a red herring. The "Islamic Brigades" are a creation of the CIA. In standard CIA jargon, Al Qaeda is categorized as an "intelligence asset". Support to terrorist organizations is an integral part of U.S. foreign policy. Al Qaeda continues to this date (2002) to participate in CIA covert operations in different parts of the World.2 These "CIA-Osama links" do not belong to a bygone era, as suggested by the mainstream media.
The U.S. Congress has documented in detail, the links of Al Qaeda to agencies of the U.S. government during the civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as in Kosovo.3 More recently in Macedonia, barely a few months before September 11, U.S. military advisers were mingling with Mujahideen mercenaries financed by Al Qaeda. Both groups were fighting under the auspices of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), within the same terrorist paramilitary formation.4
The CIA keeps track of its "intelligence assets". Amply documented, Osama bin Laden's whereabouts were always known.5 Al Qaeda is infiltrated by the CIA.6 In other words, there were no "intelligence failures"! In the nature of a well-led intelligence operation, the "intelligence asset" operates (wittingly or unwittingly) with some degree of autonomy, in relation to its U.S. government sponsors, but ultimately it acts consistently, in the interests of Uncle Sam.
While individual FBI agents are often unaware of the CIA's role, the relationship between the CIA and Al Qaeda is known at the top levels of the FBI. Members of the Bush Administration and the U.S. Congress are fully cognizant of these links.
The foreknowledge issue focussing on "FBI lapses" is an obvious smokescreen. While the whistleblowers serve to underscore the weaknesses of the FBI, the role of successive U.S. administrations (since the presidency of Jimmy Carter) in support of the "Islamic Militant Base", is simply not mentioned.
Fear and Disinformation Campaign
The Bush Administration — through the personal initiative of Vice President Dick Cheney — chose not only to foreclose the possibility of a public inquiry, but also to trigger a fear and disinformation campaign:
"I think that the prospects of a future attack on the U.S. are almost a certainty. . . . It could happen tomorrow, it could happen next week, it could happen next year, but they will keep trying. And we have to be prepared." 7
What Cheney is really telling us is that our "intelligence asset", which we created, is going to strike again. Now, if this "CIA creature" were planning new terrorist attacks, you would expect that the CIA would be first to know about it. In all likelihood, the CIA also controls the so-called ‘warnings' emanating from CIA sources on "future terrorist attacks" on American soil.
Carefully Planned Intelligence Operation
The 9-11 terrorists did not act on their own volition. The suicide hijackers were instruments in a carefully planned intelligence operation. The evidence confirms that Al Qaeda is supported by Pakistan's military intelligence, the Inter-services Intelligence (ISI). Amply documented, the ISI owes its existence to the CIA:
"With CIA backing and the funnelling of massive amounts of U.S. military aid, the ISI developed [since the early 1980s] into a parallel structure wielding enormous power over all aspects of government....The ISI had a staff composed of military and intelligence officers, bureaucrats, undercover agents and informers estimated at 150,000."8
The ISI actively collaborates with the CIA. It continues to perform the role of a ‘go-between' in numerous intelligence operations on behalf of the CIA. The ISI directly supports and finances a number of terrorist organizations, including Al Qaeda.
The Missing Link
The FBI confirmed in late September, in an interview with ABC News (which went virtually unnoticed) that the 9-11 ring leader, Mohammed Atta, had been financed from unnamed sources in Pakistan:
"As to September 11th, federal authorities have told ABC News they have now tracked more than $100,000 from banks in Pakistan, to two banks in Florida, to accounts held by suspected hijack ring leader, Mohammed Atta. As well . . . "Time Magazine" is reporting that some of that money came in the days just before the attack and can be traced directly to people connected to Osama bin Laden. It's all part of what has been a successful FBI effort so far to close in on the hijacker's high commander, the money men, the planners and the mastermind."9
The FBI had information on the money trail. They knew exactly who was financing the terrorists. Less than two weeks later, the findings of the FBI were confirmed by Agence France Presse (AFP) and the Times of India, quoting an official Indian intelligence report (which had been dispatched to Washington). According to these two reports, the money used to finance the 9-11 attacks had allegedly been "wired to WTC hijacker Mohammed Atta from Pakistan, by Ahmad Umar Sheikh, at the instance of [ISI Chief] General Mahmoud [Ahmad]." 10 According to the AFP (quoting the intelligence source):
"The evidence we have supplied to the U.S. is of a much wider range and depth than just one piece of paper linking a rogue general to some misplaced act of terrorism." 11
Pakistan's Chief Spy Visits Washington
Now, it just so happens that General Mahmoud Ahmad, the alleged "money man" behind 9-11, was in the U.S. when the attacks occurred. He arrived on the 4th of September, one week before 9-11, on what was described as a routine visit of consultations with his U.S. counterparts. According to Pakistani journalist, Amir Mateen (in a prophetic article published on September 10):
"ISI Chief Lt-Gen. Mahmoud's week-long presence in Washington has triggered speculation about the agenda of his mysterious meetings at the Pentagon and National Security Council. Officially, he is on a routine visit in return to CIA Director George Tenet's earlier visit to Islamabad. Official sources confirm that he met Tenet this week. He also held long parleys with unspecified officials at the White House and the Pentagon. But the most important meeting was with Marc Grossman, U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. One can safely guess that the discussions must have centred around Afghanistan . . . and Osama bin Laden. What added interest to his visit is the history of such visits. Last time Ziauddin Butt, Mahmoud's predecessor, was here, during Nawaz Sharif's government, the domestic politics turned topsy-turvy within days." 12
Nawaz Sharif was overthrown by General Pervez Musharaf. General Mahmoud Ahmad, who became the head of the ISI, played a key role in the military coup.
Schedule of Pakistan's Chief of Military Intelligence Lt. General Mahmoud Ahmad, Washington, 4-13 September 2001
Summer 2001: ISI Chief Lt. General Mahmoud Ahmad transfers $100,000 to 9-11 Ringleader Mohamed Atta.
4 September: Ahmad arrives in the US on an official visit.
4-9 September: He meets his US counterparts including CIA Head George Tenet.
9 September: Assassination of General Massood, leader of the Northern Alliance. Official statement by Northern Alliance points to involvement of the ISI-Osama-Taliban axis.
11 September: Terrorist Attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon. At the time of the attacks, Lt General Ahmad was at a breakfast meeting at the Capitol with the chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees Sen Bob Graham and Rep Porter Goss. Also present at the meeting were Sen. John Kyl and the Pakistani ambassador to the U.S., Maleeha Lodhi.
12-13 September: Meetings between Lt. General Ahmad and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. Agreement on Pakistan's collaboration negotiated between Ahmad and Armitage. Meeting between General Ahmad and Secretary of State Colin Powell
13 September: Ahmad meets Senator Joseph Biden, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Condoleezza Rice's Press Conference
In the course of Condoleezza Rice's May 16 press conference (which took place barely a few hours after the publication of the "Bush Knew" headlines in The New York Post), an accredited Indian journalist asked a question on the role of General Mahmoud Ahmad:
Q: Dr. Rice?
Ms RICE: Yes?
Q: Are you aware of the reports at the time that the ISI chief was in Washington on September 11th, and on September 10th $100,000 was wired from Pakistan to these groups here in this area? And why was he here? Was he meeting with you or anybody in the Administration?
Ms RICE: I have not seen that report, and he was certainly not meeting with me.13
Although there is no official confirmation, in all likelihood General Mahmoud Ahmad met Dr. Rice during the course of his official visit. Moreover, she must have been fully aware of the $100,000 transfer to Mohammed Atta, which had been confirmed by the FBI.
Lost in the barrage of media reports on ‘foreknowledge', this crucial piece of information on the ISI's role in 9-11, implicates key members of the Bush Administration including: CIA Director George Tenet, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage, Under-Secretary of State Marc Grossman, as well Senator Joseph Biden (Democrat), Chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee (who met General Ahmad on the 13th of September)."According to Biden, [Ahmad] pledged Pakistan's cooperation".14.
Mysterious 9-11 Breakfast Meeting on Capitol Hill
On the morning of September 11, General Mahmoud Ahmad, the alleged "money-man" behind the 9-11 hijackers was at a breakfast meeting on Capitol Hill hosted by Senator Bob Graham (Democrat) and Representative Porter Goss, respectively chairmen of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. Also present at this meeting was Pakistan's ambassador to the U.S. Maleeha Lodhi. The report confirms that other members of the Senate and House Intelligence committees were present.
"When the news [of the attacks on the World Trade Center] came, the two Florida lawmakers who lead the House and Senate intelligence committees were having breakfast with the head of the Pakistani intelligence service. Rep. Porter Goss, R-Sanibel, Sen. Bob Graham and other members of the House Intelligence Committee were talking about terrorism issues with the Pakistani official when a member of Goss' staff handed a note to Goss, who handed it to Graham. "We were talking about terrorism, specifically terrorism generated from Afghanistan," Graham said.
(...)
Mahmood Ahmed, director general of Pakistan's intelligence service, was "very empathetic, sympathetic to the people of the United States," Graham said.
Goss could not be reached Tuesday. He was whisked away with much of the House leadership to an undisclosed "secure location." Graham, meanwhile, participated in late-afternoon briefings with top officials from the CIA and FBI." 15
While trivialising the importance of the 9-11 breakfast meeting, The Miami Herald (16 September 2001) confirms that General Ahmad also met Secretary of State Colin Powell in the wake of the 9-11 attacks.
"Graham said the Pakistani intelligence official with whom he met, a top general in the government, was forced to stay all week in Washington because of the shutdown of air traffic "He was marooned here, and I think that gave Secretary of State Powell and others in the administration a chance to really talk with him," Graham said. 16
With the exception of the Florida press (and Salon.com, 14 September), not a word was mentioned in the US media's September coverage of 9-11 concerning this mysterious breakfast reunion.
Eight months later on the 18th of May, two days after the "BUSH KNEW" headline hit the tabloids, the Washington Post published an article on Porter Goss, entitled: "A Cloak But No Dagger; An Ex-Spy Says He Seeks Solutions, Not Scapegoats for 9/11". Focussing on his career as a CIA agent, the article largely served to underscore the integrity and commitment of Porter Goss to waging a "war on terrorism". Yet in an isolated paragraph, the article acknowledged the mysterious 9-11 breakfast meeting with ISI Chief Mahmoud Ahmad, while also confirming that "Ahmad :ran a spy agency notoriously close to Osama bin Laden and the Taliban":
"Now the main question facing Goss, as he helps steer a joint House-Senate investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks, is why nobody in the far-flung intelligence bureaucracy -- 13 agencies spending billions of dollars -- paid attention to the enemy among us. Until it was too late.
Goss says he is looking for solutions, not scapegoats. "A lot of nonsense," he calls this week's uproar about a CIA briefing that alerted President Bush, five weeks before Sept. 11, that Osama bin Laden's associates might be planning airline hijackings.
"None of this is news, but it's all part of the finger-pointing," Goss declared yesterday in a rare display of pique. "It's foolishness." [This statement comes from the man who was having breakfast with the alleged "money-man" behind 9-11 on the morning of September 11]
(...) Goss has repeatedly refused to blame an "intelligence failure" for the terror attacks. As a 10-year veteran of the CIA's clandestine operations wing, Goss prefers to praise the agency's "fine work."
(...)
On the morning of Sept. 11, Goss and Graham were having breakfast with a Pakistani general named Mahmud Ahmed -- the soon-to-be-sacked head of Pakistan's intelligence service. Ahmed ran a spy agency notoriously close to Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. 17
While the Washington Post acknowledges the links between ISI Chief Mahmoud Ahmad and Osama bin Laden, it fails to dwell on the more important question:
What was Mahmoud doing on Capitol Hill on the morning of September 11, together with Rep. Porter Goss and Senator Bob Graham and other members of the Senate and House intelligence committees?
Neither does it acknowledge the fact, amply documented by media reports that "the money-man" behind the hijackers had been entrusted by the Pakistani government to discuss the precise terms of Pakistan's "collaboration" in the "war on terrorism" in meetings held at the State department on the 12th and 13th of September.
When the "Foreknowledge" issue hit the street on May 16th, "Chairman Porter Goss said an existing congressional inquiry has so far found 'no smoking gun' that would warrant another inquiry." 18 This statement points to an obvious "cover-up".
The Investigation and Public Hearings on "Intelligence Failures"
In a bitter irony, Rep. Porter Goss and Senator Bob Graham, --the men who hosted the mysterious September 11 breakfast meeting with the alleged "hijacker's high commander" (to use the FBI's expression), had been put in charge of the investigation and public hearings on so-called "intelligence failures".
Meanwhile, Vice President Dick Cheney had expressed anger on a so-called "leak" emanating from the intelligence committees regarding
"the disclosure of National Security Agency intercepts of messages in Arabic on the eve of the attacks. The messages (...) were in two separate conversations on Sept. 10 and contained the phrases 'Tomorrow is zero hour' and 'The match is about to begin.' The messages were not translated until Sept. 12" 19
Red Carpet Treatment to the Alleged "Money Man" behind 9-11.
The Bush Administration had not only provided red carpet treatment to the alleged "money man" behind the 9-11 attacks, it also had sought his ‘cooperation' in the "war on terrorism". The precise terms of this ‘cooperation' were agreed upon between General Mahmoud Ahmad, representing the Pakistani government and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, in meetings at the State Department on September 12 and 13. In other words, the Administration decided in the immediate wake of 9-11, to seek the ‘cooperation' of Pakistan's ISI in "going after Osama", despite the fact (documented by the FBI) that the ISI was financing and abetting the 9-11 terrorists. Contradictory? One might say that it's like "asking the Devil to go after Dracula."
(By Christina Lamb Diplomatic Correspondent
The Telegraph - London)
6-30-2
Senior officials in the Prime Minister's office have launched an astonishing attack on America's handling of the hunt for Osama bin Laden and al-Qa'eda fugitives.
They have told The Telegraph that troops carrying out house-to-house searches in the remote tribal areas of Pakistan along the Afghanistan border were "blundering" with a "march-in-shooting" approach.
The US action was "backfiring", increasing support for terrorism and making it harder for bin Laden and his henchmen to be caught.
"The Americans think they and the Pakistanis can just march in shooting", said an official closely involved in the direction of the war.
"They don't understand the sensitivities. We have years of experience in the tribal areas and we know using force will just backfire and increase sympathy for al-Qa'eda."
The comments will put further strain on Anglo-US relations after a week of tensions over the Middle East policy and the introduction of steel tariffs.
The scale of the divide between London and Washington was made plain by scathing comments about the Bush administration by one British minister involved in negotiations over the steel tariffs.
"You have to remember that this is a rather unpleasant administration," the minister told The Telegraph yesterday. "The fact there has been a full-blooded attempt to forge a relationship with it hasn't changed its fundamental nature - protectionist and self-interested."
A spokesman for US Central Command angrily rejected the criticism. Col Rick Thomas said: "Our entire approach to removing the Taliban from power and eliminating the al-Qa'eda threat has been sensitive to regional issues.
"We have liaison teams co-ordinating with the Pakistani military but have not been directly involved in any operations in that area."
Although officially part of Pakistan, the tribal areas have governed themselves since British colonial times.
They live by a strict code of honour, attacking and kidnapping outsiders who stray into their mountain valleys.
Federal forces carry no mandate beyond the main highways and disputes with the outside have traditionally been resolved through negotiation between political agents and their chiefs, usually involving large amounts of money.
Pakistan and the people of the tribal areas, who are Pathans like the Taliban, with little sympathy for the war on terrorism, refused to allow the search for al-Qa'eda to move there.
The Pentagon claims that at least 1,000 al-Qa'eda crossed into the tribal areas late last year, possibly including bin Laden, and are now regrouping.
After pressure from Washington, Pakistan agreed to deploy 12,000 troops in April, backed by US Green Berets, CIA paramilitaries and British special forces.
Tribal leaders were furious. "This is not how things work here", said Arsallah Hoti, a leading member of the powerful Yusufzai tribe.
"They have been raiding our villages with less than an hour's notice and even burst in on a wedding because they heard the traditional firing of Kalashnikovs and assumed it was al-Qa'eda."
Mr Hoti visited London last week and expressed his concerns to an adviser to Tony Blair. "I think people who were ambivalent to al-Qa'eda in the tribal areas are now supporting them" he said.
"A lot more could have been achieved through the old colonial way of negotiations rather than the American way of bombing and killing. The British understand that."
Although Mr Blair and Mr Bush have presented the war on terror as a united stand, the argument over how to proceed in the tribal areas is the latest in a series of clashes between the British and American forces on the ground.
The biggest rift came when the Royal Marines launched Operation Condor without telling US commanders. Operation Condor failed to capture any al-Qa'eda and Brigadier Roger Lane, the British commander, was removed from his post.
Operation Condor? Isn't that a Jackie Chan movie? Whose naming these operations?
Retropsychokinesis is the claimed ability of certain subjects to alter random data generated, but not examined, prior to the time the data are presented to the subject. Crazy, you say! Well, there's certainly no mechanism in mainstream physics which could permit such an effect, yet experiments conducted by a number of different researchers over the last 20 years suggest, compellingly according to some analyses, that the probability of the results obtained in such experiments being purely the result of chance is sufficiently low that they would be considered evidence of a causal mechanism in most scientific disciplines.
We neither accept nor dismiss the existence of retropsychokinetic effects--instead we make experiments available to anybody with access to the World-Wide Web in order to discover if there is anything genuinely there. If so, the implications for physics and consciousness studies are profound. That's reason enough to see if there's something spooky going on or just a blip readily explained by the inevitability of improbable results in a few of an immense number of experiments.
June 27 — Two men who work in New York for Iran's mission to the United Nations are being expelled from the United States, ABCNEWS has learned.
Sources told ABCNEWS that the two Iranians were seen five days ago videotaping the Brooklyn Bridge, the entrance to the tunnels into Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty. The men, who have been in the United States only four months and are described as security workers for the mission, were stopped and questioned by New York police, sources said, but were not arrested because of their diplomatic immunity.
U.S. officials plan to expel the men for suspicious activities, some of which are related to irregularities in their identification documents, sources said.
The expulsion of the two Iranians reflect the nationwide tightening of security as the July Fourth holiday approaches. Officials told ABCNEWS the Pentagon is preparing to dramatically increase its combat air patrols over about a dozen U.S. cities during the holiday week.
The Bush administration had scaled back on combat air patrols in recent months because of expense and the toll it was taking on the planes and the pilots. Officials said the increased patrols next week is not in response to a new threat but rather a precaution for any unknown threats.
July 01, 2002
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Two Iranian nationals seen by a New York police officer photographing city landmarks were just tourists nearing the end of their stay in the United States, Iran's mission to the United Nations said on Friday.
"It was these two guys on Saturday, June 22, taking pictures of themselves in Battery Park" at the southern end of Manhattan, said Mohammad Hossein Nosrat, mission spokesman.
The two, who work as security guards at the mission and do not have diplomatic immunity, took 1 minute 40 seconds of videotape of the park and environs, Nosrat said.
At that point, a police officer walked up to them, asked to see their identification cards and then wished them a good day, Nosrat said.
"'Have a good day!' That was it," he said. "There were thousands of tourists around."
He spoke after a U.S. official said late on Thursday that the United States wanted to question the two Iranians, who worked as security guards at Iran's U.N. mission in New York.
The U.S. official said the Iranians were seen taking pictures of area bridges and the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor, potential targets for terrorist attacks against the United States like those that occurred on Sept. 11.
"The U.S. mission is looking into the matter," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Nosrat said neither the Iranian U.N. mission nor the two men had been contacted by police or U.S. officials.
ABC News reported that the United States planned to expel the two men. But both U.S. and Iranian officials denied this was the case.
F O R T D E T R I C K, Md., June 27 (AP)— A biodefense researcher whose home was searched by FBI agents commissioned a 1999 study depicting a hypothetical anthrax attack by mail, The (Baltimore) Sun reported today.
The study was commissioned by Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, 48, while he was working in McLean, Va., for defense contractor Science Applications International Corp., the newspaper said.
The study was written by bioterrorism expert William C. Patrick III and describes placing 2.5 grams of Bacillus globigii, an anthrax simulant, in a standard business envelope, according to the Sun.
The newspaper said portions of the study were read to it by a person who has a copy.
A telephone message by The Associated Press left today for an FBI spokesman in Washington was not immediately returned.
Hatfill's telephone at the Detrick Plaza Apartments has been disconnected and nobody answered a knock on the door Wednesday by an Associated Press reporter.
Authorities said Hatfill volunteered to have the apartment searched to clear his name.
Hatfill has denied involvement in the anthrax mailings, complaining to The Sun in a March telephone message that he had been fired from the defense contractor and blaming news media inquiries.
"I've been in this field for a number of years, working until 3 o'clock in the morning, trying to counter this type of weapon of mass destruction, and, sir, my career is over at this time," Hatfill said.
Hatfill worked in the virology division of the U.S. Army Medical Institute of Infectious Disease at Fort Detrick, base spokesman Chuck Dasey said. He worked for two years at the institute on a fellowship from the National Research Council, Dasey said.
He stopped working at Fort Detrick in September 1999 and was employed by Science Applications until March 4.
The Sun said Hatfill was dismissed after his Defense Department security clearance was suspended on Aug. 23. Ben Haddad, spokesman for the defense contractor, said Wednesday he couldn't comment on the report.
Although Hatfill likely had access to anthrax in labs shared with bacteriology researchers, his primary duties didn't involve working with anthrax, Dasey said.
Five people died in the anthrax attacks that began in late September.
(FROM 12-28-98)
POMONA, Calif. (AP) _ A telephoned anthrax threat forced about 800 people to be quarantined for several hours inside a dance club Sunday - at least the fifth such hoax in Southern California this month.
No trace of the potentially deadly bacterium was found in preliminary tests, authorities said.
A Los Angeles County hazardous materials team and the FBI's Domestic Terrorism Task Force went to the Glass House late Saturday after a man called police and said ``a significant quantity'' of anthrax would be released, police Lt. Gary Graham said.
If inhaled, anthrax spores can cause respiratory failure and death within a week if left untreated.
Clubgoers were quarantined inside for about four hours while the air-conditioning system and all vents and filters were checked and samples taken for study, Graham said.
Authorities have not determined if the threat is related to four others.
A telephoned threat on Dec. 21 emptied two Van Nuys courthouses and forced about 1,500 people into quarantine for several hours. On Dec. 18, a U.S. Bankruptcy Court in nearby Woodland Hills was targeted and about 90 people underwent antibiotic treatment.
On Dec. 17, an office building in the Westwood area of Los Angeles received a letter threatening exposure to anthrax. On Dec. 14, another hoax occurred in Riverside County when a Perris School District secretary opened a letter that read: ``You've been exposed to anthrax.''
Anthrax hoaxes also have occurred in Colorado, Kentucky, and Tennessee.
By Dave Altimari, Jack Dolan, and David Lightman
Hartford Courant Staff Writers
6-28-2
Former Army microbiologist Steven J. Hatfill is either a pawn in an FBI attempt to recharge its stalled anthrax investigation, or a potential suspect who holds critical clues to solving the case that has bedeviled the agency for the past nine months.
Those two interpretations of the FBI's high-profile search of Hatfill's residence circulated through the scientific and law enforcement communities Wednesday - one day after agents removed garbage bags full of evidence from a Frederick, Md., apartment complex, and, as TV news crews circled overhead, loaded them into a large rental truck .
"Their intent was clearly to put his name in the public eye. The only question is why," said a microbiologist who has been interviewed by the FBI.
"It was either strictly for show - a bone tossed to Congress and the media - or they want to put pressure on him by starting a public investigation to stimulate the stalled non-public investigation," said the microbiologist, who would speak only on condition of anonymity.
Wednesday, a dozen FBI agents searched a refrigerated mini-storage facility in downtown Ocala, Fla. The local NBC News affiliate reported that agents removed boxes from a locker rented by Hatfill. The scientist's parents owned a horse farm in Ocala until three years ago.
After its public show of investigative aggressiveness in Maryland Tuesday, and before the evidence had even been examined, bureau officials insisted the search of Hatfill's apartment hadn't produced anything significant.
The FBI also pointed out that Hatfill had agreed to the search and is not considered a suspect.
"I do not know what all of the results of the search were, but I can tell you there were no hazardous materials found in the apartment," said a law enforcement source.
"I don't know how much in advance he knew about the search, but he has been cooperating with us fully all along," the source said.
Neither Hatfill nor his Virginia attorney, Thomas C. Carter, could be reached for comment Wednesday.
Hatfill has told several media outlets that he has a letter from the FBI stating "he never has been and is not now" a suspect in the anthrax case. The FBI has declined to comment on whether such a letter exists.
If the FBI hoped criticism of its "Amerithrax" investigation would be muted by the Hatfill search, at least one senator who received an anthrax-laced letter last fall continued Wednesday to express displeasure with the pace and intensity of the probe.
"I have asked for another briefing by the FBI on the anthrax investigation," Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., said. "I don't know if one has actually been set yet. I hope it has, because I have a lot of questions."
Daschle and Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., received the two most potent anthrax-laden letters last October. They were part of a series of anthrax letter attacks that killed five people, including 94-year-old Ottilie Lundgren of Oxford. Thirteen more people were sickened. The two letters to Congress shut down the Hart Senate office building for several months.
A source close to Daschle called the search of Hatfill's apartment and the FBI's reluctance to share information frustrating.
"In light of yesterday's news, and in light of everything else that's going on, we feel we don't know where things stand," the source said.
Another source said Daschle is hoping for an FBI briefing as early as today.
Hatfill has bounced on and off the FBI's ever-changing list of potential suspects for the past several months. That his house was searched is not that unusual. FBI officials said they have conducted many searches during the investigation. But all of them, including an earlier search of Hatfill's house and car, were done quietly with no media attention.
For example, in December two agents visited the home of Joseph Farchaus, another former scientist at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick. The scientist now lives about 15 minutes outside Trenton, N.J., where several anthrax-contaminated letters were mailed. It is the heart of the FBI's target area. The last paper Farchaus published before leaving the infectious diseases institute concerned putting anthrax in aerosol form.
The agents asked questions, searched the man's home and later gave him a polygraph test, which he passed. His New York attorney, Donald Buchwald, said Wednesday the FBI has not contacted him since.
But the scrutiny of Hatfill appears to be intensifying. His background has several intriguing aspects - including medical school training in Africa and his connection to biological weapons training programs run by the CIA.
Hatfill graduated in 1984 from the Godfrey Huggins Medical School in Zimbabwe, which was known as Rhodesia until 1980.
Not far from the medical school in the nation's capital, Harare, is the upper-middle-class suburb of Greendale. The anthrax-laced letters to Daschle and Leahy each contained the same fictitious return address: 4th Grade, Greendale School, Franklin Park, N.J. There is no Greendale School in New Jersey. But there is a grade school by that name in the Harare suburb.
In the late 1970s, when Hatfill was in Rhodesia, an anthrax outbreak killed hundreds and sickened thousands of villagers. In 1993, an African news agency reported that a former officer from the white minority army's special forces claimed that the anthrax outbreak that killed 182 and sickened more than 10,000 people between 1978 and 1980 was launched by the army.
All of the fatalities, and all but a handful of those sickened, were black. Other members of the white government's army have denied that the outbreak was a deliberate attack, claiming it was part of a natural pattern of anthrax in the region.
On his college biography and his resume, Hatfill says he worked with the Rhodesian army and a group called the Selous Scouts during the time frame of the anthrax outbreak. The Selous Scouts were an elite unit of the white Rhodesian government's army that specialized in tracking and killing enemy units in the back country.
One former classmate, Mark Hanly, who is now a pathologist in Georgia, said he always doubted Hatfill's military claims.
Another classmate remembers Hatfill as a military enthusiast.
"He carried a lot of weapons around all the time, RPGs [rocket propelled grenades] and stuff like that. On the weekends he would go with the army and they would do special forces kind of stuff," said David Andrewes, a classmate who now lives in Massachusetts.
Like dozens of other current and former employees of labs known to have handled the strain of anthrax used in the mail attacks, Hatfill fits many aspects of a profile of the killer released by the FBI last November. That profile stated the FBI believed the culprit was a lone, disgruntled, former military scientist.
Hatfill has been immunized against anthrax and had access to the bacteria while he worked as a research fellow at the Fort Detrick lab in the late 1990s. He is also very comfortable working with extremely hazardous material. Hatfill studied the deadly Ebola virus in the Army's highest level "hot suite" during his stint at the Maryland lab.
Hatfill later became a member of UNSCOM, the United Nations-sponsored group that went into Iraq after the gulf war to look for that country's biological weapons stockpiles.
Another member of UNSCOM was David Franz, who later became the colonel in charge of the Fort Detrick infectious disease center. Hatfill worked at the center from 1997 to 1999 in the virology department. He has never claimed to have worked with anthrax, but in 1999 he was involved with a CIA-run course on chemical and biological weapons.
Hatfill is a protege of William Patrick, a former bioweapons expert at the Fort Detrick center when it ran an offensive biological weapons program in the late 1960s. Patrick has acknowledged helping scientists at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah make dry or "weaponized" anthrax a few years ago.
On his resume, Hatfill states he has "a working knowledge of the former U.S. and foreign BW [biological weapons] programs, wet and dry BW agents and large-scale production of bacterial, rickettsial, and viral BW pathogens and toxins."
The FBI's sudden focus on Hatfill comes shortly after its investigation appeared to be at a standstill. The agency recently announced that it wanted to interview and polygraph more than 200 current and former employees of the Fort Detrick center and Dugway, a process that will take several months.
In the meantime, congressional leaders have promised to hold a hearing on the anthrax investigation to try to get their questions answered.
W A S H I N G T O N, June 27 —The Federal Aviation Administration is banning flights near the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore and the St. Louis Gateway Arch during the July 4 holidays.
The FAA prohibition on flights near the Statue of Liberty began Tuesday. It will run through Sept. 30, banning all planes flying under 1,500 feet within a 6,000-foot radius of the landmark.
At Mount Rushmore, all planes flying under 10,000 feet above sea level will be banned between 12:01 a.m. local time Wednesday to 11:59 p.m. July 5, within a 4.5-mile radius.
In St. Louis, planes cannot fly lower than 3,000 feet from 12:01 a.m. to 11:59 p.m. local time July 4 in a 3.4-mile radius around the arch.
The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, which represents pilots of private planes, said the restrictions were issued because of concern about possible terrorist attacks over the Independence Day holiday.
FAA spokesman William Shumann said the bans were issued at the request of the National Park Service.
The FAA had banned flights over the World Trade Center site in New York City since Sept. 11, but removed the restrictions Tuesday because the recovery work had finished, Shumann said.
The agency also has reminded pilots not to circle around or loiter over conventional power plants, nuclear plants, dams, oil refineries, industrial complexes and similar facilities.
Thu Jun 27, 1:45 AM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. government experts, wary of al Qaeda's skills on the Internet, are concerned that Osama bin Laden 's guerrilla network may be planning cyber-attacks targeting nuclear power plants, dams or other critical structures, The Washington Post reported on Thursday.
An FBI investigation of suspicious surveillance of key computers discovered "multiple casings of sites" nationwide, the report said, citing a Defense Department summary of the probe.
Routed through telecommunications switches in Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Pakistan, the visitors studied emergency telephone systems, electrical generation and transmission, water storage and distribution, nuclear power plants and gas facilities, the Post said.
U.S. officials said some of the mysterious computer probes targeted a class of digital devices that allow remote control of such things as fire dispatch services and pipelines, the newspaper said.
U.S. law enforcement and national security officials cited by the Post said information about those devices, including how to program them, turned up on al Qaeda computers seized in January by U.S. forces in Afghanistan .
A computer taken from an al Qaeda office contained models of a dam, made with structural architecture and engineering software, that enabled the planners to simulate its catastrophic failure.
Bush administration officials declined to say whether they had identified a specific dam as a possible target, the newspaper said.
U.S. investigators also have found evidence in the logs that mark a browser's path through the Internet that al Qaeda operators spent time on sites that offer software and programming instructions for the digital switches that run power, water, transport and communications grids, the Post reported.
The newspaper also said some al Qaeda prisoners have told interrogators about intentions, in general terms, to use those tools.
(UKIndependent)
27 June 2002
World equity markets were dealt a further body blow yesterday when WorldCom, one of America's largest and fastest- growing telecoms companies, admitted to accounting improprieties involving $3.8bn. The Securities and Exchange Commission, the US financial watchdog, described the scale of the deception as unprecedented and announced last night it would charge WorldCom with fraud.
The group's chief financial officer, Scott Sullivan, was fired and the US Justice Department began a criminal investigation of the company's accounting practices. President George Bush said the deception was "outra-geous" and promised that those responsible would be punished.
The dollar was put under renewed pressure as the enormity of the latest accounting scandal to hit corporate America became apparent. Stock markets across Europe and Asia fell sharply, although the Dow Jones was down only six points at 9120.
While bankers scrambled to save the company from insolvency, WorldCom announced it would fire more than a quarter of its workforce, 17,000 people.
Like the collapsed energy company Enron, WorldCom was audited by Andersen, the firm of accountants already convicted for obstructing the course of justice by shredding evidence linked to Enron's demise. Andersen claimed WorldCom had kept it in the dark on the misreporting of its figures.
There is probably no more glaring an example than WorldCom of a company that in every respect came to epitomise the greed-inspired frenzy of the latest boom. Enron fell first, but from the moment the larger-than-life former basketball coach Bernie Ebbers stepped on to the global stage, his New Economy creation, WorldCom, looked the greater house of cards.
WorldCom's origins go back to the early 1980s as a telecommunications bucket shop based in Clinton, Mississippi, reselling capacity bought from others at rock-bottom prices. But not until the mid-1990s, when Mr Ebbers, now 60, was taken under the wing of one of Wall Street's biggest investment banks, Salomon Smith Barney, did WorldCom hit the big time. There followed in rapid succession a mind-boggling 60 acquisitions, culminating in WorldCom outbidding British Telecom for one of the biggest long-distance carriers in America, MCI.
WorldCom was to become perhaps the most spectacular creation of the dot.com era. No one better personified the excitement and drama of the telecommunications boom than the 6ft 4in Mr Ebbers, with his cowboy boots and leather waistcoat.
Sir Peter Bonfield, former chief executive of BT, delights in recalling the three days of frantic negotiations with Mr Ebbers over BT's 20 per cent shareholding in MCI. Sir Peter wanted cash for the stake but Mr Ebbers was determined he should take WorldCom shares instead.
Mr Ebbers' final shot was to warn Sir Peter that hewould certainly be sued by his own shareholders for failing to take stock in a company whose share price was heading for the stratosphere. Insisting on cash was probably the best business decision Sir Peter ever made.
WorldCom's collapse, coming so soon after Enron, Tyco, Global Crossing and a series of lesser fraudulent failures, has caused America's hitherto unchallenged claim to corporate and economic supremacy to be questioned as never before. As the investment guru Warren Buffett has remarked, only when the tide goes out do you get to see who has been swimming with their trunks off. What now seems clear is that an army of chancers was skinny dipping in the great sea of the American economy.
The only consolation in the latest scandal is that the firm of auditors meant to keep watch on behalf of investors and bankers, Andersen, was the same one that presided over the collapse of Enron and Global Crossing, which means the American regulators can lay at least part of the blame for the débâcle at the door of what has already been judged a corrupt firm of accountants. Even so, it is not much of a rope to cling to.
The enormity of what has happened was all too apparent in the wording of the statement issued yesterday by the Securities and Exchange Commission, America's main financial watchdog. "The WorldCom disclosures confirm that accounting improprieties of unprecedented magnitude have been committed in the public markets," the commission said.
Just how financial markets fell victim to one of the oldest accounting fiddles in the book that of bolstering profits by treating operating expenses as capital spending will have to await the judgement of the flotilla of financial investigators.
The sheer scale of the fraud, $3.8bn over 15 months, has raised a huge question mark over American standards of corporate probity and disclosure. Investors are losing their trust in stock markets. Companies once valued in hundreds of billions of dollars are now worth little or nothing.
WorldCom and Enron were the stars of the New Economy, to which the old rules of markets and economics seemed no longer to apply. Now they have become broken monuments to a period of excess unprecedented in the modern age.
As the good times roll, investors, bankers and managers become oblivious to risk and in what seasoned observers refer to as "reaching for yield", throw caution to the wind in their pursuit of easy money. As the boom reaches its zenith, some companies will in desperation resort to fraud and deception to maintain the pretence of ever-growing revenues and profits.
Eventually, the present crisis in corporate America will have a cathartic effect. Everyone in sight will be prosecuted and sued, the rules and standards will be tightened, the US economic model will be rebuilt and strengthened, and, once everyone has forgotten the wealth destruction of the technology bubble, there will be another boom, raising altogether different issues and concerns.
But in the meantime, there is plenty of scope for things to get a great deal worse before they get better. For most of the past decade, America has been the dynamo of growth in the world economy. US growth and consumption came to be supported by an apparently endless supply of foreign capital.
With the end of the technology boom, and the now growing crisis of confidence in corporate America, that process has gone into sharp reverse. As the life-enhancing supply of foreign capital is switched off, the dollar is coming under growing pressure in the foreign exchange markets and the economy is slowing. The WorldCom débâcle may mark the bottom of the present cycle, but the climb back out is going to be long and hard.
Worldcom scandal: Currencies: Latest Wall Street disaster sends investors all over the world running for cover
27 June 2002
(UKIndependent)
The US dollar yesterday moved to the brink of free fall a nightmare scenario for the world economy after reverberations from the WorldCom scandal triggered panic among investors.
The currency came within a whisker of parity with the euro and crashed through key psychological barriers against the yen and the pound as investors rushed to dump dollar assets.
"This is threatening to become a disorderly market," David Bloom, global economist at HSBC, said. "There's no better way to show a loss of confidence in a country than through its currency."
Speculation mounted that the Federal Reserve would lead the world in a fresh round of interest rates cuts amid fears of a deflationary slump, although it kept rates on hold last night.
The dollar tumbled as much as 1.5 per cent to 99.42 cents to the euro, its weakest level since February 2000, from 97.22 late Tuesday. It fell below 120 yen for the first time despite three interventions by the Bank of Japan overnight to support the US currency. The misery was compounded by confusion over the US's dollar policy and a roller-coaster day on Wall Street.
The Dow gyrated between a 200 point fall and 34 point gain before ending down 6.7 at 9,120.1, while the Nasdaq recovered from 2 per cent fall to end up 5.3 points at 1429.3, still within a whisker of a five-year closing low. In Europe the FTSE 100 fell 100 points to 4,531, above an earlier nine-month low of 4,442.
The US President, George Bush, appeared to imply the administration had abandoned its strong dollar policy. The White House later was forced to insist there had been no policy change after Mr Bush said the currency would "seek its own level based on market forces".
The WorldCom scandal, coming hard on the heels of the Enron collapse and crises at Tyco and Adelphia, is the latest piece of news to undermine the dollar.
Sharp falls on Wall Street and fears about the solidity of the US economy have slowly undermined the dollar over the past few weeks. A dollar collapse is seen as one of the greatest threats to the nascent global economic recovery.
Mark Cliffe, a global economist at ING Financial Markets, said: "If the dollar's decline turns explosive, this could compound the problems of the US asset markets as currency losses raise fears of a massive capital flight out of the US."
Americans have collectively acted as the consumer of last resort through the financial crises of 1997, 1998, 1999 and even during the latest slump, sucking in imports from the rest of the world. More importantly, investors were happy to pour money into US markets to cash in on booming hi-tech industries.
Now, however, outsiders may be deterred from pumping any more money into the US, for fear the cash will simply be squandered. "We thought it was a bubble, but perhaps the whole thing was overstated," Mr Bloom said. "The dollar bull market was just plain wrong."
A dollar crisis would be a major headache for the Fed in its struggle to juggle tumbling markets with signs of a strong economic rebound. There was serious speculation ahead of last night's monetary policy decision that the Fed would cut rates despite figures showing new home sales soared to a record and factory orders increased in May.
Gold rose as much as $6.33, or 2 per cent, to $325.75 an ounce in London. The metal has risen 16 per cent so far this year, its best first-half performance since 1980.
LONDON, July 2 (Reuters) - Billionaire financier George Soros repeated on Tuesday his charge that U.S. President George W. Bush's administration was to blame for the recent drop in the dollar's value.
"There is no confidence in the Bush administration's management of the global economy. This is a vote of no-confidence by investors in the world," the 72-year-old Soros told a committee of lawmakers in the British parliament.
Speaking to the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee, Soros said, "The Bush administration is following a policy similar to the Reagan administration of the early 1980s, which is of an increasing budget deficit, expansion of defence spending and a financing of it from abroad."
Late last week the hedge fund king-turned-philanthropist made the same criticism in a speech in London. He said the fall in the dollar's value had taken him by surprise, however.
The European single currency, the euro, did not present an ideal alternative store of value to the dollar while the recent appreciation of the Japanese yen presented a threat to the fragile Japanese economic recovery, Soros said.
"Earlier, the strengthening of the yen could be attributed to a possible cyclical recovery in Japan. But now the Japanese market is declining, which means people are going home (into the yen) out of fear," he said. Soros's comments come in the wake of the dollar's recent fall to a two-year low of $0.990 against the euro. The dollar's decline has coincided with falls in U.S. stock markets which have been hit by a number of high-profile U.S. corporate scandals, with the latest at telecoms firm WorldCom.
Soros, whose assault on the British pound in 1992 resulted in the ejection of sterling from the European exchange rate mechanism, described the current bout of dollar weakness as the "Bush bear market."
Elsewhere, in comments spanning issues such as globalisation and financial crises in Latin America, Soros urged the world's leading central banks such as the U.S. Federal Reserve to help holders of Brazilian debt cope with high interest rates.
"It is an unsustainable situation. This would be an occasion where there would be a need for a lender of last resort," Soros said.
Soros said he favoured some kind of tax on global financial transactions to raise revenues, although he doubted whether a suggested "Tobin Tax" on foreign exchange dealings, named after the late Nobel Prize-winning economist James Tobin, was a practical idea. Last year European Union finance ministers asked the bloc's Commission in September to evaluate the feasibility of the tax, but they viewed it with little enthusiasm.
Soros said the Tobin Tax could cut liquidity in global foreign exchange markets, making price movements more, not less, volatile.
(by CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS-Solari.com)
On September 11, America experienced a national security failure. Despite America’s annual investment of approximately $350 billion in what is supposed to be the world's finest military and intelligence capacity, some 3,000 people died as the world watched helplessly. An hour after the first act of war, the Department of Defense could not protect its own headquarters.
Shortly after 9-11, American taxpayers were informed that this failure was a result of our having too much freedom and not enough military and intelligence capacity and resources. We underwrote a $48 billion increase in the defense budget and passed legislation that removed many constitutionally guaranteed freedoms. Meantime, the press reported efforts by foreign governments to warn us of the impending attacks as well as pre-9-11 reports of insider trading patterns in stocks of companies adversely impacted by these tragic events — and no similar trading patterns in other stocks in the same industries.
Soon after 9-11 came the Enron bankruptcy and revelations of massive fraud by a company that played a pivotal role in determining American energy and foreign policy — indeed, even being delegated the power to interview and choose the government official who would be its regulator.
Until the Enron revelations, it was hard for most Americans to comprehend the magnitude of Washington’s corruption. Conservatives create conservative justifications to give out government contracts and subsidies that reward the powers that be. Progressives create progressive justifications to do the same. Government “policy” is engineered to generate those contracts, subsidies and regulations that fatten banking and corporate profits and “pump and dump” the stock market. When the Enron game was up, insiders sold their stock at the top of the market to our pension plans, which take the losses when the stock goes bust.
The estimated $500 billion to $1 trillion of money laundering each year through the US financial system translates into significant influence in all sectors of our economy and government.[1]
In 1998, the CIA Inspector General issued a report that confirmed the complicity of the CIA and Department of Justice in marketing narcotics into American cities. A deeper look reveals that the Clinton and Bush families were partners in bringing in Iran Contra arms and drugs through a little airport in Mena, Arkansas.
The very same Wall Street investment houses and banks that acted as investors in, and lenders to, fraudulent Enron ventures also fed at the Mena, Arkansas trough. Numerous of the current Bush appointees were complicit in these Iran-Contra activities.
Whether Democrat or Republican, we have a government controlled by people who financed their rise to power by threatening the lives of innocent civilians. Are these the type of people who worry about the safety of ordinary Americans? I think not.
The financial questions are troubling, as the federal financial books appear to be as “cooked” as Enron’s. US citizens pay federal taxes of $5,324 every year for every man, woman and child.[2]
Of that amount, $4,835, or approximately 85% is spent by eleven agencies that cannot produce reliable financial systems or audits.[3]
The Departments of Defense (DOD) and Housing and Urban Development (HUD), with Lockheed Martin as their lead contractor, are missing over $3.3 trillion between fiscal 1998-2000.[4]
The numerous allegations regarding fraud, government sponsored narcotics trafficking and black budget funding over the last two decades at both DOD and HUD are deeply disturbing.
In the summer of 2000, a senior staffer for the Senate HUD appropriations subcommittee asked me what I thought was going on at HUD. I deferred. The staffer said, “HUD is being run as a criminal enterprise.” HUD cannot be run as a criminal enterprise without Lockheed taking a lead role.
With Lockheed’s stock up over 60% since 9-11, as a result of new War on Terrorism- related contracts, it is time to ask where the loyalty of government contractors lies.
We are awarding rich financial bonuses to those who failed 3,000 men, women and children and their families and the country which it was their sacred duty to defend.
The time has come for Americans to investigate what happened on 9-11, including the reports of prior knowledge and insider trading. We must insist on full Internet access and disclosure of all federal contracts and bank accounts, by both agency and geographical location, and ownership of all private government contractors and U.S. Treasury bank depositories.
The time has come to hold those in control accountable to the citizens whom they are paid to serve. The time has come to stop rewarding failure.
* + * + *
Notes:
1. Estimate by the U.S. Department of Justice.
2. Based on 1999 IRS statistics and the April 2000 Census.
3. Agencies based on Senator Fred Thompson’s report “Government on the Brink” and Congressman Horn’s annual report card on federal agency audits in fiscal 2000. Amounts based on the President’s 2002 budget before the 9-11 increases.
4. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld confirmed in a Congressional testimony that the Department of Defense had undocumentable adjustments in one year of $2.3 trillion.
- * Catherine Austin Fitts is the President of Solari, Inc. ( http://solari.com) and a former Assistant Secretary of Housing – Federal Housing Commissioner in the first Bush Administration. She publishes a column on Scoop which is distributed for free by email - see... Free My Scoop to sign up.
- ** Learn more about Global Outlook and the Centre for Research on Globalization.
http://globalresearch.ca/
CounterPunch.org
6-27-2
Palestinian Authority President Yasir Arafat stunned the world yesterday by demanding that the United States hold democratic elections for a new Chief Executive before it attempts to continue in its role as broker between Israel and Palestine.
"Mr. Bush is tainted by his association with Jim-Crow-style selective disenfranchisement and executive strong-arm tactics in a southeastern province controlled by his brother," said Mr. Arafat, who was elected with 87% of the vote in 1996 elections in the West Bank and Gaza, declared to be free and fair by international observers, including former U.S. president Jimmy Carter. "Our count shows that he would have lost the election if his associates hadn't deprived so many thousands of African-Americans, an oppressed minority, of the right to vote. He is not the man to bring peace to the Middle East."
Hugo Chavez, elected president of Venezuela with 62% of the popular vote, concurred with Mr. Arafat. Chavez has long been a victim of Bush's anti-democratic attitude, as the Bush administration funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars through the "National Endowment for Democracy" to anti-Chavez forces and reportedly gave the go-ahead for an attempted military coup by those forces. "After it was over and I was back in power," said Chavez, "his administration actually told me 'legitimacy is not conferred by a majority vote.' Unless, of course, it's a majority of the Supreme Court. I respect the local traditions, however quaint, of the United States, but he hardly sets the best example for the Middle East, does he? Why don't we get back to that idea of an international conference to settle the question of Palestine?"
Bush was not without his supporters, however. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, elected head of a country that legally discriminates among its citizens on the basis of religious belief, forbids political candidates from advocating an end to that discrimination, and disenfranchises an entire people through military occupation, dismissed the call as "absurd."
Hamid Karzai, recently "elected" head of Afghanistan by a grand council, or "loya jirga," in which a foreign body, controlled by the United States, selected delegates; unelected warlords who had ravaged the country were permitted to control the meeting and to threaten delegates who refused to vote their way; and the U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, refused to allow at least two other candidates to stand for election, added his support for Mr. Bush in his hour of need. Said Karzai, "In Afghanistan, we have the loya jirga. In the United States, you have your own process -- as we understand, it's traditional over there for corporations to play a large part in electing officials and writing legislation. We're very interested in looking into that kind of system ourselves."
Vojislav Kostunica, chosen head of Yugoslavia in an election where the United States spent an estimated $25 million to influence the results, was also keen to rush to Bush's defense, indicating that he saw no procedural problems with the 2000 elections.
And Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia, long derided for his claim that "Asian culture" is at odds with universal human rights, added, "The elections are strictly an internal matter, and should have no bearing on the status of the United States as a broker. The Palestinians' high-handedness is a serious threat to national independence."
In a surprise move, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, long an ally of the United States, supported Arafat's call, saying, "While we're at it, let's take another look at our agreement on American independence. George Washington was not only unelected, he did rather associate with terrorists. Benedict Arnold would have been a much more suitable partner for peace, n'est ce pas?"
Arafat, busy working on a plan to find a new Israeli leader not tainted with the massacre of hundreds of innocents in Sabra and Shatila to negotiate with, could not be reached for further comment.
(JerusalemPost)
Jul. 2, 2002
Groups affiliated with Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement yesterday called upon all Palestinian organizations, including the Islamic movements, to attack Zionist and American targets everywhere in response to US efforts "to remove the legitimate leadership of the Palestinian people."
Fatah's military wing, al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades, issued a statement yesterday in which it threatened "to strike at Zionist and American interests and installations" in Israel and throughout the world if the United States maintains its opposition to Arafat.
The statement warned US President George W. Bush that it will return to the type of fedayeen operations that prevailed in 1970s if what they called the conspiracy against Arafat continued.
The statement called for boycotting US Secretary of State Colin Powell and said there is a conspiracy to harm the Palestinian leadership.
Arafat later issued a statement distancing himself from the Fatah statement, saying it was not made in his name.
Meanwhile, thousands of Palestinians chanting, "We are not beggars," marched in Gaza City yesterday protesting against a lack of work and food.
In the West Bank, curfews were lifted for a number of hours yesterday in all but two Palestinian cities where IDF forces have been deployed in Operation Determined Path.
In Jenin, Hebron, Ramallah, Kalkilya, and Bethlehem Israeli security officials increased the number of curfew-free hours to allow local residents to stock up on goods and high school students to take matriculation exams. The curfews were reinstated in the late afternoon. Only in Tulkarm and Nablus was the curfew not lifted.
The IDF said it plans to lift the curfews imposed on the West Bank towns and cities for longer periods in the coming days in order to allow residents to go about their daily routine.
Elsewhere, the IDF continued widespread arrests of Palestinian terrorists.
Soldiers from the Nahal haredi battalion yesterday arrested Nizal Sawiftah, the head of Islamic Jihad in Tubas, northeast of Nablus.
Security forces arrested Bilal Mohtasab, a Hamas activist, and Munzar Jimil Abdel Razek Jaisidi, affiliated with Tanzim, in Hebron, and a Hamas activist in Nablus.
More Palestinians suspected of terrorist activities were arrested in a village south of Tubas, and in Dahiniye and El-Bureij in the Gaza Strip, security sources reported.
According to Palestinian reports, security forces arrested a Palestinian woman in Nablus who was planning to carry out a suicide bombing in Israel.
Soldiers arrested a Palestinian at the A-Ram roadblock north of Jerusalem when he attempted to snatch one of their weapons.
Soldiers checking a deserted car in Hebron found a pipe bomb, ceramic flak jacket, a fragmentation grenade, and bullets, the IDF reported.
At the Dehaishe refugee camp southwest of Bethlehem a bomb was thrown at a tank.
Early yesterday, IDF forces entered the villages of Adora, west of Hebron, Beit Rima, northwest of Ramallah, and Salfit, south of Ariel and north of Ramallah, to search for suspects involved in terrorist attacks.
In the Gaza Strip, a bomb was thrown at an IDF patrol operating near Rafah. One soldier was lightly wounded and hospitalized. Security forces later demolished three shacks on the outskirts of Rafah due to continued attacks by Palestinians against soldiers operating in the area. According to Palestinian sources, the IDF destroyed eight houses.
A day after Jewish residents in Judea and Samaria peacefully dismantled 11 of 20 encampments in accordance with a deal struck with IDF and government officials, Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said 34 illegal encampments have to be dismantled for security considerations. He said nine encampments were scheduled to be removed in two weeks, but did not specify a time frame for the rest.
Speaking on Army Radio, Ben-Eliezer said: "From our documents and reports we have 34 encampments that are defined as illegal and require evacuation for purposes of security."
In the Gaza City march, the demonstrators expressed their anger at the PA, accusing it of corruption, but stopped short of attacking Arafat. At the end of the rally, demonstrators shouted slogans in support of Arafat in response to Bush's call to oust him, according to a Palestinian source. But in general, the mood was against the PA, the source added.
"There is no problem with al-Khetiar [the old man], but all faces around him must be removed," said Ahmad el-Laham of the Khan Yunis refugee camp, as others nodded agreement.
"Some of those who should be serving the public are robbing the public," said Tawfik al-Mashwaki. He said he traveled five hours through Israeli checkpoints to attend the rally.
Most of the demonstrators were Palestinian laborers. The crowd marched on Arafat's damaged headquarters to express its anger.
"I warn that there is a hunger revolution coming... It is not politics anymore, it is survival," said Bassam Abu Sharif, an adviser to Arafat.
Demonstrators demanded PA jobs or stipends. Several demonstrators held up empty plates. Others accused officials of embezzling foreign aid.
"Where is the money we see donated by Arab nations on our TV screens? We get nothing," a man shouted. "It was stolen," others responded.
Palestinian officials warned that the harsh economic situation, together with frustration, will lead people to support Islamic extremists who are providing social and welfare networks and lead to more extremism.
"This situation will only breed more suicide bombers," Abu Sharif warned.
"Israel is the cause of all miseries, but the Palestinian Authority has a duty to protect its citizens from hunger," said march organizer Muhammad Dahman. Palestinians are unhappy with widespread corruption and what they perceive the slow process of reform, he said.
Arafat is under international pressure to make his government more transparent and introduce due process to his institutions. Backed by the United States, Israel says such reform is a prerequisite for the resumption of peace talks. However, Arafat said he cannot proceed with the reforms as long as Israel is imposing a curfew on most of the West Bank.
"The Palestinian Authority is in deep financial crisis because of the war of starvation launched against it by Israel and because of an absence of international financial aid," said Palestinian Labor Minister Ghassan al-Khatib.
According to unofficial Israeli figures, at least 120,000 Palestinians worked in Israel before the intifada began, earning up to $30 a day. According to World Bank statistics, 50% of Palestinians now live on $2 a day or less.
There is reportedly close to 60% unemployment in the Gaza Strip. Dahman said at least 135,000 people lost jobs during the 21 months of violence, 40,000 of whom used to work in Israel.
("Old boy" owned Newsmax.com)
June 28, 2002
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat began using a soft-core sex video on Thursday to entice new "martyrs" to the cause of killing Israelis.
Arafat's state-run Palestinian Broadcast Company debuted the sexy promotional film aimed at would-be suicide bombers, with footage that shows how Palestinian martyrs will be serviced by six dozen anxious-to-please virgins in the afterlife.
The video, which preceded Thursday's 3 p.m. afternoon news, shows a young Palestinian man walking with his girlfriend as he spies some Israeli soldiers off in the distance.
According to a report on the Mideast news website "Media Line," the man in the video clearly starts thinking about how to strike out at the Israeli soldiers.
As he musters his courage to commit a terrorist act, the image of a bevy of stunningly beautiful young women appears out of nowhere. The girls are between 18 and 22 years of age.
Clad in billowy white robes, the attractive women smile fetchingly as they call to the prospective martyr, making motions with their hands as if to say "come here" and "join us."
Next the film shows the Palestinian man being captured by the Israeli Defense Force after his attempted terrorist attack is foiled, which, the film suggests, means he faces certain death.
After being killed by Israeli soldiers, the camera moves quickly to the new Palestinian martyr, who is smiling in paradise.
"One of the gorgeous women in white greets him and pulls him into the mist where she and seven or eight beautiful women begin to surround him and gently caress him," reports Media Line.
PRAVDA.Ru
2002-06-28
The US Ambassador to Bolivia has told the Bolivian people not to vote for the indigenous Indian candidate for the Movement for Socialism (MAS), Evo Morales Ayma. If he is elected next Sunday, the USA will suspend economic aid and will review its agreements.
Manuel Rocha, the US Ambassador to La Paz, made it clear that the USA does not view Evo Morales Ayma as a valid candidate. “I would like to remind the Bolivian people that if they elect those who want Bolivia to become an important exporter of cocaine, this result will place in danger the future aid that the USA gives to Bolivia,” he declared on Wednesday on a visit to Chimore, where an airport was being inaugurated.
This attack comes after numerous speeches by Morales Ayma against the USA. Ex-member of Parliament, he defends the traditional Indian way of living and is against the policy of massive destruction of traditional cultures, instigated by the USA. Morales is backed by left-wing intellectuals and defends a position which attacks neo-liberalism and social exclusion.
As a result, Ambassador Rocha declared that the USA will suspend the programme to import Bolivian gas and textiles, crucial for this country’s economy. Morales Ayma, currently running fourth in the presidential election opinion polls, retorted that the USA “continues to violate the sovereignty and dignity of the people of Bolivia”.
He called the comments by Ambassador Rocha “terrorist and arbitrary because it is an attempt to stop the people reaching the places which until now have been reserved for the traditional parties”.
However, it is not likely that Morales Ayma will win the election. Running in first place in the polls is Manuel Reyes Villa, mayor of Bolivia’s second city, Cochabamba, accused by the Union of Political Prisoners of having used torture when he was serving as a captain in the Bolivian army.
Whoever wins, and however abhorrent is the prospect of a person linked to the culture of drugs running a country’s administration, it does not seem politically correct for a state of law to wave economic aid agreements around before elections like a carrot before the donkey. The people of Bolivia are perfectly capable of choosing who they want for their president and they will choose the person they think will best represent them.
Jun 26 2002
BERLIN (Reuters Health) - Eating certain smoked sausages in childhood may increase the risk of developing the crippling autoimmune disease multiple sclerosis (MS) later in life, researchers said on Wednesday.
The findings support other studies that have pointed to a possible link and suggest that nitrates used in meat preparation combined with chemicals in smoke could be causing autoimmune problems.
In MS, the slow destruction of myelin--the thin, protective coating that insulates nerve fibers in the brain and spine--leads to numbness, muscle weakness and stiffness, impaired vision and coordination problems.
Marcel Geilenkeuser, from the Darmstadt Clinic in Germany, and colleagues looked at the childhood diets of 177 MS patients and 88 healthy "control" individuals, focusing on how much hot-smoked sausage, cold-smoked sausage, cold-smoked meat and other foods such as butter and oat flakes they ate.
Geilenkeuser also took into account the socioeconomic status of the patients' families for his doctorate study, which he presented here at the 12th Meeting of the European Neurological Society.
The consumption of all three smoked meat products was associated with MS, he found. More detailed statistical analysis showed that hot-smoked sausages and animal-fat intake independently contributed to MS risk.
The researcher said he was cautious in interpreting the results.
"There were a number of drawbacks to the way the study had to be done, for example, and I do not want anyone to take it as conclusive.
"Having said that though, it does support previous work which suggested a link between the combination of nitrates and nitrites used to prepare meat for production of smoked sausages, and the phenols from smoke, with the production of nitrophenols which are connected with autoimmunity problems."
He said that MS, which only emerged at the start of the 19th century, could not be only related to the chemicals in wood smoke. Communities in northern Europe, he said, had smoked their foods for many centuries without developing MS, but had not used nitrates on the meat or fish before smoking.
Nitrogenous chemicals are generally used to ensure that meat does not lose its colour during the smoking process, he said.
Further study of the subject would be justified, he said, with ideally 200 newly diagnosed MS patients and a 200-strong control group of healthy individuals.
June 10, 2002 in the Baltimore Sun
AUSTIN, Texas - The Securities and Exchange Commission is now investigating Halliburton - the company formerly run by Vice President Dick Cheney - for accounting irregularities. What took so long?
When you consider all the time and ink spent on Whitewater, the neglect of the Cheney-Halliburton story is unfathomable.
The proximate cause of the SEC investigation is an "aggressive accounting practice" at Halliburton approved by the accounting firm Arthur Andersen - a little matter of counting revenue that had not yet been received, $100 million worth.
The New York Times reports that two former executives of Dresser Industries, which merged with Halliburton in 1998, say Halliburton used the accounting sham to cover up its losses. Dresser may have thought it got a bad deal in that merger because of that $100 million "anticipation" on the credit line, but it turned out to be much more sour for Halliburton.
Mr. Cheney bought himself a former Dresser subsidiary facing 292,000 claims for asbestos-caused health problems. He said at the time the merger was "one of the most exciting things I've ever been involved in," and predicted it would benefit Halliburton's customers, employees and shareholders. The first thing that happened was Halliburton eliminated 10,000 jobs. (It was amusing to hear Mr. Cheney on the campaign trail in 2000 claiming he had been out in the private sector "creating jobs.")
According to executives at Halliburton, Mr. Cheney knew about the asbestos liability before the merger and considered the risk. Because of the liability, Halliburton's stock has fallen from over $60 to under $20. In January, the company had to deny rumors it was going into bankruptcy. In other words, Mr. Cheney pretty well ruined the business. Of course, what the company wants to do now is have Congress pass a new law limiting asbestos liability.
Even more interesting is Halliburton's governmental record under Mr. Cheney. In an August 2000 report, the Center for Public Integrity noted that Mr. Cheney had said that the United States should lift restrictions on American corporations in countries listed by the government as sponsoring terrorism. Hey, that was then, this is now.
Despite repeatedly claiming his company would not do business with Iraq - he was defense secretary during the Persian Gulf war -Halliburton racked up $23.8 million in sales to Iraq in 1998 and '99. It did so by using two European subsidiaries, so Halliburton was not directly violating the sanctions against Iraq. Hey, it was business.
And striking another blow for freedom from government interference, Mr. Cheney led Halliburton into the top ranks of corporate welfare hogs, benefiting from almost $2 billion in taxpayer-insured loans from the U.S. Export-Import Bank and the Overseas Private Investment Corp. In the five years before Mr. Cheney joined the company, it got a measly $100 million in government loans.
Mr. Cheney also specialized in getting government contracts for the firm. During his five years as CEO, Halliburton got $2.3 billion in contracts, compared with $1.2 billion in the five years before he took over.
Most of the work was done by Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root, the construction firm, thus reinstating a fine old Texas tradition. Brown & Root was Lyndon Johnson's major money source: It was to LBJ what Enron was to George W.
This brings to mind a famous story from the Kennedy-Johnson campaign in 1960 relished by Texans. It's after the election, and the Democrats win. John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson are sittin' in the Oval Office the first day, and the phone rings. It's the pope on the phone. He says, "John, my boy, the Vatican roof is leaking something fierce, we were hopin' y'all might fix it for us."
"Of course, Mr. Pope, sir. Just let me check with my vice president. Lyndon, the pope's on the phone and wants to know if we can fix the Vatican roof for him."
"That's fine with me," says Mr. Johnson. "Just make sure Brown & Root gets the contract."
Nice to see tradition reassert itself.
June 24 2002
(Canadian GlobeandMail.com)
Imagine the excitement last week at the headquarters of GATA — the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee — when noted Royal Bank mutual fund manager John Embry issued a report referring to a price-manipulation conspiracy in the global gold market. For GATA, which has been preaching that message for years now, it was probably a bit like the U.S. government admitting that yes, there was a top-level CIA plot to assassinate former president John F. Kennedy, and the whole lone-gunman theory was just a crock.
Gold conspiracy theorists might not like being compared with the Kennedy crowd — which is so synonymous with loopy theories that a group of geeky true believers on The X-Files were known as "the lone gunmen" — but GATA is seen in a similar light by traditional gold watchers. The Embry report is "tremendous credibility," GATA chairman Bill Murphy said. "Most of the gold world thought we were idiots. It turns out we're right."
The Royal Bank seemed less than impressed at being allied with the gold conspiracy camp, however. Mark Arthur, head of Royal Bank Investment Management, said Mr. Embry's report was done for internal use and "in no way reflects the views of Royal Bank." He described it as "a collection of various arguments for gold stocks" that was part of a larger discussion. But it was clear that GATA members saw it as an endorsement by RBC.
Mr. Embry is not a crank — he is one of Canada's leading fund managers. In his report, he lists several reasons why gold prices could rise, including "increasing evidence of unsustainable gold price manipulation." He refers to gold sales by New York's Federal Reserve Bank, the timing of gains in the government's Exchange Stabilization Fund, and a statistical analysis that shows "high probability of price suppression."
As jubilant members pointed out in e-mails, the report was a vote of confidence in the group, which makes many of the same points. For the past few years, Dallas-based GATA has been engaged in a crusade of sorts to prove that various central banks and the world's major gold traders — or "bullion banks" — have been manipulating the price of gold in order to keep it low. Bullion banks lend to short-sellers (who profit if the price falls) and also engage in hedging trades with various gold producers.
GATA launched a lawsuit last year against the Bank for International Settlements — the central bank of central banks — as well as Fed chairman Alan Greenspan and a number of commercial banks, alleging that they engaged in a conspiracy to manipulate gold prices. Why would a global conspiracy want to keep the gold price low? A couple of reasons, GATA says. For one thing, banks such as J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs make a nice return lending their gold and investing the proceeds in other financial instruments, and they generate better returns if the price of gold is low.
GATA also says the U.S. and other governments are concerned that the world's banks have sold so much gold in the past that a run on bullion could trigger a global financial meltdown. According to the group, world gold demand exceeds supply by 1,500 tonnes, and if there were no price manipulation, bullion would be $800 (U.S.) an ounce instead of $350. GATA also says the "notional value" of the gold contracts held by U.S. banks is $87-billion, or greater than that country's entire gold reserves of 8,140 tonnes. The World Gold Council, of course, disputes most of these figures.
The driving force behind GATA is chairman William J. Murphy III — a former wide receiver for the Boston Patriots football team who later became a futures trader. Other executives with the group include Chris Powell, managing editor of a daily newspaper in Connecticut, and Reginald Howe, a graduate of Harvard Law School who runs a private investment fund. Proponents of its price-manipulation theories have included such market luminaries as John Willson, the former CEO of major gold producer Placer Dome.
Part of what makes GATA's arguments attractive is that the gold market is notoriously shadowy and complex — even more so than other commodities. Fans of the price-manipulation theory like to point out that the U.S. Treasury and various central banks were involved in price-rigging in the late 1960s through the London Gold Pool. After the rigging program ended, the price of gold soon soared to a high of $800 an ounce.
So if there's a global effort to manipulate the price of gold in order to keep it low, why has gold been climbing higher for the past few months? Simple, the conspiracy theorists say: the plot is finally coming apart at the seams, and as it unravels it will push the gold price even higher. The only problem with this argument, as more than one observer has noted, is that it relies on the logical fallacy of circular reasoning, in which a lack of evidence is seen as further proof of a vast conspiracy — since a conspiracy would naturally suppress any evidence of its existence.
How come FBI special agents Mulder and Scully never got into this one while the X-Files was still on?
Date: 27 May 2002 19:39
27 June 02
(New Scientist)
Magnetic wood could be a major plank in the battle against noisy cellphone users. The high-tech material absorbs microwave radio signals, making it impossible to use a mobile phone in any room lined with it. Or a radio for that matter. So theatres and restaurants, for example, can stop people using cellphones on their premises without resorting to signal jammers.
The anti-cellphone sandwich
These are illegal in some countries, including the US, Britain and Australia. Jammers also cause wider problems because their signals can spill out of the building they are covering, interfering with other people's calls.
The magnetic wood - so called because it is packed with minute magnetic particles - is the brainchild of Hideo Oka and a team of electronics engineers at Iwate University in Morioka, northern Japan. They chose wood as their preferred blocking material because it offers more natural, aesthetic options for interior design. Oka hopes that it will soon be possible to buy the novel wood panelling by the metre at your local hardware store.
While normal wood is transparent to radio waves, Oka's blocks them because it contains fine particles of a magnetic material called nickel-zinc ferrite. When an electromagnetic wave hits the ferrite particles, the magnetic part of the wave is absorbed.
Bluetooth frequencies
The team looked at four different ways of making wood absorb radio waves before hitting on the best one. The first was simply wood coated with a ferrite powder. The others were made by mixing ferrite powder with cider wood powder and pressing it into boards, or impregnating the wood with particles, or sandwiching wood pulp containing ferrite powder between two thin wooden panels.
Oka tested each wood in turn by putting collars of each material over a short antenna that broadcasts radio waves at the typical GSM mobile phone frequencies of 900 megahertz and 1.8 gigahertz.
The antenna can also broadcast at frequencies up to 2.5 gigahertz, which covers the range commonly used for wireless networks like Bluetooth and the emerging IEEE 802.11 standard, better known as Wi-Fi. A receiver measured the strength of the radio waves transmitted through the material.
Ferrite sandwich
In the end, Oka found that ferrite sandwiched between thin sheets of wood performed best. Further tests showed that a 4-millimetre-thick sandwich absorbed the most microwave radiation, cutting the wave's power by 97 per cent. Increasing the thickness of the outer wooden sheets of the sandwich increased the frequency of radio waves that the shield would absorb.
The wood-based shields could be used to make doors and walls for rooms or even entire buildings where mobile phones simply won't work. While the prospect of being forcefully cut off might horrify some cellphone addicts, Oka says theatre-goers and restaurant customers might appreciate the silence.
Panels that absorb radio waves could also help with a problem emerging in Japanese cities, where many homes are being fitted with wireless computing networks. If several networks are set up close together, they can interfere with each other. The new panels could divide up the house into different areas, allowing several networks can operate close by.
Oka believes he can make the wood cheap enough for it to be viable. And he now hopes to cut the cost still further by making the panels from recycled magnetic materials and waste wood.
I wonder if I could make money selling hats made out of this stuff?
(UKTelegraph)
(21/06/2002)
The turbulent love life of Henry VIII, which led to the Reformation and dissolution of the monasteries, may also have postponed the industrial revolution by 200 years.
Archaeologists have found evidence that the Cistercian monks of Rievaulx Abbey, Yorkshire, were developing a prototype blast furnace for the large-scale production of cast iron when they were evicted by the king in 1538.
Without the Reformation, it is possible that the seeds of industrial Britain could have been sown in the tranquil cloisters of North Yorkshire.
In an attempt to discover more about the industrious monks of Rievaulx, researchers will today produce iron in the abbey grounds for the first time in 450 years.
By analysing the slag produced in the recreated clay furnace, scientists hope to find clues about the development of the full-scale blast furnace, the invention that perhaps more than any other ushered in the industrial age.
Although the popular perception of monasteries is one of study, contemplation, prayer and bee-keeping, the reality of medieval Yorkshire was very different. Rievaulx had its own facilities for producing iron for the abbey's quarries and farms, and for sale to the outside world.
After the monks were expelled, an inventory of the abbey listed a "bloomsmithy" at Laskill, an outstation about four miles from the abbey.
Dr Gerry McDonnell, an archaeometallurgist at Bradford University, was intrigued to find out how far the monks had developed iron technology.
Since the Iron Age, the most common form of furnace had been a clay stack, usually around 6ft high and 3ft wide and built around a frame of willow withies. Charcoal and iron were piled into the top and air was pumped into it with bellows.
Iron in a stack furnace forms a "bloom" on the clay which has to be chipped off, heated and worked to remove as many impurities as possible. Stack furnaces are unlikely to reach the 1,500C needed to melt iron. To create cast iron, blast furnaces with mechanically powered bellows are needed. Textbooks used to state that the first were built in Kent in the 1490s.
But Dr McDonnell believes that the transition was far more complex. "There is confusion between the idea that the blast furnace equalled cast iron," he said. "Now there is evidence that cast iron was in use long before that, even as far back as the Saxon period."
What matters is not the creation of cast iron, but the large-scale production of cast iron in dedicated furnaces. Dr McDonnell believes that the Rievaulx monks were close to creating such a furnace at Laskill.
An excavation has revealed a square, stone built furnace around 15ft across which was probably water powered. The slag of a primitive stack furnace contains high concentrations of iron. But a chemical analysis of the slag at Laskill reveals concentrations far more typical of a blast furnace.
"One of the key things is that the Cistercians had a regular meeting of abbots every year and they had the means of sharing technological advances across Europe," he said. "They effectively had a stranglehold on iron. The break-up of the monasteries broke up this network of technology transfer.
"They had the potential to move to blast furnaces that produced nothing but cast iron. They were poised to do it on a large scale, but by breaking up the virtual monopoly, Henry VIII effectively broke up that potential."
An experiment by English Heritage and Bradford University will attempt to produce iron today and tomorrow at the abbey for the first time since the time of the Reformation.
Ian Panter, a scientific adviser to English Heritage, said: "There are so many unanswered questions about the way monks produced iron that the only way to resolve them is to rebuild one of their furnaces.
"It will take up to eight hours to reach peak temperature and heat sensors will monitor each burn. Slag left over will be analysed and compared with archaeological finds to provide further clues about Rievaulx's industrial past."
June 28, 2002
BOCA RATON, Fla. (Wireless Flash) -- First, the Vatican was accused of hiding the records of priests who've abused kids. Now, it's being accused of hiding a time machine.
The machine in question is called a "Chronovisor" and was built in the 1950s by a Benedictine monk named Father Pellegrino Ernetti.
No photos of the Chronovisor exist, but paranormal journalist John Chambers says Ernetti reportedly used the "way back machine" to film Christ's crucifixion for Vatican officials.
Ernetti died in 1994 without revealing the secret of the Chronovisor but Chambers says evidence is mounting that the Catholic Church is hiding a working model from the rest of the world, supposedly to keep it from getting into evil hands.
Sound crazy? Maybe, but there may be something to it. Chambers says a Jesuit priest named Father Francois Brune believes the Chronovisor must exist because -- in the priest's words -- "Ernetti wouldn't lie about such things."
LONDON, July 1 (Reuters) - A fox attacked a three-month-old baby as it lay sleeping on a sofa in the sitting room of a London home, a British newspaper reported on Monday.
Infant Louis Day was left covered in blood and with bite marks on his temples after the fox crept into the house through open french windows at the back of the family's home in the eastern suburbs of the capital, and grabbed him by the head.
The child's father, Peter Day, who was in the kitchen when he heard the screams of Louis and his partner Sue Eastwood, said he thought the fox was trying to drag the child outside to eat him.
"I had only been there a second when I heard Louis scream and then Sue scream as well," Day told the Evening Standard newspaper.
"By the time I got back in the room, the fox was sitting there, just looking at me. I didn't see him grab Louis, but the baby was covered in blood," he said.
The child was taken to hospital, where he was treated for bite wounds, which, officials said, looked as though they could have been caused by a fox.
"Louis is now back at home, recovering with his family," a hospital spokesman confirmed.
Foxes are an increasingly common sight in Britain's big cities, making their homes in gardens, alongside roads and railways as the countryside comes under ever greater pressure from the urban sprawl.
The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty for Animals (RSPCA) expressed scepticism about the family's version of events, saying they had never received a substantiated report of a fox attacking a child.
"It is likely a dog was responsible," the RSPCA said in a statement, adding that foxes did not represent a risk to humans.
"Foxes generally avoid human contact and although those living in urban areas can be less timid than those in the countryside, they are still cautious of people. It is exceedingly rare, therefore, for a fox to even enter a house, let alone attack a child."
(Diario "Nuevo Día" via Rense.com)
June 15, 2002
Doctor Daniel Belot, a SENASA Technician in Salliqueló, doesn't believe in Chupacabras, but has never seen anything like it. He was the veterinarian who analyzed the first animal mutilation in the area, in Salliqueló. He has examined over a dozen cases for which he can find no explanation, and is disconcerted. He does not believe in the intervention of any agencies other than human, but he discards nothing in the light of the magnitude of what he has observed. He is convinced that the perpetrators arrived by aerial means and is certain that the animals were slain elsewhere and subsequently dumped in the field. He asks that all strange animal deaths be reported promptly.
Dr. Belot is startled, moved and disoriented by the sudden appearance of mutilated animals throughout the region. In spite of his considerable professional experience, Belot, who is a technician for SENASA, claims having never seen anything similar and believes that only those who have seen any such case can understand the magnitude of the events.
The expert has been asked to analyze over a dozen cases, and common patterns appear in all of them to which no explanation can be found. Although he is unwilling to forecast the events, he is certain that more cases will only confuse him more rather than clarifying matters. The near-certainty that the perpetrator arrives by air, and the certainty that the deaths have occured 3 to 4 days earlier at a location other than where the carcasses were found only adds to the state of confusion.
His account of the facts and some of his interpretations merit analysis, since he is an acknowledged professional with a solid reputation throughout the region, aside from being an official for a national delegation of SENASA, with the added responsibility and weight that this fact adds to his pronouncements. Dr. Belot urged our region's cattlement to report any anomalous case immediately, since he believes that the sooner investigations take place, there is a greater possibility of reaching a solution, which is hitherto completely unknown.
Belot began his story by recalling that "the cattleman told me he had a dead animal in a field and his attention had been drawn to the fact [the animal] seemed to be skinned to the bone on one side, which I thought was impossible, because it was something I wasn't familiar with, something utterly abnormal. For that reason I told him that some animal must have eaten it, which the cattleman completely rejected, saying that no animal eats in a straight line. Therefore, I resolved to go and see what was going on."
"I was confronted by an unnerving sight," the professional told NUEVO DIA, stressing that "those who haven't seen it cannot understand the magnitude of the situation." Belot explained that "the animal lay on the ground like a hare, and the entire left side of its face was skinned to the bone beneath the eye. All of its molars were visible.
"When we performed the necropsy we found that it was missing its tongue, all of its vocal apparatus, which is to say the larynx and part of the pharynx, and something very odd: there was no blood inside or outside the animal. It was perfectly clean. That came as an enormous surprise for us." He confirmed that there was no tearing [of flesh] of any kind on the animal, therefore discarding the likelihood that predators would have attacked it. "It is a deed that appears to have been carried out by humans, but even so it's something very hard to do."
When asked if he was able to come up with any explanation whatsoever, Dr. Belot confessed that "my curiosity has not yet been sated, since I've sent samples to the University of Buenos Aires' School of Pathology and the only response I've received is that how the incisions were made cannot be determined." The professional stated that he did not establish the animal's cause of death, going as far as to state that blood samples taken from other animals to detect strange substances "have yielded no results so far. The ones I have recieved confirm that there is nothing strange in the [animals'] blood."
Belot, who has analyzed over a dozen of these mutilation cases, remarked that vital organs were missing in most of them. " In the first case, which is the one I'm discussing here, the animal was missing all of its maxillaries, but others were missing testicles and penises, others were missing ears, others were missing mammary glands, and still others were missing rectums and vaginas. All of this suggest some kind of scientific research, but don't ask me why a scientist is going to conduct research in the middle of different farms without asking for permission, because I can't imagine why."
Belot reiterated his astonishment as to the absence of tracks around the mutilated animals, wondering how it is possible "for no other animal to come near." When Dr. Daniel Belot reached the first animal he inspected, it had been dead for 3 or 4 days, a situation which has repeated itself in many of the cases he analyzed. "In many cases they were not yet bloated and did not give off any odor. In others, they presented normal alterations, which increases the uncertainty." The cases observed by the SENASA technician occured in the Salliqueló region, but were later extended to Casbas and Guaminí.
Belot acknowledged that in recent days he learned of the Chupacabras legend. While not dismissing it, he is not a believer. "The facts occured, they are very strange and cannot be disputed, but I don't know what to attribute them to. I wouldn't want to chance it."
The professional does not recall having seen perfectly circular burned grass spots or any alterations near the mutilated animals, as other experts have stated, explaining that "the only mark I saw around the animals within a ten meter radius, is that the grass has continued to grow [...] but no animal will step into that circle, despite the fact that the grass is in good shape."
Two months after the first discovery, Belot points out that "after some time, the dead animals have already been attacked by predators. But until recently, they wouldn't come close." Regarding the behavior of the herd's other members, the veterinarian noted that "they appear indifferent, looking from a distance without coming close. What is commonly seen in the countryside is that the rest of the animals sort of "mourn" the deceased animal, and that has not occurred in this case."
The professional further emphasized that "the animals were killed elsewhere and dumped there, and that indication I'm inferring from the way in which the carcasses have been positioned."
But the prints are 55 million years older than the oldest known bird fossils - so what made them?
26 June 02
(NewScientist.com)
Argentine paleontologists have found bird-like footprints 55 million years older than the oldest known bird fossils.
The team discovered dozens of three-toed footprints in rocks older than 212 million years in northwest Argentina. Averaging about 3.5 centimeters wide and similar in length, they look very much like bird footprints made in small shallow ponds along a river. However, the rocks are some 55 million years older than the most ancient known bird skeleton, Archaeopteryx. The big question is what made them.
Paleontologists believe birds evolved from small two-legged predatory dinosaurs called theropods between five and ten million years before Archaeopteryx lived, 155 million years ago. Archaeopteryx had flight feathers, but its skeleton looked like a small theropod dinosaur.
Theropods were among the earliest known dinosaurs, and n the early 1800s their three-toed footprints were mistaken for birds. But researchers have since developed tests that help them tell the birds from the dinosaurs.
The Argentine prints pass most of them. Their structure, the environment where they formed, and their high concentration all favour an avian origin, says Ricardo Melchor of the Universidad Nacional de La Pampa.
No assumptions
The Argentine footprints have a key feature not known in any theropod: a reversed hallux, the backward-facing toe of modern birds.
Nonetheless, Melchor cautiously avoids saying birds made the prints. "These bird-like footprints can only be attributed to an unknown group of theropods showing some avian characteristics," he writes in the journal Nature.
Other bird specialists are intrigued but cautious, warning its hard to match footprints to their makers.
"I think it is pretty interesting but you can't necessarily assume that those are bird footprints," Luis Chiappe, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, told New Scientist.
Hard to convince
"They are neat tracks, and look avian, which would be remarkable given their age," says Emma Rainforth, curator of the Mesalands Dinosaur Museum in Tucumcari, New Mexico. But, she asks, "where are the tracks and skeletons of birds" for the next 55 million years?
The footprints might revive interest in a controversial fossil of the same age. They are the right size to match "Protoavis," says Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University, who for a decade has had little success convincing other paleontologists that his discovery in the late 1980s was an ancestral bird.
"I am really happy," Chatterjee told New Scientist. "This looks very convincing" evidence for a bird-like Protoavis.
(aftenposten.no)
In a bizarre series of incidents, two farmers in different parts of the country were hospitalized after being attacked by cows. Elsewhere, four men narrowly missed having their car crushed by a crash-landing cow.
Friday saw the first attack in the odd cow crime wave. Stian Skoglund, 23, was bashed and trampled by a furious cud-chewer. Stian was helping his girlfriend with her summer job on a farm in Belta in Åsnes when the attack occurred.
"The cow attacked me. I was going to scare up the cows at about four in the afternoon and chase them over to where they are milked twice a day," Stian recalled. As he approached he noticed that one of them was uneasy. He made eye contact with the animal and tried to calm it. Instead, the beast became provoked and charged.
"The cow butted me and I fell," Stian said. He got up and tried to escape but the cow again knocked him to the ground before it began to hop and trample him. The cow shattered one of his legs just four centimeters below the knee. Skoglund also suffered several broken ribs, cuts and bruises. The attack finally stopped when he played dead.
Now he wonders if the attack might have been connected to a job he did a few days earlier when he drove away the body of a calf that had died on the farm.
"Maybe it was her motherly instincts being aroused. I have also heard that I shouldn't have made eye contact with her, that only provokes them," Skoglund said.
A 45-year-old farmer in Nordby, Raelingen was hospitalized Tuesday in stable condition after an encounter with a cow he found leaving Jahr farm. The animal first charged his wife. After waving his arms to distract the animal, the farmer found himself being knocked to the ground.
"The cow went berserk and couldn't be stopped. The farmer was thrown into the air and landed injured on the ground," a witness said.
While terrified witnesses tried in vain to calm the rampant cow others contacted authorities who sent an ambulance and a medical helicopter. A veterinarian was also summoned. He tranquilized the animal and a decision about it future is likely today.
The attack at Jahr farm comes a year after a nearby farmer was trampled to death by several bulls.
A flying - and landing - cow accounted for a close encounter with death on road E39 near Rogaland on Monday night.
Four men traveling in a car saw only a large shadow in the sky before a massive impact shook the ground. Driver Olav Kjeldstad managed to avoid hitting the object, looked behind him and saw a cow in the road.
Police deduced that the cow must have fallen from a ten-meter high cliff overhanging the road. The animal only managed a few moos before dying of its injuries.
"I was pretty shaken afterwards but I have to admit we had a laugh as well. The whole thing was tragicomic," Kjeldstad said.
(The Associated Press)
June 27, 2002
VIENNA, Austria –– Drivers in farming regions know to be on the lookout for animals that stray onto the road, but even the most cautious seldom scan the heavens for livestock.
A 36-year-old woman should have been doing that Thursday when a cow strayed from a hillside pasture to the top of a tunnel entrance and then fell onto her car.
The woman was hospitalized with minor chest and foot injuries. Her husband, in the passenger seat, was unharmed. The cow died after being hit when it fell 15 feet just as the car was leaving the tunnel.
(Space.com)
6-27-2
Not only has the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency admitted its role in trying to "correct" public opinion about UFOs over the last half century, it now believes the policy caused "major problems" in dealing with the public. In an internal report entitled "CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90," agency historian Gerald K. Haines portrayed the CIA as consistently and deliberately working to suppress reports of unidentified aerial phenomena since modern UFO sightings began with the Kenneth Arnold case of 1947. Still, even in a paper filled with covert attempts on the part of both the CIA and the Air Force to "persuade the public that UFOs were not extraordinary," Haines himself continued the suppressive policy, perhaps unconsciously, by writing that the CIA "paid only limited and peripheral attention to the phenomena" since the early 1950s.
This tension in the report, written at the request of CIA Director R. James Woolsey in 1997, is a telling reflection of the government agency's troubled broader relationship with UFO sightings and literature. Haines' history is studded with depictions of the CIA not only repressing UFO reports and reviewing recommendations that agents monitor UFO clubs for subversive activities, but also trying to hide its own interest in the matter. Indeed, the struggle to "carefully restrict" and "forbid" any public awareness of CIA involvement in UFO investigations eclipses the actual investigations as the major thrust of the agency's UFO efforts. Even though the agency had accepted the Air Force's conclusion that there was only "a remote possibility" that UFOs were interplanetary aircraft as early as 1952, investigations of the "massive buildup of sightings" went on, just in case.
Concealment of CIA interest
However, after 1953, when negative findings from a civilian panel motivated the CIA to "put the entire issue of UFOs on the back burner" entirely, Haines said the agency became almost exclusively concerned with covering up its own involvement in the world of unidentified flying objects. This aggressive policy of public non-involvement was important to the CIA for many reasons. First, a number of agency officials and study groups over the years urged the CIA to "conceal its interest" because such attention would seem to officially sanction to the existence of UFOs. Although the agency itself, like the Air Force, believed the chance of flying saucers posing a direct threat was minimal, the fear that even unfounded public belief in the phenomenon, if encouraged by government interest, could be enough to "touch off mass hysteria and panic." Particularly in the 1950s, the Cold War heightened this somewhat obsessive concern with hiding any evidence of the CIA's involvement, said Haines.
Although the agency's UFO study group did not see any security threat emerging directly out of flying saucers themselves, even if they actually existed, the CIA was deeply worried by the possibility that Soviet agents could use UFOs as "a possible psychological warfare tool" or cloak a more Earthly attack with fake UFO reports. Tantalizingly, Haines also noted that at least one CIA Director, Walter Bedell Smith, "wanted to know what use could be made of the UFO phenomenon in connection with US psychological warfare efforts." The report does not mention whether the agency followed up on this opportunity to manipulate UFO reports in a more sophisticated manner for its own purposes.
As the 1950s wore on, the CIA became even less interested in UFOs in themselves and more concerned with covering up its own early involvement with the phenomenon. In 1955, only the possibility that the Soviets would eventually develop a flying saucer of their own kept the investigations from ending completely. Meanwhile, ironically, the CIA had built its own "unidentified flying object," the U-2 surveillance aircraft, and sightings of these planes needed to be kept out of the media. According to Haines, Air Force investigators were "careful not to reveal the true cause" of U-2 sightings. However, having no other means of explaining the encounters, it is likely the field agents were forced either to lie or retreat into a suspicious silence. The return of the repressed Haines argues that this suspicious silence was not a good strategy for the agency, but the established need for secrecy left the CIA with little choice while fervor over the government's role in "covering up" UFO information grew.
Even though the agency itself "had a declining interest in UFO cases" by the late 1950s, it was still spending considerable resources looking out for "the more sensational UFO reports and flaps" in order to suppress them. Ultimately, this policy backfired by highlighting the CIA's role in investigation -- or the ominous cover-up thereof -- only to "add fuel to the growing mystery surrounding UFOs." UFO researchers blamed the agency for starting the UFO flap of the 1950s for psychological warfare purposes, and the idea proved so persuasive that even CIA Director Stansfield Turner asked his staff whether the agency was "in UFOs" after reading a 1979 New York Times article.
At the end, Haines concluded, the tactics of silence and repression were a failure. "The UFO issue probably will not go away soon, no matter what the agency does or says. The belief that we are not alone in the universe is too emotionally appealing and the distrust of our government is too pervasive to make the issue amenable to traditional scientific studies of rational explanation and evidence." Indeed, much of that "distrust" was the CIA's own doing, and the benefits appear to have been limited. Despite the agency's best efforts to keep UFO reports out of the media, according to Haines, "an extraordinary 95 percent of all Americans have at least heard or read something about UFOs, and 57 percent believe they are real."
CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90
http://www.odci.gov/csi/studies/97unclas/ufo.html
During January '66, several Spanish citizens from Madrid received
anonymous letters mailed from Spain, but also from all over the world:
Australia, Canada, Switzerland, West-Berlin, etc...
These letters, which never mentioned the adress of the sender, carried
the following stamp :
)+(
This is the stamp of a so-called "Unified government of the planet
Ummo", and the letters were signed by a so-called "extraterrestrial
expeditionary group" on a mission on Earth, and especially in Spain.
The most important characteristic of these letters was that they
contained, amongst unverifiable scientific topics, lots of clearly
anti-Franco, anti-American, pro-communist statements.
Some letters from Ummo (Ummo case consists of thousands of letters !)
had been brought to the attention of the Spanish population thanks to
the Spanish press, radio and TV, and to the recipients. Some of them
wrote books dealing with Ummo:
"Ummo : Another Inhabited Planet" Fernando Sesma, 1967
"Looking Toward The Edge Of The Universe" Father Enrique Lopez
Guerrero, 1968
"The Ummo Mystery" Antonio Ribera, 1975
The recipients had also created an association called ERIDANI,
in order to study the Ummo case.
After 1975 and Franco's death, the letters were rarer, but they
continued to denounce the USA, capitalism, American military policy,
etc... Since the eighties, some Spanish and French ufologists have
strongly suspected that Ummo was a political manipulation and that
Mr. Jose Luis Jordan Pena, the chairman of ERIDANI (!), was the
principal author of the mystification. But he strongly denied it.
In April '93, Mr. Jose Luis Jordan Pena admitted for the very first
time his guilt. He made the following statement to some Spanish
journalists and ufologists :
"I am the man who has written the letters from Ummo."
But he absolutely refused to talk about his motive, his goals, and
the political aspects of the case. The French UFO network SOS OVNI
has published in its magazine Phenomena some papers about the
political aspects of Ummo and Jose Luis Jordan Pena. An investigator
of SOS OVNI has also published a book titled:
"Ummo Case : The Extraterrestrials Who Came In From The Cold"
Today, the inquiry is still on-going. Here are some of the first
recipients of the letters in Spain (1966):
Fernando Sesma : ufologist and esoterist.
Alicia Araujo : secretary of the USA Embassy
Dionisio Garrido : policeman
Antonio Ribera : journalist and writer
Raphael Farriols : chairman of industry
Here are two typical statements of Ummo :
1966 : "Mr Sesma, you are a man unknown in the scientific
field and in the philosophical field, but you are a courageous
and independant man in a country internationally reputed as
the most backward country in Europe, lead by a dictatorial
government connected with nazi and fascist experiences. Your
country is suffering from the opressions forbiding all
scientific, technological and ideological developments.
All the great intellectuals are in exile or have been punished
with death by the oligarchs like Garcia Lorca."
1987 : "Gorbatchev is clever and honest (...) Marxism is the
best political way (...) AIDS has been created by the US Army."
Any comments from persons knowledgeable in manipulation and
disinformation on the following topics will be appreciated :
-Why Ummo?
-Did Jose Luis Jordan Pena work as an agent of disinformation
for the Soviet Union or for the Spanish communists?
-Did the ex-KGB create the Ummo case for psychological war?
-Has ufology often been manipulated like that?
by Manuel Carballal
I visited Aluche and San José de Valderas for the first time in 1988. The purpose of my visit to these alleged locations for the UMMO sightings -- in the footsteps of all the researchers who preceded me in the search -- was to reconstruct the events and attempt to locate other witnesses to the incidents aside from those already interviewed. I remember that upon questioning the new owners of the Palencia Bar (it had change hands shortly before) in Aluche, the most picturesque exchange possible came about:
"Do you remember the thing about the flying saucer?" I asked. "Yes,sir! Of course. They even wrote a book about it!"
He was referring to Un Caso Perfecto by Antonio Ribera. "Do you know anyone in the neighborhood who might have seen it?"
"Sure! Many people saw it. A guy named VIcente Ortuño, another guy named José Luis Jordán...lots of people. They even wrote a book about it!"
"Right, right" I insisted. "But was there anyone else?"
"Wow! Lots of people. Ortuño...that Jordán...lots of people. They even wrote a book about it!"
"We've established that. But you don't remember anyone else who may have seen it?"
"I'm telling you lots of people saw it! This Vicente Ortuño character, and another guy who was coming through town and was called Jose Luis Jordán...and...well, everybody saw it. They even wrote a book about it!"
No use. There was no way of securing any other names. The fact that a book had been written about the subject was, to these workers, proof positive of the case's authenticity. "How could they write a book if it wasn't true," they argued.
The very same happened when I visited San José de Valderas. At least in my visits prior to April 7, 1990, the date in which Antonio José Ales organized a "UFO Watch" in Valderas Castle. Hundreds of people met there that night, many of them UFO fanatics willing to do anything to appear in a photo, and those of us researchers who attended the event were able to meet countless "UMMO contactees." However, there was little credibility to their accounts. All of the alleged UMMO contactees were steeped in the books on the subject and could easily confabulate the story.
In one of my visits to Valderas prior to 1990, I repeat, I managed to track down, through a roll of the dice, an alumna of the school located in the famous Valderas Palace at the time of the alleged landing. Apparently, there were numerous witnesses to the event, and the eyewitness acounts collected from among the students of the nuns of the Order of the Love of God (who then occupied the currently abandoned castle of the Marquis of Valderas). Well then. Maria Pilar Martín-Maestro Barea had been a student of the aforementioned school in June 1967, and she had gone to class every day along with ther classmates. When asked if she knew anyone in San José de Valderas who might have seen the spaceship, she confirmed my greatest fears:
"Did you get to see anything?"
"No, the truth is I saw nothing, but many people must have seen it, because it was in the papers the next day."
"Do you know anyone who saw the spaceship?"
"The truth is that I couldn't give you a name, but many people must have seen it, because it was in the papers the next day."
"Right, but one of your neighbors must have said something..."
"Of course they did! The whole neighborhood talked about it, but mainly about what came out in the papers. Now that I think about it, I can't recall anyone saying that they'd seen it."
"But according to what's been written, your classmates and teachers, too, saw the saucer. According to the photos, it passed right over your school in broad daylight."
"Yes, it would seem so by the photos. But none of my classmates saw it."
"What about other students?"
"I spent many years at that school, and the fact is that I never met anyone -- student or teacher -- who claimed having seen the spaceship. But many people must have seen it, because it was in the papers the next day."
These two examples present us with the essence of the UMMO Affaire. The case's social repercussions have been so far reaching that few UFO buffs have ever seriously paused to wonder about its authenticity, and much less invested time and money in researching it.
I acknowledge my helplessness in finding other witnesses of the massive sightings, both in Aluche and in San José de Valderas, aside from those already mentioned in the book Un Caso Perfecto, which quotes a third sighting of an Ummite ship in Spain around that time. Regarding this alleged sighting on the road from Betanzos (La Coruña) to Villalba (Lugo), the results of my groundwork were equally unproductive.
Ufologically, in my opinion, there was very little to investigate in the UMMO affair, with the exception of certain UFO sightings having the famous Ummite ")+(" emblem or something similar on their fueslage. I have witness accounts and even UFO photographs whose publication has been forbidden for the time being, which show something quite similar to the ")+(" emblem on the side of the object. But to my understanding, those sightings, some of them earlier than 1950, have nothing to do with the Ummite reports received from the 1960s onward. For example, in the summer of 1917, a family in Peñascosa (Albacete) saw a kind of "hat with four legs" having an emblem which resembled the letter "H" (see ENIGMAS, No.20, p.24).
I can also prove that the ")+(" emblem also exists in esoteric and paranormal environments prior to 1950, the year in which the Ummites allegedly reached Earth. However, it is true that its use became widespread universally after 1966, when Fernando Sesma began receiving the Ummite letters.
The Most Universal of Spanish Cases
Never before in the history of Spanish ufology had a case of alleged UFO contact had greater repercussions, and the social impact is crucial to understanding the many uses of the case. After the sightings at Aluche, Valderas and Galicia, Fernando Sesma's meetings at the bar known as La Ballena Alegre ("The Happy Whale"), and thus the Ummite reports, achieved national diffusion. The NODE, Sesma's articles in Diez Minutos magazine, and his public lectures helped to popularize UMMO.
Antonio Ribera published his books: "De veras los OVNIS nos Vigilan?" (1975); "El Misterio de UMMO" (1979); "UMMO-La Increible Verdad" (1985); and "UMMO informa a la Tierra" (1987), which completed the task of spreading the passion for UMMO all over the world after being translated into other languages in other countries.
Father López Guerrero also published his monumental "Mirando a la Lejanía del Universo" (1978) and dear Dr. Juan Aguirre busied himself in putting out -- in three volumes -- all of the Ummite reports received to date. In various South American and European countries, "Ummology" became a specialty of its own within ufology. Argentina witnessed the building of a "hospital" staffed by alternative physicians who allegedly practiced Ummite medicine. In June 1971, Rafael Farriols organized the First UMMO Symposium in Spain at the Hotel Osauna in Barajas: three days of lectures, colloquiums and debates qith the participation of countless researchers. A professional announcer read, over the course of 30 hours, all of the Ummite reports in existence to an audience obviously able to handle it. Two years later, in May 1973, Farriols himself organize the second conference on the subject at Barcelona's Hotel Ritz. A third conference was slated later for Alicante, and had even greater international impact.
Scientists of great renown, such as French astrophysicist Jean Pierre Petit, would stake their academic credibility on the line by publishing books on UMMO in their countries of origin, or including Ummite "hints" in their purely scientific papers, as well as fascinating childrens' comics like "Les Aventures d'Anselme Lanturlu" (Paris, 1985) where Petit depicts Hoyle on page 61 wearing a tie crawling with Ummite symbols. Others, like Wendelle Stevens, prepared documentaries on the subject, which took UMMO to television screens other than those in Spain. In 1969, Argentina's Channel 13 had already done the same by having their cameras visit Sesma's get-togethers in La Ballena Alegre.
Bona fide UMMO fan clubs sprouted in Japan, Canada, Italy and elsewhere. Auhtors from other countries began writing books on UMMO. Without going much farther, I myself was able to purchase, in May 1997, the book "Comentariu la misteriul UMMO" by Dan Mirahorian in a large department store in Bucharest, Romania. An earlier book entitled "OZN. Afacerea UMMO" by Renaud Marhic, had brought UMMO, the world's most famous UFO case, to Romanian audiences.
Renown actor and director Jacinto Molina -- better known as Paul Naschy -- even prepared a screenplay entitled: "The Man from UMMO", starring Patty Shepard and Michael Rennie. As Molina himself told me during one of our interviews in his Madrid home, "The Man from UMMO", produced by Jaime Prades, S.A. in 1969 wound up being retitled "The Monsters of Terror", a much more commercial title, and it told the story of an extraterrestrial (Michael Rennie) who had arrived from UMMO to enslave Earth, using classic terrestrial mosnters for his plans: Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolfman, etc. Naturally, the film has nothing to do at all with the "authentic" Ummite story, but it constitutes a fresh example of the UMMO affair's social impact.
The UMMOELEWE's emblem ")+(" has become absolutely universal. During the 1970's, it was adopted as an extraterrestrial symbol by all manner of contactees, and began to appear in Peru's Misión Rama's automatic writing sessions, as well as in messages received from the Fratellanza Cosmica or in telepathic "visions" from tens of dozens of contactees around the world. Moreover, when the infamous UFO sighting in the Russian city of Voronezh occured, some of the witnesses interviewed by the press described the UMMO symbol on the hull of the ship which had allegedly landed in Voronezh. This was the event which finally managed to "authenticate" the extraterrestrial origin of the Ummite spacecraft.
The symbol became famous in 1967, exactly 30 years ago, with the photographs taken at San José de Valderas. We must go back in time.
Jose Luis Jordán Peña
José Luis Jordán Peña remains the only constant character throughout the entire history of the UMMO affaire. It is precisely he, aside from being the main witness of the Aluche Case, along with a local resident who "by chance" happedned to see the craft from his home (Vicente Ortuño), was also the main investigator in the Valderas Case (to which Ortuño also collaborated, "by chance"). It also coincided the Jose Luis Jordan interviewed Pedro Pablo Barrios, the witness to the Ummite ship seen between Betanzos and Villaba. Moreover, Jordán's other surname is Peña. He, and no other, is the famouns Mr. Peña who began to frequent Sesma's lectures at La Ballena Alegre in 1966, spearheading the skeptical contingent of the group, and finally establishing his own Eridani Association.
Oscar Rey Brea, who began his study of UFOs in 1945, first became aware of the "Ummite colony living in Spain" thanks to the scandalous statements made by Enrique López Guerrero to the newspaper ABC on September 17, 1968. However, a letter from Catalan ufologist Antonio Ribera, dated December 9, 1967 stated the following: "Concerning the types of "humanoids", I believe that we may narrow them down to two kinds: "dwarfs" and "normal human beings'...There is a piece of information I cannot give you in detail, since it would take much too long, which states that the point of origin of the "humans" is a planet orbiting the star Wolf-424, a red dwarf star -- thus very old -- at some 14.6 light years from Earth. This is a "clue" we are working on, and we have no idea where it might lead us."
This, then, is the first reference to UMMO received by Rey Brea, although he did not realize it until much later. But Rey Brea was already questioning the case's authenticity in his reply to the above letter (dated January 16, 1997): "I do not know what antecedents lead you to believe that UFOs manned by humanoids come from the star Wolf-424. It is hard to believe that a star at such a level of decay , having a surface temperature no greater than 2500° C, may harbor on its planets beings who differ so little from our own physical makeup. It is equally hard to believe that we could both be the product of separate but identical evolutions separated by distance."
Unknowingly, Rey Brea began his relationship with UMMO in the same skeptical spirit with which he ended it. In a letter to Ribera on October 2, 1968: "On one of those five days, I read some statements made by a priest from Seville regarding an extraterrestrial colony and evidence regarding its origin. With regard to the latter, I remember you telling me something similar. What evidence do you have of this?" And if I must be as precise as possible, his active research efforts concerning UMMO began on August 30, 1968, since due to the fact that he was the only known Galician ufologist, Antonio Ribera asked him to look into the alleged sighting on the Betanzos to Villalba road, which I mentioned earlier.
In 1969, Antonio Ribera sent Oscar Rey Brea a copy of Un Caso Perfecto, and the Galician ufologist analyzed the photos taken at San José de Valderas which illustrated the book. Rey Brea's copy is filled with marginalia -- notes, computations and equations. His final verdict was that the Valderas UFO photo was a hoax. According to Rey Brea's calculations, there were two series of photos taken by the same cameraman, using a tripod, and a flying saucer mockup. We can well imagine how Rey Brea's statements were received by Spanish ufology.
Rey Brea's correspondence with other ufologists of the time makes his opinions clear: "Particularly in Valderas, I believe there was something, due to the number of witnesses, but regarding the photos I can flatly say they were made through the use of a tripod and a flying saucer mockup, which makes them, in other words, a hoax" [...].
Soon, other Spanish ufologists like Andalusian pioneer Manuel Osuna would share Rey Brea's opinion: "Regarding the UMMO affair, my position is--and has always been--as negative as yours. It is patently impossible for me to accept it as extraterrestrial. It challenges my good will. I have been saying so to Antonio Ribera from the start. A year and a half prior to the presentation of the book on Valderas, I repeatedly urged him to be careful and not to throw his weight behind the case. I was later astonished to find that he had dedicated his book to "brother" DEI-98. He must have his reasons. The Valderas UFO represents a committment with a barely proven fact." (Osuna to Rey Brea, 1970). "I do not know who or whom may be behind the UMMO affair. Perhaps a group of mystics, perhaps another weapon in the international free-for-all we suffer. But I squarely oppose the importance it has been given. It lacks any sense whatsoever." (Rey to Osuna, January 25, 1970).
What is most fascinating of all is that in 1971, Rey Brea was able to finger a possible culprit: "due to the fact that Jordán was one of the creators of Un Caso Perfecto...Aside from Jordán, those who witnessed the strange emblem associated to UMMO have chosen to remain anonymous. The other witnesses who choose to show their faces and perhaps some other ones, only saw the object, and at most a dark something on its underbelly." (Rey to Ballester Olmos, April 8 1976).[...]
With the passing opf time, other researchers such as the IVAN group and Carlos Berché, would conduct extraordinary work at fingering Jordán as the probable culprit. All that was needed was evidence.
In this sense, fate was on our side, and in 1988, luck would bring an important revelation our way concerning Jordán Peña and the Aluche/Valderas cases. By sheer coincidence, José Juan Montejo's father, who worked at the time with Javier Sierra on a joint investigation on Aluche, recalled having shared a room back in 1966 with José Luis Jordán Peña...and with Vicente Ortuño! In other words, Ortuño and Jordán, the only known eyewitnesses to the UFO at Aluche, were known to each other prior to the incident in question, flying in the ace of what both had always said. This incredible coincidence, a gift from fate to Montejo's tenacity, put all of us on the trail of the true nature of the Aluche incident and by logical extension, that of UMMO.
It was precisely a conversation with Montejo that motivated me to restart my investigations into UMMO from another angle. On one hand, there existed the possibility that Jordán formed part of a group, or could have been the sole perpetrator. Unlike other "ummologists", I was in favor of the second option, precisely because I had researched a case having astonishing parallels to UMMO in its inception: the DARO case, which could have blossomed into another UMMO, and turned out to be a hoax concocted by a single individual. Thus, conditioned by my personal experience with the DARO hoax, which took me 3 years to unravel, I concentrated my research on Jordán based on the hypothesis that he was the sole author of the UMMO affair.
At the time, I managed to secure access to police records on the enigmatic Mr. Peña. A curious detail appeared on his police files:
D. José Luis Jordán Peña - Son of Dionisio and Rogelia
Born in Alicante, January 13, 1931
Marital Status: married to Mrs. Maite_____.
Resident of No.__Bruselas St__, Madrid. His file has been marked by the Gabinete de Indentificación (Gabinete de Policia Científica), having taken his fingerprints on March 4, 1974 after having been detained for the crime of "terroristic threats." The charges against him include theft of an automobile, Seat-124, plate number____.
As a point of information I will add that Jordán Peña's legal problem appeared the following day in the press.
Surprisingly, the police record does not mention his relationship to another file in the Cult Watch Group of the National Police regarding a cult calling itself: "Friends of the Brothers from UMMO". This cult, led by two sisters who were daughters of a South American diplomat, have authored some Ummite letters, but their greatest role was the publication on May 5th and 20th, 1989 of separate notices in El Pais newspaper, claiming that ufologist J.J. Benítez had been in an accident and was in a coma. Followers of the subject will remember the incident. The author of both notices was Sonia Cronfel, spearhead of the "Friends of the Brothers from UMMO", currently residing in COlombia.
Police files didn't hold the photo of DEI-98, the leader of the Ummites inflitrated among humans, I was told. According to the letters, [the photo was] allegedly confiscated from Enrique de Vicente after he was detained by the Socio-Polictical Brigade (a routine event in those days). It is just another groundless myth surrounding UMMO, since Enrique de Vicente, upon leaving the Madrid police station and head for the Sol subway station, still had the photo in his wallet.
Nonetheless, putting aside these police anecdotes, what is truly interesting is the complete confession which Jordán Peña has recently made to sources of the National Police's Cult Watch Group, to which we have had access.
The Confession
According to these sources and the documents, photos and evidence regarding the inception of UMMO, José Luis Jordán Peña is the only party responsible for the hoax, athough he had a number of sporadic collaborators who have not added valuable information in understanding the who, what, where and why of the UMMO case.
These are the facts:
In 1966, Jordán Peña became aware of the BURU group's existence and of Fernando Sesma's meetings at La Ballena Alegre. He participated in the discussions like the rest of the young college students of the time, and decided to play a more active role by phoning Sesma one day and presenting himself as DEI-98, an alleged resident of the planet UMMO. "I wanted the phonetic symbolism to inspire the falsehood of its content," Jordán has stated. "UMMO evokes the Spanish word for "smoke"." However, I have my own reasons to believe that Jordán was consciously or subconsciously inspired by UMMA, one of the Tantric Hindu names for the spinal column through which Kundalini force allegedly flows to the hypothetical chakras.
"In order to simulate the peculiar Ummite voice, I used an electrical vocal distorter which I built myself. It gave my voice, or the voice of anyone using it, a nasal, metallic ring." Keep in mind that Jordán is sufficiently well-versed in electronics to have been the creator of almost all the laboratory equipment used by the Spanish Parapsychological Society.
"I chose the star Wolf 424 at random, since my real goal wasn't the creation of a credible extraplanetary society." Nevertheless, that world was believable enough to many of Sesma's followers, since the Ummite leters, as opposed to those recieved from Salianus, Lao Tze and Sesma's other "contacts", were laden with technical and scientific jargon. Few are aware that Jordán Peña taught physics and mathematics at the Lope de Vega Middle School, where he headed the physics program. Furthermore, Jordán Peña has always been a faithful reader of scientific publications and has kept in touch with scientists from many countries.
"I recall writing the reports on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, taking advantage of my trips to France, Britain, etc., or of my friends' trips, to mail the letters from said locations." Jordán also admits to using his own typewriter, those of his office, and those of his friends."
The Ummite reports were avidly read at La Ballena Alegre, but it was necessary to have a spark that would heighten their credibility. In 1966, he thought up an Ummite landing in Madrid. "Together with some friends, we made some prints using a plastic mold which we buried deep into the earth. We burned the surrounding soil and scattered radioactive soil around." This last detail was ignored even by his accomplices. And sadly --or perhaps fortunately--no one used a Geiger counter at Aluche, otherwise they would have found the characteristic radiation signature found at UFO landings sites.
His main accomplice in Aluche and San José de Valderas was Vicente Ortuño, just as the latter would openly admit at his home in Aluche. Ortuño was also the famous Ummite "typist" who visited Sesma to deliver the legendary "three-dimensional photos" -- simple holographic devices showing yellow spheres surrounded by fog. Such images were made in Japan, were they had recently been patented, but were unknown in Spain at the time.
After making the prints, Jordán ran screaming into the El Regajal ranch, causing a number of people to come out to see them. The word spread throughout the neighborhood and some people even went as far as to say they had seen a strange light that night. "I myself was surprised," Jordán admitted, "that people in Aluche claimed to have seen the UFO I dreamed up, but that by saying so, could enjoy a measure of celebrity in the press."
Jordán selected newswriter Antonio San Antonio to receive the story about the landing, since San Antonio had already published some information on UFOs and both he and Ortuño, separately (as if not knowing each other) described the same object to San Antonio. He would later go on to write a new Ummite letter in which the aliens had landed for a few minutes in Aluche that day -- enough to convince Sesma.
Jordán exploited the Aluche case for a year, but decided to push the envelope in 1967. For this purpose, he confesses having built a plastic saucer using two paper plates and a transparent half-sphere. One afternoon in May 1967, he went to San José de Valderas with Ortuño, and with his help, shot several rolls of film. "We hung the model from a thin piece of nylon. I remember using a high-speed aperture, 1/1000, so that the saucer and the background would come out more or less in focus, and the saucer would seem larger."
Once the photos were taken, Jordán developed them himself. He was an amateur photographer and could develop his own film, but black and white film only. He was able to force the developing process and the emulsion's grain to make the nylon thread even less visible. He then chose the best photos, having to cut the negatives, since Ortuño's hands inevitably showed up in some of them. Thus, he provided the journalist with individual negatives rather than with the characteristic strip of film. Following his indications, we built our own model, using the same quality thread, a black and white roll of film at the same speed, and exactly 30 years later, in May 1997, at the same time, we repeated the Valderas photos.
Jordán went on to build a number of nickel sheaths for thermometers and a customized die upon which he stamped the famous ")+(" symbol. Jordán still keeps the die in the same desk drawer containing the original stamp employed on all the Ummite letters. "I'd met," Jordán reminisced, "a NASA engineer who was in Spain at the time, and he provided me with some plastic strips which was unknown here at the time, but which NASA commonly used in its rockets. Polyvinyl Chloride was known in Spain at the time, but not Polyvinil Fluoride, which is what I used. I stamped the UMMO emblem on the strips using the die. Of course, he had no idea what I was going to use the plastic for."
Later on, the "Ummites" cautioned Sesma that an Ummite spaceship would reach Earth soon, and with the stage all set beforehand, the "Ummites" kept their word. On June 1, 1967, using another friend, visited Antonio San Antonio to give him a scoop. The journalist never met the photographer, for if he'd seen Jordán and Ortuño together again, he would have recognized them from the previous year. Jordán had paper copies of the negatives made and left them for the journalist at a Madrid photo lab.
Jordán later invented some phony witnesses who would corroborate the photos by phone or by mail, such as the fictitious Antonio Pardo. "The most incredible thing was that I got to interview people who claimed having seen the saucer, but weren't paid by me, " recalls the hoaxer. "I remember a certain engineer who even told me that the symbol on the spaceship, which he'd seen in San Antonio's photos, reminded him of the gearshift on a car...I was stunned to interview people who would adopt the case I'd hoaxed only to appear in the papers."
With the press notified, Jordán deposited at Valderas some of the strips and tubes he had crafted. But since he wasn't entirely certain that people wouldn't keep them, he mailed out one of the strips, which was later analyzed at the INTA by General Calvo, who was Rafael Farriols' uncle. [...].
In 1993, Jordán Peña mailed two letters to Rafael Farriols, confessing that he was the sole perpetrator of the hoax. Farriols refused to accept this. The reason for Jordán's confession was twofold: "I was outraged that the Edelweiss sect was branding my emblem with fire on the bodies of innocent children. I later received an anonymous invitation from Cuba to attend some Ummite meeting or another at Farriols' house, so I chose to terminate the experiment I'd initiated 25 earlier."
Jordán is referring to an Ummite letter received by Farriols from Cuba, which gives me reason to believe that a new era in the UMMO affair has begun.
The Secret Service and UMMO
The power of myth is uncontrollable, and UMMO is a good example. Jordán Peña confesses having created UMMO, but its creature grew in size and escaped his control. "I regret having created an experiment that I consider immoral and which has turned against me."
Dangerous sects such as Edelweiss, or the "Friends of the Brothers from UMMO", made use of his reports and the Valderas photographs to create their own cults. Imitators appeared in cities like La Coruña and Granada who employed the myth, passing themselves off as Ummites (any tall blonde with funny speech patterns would do) to engage in dalliances or even set up illegal businesses. A nearly identical case to the one in Valderas almost occured in Galicia, and the most interesting feature of this hoax is that its perpetrators, having no knowledge whatsoever of how UMMO had been carried out, followed nearly the very same techniques used by Jordán. On the other hand, "I was moved to learn," Jordán writes in his confession, "that Luis Anglada Font's ailments worsened through his obsession with UMMO. His mother recalls that on his deathbed he couldn't stop moaning: "Aioumma...." [the name of UMMO's "star"--Ed.] Could I have been indirectly responsible for his mental collapse?" The "Tarrassa Suicides" lost their lives due in part to their belief in the Ummite reports, and they weren't perhaps the only ones.
But there are even more serious items: Aside from having conditioned the beliefs of the BURU group and the members of Sesma's crowd, he went on to set up two new cults: Pirophos and a pseudo-Hindu group. In the second case, two of the victims, Mercedes Carrasco and Trinidad P. collaborated with Jordán by playing the role of Ummite mail carriers, or placing phone calls to the recipients of Ummite letters in the guise of "Marisol", an alleged friend of the Ummites who appears in a number of works on the subject. As far as Pirophos is concerned, up to seven men and eleven women, mostly lawyers, economists, bankers, a veterinarian, etc. were victims of Jordán's latest creation. In both cases, the incentive was the creation of a sadomasochistic cult. I will omit the sordid details out of respect for the victims and for Jordán's family.
In the end, all of the letters from Eastern masters, all of the esoteric messages, all the paranormal phenomena -- which Jordán created through a skillful blend of prestidigitation and his knowledge of electronics and chemistry, had sex as their only goal, although Jordán claims that his ultimate purpose was to create a "sociologically-oriented scientific study." I admit to being conditioned by my experiences, but the authors of similar hoaxes, such as the DARO case or the Ummite landing at La Coruña, made the exact same confession when they were unmasked.
Something even more sinister lurks behind UMMO.
Certain researchers, such as Javier Sierra, reached the conclusion that although Jordán might be the intellectual author of the myth, intelligence agencies interfered with the mix. Not necessarily the CIA, but Spain's CESID. "It was probably around 1973, when those strange letters discussing the Piedralaves shelter were received. I feel that CESID was trying to see if it could use the Ummite letters to send coded messages which, if intercepted, would not be taken seriously since they were "letters written by martians". The CESID's interference would have been sporadic."
Javier was on the right path. The CESID, in fact, and the SECED before it (this was the secret service agency founded by Carrero Blanco, from which CESID would later emerge), were both implicated in the UMMO affair. In fact, Jordán admits to having contact with CESID agents at least onces, when two officers of La Casa ("The House") visited the SEP to see if a given psychic could be employed toward military goals.
A few months ago, ENIGMAS magazine published a report on the CESID and UFOs in Spain. The article mentioned that I had gone to the same shooting range used by the police and CESID agents, and had managed to contact certain spies who had had contact with the UFO phenomenon. Recently, one of those CESID agents provided me with new information about UMMO.
I must explain that Oscar, and another agent who shall remain anonymous, gave me this information in Zaragoza. They had access to at least one SECED report and two CESID reports concerning UMMO.
According to the CESID sources, the Spanish secret service infiltrated at least one mole, a SECED lieutenant commander, into the meetings at La Ballena Alegre. From the start, the SECED knew of Jordán Peña's dark sexual yearnings, regarding which a number of lawsuits were presented in court without effect, perhaps because the SECED chose to manipulate the UMMO affair rather than making it disappear by arresting Jordán.
According to Oscar and his comrade, the Franco Regime's Ministry of Foreign Affairs requested the Central Documentation Service to apprise it of any news concerning UMMO outside the country. Oscar, who worked at "La Casa" up to a few weeks ago, had access to the Central Intelligence Department, which processes all information that reaches CESID, and where he claims to have seen reports on both UMMO and Jordán Peña in an alleged dossier named "Apocalypse", which contains information on cults, UFOs, etc.which could threaten national security or serve as a cover for the exfiltration of foreign operatives from Spain.
It is understandable that the Secret Service would feel interested in meetings which, in the Franco dictatorship's time, gathered policement, military men, doctors, intellectuals and even a secretary of the U.S. embassy in Madrid, all in the same basement. A treat for any intelligence agency. Particularly taking into consideration that the UMMO affair has reached the Spain's Royal Family itself.
It wouldn't be surprising to discover that these very same agencies or others supported the myth by manufcturing the evidence at La Javie, creating letters containing advanced scientific concepts, causing some sightings, etc.
The final UMMO letter to which I have had access was recieved on August 26, 1996. I have reason to believe that this letter has the same origin as the one received earlier, on July 15, 1996 and the one originating in Cuba in 1993. These letter seek to recereat the network of recipients and the legendary "Madrid Group". It is my opinion that Jordán Peña is not involved with these Ummite letters. A new age in the UMMO affair is upon us.
Recently, countries such as France, Romania and Japan have published new books on UMMO with entirely harebrained premises: the Internet has a web page renewing the same old myth among youngsters who are new to the UFO phenomenon. Worse yet: each passing year gives us a new crop of UFO contactee suicides, who end their lives due to their belief in extraterrestrials (as happened in Tarrasa). It is my humble opinion that ufologists shouldn't aid or abet this situation.UMMO remains the great unsolved matter of Spanish ufology. It is our moral duty -- researchers and disseminators alike -- to keep the extraterrestrial myth from affecting the lives of our readers, regardless of its real alien nature or not. Even if Ummites had really written their letters on Wolf-424, we should not countenance the existence groups such as Edelweiss or of suicides like the ones in Tarrasa. Otherwise, we will never be able to tell what is really behind the UFO phenomenon. May God mete out fate, and may every one act according to his or her conscience.
The premiere issue of El Ojo Cr¡tico declares that Spain's "new wave" of UFO investigators may have triumphed where there elders have failed: learning the truth behind the UMMO mystery. Young investigators like Carles Berch‚, Jos‚ J. Montejo and Javier Sierra have discovered that the author of the worldwide hoax was eminent parapsychologist Jos‚ Luis Jordan Pea. After a barrage of articles in ufological journals attacking UMMO, Jordan Pea confessed to his authorship of the entire scenario, protesting that it was a "scientific experiment" designed to gauge the gullibility of UFO researchers of the '60s and '70s. Investigator Manuel Carballal has discovered through a series of interviews that Jord n Pea's goals may not have been quite so sanguine.
In 1993, Trinidad Pastrana confessed to being the enigmatic character "Marisol", the Ummites go-between and a recipient of the enigmatic "reports". "Marisol" made use of the telephone and overseas trips to drop off letters and Ummite
messages in the postal services of the countries she visited, leading researchers to believe that the Ummites were indeed travelling around the world to gather data about this planet. The UMMO correspondence was dictated to her by Jordan Pea.
Trinidad stated that she had met Jordan Pea outside a radio studio, captivated by his discussion of Kirlian photography. Circumstances led to her being hypnotized and subjected to sexual abuse by Jordan Pea. Another woman, Mercedes Carrasco, another sexual abuse victim, would also become involved in the parapsychologists' fantasies and become a player in the UMMO hoax.
Carballal goes on to say how the "final" UMMO letters, mailed from Malaysia and Zimbabwe in 1983-84, were sent from said locations by none other than Carrasco herself. In a taped interview, the woman recounted her involvement with UMMO.
"I met him (Jordan) in '72 or '73 at the SEP Conference, and agreed to be hypnotized, first with witnesses and later alone..."
Jordan took advantage of a letter Carrasco had mailed to a spiritual group to pose as a Hindu "master", leading her to believe that the only way to balance off her "bad karma" from a previous existence was by subjecting herself to a sadomasochistic relationship.
Early in the cover-up on the alien presence were a few well orchestrated hoaxes, the Ummo case among them. As with most hoaxes, publicity and the resultant personal attention were the prime motivators, but when a hoax is elaborate and long lasting, other motivators are usually present. There are few opportunities for instant fame in human society - winning the lottery, making a breakthrough scientific discovery, rescuing children from a burning building, etc. The average human, even those with status by virtue of their position among the wealthy or due to being professionally accomplished, live quiet lives. Outside of the family, the circle of friends, and the immediate coworkers, no one is aware of them. For those individuals with a secret longing to be the center of attention, participation in a hoax can be it's own reward. Thus, when those who planned the Ummo hoax were looking for cooperatives, they did not have to look far!
When professional individuals participate in a hoax, for personal reasons, they do so because they are given a rational, an excuse for the hoax, that allows them to explain what they are doing in a face-saving manner. It’s for the public safety, to help the government learn of scientists who might be contactees and thus traitors to the human race, or perhaps so the government can learn of real technology gifts given to real contactees, and thus share these gifts with the rest of mankind. Of course, the motive on the part of establishment perpetrators is greed and the desire to be in control, to retain their power positions, but this is not the way the rationale for the hoax is put forth.
Thus, the Ummo case was a grand scheme to poll the scientific community and locate those scientists who seem to be genuine contactees. What resulted, to the great disappointment of the perpetrators, was contact with yet more individuals desiring to be the center of attention, not genuine contactees receiving technology from aliens.
(ForteanTimes)
As the end of the 20th century recedes into memory millennialist cults have not disappeared, despite the failure of the predicted apocalypse. Sociologists and cult-watchers have been wondering what new catastrophes the prophets will come up with to hold on to their congregations. ENZO DAEDRO has observed just such an adaptation in the Daughters of Ummo, little known outside Bolivia, whose beliefs are disturbingly similar to the Heavens-Gaters, and who have just postponed the End of the World, as we know it, to the summer solstice in 2033.
While attending a UFO symposium in Mexico in 1994, I had the honour of meeting a Portuguese lady (whose name I can’t reveal) who wished to discuss with me a problem she had encountered during the previous year. We met in a bar in the Federal District and, for two hours, she spoke of her concerns about a strange Bolivian cult called the Daughters of Ummo. This was the first I’d heard of the group although, as a ufologist, I was familiar with the Ummo mystery (see article below). When I explained that I couldn’t investigate this group immediately because I had to complete some work in Chile, the lady became very nervous and left without another word.
I didn’t finish my Chilean magazine assignments until the following year, but in the summer of 1995 I travelled to Bolivia to find out what I could about Ummo’s Daughters. My stay was brief, but while I was there I met an old friend, Ramón Lafañe, who worked for a local newspaper. He immediately warned me that investigating the sect was likely to be dangerous. “If I were you, I wouldn’t bother,” he said. “Dinovi Gutierrez does not allow anybody to investigate her affairs.” I asked him who this Gutierrez woman was. “She’s the president, an elderly but dangerous woman. Forget all about it, Enzo!” I took his advice and returned to Buenos Aires and my other assignments.
Several years later, in 1998, I received an odd message by e-mail. It came from a woman who called herself ‘Cornopus 77’. She claimed to be a member of the Bolivian Daughters of Ummo and invited me to visit their headquarters in La Paz, Bolivia. I refused immediately, which turned out to be a mistake. Soon I was receiving a steady flow of communications reporting, in some detail, the social, political and religious life of the Ummite civilisation and their origins in the area around the star Wolf 424. Naturally, I filed all the documents.
Under this bombardment, I began to feel threatened. I closed down my mailbox, but somehow the torrent of antagonistic messages from Cornopus 77 continued unabated. I wondered if she had contacts in Argentina watching me. With a new feeling of determination, I tidied my papers and cleared the decks for a serious inquiry. Very well, the Daughters of Ummo had made a new enemy! I read everything I could about Ummo, including Antonio Ribera’s history and analysis of the original Ummo enigma in the mid-1960s and how it had mystified Spanish ufologists for nearly three decades. Although now known to be largely a clever and sustained hoax, the Ummo mystery has been endlessly exploited and promoted to the credulous over the years. The Ummite mythology, even if only the product of a highly inventive imagination, exerts a fierce grip on the minds of its believers and its power should not be underestimated.
In essence, the Daughters are brainwashed into believing that the Ummites who came to Earth represent a race of superior beings who are somehow, simultaneously, both extraterrestrial entities and their own ‘fathers’ and ‘mothers’. The Daughters conduct rituals worshipping the Ummites and believe they have been empowered to do their will, to prepare the planet for a new, larger invasion of Ummites in the year 2033.
The Internet proved invaluable; it allowed me to correspond with veteran investigators who had received similar volumes of communications from the original Ummite sources and who told me of their concerns about this modern cult which has based itself on the original Ummite archive. But it also brought emails from other Daughters, calling themselves ‘Beotho 55’, ‘Soromon 44’, and ‘Lawwae 92’.
In March 1999, I received a new and totally unexpected Ummite document; this time it was from Florencia Dinovi Gutiérrez, the organisation’s apparently fearsome president. I must come to Bolivia immediately, she demanded, because I had been accepted to enter the organisation as an “external contributor”. My research into the history of Florencia Dinovi Gutiérrez led to a mental hospital in Peru from which, some years back, a woman answering her description had absconded while being treated for millennialist obsessions and hallucinations about aliens. To check the possibility that this notorious patient might have been Gutiérrez, I spoke to Dr Horacio Torna at the hospital. He listened patiently as I described the beliefs of the Daughters of Ummo and their leader. “It’s her,” he said hoarsely. “It’s Juana Pordiavel!” This identification was confirmed after the doctor cautiously sent me some pages from Pordiavel’s personal file, with the condition that I wouldn’t publish them.
Juana Pordiavel (left) was born in Cuzco, Peru, in 1912, to a humble peasant family. When she was 12, she left home claiming that her father had abused her. She lived rough in the streets by begging, until a Spanish priest – Hermenegildo Abustín – took pity on her condition and invited her to live in the church. This act of kindness was a major turning point in her life; Hermenegildo believed Juana had the potential to become a nun and became her tutor. In return for cleaning the church, the priest bought her books and encouraged her intellectual development. He remembers her reading biblical texts with passion and, in time, becoming more confident about her culture and language. By the time she left the church, aged 19, her belief in fundamentalist theology was informed by her general dissatisfaction with life, providing the ideal ingredients for a future sect leader.
Pordiavel spent some time in a mental hospital in 1941 and eventually met Carlos Opanova, who, despite suffering from a few mental problems of his own, was leader of a fanatical spiritualist organisation called ‘The Deer of the Sixth Christ’. They fell in love and married. In 1963, the Deer moved to Oruro, in Bolivia, where they took over (or squatted) a building, calling it ‘The New Heavenly Jerusalem’. The group’s nocturnal ceremonies began to annoy the neighbours, who complained of hearing strange voices in the nights and of missing children. At some time during this period, Pordiavel was again interned in a mental hospital.
When the curiosity of the police became too intrusive in 1967, the Deer fled their ‘Heavenly Jerusalem’ in scattered groups. Taking a big chunk of the organisation’s money, Juana and Carlos bought a small flat in La Paz and began to re-invent themselves. Carlos had been corresponding with the Spanish ufologist Jiménez del Oso, who sent them copies of many of the original Ummite writings – which proved to be a revelation to Opanova. Dazzled by the Ummite picture of a better world, a world that could be theirs, Opanova decided to adopt the philosophy and teachings of Ummo. From now on Opanova’s disciples would be devoted to the emulation of all things Ummite.
And so, in 1969, the Deer finally became the Daughters of Ummo. Juana baptised herself Florencia Dinovi Gutiérrez while her husband took on the persona of ‘Yiewaka’, an Ummite ‘father’ on Earth. The sect grew beyond their wildest dreams, taking advantage of cruel social circumstances; as much as 90 per cent of its members are drawn from the poor and uneducated, many recruited directly from the streets. Apparently, the Daughters are not puzzled by the contradiction of Opanova being both Juana’s husband and an incarnate Ummite appointed as president and ‘father-in-law’ of Earth; to them it is part of the unquestioned mystery.
As the new cult became more established, there were arguments with priests from the local Catholic Church. Dinovi reacted by renouncing her Catholic heritage and, in a dramatic nocturnal caper, dispatched two of her disciples to steal the chalice and wafers from a church. She took her revenge by urinating on them. A madness similar to ‘speaking in tongues’ (glossolalia) possesses her. She mutates the language of Ummo and gives members strange names such as Cornopus, Soromon, Aweea, Lawwae, and Beotho. (The addition of numbers denotes a ranking system for appointments, the most senior being 44, then 77.)
An emailed warning (panel, left) was aimed, mainly, at the editor of the Buenos Aires-based UFO journal Crónica and Mr Lurchuk, creator of the website ‘The Invisible Dragon’.
Last summer (2000), I received an e-mail from none other than Ummo’s ambassador to Earth, Yiewaka. I reproduce this singular and disturbing letter in full as it gives a flavour of the group’s mentality:
MESSAGE TO THOSE WHO HAVE BLASPHEMED THE INTEGRITY, THE MORALITY AND DISCIPLINE OF OUR ORDER. HEAR THE MESSAGE FROM THE SUPERIOR FATHER OF UMMO, YIEWAKA, THE WISE.
Mr Jorge M Iglesias, Mr Carlos A Lurchuck, Mr Enzo Daedro, Mr Sebastián Jarrè, Mrs Annabel Ascar, Mrs Victoria Palacio, Mr Miguel A Gómez, Mrs Mirtha Allende de Pace, Mr León Samaritano, Mrs Héctor Braum, Mr Ernesto Luppi, Mr Antonio R. López, Mr Leonardo Finse and Mrs Manuela Calaña... ...among others. They have been highlighted because they slandered in a grotesque and miserly way our organisation’s integrity.
Due to “misunderstandings”, wrongly delivered information, “ghostly” informants, etc. they believe and express, with the harmful and loud voice that may exist over the face of the Earth, that the words pronounced by the Bolivian Daughters are a consequence of a “psychotic end-of-century decadence”.
What these individuals don’t understand is that they fear the UNKNOWN. As none of them (except for Mr Samaritano) has approached us to understand the meaning of our message, they have been influenced by race and phobic feelings. It’s a pity that this kind of persons survived THE LAST IMPRESSION (1987).
We, blood Ummites, believed that the human race had overcome the problem of living together, and that peace and truth were guiding you. We are disappointed at your unjustified actions. The only course left to us is to: DELAY THE 2033 AGREEMENT.
We feel sorry about that. You have not reached the expected level. That’s why we will communicate with your leaders, governmental and religious, to give them the bad news. The Interplanetary Agreement that took a lot of effort by my predecessor, WALAKEA, to arrange will now terminate.
What have you gained by this? The human race will not have the privileges of belonging to our nation. As for Echelon and Merc 9, we will dismantle the units and the programs will no longer be in use. Nordic and African Ummo’s Daughters, sent directly from Ummo’s Capital, will help us, with great sorrow, to end the hydroelectric services. Many cities will suffer the effects of this aggression against our holy organization.
YIEWAKA
UMMO’S FATHER
-----FINISHED REPORT.
0-2321 – XIJASXUMMOX – HEAD OFFICE 034 – BOLIVIA.
Others, like myself, come further down the list. It seems that Yiewaka (aka Carlos Opanova) is furious with the unenthusiastic, suspicious and even scornful responses to the Daughters’ propaganda programme. What did they expect after Dinovi Gutiérrez (aka Juana Pordiavel) emailed serious threats to most of the list, warning that if they did not join the sect they would die in some terrible Dantesque hell? Applause?
The Last Impression – mentioned in the letter – is believed to be the mass abduction of a huge number of people from many countries, supposedly to Ummo. The impending event, called the ‘2033 Agreement’, appears to mean the next wave of Ummite immigration, which Yiewaka threatens to postpone. Various unnamed governments are claimed to be accomplices in the event which seems to be planned as a silent invasion. The letter also refers to two other groups – Nordic and African Ummo’s Daughters – but despite serious effort, I have not been able to find out anything about them.
The most significant development came from a mole within the Bolivian sect – to protect his identity I will call him ‘S’ – who has been keeping me informed about their structure, beliefs and behaviour. Every year they embark on a public drive to recruit new members. They set up a table in a plaza near their headquarters in La Paz(see photo, right) which is attended by two Daughters specially trained to lure passers-by with false promises and expectations. Anyone can apply to join once, explained ‘S’, but if they fail the exam, they will never be allowed another opportunity.
When 30 applicants have been chosen, they are housed in a courtyard in the headquarters for the induction lecture. Soromon 44 – one of Dinovi’s chief secretaries – takes the stage to thank them for “accepting the call.” She shakes hands with the males and kisses the females before inviting them into the interior of the building. With no knowledge of what is about to happen to them, they take a step into the unknown.
The initiation attended by ‘S’ took place in a dark and depressing cellar. Soromon 44 closed the door slowly and they stood for some minutes in silence. Suddenly, a formal voice coming from a loudspeaker ordered them to separate into male and female groups. (According to ‘S’, at least 80 per cent of those present were woman). Then, as bright lights were switched on, about 15 Daughters entered the cellar from doors on both sides, handing out triangular green hats to the women and violet hats to the men. All were asked to kneel down and put on the hats; as they did so the Daughters left the room and all was silent for some time.
‘S’ and his fellows then heard a faint chanting. A blue light came on, illuminating the president Florencia Dinovi Gutiérrez, standing there in a long red gown with a green Ummo logo on both shoulders. Humming and roaming among the women, Dinovi selected one, seemingly at random, drew her to the centre of the room and asked her to uncover one of her breasts. The chosen woman obeyed as if she had been hypnotised. Dinovi produced a dagger from her clothes and pricked the woman’s nipple until it started to bleed. A Daughter ran to them to gather some of the blood. As the woman was laid on the floor, Dinovi began singing: “Walae! Walae! They are here for you. Yiewaka, stellar lord, open your mind and let them enter your glory. Walae! Walae!” Dinovi asked the newly-bled woman and ‘S’ to stay and talk with her while the rest were taken to their rooms. Despite his overwhelming anxiety, ‘S’ was determined to stay and infiltrate the group.
The Owwa – the ‘Book of Imperfection’ – is the pillar of Ummite beliefs. It was originally written by Carlos Opanova, adapted partly from his spiritualist writings for the defunct Deer of the Sixth Christ and partly from the voluminous texts attributed to the ‘White Brothers’ of Ummo. It is the sect’s bible. The Ummite day begins at 7 o’clock in the morning with a compulsory reading of the Owwa. A sixth-grade Daughter then chooses a newer member to give her interpretation and, if this is unsatisfactory, the hapless member is confined in a cellar lock-up for a period specified by the group’s laws.
After a light breakfast – usually a cup of milk and some rye bread – members go about their appointed tasks and work till 8:30pm. Bedtime is 9 o’clock. Sexual activities are not allowed except on application to the Daughter called Waooa 11, who seeks permission from Dinovi Gutiérrez. Members are generally allowed one day a week to themselves. Advancement in the early grades is down to hard work, long hours and a thorough indoctrination in the Owwa. Most days, the elderly Dinovi Gutiérrez shuts herself in her large office where she uses a powerful computer to maintain the group’s website. There, she also targets prominent individuals with a constant stream of emails, seeking to recruit them or obtain their help in spreading the Ummite message. Dinovi is served by four secretaries – Soromon 44, Waooa 11, Cornopus 77 and Lawwae 22 – who look after their leader’s daily needs and the sect’s affairs, including its economic and political administration. They receive prominent guests and organise street sales of clothing and food.
It is hardly a secret that the elderly priestess still has a voracious sexual appetite; She receives regular visits from a ‘taxi-boy’, an adolescent who has been given the name Nuwuo (or ‘innocent’ in the Ummite language). ‘S’ is concerned that, at present, the boy seems to be missing. Dinovi/Pordiavel’s most recent spell in a mental hospital, in 1984, was precipitated by a serious vaginal infection. You may wonder why ‘S’ didn’t simply go straight to the police and ask them to put a stop to the Daughters’ expanding activities. In fact, he tried to get the local police to understand the dangerous aspects of the sect – that they were depriving their members of their freedom and inciting them to acts of robbery, deceit and violence – but was rebuffed and refused any help.
On one occasion, he was even hit by two policeman when he was on his way to give evidence. No court or embassy has taken any account of what he has so far revealed, so he has determined to continue his infiltration of the Daughters in order to gather the necessary proofs. Thanks to ‘S’, we now know, for example, that the Owwa recommends inducting at least three children each year, without the knowledge or consent of their parents. We hope he is successful in heading off the prophesied disaster.
BOB RICKARD summarises a 27-year Close Encounter of the postal kind.
Some time around the end of 1965 and the beginning of 1966, a number of Spanish UFO enthusiasts received anonymous communications claiming to come from an “extraterrestrial expeditionary group” from the star Wolf 424 on a mission to Earth. The letters had been posted from various countries – including Spain, Australia, Canada, Switzerland, and Germany. Each was ‘authenticated’ with a strange logo designated the seal of “the Unified government of the planet Ummo.” (Apparently the design was inked onto a fingertip, then used to ‘stamp’ on the letters.)
In their first years on Earth, the Ummites said, they had pursued scientific research, including breaking into houses and anæsthetising the inhabitants to take samples of hair and vaginal mucus; this was before the topic of abductions by the Grey gynæcologists became well known and two years before John Fuller’s The Interrupted Journey was published in Spanish.
The Ummo papers (see example, right) were truly mystifying; they appeared to be skilled expositions, displayed a wide knowledge of science and philosophy and did not look like the ravings of lunatics. Over time, several hundred letters were received, some of them voluminous and illustrated manuscripts. Occasionally, someone received a phone call; the Ummite voice was curiously mechanical, as though deliberately distorted. Religious matters were dealt with historically – for Catholic readers, there was the added interest of learning about an ancient Ummite parallel to Christ in ‘Ummowoa’, a prophet whose body vanished from the table on which he was being vivisected by order of an evil Empress – but, behind the unverifiable and convoluted tracts about alien philosophy and the science of Ummo, was a sentiment that was clearly anti-Franco in its description of a utopian society that was a strange mix of communism and the “American way of life”.
The first recipients of the Ummo missions were loosely associated with the Sociedad de Amigos de los Visitantes del Espacio (Friends of Space Visitors Society) formed by Fernando Sesma to discuss UFOs and extraterrestrials. In 1970, a number of these recipients formed their own organisation, called ERIDANI, to study the Ummo case. Several of them wrote books – including Fernando Sesma’s Ummo: Another Inhabited Planet (1967) and Looking Toward The Edge Of The Universe (1968) by Father Enrique Lopez Guerrero, the best known outside Spain being Antonio Ribera’s The Ummo Mystery (1975). The authors differed widely in their opinions of the origin of the letters and the meaning of their contents, but they agreed on their extraterrestrial origin. The only alternative considered was that the letters were part of some kind of social engineering experiment perpetrated by an unknown intelligence agency – the KGB, the East German Stasi, the CIA and the Vatican organisation Opus Dei were all mooted, even by the Ummite letter-writer.
The Ummo phenomenon remained relatively unknown outside the Spanish ufological community until September 1968, when Father Enrique Lopez Guerrero drew the attention of the world’s press by publicly denouncing the Ummite aliens’ presence on Earth. The few British and American ufologists who commented on the Ummo mystery were divided; while most thought it a hoax, others embraced it excitedly. In Spain at least, it was taken seriously and has been a perennial topic of the press, radio and TV ever since.
After Franco’s death in 1975, the frequency and quantity of letters decreased but they continued to denounce capitalism, American military policy, etc. A few serious Spanish ufologists – such as Ballester Olmos and Ares de Blas – had never accepted the documents or photos and at least one journal – Stendek, the bulletin of the main ufological Spanish organisation, Centro de Estudios Interplanetarios (CEI) – denounced Ummo very early on. In the 1980s, a new generation of French and Spanish ufologists began to re-evaluate the Ummo archive, eventually concluding that the chief culprit was not an alien but none other than Jose Luis Jordan Peña, the chairman of ERIDANI itself.
Senor Peña strongly denied it and continued denying it until April 1993, when he astonished many people with a sudden and definitive admission of guilt. In a statement to Spanish journalists and ufologists, he confessed: “I am the man who has written the letters from Ummo.” However, he steadfastly refused to discuss his motive, political intentions or what he hoped to achieve by this hoax. As Peter Rogerson noted (in Magonia 43), the writings were “samizdat literature, saying things which could not be said openly in Franco-ist Spain.” Luis R González Manso, a Spanish ufologist who has made a special study of the Ummo case, and his colleagues have identified at least one accomplice; there may have been others.
Today, references to the Ummo hoax in British and American ufological literature are few and far between – a curious oversight given the important role the case has played in French and Hispanic ufology. But who was this mastermind behind one of the greatest UFO hoaxes ever? Luis González told FT that Jordan Peña was well placed to perpetrate the hoax. He had a degree in telecommunications and worked for one of the largest Spanish building societies but had, for years, maintained a keen interest in cultural anthropology, philosophy, the sciences and the history of religions; he also learned several languages and was one of the founders of the Spanish Parapsychology Society. He has variously described himself as an agnostic, a sceptic and a psychologist.
Writing in Magonia 47 (October 1993), González says it is important to take account of the expectant atmosphere of the period between 1952 – when George Adamski met alien beings in an American desert – and the onset of the Ummo phenomenon in 1966. In 1954, alone, there were similar contact claims to Adamski’s from Coniston (England), Oeydalen (Norway), Natal (South Africa) and Madrid (Spain).
In the Madrid case, male nurse Alberto Sanmartin claimed to have been given a ‘Space Stone’, covered with strange signs, by an alien. Significantly, a few weeks earlier, articles about UFOs (including mention of Adamski) had been published in a local newspaper. Their author was Fernando Sesma, a postal worker and self-appointed ‘professor’ of cryptography and graphology, who went on to see his first UFO in 1961 and, the following year, claimed to have received letters from an ET called ‘Saliano’, from the planet Auco, orbiting Alpha Centauri. This is the very same man who was destined to be one of the first to receive Ummo papers 12 years later.
April 1964 saw the famous UFO encounter at Socorro (USA); according to ufologist Jacques Vallée, the symbol on its fuselage was the Arabic sign for Venus! That same year, an associate of the well-known writer on ancient mysteries Robert Charroux began to receive letters from immigrants from Proxima Centauri, who called themselves ‘Baavi’, detailing their civilisation, language and science. In 1965, another possible precursor of Ummo appeared in the first volume of Frank Herbert’s Dune, destined to be a huge cult SF classic. It included the word ‘Umma’, defined as “one of the brotherhood of prophets (a term of scorn in the Imperium, meaning any ‘wild’ person given to fanatical prediction).”
Senor Peña’s (left) involvement seems to have begun on the evening of 6 February 1966 – about the same time the USAF were deliberating ‘Project Blue Book’ – when a large luminous object flew over his car as he was driving home in Madrid. On the object’s belly he noticed a curious design, rather like the alchemical symbol for Uranus. Strange ground marks were found at Aluche, on the city outskirts, and attributed to the UFO landing there. On 1 June 1967, a man came forward saying he’d photographed a UFO hovering over San Jose de Valderas and, wonder of wonders, it too bore the secret icon of Ummo!
Sesma’s group was as ecstatic as they were credulous, seeing in the San Jose de Valderas visitation vindication of all their hopes and speculation. At some point, Peña joined the ‘Friends’ and quickly rose to a position of influence. He would have known of Sesma’s contact with the alien from Alpha Centauri and, as an insider, had a unique opportunity to have further fun with this group of ET-believers. The Aluche and San Jose de Valderas incidents seem to implicate Peña by association and he could have easily crafted his accounts of them to substantiate the Ummo mythology.
This is González’s theory: he believes that the first phase of the hoax lasted just over a year – from February 1966 to July 1967. “I maintain that it all began as some kind of joke that later got out of hand,” he concludes. “The real mystery is why so many people had believed in them for so long.” It was not until some of the ERIDANI group began to consult or compare notes with more sceptical ufologists outside their circle or overseas that they began to notice significant errors in the epistles from Ummo. One of the first was also one of the most serious; Wolf 424 is described as a two-planet solar system, while astronomy shows indisputably that it is a binary system with twin stars.
As to why Peña chose the star Wolf 424 as the home of his alien master race, Luis González told FT that even Peña probably did not know the answer. “Perhaps he was crying ‘Wolf’? The ufologist Donald Keyhoe once suggested that aliens could come from Wolf 359, so maybe Peña simply changed the digits?”
With hindsight the clues are quite visible. The Ummites plagiarised passages from the writings of Isaac Asimov and Martin Gardner, and had once bizarrely suggested that the British humourous magazine Punch was behind the whole Ummite mythos. A close inspection of the impressive Ummite tracts on science reveals them to be gobbledegook. But suspicion should have been aroused by the original account of their first landing, near the town of La Javie, at the base of the Alps (about 53 miles (85km) northwest of Cannes) on 28 March 1950.
According to Luis González: “It is a long story (49 pages), a masterful piece of work. The reader is absolutely touched when the [Ummites] discover their first human artifacts – ‘some fragments of white-yellowed, flexible and brittle sheets… full of characters… and stained with fæces’ – and attribute to it ritual meanings. It is really too much,” he adds, sadly, “that the first document preserved for galactic posterity turned out to be some pages of the French newspaper Le Figaro used as toilet paper by a peasant.”
(Ananova.com)
25th June 2002
A replica of Noah's Ark is to be built on top of Mount Ararat in Turkey to attract tourists.
It will house a museum, restaurants, a conference hall and shops to attract tourists back to a region that for years suffered the ravages of war.
The 5,000-metre-high Mount Ararat stands on the border between Turkey and Armenia.
Tourism Minister Mustafa Tasar told Turkish newspaper Milliyet a five-mile-long cable car run will take visitors from the foot of the mountain to the summit.
Mount Ararat has attracted considerable attention from archaeologists in the last decade who have been searching for remnants of the "real" Noah's Ark.
But so far they have found no clues that Noah and his animals really did land on the mountain.
Authorities in the region have been endeavouring to attract tourists back to the area since the end of the war between the Workers Party of Kurdistan (PKK) and the Turkish Army.
mystery.
panther.
Tokyo-AP
22 Jun 2002
Japan's Mount Asama volcano towers over a group of tourists in this 1997 photo
Japanese authorities are watching a volcano about 150 kilometers from Tokyo. There are fears Mount Asama may be waking after a 12-year slumber.
Japan's Meteorological Agency says more than 200 small earthquakes have shaken the area near Mount Asama, indicating that an eruption is possible. The agency is warning people not to go within four kilometers of the mountain. However, there is no order so far to evacuate homes and officials stress they do not believe a major eruption is imminent.
The 2,500 meter volcano is close to the resort town of Karuizawa, a favorite escape from the summer heat of Tokyo for politicians, expatriates and members of the Imperial Family.
Seismologists and vulcanologists have been paying close attention to Mount Asama since last month when the floor of its crater bulged. In recent weeks, plumes of smoke climbing one thousand meters have been seen. The scientists say the temperature inside the crater has hit 180 degrees Celsius.
The volcano's last major eruption came in 1783, killing more than one thousand people and destroying crops throughout the region. Mount Asama took lives again in 1947 when eleven mountaineers were struck and killed by molten rocks. The last minor eruption, 12 years ago, injured nearly a dozen people.
26 June 02
(New Scientist)
In April 1986, one of Chernobyl's reactors exploded and showered a swathe of Europe with radioactivity. Although most experts say the fallout had a detectable impact on human health only in the Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, studies in Germany, Greece, Scotland and Wales have suggested links between the accident and increases in infant leukaemia.
Now research by John Urquhart, a statistician based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, has discovered high rates of infant deaths and birth defects in England and Wales in the three years after Chernobyl. He estimates that between 1986 and 1989, at least 200 more children than normal died before their first birthday.
He calculates there were over 600 extra cases of babies born with Down's syndrome, spina bifida, cleft palate and other abnormalities in these years. One possible explanation is that radiation from the accident could have damaged the immune systems of the children or their parents, rendering them more vulnerable to harmful viruses.
The results, unveiled at a conference on low-level radiation in Dublin last weekend, were "unexpected but dis-turbing", Urquhart says. "We've probably been too complacent about health effects from Chernobyl in western Europe."
High rainfall
Urquhart analysed 80,000 birth defects in children born in the 15 health regions of England and Wales between 1983 and 1992. He found that most of the extra cases between 1986 and 1989 were concentrated in just five English regions: Northern, North Western, Trent, South Western and South West Thames.
When he looked at infant deaths in England and Wales from 1981 to 1992, he found a similar pattern. Death rates fell every year except for 1986, with the extra deaths mostly occurring in four of the five same regions. The odds that the overlap occurred by chance are 1 in 200, he says.
Urquhart can't explain why these particular regions should have suffered more than others. But he points out that the total radiation dose received by people in Britain was at least 40 per cent of that received by people in the affected areas of the Ukraine, partly because of high rainfall, and that doses varied across the country.
"At first sight his data appears to support his conclusions, and the matter needs thorough examination," says Philip Day, a radiation specialist from the University of Manchester.
Doctors in Kazakhstan are baffled after finding a six-year-old boy covered in ape-like hair.
The boy, called Ablay, was found in a remote mountain village close to the Chinese border.
He is covered in thick hair from head to toe and has an oval shaped skull.
Doctors suspect nuclear radiation or a genetic disorder may be responsible.
Ablay was found by a visiting team of doctors holding a medical camp for children in the village of Terymagash.
They believe he is suffering from a rare and incurable condition known as hyperthrihos.
His mother Ayaulym, 26, and father Bahyt, 33, are distant relatives. Such marriages are common in Kazakhstan mountain hamlets.
Ayaulym said village elders advised them to send their son to the circus but she wanted him to go to school.
She said: "His life will be full of difficulties. Looking in mirror will bring him pain. He will be ridiculed and mocked."
Doctors from Aksay hospital said the boy has surprising mobility, flexibility, sociability, a kind of special intuition and a unique sense of direction.
(NewScientist.com)
28 June 02
The US Supreme Court has narrowly decided, by a vote of five justices to four, that state funds can be used to pay for religious schools. The ruling is a victory for the religious right, which wants the biblical story of creation taught in schools instead of evolution.
At issue was a programme in Cleveland, Ohio that allows students from poor families to attend private schools instead of state-funded public schools, using state-funded tuition "vouchers" of up to $2500. Supporters said the scheme would give parents a choice of schools they could not otherwise afford, in a city where public schools, especially in deprived areas, are considered among the worst in the country.
But the US Constitution bars the US government from supporting religious institutions. Some 82 per cent of private schools in Cleveland are religious, the majority Catholic, the rest Islamic or Christian fundamentalist.
In 2000 the Ohio appeals court ruled that the voucher scheme was unconstitutional, as it provided public funding to religious organisations that "incorporate religious concepts... into all facets of their educational planning."
The Supreme Court has now overturned this decision, deciding that the Cleveland scheme merely permits needy families "to exercise genuine choice among options public and private, secular and religious."
Bush's support
Four of the nine justices argued that the vouchers violate the separation of church and state. But the Christian Coalition, a conservative political organisation, called the decision a "victory for school choice" and called on other states, and Congress, to permit vouchers.
President George Bush, who has long supported school vouchers, issued a statement calling it "a victory for parents and children throughout America".
But the decision will mean that even fewer US children will be taught evolution. Repeated attempts since the 1920s by Christian fundamentalists in the US to ban the teaching of evolution in public schools, or at least mandate teaching the biblical account of creation as well, have been defeated in court on the grounds that teaching religion in a state-funded school violates the separation of church and state.
Private schools are under no such restriction. So creationists have turned their efforts towards expanding private schooling. The voucher scheme is widely supported by Christian right wing organizations. One Cleveland voucher school states that "the one cardinal objective of education to which all others point is to develop devotion to God as our Creator".
DOD Releases Project SHAD Fact Sheets
From American Patriot Friends Network
[email protected]
6-27-2
Project SHAD, an acronym for Shipboard Hazard and Defense, was part of the joint service chemical and biological warfare test program conducted during the 1960s. Project SHAD encompassed tests designed to identify US warships' vulnerabilities to attacks with chemical or biological warfare agents and to develop procedures to respond to such attacks while maintaining a war-fighting capability. Although classified, the Department of Defense has been actively pursuing declassification of relevant medical information. To date twelve SHAD projects have been evaluated and released for your review. The Department of Defense continues to search and declassify documents associated with this project, and will post additional information as it becomes available. http://deploymentlink.osd.mil/current_issues/shad/shad_intro.shtml
American Servicemen used as Guinea Pigs [email protected] (Last update) June 27, 2002
"Project Shipboard Hazard and Defense" (SHAD), was a program started in the early 1960's, to learn the vulnerabilities of US warships, during chemical or biological warfare attacks. Under "Project SHAD" were 113 different "Operations" or tests.
US Naval crews and Marine personnel were sprayed with various biological and chemical germ warfare agents, and simulants. Some ships, and Marine personnel were sprayed from overflying aircraft, while other tests on ships were being sprayed by aircraft carriers, which were upwind. While some high ranking personnel may have had knowledge of what was happening, most of the ships crews did not.
Project SHAD was controlled by The US Army Deseret Test Center, later to be known as Dugway Proving Grounds, Utah. For over 35 years, The Department of Defense said, "there was NO Project SHAD".
Today the DoD admits that it tested the deadly nerve agent Sarin, known as VX, or biological toxins on American Servicemen, but said the information was "classified".
Lately the DoD agreed to declassify all of the 113 "Operations" and inform the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) of the findings. Presently 12 of the 113 have been declassified, although the information being released is very limited.
The Department of Defense is not releasing ALL the information needed by the Veteran, which would allow him to apply for treatment in a VA facility and to file a claim for service connected disability compensation.
Only about 600 veterans of the estimated tens of thousands of those exposed to warfare agents have been notified they could be suffering from related dangerous health effects, according to VA and Pentagon officials.
A study by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs completed in September of 2001, but never released to the public or the affected veterans, suggests that Veterans, who participated in "Project SHAD", may be at increased risk for cerebrovascular diseases and respiratory diseases. That they are three (3) times more likely to die of respiratory and vascular brain diseases than the general population.
Steve Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resources Center, said: "These veterans could be dying at a rate three times greater than the general population from diseases that could be related to their military service."
"We have a moral responsibility to set the record straight and that seems to be a problem for both the leaders in the Department of Defense, and the entrenched bureaucrats of the Department of Veterans Affairs."
Agents and decontaminants used, different ones in different tests are: Bacillus globigii (BG), Coxiella burnetii, Pasteurella tularensis, Zinc Cadmium Sulfide,
Beta-propriolactone, Sarin, VX, Escherichia Coli (EC), Serratia Marcescens (SM), Sodium Hydroxide, Peracetic acid, Potassium hydroxide, Sodium hypochlorite, "tracer amounts" of radioactivity and asbestos, Methylacetoacetate.
Senator Bill Nelson (D) of Florida, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and Rep. Mike Thompson (D) of California plan to introduce legislation in their respective chambers next week, urging the Pentagon to reveal more information about the tests, known as "Project SHAD". Eleven other members of Congress have signed the request from Thompson. They have attached a provision on to Senate bill, S-2514, known as the National Defense Authorization Act, to fund the declassification of Project SHAD.
The President has vowed to veto the bill. The tests involved substances that the military believed at the time to be harmless. But evidence now shows that some could be harmful.
The Secretary of veterans affairs, Anthony Principi, urged Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to declassify more of the tests "as quickly as possible".
Anyone that believes they were part of the SHAD tests, should contact:
Vietnam Veterans of America 8605 Cameron Street, Suite 400 Silver Spring, Maryland 20910 301-585-4000, Fax 301-585-0519, 1-800-VVA-1316
The SHAD helpline is at 1-800-749-8387 or contact VA by e-mail at [email protected]
All known SHAD operations, dates of operations, the agents sprayed, and the ships and Marine personnel involved, in no particular order, are:
Operation Dates, Agent Sprayed and Ships involved:
'Copper Head' Jan 24-Feb 25, 1965
Bacillus globigii
Zinc Cadmium Sulfide
(FP-fluorescent particle)
* USS Power
'Shady Grove' Jan 22-Apr. 9, 1965
Bacillus globigii,
Coxiella burnetii (OU),
Staphylococcal enterotoxin
(Type B _PG2)
Uranine dye (sodium fluorescein)
* USS Granville S.Hall
'Autumn Gold' May 3-31-1963
Bacillus globiggi (BG)
* USS Navarro (LPA-215)
* USS Tioga County (LST-1158)
* USS Carpenter
* USS Hoel (DDG13)
* USS Granville S. Hall (Yag-40)
* Marine Air group 13, First Marine Brigade
'Purple Sage'
Jan & Feb 1966
Methylacetoacetate
* USS Herbert J. Thomas (DD-833)
'Eager Belle I' Jan-Mar 1963
Bacillus globiggi (BG)
* USS George Eastman (yag39)
'Eager Belle II' Feb-Mar 1963
Bacillus globiggi (BG)
* USS George Eastman (yag39)
* USS Granville S. Hall (yag40)
* USS Carpenter (DD-825)
* USS Navarro (LPA-215)
* USS Tioga County(LST-1158)
'Scarlet Sage' Feb 9,1966-Mar 4, 1966
Bacillus globiggi (BG)
* USS Herbert J. Thomas (DD-833)
(Army tugs manned by naval personnel)
An article at www.tugboatsF.com/1t2080Frame1 LT-2080, LT-2081, LT-2085
source1.htm, lists the following agents as being used: LT-2086, LT-2087,
LT-2088
Tularamia, anthrax, parrot fever, Q fever, botulism, and Rocky Mountain
spotted fever.
'Fearless Johnny' Aug-Sep 1965
VX nerve agent Diethylphthlate
* USS George Eastman (yag-39),
* USS Granville S. Hall (yag-40)
* Two light tugs (not identified)
* VC-1 Utility squadron One,
* Blue Aiis Squadron (Blue Warriors)
* Patrol Squadron Six (PATRON SIX)
* Flight Wing Two,
* Covered lighter (barge) YFN-811
* US Navy Tug, ATF-105
'Flower Drum I' Feb-Apr
Sarin nerve agent
* USS George Eastman (yag-39),
Aug-Sep 1964
Sulphur dioxide, Methylacetoacetate
* USS Granville S. Hall (yag-40)
'Flower Drum II' Nov & Dec 1964
VX nerve gas
* US Navy Barge YFN-811
Phosphorous 32
* US Navy Tug, ATF-105
Bis (2 ethyl-hexyl)
hydrogen phosphite
DTC Test 69-32
Apr 30-Jun 28, 1969
Serratia
* USS Granville S. Hall (yag-40),
Marcensen, Escherichia coli, Five Army light tugs, (manned
Bacillus subtilis var. by naval personnel). niger (BG),
DTC Test 68-50 Sep-Oct 1968
Bacillus globiggi (BG)
* USS Granville S. Hall (YAG-40)
Staphylococcal enterotoxin,
Type B (PG2),
Uranine dye (sodium fluorescein).
used on:
* 4533rd Tactical Test Squadron
* 33rd Tactical Fighter Wing (F-4E aircraft)
* Marine Air Group 13, First Marine Brigade
'Half Note'
'Red Beva'
'Night Train'
'Big Tom'
101 Others to come (Hopefully).
Karl Theis
Video Field Reporter
RealityExpander Channel 10 TimeWarner
Austin,Texas cell 512 297-9875
[email protected]
IF THEY DID THIS THEN...WHAT ARE THEY DOING NOW?
DoD News, the official news of the Department of Defense, HA!
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/dodnews.html
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/May2002/b05232002_bt264-02.html
(FORTUNE.com)
July 8, 2002
By Bill Powell
They made 16,000 of them the last time: Sacks that are about eight feet long and three feet across, with six handles and a zipper across the top. "Human Remains Pouches" is the horrible phrase the Pentagon uses for them, but everyone else knows them by the vernacular: body bags.
Remember the run-up to the first war with Iraq, Operation Desert Storm? The U.S. was headed to war, and for the first time since Vietnam we were going to take casualties, probably numerous.
Or so we thought. Three hundred and ninety American troops died in Gulf War I, a figure that is larger than what you may remember, but far, far smaller than what we had feared. Now, 11 years later, the U.S. military is fresh from subduing a band of fanatic tribal warriors in a country sprung straight from the Middle Ages, a conflict that was, on our side anyway, even more bloodless than Operation Desert Storm. This recent history of no-muss, no-fuss military success serves now as the critical backdrop to an atmosphere, both in Washington and across the country, that one eminence grise in the nation's capital reasonably describes as "surreal." We appear headed for round two with Saddam Hussein. And this time, as an HBO promo might have it, it's for keeps.
That prospect, even if it is probably a year away at best, is hugely serious business. No matter how smoothly (knock wood) any eventual military operation goes, a "regime change" in Iraq will have vast geopolitical and economic consequences. Some of them might be good, some not so good, and some of them could be horrible. But consequences there will be, for Iraq, for the region, and for the world. What is "surreal" is that for the most part, for now anyway, a lot of people in Washington talk about punching out Saddam the way they talk about, say, passing an education bill. Everyone's in favor, passage is a done deal, everyone will take credit, but please, spare us the details.
This state of denial isn't limited to the Beltway either. Stock analysts, economists, and other pundits do contortions every day trying to explain why, in a reasonably healthy economy, the stock market is so bad and so many corporate executives remain in a blue funk. They seem to focus on everything other than the 800-pound gorilla sitting in the room. Paul O'Neill, the Secretary of the Treasury, went so far as to say in mid-June that the market's recent slump was "inexplicable." But somewhere in the minds of investors, CEOs, and the man in the street are the following facts: Nine months ago the World Trade Center towers collapsed after the most heinous terrorist attack in this country's history. The man responsible for organizing it, Osama bin Laden, is unaccounted for. One of his alleged acolytes has just been arrested for planning to set off a "dirty bomb" somewhere, presumably in New York City or Washington. Meanwhile, in the Middle East, the Israelis and the Palestinians slaughter each other daily. That fuels anti-American sentiment in the Arab world as the U.S. talks big about taking out an Arab despot who has openly--and in his own way successfully--defied the U.S. for more than a decade. (He may be an S.O.B., but he's their S.O.B.)
Pardon the cliche, but markets hate uncertainty, and in that volatile mix of facts lies a whole heap of it. With all due respect to the Secretary of the Treasury, the market's continuing weakness is not necessarily all that inexplicable, and it probably isn't entirely related to funny accounting or whether Cisco meets its whisper numbers next quarter.
The fact is, by the beginning of summer 2003, if not sooner, the U.S. could be in the middle of Desert Storm II, with tens of thousands of troops headed back to Iraq, this time not to restore an oil-rich monarchy to its throne but to put Saddam out of our misery once and for all. So before the 2002 summer doldrums set in, let's at least start to think seriously about what the implications of that may be.
It's necessary, in any effort to game out scenarios for what a regime change in Iraq may mean for the world, to start with a basic question that George W. Bush has already settled in his own mind. Is it really necessary? Bush has decided that it is. The decision to get rid of Saddam, telegraphed first in his now famous Axis of Evil speech and most recently in a commencement address at West Point, is not rooted in some Shakespearean grudge, a desire to correct what is now widely perceived (rightly or wrongly) to be a family mistake: his father's "failure" to get rid of Saddam in 1991. For W., it's all about Sept. 11 and three inescapable truths. When U.N. inspectors left Iraq in late 1998, Saddam still had weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, at his disposal, despite the fact that UNSCOM (as the U.N. inspection agency was known) for more than two years had incinerators disposing of WMD materiel nonstop 24 hours a day. Saddam already has biological and chemical capacity, and he is well down the road to developing a nuclear capability that, if attained, would alter the balance of power in the Middle East forever. Inescapable reality No. 2 is that since UNSCOM departed, several Iraqi defectors have said that Saddam has redoubled his efforts to develop those programs, despite the very real burden U.N.-mandated economic sanctions have placed on those efforts. And fact No. 3 is that Sept. 11 showed all of us, a new President included, that the U.S. has ruthless enemies that not only aim to hurt us but can. Saddam is one of them. Therefore, he must go.
Supporters of Bush's conclusion believe that the status quo--keeping Saddam in a box with sanctions and a new inspection regime--simply can't be sustained indefinitely; that, in the words of Charles A. Duelfer, former No. 2 man at UNSCOM, it amounts to a policy of "slow-motion suicide." Saddam, or one of his like-minded comrades, will use those weapons of mass destruction eventually, and it will make Sept. 11 look like a junior-varsity exercise in death and destruction. Thus, the time has come to do whatever it takes to get rid of him.
Everyone, of course, hopes that a fed-up Iraqi general finally does what almost everyone outside Iraq has wanted for 11 years and offs Saddam in the still of the night. It's not likely to happen. As Nabeel Musawi, who helped lead the Kurdish rebels in the north of Iraq until they were abandoned by the Clinton Administration in 1996, says, there have been no fewer than six coup attempts since the Gulf war in 1991. None has really come close to succeeding. And Musawi, like many others, believes it's a "fantasy'' to think that it's going to happen now. The reason it hasn't, he says, "is hardly a coincidence. Saddam's entire regime, the whole paranoid security structure, is designed precisely so that it doesn't." That, indeed, is why Tommy Franks, head of the U.S. Central Command, and the other U.S. generals are finally, if reluctantly, beginning to draw up plans for a military operation that could involve up to 200,000 U.S. troops. If Saddam has to go, we are the ones who are going to have to do it.
The logic behind Bush's conclusion is sufficiently compelling that a lot of foreign-policy types who are not by instinct hawks accept it. The surprising thing is that some of Saddam's neighbors--the people you'd think would most want to be rid of him--don't. At least not completely. And the reason is that they simply don't believe the Administration has given enough thought to what the consequences of a move against Saddam might be. Neither Saudi Arabia nor Turkey, two of the most important players in Saddam's neighborhood, oppose removing him per se. They are the leaders of what can be called the law-of-unintended-consequences crowd. They fear that the most likely method of ousting Saddam--another large-scale U.S. invasion--could lead to madness. And though the Saudis for very good reason are hardly in good odor among many Americans since Sept. 11, their concerns are not idle.
First, they are not alone in believing that Saddam is in a box and that he isn't much of a threat to anyone anymore (his own people, in this cold-blooded calculation, excluded). "There is an argument that Saddam is deterrable, so why not just deter him," says Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. The basic assumption here is that Saddam wants to stay in power until he dies a natural death, and that he knows that if he is ever linked to the use of WMD in the U.S. or Israel, he's history. So if he's unlikely to make real trouble in the region anymore, why risk a military invasion now?
The logic of that argument goes further: An attack intended to get rid of Saddam will prompt him to use whatever weapons of mass destruction he has, specifically against Israel, to widen the war and go down as a modern-day Saladin, the slayer of infidels. And in fact, if he's going out anyway, it's hard to believe he wouldn't want to do so in what in his mind is a blaze of glory. U.N. inspectors believe he has managed to hide 12 to 18 Scud missiles left over from the Gulf war and has legally continued to work on short-range missile development--some of which is applicable toward long-range missiles. Further, Saddam has devoted significant resources to figuring out how to keep chemical agents floating in the air--"aerosol-dispensing technology," in WMD argot. If he believes he's going down, everything he has will probably be headed toward Israel. If any of it hits its intended target and the Israelis retaliate, "chaos" is a mild word for what will ensue. A region-wide conflagration, an oil embargo, ever more hatred directed at Israel's sponsor, the U.S. You get the picture. Leave him alone, say the containment advocates, and eventually the world will be rid of him.
Here, as University of Maryland political scientist Shibley Telhami says, "context, and the tenor of the times," are critically important. Again, no one has any brief for Saddam, but skeptics ask, simply, Is this really the moment? Eleven years ago the Arab world was not nearly as inflamed as it is now, its TVs not teeming with images of intifada and the Israelis' iron-fisted response to the deadly reality of teenage suicide bombers. Like it or not, the Saudis and the Egyptians are two of America's critical allies in the Middle East, and their governments are now under fierce pressure from their own population because of it. A campaign against Saddam, particularly one that involves massive air bombardment and attendant civilian casualties (which it will) could have a convulsive impact across the region, even if the Bush Administration manages to rein in the violence with its frantic proposals for a Palestinian state. (And if by contrast the heat doesn't diminish, Saddam may well get a free pass, which is why he will continue writing big checks to the parents of Palestinian suicide bombers.)
How convulsive might the reaction be? Ellen Laipson, a sober-minded Iraq specialist who was vice chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council until earlier this year, says the Saudis, among others, "can't really be blamed" for being worried. For 11 years they have played a double game with their own people and with the U.S., allowing U.S. troops on the sacred soil of Islam while permitting clerics to preach anti-Western screeds in the mosques and madrassahs. Sept. 11 and widespread support of the Palestinian cause may have been sufficient to bring that jig to an end. A U.S. invasion of Iraq is not something the Saudis want to have to deal with anytime soon, given that at a minimum Washington would again need the state-of-the-art Prince Sultan air base south of Riyadh to help run the air war. In short, a collapse of the house of Saud in the current environment, even if unlikely, is not inconceivable, and what could come in its wake could easily be a government that wouldn't necessarily disown the sentiments of the kingdom's most infamous son: Osama bin Laden. Whatever you may think of the Saudis, they have been a reliable supplier of reasonably priced crude oil for a long time, and for every American Administration since F.D.R. that has been the bottom line. The Bush Administration, though unquestionably attuned to oil interests, is hardly unique in not wanting trouble in Saudi Arabia.
But trouble it is likely to get. The Saudis, like the Egyptians, don't feel particularly threatened by Saddam anymore, and they don't really believe they face a life-or-death threat from bin Laden-style terrorism (even if, on June 18, the Saudis announced that their security services had arrested 13 suspected al Qaeda members who had allegedly been planning attacks against various sites within the kingdom). What they do fear is a growing general discontent among their own populations, fueled by increasing economic problems, sympathy for the Palestinian cause, and the anti-American baggage that comes with it. All of which could be ramped up significantly by a war with Iraq if the regimes in Riyadh and Cairo are seen to be holding America's coat.
Saudi fragility is not itself a reason to leave Saddam alone, even with the possible consequences for the oil market that serious turmoil there would imply (a subject we will get to shortly). But skeptics of any forthcoming Iraq operation believe there is much more trouble to come should the U.S. move anytime soon. Maryland's Shibley Telhami, who organizes extensive public-opinion soundings in the Arab world, believes it is likely that a war with Iraq would result, at least in the short run, in an increase in terrorism throughout the Middle East, directed at any regime--Egypt, Jordan, the other Gulf monarchies--seen as supporting us, and inevitably bring the suicide-bomber phenomenon to U.S. shores. That's precisely what Bush is trying to avoid. Duelfer, the ex-UNSCOM official and one of the most knowledgeable Americans about Iraq, supports removing Saddam but doesn't disagree with Telhami. "There is," he says glumly, "no shortage of kids in the region who seem to want to grow up to be cruise missiles." To the skeptics, an invasion now would only increase the arsenal.
We are, it's true, focusing on the downside here, if only because so little of it has been heard to date. Bear with us: There's a bit more. Many businesses may not be overly concerned right now with the prospective geopolitical fallout of the next war with Iraq, believing that the direct economic impact of any conflict could be contained, especially if the conflict is short and stays within Iraqi borders--a plausible scenario. The U.S. in 2000 exported only about $23 billion worth of goods to the Middle East (Israel excluded), compared with European exports to the region of $63.7 billion. But there are other numbers that should concentrate minds.
Most obvious is the cost of another war--and its aftermath. Japan and Saudi Arabia won't be writing billion dollar checks this time around. A full-scale invasion, even one smaller than Desert Storm, will not be cheap, and it will come at a time when the federal budget is already sinking into deficits.
The effect of a war on consumer sentiment may not be negligible, either. In August 1990, when Saddam invaded Kuwait, the University of Michigan's consumer sentiment index stood at 76.4. A month later, when the U.S. response remained uncertain, it had dropped just four points. By October, however, when we began counting those prospective body bags, the index fell off a cliff, plunging to almost 30% below the level at which it stood in July. (By March 1991, after the U.S. rout was over, the index had jumped back up to 87.) The point is obvious. If, as seems certain, war planning picks up and details of various Pentagon plans leak to the press (and that's already started), consumers could yet react negatively, particularly if the planning is drawn out.
And drawn out it will be. Even the most fervent cheerleaders for U.S. military action--Iraqi exiles in groups like the Iraqi National Congress--concede that the Administration has so far been painfully slow in trying to figure out not only what kind of war it wants to wage but what it wants a post-Saddam Iraq to look like politically. "There's just a tremendous degree of ignorance as to what it will take to keep things together after a war ends," says Raad al Kadiri, manager of country-risk analysis for the Petroleum Finance Corp. in Washington, D.C. Getting up to speed will take time, and that means the uncertainty that hangs over the forthcoming fight with Saddam will not go away in six months as it did last time. The drop in consumer sentiment may not be as sharp--with Americans in effect discounting for swift, painless success once the battle is joined--but the uneasiness could last longer until it becomes a lot clearer just how it is going to go.
The mother of all economic nightmares revolves around oil. Iraq, under the U.N.'s oil-for-food program, has been exporting about two million barrels a day of crude (compared with about 3.5 million barrels before the Gulf war). Even if that is disrupted during a war, and even if Saddam takes Iraqi oil off the market for a while by somehow managing to torch a patch of his own country's capacity on his way out to spite whoever might succeed him, the Saudis, Kuwaitis, and other OPEC members could easily mitigate the effects as long as they were willing to do so.
The oil-driven disaster would probably come only if a wider war involving Israel prompts an Arab embargo, something angry populations might demand and quaking Gulf governments would accede to. Six months of oil at $50 a barrel would stick the U.S. economy with the equivalent of a huge tax increase. As Mark Zandi, chief economist at economy.com, points out, a mere $10 increase in the price of oil shaves a full percentage point off of GDP. Another oil shock may not be likely, but to dismiss it out of hand would not, as President Bush's father used to say, be prudent. For that and other reasons George W. Bush needs to do as his father did in 1991 and make sure the Israelis stay out of it when Saddam's remaining Scuds take flight. But in this environment, and with Ariel Sharon as Prime Minister, will they?
We don't mean to spoil your summer vacation with these doom-laden scenarios. There are, make no mistake, people who believe the end of Saddam Hussein will come with relative ease. They argue that once the U.S. makes it clear that it will buttress local forces like the Kurds in northern Iraq with our own contingent of troops--and that this time it really is for keeps--even his most loyal officers will know the game's over, and most won't even fight. Then, says Zaab Sethna of the Iraqi National Congress, "the Iraqi people will be kissing your GIs in the street."
Well, let's hope so. But don't bet on that either. For now, know at least that some sort of conflict is coming. There is no way the Bush Administration, given its rhetoric to date, can back down from a confrontation with Saddam. The 800-pound gorilla has begun to stir. It wouldn't be wise to take your eye off it.
Thursday, June 27, 2002
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
(Seattlepi)
TEHRAN, Iran -- So a senior Iranian official is explaining to me how the world looks from Tehran: Let's see, he says, Iran helps the United States organize the Northern Alliance, a longtime Iranian ally, to oust the Taliban in Afghanistan -- a regime Iran staunchly opposed. ("We are civilized fundamentalists," unlike the Taliban, sniffed an Iranian official.)
Once the Taliban were out, Iran quietly aided the United States in forming the interim government in Kabul. Not a single Iranian was involved in Sept. 11, not a single Iranian has been found in al-Qaida, and Iran's nuclear reactor is under international inspection.
Iran has the most democracy and freest press of any Muslim country in the Middle East. And as a thank you, President Bush labeled Iran part of the "axis of evil."
Pakistan, meanwhile, created the Taliban, gave sanctuary to members of al-Qaida, supported Islamist terrorists in Kashmir, and built an Islamic nuclear bomb, and its leader, a military dictator, got $1 billion in aid from America.
Saudi Arabia financed the Taliban, has hundreds of its citizens in al-Qaida, has private charities that support Hamas and Islamic Jihad, funds Islamic fundamentalist schools all over the world, was home to 15 of the 19 hijackers of 9/11 and has no democracy, and its leader, Crown Prince Abdullah, was invited to President Bush's ranch.
I confess, I did laugh when it was all put that way. But I am not here to defend Iran, which has supported terrorism both against its own citizens and abroad. I would, though, defend the notion that Iran is the one Muslim Middle East country that is politically alive, full of ferment, with certain overlapping interests with the United States, and worth a fresh look as to how it might be nudged in the right direction -- not just branded evil and ignored.
Iran has three power centers. There is Iran-E -- the evil conservative clerics, intelligence services and shock troops of the regime, who still have a monopoly on all the tools of coercion and are responsible for Iran's support for Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and the killing of Iranian intellectuals a few years ago.
Then there is Iran-C -- the rational conservatives among the clerics and bazaari merchants, who backed the Islamic revolution out of a real revulsion for the Shah's secular despotism, but who favor democracy and the rule of law. For now, Iran-C is aligned with Iran-E.
Finally, there is Iran-R, all the reformers -- the economically strapped middle class, the rising student generation and former revolutionaries who are fed up with clerical rule. They want more democracy and less imposed religion, and they are leading the opposition in Parliament but they have the least power.
That's why the key to peaceful change in Iran is a break within the conservative ruling elite. The key is to get Iran-C, the rational conservatives, to break with Iran-E, the dark conservatives, and forge a new alliance with the reformers. It's not impossible. There are many members of Iran-C who realize that clerical rule -- particularly of the incompetent, isolating and arbitrary variety found in Iran today -- is increasingly resented by the population and could eventually threaten the whole Islamic revolution.
What can the United States do? Most reformers said they would be helped by the United States resuming diplomatic ties and easing economic sanctions. Others told me the United States should go to the United Nations and publicly identify, with evidence, any Iranian officials involved in terrorism. "We ourselves don't know who's doing what, and if the United States put out the names it would freeze these people inside," said one reformer. (When an Iranian cleric recently proposed a small new tax to support the Palestinian uprising, it was rejected by the Iranian Parliament.)
Others said the United States should speak up in defense of every Iranian who wants to run for office, or start a newspaper, and is being blocked by the clerics. The clerics claim Iran is a Muslim democracy, and America should constantly challenge them to prove it.
I don't know if all this advice is correct, but I do know that Iran is in flux and worth a new look from Washington -- not because the dark forces here are innocent of supporting terrorism, but because they are guilty of it; not because it would strengthen those dark forces, but because many here think it would weaken them; not because Iranians themselves have been unwilling to courageously confront those dark forces, but because they have; not because it would delay the demise of those dark forces, but because it might just hasten it.
Haaretzdaily.com
28/06/2002
By Ze'ev Sternhell
It is generally accepted today that at this stage, the declared primary aim of Jewish settlement in the territories has already been achieved. As this was described by Hanoch Marmari in the heartfelt plea he published here two weeks ago (`You are sitting on the key,' Ha'aretz, June 14), it is the ideological settler who holds the key to our future. And indeed, if settlement is not ended once and for all by an unequivocal political decision and in the framework of a comprehensive peace agreement, Jewish settlement in the territories is a process that will continue until the last dunam of land in the West Bank is "redeemed," or until the last of the Arabs who refuses to accept the sentence of Jewish overlordship is thrown out. Thus, the war that has been imposed on us is an eternal war. Now, when settler leader Ze'ev Hever (Zambish) and his people have won allies like U.S. President George W. Bush and the Islamic terror people, each of whom in his own way and for his own reasons is positing unreasonable or insane conditions for ending the war, only the sky, in the West Bank, is the limit.
However, the greatest danger inherent in the settlement concept lies elsewhere. Instead of strengthening and glorifying Zionism, ultimately, settlement will erode to nothing but its moral basis. If it takes root, the settlement argument will end up justifying not only the old accusation by Zionism's greatest enemies, but will also undermine the security of the Israelis themselves in the context of the Jewish national movement.
The people who will cause this are those who say that any Jewish presence within the boundaries of the historic Land of Israel derives its right to existence from the same principle. If indeed there is no difference between the territories that were conquered by the end of the War of Independence and those that came into our hands in the Six-Day War, it is possible that Zionism really never was, as its opponents have always said, either national liberation movement or a movement to save Jews from physical and cultural extinction, but rather an imperialist movement that aims at constant expansion.
However, fortunately for us, the truth is otherwise. Zionism derived its legitimacy from being an answer to an existential danger that threatened the Jewish people during the first half of the 20th century. It was not a historical right, but rather the necessity to save life that was the moral basis for the conquest of the land. Therefore, the right of all people to ensure their existence by controlling their fate through establishing an independent political framework is what justified taking control of the territory that made it possible to establish the State of Israel. The land was not empty of people: The slogan "A land without a people for a people without a land" was nothing but a gimmick for purposes of internal conviction, for silencing the conscience and for maintaining good public relations. The bitter opposition over many years by the Arabs left no doubt in their consciousness as to the danger that threatens them.
Ultimately, after the Holocaust, which proved Zionism was justified, and with the end of the War of Independence, all the aims the Zionist movement had set for itself had been achieved. Therefore, there is an essential difference between our right to Petah Tikva and Ofakim and the theft of the hills in the West Bank from their owners. Anyone who denies this essential difference will end up casting the entire Jewish national movement, and not just the settlements of the last generation, in the light of a colonial movement. Kfar Giladi, Hanita and Merhavya had a crucial role in our national revival, whereas Beit El, Tappuah and Netzarim call into question not only the moral image of the State of Israel but also our very future.
Indeed, this fanatical nationalism, which is brutal not out of necessity but out of deliberate choice and rational decision, is already beginning to sprout noxious weeds that arouse disgust. I am referring to the settler mentality in its latest manifestation in the form of letters that students at schools in the territories wrote to fighters in Operation Defensive Shield. These children did not ask the soldiers to wipe out terror and strike at the terrorists, but "to kill as many Arabs as possible." One asked: "For me, kill at least 10"; another made an even simpler suggestion: "Ignore the laws and spray them."
What is interesting is not only these children's, and apparently their teachers', attitude toward human life, but rather the brief that was offered in their defense. Writing in the daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth (May 5), Emunah Elon, a spokeswoman for the settlers, does not apologize and does not see these letters as "an educational failure." No one is going to catch her in any admission of having lost the way: She praises these manifestations as "healthy hatred" (no less!) and also sees the suggestion to ignore the laws of the state as a healthy, practical and mature approach. There were times when in Europe, too, inspired people like Emunah Elon thought that observing the rules of war, that is, maintaining humanity, was dangerous, superfluous and even indicative of weakness of character. To this pass we - the people that was itself the victim of the values that are being preached at the educational institutions in the settlements - have come because of the abysmal scorn for human rights and because of the blind belief in our absolute right to rule this entire land and its inhabitants. Even the barbaric Palestinian terror cannot justify such bestiality.
6-30-2
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli troops removed two Jewish settler outposts in the West Bank on Sunday after Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer vowed to dismantle rogue settlements vulnerable to the Palestinian uprising.
While Ben-Eliezer zeroed in on unsanctioned settlements, the army relaxed its clampdown on West Bank hotbeds of militancy by lifting a curfew in Bethlehem. But more than 500,000 Palestinians remained confined to home elsewhere.
Adding to the pressure on the Palestinians, Secretary of State Colin Powell said Washington was no longer talking to Yasser Arafat and had no plans to do so in the future.
President Bush called in a speech last week for Arafat's replacement as Palestinian leader, saying his Authority was tainted by terrorism and corruption.
Arafat, speaking by satellite link to an audience of business and political leaders in Crans Montana, Switzerland, offered to meet Bush "any time, anywhere" to promote Middle East peace, despite the president's call for his removal.
Arafat, who has announced Palestinian elections for January, said it was impossible to carry out reforms demanded by the international community while Israeli military occupation of Palestinian territory remained "complete and total."
"None of my ministers can come and visit me and hold any meetings. It is impossible to achieve reform," Arafat said.
REMOVING SETTLER OUTPOSTS
A spokesman for the umbrella YESHA Council of Jewish settlements said two of the 10 outposts Ben-Eliezer slated for removal by Monday were dismantled peacefully on Sunday. Israel Radio said their inhabitants left before the army arrived.
Ben-Eliezer said the trailer clusters were too isolated to be protected.
Deputy Defense Minister Dalia Rabin-Pelossof told Israel Radio earlier that settlers had agreed to take down the first 10 designated outposts by Monday, and another 10 in coming days.
"If they do not, I understand from the defense minister that he has signaled he will evacuate them by force," she said.
Israeli peace activists opposed to settlements estimate there are at least 60 outposts -- often just a few caravans -- perched on hilltops throughout the West Bank.
Analysts said Ben-Eliezer's move against settler caravans, whose proliferation has helped inflame Palestinians, aimed to defuse a backlash in his center-left Labour Party over the current reoccupation of Palestinian cities.
Ben-Eliezer spearheaded the army's West Bank offensive in response to two Palestinian suicide bombings that killed 26 people in Israel on June 18 and 19, almost two years into a Palestinian revolt for statehood.
But the defense chief, Labour's leading hawk, appeared bent on placating party doves demanding he pursue a more moderate line in the "national unity" coalition with right-wing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Sharon, a champion of Jewish settlement, said nothing about the removal plans, suggesting he saw no danger for his coalition, made up in part of pro-settler religious parties.
'DANGEROUS' OUTPOSTS
About 145 settlements with 200,000 people have sprouted with Israeli government approval in the West Bank and Gaza Strip since their capture in the 1967 Middle East war.
But a scattering of others has been established without government permission, often near sites where settlers have been killed in Palestinian attacks.
Settlers claim a biblical right to the land. The Palestinians and most countries regard the settlements as illegal and the overriding obstacle to Middle East peace.
Soon after taking office in March 2001, Sharon's government pledged under U.S. pressure not to found new settlements. But his rightist coalition said existing settlements could expand to accommodate "natural growth."
The 145 full-fledged settlements resemble affluent U.S. suburbs that stand out from the shabby, concrete-block cities, towns and villages where three million Palestinians live.
(Stratfor)
2-8-99
The death of King Hussein causes us to reflect about the origins of Jordan as well as those of other countries in the region. When we think about these things we realize that God truly has a marvelous sense of humor. The history of the region in the twentieth century can only be described as both absurd and deadly. Most important, in spite of King Hussein's apparently sincere dedication to the concept, the idea of a comprehensive Middle Eastern peace should be met with gales of laughter from all reasonable people. Rather than thinking about the future as we usually do, the death of Hussein of the Hashemite is an occasion to reflect on the past.
Until the end of World War I, Ottoman Turks ruled the area from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, as well as the entire Saudi peninsula. Allied with Germany, the Ottomans struggled to hold on to an empire that had been in retreat for centuries. The British badly wanted to defeat the Ottomans. Having built the Suez Canal, which gave them rapid access to India and China, they had to protect it. They needed to secure the sea-lanes of the eastern Mediterranean and drive the Turks away from the Canal and its approaches. The British conducted a series of campaigns to break the Turks, including the disastrous Gallipoli landings and the more successful invasion of the province of Syria by General Allenby, who was supported by a Bedouin army recruited from the Arabian peninsula. Controlled by British intelligence and special operations teams, including that of the famous Lawrence of Arabia, they first loosened Turkish control over Arabia and then supported Allenby's attack on Jerusalem and Damascus. King Hussein's tribe, the Hashemite, was the engine behind the operation.
The British were allied with the French, which meant they had to share the spoils of war. The British kept Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula for themselves. They did agree to divide the Ottoman province of Syria, which contained today's Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. The division, codified in the then secret Sykes-Picot agreement, was extraordinarily arbitrary. A line was drawn through the province. Everything to the north would be French. Everything to the south would be British.
The French had been making trouble in this area since the 1880s, when they had intruded into another Lebanese civil war, siding with Christian factions. The French owed the Christians a great deal. They also wanted to cement their control of the region by creating a pro-French Christian state. The Christians were at the time in the majority (they no longer are), but the area reserved for them contained Shiite, Sunni, and Alawite Muslims, Druse, and a wide variety of Christians. The religious groups were further divided among themselves along clan lines, with some of the bitterest hatreds dividing clans of the same religion. The nation was a contrivance without any reality. It didn't even have a real name, so they named it after a prominent geographic feature, Mount Lebanon. It was as good a name as any. Fortunately, the French ran out of ideas for improvements and left the rest of Syria intact, not even changing its name. They did, however, get rid of the Hashemite King the British had selected. The British gave him the consolation prize of the Iraqi throne.
The British were busy double-crossing everyone. They had made many promises to many people. They had promised various competing Bedouin tribes that they would be given responsibility for Mecca, just as they promised in the Balfour Declaration that they would give the Jews a homeland while they also promised the Arabs that they would control their own destiny. They were particularly close to King Hussein's tribe, the Hashemites, who had governed Mecca since the 13th century. Having spearheaded the British campaign against the Ottomans, you might have thought that the Hashemites were in good shape. Unfortunately, a rapidly rising Bedouin tribe, the Saud who were Wahabi Moslems, had become more powerful than the Hashemite, and the British double- crossed the Hashemites, turning the Arabian peninsula and the guardianship of Mecca over to them.
The British had to figure out what to do with the Hashemites. The royal family could be given thrones, but the tribe itself had to get out of Arabia, since they would be torn apart by the Sauds or, at the very least, destabilize the region. The British decided to settle them in the middle of nowhere. There was not a whole lot east of the Jordan River, so the British decided to put them there. The region had no name, since it was primarily a wasteland of little interest to anyone. So they named it for where it was -- the other side of the Jordan or, to be fancy, Trans-Jordan. After independence in 1948, the word "trans" was dropped out and the modern state of Jordan or, to be more precise, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan was born as a homeland for a displaced band of Bedouin with nowhere else to go.
The rest of the "mandate" was left with the same name it had when it was a county within the Ottoman province of Syria, Filistina, after the Biblical people that produced Goliath. The British kept that name and it became bastardized into English as Palestine. And so the modern map of the region was born. Palestine consisted of small villages surviving on agriculture and small merchants. Divided among Moslem, Christian, Druse and Jewish communities, much of the land was owned by absentee landlords. The people of Palestine had as much in common with the Bedouins across the river as a New Yorker has with a Montana cowboy -- enough not to like each other a lot and not to understand each other at all. They were now all neighbors.
So, the French invented Lebanon, the British invented Jordan, a county became Palestine, and the Syrians claimed everything. Then the Jews showed up. If things weren't wild enough before, Jewish intellectuals from Poland, who argued the finer points of German philosophy, decided to come and farm in the middle of this insanity. The fact that they couldn't speak Arabic merely added to their charm, since they also knew nothing about farming. Jews living in London purchased the land from Arabs living in Paris and Cairo, thereby throwing people who had farmed the land for generations off their land. Out of this, the State of Israel was born.
There is no point in going on. You get the picture.
The Jews settled primarily along the coastal plain as well as in the Galilee. There were relatively few settlements in what is today the West Bank. The Lebanese were not unhappy with creation of Israel, since they were Christian and liked anything that gave the Moslems a headache. The Hashemites were not too unhappy either. They had never really gotten along with their Palestinian brothers. After the War of Independence in 1948, the West Bank remained under Arab rule. Since at that time no one had yet thought of an independent Palestine (the main thinking was that Palestine belonged to Syria), governance of the West Bank fell to the only Arab country physically connected to it, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
This was big trouble for the Jordanians, since the Hashemites didn't like the Palestinians and the Palestinians didn't like the Hashemites. Hussein's grandfather held secret talks with the Israelis on a peace settlement designed to keep the Palestinians under control. Unfortunately for him, the peace talks didn't stay secret and he was assassinated. From 1948 until 1967, Hussein, who succeeded his grandfather, was in constant danger from the Palestinians. In many ways he welcomed the Israeli conquest of the West Bank, since it made the Palestinians their problem rather than his. Unfortunately for him, there were masses of Palestinian refugees living in Jordan after 1967, who decided that it was time to get rid of the Hashemites and create their own state. They tried to do just that in September 1970. Unfortunately for them, the Bedouin Army that had been trained by the British not only defeated the Palestinians but conducted a brutal massacre, securing the Hashemite throne from its only real threat, the Palestinians.
The "Black September" massacre had two effects. It directly spawned a wave of Palestinian terrorism and it turned King Hussein into a wise statesman. Having taken care of his Palestinian problem, he could now take the long view. In fact, the last thing Hussein wanted to see was a Palestinian state. Such a state, bordered by Israel and Jordan, would inevitably seek to topple the Hashemite throne in order to break out of an impossible encirclement. Hussein's brilliance was to appear to be an urbane man and wise ruler utterly dedicated to peace while doing everything possible to prevent the emergence of an independent Palestinian state and shifting the blame to Israel. We suspect that he was much relieved, if not very surprised, when the Oslo Accords fell apart.
The last thing Hussein wanted was Yasir Arafat feeling hemmed in on the other side of the Jordan. His mortal enemies, the Saudis, still rule Arabia (and we wonder how much Hussein's support for Iraq in 1990 had to do with dreams of a return to Mecca after the defeat of the Saudis). Syria still claims the entire old Ottoman province including Jordan. No one knows what Saddam in Iraq will do next. Hussein's exiled Hashemites had more than enough to worry about. The last thing he wanted to see was an independent Palestinian state threatening his throne in the year 2000 as it had in 1970. So he acted the peace maker at the Wye Plantation meeting, content with the knowledge that nothing could possibly come of any of it.
King Hussein's life and the recent history of the Hashemites embody the wildly improbable history of the region. The heir to seven centuries of Bedouin nobility, his presence in Amman was pure accident and in many ways, utterly temporary. The Hashemites eyes were always on Mecca and the usurper Saudis. Israel, Palestine and all the rest were detours in Hashemite history. Hussein was patient, but then everyone in the region has learned to be patient. Patience and long memories are part of the region's geopolitics, the one common denominator of all nations and states in the region, regardless of the name they were given by the last duplicitous conqueror.
The point to all of this is that there are no permanent solutions to the region's problems. All of the current structures are merely temporary and artificial, some without any real substance at all. How does one make peace in Lebanon when Lebanon is neither a nation nor a state? How can Syria, which sees itself as the rightful heir to Jordan, Israel and Lebanon, give up its inheritance without giving up its identity? How can Israel, which cannot decide if it is the Third Temple or a place to produce low-cost microprocessors, make a lasting peace with a Jordan whose real interest is to dream of a return to Mecca and 700 years of greatness?
Hussein's death reminds us that there is nothing permanent in this region save perpetual instability. What we have now is as good as it will ever get. This is something that Hussein understood. He did not believe in lasting solutions. He believed in permanent, unchanging interests, the patience to wait until they become possible, and the skill to stay in power to take advantage of the day, when it comes. Hussein managed to die while still king of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. That in itself was his great achievement. There were many times that people would have given long odds against him pulling that off. Hussein endured, survived, waited and remembered. The rest was meant for speeches at Harvard University.
Hussein's secret mission was to survive and to never forget his lost inheritance. That is everyone's secret mission in the region. That means tension, conspiracy and war. The best that can be hoped for is temporary periods of relatively little mayhem. Peace is out of the question. Many conquerors have come into this region from the outside, dreaming of permanent empire. They all have gone away, many broken by the experience. American dreams of permanent, stable arrangements would be funny, if they weren't so dangerous.
Associated Press
1-29-99
"The virus is so contagious that once an animal is infected, there is no escape for its companions in the herd."
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) _ Hoof-and-mouth disease has crippled at least 1 million sheep and cattle in Iraq and the lack of vaccines for the highly contagious disease threatens the country's livestock, a U.N. official said Thursday.
The implications of the disease are catastrophic, the official said: Farmers could be ruined, and meat and milk could become even more scarce in a country where 8{ years of U.N. economic sanctions have already made shortages commonplace.
At least 50,000 animals _ mostly lambs, kids and calves _ have died from the viral disease, the official told The Associated Press. He spoke on condition of anonymity.
In an earlier interview, the representative of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization in Iraq, Amir Khalil, said almost all of Iraq's 18 provinces have suffered outbreaks of the sickness, known also as foot-and-mouth disease. ``We have to take it seriously. If we don't contain it as soon as possible, it might become an epidemic,'' he said.
Because grazing herds wander across borders, the danger extends beyond Iraq and into neighboring countries. The virus also clings to clothes and farming equipment and can drift as far as 30 miles in the air.
Hoof-and-mouth disease affects cloven-hoofed animals. It eats away at the skin on tongues and lips and causes lesions on feet. Infected animals are left unable to eat or walk, and they lose weight and their ability to reproduce. Newborn animals that drink milk from their infected mothers usually die. The disease is seldom transmitted to humans.
The first U.N. official said the number of infected animals is increasing daily and noted that the Iraq government does not have the resources to stop the disease from spreading.
The government has exhausted its reserve of 250,000 vaccine dosages. Impoverished by the embargo imposed after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, it has no money to buy more.
To prevent an epidemic, Iraq needs 3 million doses _ worth $3 million _ as an emergency quick-fix, plus an additional 12 million doses later, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. The U.N. body is trying to organize delivery of at least 1 million vaccines.
The outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease is especially painful because Iraq had eradicated the virus years ago and even produced its own vaccines for it.
Iraq used to prepare the vaccines at a laboratory in the capital, Baghdad, and export them for use on farms throughout the Middle East. Iraqi farmers used to vaccinate animals three times a year, one dose more than the required minimum.
However, the vaccine laboratory was destroyed in 1993 by the U.N. commission set up after the 1991 Persian Gulf War to ensure that Iraq eliminates its weapons of mass destruction. The commission feared the facility could be used to help manufacture biological or chemical arms. Iraqis have not vaccinated their livestock against hoof-and-mouth disease since then.
The outbreak was first reported 1{ months ago. Since then, 982,000 sheep and 50,000 cattle have been reported infected. In addition, 48,000 newborn lambs and 3,000 calves have died, the official said.
But many of Iraq's remaining 7 million farm animals are likely to become infected: The virus is so contagious that once an animal is infected, there is no escape for its companions in the herd.
By Zoltan Grossman
12-17-98
400s BC.: Spartan Greeks use sulfur fumes against enemy soldiers.
1346: Crimean Tatars catapult plague-infected corpses into Italian trade settlement.
1500s: Spanish conquistadors use biological warfare used against Native peoples.
1763: British Gen. Jeffrey Amherst orders use of smallpox blankets against Native peoples during Pontiac's Rebellion.
1800s: Blankets infected with smallpox deliberately given to Native Americans, causing widespread epidemics.
1907: Hague Convention outlaws chemical weapons; U.S. does not participate.
1914: World War I begins; poison gas produces 100,000 deaths, 900,000 injuries.
1920s: Britain uses chemical weapons in Iraq "as an experiment" against Kurdish rebels seeking independence; Winston Churchill "strongly" backs the use of "poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes."
1928: Geneva Protocol prohibits gas and bacteriological warfare; most countries that ratify it prohibit only the first use of such weapons.
1935: Italy begins conquest of Abyssinia (Ethiopia), using mustard gas.
1936: Japan invades China, uses chemical weapons in war; German chemical labs produced the first nerve agent, Tabun
1939: World War II begins; neither side uses bio-chemical arms, due to fears of retaliation in kind.
1941: U.S. enters World War II; President Roosevelt pledges U.S. will not be first to use bio-chemical weapons.
1943: U.S. ship damaged by German bombing raid on Bari, Italy, leaks mustard gas, killing 1000.
1945: Germans use Zyklon-B in extermination of civilians. Japanese military discovered to have conducted biological warfare experiments on POWs, killing 3000. U.S. shields officers in charge from war crimes trials, in return for data. Soviets take over German nerve gas facility in Potsdam. The Nazis had stockpiles of nerve gas, against which the Allies had no defenses, and had also been working on blood agents.
1947: U.S. possesses germ warfare weapons; President Truman withdraws Geneva Protocol from Senate consideration.
1949: U.S. dismisses Soviet trials of Japanese for germ warfare as "propaganda." Army begins secret tests of biological agents in U.S. cities.
1950: Korean War begins; North Korea and China accuse U.S. of germ warfare--charges still not proven. San Francisco disease outbreak matching Army bacteria used on city.
1951: African-Americans exposed to potentially fatal simulant in Virginia test of race-specific fungal weapons.
1952: German chemical weapons researcher Walter Schreiber, working in Texas, exposed as a perpetrator of concentration canp experiments, and flees to Argentina.
1956: Army manual explicitly states that bio-chemical warfare is not banned. Rep. Gerald Ford wins policy change to give U.S. military "first strike" authority on chemical arms.
1959: House resolution against first use of bio-chemical weapons is defeated.
1961: Kennedy Adminsitration begins hike of chemical weapons spending from $75 million to more than $330 million.
1962: Chemical weapons loaded on U.S. planes during Cuban missile crisis.
1966: Army germ warfare experiment in New York subway system.
1968: Pentagon asks for the chance to use some its arsenal against civil rights and anti-war protesters to demonstrate the "efficacy" of the chemicals. "By using gas in civil situations, we accomplish two purposes: controlling crowds and also educating people on gas," said Maj. Gen. J.B. Medaris. "Now, everybody is being called savage if he just talks about it. But nerve gas is the only way I know of to sort out the guys in white hats from the ones in the black hats without killing any of them."
1969: Utah chemical weapons accident kills thousands of sheep; President Nixon declares U.S. moratorium on chemical weapons production and biological weapons possession. U.N. General Assembly bans use of herbicides (plant killers) and tear gasses in warfare; U.S. one of three opposing votes. U.S. has caused tear gas fatalities in Vietnamese guerrilla tunnels.
1971: U.S. ends direct use of herbicides such as Agent Orange; had spread over Indochinese forests, and destroyed at least six percent of South Vietnamese cropland, enough to feed 600,000 people for a year. U.S. intelligence source gives swine-flu virus to anti-Castro Cuban paramilitary group, which lands it on Cuba's southern coast (according to1977 newspaper reports).
1972: Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention. Cuba accuses CIA of instilling swine fever virus that leads to death of 500,000 hogs.
1974: U.S. finally ratifies 1928 Geneva Protocol.
1975: Indonesia annexes East Timor; planes spread herbicides on croplands.
1979: Washington Post reports on U.S. program against Cuban agriculture since 1962, including CIA biological warfare component.
1980: U.S. intelligence officials allege Soviet chemical use in Afghanistan, while admitting "no confirmation." Congress approves nerve gas facility in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Iraq begins eight-year war with U.S. arch-enemy Iran.
1981: U.S. accuses Vietnam and allies of using mycotoxins (fungal poisons) in Laos and Cambodia. Some refugees report casualties; one analysis reveals "yellow rain" as bee feces. Israel bombs Iraqi nuclear reactor, leading to Iraqi decision to build chemical weapons.
1984: U.N. confirms Iraq using mustard and nerve gasses against Iranian "human wave" attacks in border war; State Department issues mild condemnation, yet restores diplomatic relations with Iraq, and opposes U.N. action against Iraq. Bhopal fertilizer plant accident in India kills 2000; shows risks of chemical plants being damaged in warfare. President Reagan orders over a half million M55 rockets retooled so that they contain high-yield explosives as well as VX gas. (The Army now claims that many of these rockets are "unstable" and leaking nerve agents.)
1985: U.S. resumes open-air testing of biological agents. U.S. firms begin supplying Iraq with numerous biological agents for a four-year period (according to a 1994 Senate report).
1986: U.S. resumes open-air testing of biological agents.
1987: Senate ties in three votes on resuming production of chemical weapons; Vice President Bush breaks all three ties in favor of resumption.
1988: Iraq uses chemical weapons against Kurdish minority in Halabjah; U.S. continues to maintain agricultural credits with Iraq; President Reagan blocks congressional sanctions against Iraq.
1989: Paris conference of 149 nations condemns chemical weapons, urges quick ban to emerge from Geneva treaty negotiations; U.S. revealed to plan poison gas production even after treaty signed.
1990: U.S., Soviets pledge to reduce chemical weapons stockpiles to 20 percent of current U.S. supply by 2002, and to eliminate poison gas weapons when all nations have signed future Geneva treaty. Israel admits possession of chemical weapons; Iraq threatens to use chemical weapons on Israel if it is attacked.
1991: U.S. and Coalition forces bomb at least 28 alleged bio- chemical production or storage sites in Iraq during Gulf War, including fertilizer and other civilian plants. CNN reports "green flames" from one chemical plant, and the deaths of 50 Iraqi troops from anthrax after air strike on another site. New York Times quotes Soviet chemical weapons commander that air strikes on Iraqi chemical weapons would have "little effect beyond neighboring villages," but that strikes on biological weapons could spread disease "to adjoining countries." Czechoslovak chemical warfare unit detects sarin nerve gas during air war. Egyptian doctor reports outbreak of "strange disease" inside Iraq. U.S. troops use explosives to destroy Iraqi chemical weapons storage bunkers after the war.
1992: Reports intensify of U.S. and Allied veterans of Gulf War developing health problems, involving a variety of symptoms, collectively called Gulf War Syndrome. U.N. sanctions intensify civilian health crisis inside Iraq, making identification of similar symptoms potentially difficult.
1993: President Clinton continues intermittent bombing and missile raids against Iraqi facilities; U.N. inspectors step up program to dismantle Iraqi weapons. U.S. signs U.N. Chemical Weapons Convention, but approval later blocked in Senate.
1995: Japanese cult launches deadly sarin nerve gas attack on Tokyo subway system.
1996: Congressional hearings on Gulf War Syndrome focuses on Iraqi storage bunker destruction, rather than other possible causes, and does not call for international investigation of symptoms among Iraqis.
1997: Cuba accuses U.S. of spraying crops with biological agents. Iraq expels U.S. citizens in U.N. inspection teams, which are allowed to continue work without Americans, but choose to evacuate all inspectors. U.S. mobilizes for military action. Senate act finally implements Chemical Weapons Convention, with a provision that "the President may deny a request to inspect any facility" on national security grounds.
1998: U.S. again mobilizes for bombing campaign against alleged Iraqi bio-chemical weapons sites, after Iraq questions role of Gulf War veteran as U.N. inspector, and restricts inspector access to presidential properties and security.
July 8th 2002
(Yahoonews.com)
Until last month, officials had said they would soon vaccinate a few thousand health workers and would respond to any smallpox attack with limited vaccinations of the public. Since 1983, only 11,000 Americans who work with the virus and its related diseases have received a vaccination, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention .
The plan to increase the number of "first responders" who receive the vaccination to roughly 500,000 from 15,000 and to prepare for a mass undertaking of vaccinations in effect acknowledges that the government's existing program is insufficient to fight a large outbreak.
The government's new vaccination safeguards come amid continued talk in Washington of war against Iraq, which terrorism experts suspect of maintaining clandestine stocks of the virus, as well as growing criticism of the government's limited plan. Only Russia and the United States have declared stocks of the virus.
A highly contagious disease, smallpox was declared eradicated globally in 1980, eight years after the United States stopped routine vaccinations.
Until its eradication, smallpox killed roughly one in three people who were infected but not vaccinated. Because immunity is believed to diminish with time, most people alive today are considered vulnerable to smallpox. But federal officials have long resisted the resumption of mass smallpox vaccinations, citing the probable risk of serious side effects, even death.
Last month, a federal advisory panel backed a plan for "ring vaccinations," in which health workers would isolate infected patients and vaccinate people in close contact with them, forming a ring of immunization around an outbreak and a barrier to its spread. In theory, such a strategy can work because the vaccine, if given within four days of exposure to the virus, protects people from the disease.
Some experts on infectious disease said the plan's main virtue was that it required little smallpox vaccine.
The government's more aggressive plans are possible because vaccine supplies are rapidly increasing as a result of crash manufacturing and stockpiling efforts begun soon after last fall's terrorist strikes, officials said. Also, studies have found that existing vaccine doses can be diluted without loss of effectiveness.
"Now we can act differently because we have more vaccine," Dr. Donald A. Henderson, senior science adviser to Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of health and human services , said in an interview. Dr. Henderson, who led the global smallpox eradication effort, added that in a crisis "we can make vaccine available on request throughout the community."
Officials said that about 100 million doses of the smallpox vaccine (160 million if diluted) are in hand and that by late this year or soon thereafter enough will be available for every American, more than 280 million people.
Health and military experts, citing new models of how the contagion can spread and new disclosures about how the weaponized virus can sail on the wind, have recently argued that limited, local vaccinations could produce thousands if not millions of needless infections and deaths. Most critics of the ring vaccination plan advocate mass vaccinations of the United States population — but often before a smallpox attack, not after, as the government is now planning.
In addition to vaccinating more "first responders," the government plans to develop ways to speed vaccine deliveries around the country and help states plan how to carry out mass vaccinations after an attack.
Officials said the vaccinations of hospital workers and smallpox response teams, to begin fairly soon, would help train health professionals in smallpox vaccination and educate the public to the attendant risks.
The White House, Defense Department and other federal agencies are involved in the vaccination planning. "Everyone is aware," an administration official said.
Jerome M. Hauer, acting assistant secretary for emergency preparedness at the Department of Health and Human Services , said the agency hoped to send planning documents on how to best conduct mass vaccinations to cities and states in the next week or two. Mr. Hauer added that logistics changes to that end were under way at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, which oversees the production, safekeeping and distribution of the nation's stockpile of smallpox vaccine.
Other details of the plans, such as who would receive peacetime vaccinations, have yet to be approved by Mr. Thompson, officials said.
In interviews last week, health officials said the government had not abandoned its longstanding plan for ring vaccinations of people near a smallpox outbreak, the approach health workers used decades ago to eradicate the highly contagious disease from human populations. But the added steps, officials said, will make it possible to move far more aggressively if a terrorist attack ends up infecting more than 100 people or so.
Critics had said the ring approach, while useful in battling natural outbreaks, would do little or nothing against a moderately skilled enemy intent on mayhem.
"Unless the initial attack is very small and the infectiousness of the agent is quite mild, ring vaccination is not going to do much good," said Edward H. Kaplan, a Yale public health specialist who questioned the method's value at a federal meeting in Washington three weeks ago.
In a report, the Cato Institute, a policy group in Washington, called ring vaccination "woefully inadequate for countering a direct attack."
Critics argued that a number of factors had diminished the method's effectiveness since the disease was eradicated in 1980: populations are now increasingly mobile, levels of immunity are very low and advanced technologies have become commonplace, raising the odds that a smallpox attacker would be at least moderately skilled.
"Today it's a totally different scenario," said William J. Bicknell, an international health expert at Boston University who recently faulted federal smallpox policy at a Cato meeting. The ring plan, he declared flatly in an interview, "will not work."
Federal officials said the rising criticism played no direct role in shaping preparations for mass vaccinations.
"The key to responding to any public health emergency is flexibility," Mr. Hauer said. "You listen to critics, but you can't let that drive policy. You have to do what's best for public health and national security."
Ring vaccination, he added, was envisioned as simply a first line of defense that could quickly expand to much wider immunizations if necessary.
Mr. Hauer added that the ring strategy was inherently small-scale because it required health professionals to carefully trace the whereabouts and contacts of infected people. Such work is so hard and time consuming, he noted, that ring vaccination is unsuitable as the only means of fighting a wide epidemic.
He said another complication could arise if the disease broke out simultaneously in multiple cities, suggesting a strike of unknown size and danger. In that case, he said, "the forces pressing you to mass vaccinate become greater."
Dr. Henderson, the chairman of the Secretary's Council on Public Health Preparedness at the Department of Health and Human Services, said critics have falsely portrayed the government as relying exclusively on ring vaccination.
"Let me be clear," he said. "If there is an emergency, and if we have to vaccinate widely, we need to be ready for it. That's what we're doing."
Mass vaccinations are not without risk because the smallpox vaccine uses a live virus, vaccinia, a cousin of smallpox, that on occasion can cause brain damage or even kill. In the days of wide vaccination, roughly one person in a million died.
The risk may be greater for people with weakened immune systems, like AIDS patients or people undergoing chemotherapy.
The government is seeking more supplies of vaccinia immune globulin, a substance now in short supply that can prevent severe reactions in people with immune problems as well as the healthy. Officials said 700 doses are in hand and 3,000 will be available by the year's end.
Despite the vaccine's well-known dangers, federal critics have increasingly called for various styles of mass vaccination — including doing it on a voluntary or mandatory basis, before or after a smallpox attack.
At a June 15 public forum in Washington on federal smallpox vaccination policy, Dr. Kaplan, of Yale, presented a study done with colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that described how a smallpox attack could affect a crowded metropolitan region like New York City. What began as 1,000 infections at a train station or airport, he said, would spiral over weeks and months into 97,000 deaths if fought with ring vaccination alone.
"By contrast," he said, "post-attack mass vaccination would result in only 525 deaths" from the smallpox virus, which takes about two weeks to develop in the body before symptoms become obvious.
Some federal officials call this study unrealistic. But at the meeting, such ideas gained force as new evidence came to light on how powdered smallpox can be used as a biological weapon.
Dr. Alan P. Zelicoff, a smallpox expert at the Sandia National Laboratories, reported that he and experts from the Monterey Institute of International Studies had linked a 1971 outbreak in the Kazakh Republic to a Soviet field test of weaponized smallpox.
Dr. Zelicoff, a physician, quoted a former Soviet official as saying the accident occurred when a plume of smallpox germs sailed about nine miles on the wind.
By the meeting's end, medical experts were questioning not only the ring plan but also federal assertions that the smallpox threat is low.
Dr. Kenneth I. Berns, president of the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City, said he judged the probability that Iraq possessed weaponized smallpox as "reasonably high" and that Saddam Hussein would use such germs in a war against the United States as "quite high."
"That's the confounding issue that we all face," Dr. Berns told the forum, according to a transcript.
Frank public discussion of the Iraqi threat, he added, "is absolutely essential."
In interviews, officials of the Department of Health and Human Services declined to comment on federal threat assessments but detailed wide contingency planning for mass smallpox vaccinations.
On June 20, a federal panel known as the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices backed the idea of immunizing some emergency workers before any attack. Experts estimated that the immunizations would go to some 15,000 health care and law enforcement workers who would be most likely to respond to a biological attack and come in contact with victims.
But Dr. Henderson, the health department's senior adviser on bioterrorism, said the tentative new plan was for many more to be vaccinated. "We could easily be at a half-million without too much difficulty," he said.
Wide peacetime vaccinations, he said, would help educate not only the nation's medical community on the practical aspects of smallpox immunization but also the public.
If the peacetime group suffers a couple of deaths, "there will be a lot of publicity and concern," Dr. Henderson said. "It's a question of how people are going to respond."
WebMD Medical News
(June 25) -- Eight hours of sleep is a luxury; six is enough to get you through, right? Wrong.
According to experts, getting just six hours of sleep a night is associated with increased daytime sleepiness, decreased performance, and a change in blood factors that promote the potentially dangerous process of inflammation.
Inflammation of this sort can lead to a variety of problems such as heart disease and hardening of the arteries, or atherosclerosis.
"We found that ... six ... hours of sleep is not optimal [when compared with eight]," Alexandros N. Vgontzas, MD, tells WebMD. "Two hours of sleep deprivation per night for one week is associated with increased sleepiness, decreased performance, and activation of the inflammatory system." Vgontzas, a professor of psychiatry at Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey, is the author of a study on the effects of sleep deprivation presented at a recent medical meeting.
Most studies of the effects of sleep deprivation evaluate either total or severe sleep deprivation, allowing for less than five hours of sleep per night. Vgontzas asserts that there are few studies on the effects of modest sleep restriction, allowing for six hours of sleep, a pattern more closely resembling contemporary life.
This latest study evaluated the effects of eight hours of sleep vs. six hours of sleep on performance and blood factors associated with inflammation in 25 healthy volunteers.
The volunteers were observed in a sleep laboratory for 12 consecutive nights. The subjects were allowed to sleep for eight hours each night for the first four nights, and they were awakened at 6:30 a.m. Then, the volunteers underwent one week of sleep restriction, when they were awakened two hours earlier, at 4:30 a.m.
After just one week of sleep restriction, the volunteers had a significant increase of daytime sleepiness. Their levels of inflammatory factors jumped when they got only six hours of sleep, and they suffered from decreased vigilance and decreased ability to perform tasks that require coordination and thought.
The findings suggest that modest sleep deprivation may be associated with public safety concerns, such as traffic accidents, the investigators report. They also expressed concern that moderately sleep-deprived people may be at increased risk of major health hazards such as cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis.
"This is an excellent study," Marc R. Blackman, MD, tells WebMD. Blackman is the chief of the laboratory of clinical investigation at the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine with the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., and was not involved in the study.
It would be interesting to see if these changes reversed when patients were returned to normal sleep patterns, he says.
Jun. 24, 2002
Fern Leitman, 56, a longtime Florida resident, thought her repeated bouts of pneumonia were just bad luck. Doctors told Suzan King-Carr, 58, of Hobe Sound, Fla., that the spots on her lungs were probably cancer. Ida Mae Williams, 76, of Bogalusa, La., was informed that she had tuberculosis. Three women, three different diagnoses — all of them wrong. After years of ineffectual treatment, each woman learned that she, like thousands of other Americans, had developed a mysterious lung infection that mimics TB, seems to strike thin, white women in particular and can be permanently debilitating. Most unsettling of all, they could have developed the ailment simply by stepping into a shower.
Physicians don't know much about this mysterious illness. Like TB, it is triggered by a group of germs called mycobacteria. Unlike TB, it is not contagious, though it seems to thrive in hot, humid states in the U.S. Indeed, a recent survey conducted by health authorities in Florida found that hospitals in the region discharged far more patients with non-TB mycobacterial (or, as doctors call it, NTM) infections than with TB. And once you have NTM, it's tough to get rid of. "It takes three times as long to treat as conventional TB and relapses are common," says Dr. Michael Lauzardo, deputy TB controller of Florida. Drug costs alone run $5,000 a year, and a full course can last 18 months.
Not only does the number of cases appear to be growing, but the infection itself seems to be changing. Back in the 1950s NTM infections were rare, usually occurred in male smokers and were generally curable. In the 1980s NTM emerged as one of the opportunistic infections that AIDS patients developed after their immune system collapsed. (Combination-drug therapy has since produced a sharp drop in AIDS-related mycobacterial infections.) Now, the typical patient with a NTM infection is an otherwise healthy Caucasian woman who is usually middle aged and often thin.
What is unclear is whether the increase in reported cases is the result of better diagnoses or of some as yet undiscovered change in the bug or the environment it grows in. "That's what keeps me awake at night," says Dr. Gwen Huitt, a pulmonologist at the National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver. "These mycobacteria are everywhere." They thrive in what scientists call biofilms — pond scum and the slime inside faucets and showerheads.
Shower stalls are particularly suspect. Some doctors believe that mycobacteria from the pipes are becoming aerosolized in water spray. The more enclosed a shower stall, the greater the buildup of germ-infested spray. (A variant of the illness — sometimes called hot-tub lung — occurs when people develop an allergic reaction to the mycobacteria in indoor hot tubs.) Making matters worse, says Dr. Michael Iseman of National Jewish, "we have changed the way we treat our water." Since the 1970s, the temperature of most hot-water heaters has been reduced to 120[degrees] to save energy and prevent scalding — perfect conditions for mycobacteria. The result: we shower in a fine mist of mycobacteria that reaches deep into our lungs.
That can't be the whole answer, of course, since plenty of Americans take showers without getting sick. Studies show that nearly half of NTM patients are also genetically predisposed to lung infections. Some have inherited one of the genes for cystic fibrosis. Others have a defective alpha-1 anti-trypsin gene, a condition that has been linked to a high risk of emphysema. Perhaps it is a combination of bad genes and bad luck that is making people sick.
Things seem to be getting worse. Several doctors report that more and more of their NTM patients are infected with so-called rapid growers — mycobacteria that are particularly destructive and hard to treat. No one knows why.
One thing is certain: most people with NTM infections are not getting properly diagnosed. Their complaints tend to be general and vague: long-lasting fatigue and a cough that won't go away. A specialized sputum test can identify the infection — if one is ordered. Telltale signs will also show up on a cat scan — if you know what to look for. That is why doctors and patients are trying to spread the word about this mysterious ailment. (Leitman's husband Philip has taken the lead in Florida, raising funds, organizing medical workshops and creating a website, www.ntminfo.com.) Sometimes what you don't know can hurt you.
(St. Petersburg Times-Florida)
August 14, 2001
When University of Florida entomologist Phil Koehler heard about the mystery from a bewildered Orlando pest control company, he wondered if a creature out of a Bram Stoker novel was lurking about. Dracula, it turned out, was not establishing a beachhead in the land of Mickey and Goofy.
Chewing on hotel guests was a critter seldom seen anywhere in North America, much less Florida.
"We didn't think bedbugs would ever be a problem again," says Koehler, a world expert on urban pests. "I guess we were wrong."
Thanks to changing pesticide practices and record international tourism, bedbugs are enjoying a comeback for the first time in half a century. Hitchhiking to the United States in the luggage of overseas visitors, they're showing up in houses, apartments, flophouses and even posh hotels.
Last year, the United States reported a record 51-million international tourists, with Florida accommodating 20 percent of all foreign visitors. Bedbugs are making a night's sleep a challenge at certain hotels in New York, Washington, San Francisco, Miami and Orlando. (If you're wondering which hotels, keep wondering. If the pest control people divulged that information, they'd never get another exterminating job.) Pest control companies say the problem has increased tenfold since 1999.
A bedbug
No west Florida hotels have reported bedbug woes -- "Nobody wants to say "Yes, we have bedbugs,"' Koehler says -- but they're here. Ask the pest control workers in Tampa and St. Petersburg who have been treating homes and apartments.
"We've had four or five cases in just the last nine months," says Teresa Nixon of Hunt Exterminating Co. in Pinellas Park.
"They're difficult to control," says Kurt Demarr of Safe Pest Control in Seminole. "We have to be completely thorough."
Unlike mosquitoes, bedbugs are not known to transmit disease to human prey. Though bites are seldom painful, the itching afterward can be maddening enough to send victims to the medicine cabinet for Benadryl, or to the doctor's office.
There's also a psychological cost.
"If you know something is going to bite you, it's kind of hard to sleep," Koehler says. "I advise people to hang on to their own blood instead of donating to a bedbug."
Easier said than done.
First you have to find them
Most baby boomers have never seen a bedbug. Bedbugs are ancient history, something encountered in a Dickens novel.
But the bedbug -- Cimex lectularius to folks in the know -- is all too real. It's a small creature about the size of a ladybug. It's flat and tan -- at least until it starts to feed. It's not a tick, but it darkens with blood and looks a little fatter.
"The bedbug is not a pleasant animal," says Frank Meek, the Atlanta-based national pest control technical manager for Orkin.
Recently, after spending the night at an Atlantic Seaboard hotel, Meek found out how unpleasant. Waking, he didn't feel like telephoning room service for coffee. He yearned for a bottle of calamine lotion to soothe the itchy welts on his ankles. Droplets of blood -- his own -- covered the bed sheets. He'd been the main course at a bedbug dinner party.
"I should have known not to stay in the room," Meek says. The room reeked of bedbug musk and bedbug fecal matter. "Kind of a throw-up smell. It's the calling card for a bad infestation."
Orkin is now giving bedbug lessons to the nation's hotel industry: Look for blood spots on bed linens. Look for egg casings. Use your sense of smell.
"Most hotel workers don't know what to look for," Meek says. Even if they do, bedbugs are tough to treat. Getting rid of one is a little like exterminating one of Stoker's vampires. You have to find the devil first. Then you have to drive a really tiny stake through its heart. Just kidding.
During the day, bedbugs sleep. They might hide under the bedroom rug or mattress or snuggle in the crack between floor and wall. Bedbugs sometimes lay low behind picture frames and even beneath loose sections of wallpaper.
In Central Florida recently, a pest control expert opened the windows to air out an infested room at a hotel. The change in the humidity caused the loose wallpaper to contract, squashing hundreds of bedbugs.
The wall oozed with blood.
Bedbugs can't fly. When dark comes, they emerge from their lairs and creep across the floor toward a midnight snack. They apparently home in on body heat or odor. Equal opportunity feeders, they'll snack on anything warm-blooded, from the family to the family pet.
Bedbugs, once an international scourge, were associated with poor hygiene. The pesticide DDT, introduced during World World War II to fight mosquitoes and crop pests, also knocked out the bedbug. Desperate homeowners even sprinkled DDT powder in their beds.
DDT killed more than harmful insects. It contaminated the food chain and was blamed for putting the bald eagle, peregrine falcon and brown pelican on the endangered species list. After DDT was banned, less potent pesticides came along. Over the years they were replaced by new stuff.
"But we kept refining the home pesticides," UF's Koehler says. "Where we used to spray everything, now we use baits and traps. It's a method that targets roaches and ants. But it doesn't work against bedbugs. We don't really have anything specifically intended for bedbugs right now."
Build a better bedbug trap and the world will beat a path ...
Search and destroy missions
Let's say your neighbors just returned from Europe -- with welts on their ankles and uninvited guests in their luggage. Say they have a child the same age as your child. The children play together. Sometimes your child is invited for a sleepover.
Your child comes home with a few welts on her arms. And guess what's in her backpack?
"That's how they travel," Koehler says.
Koehler, 52, is not used to bedbugs either. Best known in entomology circles as a cockroach man, he doesn't even mind when a big boy races across his bare toes as he lumbers into the dark kitchen at night for a glass of water. Well, maybe he minds a little. But not enough to shriek and babble and threaten to sell the house.
At least roaches are big. If nothing else, he can step on one.
The war on bedbugs is going to require weaponry more potent than shoe leather.
Pest control companies say treating a home is painstaking. First, find where the bedbugs are hiding. Eliminate them any way possible. It's okay to give Raid a try, though don't spray it on your pillow.
Wait a few days.
If the bedbugs return, try another bug hunt. Or call a pest control company.
"Sometimes the only solution," Koehler says, "is to get rid of your bedding and furniture."
Good night. Sleep tight. You know the rest.
(via Dog News Blog http://radio.weblogs.com/0107233/)
"Last month ten-year-old Nicki Hughes lay on an operating table for two hours having her face stitched together and a lump of flesh the size of a tennis ball cut from her arm which had been infected by bacteria from a dog's mouth."
Alice Beer, the author of the article, attributes the rise in dog bites to the number of people adopting so called dangerous dog breeds. What is interesting is her admission that the law designed to banned dangerous dog breeds (passed in 1991) has not been effective because it is impossible to enforce. She has missed the obvious about so-called dangerous dogs and that is that dogs are dangerous when they are trained to attack (as many pitbulls are). Dogs are more dangerous when they are allowed to roam freely unsupervised and untrained. Dogs are dangerous when they are neglected and abused and not taught to respect people.
Ms. Beer infers that people are too nonchalant about dogs. 'Doggy' is probably high up there in the first ten words spoken. So why are they suddenly and unpredictably turning on children like prey?' She absolutely hits the nail on the head with that quote. We should never forget that dogs are dogs; dogs are not people and they never will be. Dogs are more visceral in their emotions and actions than people; a dog mauling a child may have the intention of 'herding and putting the child under its domination', not killing it, but the end result IS the same. A dog must be trained, because an untrained dog can, in effect, be as lethal and deadly as a loaded gun.
(ANANOVA)
29th June 2002
An earthquake with a magnitude of 4.5 shook the Mount Hood area of Oregon in the United States.
The early morning quake was centred about three miles south of the summit of Mount Hood and about four miles deep.
Several groups of quakes have occurred there since the 1970s but a spokesman for the University of Washington's Pacific Northwest Seismographic Network said: "This was stronger than any of those."
Mount Hood is an active volcano, but the quake, which felt like "a sharp jolt", did not signal any eruption, he added.
There were no immediate reports of damage.
(BBC News)
8-9-99
Scientists have transformed promiscuous male mice into more faithful partners and doting dads by inserting a single gene from a prairie vole.
It is the first time that one gene has proven sufficient to change complex social behaviors so dramatically, the US researchers believe.
Tom Insel and Larry Young, at Emory University, have also recently done related studies in non-human primates and now plan to focus on humans.
Progress for mental illness
Virtually every kind of human mental illness is characterised by abnormal social attachments, but very little is known about the role that genetics has on forming social partnerships.
The team think their research could lead to greater understanding of this area, for example in in learning how social isolation can result from brain dysfunction.
"In psychopathologic disorders, there is a severe deficit in social behaviour and there could be genetic factors involved," Dr Young said.
"But it takes a lot of time to move from animal research into humans," Young warned. "And in human cultures we may find that experience and values have a lot more to do with behaviour."
Partners for life
The experiments, published in Nature magazine, used a gene from the prairie vole. Males of this rodent are faithful partners and attentive fathers.
"After mating, the male prairie vole forms a strong social bond. He prefers to be with that mate to the exclusion of all others," said Dr Young. "That pair nests together. When she has her babies he spends as much time with those babies as she does. He also defends the nest and they stay together for the next litter and the next and the next."
By contrast, the male mice used normally abandon the female immediately after mating and have no role in raising their offspring.
But by transferring a gene from the voles to the mice, the male mice became much more sociable to their mates, although occasional "extra-marital" affairs did still occur.
Patterns of the brain
The gene determines the pattern of particular hormone receptors in the rodent's brain. The hormone here is called vasopressin and was already known to have an effect on male social behaviours such as aggression and communication.
Dr Insel said: "What is really intriguing is that a change in a single gene can lead to a new pattern of receptors in the brain and then result in this profound difference in something as complex as social behavior."
Although a multitude of genes are likely to be involved in the evolution of monogamy, this work begins to identify the links between DNA sequences, brain chemistry and social behavior.
"Perhaps it will turn out that mutations in this same gene have occurred many times in evolution, leading to alterations in patterns of social interaction and facilitating monogamy under special socio-ecological conditions," Dr Insel added.
www.sunday-times.co.uk
5-10-99
BIG BROTHER could soon be watching from the 'inside.' Several international companies are consulting scientists on ways of developing microchip implants for their workers to measure their timekeeping and whereabouts.
The technology, which has been proven on pets and human volunteers, would enable firms to track staff all around a building or complex. The data could enable them to draw up estimates of workers' efficiency and productivity.
Professor Kevin Warwick of Reading University, a leading cybernetics expert, has been approached by several firms including a leading software company with a British subsidiary and Blackbaud Inc, the American software giant.
Warwick hit the headlines last summer when he had a silicon chip transponder surgically implanted in his forearm. He was subsequently able to show how a computer could monitor every move he made using detectors that were scattered around the building in which he worked.
In his experiment, Warwick showed how the system could also benefit workers by programming it to switch on lights, computers and heating systems as he entered a room - and turning them off when he left.
The technology is likely to have a strong appeal to companies with high labour costs, for which small increases in staff productivity can have a big impact on profits. It is also relatively cheap - just a few pounds for each person, according to Warwick.
"For a business the potential is obvious," he said. "You can tell when people clock into work and when they leave the building. You would know at all times exactly where they were and who they were with."
Warwick admits that people will be "shocked" by the idea of companies asking their employees to have such implants. He said: "It is pushing at the limits of what society will accept but it is not such a big deal. Many employees already carry swipecards. I think this is just a step on from that."
His research follows earlier experiments by companies such as the telecommunications firm AT&T that showed how smart cards carried by staff could be programmed to relay a worker's position back to a central computer. AT&T Laboratories in Cambridge has been working on its "smart badges" for two years. They use ultrasound to tell the main computer exactly where the wearer is, allowing their desktop computers and phone calls to "follow" them around the building.
The company has, however, stopped short of suggesting staff should have devices inserted into their bodies.
The first practical application of such technology is, however, not in humans but in pets. Under the government's new "passports for pets" scheme, which replaces the quarantine system from 2001, dogs will have a microchip implanted beneath their skin to identify who they belong to.
Representatives from police forces in Britain and the United States have also expressed interest in the implant technology, according to Warwick.
He believes that submitting to an implant could be made a condition, for example, of being granted a gun licence.
The Sunday Times
1-3-99
A TRIANGULAR AIRSHIP could soon be used to take tourists into space.
Coopership, a Dallas company, claims its airship will win the £6m X Prize for the first commercial space flight.
According to Dale Harris, the inventor of the Coopership, it would allow a shuttle carrying several passengers to get into space simply and cheaply.
"We hope to announce a partnership with a big aerospace company later this year," he says.
The airship would have three sides of 600ft and be made from a rigid composite material to give it a hard outer shell. This would allow the top of the ship to be used as a launch track for the space shuttle. The hull would be filled with a mix of helium and oxygen to provide lift. Several high-powered engines at the rear would provide propulsion, allowing it to cruise at speeds of 170mph.
The airship would be launched from the sea and soar to 50,000ft. Then the shuttle would be launched with an electric catapult being developed by Coopership.
"One of the things we discovered during the development of the airship was that it is easy to store electrical energy within it," says Harris. "This led us to look at different ways of launching a shuttle and we think we now have a way to use electrical energy to propel the shuttle down a track on top of the ship."
The shuttle would be catapulted off the airship and, with the help of rocket engines, rise to a height of 65 miles. It would then start to descend, bouncing off the edge of the Earth's atmosphere to reduce its speed. When the shuttle has re-entered the atmosphere and come down to 50,000ft an air-breathing engine would be turned on to start a controlled descent.
Coming down over water, the shuttle would lift its nose and use the ground effect just above the water to skim along at 100mph until it reached the airship from which it was launched.
Harris says the shuttle would land on the track on top of the floating Coopership. Once refuelled, the shuttle would be able to take off again within hours.
Harris hopes to build a prototype of the airship in 2001. This would be a smaller version of the space launch system, measuring about 250ft on each side, and carrying three 100ft by 25ft television screens to be used for advertising.
"We decided we may as well use our prototype for something, and advertising seems an obvious thing to go for - the market for advertising blimps is huge, and we think we can offer something a bit different," says Harris. The advertising blimp would also carry 25 passengers, and be able to fly at 30mph.
The company is also planning a larger 800ft long, cargo-lifting airship capable of carrying modules for 1,000 tonnes of cargo or 2,000 passengers and 1,500 crew.
The Coopership will cruise at 170mph and Harris says it would be able to go around the world without refuelling.
"Airships were originally used as luxury passenger carriers, and I think we can go back to those days. The one thing that worries everyone about airships is safety, and because we use helium rather than hydrogen, and we also have a rigid hull that is difficult to puncture, we think we can offer total safety," says Harris.
To increase the safety of the cargo Coopership, it would contain dozens of spheres holding the helium and oxygen mix: several could be punctured without bringing down the ship. According to Harris, different modules can be picked up by the ship, allowing the same craft to carry either cargo or passengers.
"We think a passenger Coopership will be comparable in both cost and luxury to a top-of-the-range cruise ship. The advantage is that we can go to more interesting places - for instance, we could offer a 12-day flight around the world," he says.
Each passenger ship would cost about £14m, and Harris claims to already be in discussions with several cargo and passenger lines about the system.
I wonder if the AIR Force has ever built one of these?
HUGE SILENT TRIANGLE SEEN IN QUEENSLAND, AUSTRALIA
Two women, aged 39 and 59, reported seeing a huge triangular object fly by as they fished near Morton Bay, Queensland, on the night of Aug 8. It moved very slowly, "nothing like a plane," and had seven brilliant red pulsating lights along its triangular perimeter, they said.
TRIANGULAR UFO REPORTED IN SAO PAULO, BRAZIL
Workers at a water treatment station in Cubatao, Sao Paulo state, witnessed a large triangle-shaped UFO at around midnight on Aug 21. The UFO had a red light above and three red lights below at the corners. Witness Roberto Rabelo said it appeared to be "bigger than a soccer field." Shortly before disappearing, the object displayed "hundreds of white flashes."
FLYING TRIANGLES MAKE IMPRESSIVE DISPLAY IN ISRAEL
Israeli journalist Barry Chamish notes that major UFO events are most likely to occur in Israel on Jewish holy days, a fact for which there is no explanation. In a recent instance, on the fasting day called Tisha B'av on July 22, Israeli ufologists were able to coordinate the tracking and videotaping of a large triangle UFO as it moved scores of miles over several major cities and was viewed by hundreds of witnesses. Video of that UFO, shot by Professor Rami Shkalim of Bar Ilan University, was shown on a popular morning TV news program, Good Morning Israel.
11-26-98
(AP) -- If the world suddenly gets hotter, you might survive better with a new skin color, or you might sprout a tail to maneuver in the dense tropical forest that spreads around the globe.
And, if scientists are correct, you might already be carrying the genes for these radical traits, and more.
Scientists working with fruit flies believe they have unlocked a vault of last-ditch genetic variations that kick in to help organisms survive in a much altered form that defies the neatly predictable, incremental pace of evolution.
Researchers at the University of Chicago and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute report in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature that the fruit flies expressed these prefabricated variations -- from weird limbs to different wings -- when scientists fooled the insects into thinking their climate was changing.
The physical changes erupted in the span of a few generations in the face of supposedly new and dire living conditions. In doing so, they radically changed the appearance and behavior of a creature that had looked and lived the same for eons.
Doomsday Genes Well Hidden
Researchers caution this cache of doomsday genes has been unlocked only in controlled experiments.
Such emergency countermeasures are kept under tight molecular wraps in normal circumstances, they said. Nor has it been determined if these genes actually work this way in nature.
"This sounds like a very bad thing, and no doubt it is for most of the individuals," said study co-author Susan Lindquist of the University of Chicago. "But for some, the changes might be beneficial for adapting to a new environment. Genetic changes exposed in this way become the fodder for evolution."
In the 19th century, Charles Darwin described evolution as a gradual, orderly march by a species toward self-improvement.
In the fossil record, most evolutionary changes are seen to have unfolded over millions of years. But not always.
Punctuated Equilibrium Theory
The theory of punctuated equilibrium championed by paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and others suggests that evolution is a messy business driven by random disasters that force survivors to adapt hurriedly to new environmental conditions.
For example, mammals and other life forms flourished after an asteroid or comet hit Earth 65 million years ago, but dinosaurs perished.
"Evolution is often thought of as incremental," said biologist Andrew Cossins of the University of Liverpool in England. "But the fossil record contains many examples of apparently rapid changes in body form. This mechanism provides, for the first time, a means by which changes in body form can be substantial and stepwise rather than progressive."
Other scientists want to see whether such drastic variations can occur quickly outside the laboratory.
"In real life, are there organisms that change this way? Are there examples in nature that are going begging for an explanation like this?" said Aaron Bauer, a lizard geneticist at Villanova University.
Bauer studies a group of geckos native to the deserts of southwest Africa. He said one type of lizard could be a candidate for study because it looks and acts differently, yet its genome is nearly identical to other lizards in the area.
"If this molecular mechanism could be shown to be generally applicable among different organisms, it would be an important advance," Bauer said.
In the fruit fly experiments, the Chicago researchers determined that the genetic variations held in reserve depended on a protein called Heat shock protein 90.
Hsp90 is known as a chaperone protein. As temperatures rise, it prevents other proteins from going awry and disrupting normal cell functions and growth, and also prevents degenerative diseases.
However, Hsp90 gets spread too thin when conditions continue to deteriorate. With the chaperone distracted, many different proteins begin to misfire in cells. Genetic variations that were held in reserve begin to trigger.
In the experiments, the researchers deliberately reduced the levels of Hsp90 in fruit flies to simulate the biological response in fruit flies to climate change.
As many as 90 percent of the flies' offspring emerged with oddly shaped wings, strange bristle configurations and limb deformities. The eventual evolutionary benefits of these genetic changes were unknown, the researchers said.
The abnormalities persisted even when Hsp90 levels were returned to normal in later generations, suggesting the changes had become permanent in the fruit flies' genetic code, Lindquist said.
Our planet is running out of room and resources. Modern man has plundered so much, a damning report claims this week, that outer space will have to be colonised
July 7, 2002
(The UK Observer)
Earth's population will be forced to colonise two planets within 50 years if natural resources continue to be exploited at the current rate, according to a report out this week.
A study by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), to be released on Tuesday, warns that the human race is plundering the planet at a pace that outstrips its capacity to support life.
In a damning condemnation of Western society's high consumption levels, it adds that the extra planets (the equivalent size of Earth) will be required by the year 2050 as existing resources are exhausted.
The report, based on scientific data from across the world, reveals that more than a third of the natural world has been destroyed by humans over the past three decades.
Using the image of the need for mankind to colonise space as a stark illustration of the problems facing Earth, the report warns that either consumption rates are dramatically and rapidly lowered or the planet will no longer be able to sustain its growing population.
Experts say that seas will become emptied of fish while forests - which absorb carbon dioxide emissions - are completely destroyed and freshwater supplies become scarce and polluted.
The report offers a vivid warning that either people curb their extravagant lifestyles or risk leaving the onus on scientists to locate another planet that can sustain human life. Since this is unlikely to happen, the only option is to cut consumption now.
Systematic overexploitation of the planet's oceans has meant the North Atlantic's cod stocks have collapsed from an estimated spawning stock of 264,000 tonnes in 1970 to under 60,000 in 1995.
The study will also reveal a sharp fall in the planet's ecosystems between 1970 and 2002 with the Earth's forest cover shrinking by about 12 per cent, the ocean's biodiversity by a third and freshwater ecosystems in the region of 55 per cent.
The Living Planet report uses an index to illustrate the shocking level of deterioration in the world's forests as well as marine and freshwater ecosystems. Using 1970 as a baseline year and giving it a value of 100, the index has dropped to a new low of around 65 in the space of a single generation.
It is not just humans who are at risk. Scientists, who examined data for 350 kinds of mammals, birds, reptiles and fish, also found the numbers of many species have more than halved.
Martin Jenkins, senior adviser for the World Conservation Monitoring Centre in Cambridge, which helped compile the report, said: 'It seems things are getting worse faster than possibly ever before. Never has one single species had such an overwhelming influence. We are entering uncharted territory.'
Figures from the centre reveal that black rhino numbers have fallen from 65,000 in 1970 to around 3,100 now. Numbers of African elephants have fallen from around 1.2 million in 1980 to just over half a million while the population of tigers has fallen by 95 per cent during the past century.
The UK's birdsong population has also seen a drastic fall with the corn bunting population declining by 92 per cent between 1970 and 2000, the tree sparrow by 90 per cent and the spotted flycatcher by 70 per cent.
Experts, however, say it is difficult to ascertain how many species have vanished for ever because a species has to disappear for 50 years before it can be declared extinct.
Attention is now focused on next month's Earth Summit in Johannesburg, the most important environmental negotiations for a decade.
However, the talks remain bedevilled with claims that no agreements will be reached and that US President George W. Bush will fail to attend.
Matthew Spencer, a spokesman for Greenpeace, said: 'There will have to be concessions from the richer nations to the poorer ones or there will be fireworks.'
The preparatory conference for the summit, held in Bali last month, was marred by disputes between developed nations and poorer states and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), despite efforts by British politicians to broker compromises on key issues.
America, which sent 300 delegates to the conference, is accused of blocking many of the key initiatives on energy use, biodiversity and corporate responsibility.
The WWF report shames the US for placing the greatest pressure on the environment. It found the average US resident consumes almost double the resources as that of a UK citizen and more than 24 times that of some Africans.
Based on factors such as a nation's consumption of grain, fish, wood and fresh water along with its emissions of carbon dioxide from industry and cars, the report provides an ecological 'footprint' for each country by showing how much land is required to support each resident.
America's consumption 'footprint' is 12.2 hectares per head of population compared to the UK's 6.29ha while Western Europe as a whole stands at 6.28ha. In Ethiopia the figure is 2ha, falling to just half a hectare for Burundi, the country that consumes least resources.
The report, which will be unveiled in Geneva, warns that the wasteful lifestyles of the rich nations are mainly responsible for the exploitation and depletion of natural wealth. Human consumption has doubled over the last 30 years and continues to accelerate by 1.5 per cent a year.
Now WWF wants world leaders to use its findings to agree on specific actions to curb the population's impact on the planet.
A spokesman for WWF UK, said: 'If all the people consumed natural resources at the same rate as the average US and UK citizen we would require at least two extra planets like Earth.'
The world's ticking timebomb
Marine crisis:
North Atlantic cod stocks have collapsed from an estimated 264,000 tonnes in 1970 to under 60,000 in 1995.
Pollution:
The United States places the greatest pressure on the environment, with its carbon dioxide emissions and over-consumption. It takes 12.2 hectares of land to support each American citizen and 6.29 for each Briton, while the figure for Burundi is just half a hectare.
Shrinking Forests:
Between 1970 and 2002 forest cover has dwindled by 12 per cent.
Endangered wildlife:
African elephant numbers have fallen from 1.2 million in 1980 to half a million now. In the UK the songbird population has fallen dramatically, with the corn bunting declining by 92 per cent in the past 30 years.
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