By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES' "PENTAGON PR CONSULTANT")
U.S. national security agencies are on alert for a terrorist attack after the discovery that a Middle Eastern man carried out suspicious surveillance of the Washington Monument, the Pentagon and other buildings in the area.
The man in question videotaped the Washington Monument on the Mall on Sept. 1 and paced off several distances around the monument, according to U.S. intelligence officials.
U.S. intelligence agencies surreptitiously obtained a copy of the videotape and discovered that it also contained surveillance of the Pentagon and other buildings, said officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The surveillance activity is regarded as a key indicator of terrorist preparation and one of the few signs of targeting.
Asked yesterday about future terrorist attacks, Vice President Richard B. Cheney said the al Qaeda network often waits years before striking, and U.S. and allied efforts may have forestalled an attack.
"We have made it much more difficult I think for them to operate," Mr. Cheney said on NBC's "Meet the Press."
"Now, did they have a major attack planned in that intervening period? I don't know. I suspect they probably did, and I suspect we probably deterred some attacks. But does that mean the problem is solved? Obviously not."
Mr. Cheney said there have been signs of increased communications among Islamic terrorists. He noted that there is a "temptation" on the part of terrorists to conduct attacks on significant dates.
"I'm not saying something is going to happen on September 11, but as these major milestones come along we often receive reporting that it's tied into one of those dates," he said.
U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies detected a similar reconnaissance activity in Los Angeles several months ago. Two Middle Eastern men were spotted in the vicinity of the World Cruise Center in the Port of Los Angeles in June as they paced off distances to measure the length of the pier. Other surveillance was detected nearby as other suspicious men were seen videotaping the Vincent Thomas Bridge that crossed the main port channel.
Counterterrorism officials suspected that terrorists might be planning an attack on a cruise ship or planning to blow up the bridge in an attack that would block ship traffic in and out of the port.
Despite the recent targeting in Washington, U.S. intelligence agencies said there are no "specific" threats of impending attacks by terrorists coinciding with the one-year anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center.
However, U.S. military, intelligence and law-enforcement agencies have been on a heightened state of alert since Friday and will remain so through Wednesday.
A recent U.S. intelligence assessment stated that al Qaeda terrorists do not have a tradition of conducting terrorist attacks on the anniversary of earlier strikes. The main threat of terrorism this week is likely to be from terrorists or groups that are sympathetic to the al Qaeda network and other Islamic extremists.
"There could be some copycats," one official said.
U.S. intelligence analysts believe the car bombs that were detonated last week in Kabul, killing 30 persons, and the attempted assassination of Afghan leader Hamid Karzai also have raised fears of a coming al Qaeda terrorist attack.
Government counterterrorism analysts believe the Karzai assassination attempt may signal the start of a coordinated terrorist attack. The assassination attempt might be similar to al Qaeda's assassination of Ahmed Shah Massoud, a respected Afghan leader, who was killed by suicide bombers two days before the September 11 attacks.
Officials fear the attempt to kill Mr. Karzai may signal that a new mass-casualty attack by al Qaeda is coming.
Intelligence reports of the suspected terrorist targeting of the monument and the Pentagon come amid the resumption of 24-hour warplane patrols over New York and Washington.
The patrols in the past have included U.S. Air Force F-16 fighter interceptors, air refueling tankers and airborne warning and control aircraft that fly off the East Coast monitoring the skies.
Intelligence officials said there have been reports based on increased communications among suspected terrorists around the world that an attack might be coming.
"It's at a heightened level, but not as high as around the Fourth of July," a U.S. official told Reuters on the condition of anonymity. "Threat information comes in every day. Are we on a real high trend? No. Is there information coming in? Yes."
Federal law-enforcement agencies have not issued any major terrorism alerts in the past several days.
LONDON, Sept 8 (Reuters) - Britain's Sunday Times quoted two leading members of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network as saying the initial plan for the September 11 hijackers had been to crash planes into nuclear power plants in the United States.
This had been rejected for fear "it would get out of control," but future nuclear targets were not ruled out.
The newspaper was quoting from a documentary by Yosri Fouda, chief investigative reporter for the Arab television station al-Jazeera, who interviewed Ramzi bin al-Shaibah and Khaled al-Sheikh Mohammad in Pakistan's port city of Karachi. The date of the interview was not given.
Qatar-based Jazeera television showed the first part of the documentary last Thursday. It plans to air the second part next Thursday, which it said would include confessions by the two men that al Qaeda was responsible for the September 11 attacks.
More than 3,000 people were killed when hijacked airliners devastated the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center and smashed into U.S. military headquarters at the Pentagon near Washington.
The Sunday Times quoted the men as saying in the "recent" interview that the fourth target had been Capitol Hill in Washington. But the airliner crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.
An official at Jazeera told Reuters the station had not been aware that the Sunday Times was going to run an article with details from the documentary, nor was he aware Fouda was going to write a by-lined item about how he got the story.
"We were not planning to release anything before Thursday (Sept 12)," the official said.
The newspaper identified Sheikh Mohammad, 38, as head of the al-Qaeda military committee, and Shaibah, 30, as coordinator of the operation from his base in Germany. It said Sheikh Mohammad had devised the idea of targeting "prominent" buildings in the United States.
"DEPARTMENT OF MARTYRS" RECRUITS
The hijackers who died in the crashes were recruited from al Qaeda's "so-called Department of Martyrs."
"The attacks were designed to cause as many deaths as possible and to be a big slap for America on American soil," Sheikh Mohammad was quoted as saying.
The Sunday Times said Shaibah had also written a 112-page justification for the attacks, entitled 'The Reality of the New Crusaders War', which he wanted translated into English and lodged with the Library of Congress in Washington.
"In case that the events which took place in America were the doing of Muslims, then it is legal because those operations were against an enemy state.
"It is permissible for Muslims to kill infidels under a principle of reciprocity, because if those infidels are targeting Muslim women, children and the elderly, then the Muslims can do the same," the Sunday Times quoted the document as saying.
The newspaper said the opening page included pictures of the World Trade Center as it collapsed, on a day described by Shaibah as "that glorious Tuesday."
It said the decision to launch a massive suicide attack on the United States was taken with bin Laden's approval by the al Qaeda Military Committee in early 1999.
It said Mohammed Atta, the leader of the suicide mission had been a network "sleeper" in Germany since 1992 and was called to a meeting of the military council in the summer of 1999. It said Yemen-born Shaibah had shared an apartment with Atta in Hamburg.
The Sunday Times said "one of their agents also claimed that bin Laden was "alive and well," although he provided no evidence."
Jazeera told Reuters last Thursday the interview was arranged by an al Qaeda liaison officer identified by the channel as Abu Bakr and contained "confessions."
The Sunday Times said Sheikh Mohammad was an uncle of Ramzi Yousef, now serving a life sentence in the United States for the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.
8 September, 2002.
Al-Qaeda initially planned to fly hijacked jets into nuclear installations - rather than the World Trade Center and the Pentagon - according to an Arab journalist who says he interviewed two of the group's masterminds.
The Arabic television station al-Jazeera says it will broadcast on Thursday the interview in which Osama Bin Laden's aides describe in detail how they planned the 11 September attacks.
In an article published in several European newspapers, documentary-maker Yosri Fouda said Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh told him they had decided against the attack on nuclear power plants "for the moment" because of fears it could "get out of control".
Both men are on the FBI's most wanted list and have a $25m bounty on their heads.
The FBI says Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is one of Bin Laden's key lieutenants, while Ramzi Binalshibh is said to have shared an apartment in Hamburg with Mohammed Atta, the alleged ringleader of the hijackers.
Department of Martyrs
Yosri Fouda said he was taken to a hideout in Pakistan. He was told by a man there that Bin Laden was alive and well, but was not shown any proof of this.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told him he was head of the al-Qaeda military committee and Ramzi Binalshibh the co-ordinator of what they refer to as "Holy Tuesday".
Over the course of two days, Mr Fouda says, the men gave him an insight into how the terror group operates and how the 11 September attacks were planned.
Mohammed and Binalshibh alleged that:
-The decision to launch a "martyrdom operation inside America" was made by network's military committee in early 1999
-Atta was summoned to a meeting with key hijackers in Afghanistan that same year
-Hijackers were recruited from al-Qaeda's Department of Martyrs, which is still active
-Mr Binalshibh wanted to be one of the hijackers, but was refused a US visa
-A number of reconnaissance teams travelled to the US ahead of the hijackers
-Ramzi Binalshibh posed in e-mails as Atta's girlfriend in Germany when the two communicated through the internet
-The fourth hijacked plane was heading for Congress, not the White House, when passengers overpowered the attackers
-The codenames for the targets were university faculties: "town planning" for the WTC, "law" for Congress, "fine arts" for the Pentagon
-On 29 August, Atta gave the date for the attacks to Mr Binalshibh, who ordered active cells in Europe and the US to evacuate
-Bin Laden was told on 6 September
At the end of his two-day interview, Mr Fouda writes, he was instructed to leave the videotapes behind so the faces of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh could be blanked out.
Despite promises that they would be returned, the videos never turned up. But, the journalist says, he did eventually receive voice tapes of the interviews.
SEPT 08, 2002
To help make the case for toppling Hussein, the White House is working hard to track down one graphic exhibit: a video, which is said to show Saddam presiding over the execution of one of his political opponents!
TIME magazine will report in Monday editions, Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan has told Bush about the video -- and the hunt is on.
(UKIndependent)
By Kate Clark in Kabul
07 September 2002
Weeks before the terrorist attacks on 11 September, the United States and the United Nations ignored warnings from a secret Taliban emissary that Osama bin Laden was planning a huge attack on American soil.
The warnings were delivered by an aide of Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, the Taliban Foreign Minister at the time, who was known to be deeply unhappy with the foreign militants in Afghanistan, including Arabs.
Mr Muttawakil, now in American custody, believed the Taliban's protection of Mr bin Laden and the other al-Qa'ida militants would lead to nothing less than the destruction of Afghanistan by the US military. He told his aide: "The guests are going to destroy the guesthouse."
The minister then ordered him to alert the US and the UN about what was going to happen. But in a massive failure of intelligence, the message was disregarded because of what sources describe as "warning fatigue". At the same time, the FBI and the CIA failed to take seriously warnings that Islamic fundamentalist students had enrolled in flight schools across the US.
Mr Muttawakil's aide, who has stayed on in Kabul and who has to remain anonymous for his security, described in detail to The Independent how he alerted first the Americans and then the United Nations of the coming calamity of 11 September.
The minister learnt in July last year that Mr bin Laden was planning a "huge attack" on targets inside America, the aide said. The attacks were imminent and would be so deadly the United States would react with destructive rage.
Mr bin Laden had been in Afghanistan since May 1996, bringing his three wives, 13 children and Arab fighters. Over time he became a close ally of the obscurantist Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar.
Mr Muttawakil learnt of the coming attacks on America not from other members of the Taliban leadership, but from the leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Tahir Yildash. The organisation was one of the fundamentalist groups that had found refuge on Afghan soil, lending fighters for the Taliban's war on the Northern Alliance and benefiting from good relations with al-Qa'ida in its fight against the Uzbek government.
According to the emissary, Mr Muttawakil emerged from a one-to-one meeting with Mr Yildash looking shocked and troubled. Until then, the Foreign Minister, who had disapproved of the destruction of the Buddhist statues in Bamian earlier in the year, had no inkling from others in the Taliban leadership of what Mr bin Laden was planning.
"At first Muttawakil wouldn't say why he was so upset," said the aide. "Then it all came out. Yildash had revealed that Osama bin Laden was going to launch an attack on the United States. It would take place on American soil and it was imminent. Yildash said Osama hoped to kill thousands of Americans."
At the time, 19 members of al-Qa'ida were in situ in the US waiting to launch what would be the deadliest foreign attack on the American mainland.
The emissary went first to the Americans, travelling across the border to meet the consul general, David Katz, in the Pakistani border town of Peshawar, in the third week of July 2001. They met in a safehouse belonging to an old mujahedin leader who has confirmed to The Independent that the meeting took place.
Another US official was also present possibly from the intelligence services. Mr Katz, who now works at the American embassy in Eritrea, declined to talk about the meeting. But other US sources said the warning was not passed on.
A diplomatic source said: "We were hearing a lot of that kind of stuff. When people keep saying the sky's going to fall in and it doesn't, a kind of warning fatigue sets in. I actually thought it was all an attempt to rattle us in an attempt to please their funders in the Gulf, to try to get more donations for the cause."
The Afghan aide did not reveal that the warning was from Mr Muttawakil, a factor that might have led the Americans to down-grade it. "As I recall, I thought he was speaking from his own personal perspective," one source said. "It was interesting that he was from the Foreign Affairs Ministry, but he gave no indication this was a message he was carrying."
Interviewed by The Independent in Kabul, the Afghan emissary said: "I told Mr Katz they should launch a new Desert Storm like the campaign to drive Iraq out of Kuwait but this time they should call it Mountain Storm and they should drive the foreigners out of Afghanistan. They also had to stop the Pakistanis supporting the Taliban."
The Taliban emissary said Mr Katz replied that neither action was possible. Nor did Mr Katz pass the warning on to the State Department, according to senior US diplomatic sources.
When Mr Muttawakil's emissary returned to Kabul, the Foreign Minister told him to see UN officials. He took the warning to the Kabul offices of UNSMA, the political wing of the UN. These officials heard him out, but again did not report the secret Taliban warning to UN headquarters. A UN official familiar with the warnings said: "He appeared to be speaking in total desperation, asking for a Mountain Storm, he wanted a sort of deus ex machina to solve his country's problems. But before 9/11, there was just not much hope that Washington would become that engaged in Afghanistan."
Officials in the State Department and in UN headquarters in New York said they knew nothing about a Taliban warning. But they said they would now be looking into the matter.
Mr Muttawakil is now unavailable for comment he handed himself in to the Afghan authorities in the former Taliban stronghold of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan last February. He is reported to be in American custody there, one of the few senior members of the Taliban regime the US has managed to arrest.
As America steadily broke the Taliban's military machine last autumn, there were no Taliban defections. Apart from Mr Mutawakil's one vain attempt to warn the world, the Taliban remained absolutely loyal to their leader's vision.
Saturday September 7 2002
BERLIN (Reuters) - German officials said on Friday they had arrested an apparent follower of Osama bin Laden and his American girlfriend for planning attacks on U.S. sites to mark the anniversary of the September 11 attack.
Separately, the German prosecutor's office said U.S. authorities had arrested an Afghan-born German from the city of Hamburg, where three September 11 hijackers once lived, on suspicion of planning attacks.
In Germany, police arrested a 25-year-old German-born Turk who was in possession of explosives and chemicals near the tourist city of Heidelberg on Thursday. They also detained his 23-year-old American girlfriend who works as a civilian at a U.S. base supermarket.
"We have evidence that an attack was planned for September 11," said Thomas Schaeuble, interior minister for the southwest German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg. "He seems to be a follower of Osama bin Laden who is deeply religious and harbours a hatred for Americans and Jews."
He said the attacks would have been aimed against U.S. military installations and sites in the centre of the city.
Security has been tightened across Europe ahead of the first anniversary of the attacks on the United States in which more than 3,000 people died.
Washington has blamed Saudi-born dissident bin Laden and his al Qaeda network for the attacks with hijacked airliners, which destroyed the twin tower landmark of the World Trade Center in New York and hit U.S. military headquarters at the Pentagon on Washington's outskirts.
The Heidelberg area is home to the U.S. Army Europe headquarters and is a popular destination for American tourists and students studying in Germany.
BOMB SHELLS FOUND
Schaeuble said police had found shells for five bombs and 130 kg (287 pounds) of chemicals and electrical material. The suspect worked in a chemical factory in the western city of Karlsruhe.
He added that Germany had received help from U.S. officials in uncovering the case.
The state interior minister said it was unclear if the pair were part of a larger international terror group. "One must also consider the possibility of fanatical individuals," Schaeuble said.
The case appears to be the first involving a September 11 anniversary attack. Just on Wednesday German Interior Minister Otto Schily said authorities had reviewed 500 tip-offs of possible new attacks since September 11, 2001, but found no evidence of a concrete plot to mark the date.
The prosecutor's office in Karlsruhe said U.S. officials had arrested an Afghan-born German in New York and said he was being held in Virginia. It said the man travelled from Germany to the United States in mid July and was arrested in late August.
U.S. officials told Germany there was evidence of possible attacks planned by the 39-year-old man, the office said. Germany was able to identify him and opened a criminal case on charges of membership in a terrorist organisation.
Hamburg has been a focus of investigations into the September 11 attack because Mohammed Atta, the leader of the 19 kamikaze hijackers, and two other lead pilots lived and studied for years in the northern port city.
HUNT ON FOR OTHERS FROM HAMBURG
Police are looking for several others from Hamburg in connection with the September 11 attack.
"We cannot rule out that sleeper agents live even here in Germany or in Europe or elsewhere," Ulrich Kersten, the head of Germany's Federal Crime Agency, said this week. "What we know for sure is that in Europe and in Germany there are people who are ready to commit violence in a jihad."
Some conservatives who are running against the ruling coalition of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder say they have been expecting an increase in anti-terrorism arrests ahead of Germany's tight September 22 election.
(Associated Press)
BERLIN (Sept. 8) - German authorities had suspicions nearly two months ago about a Turkish man suspected of plotting to bomb U.S. military bases in Germany, but bureaucratic procedures delayed his arrest until last week, a prosecutor said Sunday.
A tip from U.S. security officials that a witness reported the suspect had chemicals at home reached German prosecutors in mid-July, but a judge put off questioning of the woman, scheduled for Aug. 13, because the summons could not be delivered on time, said Elke O'Donoghue, a prosecutor in the city of Stuttgart.
When the witness was interviewed later, she said suspect Osman Petmezci ''was planning something very soon,'' O'Donoghue told The Associated Press. Prosecutors got a search warrant Aug. 30 - six days before Petmezci, 24, and his American fiancee, Astrid Eyzaguirre, 23, were arrested Thursday near Heidelberg, home to U.S. Army Europe headquarters in southwestern Germany.
German authorities so far believe the couple was acting alone, despite citing evidence they admired Osama bin Laden and shared some of his convictions, including a hatred of Jews. Federal prosecutors, who likely would take over the investigation from Baden-Wuerttemberg state authorities if a terror link was discovered, were still reviewing the evidence Sunday.
Baden-Wuerttemberg state investigators and Heidelberg prosecutors said Sunday they were focusing on whether the couple acted alone or as part of a group. Federal investigators and U.S. security officials were supporting the probe, they said Sunday.
O'Donoghue's account was the most detailed yet of events leading to the arrests in the couple's shared apartment in Walldorf, six miles south of Heidelberg.
Inside the couple's third-floor apartment, police found 287 pounds of bomb-making chemicals - which investigators said Sunday could have been used to make about 44 pounds of gunpowder - along with five pipe bombs, a book about bomb-making and electronic parts apparently intended as detonators.
Police also found a picture of Osama bin Laden and computer diskettes, which were being reviewed.
Technical experts were assembling the bomb-making materials to determine how much damage the devices would have caused, investigators said Sunday.
Germany's top security official said there was no evidence al-Qaida members are in Europe to carry out attacks on the anniversary of Sept. 11.
''Certainly we have to determine in the course of the investigation if the arrested man had links to other people or is part of a group,'' Interior Minister Otto Schily told Germany's most-read Sunday newspaper, Bild am Sonntag.
The German weekly Der Spiegel reported over the weekend that a friend of Eyzaguirre's told U.S. military police Eyzaguirre warned her to stay away from the military shopping area for the next few days.
Eyzaguirre worked at the base store, known as a PX, and had access to many facilities at Campbell Barracks, which also contains the Army's 5th Corps headquarters and a NATO facility.
Petmezci is believed to have stolen the bomb-making materials at a chemical warehouse where he worked, Schily said. State authorities said he had previous convictions for theft and drug offenses.
Petmezci's father, Mehmet, told Bild am Sonntag, ''I cannot imagine my son being a terrorist.''
But the paper said he recalled how his son liked to play with fireworks.
''Already as a boy, he made his own New Year's firecrackers. He loved it when things went bang,'' the father was quoted as saying.
Walldorf is a town of 14,000 with a large American military community, a Turkish mosque and an Islamic center run by Milli Gorus, a group that has been under observation by German intelligence officials. One neighbor, Juergen Meyer, recalled that Petmezci openly disdained Jews, though he said he believed it was ''all nonsense.''
There apparently were other signs. An unidentified neighbor told the Sunday newspaper Welt am Sonntag that a few drops of a chemical spattered onto his head from Petmezci's balcony two months ago, sending him screaming with pain into the stairwell. Petmezci apologized, saying he was using paint thinner to remodel the apartment, the paper said.
Officials had no comment Sunday on a German television report that investigators were exploring possible links between the male suspect and an Islamic center in Heidelberg investigated for allegedly helping finance the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.
(WorldTribune.com)
Friday, September 6, 2002
JERUSALEM — Israel has warned the Libya could become the first Arab nation with nuclear weapons.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Libya is working with such countries as Iraq, North Korea and Saudi Arabia to develop missiles and weapons of mass destruction. Sharon indicated that Libya has obtained expertise to launch a project to develop nuclear weapons.
"Libya is becoming perhaps a more dangerous country than we thought," Sharon said on national television on late Wednesday. "Libya may be the first [Arab] country to have the worst kind of weapons of mass destruction."
Sharon did not specify which type of weapons Libya would obtain. But he indicated that he meant nuclear weapons. Libya already has chemical weapons. "Probably the worst kind," Sharon said.
The prime minister said Libya is obtaining missile and WMD help from Iraq, North Korea and Pakistan. Sharon said some of the programs could have been financed by Saudi Arabia.
Israeli officials said Sharon went public with his accusations against Libya after several consultations with U.S. officials and congressional leaders. They said Sharon discussed his concerns over Libya last month during a meeting with visiting U.S. Sen. Robert Toricelli.
The officials said Washington largely shares the concerns of Israel regarding Libya's intermediate-range missiles and WMD programs. Both countries are said to share the assessment that Libya is rapidly developing a missile based on North Korea's No-Dong, in a project that involves Iran.
But the Israeli officials said the State Department and other agencies have concluded that Libyan ruler Moammar Khaddafy is moving away from terrorism and wants to reconcile with the United States and the West. They said this has raised the prospect that the State Department could remove Libya from its list of terrorist sponsors over the next year.
"This is a new strategy [by Khaddafy]," a senior Israeli official said. "They are in close contact with the Egyptians and they are telling Khaddafy to behave nicely and do everything he has to do beneath the surface. There is a significant [Libyan] effort regarding missiles and the start of something in WMD.
On Tuesday, Libya and Saudi Arabia signed a series of economic agreements that include scientific and technological cooperation. Israeli officials said the accords appear to be part of increasing strategic ties that are connected to Libyan missile and WMD projects.
Hours later, Libya denied Sharon's assertion. A Libyan government statement accused the Israeli prime minister of hysteria.
For his part, Khaddafy has asserted that he has abandoned what he termed "revolutionary behavior" and now opposes Islamic insurgents, including Al Qaida.
""In the old days, they called us a rogue state," Khaddafy said in a speech on national television last week. "They were right in accusing us of that. In the old days, we had a revolutionary behavior."
9/8/02
LONDON (AP) - Extremist Muslim clerics will meet in London on Sept. 11 to celebrate the anniversary of the attacks on the United States and to launch an organization for Islamic militants, an organizer of the conference said Saturday.
Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed of Al-Muhajiroun, a radical group that supports making Britain an Islamic state, said the conference will argue that the terror attacks were justified because Muslims must defend themselves against armed aggression.
The event at Finsbury Park mosque in north London, ``Sept. 11, 2001: A Towering Day in History,'' will also mark the launch the Islamic Council of Britain.
Mohammed said the council will aim to implement Sharia law in Britain and will not exclude al-Qaida sympathizers from membership.
The conference will discuss the ``positive outcomes'' of Sept. 11, which delegates perceived as a battle against an ``evil superpower,'' he said.
``I did not praise Sept. 11 after it happened but it becomes more clear now why they did it, although I personally regret the loss of life,'' he said.
Mohammed said he had secured a six-figure sum to fund the Islamic council, which would build a dozen Islamic centers, launch a Web site and hold classes for Muslims.
``We will not stop al-Qaida people from joining. To us they are devoted people who were trying to stop the invasion of a Muslim country,'' Mohammed said.
Also due to attend the meeting on Wednesday are Yasser al-Sirri and Abu Hamza al-Masri, a cleric at the Finsbury Park mosque, which is widely regarded as a center of radical Islam in Britain.
Al-Sirri has been accused by the United States of sending money to Afghanistan to sponsor terrorism. British officials in July dropped extradition proceedings against him, saying there was not enough evidence.
Al-Masri is one of Britain's most contentious Muslim radicals. The Egyptian-born cleric, who lost his hands and left eye fighting in Afghanistan, is a prayer leader at the mosque.
He has had British citizenship since 1985, and is protected by British law from extradition to Yemen, where he is wanted in connection with several bombings.
Mainstream Muslim leaders have criticized previous conferences held by Al-Muhajiroun and other extremist groups, saying that their radical anti-American opinions did not represent the views of the majority of Britain's 1.5 million Muslims.
Thu Sep 5, 2002
TOOELE, Utah (AP) - Officials at an Army depot where nerve gas and other chemical weapons are stored found no trace of a reported intruder after a terrorist alert was sounded Thursday.
Col. Peter Cooper, commander of the Deseret Chemical Depot, said the security of the depot was never at risk and that the person didn't get close to the chemical storage area.
"At this time we cannot confirm an intruder," Cooper said. "Right now we are pretty sure we've cleared the depot. We're not sure if it was an employee who was not in the right area."
The person fled after being spotted within the heavily guarded perimeter by four soldiers during two separate patrols, Cooper said. By late afternoon, officials were still searching the depot grounds for the possible intruder.
In Washington, a senior administration official speaking on condition of anonymity said there was no evidence that anything was stolen or that terrorism was involved.
The apparent trespasser, dressed in dark clothing, was sighted within a fenced area between the stored chemicals and the outer perimeter, authorities said.
Sheriff's deputies set up a roadblock around the depot after the alarm sounded at 9:24 a.m. and state law officers used a helicopter to search the grounds. There were no evacuations of the depot or surrounding areas.
The depot, which is about 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City and covers 19,000 acres of mostly barren, wind-swept desert dominated by sagebrush, stores chemical weapons such as nerve gas and mustard gas. It has been destroying a stockpile of deadly chemical weapons since 1996.
Earlier this year, it finished destroying the largest stockpile of sarin nerve gas in the United States. It is scheduled to destroy 1,300 tons of VX, a more toxic but less volatile nerve agent, and 6,100 tons of mustard gas, a blister agent that can dissolve tissue on contact.
Sep. 06, 2002
(Reuters)
DETROIT - Three alleged Muslim extremists pleaded not guilty Friday to charges that they were part of a covert Detroit area group that was planning terrorist attacks in the United States and abroad.
The suspects, Karim Koubriti, 24 and Ahmed Hannan, 34, both natives of Morocco, and Algerian-born Farouk Ali-Haimoud, 22, entered their pleas through their lawyers in separate back-to-back arraignments in a heavily guarded Detroit federal courtroom.
The three were taken into custody shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. They were indicted last week with an alleged co-conspirator -- who remains a fugitive -- of seeking to provide weaponry, intelligence and support for "violent attacks against persons and buildings within the territory of Jordan, Turkey and the United States."
Court papers said the detainees all worked at some point at Detroit Metropolitan Airport and allegedly sought clandestine access to airliners. They were charged with operating a covert underground support unit for terrorist attacks and as a "sleeper operational combat cell."
The indictment also charged the suspects -- linked to a fundamentalist Islamic religious movement called Salafiyya and alleged backers of a holy war or "global jihad" -- with trying to recruit other members to their cause and help potential operatives enter the United States illegally.
But while the indictment mentioned Osama bin Laden and what it described as his calls for "all Muslims to kill the Americans," it made no direct links between the men, who lived in Detroit and Dearborn, Michigan, and the alleged mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks.
Dearborn, just outside Detroit, is home to one of the largest concentrations of Muslims and Arabs outside the Middle East.
The Detroit area men were paraded separately into court in canary yellow prison uniforms, their arms handcuffed behind them. Each waived his right to have the 24-page indictment read aloud for him, and the arraignments took no more than a few minutes each. A jury trial for the men has been set for Jan. 21, the U.S. attorney's office said.
'SMOKE AND INNUENDO'
Kevin Ernst, a lawyer for defendant Ali-Haimoud, told Reuters Friday the case against his client was a weak one.
"There's no evidence, there's a bunch of, you know, smoke and innuendo; inflammatory allegations and the unsubstantiated, uncorroborated word of a single snitch who is in more trouble than the other three combined," Ernst said.
Ernst maintains the alleged informer in the case is Youssef Hmimssa, a former Dearborn resident also in federal custody.
A spokeswoman for U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Collins said the government was unable to comment on his exact location or whether he was acting as an informant.
The Detroit indictment was announced on the same day that a Seattle man, James Ujaama, was charged in a separate case of links to an alleged al Qaeda plot to train U.S. recruits at a ranch in Oregon.
Ujaama, formerly known as James Earnest Thompson, planned to train recruits to use guns, poisons and firebombs to attack people and buildings in the name of "fundamentalist Islamic principles," according to an indictment.
Ujaama, who has denied the charges in interview with local media, was arrested in Denver in August.
Sept 4, 2002
(UKGuardian)
One of Washington's most wanted al-Qaida fugitives was captured in Karachi in July and secretly transferred to US custody, striking a significant blow to Osama bin Laden's network, Pakistani intelligence sources have claimed.
Sheikh Ahmed Salim, detained in a joint Pakistan-US raid, was among a group of suspects flown out of the country in recent weeks.
The 33-year-old Kenyan, who also goes by the name Swedan, had a $25m (£16m) price on his head for his role in the 1998 bombings of US embassies in east Africa. Since then he is believed to have emerged as an important al-Qaida figure, directing and funding Islamist militants in Pakistan.
Officially, the Pakistani and US governments denied knowledge of the arrest, but in interviews with the Guardian, senior Pakistani intelligence sources and a top investigator in Karachi insisted they had positively identified Salim among suspects arrested in a raid in Karachi in July.
Details of the arrest emerged as Guardian reporters in 11 countries were preparing an in vestigation into the strength of al-Qaida internationally, a year after the September 11 attacks. Their research reveals new information on how Bin Laden slipped away from US forces in Afghanistan; produces evidence connecting a deadly attack on a synagogue in Tunisia this year with al-Qaida; and shows how al-Qaida operatives are using local groups in Pakistan to organise a new wave of attacks on foreigners.
Pakistani intelligence agents were led to Salim's cell by satellite telephone intercepts provided by the FBI. That led to the arrest in Karachi of a more junior al-Qaida figure, a Saudi known only as Riyadh or Riaz. In early July he in turn led investigators to Salim, who was arrested in Kharadar, a slum area in the south of the city.
Salim, who once ran a trucking firm in Kenya, is alleged to have bought the Toyota and Nissan lorries used in the 1998 embassy attacks in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, before fly ing out of Nairobi to Karachi five days before the assault was launched.
Asked about Salim's arrest yesterday, a US intelligence official said he had "nothing to substantiate" the report. The Pentagon has a policy of not naming suspects in military custody, to keep al-Qaida guessing about how much the US knows.
Salim told Pakistani investigators that he had collected millions of dollars from local sympathisers in the months since September 11. His claims were regarded as exaggerated but thousands of dollars and fake passports and visa stamps were found in his house. He is believed to have worked in particular with Pakistani militants from the banned Lashkar-i-Jhangvi group. After a series of arrests of Lashkar members in Karachi police found a makeshift chemical laboratory which contained several toxins, including cyanide.
Islamists have already launched attacks against western targets in Pakistan which it is believed were coordinated by al-Qaida. In May a suicide bomber killed 11 French engineers outside the Sheraton hotel in Karachi. A month later a second suicide bomber crashed a van into the US consulate, killing 10 Pakistanis.
Sept. 5 — U.S. officials said the CIA has been given access to an al-Qaida recruiter at Syrian secret police headquarters.
(NBC NEWS)
WASHINGTON, Sept. 5 — The United States is quietly allowing Syria, which it has declared a state sponsor of terrorism, to illegally import 200,000 barrels of Iraqi crude oil a day in exchange for information about al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations, U.S. and Syrian officials have told NBC News.
SOURCES SAID THAT earlier this year, U.S. troops were saved from an al-Qaida attack in the Persian Gulf based on information from Syria.
“We supply the United States with any information we have on al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations that we consider terrorist,” said Georges Jabbour, a political analyst at Aleppo University in Syria and a past adviser to Syrian President Bashar Assad.
“And this does not mean we agree with the United States on what she considers to be terrorism and terrorists,” said Jabbour, who often speaks unofficially for Syria.
U.S. officials characterized the Syrian information as “golden.” “The Syrians have provided significant operational intelligence,” a senior State Department official told NBC News on condition of anonymity. “I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.”
In exchange, Washington has chosen to look the other way as Syria illegally imports 200,000 barrels of of cut-rate Iraqi oil every day in defiance of a United Nations-imposed embargo.
U.S. officials said the oil flows through an old, long-unused pipeline from the Kirkuk oil field in the north, which the Energy Department has estimated has more than 10 billion barrels of proven reserves. Syria denies importing the oil, but U.S. officials said it was lying.
Even though Iraq charges Syria only $14 a barrel — half the market price — the arrangement has yielded a $3 billion-a-year bonanza for Iraq, which a senior U.S. official said was used as a slush fund for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
“He certainly needs money to support his elite troops and to keep them happy,” said Jeffrey Schott, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics, a Washington policy institute.
SEPT. 11 RECRUITER HELD
In addition to intelligence information, officials said, Syria has also giving the CIA access to Mohammed Haydar Zammar, who is believed to have recruited some of the 19 men who hijacked four jetliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania almost a year ago.
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Zammar, 41, a German citizen born in Syria, was allegedly the main contact for lead Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta. He was arrested in Morocco earlier this year and deported to Syria, where he was secretly detained, reportedly with the knowledge of the United States.
Because he is in Syrian custody, the arrangement allows interrogators to question him outside the protection of the U.S. Constitution. German officials have accused Syria of torturing Zammar and have demanded that he be treated in accordance with international law.
“I would say that the questioning in Damascus is going to be more brutal and more effective than in Guantanamo or in Washington,” said Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States.
Zammar, who is being questioned at Syrian secret police headquarters, is talking, as are two dozen other al-Qaida members also imprisoned in Syria, U.S. officials said.
2 nations possibly cooperating in opposition to Iraq
(STRATFOR GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE UPDATE via WorldNetDaily.com)
Sept 3, 2002
Recent allegations that an Israeli company was caught shipping military parts to Iran have raised several questions about shadowy ties between the two countries, which share a common enemy in Iraq, reports Stratfor, the global intelligence company.
On Aug. 28, German officials seized a ship carrying rubber parts which, interestingly, are used primarily to make tracks for the M113 Armored Personnel Carrier – an older, U.S.-made vehicle that many countries use. What made it even more interesting was that the parts were being shipped by an Israeli company called PAD. And what made it absolutely fascinating was that the final destination for the parts was the Islamic Republic of Iran, which, like Israel, uses the M113.
PAD is headed by Avihai Weinstein, who had been detained before on charges of selling engines for the M113 to Iran in 1996 – although those charges were dropped for lack of evidence. In the recent incident, PAD had an export license for the parts, but they were supposed to go to Thailand. However, according to Israeli newspapers, the parts were to be transferred to an Iranian ship in Hamburg and sent to Bandar Abbas, Iran, instead.
Israelis close to the government claimed that, far from trading with Iran, Israel had tipped off Germany. And officials in Tehran expressed shock and horror at the idea that they would be doing business with the Zionist entity.
All of this may be true. Weinstein, already suspected by the Israeli government of being involved in shipping military equipment to Iran (yet without enough evidence to convict), may nevertheless have decided to try again, undoubtedly on the theory that the government would never suspect someone like him. This would make Weinstein a leading contender for this year's Darwin award for people too dumb to be allowed to reproduce. For its part, Israel – instead of arresting Weinstein before he left – may have decided that Hamburg would be a better place to stop him, since it would create a more embarrassing public spectacle. And Iran indeed may never have done business with Israel, preferring to buy spare parts for their U.S.-built system at flea markets.
All of this is possible, but other theories suggest themselves. Israel and Iran engaged in intense intelligence and military cooperation during the shah's rule. The fall of the shah and the rise of an Islamic regime shattered any formal ties between the two countries, but it did not obliterate their shared geopolitical interests.
Under the shah, Iran and Iraq fought a war that ended in 1975. After the establishment of the Islamic Republic, that war resumed and continued until 1988, more intensely and brutally than before. Israel did not want to see Iraq defeat Iran – not because it held any affection for the regime in Tehran, but because a triumphant Iraq would have been disastrous for Israel. And Tehran, facing an Iraq whose attack had tacit U.S. support – and with a military equipped almost exclusively with American weapons – lacked access to American spare parts and newer weapons. Without that, Iran could have lost the war. Therefore, ideology aside, geopolitical interest kept the channels between Israel and Iran open.
At one point, with the Iran-Contra affair, Washington deliberately used those channels. Phase 1 of the affair involved selling arms to Iran; Phase 2 involved using the money from the sales to fund the Contras. The United States used Israel to transship arms to Iran not only for plausible deniability (which was never really plausible to begin with), but because Israel had an open channel with Tehran. Israeli leaders knew the professional military in Iran and maintained liaisons with Iranian intelligence and some Iranian factions.
That channel has never completely closed, although the level of activity has varied. Israel and Iran remain enemies of Iraq. Tehran was delighted when Israel destroyed Iraq's nuclear facilities in 1981, since officials knew perfectly well that Iran would have been the first target of Iraqi nukes. There were even rumors of some Iranian assistance to Israel at the time of the attack. The United States has found the channel between the two countries useful both for intelligence purposes and for making certain that the military balance between Iran and Iraq is maintained.
The idea that Israel and Iran could have active, covert relationships that both would deny – and that the United States actually might encourage – is strange, but only if one takes absolutely seriously the ideological pronouncements of all sides. In a world where Stalin could be allied first with Hitler and then with Churchill, the idea of Israeli-Iranian relations is not as insane as it sounds.
In fact, it is one of the critical features of the Middle East. Iran and Israel have a common enemy in Iraq. They are not enemies only of Saddam Hussein, but also of the various groups that he has created. The fact that Iran sponsors Hezbollah does not change the fact that Iraq also sponsors anti-Israeli groups. If Iran will help destroy those groups while still supporting Hezbollah, Israel is a net winner. And if Israel can help Iran defend itself, Iran is a net winner.
It is the United States' position on this that is not clear. There certainly have been times when Washington wanted to support Iran, but it is not clear that this is one of those times. If Iraq is destroyed, Iran will be the most powerful country in the region, no longer checked by Baghdad. In addition, Iran appears to be helping al-Qaida. Therefore, this would not seem to be a time when Washington would want to strengthen Tehran.
But then again, all this may be simply the money-making scheme of a 32-year-old businessman working behind the backs of the Israeli and Iranian governments, neither of which would ever knowingly have anything to do with each other. Anything is possible.
Status: False. Oliver North claims it was Abu Nidal (whose sympathizers, he claims were attempting to assasinate him and his family at their home in Virginia) who should be eliminated. (Snopes)
(The Ottawa Citizen and Citizen News Services via rense.com)
8-30-2
Health Science Communications for People Around the World
Sandpoint, ID -- Three veteran investigators have independently narrowed the field of anthrax mailings suspects to a single Russian defector affiliated with two heavily implicated defense contractors and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Kanatjan Alibekov, alias "Ken Alibek," the President of Hadron Advanced Biosystems, should be re-interrogated by the FBI, according to three researchers who arrived at this conclusion independently. They say Stephen Hatfill-the military virologist cited by FBI officials in recent weeks as a chief subject was not likely involved in the mailings at all.
The three men include: Dr. Leonard G. Horowitz-a public health and emerging diseases expert, Michael Ruppert-a retired Los Angeles Police Department narcotics detective, and Stewart Webb-a federal whistle blower credited with supplying key evidence to federal prosecutors during the 1989 Housing and Urban Development (HUD) scandal. All three investigators say substantial evidence implicates Dr. Alibekov and the parties he served before and during the anthrax mailings, including the CIA. This, they propose, might best explain why the FBI's inquiry has floundered.
Their compiled evidence is largely public knowledge. Dr. Alibekov was the first Deputy Director of Biopreparat-the Soviet Union's leading biological weapons testing center. He oversaw military anthrax production for nearly 20 years, and was personally responsible for 32,000 employees at 40 facilities when he suddenly defected to the United States in 1992 to begin working for the CIA. According to interviews, Dr. Alibekov allegedly defected to help stop the biological weapons race, not for monetary reward. Yet, his activities in America indicate otherwise.
On May 20, 1998 Dr. Alibekov testified before the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress as a Program Manager for the Battelle Memorial Institute (BMI)-a leading military contractor and one of few institutional suspects identified by the press. William Broad of the New York Times (Dec. 13, 2001), upon Dr. Horowitz's earlier urging, cited BMI as the chief CIA contractor for project "Clearvision"-an effort to produce the deadliest Ames strain anthrax ever developed. It was hyper-concentrated, silica-laced, electro-magnetized, and extremely transmissible. The facts indicate Dr. Alibekov, one of two leading anthrax experts contracted by the CIA at the time of "Clearvision," may have managed the entire program during which the germ was sent from BMI to the BMI administered and supplied Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah. From here or BMI's anthrax lab in West Jefferson, Ohio, the never-before-seen anthrax weapon was transferred to envelopes and mailed from four locations including Trenton, N.J. and St. Petersburg, FL in early October, 2001. The mailings killed five people while scores of others were victimized by the ensuing fright and toxic side effects from taking CIPRO-the "anthrax antibiotic," according to experts and news reports.
More suspicious ties to the Russian defector and Hadron Advanced Biosystems were realized when investigators learned of the second leading BMI and CIA anthrax contractor, and close personal friend of Dr. Alibekov, Dr. William C. Patrick, III. Suspiciously, Dr. Alibekov and BMI had contracted with this anthrax ace in the Spring of 1998 to predict the dispersal and damage capability of mailing such a hyper-weaponized germ much like the one sent to select members of the media and legislators on Capitol Hill. Evidence indicates Dr. Patrick, who holds several secret patents on America's anthrax weapons, worked closely with Dr. Alibekov in developing the anthrax that was mailed.
The three independent investigators each cite economic and political motives for the targeted anthrax mailings. Given the high grade and technical difficulty in producing and handling this grade of anthrax, they reasoned, "white collar criminals" with access to military or pharmaceutical labs most likely acted on behalf of those who benefited most from the attacks and ensuing fright. Hadron, DynCorp, and BMI lead the pack of corporate and institutional suspects, the investigators say. A revelatory organizational chart prepared by Dr. Horowitz depicting the leading corporate and institutional suspects was mailed to more than 1,500 FBI agents late last year along with an extensive 25-page report still available over the Internet.
Logically, the three investigators reasoned, the media was initially targeted to sway public opinion in support of government orders worth billions of dollars for hyped vaccines and drugs, much of which benefited Hadron, DynCorp, BMI and their directors and contractors. DynCorp was the major military and intelligence provider awarded $322 million to develop, produce, and store anthrax and smallpox vaccines for the nation. BMI, a leading defense and energy industry contractor, directed the US military's Joint Vaccine Acquisitions Program. Bioport, LLC became a leading beneficiary. This British-controlled anthrax vaccine maker in Lansing, Michigan was sanctioned repeatedly by federal officials and members of congress for unethical business practices, violating health and safety guidelines, and vaccine contaminations that some researchers say may have triggered the mysterious Gulf War illness.
Corporate profiteering was firmly secured after the mailings to Capitol Hill, the investigators say. The specific targeting of Senators Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), traditionally strong drug and military industry adversaries, reinforced their suspicions.
Dr. Horowitz had been studying anthrax advances since 1989. He correctly diagnosed "the beginning of the anthrax scam" one week before the first mailings were heralded by the media. FBI records show he urged the bureau to begin their ongoing investigation into anthrax-related bioterrorism on October 1, 2001. It took bureau officials six months to finally respond to his repeated urgent correspondence. "Then, rather than expressing gratitude and following my leads," he said, "my two interrogators were primed to make me a suspect." For this reason, Horowitz says, he can "feel for the plight of the bureau's scapegoat"-Dr. Steven Hatfill.
Detective Ruppert, collaborating with investigative journalist Michael Davidson, followed their suspicions to Hadron and DynCorp through court records pertaining to a secret pirated military software program called PROMIS. They learned that Dr. Alibekov's predecessor-Hadron's past director and founder, Dr. Earl Brian-a business associate of former Reagan administration Attorney General Edwin Meese-was convicted of fraud during the 1980s.
"Dr. Alibekov's interrogation and lie detection at Hadron's Advanced Biosystems," Ruppert advised, "may not only solve the anthrax mailings mystery, but also shed light on the recent untimely and inexplicable deaths of several biological weapons experts including Dr. Alibekov's former boss, Dr. Vladimir Pasechnik." Dr. Pasechnik-the Soviet Union's top biological weapons director-was most likely murdered, according to Ruppert and Davidson. His demise immediately followed his volunteering to help solve the anthrax mailings mystery.
Dr. Pasechnik defected to Great Britain three years before Dr. Alibekov defected to America, Mr. Ruppert recalled. Pasechnik abandoned his work in biological weapons development. Dr. Alibekov, contrary to his stated reason for defecting, continued to work in this field. Pasechnik's death, according to British intelligence officer Christopher Davis, was reportedly due to a stroke. Ruppert and Davidson remain unconvinced.
(2dayUK.com)
August 22, 2002
Shocked Josie Waters is recovering today after an escaped bull attacked a Portaloo she was using at a country show.
Mrs Waters, 51, had just stepped into the bright green toilet when the creature broke free from its handler.
The 1,100lbs animal then charged 400 yards across a car park and a field before it rammed head-first into the mobile unit.
The impact caused one side of the loo to lift up off the ground as Mrs Waters sat terrified inside.
Stewards carefully gathered around and warned her not to move as the 18- month-old Simmental bull buffeted up against the loo.
Mrs Waters said she sat frozen on the spot as she heard the creature puffing and panting as it circled around her.
Eventually a vet was called to the site and tranquilised the bull before Mrs Waters emerged from the toilet 15 minutes later.
The bull, which belonged to a local farmer, was due to be paraded around the show and was being taken off a lorry at the time.
Mrs Waters, from West Moors, Dorset, said: "I was aware of the cattle being taken off the lorry on the other side of the field but didn't think anything of it.
"I went into the toilet and a couple of seconds later I heard this thundering noise and then an almighty crash before one side lifted up.
"I didn't know what the hell it was."
30th August 2002
(orange-today.co.uk/news)
A Dutch artist has used his mother who suffers from severe dementia as part of an artwork.
Seventeen artists had been asked to redecorate the same number of beach cabins on the island of Texel for a special exhibition.
Wouter Jansen unveiled his 82-year-old mother, sitting in his cabin.
He explained she always liked the beach and he was trying to recall old emotions of how they used to visit the island as a family when he was a child.
He told De Telegraaf newspaper: "I think she liked it, although I can't ask her that now. But I think, if I was in the same condition as she is, I would have liked it as well.
"In the past we used to come a lot to the sea on holiday. My mother always liked the beach and the sea."
(MadCowMorningNews )
Missing Witnesses & a Massive 9-11 Cover-Up in Florida
by Daniel Hopsicker
July 22—Venice, FL.
Secret Service agents guarding the President during his visit to Sarasota, FL. on Sept 11 received a pre-dawn warning that a terrorist attack on America was imminent four hours and thirty-eight minutes before Mohamed Atta flew an airliner into the World Trade Center.
The warning, which proved accurate, also contained information that President George W. Bush might be a target for assassination that morning as well.
And indeed there was an attempt to assassinate Pres. Bush in Sarasota on the morning of Sept. 11., the MadCowMorningNews has learned.
But, perhaps because of the potentially explosive identity of the person named in the warning, authorities have, ever since, been assiduously covering it up.
Pre-dawn cold sweat?
The drama began when a Middle Eastern native residing in Sarasota named Zainlabdeen Omer contacted local police the night before the attack.
Omer said that a friend of his, who had made violent threats against the President in the past, had just arrived in Sarasota, thirty miles north on Florida's Gulf Coast from Venice, the home-away-from-home of Mohamed Atta's terrorist cadre.
In the police report obtained by the MadCowMorningNews the man Omer is warning authorities about is identified only as "Ghandi."
"Ghandi" reportedly told Omer he was in town to get a friend out of jail. But since the President was staying in Sarasota too, Omer feared that there was a connection.
He told Sarasota police that "Ghandi" might be in Sarasota to kill the President.
Sarasota Police immediately called in the Secret Service.
"You're not cleared for ANY of this information."
When local reporters got wind of the story in the days following the attack, oddly enough the Secret Service dismissed the warning as "just coincidental" to Sept 11.
But according to the eyewitness testimony of a local fire captain, Longboat Key Fire Marshall Carroll Mooneyhan, who was at the front desk of the Colony Beach Resort that morning as President Bush prepared for his morning jog, the warning proved accurate several hours later.
Mooneyhan told reporter Shay Sullivan of the Longboat Observer that at about 6 a.m. on Sept. 11 a van carrying Middle Eastern men tried to gain entry to the Colony Beach Resort, where Bush was staying.
The Middle Eastern men identified themselves as a television news crew with an appointment with the President.
They claimed they had a "poolside" interview scheduled with the President, and asked for a Secret Service agent by name, Mooneyhan said.
The van was turned back by suspicious Secret Service agents at the guard station in front of the Colony Beach Resort, who told the men to contact the President’s public relations office in Washington D.C.
But the Secret Service has not acknowledged the obvious... which is that the ruse used at the Colony Resort on Longboat Key to attempt to gain access to Pres. Bush is exactly the same as that used just two days earlier to successfully assassinate Afghan Northern Alliance leader Shah Masood.
Masood had granted an interview to a television crew whose camera exploded when it was turned on, killing Masood and two suicide bombers disguised as journalists.
Given the identical modus operandi and the massive terrorist attack which occurred just two hours later that morning, the Secret Service is no doubt lying, or at least issuing statements that will later be rendered inoperative, when they say the warning was "just a coincidence."
This incident, clearly, was not a breakdown in media relations.
It was an assassination attempt.
Christian Animists Against the New World Order?
Later that morning Secret Service agents searched an apartment in Sarasota looking for further corroboration of Omer's account.
Inside they found and arrested three men from Sudan, and took them in for questioning that lasted for the next ten hours, according to one of the three, Fathel Rahman Omer.
Next the Secret Service raided a beauty supply store in Sarasota.
The owner of the store, identified only as "Hakim," had information about "Ghandi," the man who came to Sarasota on the same day as the President.
Hakim identified 'Ghandi' as a member of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, or S.P.L.A., a Christian and animist group fighting against the fundamentalist Muslim government in Sudan, itself closely allied with the Taliban and Al Queda.
Hakim's story seems to make no sense.
Why would an operative battling a fanatic fundamentalist Islamic government want to murder George W. Bush?
We tried to find out.
But, as it happens, the key witnesses are all missing.
"Forget the money. Follow the bodies."
A few days after the Secret Service questioned the owner of the beauty supply store, reported Monica Yadov of Sarasota's ABC News 40, it was suddenly closed, and the owner, Hakim, was gone.
Said Greg Breslich, owner of North Trail Liquors next door, "We always thought there was something strange about the operation of that establishment. We saw a lot of people go in there, but didn’t see anyone come out with beauty supplies."
Where is the man who accurately warned of an assassination attempt, Zainelabdeen Omer?
You'll never guess.
He's missing too.
After Zainelabadeen Omer went to federal authorities with his information, he quickly quit his jobs, and left his Sarasota apartment.
"All I know is he can’t leave town," a friend of Omers’ told reporter Monica Yadov. "Omer got in a lot of trouble with the law."
"So you think he’s still somewhere?" Yadov asked.
"Should be," shrugged Omer’s friend, who insisted on anonymity.
"If he’s still alive."
When Yadov took the story to the Secret Service for comment, the Special Agent in charge of the Presidential detail in Sarasota said that the President was never in any danger while he was in Sarasota.
The agent said the connection to the SPLA, and the warning that the Secret Service got just before the terrorist attack was all "just a coincidence."
The Secret Service's deliberate stonewalling leads to questions about what other assistance the group may have provided to the ongoing and massive cover-up in place in Florida.
Consider: It was Bush brother Jeb Bush who flew out of Sarasota aboard a C-130 loaded with files about the Venice flight schools which trained the terrorist cadre.
Did the Secret Service help with this get-away project? Were they controlling access into and out of the Sarasota Airport?
Where are these missing witnesses? The Secret Service says they don’t know.
Is Omer being detained? The INS won’t say. What's the reason for all the official silence?
The answer may lie in the identity of the mysterious "Ghandi," whose name may have been deliberately misspelled by authorities, a tactic which has previously been used by authorities to conceal inconvenient knowledge in everything from the Kennedy assassination to the Vince Foster investigation.
That the man whose presence in Sarasota was obviously a part of the Sept 11th conspiracy and Presidential assassination attempt shares the same last name as a revered Indian pacifist seems more than just a little "over the top."
It seems downright absurd.
But it wouldn't be absurd if his real name wasn't "Ghandi'' but "Al- Ghamdi."
It would actually make perfect sense...because if the man who threatened the life of George W. Bush in Sarasota on September 11th was named "Alghamdi," he would join three other men with the same last name who have already been identified as being part of the terrorist conspiracy.
Three men named Alghamdi were among the nineteen hijackers.
Curiously, all three listed on their drivers' licenses a home address at the Pensacola Naval Air Station.
All three are now, presumably, very much dead.
But there is yet another Alghamdi... still very much alive.
And this fourth Alghamdi, authorities believe, was also involved in the Sept 11th terrorist conspiracy.
August 29 2002
(MadCowMorningNews)
VENICE, Fl.-At least four months before the FBI says he first arrived in this country, terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta was living with (and physically abusing) an American girlfriend at an apartment they shared across from the Venice Airport.
According to numerous eyewitnesses, including their next door neighbor and the apartment manager, Atta lived with a girl named Amanda Keller during March and early April of 2000, four months before the FBI says he first entered the U.S.
The two shared an apartment located directly across the street from the Venice Airport at the Sandpiper Apartments, a drab two-story stucco building which was the American home of dozens of foreign pilot trainees from Huffman Aviation and the Florida Flight Training Academy, the two Dutch-owned flight schools that trained three of the four terrorist pilots.
During her year-long sojourn in Venice Amanda Keller was a willowy 20-year old bleached-blond cocktail waitress (at a restaurant at the airport, the 44th Aero Squadron), and also, according to observers, an out-call 'lingerie model' for an escort service called Fantasies & Lace in nearby Sarasota, where she may have first met Atta, who is known to have frequented Cheetah's, a nearby strip club.
Another 'disappeared' witness
While Amanda Keller’s present whereabouts are a mystery, what is clear is that the FBI has been inordinately eager to suppress the story of her and Atta’s dalliance… so eager that agents from the Bureau have engaged in a regular and systematic pattern of intimidation of eyewitnesses to the affair.
"The question they asked was always the same," says Stephanie Frederickson, who lived next door to the couple: "You aren’t saying anything to anybody, are you?"
For six months after the Sept 11 attack, Frederickson says she received weekly visits from agents from the FBI’s Sarasota office.
"At first, right after the attack, they told me I must have been mistaken in my identification. Or they would insinuate that I was lying. Finally they stopped trying to get me to change my story, and just stopped by once a week to make sure I hadn’t been talking to anyone. Who was I going to tell?"
She shrugs. "Most everyone around here already knew."
"All the news that's ripped from print."
Curiously, Frederickson says that a New York Times reporter to whom she told the story also accused her of making it up, and urged her to stop talking about it.
What makes this especially strange is that the N.Y. Times reporter need only have read early wire service reports in the days after the attack to learn that the story about Atta’s American girlfriend had already been confirmed by numerous witnesses, even including Amanda Keller herself as well as her mother and the apartment managers where the duo co-habitated.
"Charles Grapentine, the manager of Sandpiper Apartments on Airport Avenue in Venice, said he remembers seeing Atta at the complex for about three weeks in April," read a Sept 15 AP story. " He said Atta was living in the apartment of Amanda Keller."
"In a telephone interview late Friday, Keller said she met Atta through a friend and let him stay in the apartment with her and her then-boyfriend, Garrett Metts, because she felt sorry for him. She said authorities told her not to say anything at all about Atta," the story continued.
"I can't really discuss anything," she said. "I'm afraid I'll get in trouble."
"Real Americans won't be silenced."
Now the duo's next-door neighbor, a 50-year old housewife named Stephanie Frederickson, has stepped forward to testify about the affair, as well as the FBI harassment that has—so far— been successful in preventing the story from surfacing.
"Amanda moved in next door first, saying she had come from Orange Park (near Jacksonville," Frederickson says. "Then one day in the middle of March (of 2000) she brought home Atta.
‘I’d like you to meet my friend Mohamed Atta,’ she said to me. ‘He’s from France.’"
"Later when I saw her alone I asked her if she realized that Mohamed Atta wasn’t really a French name, and he was definitely not French. She looked at me like I was nuts. I didn’t know if she really believed he was French or not, but it was clear to me that he wasn't."
The relationship was troubled. While Atta's cheesy taste for infidel flesh is well-known, he apparently balked at sharing it with others.
Blows Against the Empire?
"There were a couple of time he beat her up that I know about," Frederickson says, "mostly over the slutty way she dressed to go to meet her escort service clients. Her hair was always done up in a half dozen funky colors and she always dressed…well, like a hooker."
Frederickson said that Fantasies & Lace would send a car and driver to get Keller. "And I would hear the driver and Atta arguing out on the balcony. Atta didn’t want her to leave."
"The third time he beat her up she put him out," states Frederickson. "She threw his two suitcases, and a blue Gold’s gym bag which he always carried around with him, over the balcony railing onto the driveway in front of the apartments and called a cab to come get him."
Frederickson was glad to see Atta leave. "He was a really nasty guy," she says. "He had no patience, and seemed mad at the world. One day I remember, it was raining out, and I left the apartment house at the same time he was leaving. He didn’t have a car then, so I offered him a ride."
"He got furious at me. ‘You do not speak to me unless I speak to you first!" he shouted.
"‘Hey bub, you’re in America,' I told him.’
"American women are bitches,’ he told me. I told him the least he could do was thank me for offering him a ride."
What was the attraction between Atta and Amanda Keller?
"Atta and his crew were always flush with lots and lots of money," she says. "These guys were really party animals."
Although they may have been well off, their living accommodations didn’t reflect it.
"I lived next door to Amanda and Atta on the second floor, but then moved downstairs to my father’s apartment to help him, because he had had surgery and couldn’t climb stairs any longer," says Frederickson.
"So Atta’s pals took my old apartment. One time I stuck my head in, and there were at least eight of them living in a small two-bedroom place, with sleeping bags spread out everywhere."
Paging the National Enquirer
Our week-long search for Amanda Keller has failed to locate her current whereabouts. And its raised more questions than it's answered. Questions like:
Why are you reading about it first in the MadCowMorningNews?
A girl who makes her living as a "lingerie model," like Keller, certainly could use the couple hundred thousand the tabloids would seem eager to pay to run a story titled "Terrorist's Girlfriend Bares All!"
So why hasn't she? Is something preventing her? Is she even still alive?
Last Sunday’s Associated Press headline about the approaching 1-year anniversary of the 9/11 attack read: "A year later, the 19 hijackers are still a tangle of mystery and contradiction."
Sun Sep 1,2002
(New York Times)
LONDON, Aug. 31 Swedish authorities said today that a man arrested at a Swedish airport with a gun in his carry-on luggage as he tried to board a London-bound flight had studied at an aviation school in the United States and had a criminal record.
However, almost two days after the man, identified as Kerim Chatty, 29, was arrested, a senior Swedish official denied reports attributed to Swedish intelligence and police circles that he had planned to seize the plane and attack an American embassy in Europe in a conspiracy with four other men. There was no word either on whether the man was suspected of being linked to Al Qaeda.
The reports nonetheless deepened apprehension among European security officials that, days before the commemoration of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, anti-Western militants might be planning copycat attacks on this side of the Atlantic.
Margaretha Linderoth, Sweden's security police director, denied that Mr. Chatty was part of such a conspiracy. "It's false information," she said. "We are not looking for four more men." Earlier, Reuters had quoted an unidentified military intelligence source as saying, "We know for sure that the plan was to crash the plane into a U.S. embassy in Europe."
Mr. Chatty underwent training at the North American Institute of Aviation in Conway, S.C., near Myrtle Beach. He was dismissed from the school's pilot program for poor performance, a top school official said tonight.
The flight school specializes in training foreign pilots, particularly students from Scandinavia, who arrive with special visas allowing them to attend school and later work in the United States. School officials go to Scandinavia every year to test and recruit potential students, according to the school's Web site.
Mr. Chatty was arrested late Thursday as he tried to board a flight operated by Ryanair, a low-cost carrier, out of a small airport in Vaesteraas, 60 miles northeast of Stockholm.
He was identified as belonging to a group of about 20 Muslims on board the plane that was heading for a conference in Birmingham, England, arranged by a Muslim sect known as Salafists. The sect describes itself as a purist strand of the Islamic faith. Its spokesman in Birmingham, Abu Khadeejah, said the conference organizers did not know Mr. Chatty. He also said the Salafists reject terrorism and had condemned both Osama bin Laden and the attacks last Sept. 11.
The Swedish police said they might hold Mr. Chatty until midday Monday before seeking court action against him. He is being held on suspicion of attempted hijacking and illegal possession of a firearm.
Nils Uggla, his defense lawyer, said that Mr. Chatty, a Swedish citizen of Tunisian descent, could explain the presence of a handgun found in his luggage. "He denies that this has anything at all to do with terrorism or airplane hijacking," Mr. Uggla said.
Several passengers already aboard the aircraft were evacuated while police officers searched the cabin and luggage compartment.
The flight school in South Carolina opened in 1972 and has trained about 3,500 pilots over the past three decades, according to its Web site.
The school offers a six-month course that trains students to fly and work as flight instructors, the first step to obtaining a commercial pilot's license. At about $35,000 including housing, the course is considered a bargain compared to comparable European programs.
Beginning in 1997, the school was 1 of 21 in an experimental program in the southeastern states that used the Internet to report foreign students who did not show up for classes to the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
All schools are required to report students who do not show up for classes, but reporting was spotty before Sept. 11. One of the hijackers came into the United States on a student visa but never reported to the California school that he was supposed to attend.
Federal Bureau of Investigation agents visited the school twice after Sept. 11 during sweeps of flight schools across the country, The Sun News of Myrtle Beach reported last year. Robert Sunday, the school's chief operations officer, told The Sun News at the time that his school took extra care in admitting its students. Typically students are required to have J-1 visas, a special educational visa that requires tougher screening than a typical student visa. Mr. Sunday also said the school immediately reports students who do not show up for class.
In May, a fire destroyed the administrative offices of the school. James Lamb, an instructor at the school, said he could not be sure whether Mr. Chatty was a student because student records were destroyed in the fire.
Morgan Martin, a former state legislator from Conway who serves on the state Transportation Commission, said the school had a good reputation.
"As far as I know it is a well-respected and well-run operation," he said.
Swedish newspaper reports depicted Mr. Chatty as a recent convert to Islam. He had been convicted of theft and assault charges, relating to a brawl with American marines at a gym in Stockholm and an earlier scuffle at a bar, according Mr. Uggla, the defense lawyer.
9-5-2
DUBAI (Reuters) - Arabic television station al-Jazeera said on Thursday it had confessions from two men it identified as members of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network claiming the group was responsible for the September 11 attacks.
A Jazeera official identified the two men as Ramzi bin al-Shaibah and Khaled al-Sheikh Mohammad, who the channel said were former room mates of Mohamed Atta, one of the 19 hijackers of the aircraft which were flown into U.S. landmarks.
In the first part of a documentary aired on Thursday, the Qatar-based channel, noted for its footage of bin Laden, said the two men were interviewed in Karachi, Pakistan, but did not say when.
"In the second part of this documentary, there will be the first direct confession as to how al Qaeda planned and executed the September 11 (attacks)," Yosri Fouda, the journalist who prepared the documentary, said. The second part will be aired next Thursday.
Washington blames Saudi-born militant bin Laden and al Qaeda for the attacks that killed more than 3,000 people. Al Qaeda officials have welcomed the attacks as "blessed" acts of holy struggle, but the group has not claimed responsibility for them.
The interviews were arranged by a liaison officer of al Qaeda, identified by the channel as Abu Bakr. It did not give further details about the interview, but said the two men lived with Atta in Hamburg, Germany, until days before the attacks.
FACES NOT SHOWN
The Jazeera documentary, titled "Top Secret," showed still pictures it identified as being of Ramzi and Mohammad, but it did not show their faces in what appeared to be footage from the interviews.
It showed the bare foot of a man clad in traditional Pakistani robes sitting on the floor in a room with Fouda, and the back of the head and part of the profile of a man with a black beard and hair and a dark complexion.
Fouda said he was taken by "professionals" through "mazes" in the busy streets of Karachi with his eyes covered until he arrived in an apartment building where he met the two men.
"...He (Mohammad) led me through a corridor to a room on whose floor Ramzi bin al-Shaiba in the flesh was sitting, both men are wanted with a (U.S.) bounty of $25 million for each."
Fouda continued: "Khaled (Sheikh Mohammad) jokingly asked me 'do you recognize us now?' I said: 'Your faces seem to be familiar'. Ramzi responded by saying: 'If you don't know who we are yet, you can rest assured that you will know when the intelligence dogs start to knock on your door'."
Jazeera did not broadcast any remarks by the two men indicating any link between al Qaeda and the September 11 attacks. But two officials of the channel told Reuters it had "confessions."
(UKIndependent)
02 September 2002
Kerim Chatty, who has been accused of attempting to hijack a Ryanair flight from Sweden to London, has links with Islamic extremists including a high-level al-Qa'ida suspect, security officials say.
The Swedish government highlighted how seriously it was taking the affair by taking the highly unusual step yesterday of informing other political parties about progress in the case, a step undertaken when there is deemed to be a threat to national security.
It was disclosed that while serving a sentence for violence at Osteraker prison, near Stockholm, Mr Chatty, 29, struck up a friendship with a follower of Osama bin Laden, named as Oussama Kassir, who allegedly plotted to set up a terrorist camp in the US.
Mr Kassir, 36, a Swedish resident alleged by the FBI to have identified himself as a hitman for Mr bin Laden, said he became Mr Chatty's friend and mentor in prison in 1998, teaching him to pray and become "a good Muslim" after the younger man's conversion to Islam, but denied either were involved with al-Qa'ida.
He said: "He is not like me, who loves Bin Laden or talks about jihad. He doesn't understand about Bin Laden, it is like talking to a child. He is a good guy. He wanted to learn how to live a good life. I taught him how to pray and do right. It pleases me he has become a good Muslim."
The FBI alleges that Mr Kassir travelled to the US via the London mosque run by the controversial imam Abu Hamza al-Masri and became involved in a 1999 plot to set up a "jihad training camp" at a ranch in Oregon.
He was accused of being an accomplice to another alleged associate of Abu Hamza, an American national James Ujaama, who was one of six men charged last month with plotting terrorist attacks. His link with Mr Chatty will increase speculation that last week's alleged attempted hijacking was part of a conspiracy to attack US targets.
Mr Chatty, who has a Tunisian father and a Swedish mother, visited Saudi Arabia twice to study Islam and was in the kingdom on 11 September. He was questioned by police on his return. The court where he is to appear today will decide whether he should be charged or kept in custody while investigations continue.
Police in Stockholm are liaising with officers from Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist branch and officers from the CIA and FBI.
The prosecution will present its evidence at the hearing in Vasteras today, to establish which charges can be laid. The court will then go into private session as the judge hears from the suspect and his lawyer before deciding whether to remand Mr Chatty for further investigation, free him or ask the police to charge him immediately.
If Mr Chatty is remanded in custody the prosecutors have a further two weeks in which to gather evidence. A police spokesman, Ulf Palm, said Mr Chatty was likely be charged with planning a hijack or illegal possession of firearms, with further charges to follow. If found guilty he could be jailed for life.
Mr Chatty, who had taken flying lessons in the United States, like the 11 September hijackers, had planned to fly the Ryanair Boeing 737 into an American embassy in Europe, Swedish intelligence sources told the Reuters news agency.
The agency said police were hunting for four other suspects, including an explosives specialist, a claim denied by Margareta Linderoth, the director of Sweden's national security police, and by sources in London. Reuters' sources claimed the Swedish government wanted to play down "Arab terrorist threats" to avoid extreme right-wing parties exploiting it as a racial issue in the run-up to the general election in two weeks' time.
British security sources say Mr Chatty's extremist connections are still being unravelled. But they admit that Richard Reid, the alleged "shoe bomber" awaiting trial in America, was initially thought to have been acting alone before his al-Qa'ida links were discovered.
Mr Chatty claims he was catching flight FR685 to attend an Islamic conference organised by the Salafi sect in Birmingham. Mr Reid is a member of the sect, as was Mohamed Atta, the suspected leader of the 11 September hijackers.
FBI agents questioned staff at the North American Institute of Aviation in Conway, South Carolina, the flying school where Mr Chatty was a student in 1996. He left the course after being judged a poor student but, according to his family, finished his training at another school in Florida.
Mr Chatty is said to have told police that he was carrying the 6.5 calibre pistol found in his hand luggage "for personal protection, since I felt I was under threat, especially at the place I was going to".
He added: "If I had planned to hijack the plane, I wouldn't have hidden a pistol in my washbag, I would have hidden it somewhere else."
Mr Chatty's father, Sarok, 58, and mother, Gunilla, 54, said their son's interest in Islam had deepened after his flying course. They said their son's involvement in criminality he has convictions for theft and assault stopped with his growing interest in religion.
Mr Chatty said: "I cannot understand why he had that gun with him. I know it must be a mistake. He would never have hijacked that plane."
He added: "I am a Muslim but not a practising one. My wife is a Christian but we gave Kerim a normal Swedish upbringing. He was always very kind and popular. His teachers used to say that he was a peacemaker who would always break up fights in the playground." One of Kerim Chatty's arrests resulted from a brawl. He is also said to have acted as a bodyguard for an underworld figure.
(NYPOST)
Aug 30th 2002
WASHINGTON - In the first bust of a "sleeper cell" on U.S. soil since 9/11, the feds yesterday charged five Middle Eastern men in Detroit with plotting terror attacks in the United States - including at Disneyland.
The five men, who come from Algeria and Morocco, "operated as a covert underground support unit for terrorist attacks within and outside the United States, as well as [being] a 'sleeper' operational combat cell," the government says in an indictment.
The suspected terrorists - some of whom worked at a Detroit airport - allegedly had surveillance videos of California's Disneyland and Las Vegas' MGM Grand Hotel and Casino, which were said by law-enforcement sources to be targets of their attacks.
They also tried to find security weaknesses at Detroit Metropolitan Airport so that they could have direct access to airliners, the federal indictment says.
Authorities say the cell members tried to get weapons and fake IDs, and recruit terrorists for attacks on a U.S. air base in Turkey and a hospital in Jordan.
The men charged are Karim Koubriti, Ahmed Hannan, Farouk "Khalid" Ali-Haimoud, Youssef Hmimssa and Abdella, whose last name is unknown.
The five are in custody, and Hmimssa is cooperating in the investigation.
Koubriti, Hannan and Ali-Haimoud lived in a Detroit apartment that appeared to be the cell's headquarters, but the three took orders from Abdella, the ringleader, who lived in Chicago.
Hmimssa lived in Iowa, but fake IDs in his name were found in the Detroit pad.
Abdella ordered the "brothers" in the cell to speak only in code, and claimed to have terror contacts throughout the world, the indictment says.
Last July, Abdella received a wire transfer of $1,206 from Khaled Aly, whom he described as one of the "brothers" at his disposal.
The government said the suspects were in the Salafi Group for Call and Combat, a Muslim militant group launched in Algeria and supported by Osama bin Laden. The group is dedicated to the destruction of all "infidels" who don't accept its members' fundamentalist beliefs.
The federal indictment says the men were taking actions to "engage in or support holy war, or global jihad" and that three of them had discussed in June 2001 the notion that "Islam permitted the killing of innocent civilians."
The Detroit suspects, who worked as dishwashers for the Sky Chefs food vendor at the Detroit airport and as chauffeurs, were busted on Sept. 17 when the FBI came to their apartment looking for Nabil Almarabh, then a suspected bin Laden associate.
They were slapped with fake-ID charges last year and held in jail, but the feds recently backed away from their claim that Almarabh is linked to terrorists.
The four-count indictment includes charges of giving material support to terrorists.
Also yesterday, James Ujaama, was charged by the Justice Department with giving material support to al Qaeda. Ujaama allegedly planned to set up a terror training camp in Oregon.
(TIMEMAG)
Sunday, September 1, 2002
When the alleged shoe bomber struck in December, Cristina Jones and Hermis Moutardier became unlikely soldiers in an unusual war
"That's when he bit me. Right there."
Cristina Jones extends her hand to show the teeth marks below her thumb on her left hand, where alleged shoe bomber Richard Reid bit her in their struggle aboard Flight 63 high over the Atlantic last December. Hermis Moutardier bears wounds from her battle with Reid too. They're just not so visible.
One minute they were flight attendants who adored flying to glamorous destinations for American Airlines. The next, they were on the front line of a war. For Jones and Moutardier, that transformation happened the day two planes from their airline were used in the biggest attack on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor. They simply didn't know it then.
In the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, Jones, a single mother, tried to comfort her 7-year-old son Ian, telling him that the chances of something like that happening on one of her planes were "slim, so slim." It was harder to reassure herself. But she had to work and within two weeks was back in the air. Moutardier, in a chilling instant, remembered working with one of the crew members killed. A month after she returned to work, she suffered a panic attack so paralyzing that she didn't want to get on another flight. Her supervisor told her to go home, but Moutardier willed herself on board. "As a flight attendant, you learn to leave your feelings at the door," she says.
The flights each woman flew last fall were largely uneventful, but many passengers were scared and jittery. "Even if they didn't say anything, you could see it in their faces," says Moutardier. Others, Jones recalls, reacted to the attacks by being "really very respectful and cooperative." But as time passed, Jones says, "it went back to business as usual," with some passengers flouting the rules and behaving rudely. Attendants traded tips on how to distinguish potential terrorists from passengers with air rage.
Those tip-trading sessions proved useful on Dec. 22, when the two flight attendants boarded Flight 63 from Paris to Miami. Although both live in Florida, each holds French citizenship, speaks French fluently (Jones spent part of her childhood in Antibes, Peruvian-born Moutardier is married to a Frenchman) and flew the Paris route often. Flight 63 was jammed with 185 passengers that pre-Christmas Saturday morning. Baggage problems delayed takeoff from Charles de Gaulle Airport an hour, but everything seemed routine once the plane was airborne. Then a passenger aroused the flight attendants' curiosity. He was a "huge" man, 6 ft. 4 in. and more than 200 lbs. He refused to eat or drink anything, even water, odd behavior on a transatlantic flight that could last up to 10 hours. Jones had been cautioned by another flight attendant to be wary of passengers who didn't accept food on a long flight, so she asked the man three times if he wanted anything. "Usually I think, 'Yeah! Less work for me.' But something about him ... seemed strange," she recalls.
Moutardier joked that maybe he was on a diet, but she too asked him if he wanted to eat. "I talked to him in French, assuming he was French. He said he didn't speak French. I wanted to be nice, so I asked where he was from, and he told me Sri Lanka." She didn't believe him. And she was right. For he turned out to be Reid, now 29, a British citizen who investigators believe was an operative in the al-Qaeda network.
About two hours out of Paris, with the plane cruising over the Atlantic at 35,000 ft., passengers began to report smelling smoke. Jones was back in the galley cleaning up after the meal service, and Moutardier, who was picking up trays, cruised the aisles looking for the source of the burning smell. She discovered Reid, seated alone by a window, trying to light a match. She sternly warned him that smoking was not allowed. He promised to stop, then began picking his teeth with the blackened matchstick. A few minutes later, she saw him bend over in his seat. "I thought, He's smoking," Moutardier recalls. "It got me mad. I was talking to him, saying, 'Excuse me,' but he just ignored me. I leaned in and said, 'What are you doing?'" As she pulled at him, he turned, giving her a glimpse of what he was hiding. What she saw terrified her. "He's got the shoe off, between his legs. All I see is the wiring and the match. The match was lit," she says. Twice she grabbed him, twice he pushed her away, the second time so hard she fell against an armrest across the aisle. I'm going to die, she thought.
Jones had seen and heard none of this—when Moutardier came running back yelling, "Get him! Go!" Moutardier was so flustered, she said nothing about the shoe and the match. Jones rushed out and quickly figured it out. Reid's back was turned away from the aisle, but "you could just tell he was very intent on doing something. I didn't talk to him or ask him what he was doing. I just knew it in my mind," she says. "I yelled, 'Stop it!' and grabbed him around the upper body. I tried to pull him up. And that's when he bit me." She screamed, and passengers started crawling over seats to restrain him. But his teeth would not let go. "I couldn't get my hand out of his mouth. I thought he was going to rip my hand apart it hurt so bad. It was surreal," she says. "I saw all these men coming ... and I knew I had to get out of the way, but he still had my hand in his mouth." Finally, when he let go, she calmly and professionally—no doubt in shock—put up the tray table next to him. Then she ran for the fire extinguisher.
Fearing the match would somehow ignite, Moutardier rushed back and got passengers to pass bottles of Evian to pour over Reid. Other crew members arrived on the scene. They brought plastic cuffs for Reid's hands, a seat-belt extension to tie up his feet. Passengers passed belts, headphone cords, anything they could find. (When the rerouted plane landed in Boston, Reid was so trussed up that the FBI had to cut him out of his seat.) A doctor on board was drafted to give him Valium, kept in the flight kit.
Even after Reid was restrained and sedated, he continued to taunt the crew. Moutardier says that whenever he heard the voice of a crew member, he would open his eyes and glare. When a flight attendant offered him water, he bared his teeth. "At one point, he wanted to get loose; he was rocking and praying. I got real scared," says Moutardier. No one knew if Reid had accomplices on board. There were no clear procedures to guide the crew of 12, so they improvised. They barred anyone from standing up without permission for the remaining three hours of the flight. Passengers who asked to go to the bathroom were searched and their pockets emptied. The crew checked the passports of male passengers. A flight attendant created a barrier in front of the cockpit and stood guard.
Passengers were asked to get to know their seatmates. A woman said she had seen Reid the day before at the airport—with another person. Crying and shaking, the passenger went around the plane three times with Moutardier looking to see if the other man was on board. At another point, when passengers started smelling smoke again, Jones walked the plane barefoot to see if she could detect heat from the cargo hold. "Most of it was instinct," says Jones, "and the knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks. I don't believe I would have grabbed [Reid] the way I did had I not known about Sept. 11. I don't know that the passengers would have come to my aid so quickly had they not known about Sept. 11. I have thought about those crews so much since December. They are my heroes. They're the ones who saved us. It's the knowledge of how they lost their lives that empowered us."
The attendants concede that they made some mistakes. They didn't retrieve Reid's shoes until 30 minutes after he was subdued. Then the crew's first reserve officer brought the shoes into the cockpit. Thinking there was a knife inside, he found instead a wire protruding—and a burn mark. Hastily, the crew put both shoes in a safe place reserved on all planes for bomb disposal. The FBI later reported that one shoe had enough plastic explosives to blow a hole in the plane's fuselage. "Yet nobody went and curled up into a ball in the corner. Nobody started opening up minis [of liquor] and said, 'I'm going to get drunk,'" says Jones proudly. "Everybody did their job."
Flying is in Jones' blood. Her great-grandfather was a test pilot. A picture of her mother in a solo glider hangs over the mantel in her home in Tampa, Fla. Jones, 40, began working for American in 1985. "I love airports, the excitement, the electricity, people going places," she says. "I would go to the airport even before I had a job and just hang out. I like the smell of jet fuel." But after Sept. 11, Jones started thinking about another career. She began taking college courses with the idea of getting her degree and becoming a paralegal. After the shoe-bomber incident, she desperately wanted to quit and found herself withdrawing from friends, spending most of her days sleeping. At night, she would have bad dreams and wake up anxious, believing she had heard footsteps in the house. "You'd think you'd have more of an appreciation for life, appreciate friends and family more, but I'm scared. I'm scared of the way things are, scared of the future, scared of my ability to provide for my son, scared about my career. I'm afraid all the time," she says. "Airports are stressful now. It's not the fun place it used to be." She tried seeing a psychologist but didn't find that the counseling helped. "She'd tell me I did a great thing," says Jones. "She felt I was handling it all well."
In March, Jones went back to work. On her first flight, to London, she thought she smelled smoke. "My heart started pounding, and I thought I was going to pass out," she remembers. "I went into the bathroom and started crying." She asked for domestic flights, thinking they might be less stressful, but the pay was lower so she went back to international routes. Crewmates treat her like a celebrity, asking her to repeat her story of the Reid capture, but passengers don't recognize her. After she asked a female passenger from coach not to use the lavatory in business class (new security rules require flight attendants to keep people from roaming), the woman called her a "f______ bitch."
Moutardier, 47, caught the flying bug early too, and she has longed to be a flight attendant since she was a girl. But she was married for the fourth time and pregnant with her second son before, at 36, she realized her dream. "Even if I knew that Richard Reid would be on my flight someday, I would still have been a flight attendant," she says, sitting surrounded by travel mementos in her Coral Gables, Fla., home. Since Flight 63, she has been on medical leave for injuries to her shoulder suffered in her scuffle with Reid. When the White House invited Jones and Moutardier to be the First Lady's guests at the State of the Union speech in January, Moutardier considered not going because it meant flying to Washington. Both women did attend, but Moutardier didn't fly again until July, when she and her 10-year-old son Patrice—taking the same Paris flight on which she had helped capture Reid—made their annual trip to his summer camp in the south of France. Moutardier was nervous, for herself and for her son. Patrice tried to reassure his mother. "Mom, if you saved 200 people, you'll save me," he told her. The crew welcomed her warmly, and the flight was smooth, but when she finally arrived at the apartment she and her husband keep outside Paris, Moutardier broke down in tears.
Their families also suffered. Jones found it difficult to explain to her son Ian what happened on the Paris flight, but she knew she had to explain the bandage on her hand and the marks from Reid's teeth that are still visible below her thumb. "I just told him that a bad man on my flight was trying to hurt people, and in trying to stop him, he hurt me." The 7-year-old said he was proud of his mom, but it was obvious he was also worried for her. In the weeks following the aborted attack, Ian began wearing a pair of military camouflage pants he had pulled from his costume trunk, and he punched newspaper pictures of Reid. "He was fighting the war there for a while," she says. The endless phone calls from the media, the airline, the flight attendants' union and the FBI further upset him, but Ian refused to discuss any of it. "Only recently has he told friends what I did," Jones said. Moutardier's 27-year-old elder son Oscar cried when he heard about the incident, but Patrice tried to act as if nothing had happened. Then his grades plunged from A-plus to F. "Finally he told me he didn't want to show emotion because he was afraid it wouldn't help me to recover," says Moutardier. "I told him, 'Patrice, it's O.K. Mommy cried. You can cry too.'"
Since the shoe-bomber flight in December, American Airlines has offered a self-defense course; neither Jones nor Moutardier has attended the training. But Jones has devised her own safety rules. Instead of walking from the front of the plane to the back when she checks to see if seat belts are fastened, she now walks aft to forward because "I can see better what people are doing with their hands." She scrutinizes passengers more closely. On an international flight, a man who spoke no English got up before the plane taxied into the gate, and started walking into the business-class section. "He was coming right at me," says Jones. Crew members made him sit down, but Jones, fearing a bomb, went further and—on her own—ordered a full aircraft interior search after passengers disembarked. "Now I'm more involved in the situation," she says. "I make sure everything is checked; bins are opened before takeoff. I'm proactive."
Moutardier, back from Paris, hopes to return to work in October. Both she and Jones may testify at Reid's trial, which is set to begin in Boston on Nov. 4, but Moutardier says she is determined to leave the incident behind her. "I'm putting a lot of positive thoughts in my head. I cannot live in fear. I'm stronger. We're all stronger," she says. "I'm gaining back my life, little by little. I know I was there that day, on that flight, for a reason. Now I need to get back to work because I'm doing what I love. I'll be perfectly ..." She pauses as if willing herself to believe her own words, then finishes with a tentative smile, "... O.K."
(Chicago Reader via Poynter.org - Jim Romenesko's Media News)
August 23, 2002
Last April 19 the Reader published a Critic's Choice by Ted Shen praising a new documentary, Gaza Strip, that was about to be shown at the Chicago Palestine Film Festival. "The constant barrage of artillery shells, the civilians' complaints, and the images of children convulsing from exposure to nerve gas offer a ringing indictment of the Sharon government," wrote Shen, who soon had reason to wish he'd chosen his words more carefully.
James Longley, the producer-director of Gaza Strip, promptly wrote Shen and the Reader to put some distance between himself and Shen's complimentary review. "Never in my film is a definite statement made as to the nature of the gas used by the IDF," he noted. "The assumption that the gas was `nerve gas' is yours, and yours alone. . . . There were no fatalities in the event I filmed. The accusation of nerve gas use by the Israeli Defense Forces is an extremely serious one and I do not want it to be associated with my film."
Other letters were far less temperate. Published with Longley's on April 26 was one from Gadi Fishman of Chicago, who wondered "what maniacal demon of blind hatred possessed the Chicago Reader, against the very basics of journalistic etiquette and responsibility, into giving voice to such a vile and deceitful fantasy." On May 24 David Roet, Israel's deputy consul general to the midwest, wrote that Shen "has perhaps unintentionally stumbled on one of the most terrible blood libels . . . perpetuated by the Palestinians and their supporters. . . . Based on this narrative, the Israelis are accused of deliberately poisoning Arab women and children. This propaganda echoes the centuries-old anti-Semitic canard that Jews poison Christian children."
This canard -- the "blood libel" that Jews drain the blood of murdered Christians for their rituals -- has haunted Jews for centuries and has been traced back at least as far as the cult of William of Norwich, a 12-year-old supposedly murdered before Passover on March 22, 1144. Not a century since has been free of similar accusations.
"Nerve gas is a loaded term, and I shouldn't have used it," Shen replied in print to Longley and Fishman. Answering the deputy consul a month later, Shen was more assertive: "Despite the objections of Mr. Roet and the many others who've weighed in, [Longley] has well-documented evidence that hundreds of Palestinians were the victims of something that was clearly worse than tear gas."
Among the letters the Reader did not print was a series from Isaac Levendel of Chicago. The "nerve gassing" never happened, Levendel declared, the shots of children in a hospital proved nothing ("We know of several cases of staging for journalists"), and Sharon hadn't even taken power at the time of the "imaginary incident" in early February 2001 (he'd been elected a few days earlier).
Levendel wanted satisfaction on a scale the Reader didn't intend to provide. Shen altered his capsule review of Gaza Strip so that anyone who saw it again in the Reader or looked it up in the movies section of this paper's Web site would read "unidentified gas" instead of "nerve gas." But the reference to the Sharon government wasn't changed. And as Levendel was aware -- though Reader editor Alison True wasn't -- the original capsule remained in the Reader on-line archive (a separate electronic file). This week True learned that the original had survived there and changed it.
Another dissatisfied reader was Ora Hoshen of Naperville, who told us that because Shen's Critic's Choice had also been carried in the suburban edition of this paper, the Reader's Guide to Arts and Entertainment, the letters criticizing it and Shen's responses must also appear there. The Reader's Guide doesn't normally carry letters, and True didn't think Shen's capsule warranted an exception.
Levendel and Hoshen are highly willful people. He's the author of Not the Germans Alone: A Son's Search for the Truth of Vichy, which describes his search for the killers of his mother, who died in southern France in 1944 and his discovery that French collaborators were heavily involved. Hoshen, a cancer survivor and distance runner, led a 1992 campaign to persuade the first Bush administration to allow the abortion drug RU-486 into the country to be used to fight cancer. The highlight of that ultimately successful campaign was the time she and a couple dozen other demonstrators trapped their archenemy, Congressman Henry Hyde, in his limousine and wouldn't let him go until he agreed to a meeting.
The Shen capsule was no small thing to either Levendel or Hoshen. When the Reader failed to set the record straight to their satisfaction they took their case to Honest Reporting, a grassroots Jewish organization linked by the Internet that floods straying media with protesting E-mail. (Honest Reporting was launched two years ago in London by students belonging to Aish HaTorah, a youthful organization founded in 1974 to revitalize Judaism.) On Monday, August 12, a "communique" headlined "Blood Libel Strikes Back" was posted on the Web site honestreporting.com.
The first target of this communique was the BBC, accused of credulously reporting as true a 19th-century variation on the blood libel that had Jews in Damascus murdering a French priest and his servant and using their blood and bones to cook matzo. The second target was the Reader. Honest Reporting republished most of Shen's original capsule, putting the word "images of children convulsing from exposure to nerve gas" in bold caps, and commented: "Despite great efforts by HonestReporting member Ora H. and others, the Chicago Reader has never retracted or apologized for this `blood libel.'" A link to the Reader's E-mail address followed.
That evening Levendel E-mailed us again. "I was one of those who initially tried to help you become more objective, to no avail," he said. "This is why we asked Honest Reporting to help us help you write more truthfully. . . . In YOUR frenzy to indict Sharon, you manufactured a story that took place BEFORE he even took office, distorted the facts to better fit your goals and contributed to an unfair campaign of character assassination using half-lies. Am I writing in clear English?"
After this letter came the deluge. For the next two days our E-mail service brought us letters by the dozens, eventually by the hundreds, from all over the country. Some tried to argue or explain: "By demonizing Israel, and protecting Arafat, you do not help the Palestinians. As long as your audience, and western audiences in general, believe your version of the Mideast story, Arafat will maintain his tacit approval, or at least acceptance by the West, and there will be no peace in the Mideast."
Many more damned the Reader: "This is a blatant lie and a libel on the Israeli government." "You are not far away from the ultimate goal of accusing the Jews of using the blood of Christians or Muslims to make Matza." "This is nothing but a form of `blood libel.'" "I hope you die from nerve gas." "The nerve gas you need to examine is what travels from those adults (Hamas, et al) via poisonous minds and deposited directly into the skulls of impressionable Arab children." "Never has Israel used anything close to nerve gas." "The height of irresponsible journalism." "A blatant blood libel." "This is a Lie, Malicious, Devious and Dangerous. Israel has morals and standards beyond your comprehension." "The late Joseph Goebbels would be proud of your achievement." "Ted Shen is a pig."
This barrage was impressive up to a point, but that point was soon reached. The Internet has made mass protest quick and easy, and when so many letters so similarly shrill arrive at once they lose their force. A woman who in her day used to write for both the Sun-Times and Tribune as much as admitted she was responding on cue: "Why didn't you write about how the Israelis also kill Arab children to use their blood in making matzos? I'll never read your stupid, second class paper again. You were cited as being one of the papers that printed libel and didn't retract. You are obnoxious and if your children find out the anti-semitic lies you print, they'll be ashamed of you -- assuming, or course, that you have children."
"We're not 'anti-Semites printing vicious lies,'" Alison True told me, quoting one of the letters. "But if we were, I can't imagine that getting hammered with E-mails would do much to change our minds." She was sorry that the honestreporting.com call to arms hadn't thought to mention that letters denouncing the Reader had already appeared in the Reader, that Shen had retracted his language in the Reader, and that the capsule had been altered. I called Levendel and told him the ultimate effect of the letters was to make Reader editors angry and numb. "Yeah, that's correct, but listen," he said. "I'll tell you another viewpoint, which is mine." Like a lot of other Jews in Chicago, he hadn't been happy with the Tribune's coverage of the Middle East and he'd said so. "I'm sure the Chicago Tribune is both numb and angry." But, he went on, it's also become much more careful about what it prints. "I'll tell you candidly," he said, "if people want to hear, we talk to them. If they don't want to hear, we put pressure. Some newspapers become self-institutionalized, they consider themselves as monuments. Well, fine."
He took my point about "blood libel" losing force from repetition, and he wasn't sure Shen's capsule had deserved to be called that in the first place. But, he said, Arab papers print the charge that Jews consume Arab blood, surely a blood libel. "So to me the insinuation that the Israelis are reckless with the lives of children to the point of going after them with nerve gas -- to me that's not far from the blood libel."
Yes, he said, a vehicle such as Honest Reporting "can trigger people who didn't read the piece and know nothing of Shen. I agree with you profoundly. But don't you think a sentence in the Reader has the same effect in the other direction?" He went on, "If I had not been a perceptive guy who's going to pursue this with my friends, if I had not been Jewish and sensitive, I would have said, 'Hey, Israelis gas children.' You know the written word is very powerful. I appreciate the fact that the blind following is numbing to you. I appreciate that. But the blind distribution of half-truths and lies is numbing to me."
"For me it's very, very simple," says Hoshen. "What the Reader needs to do is apologize. Do you know what Henry Hyde did at the end? He admitted he made a mistake, and he wrote the [pharmaceutical] company and asked them to release the drug. Even Henry Hyde could admit a mistake. But not the Reader."
What Was It?
Unlike almost everyone else the Reader heard from, Isaac Levendel has actually seen Gaza Strip. I asked him what he made of the scene that Shen originally described as "children convulsing from exposure to nerve gas." Did he honestly think that sequence a sham?
"I do not truly believe that the children's illness was fabricated," he E-mailed me back. "However, I have no strong evidence that the children's problem was actually caused by nerve gas or any other unidentified gas. Here are the possibilities (not in any particular order and not necessarily an exhaustive list):
"A. The children were exposed to tear gas and had a physical and/or psychological response to it.
"B. The children had an existing condition (like a form of epilepsy), were exposed to tear gas, and they had a physical and/or psychological reaction.
"C. The children had an existing condition, were exposed to some form of explosions with fumes and had a physical and/or psychological reaction to them.
08/29/02
LONDON, Aug 29 (Reuters) - Jewish groups expressed outrage on Thursday that a British company was selling sport shoes with the same name as the Nazi nerve gas used to kill millions of Jews in the Holocaust.
Umbro, the firm that outfits the English national soccer side, said it was an "unfortunate coincidence" that its Zyklon shoe, on sale since 1999, bore the name of the poison gas Zyklon B.
Crystals of Zyklon B were dissolved in gas chambers at the death camps to produce the poison the Nazis used to exterminate millions of Jews and members of other minorities during World War Two.
"We are sure that the name was not meant to cause any offence," Umbro spokesman Nick Crook said. "Going forwards we will be investigating the names more thoroughly."
Megasports, a British sporting goods Web site, was advertising Umbro's Zyklon Junior shoes on Thursday for 20 pounds ($30). The accompanying photo showed a white running shoe with a big Umbro logo.
Crook said the shoe would be renamed or withdrawn from sale, but he would not say whether shoes already shipped would be removed from store shelves.
The name appears on the box but not on the shoes themselves, and therefore the company had no immediate plans to recall shoes already sold, he said.
"INSULT TO VICTIMS"
Shimon Samuels, international liaison director of the anti-Semitism watchdog the Simon Wiesenthal Center, pointed out the name in a letter to the company's chief executive, Peter McGuigan.
The "outrageous misuse of the Holocaust is an insult to victims and survivors, an encouragement to neo-Nazis and skinheads who terrorise the football terraces and a dishonour to sport itself," he wrote.
He told Reuters his office had since been "inundated with faxes and e-mails" calling for a boycott of the company, and said that acknowledging the mistake would not be enough to address Jewish community concerns.
"It's not just the withdrawal and the renaming, it's an investigation into how in the world this happened," he said.
"If it's purely ignorance, then they need an education. If there is something deeper than ignorance, we are saying hey: you supply the football industry. The football industry is deeply infiltrated by neo-Nazi skinheads."
He said Umbro should recall all shoes sold under the name.
"There are thousands of young people walking around in these shoes that carry the whiff of gas chambers," he said.
"I think it would be a nice message if Umbro would take out an ad offering a recall -- 'We found a defect in our Zyklon B shoes. Bring them back and get a new pair of shoes free.' That would send a message: trade in garbage and get perfectly good shoes."
8/29/02
MINNEAPOLIS (Reuters) - Retail giant Target Corp has called on its 1,100 stores to remove shorts and baseball caps marked "eight eight" or "88" -- code among neo-Nazis for "Heil Hitler" because H is the eighth letter of the alphabet.
"Target is a family-oriented store and company and it is not our intent to carry any merchandise that promotes hate," the company said in a statement on Wednesday.
Minneapolis-based Target, one of the largest discount chains in the country, directed its stores to remove the items after being alerted to the problem through the efforts of a California shopper and the Southern Poverty Law Center, a national organization which tracks racist groups.
Joseph Rodriguez, a 51-year-old video producer/director at the University of California-Davis, discovered the "88" products in a Sacramento-area Target store in late July.
Rodriguez was looking at a pair of red shorts -- marked with skulls and other symbols -- when he noted that they also bore the numeric white supremacist code.
"I just thought they were cool," Rodriguez said in a release provided by the Southern Poverty Law Center. "But when I saw the 'EIGHT EIGHT,' I couldn't believe it."
Rodriguez said he knew of the significance of the "88" from watching a recent documentary about white supremacist music, and immediately sought to alert Target to the problem.
Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center said white supremacist groups often use symbols or codes "as a way of communicating with each other under the radar screen of the public."
"The noxious thing is when these symbols make their way into popular culture and gain widespread acceptance in the mainstream," he said.
A Target spokeswoman did not immediately return a call seeking comment Wednesday. But the Sacramento Bee reported that the clothing was manufactured by UTILITY, one of Target's private labels, and that the company was investigating how it ended up being approved.
Target offered refunds for any shopper who wished to return the merchandise.
(The Miami Herald Washington Bureau)
8-25-2
WASHINGTON - Jewish help in defeating two black members of Congress who had been critical of Israel is threatening to aggravate long-standing tensions between two uneasy allies in the Democratic Party.
The chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus warned after recent primaries that many blacks are angry at the way Jewish money helped defeat incumbent Reps. Cynthia McKinney of Georgia and Earl Hilliard of Alabama, even though the money went to black challengers.
''I've been receiving angry calls from black voters all day saying they should rally against Jewish candidates,'' said Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Texas. ``To have non-African Americans from around the country putting millions into a race to unseat one of our leaders for expressing her right of free speech is definitely a problem.''
McKinney and Hilliard had voted against a resolution last May expressing solidarity with Israel in its clashes with Palestinians. McKinney also had urged a reexamination of U.S. foreign policy supporting Israel, and likened Israel's treatment of Palestinians to South Africa's treatment of blacks under apartheid. Hilliard had expressed support for a Palestinian state.
Jewish reaction to their rhetoric underscored how increasing violence between Israel and Palestinians is inflaming relations in the United States between those who support and those who criticize Israel.
If tension between the Democratic Party's two most reliable constituencies grows, it could also hurt the party in the fall elections. Turnout is critical in a midterm election when there is no presidential race on the ticket to lure voters, and Democrats need heavy turnouts from both groups.
Blacks aren't the only ones angry. Arab Americans feel they lost an important supporter in McKinney.
''The echo of this race is being felt all over the United States,'' said Osama Siblani, editor of the Arab American News in Dearborn, Mich. ``McKinney is a very popular [lawmaker] to our community. She was known for standing up for the civil rights of our community.''
He said the flow of Jewish money to McKinney's challenger, which helped her win, signaled that ``the Jewish community wants to kick out any members of Congress who are outspoken against the state of Israel and their occupation of the Palestinian land.''
Appearing on Atlanta television before Tuesday's primary, Georgia state Rep. Billy McKinney was asked why his daughter was in trouble. He spelled out his answer: ``J-E-W-S.''
Josh Block, a spokesman for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, an influential Washington-based pro-Israel group, insisted that Jews and blacks will remain close political allies.
''There are no two communities closer with more common interests than Jewish Americans and African Americans,'' he said. ``Tensions? There are tensions between the best of friends. But these communities have a historic bond.''
He also argued that the Jewish influence on the McKinney race was exaggerated.
''These elections are decided by voters who live in the district, not by anything else,'' Block said. ``In the case of Cynthia McKinney, she had over a period of years moved farther and farther away from the mainstream of her constituency. They decided to fire her.''
McKinney's criticism of Israel was not a prominent issue in her campaign. Rather, her increasingly outspoken and confrontational style appeared to motivate voters the most. For example, she outraged many voters when she suggested that President Bush might have known about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks ahead of time and might have let them happen to benefit friends financially.
The primary ''was mostly a referendum on McKinney's style,'' said Merle Black, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta. ``Her style really polarized voters in the district.''
Still, McKinney's challenger never would have had enough money for a credible campaign without outside help.
Denise Majette raised more than $1.1 million, a stunningly large amount for a challenger, much of it from pro-Israel groups or individuals from outside Georgia. Hilliard's challenger, Artur Davis, also raised more than $1 million, much of it from pro-Israel groups or individuals.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/3927698.htm
8-28-2
JERUSALEM (AFP) - Israeli experts warned that a bulge in the wall supporting a disputed Jerusalem site holy to both Jews and Muslims could collapse at any moment and ignite tensions across the region, a charge Palestinians dismissed as a bid to extend Israeli control of the site.
The hotly contested shrine was setting passions ablaze again, two days after members of the Israeli Committee to Prevent the Destruction of Antiquities on the Temple Mount sent an urgent warning to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon over a 35-foot (11 metre) wide swelling in the wall.
"In the current context of the intifada, this appears to have a very political implication," said Doctor Khaled Nashef, the director of the Palestinian Institute of Archaeology at Bir Zeit University near Ramallah.
The bulge is located on the southern side of the wall which buttresses the Al-Asa mosque compound, the third holiest site in Islam and a traditional political flash point where the Palestinian intifada erupted two years ago following a controversial visit by then opposition leader Sharon.
The mosque compound is built atop the remains of the Jewish temple, destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD and which remains the holiest site in Judaism.
Eilat Mazar, who heads the committee, said she warned the government nine months ago that the Palestinians were carrying out illegal excavations, creating a vacuum in important supporting soil and causing the bulge in the exterior wall of an area known as Solomon's Stables.
Members of the committee accuse the Palestinians of attempting to wipe out any Jewish traces on the site and call for joint supervision of the works, an option the Palestinians have categorically rejected.
"On the archaeological level, it is a huge disaster. Not only Jewish, but Islamic and Christian artefacts are being destroyed. It is everybody's heritage and what is going on is criminal," said Mazar, whose father Binyamin was one of the first archaeologists to search the site after Israel seized it in the 1967 war.
"But the most urgent concern is that tens of thousands of people are going to visit the mosque for Ramadan later this year and their lives will be at risk," she told AFP.
Adnan Husseini, who heads the Waqf -- or Islamic trust running the site -- dismissed the charges as a political move and turned the accusation against the Israelis, blaming their own excavations of a tunnel which runs along the nearby Western, or Wailing Wall.
"The issue of the bulge is not new. We have been monitoring it for a long time. We had a timetable to finish the restoration before Ramadan but the Israelis prevented us from continuing," he told AFP.
But according to the Israeli Antiquities Authority, the bulge has now sagged to a depth of 1.5 metres from 70 centimeters a year ago, and Mazar refuses to make it a political issue.
"Everything is political in Jerusalem. But does this mean nothing should be done?" she exclaimed. "Closing down the mosque is now a necessity. Who is going to take resoponsibility for the hundreds of people who will get killed if the wall collapses?"
A mysterious 12-inch stain on the nearby Wailing Wall -- Judaism's holy of holys -- stirred great excitement in July before experts found out it was caused by resin squeezed from the broken root of a shrub growing between the stones.
Some Jewish groups say it as a sign that the Messiah was about to return.
The bulge, hidden by scaffoldings which have not been used in months, has become the new tourist attraction in Jerusalem. But this time, Israeli newspapers were splashed with alarming scenarios of regional chaos.
"It looks like a scenario that could ignite the entire region: part of the Temple Mount collapses, hundreds of worshippers are killed, thousands more stream to the holy place in fury," the Maariv newspaper said Wednesday.
The new dispute comes amid renewed tensions between Israel's Jewish and Muslim communities and four days after the Israeli Islamic Movement, which cooperated with the Waqf for the excavations, drew 40,000 people to the compound for its annual convention.
When the intifada erupted, access the site was banned to non-Muslims.
In an editorial entitled "How We Lost the Mount", the top-selling daily explained: "The government's hands are tied. It will not allow, in these days of record tensions, the entry of Jews to the Temple Mount... but closing the gate to Jews signals the loss of any chance to exercise Israeli sovereignty over the Mount."
Israel warns bulge in Jerusalem wall could turn deadly
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM (AFP) — Israeli experts warned Wednesday that a bulge in the wall supporting Al Haram Al Sharif Mosque compound could collapse at any moment and ignite tensions across the region, a charge Palestinians dismissed as a bid to extend Israeli control of the site.
The compound was setting passions ablaze again, two days after members of the “Israeli Committee to Prevent the Destruction of Antiquities on the Temple Mount” sent an urgent warning to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon over a 11-metre-wide swelling in the wall.
“In the current context of the Intifada, this appears to have a very political implication,” said Khaled Nashef, the director of the Palestinian Institute of Archaeology at Bir Zeit University near Ramallah.
The bulge is located on the southern side of the wall which buttresses Al Aqsa Mosque compound, the third holiest site in Islam and a traditional political flash point where the Palestinian Intifada erupted two years ago following a provocative visit by then opposition leader Sharon.
Israelis allege the mosque compound is built atop the remains of a Jewish temple, destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD and which they consider the holiest site in Judaism.
Eilat Mazar, who heads the committee, said she warned the government nine months ago that the Palestinians were carrying out “illegal excavations,” creating a vacuum in important supporting soil and causing the bulge in the exterior wall of an area known as Solomon's Stables.
Members of the committee accuse the Palestinians of attempting to wipe out any “Jewish traces” on the site and call for joint supervision of the works, an option the Palestinians have categorically rejected.
“On the archaeological level, it is a huge disaster. Not only Jewish, but Islamic and Christian artefacts are being destroyed. It is everybody's heritage and what is going on is criminal,” said Mazar, whose father Binyamin was one of the first archaeologists to search the site after Israel seized it in the 1967 war.
“But the most urgent concern is that tens of thousands of people are going to visit the mosque for Ramadan later this year and their lives will be at risk,” she told AFP.
Adnan Husseini, who heads the Waqf — or Islamic trust running the site — dismissed the charges as a political move and turned the accusation against the Israelis, blaming their own excavations of a tunnel which runs along the nearby Wailing Wall.
“The issue of the bulge is not new. We have been monitoring it for a long time. We had a timetable to finish the restoration before Ramadan but the Israelis prevented us from continuing,” he told AFP.
But according to the Israeli antiquities authority, the bulge has now sagged to a depth of 1.5 metres from 70 centimetres a year ago, and Mazar refuses to make it a political issue.
“Everything is political in Jerusalem. But does this mean nothing should be done?” she exclaimed. “Closing down the mosque is now a necessity. Who is going to take responsibility for the hundreds of people who will get killed if the wall collapses?”
A mysterious 12-inch stain on the nearby Wailing Wall stirred great excitement in July before experts found out it was caused by resin squeezed from the broken root of a shrub growing between the stones.
Some Jewish groups say it was a sign that the Messiah was about to return.
The bulge, hidden by scaffoldings which have not been used in months, has become the new tourist attraction in Jerusalem. But this time, Israeli newspapers were splashed with alarming scenarios of regional chaos.
“It looks like a scenario that could ignite the entire region: Part of the Temple Mount collapses, hundreds of worshippers are killed, thousands more stream to the holy place in fury,” the Maariv newspaper said Wednesday.
The new dispute comes amid renewed tensions between Israel's Jewish and Muslim communities and four days after the Israeli Islamic Movement, which cooperated with the Waqf for the excavations, drew 40,000 people to the compound for its annual convention.
When the Intifada erupted, access to the site was banned to non-Muslims.
In an editorial entitled “How We Lost the Mount,” the daily explained: “The government's hands are tied. It will not allow, in these days of record tensions, the entry of Jews to the Temple Mount... but closing the gate to Jews signals the loss of any chance to exercise Israeli sovereignty over the Mount.”
(Jewish Chronicle)
9-1-2
BERLIN -- One of Germany's largest pro-Israel demonstrations in recent memory took place in Berlin last Saturday--but with no support from German Jewish groups, and severe criticism from some.
The some 3,000 demonstrators--waving Israeli flags, blowing shofars and marching under the slogan "Germany on Israel's Side"--were nearly all fundamentalist Christians who oppose a Palestinian state and view Jews as unfulfilled until they accept Jesus as their saviour.
In leaflets distributed at the march, the Union of Jewish Students in Germany decried the missionary goals and the anti-Muslim preachings of some of the organisers.
But Mordechai Lewy, deputy chief of mission at the Israeli Embassy, told the JC: "If someone is demonstrating for Israel, for a just cause, shall I tell him, please don't demonstrate?"
The Jewish student group said that, while it stood firmly with Israel, it would not join hands with the marchers. "Many fundamentalist groups do not recognise the right of Jews to exist if they do not believe in Jesus," said the UJSG's leaflet. "We sharply condemn this goal."
The students also distanced themseves from the right-wing political agenda promoted by some of the demonstration's organisers, one of whom had been quoted as saying that Israel should wage "a holy war against those who hate you, oh God."
"We completely reject this incitement against Muslims," the students said. Gunter Keil--head of The Bridge Berlin- Jerusalem, the fundamentalist Christian organisation behind the demonstration--rejected the criticism.
Although he maintained that Judaism was "completed" through Jews' acceptance of Jesus, he said his group did " not have a division devoted to a mission to the Jews."
He added: "We have nothing against the Palestinian people. But for us, the Palestinians are Arabs. The word 'Palestinian' is made up . . . so there can't be a Palestinian state in Israel." He said the demonstrators had chosen to march on a Saturday to make it clear that the Israeli Embassy and Jewish groups were not involved in the planning.
But the embassy did publicise the event in its electronic newsletter, and Ambassador Shimon Stein accepted a statement of support from the group, with more than 6,000 signatures gathered through its Jerusalem-Shalom website, at the embassy the day before the march.
Some communally involved political analysts said that they found the tacit partnership with Christian fundamentalist groups troubling.
"I share the goal to show solidarity with Israel, but I see certain problems here," said Martin Kloke, an analyst of Israeli-German relations. "Some of these groups only support Israel because they think Israel and the Jews have a certain role in the apocalyptic times in which they think we now live."
Mr Kloke added that some of the fundamentalists had made statements implying that the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had been a punishment from God, to prevent Israel from giving away land.
Mr Lewy said that by implication to justify the Rabin assassination was "lunacy," but added that more generally, given international criticism of Jerusalem in recent months, there "should not be a witchhunt against people who are ready to do something for Israel."
At the march, information from the Israeli Embassy and the Jewish National Fund was handed out alongside fundamentalist Christian literature.
"We have so few friends in Germany in this horrible time in Israel," commented Sara Rozenbaum, who represents the JNF in Germany.
"Our Christian friends are always with us on the front line for Israel." Ms Rozenbaum, who is Jewish, said that she "tried not to think about" the missionary issue and the march organisers' strongly voiced opposition to the establishment of a Palestinian state.
(The Scotsman)
8-27-2
Global warming is being accelerated by a massive drop in the tiny organisms that absorb CO2 in the North Atlantic, NASA satellites have revealed.
The latest results are highly significant and could help explain some of the decline in fish stocks and weather changes.
They are based on a 20-year snapshot of the ocean which has seen phytoplankton levels drop by 14 per cent in the North Atlantic and 30 per cent in the North Pacific.
Phytoplankton serve as food to other species so any reduction in their level ultimately affects the numbers of fish in the sea. Phytoplankton also currently account for half the transfer of CO2 from the atmosphere back into the biosphere by photosynthesis - a process in which plants absorb CO2 from the air for growth. Since CO2 acts as a heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, phytoplanton helps reduce the rate it accumulates and may mitigate global warming.
Scientists from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) say warmer ocean temperatures and low winds may be depriving the tiny ocean plants of nutrients.
Images from NASA's Nimbus 7 satellite taken between 1979 and 1986 were compared to those taken by the OrbView 2 satellite from 1997 to 2000. The images were also supplemented with information from ocean buoys and research vessels.
The results showed that phytoplankton levels have declined substantially since the 1980s.
However, at the same time phytoplankton levels in open water areas near the equator have increased significantly - by more than 50 per cent - but since most phytoplankton is concentrated in the north there was an overall decrease globally.
The authors of the study, Watson Gregg of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre and Margarita Conkright of NOAA's National Oceanographic Data Centre, also discovered what appears to be an association between more recent regional climate changes - higher sea surface temperatures and reductions in surface winds - and areas where phytoplankton levels have dropped.
A warmer ocean surface layer reduces mixing with cooler, deeper nutrient-rich waters. A reduction in winds can also limit the availability of nutrients being stirred up to generate more phytoplankton. However, the scientists still do not know if the loss of phytoplankton, which thrive on sunlight and nutrients, is a long-term trend or a climate cycle.
Since the whole ocean food chain depends on phytoplankton, a significant change could indicate a shift in our climate.
One of the world's leading marine scientists, Dr Martin Angel, said the findings were "very important".
Dr Angel, UK co-ordinator of the International Year of the Ocean, said he was now convinced global warming was happening and man was a major cause.
Dr Angel, who believes deep sea fishing should be banned in at least a third of oceans, said the decline in phytoplankton had massive implications not just for the climate but also for the whole ecosystem, including fishing.
8/29/2002
PROVINCETOWN, Mass. (AP) At least seven North Atlantic right whales, the world's rarest, recently were spotted entangled in fishing gear off the East Coast, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service.
At least four of the whales are severely entangled and could die, Scott Landry, spokesman for the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, told the Cape Cod Times.
Among the most serious is a young whale in Canada's Bay of Fundy. The whale has line wrapped around its upper jaw, head, and flippers and tail.
''The animal is pretty effectively hogtied,'' Landry said. ''It will likely die without intervention.''
The center delivered equipment to Candadian rescue teams over the weekend, including a tool used last summer during attempts to sedate an entangled whale known as Churchill. The effort failed and Churchill died.
Landry called a similar attempt for the young right whale a last-ditch option.
During a Saturday rescue attempt, a tracking buoy attached to line trailing the whale detached, and could not be reattached while the whale took long dives and avoided rescuers.
Unpredictable conditions mean Provincetown teams won't go to Canada unless a buoy is reattached, Landry said. Even in summer, rescuers must contend with high winds, fog and high seas, Landry said.
There are only about 300 North Atlantic right whales left, researchers say. They are listed as an endangered species.
08/29/02
LISBON (Reuters) - A giant squid has washed up on a Portuguese beach, a rare occurrence for the deep-water creature, a museum spokeswoman said on Thursday.
Bathers found the dead 21.5-foot-long animal on Wednesday on a beach near Melides, about 50 miles south of Lisbon, a spokeswoman for the Oceanographic Museum of Portinho da Arrabida said.
Nature reserve workers transported the 110-pound cephalopod to the museum, she said. It has been frozen awaiting examination and classification.
Giant squid normally live at depths of 1,600 to 3,300 feet, and usually sink when they die.
A giant squid with tentacles measuring at least 15 yards in length washed up on an Australian beach in July.
(by Tom Flocco of AmericanFreePress.net * And Scoop.co.nz)
August 28, 2002
Saudi Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz, an Osama bin Laden benefactor, has laundered money into tax-exempt U.S. entities for years as a foreign financier of terrorism. But a new 9/11 lawsuit is thrusting Mahfouz’s latent past business links to George W. Bush back into the spotlight and raising important questions about links between Saudi finance and terrorism in America.
Bush Financier & Osama Bin Laden’s Brother In Law
Nine hundred families of September 11 victims recently filed a trillion-dollar lawsuit against members of the royal Saudi family, businessmen worth a combined $5 billion, and banks and charities. The lawsuit accuses them of financing Osama bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, and the Taliban government. And one of the defendants - Saudi Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz -- will likely draw increasing attention in coming months due to his past business relationships with President George W. Bush - the sweetheart deals he made during the elder Bush's presidency.
According to a Saudi government audit acquired by U.S. intelligence officials, five of Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest businessmen, including National Commercial Bank (NCB) founder and chairman Khalid bin Mahfouz, transferred personal funds along with $3 million diverted from a Saudi pension fund, to New York and London banks with accounts linked to terrorism. (USA Today, 10-28-99)
The money transfers were discovered in April, 1999 after the royal family ordered an audit of both NCB and Sheikh Mahfouz.
The plot thickens when we find Mahfouz is also linked by marriage to terrorist Osama bin Laden, as Mahfouz’s sister is married to the Al Qaeda leader, according to not only former CIA Director James Woolsey in 1998 Senate testimony, but also Jean-Charles Brisard, lead 9/11 lawsuit attorney Ronald Motley's researcher, and author of the book, The Forbidden Truth.
Motley’s 9/11 lawsuit alleges that Saudi money has “for years been funneled to encourage radical anti-Americanism as well as to fund the Al Qaeda terrorists,“ a fact not taken lightly by 9/11 family members fighting back tears at the podium during Motley’s recent press conference.
NCB deposited the money into accounts of such Islamic charities as Islamic Relief -- and Blessed Relief, where Mahfouz’s son Abdul Rahman serves on the board in Sudan. Senior U.S. intelligence officials said Mahfouz and others transferred, “tens of millions of dollars to bank accounts linked to indicted terrorist Osama bin Laden.”
Powerful Washington, D.C. law firm Akin, Gump, Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP has earned hefty fees representing Mahfouz, other billionaire Saudi businessmen and the Texas-based Islamic charity, Holy Land Foundation – the largest in America -- which FBI officials fingered as a terrorist front organization in America. And two of Bush’s closest Texas friends, James C. Langdon and George R. Salem -- chair of Arab-Outreach in his 2000 campaign -- are partners at Akin, Gump. (Boston Herald, 12-11-2001)
Five days before September 11, the FBI raided Holy Land’s internet firm InfoCom Corporation, indicating pre-attack investigative interest in the charity‘s links to terrorism.
But no reports indicate whether the FBI has asked the President’s friends at Akin, Gump about financial dealings with the U.S. firm’s terrorist-connected Saudi clients.
Charles Lewis, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, a political watchdog group, said “Akin, Gump’s willingness to represent Saudi power brokers probed for links to terrorism presents a unique ethical concern since partners at the firm are so close to the president.”
Does George W. Bush Have Something To Hide?
Mahfouz’s past also includes business dealings with George W. Bush, having invested $50,000 in the younger Bush’s first company, Arbusto Energy, through his U.S. representative James R. Bath, an aircraft broker and friend of Mr. Bush from their days together in the Texas Air National Guard. (Wall Street Journal (WSJ), “Vetting the Frontrunners: From Oil to Baseball to the Governor’s Mansion,” 9-28-1999)
Legal papers regarding Bath's contested divorce listed one of his assets as a $50,000 investment in Arbusto Oil -- Bush's first company. Moreover, Bath's business partner said he had no substantial money of his own at the time he made the Arbusto investment, implying that Bath received the money from someone else: "Most of Bath's investments....were really fronts for Mahfouz and other Saudis connected with the Bank of Credit and Commerce (BCCI)." (The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride Into the Secret Heart of BCCI, Random House, Beaty & Gwynne, 1993, page 229.)
Award-winning author and journalist at the Houston Chronicle and “The Economist,” Peter Brewton, consulted James R. Bath’s resume and wrote that in early summer 1976 Bath received a huge business break:
“Bath was named a trustee for Sheikh Salem bin Laden of Saudi Arabia [half-brother of Osama bin Laden], a member of the family that owns the largest construction company in the Middle East. Bath’s job was to handle all of bin Laden’s North American investments and operations.” ( The Mafia, CIA, and George Bush, Shapolsky Book Pub., 1992) [Simon & Schuster had first signed Brewton, then decided not to publish his book]
Shortly thereafter, Bath also began working for billionaire Sheikh Mahfouz, NCB banker for Saudi billionaire financier Abdullah Bakhsh. Meanwhile, George Junior’s failing Arbusto company was renamed Bush Exploration -- hoping to trade on his father‘s increasing importance; however, it was soon merged with Spectrum 7 Energy, as oil prices were collapsing.
While hard times continued for Spectrum, in 1988 Harken Energy Corporation absorbed the company, according to WSJ. And in return for adding the famous Bush name as a corporate asset, Texas-based Harken in effect bailed out the future president’s failing fortunes with generous stock options, a salaried seat on Harken’s board of directors, low-interest loans, and other helpful perks. [ Harken Energy: George W.‘s Perfect Storm, 7-15-2002 -- http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0207/S00104.htm ]
The astute Saudi billionaires sought to develop intimate financial relationships with the upwardly mobile political Bushes, even using their Arkansas connections to pull off some deals.
Bakhsh’s Saudi banker Khalid bin Mahfouz and Bill Clinton’s close Stephens Company friend, David Edwards -- representing Bakhsh’s U.S. interests -- arranged for Bakhsh to purchase 17% of Harken Energy in 1987, as Harken also began to struggle with debt, while sorely in need of a cash infusion -- in this case, $25 million from Saudi Arabia.
After the Saudi money propped up Harken, reports revealed that Bakhsh’s other U.S. associate, Palestinian-born Chicago businessman Talet Othman, was given a seat on Harken’s board with George Bush Jr. -- the President‘s son -- further linking them both to Saudi interests. But the financial bail-out came with a political quid pro quo: a seat at President George H. W. Bush’s White House foreign policy table.
The WSJ added that by 1990, Othman began attending White House meetings with the elder Bush to discuss Middle East policy -- begging the question whether 9/11 victim families’ future terrorist sponsor Mahfouz and his wealthy Saudi banking client Bakhsh had purchased political, military, and financial influence within the Bush Administration.
According to Fortunate Son by James H. Hatfield, after George W’s Harken Energy drilling contract with Bahrain was signed, Mahfouz and Bakhsh saw to it that Othman was added to a list of fifteen Arabs who met with President George H. W. Bush, then-White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu [father of New Hampshire’s current U.S. Senate candidate John E. Sununu], and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, three times in 1990 -- once just two days after Iraq invaded Kuwait -- to discuss Middle East policy.
WHITE IN THE NICK OF TIME
Saudi banker Mahfouz and construction magnate Salem bin Laden’s U.S. representative James Bath had a close business associate named Charles W. “Bill” White. Time Magazine reporters Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne described the former Navy fighter pilot as the All-American Boy -- and Bath’s quiet personality required a complement:
“After the navy he [White] put away his combat decorations, earned a Harvard Business degree and returned to Texas to become a well-paid investment point man for a lot of heavy-hitting Republicans....He was sponsored by another Harvard MBA, Lloyd Bentsen, Jr., son of the Texas senator. Young Bentsen had discovered White on a Harvard recruiting trip....looking for someone who could handle discreet private investments.”
“As White explained it, Bentsen suggested he should look up a Houston businessman named James Bath, who was in real estate and aircraft sales, and represented some of the richest Arab sheikhs. Bath, also a friend of George Bush, Jr., was looking for a business partner. Bentsen thought that since Bath was also a former fighter pilot, the two men would have a lot in common.” ( The Outlaw Bank)
White and Bath became partners; and predictably, they were successful in a number of land development deals. White was the affable front man, while George Junior’s friend James Bath quietly found the investors -- including Saudi billionaires. “Bath told me that he was in the CIA. He told me he was recruited by George H. W. Bush himself in 1976,” when the elder Bush was CIA Director, according to Beaty’s interview with White.
White added further, “That made sense to me, especially in light of what I had seen once we went into business together. He [Bath] said that [CIA Director] Bush wanted him involved with the Arabs, and to get into the aviation business.”
John Mecklin, investigative reporter for the Houston Post, independently verified Jim Bath’s CIA connections -- and that he was also future president George Jr.’s Air National Guard friend -- as Beaty had corroborated in the White interview for The Outlaw Bank.
Moreover, White said the elder Bush recruited Bath to monitor the activities of his Saudi Arabian investors, as Beaty confirmed the elder’s friendship with Bath for himself: “White said that one time in 1982 he and Bath were at the Ramada Club in Houston when Vice-President Bush walked in. Bush waved at Bath and said, ‘Hi, Jim,’ according to White.”
Texas ties became a habit with Bath’s future terrorist financier, author Peter Brewton implied, when in 1979 Mahfouz purchased the Houston River Oaks mansion of Chester Reed, father-in-law of John Ballis, who pled guilty to Savings and Loan fraud. Mahfouz paid $4.23 million through Houston’s Baker & Botts -- a law firm traversing many Bush family business deals -- which handled the Saudi Sheikh’s Houston land investments through James Bath. Wide reports say Mahfouz still owns the Texas mansion.
Time’s Beaty and Gwynne chronicled the terrorist financier’s alleged 1985 sweetheart purchase of the Texas Commerce Bank Tower for $200 million during the mid-1980s Texas oil-business crash. Bath’s partner Bill White said Mahfouz’s purchase greatly benefited the fortunes of President Bush 41’s confidant and Secretary of State James Baker, Baker & Botts law firm, and Baker’s family -- founders and principal holders of Texas Commerce stock.
Beaty said the Tower was built for $140 million at the apex of the oil boom; but Mahfouz paid the elder Bush’s family friends $200 million at the bottom of the real estate crash, when commercial office space couldn't be given away. And interestingly, Mafouz’s partner in that purchase, Saudi-based billionaire Rafik Hariri, also over-paid Florida Senator Bill Nelson $2 million more than the assessed value to buy his McLean, Virginia home in 1989 -- illustrating the penetration of Saudi financial corruption in Congress.
Mahfouz also bought into Houston’s Main Bank as a partner with Bath and former Texas Governor John Connally in 1976. And in 1981 Mercantile Texas Corporation/Capital Bank -- soon to become MCorp -- bought Main Bank from Sheikh Mahfouz:
Strangely, The Outlaw Banknoted that “Houston’s Main Bank made news when a bank examiner discovered that the small Texas bank was purchasing $100 million in hundred-dollar bills each month from the Federal Reserve Bank -- an amount that dwarfed its miniscule asset base. That was strange, but there was nothing illegal about it.”
However, Bill White also told Jonathan Beaty that Bath had been investigated by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) while the two were partners, adding “the DEA suspected Bath was using his planes to fly currency to the Cayman Islands, although they didn’t know why, since drugs didn’t seem to be involved.” Curiously, the probe ended.
Media interest may increase now, however, as Federal Reserve financial records are likely to be subpoenaed by Ron Motley and the 9/11victim families, detailing the inordinate amount of currency that passed through Mahfouz’s small Houston, Texas bank -- and the curiously indulgent investigation of Bath and the Federal Reserve by the DEA.
Even to the uninitiated, the Caymans are synonymous with corruption and circumvention of the law. Thus it will fall to court depositions, subpoenas, and political pressure from 9/11 victim families to question why stacks of U.S. currency from the Federal Reserve Bank were flown into the Caymans by Saudi-backed representatives like James Bath -- friend to the President‘s son -- let alone where the cash went, whether is was looted from the U.S. Treasury via Federal Reserve fiscal maneuverings, and to what extent the practice continues -- given current world terrorism.
Evidence points toward such “tax havens” as financial conduits for September 11 terrorism -- not just money-laundering refuges for current corporate wrongdoing, drug lords, organized crime, and those seeking to avoid a voracious U.S. tax system.
Michigan Senator Carl Levin’s February, 2001 Minority Banking Report calls correspondent banking the “gateway to money laundering,” a financial technique wherein
illicit money is moved from bank to bank with no questions asked, thereby cleansing funds
prior to being used for legitimate purposes.
Banks in the Caymans which are not licensed, for example, gain access to American financial markets by establishing “correspondent” relationships with U.S. banks that are.
Thus, Saudi financial supporters of terrorism such as Khalid bin Mahfouz are able to move millions from one country to another.
Strangely, given wide reports that Saudi billionaires are and have been financing terrorism in the United States for years, President Bush has still not issued a freeze on all correspondent transactions linked to banks in Saudi Arabia -- since most of the hijackers were Saudi nationals. [ See Executive Order 3224 Blocking Terrorist Property, The White House, 9-23-2001 http://www.banking.state.ny.us/il01102a.pdf ]
A Washington Post report (9-29-20010) also questioned “why [Bush’s] original Executive Order did not name any banks,” as the President has the power to freeze American monetary operations connected to global banks with institutions in countries refusing to cooperate in the terrorist finance probe. Thus Saudi financial scrutiny has been avoided.
Three months later, on December 31, 2001, a U.S. State Department memo revealed that the President again declined to deal with middle eastern banks, by announcing that assets of one German and five Irish terrorist-linked organizations had been frozen.
Still left off the frozen assets list were all banks linked to the epicenter of terrorist finances in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain, where Bush 41 campaign contributors and Bush 43 have carried on personal financial business in the past via Harken Energy Corporation.
[ 12-31-2001 State Dept. Memo http://usinfo.state.gov/topical/pol/terror/02010202 ]
However, given documented monetary ties to U.S. terrorism, exemplified by Mahfouz and other Saudis, cable TV news interviews now reflect a growing victim family outrage regarding secret 9/11 congressional hearings postponed till late September -- and lack of truth and accountability. [See … Secret Hearings Conceal 9/11 Terrorist Links to Congress & White House
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0208/S00045.htm ]
MAHFOUZ’S MALFEASANCE
Osama Bin Laden
The world’s most wanted, has business connections to George Bush.
Osama bin Laden‘s brother-in-law, Sheikh Khalid, “remained at NCB until he was indicted in 1992 on charges that he had schemed to defraud depositors, regulators and auditors of the insolvent BCCI,” according to Brewton in The Mafia, CIA, and George Bush.
At the same time, the Federal Reserve Board announced that it found Mahfouz and NCB had violated American banking laws in trying to acquire Washington-based First American Bancshares in concert with BCCI.
Shortly thereafter, a federal judge signed an order freezing Sheikh Khalid’s U.S. assets, including a luxury penthouse apartment on Fifth Avenue in New York and stock in MCorp,” according to Brewton. [The value of MCorp stock, however, was next to useless -- Newsweek reported on 2-18-2002 that the company had gone bankrupt in 1989] Conveniently, however, the New York court permitted the Saudi billionaire-turned terrorist sponsor to pay the U.S. a settlement fine of $225 million to let him walk away.
In what is probably the most thoroughly-sourced book ever written about George W. Bush [literally thousands of credible newspaper articles, archived document lists, interview sources, and online reports collected may alone be worth the cost of the book], author J. H. Hatfield details George W.‘s friend James Bath’s incredible saga as the personal representative of terrorist -linked Khalid bin Mahfouz, one of the 9/11 victim family defendants:
“A deal broker whose alleged associations run from the CIA to a major shareholder and director of the Bank of Credit and Commerce (BCCI). BCCI was closed down in July 1991 amid charges of multi-billion dollar fraud and worldwide news reports that the institution had been involved in covert intelligence work, drug money laundering, arms brokering, bribery of government officials, and aid to terrorists. An accounting commissioned by the Bank of England finally exposed the extent of BCCI’s deficits and criminal offenses, forcing the bank’s eventual collapse.” ( Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President, St. Martin’s Press, November, 1999, and Soft Skull Press, 2000, by J. H. Hatfield)
Victim family scrutiny of Federal Reserve financial records related to BCCI, Islamic charity documents and bank accounts -- but also political pressure to make public the Saudi audit of Mahfouz will go a long way toward ascertaining just how much money bin Laden’s brother-in-law laundered through U.S. and foreign banks to financially support the killers of their loved ones. Moreover, Beaty and Gwynne indicate that Ron Motley and his legal team will not have an easy time of it, as corruption’s previous tracks have been well-covered:
“Sami Masri began talking again, the hushed words tumbling out painting a detailed, vivid picture of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International’s global involvement with drug shipments, smuggled gold, stolen military secrets, assassinations, bribery, extortion, covert intelligence operations, and weapons deals. These were the province of a Karachi-based (Pakistan) cadre of bank operatives, paramilitary units, spies, and enforcers who handled BCCI’s darkest operation around the globe and trafficked in bribery and corruption. As the plane began its long descent, both men (Jonathan Beaty) sat silently, lost in their thoughts. ( The Outlaw Bank, page 66)
SKYWAYS AIRCRAFT LEASING AND OTHER TEXAS TALES
The Cayman Islands
Home to sun, surf and dirty money looking for a laundry.
Perhaps Mahfouz’s most interesting Houston investment through his agent, CIA-linked Jim Bath, was Skyways Aircraft Leasing. Skyways began on July 2, 1980 as a company called Cotopax Investments, registered in the Cayman Islands, according to Pete Brewton’s The Mafia, CIA & George Bush.
In off-shore, money-laundering, “shell-corporation” traditional style, the Skyways Board of Directors met one week before Cotomax notified the Cayman Island authorities that the company name had been changed -- after 29 days.
“The directors named Mahfouz’s envoy James Bath as president and director, and then resigned. All of the stock was made into bearer stock, which meant that it belonged to whoever possessed it,” according to Brewton.
And in his sworn lawsuit against Bill White, Bath refused to reveal the owners of Skyways stock. But Brewton’s research revealed that documents filed in another lawsuit indicated that Mahfouz owned Skyways.
One of the original subscribers to the renamed Cotopax Investments, Cayhaven Corporate Services, Ltd., was also a subscriber to I.C., Inc. -- incorporated in 1985 -- but curiously found in the very center of a chart drawn by Oliver North, found by investigators in North’s White House safe. The chart showed the private network that provided support and money to the Iran-Contras -- another story with multiple legs.
White told Jonathan Beaty that he believed Bath was using Skyways’ money, which may have belonged to the CIA, to speculate in Houston real estate. When the real estate market tanked, Bath turned on White for the money rather than tell Mahfouz and the CIA that he had lost it.
SAVING A BUCK OR TWO
Air Force One Taxiing At Ellington Field
Participated in fuel scam to fund Junior Bush’s business partner
In 1990, Houston Post’s John Mecklin reported that the Bush Administration’s Department of Defense (DOD) was paying millions of dollars more than necessary by buying aviation fuel from Mahfouz surrogate Jim Bath’s Southwest Airport Services company at Houston’s Ellington Field.
Southwest was charging government military aircraft anywhere from 22 cents a gallon to over 40 cents more than the price the Air National Guard base at Ellington was paying to buy its jet fuel. Even George the elder’s Air Force One regularly participated in the scam each time it pulled into Houston -- consistently using Bath’s privately owned Southwest Airport Services instead of Ellington Field’s less expensive government fueling station. (Time, “Mysterious Mover of Money and Planes,” 10-28-1991)
Further illustrating the Saudi corruption of George Sr.'s administration at taxpayer expense, Mecklin reported that DOD paid Mahfouz stand-in, James Bath, more than $12 million in contract overruns for over-priced aviation fuel.
Mecklin estimated that between November, 1985 and November, 1989, the DOD paid Bath’s Southwest Airport Services more than $16.2 million for fuel under government contracts that should have cost about $3.6 million -- courtesy of American citizens.
Southwest even had a City of Houston lease at Ellington for $650 per month, won by Bath in a lottery, making the scheme possible; however, the lease had not been offered to anyone else for years, even though it was supposed to be temporary. Someone else was getting a private cut of the proceeds to pull off that kind of fraud; however, the Houston Post and Time revelations prompted no official investigations, leaving the American taxpayer holding the bag.
TRUTH, JUSTICE AND ACCOUNTABILITY
After a year of grieving, family members of brave firefighters and police, emergency medical service workers, brilliant Wall-Street minds, intrepid airline crews and passengers, and Pentagon military personnel are probably beginning to ask themselves: “What did the government know, and when did they know it?”
The unanswered questions linger each day, even as Congress has delayed open hearings and the Senate postpones consideration of an independent 9/11 Investigative Commission with three or four victim family members participating in the process -- perhaps waiting for the Second Gulf War (aka The First World Oil War) to eliminate 9/11 justice and accountability from the table altogether.
That Khalid bin Mahfouz and other Saudis have been financially linked to terrorist Osama bin Laden has been verified by U.S. Intelligence; but that notwithstanding, the seriousness of current events compels an additional awareness and understanding of the bin Laden benefactor’s strangely extensive financial associations with Houston, Texas entities – and powerful public persons.
For in a cryptic comment, former CIA official Larry Johnson once told the Washington Post:
“The Saudis have been complicit....It’s one of the dirty secrets.”
25/08/2002
(UKTelegraph)
Abu Nidal, the Palestinian terrorist, was murdered on the orders of Saddam Hussein after refusing to train al-Qa'eda fighters based in Iraq, The Telegraph can reveal.
Despite claims by Iraqi officials that Abu Nidal committed suicide after being implicated in a plot to overthrow Saddam, Western diplomats now believe that he was killed for refusing to reactivate his international terrorist network.
According to reports received from Iraqi opposition groups, Abu Nidal had been in Baghdad for months as Saddam's personal guest, and was being treated for a mild form of skin cancer.
While in Baghdad, Abu Nidal, whose real name was Sabri al-Banna, came under pressure from Saddam to help train groups of al-Qa'eda fighters who moved to northern Iraq after fleeing Afghanistan. Saddam also wanted Abu Nidal to carry out attacks against the US and its allies.
When Abu Nidal refused, Saddam ordered his intelligence chiefs to assassinate him. He was shot dead last weekend when Iraqi security forces burst into his apartment in central Baghdad. The body was taken to the hospital where he had had cancer treatment.
The Iraqi authorities later claimed that Abu Nidal had killed himself when confronted with evidence that he was involved in a plot to overthrow Saddam.
"There is no doubt that Abu Nidal was murdered on Saddam's orders," said a US official who has studied the reports. "He paid the price for not co-operating with Saddam's wishes."
Last week, American intelligence officials revealed that several high-ranking al-Qa'eda members had moved to northern Iraq where they had linked up with Iraqi intelligence officials.
It now transpires that Saddam was hoping to take advantage of Abu Nidal's presence in Baghdad to persuade him to use his considerable expertise in terrorist techniques to train al-Qa'eda fighters.
Abu Nidal worked closely with Saddam during the late 1970s and early 1980s to carry out a number of terrorist outrages in the Middle East and Europe, including the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador to London in 1982.
In recent years, Abu Nidal, who has been ill for many years, had scaled down his terror operations.
With the prospect increasing of the US launching a military campaign to overthrow Saddam, however, the Iraqi dictator was keen to combine Abu Nidal's expertise with the enthusiasm of al-Qa'eda's fanatical fighters to launch a fresh wave of terror attacks. In this way, Saddam hoped to disrupt Washington's plans to overthrow him.
The presence of al-Qa'eda fighters in Iraq has become a source of great concern in Washington.
US Defence Department officials said that a number of very senior al-Qa'eda members was now based in northern Iraq close to the Iranian border at Halabja.
Although Iraqi officials have denied any knowledge of the al-Qa'eda fighters' presence, Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, said last week that it was highly unlikely that they could have entered Iraq without Saddam's knowledge.
"There are al-Qa'eda in a number of locations in Iraq," he said. "In a vicious, repressive dictatorship that exercises near total control over its population, it's very hard to imagine that the government is not aware of what is taking place in the country."
August 23, 2002
(nytimes.com)
Ann Wilson, left, and Nancy Wilson of the group Heart. Ann Wilson discussed the Lap-band, a surgical device for obesity, on "The Early Show" last month. Ms. Wilson was paid to promote the device.
After learning that some celebrities who talked on its news programs about their health problems were being paid by drug companies, CNN has issued a new policy and will tell viewers about the stars' financial ties to corporations.
CNN will ask celebrities who want to talk about a medical issue whether they are being paid by a company, the network said. If so, the financial tie will be disclosed during the interview, CNN said.
Other news programs — including the "Today" show on NBC, "Good Morning America" on ABC and "The Early Show" on CBS — say that they have also become more careful after they learned that some Hollywood celebrities they had interviewed, including stars like Lauren Bacall and Kathleen Turner, had been paid to help promote drugs or other medical products on their programs.
Even a Hollywood agent who has benefited by working to link celebrities with drug companies says some of the practices have gone too far.
"The television networks and media people are not letting the public know what the connections are, which I don't think is great journalism," said Barry M. Greenberg, the president of Celebrity Connection in Los Angeles. "I think we all need to be clearer."
In the last year or so, dozens of movie, television and music stars, as well as sports celebrities, who are paid by drug and medical device companies, have appeared on talk shows and morning news programs to discuss ailments they or people close to them have. They often mention the drugs or other medical products by brand name without disclosing their ties to the company.
On Aug. 11, the same day that The New York Times published a report about the practice, CNN broadcast an interview with Ms. Turner, one of the company-paid celebrities, who discussed her battle with rheumatoid arthritis.
Ms. Turner is being paid by Amgen and Wyeth, the two companies that sell the drug Enbrel, to talk about her condition. She did not mention the drug by name in the CNN interview.
The two drug companies say they are trying to raise awareness about the disease and persuade people to see their doctors.
CNN issued its new policy the day after its interview with Ms. Turner.
"In light of recent attention involving paid celebrity endorsements, CNN became aware that some celebrities we interviewed about their health problems might be paid," said Sarah Cohn, a CNN spokeswoman. "We decided it was important for our viewers to be aware of that as part of any future interviews or features about a celebrity."
Executives at CBS say they also may have overlooked some celebrities' ties to medical companies.
"This is a brand new thing," said Marcy McGinnis, the senior vice president in charge of news coverage at CBS News.
Ms. McGinnis said producers at CBS had not looked into the financial ties of the rock singer Ann Wilson of the band Heart, to Inamed, a company that makes a medical device for the obese. A July 18 segment on "The Early Show" featured the musician and her doctor, Brian B. Quebbemann.
"The Early Show" ran part of a taped interview with Ms. Wilson where she said Inamed's Lap-band, a silicon band that is fastened around the stomach during surgery, was "a beautifully simple idea." Dr. Quebbemann performed the Lap-band surgery on Ms. Wilson in January.
Inamed, through Spotlight Health, a firm that specializes in creating celebrity marketing campaigns for medical companies, paid Ms. Wilson to promote the Lap-band.
Dr. Quebbemann promotes the Lap-band on his Web site and issued a news release on the day he appeared on "The Early Show," saying he hoped to perform the procedure on "many other patients."
At the time, Ms. McGinnis said, "it would not have occurred to us to even ask" about the singer's ties to Inamed.
From now on, she said, CBS will ask celebrities before the interview about their corporate connections and disclose them in the interview.
"It is another thing to add to the policy guide," Ms. McGinnis said.
Douglas Trigg, a spokesman for Inamed, said the company used Ms. Wilson in the campaign because "she wanted to talk about her struggle." Ms. Wilson and Dr. Quebbemann could not be reached for comment.
At ABC, Lisa Finkel, a spokeswoman for "Good Morning America," said that more than one producer was now asking the celebrities or the people representing them about any corporate ties before each interview.
"We've become much more vigilant," Ms. Finkel said.
One ABC official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that after Ms. Turner promoted a Web site used by Amgen and Wyeth to market Enbrel during a Feb. 19 interview with Diane Sawyer on "Good Morning America," producers began giving the show's hosts more information about medications before any interview. In that way, if a celebrity they were interviewing began promoting a product, the host could provide a more balanced point of view for viewers, the official said.
In recent months, some drug companies and their advertising agencies have developed new tactics, the executive said.
About a month after the interview with Ms. Turner, people representing Peggy Fleming, the Olympic gold medal skater, asked ABC whether she could appear on the show to talk about cholesterol and heart disease.
"Our producers asked if this was a drug pitch," the official said, and were told that it was not.
But near the beginning of the interview, Ms. Fleming said, "My doctor has put me on Lipitor and my cholesterol has dropped dramatically."
The show's co-host, Elizabeth Vargas, quickly responded, saying there were "plenty of drugs that you can use besides Lipitor," including Zocor and Pravachol. But by then Lipitor, which is made by Pfizer, had received an effective marketing plug.
Ms. Fleming told the audience she was working with a pharmaceutical company but did not say specifically that it was Pfizer.
Pfizer said it had made it clear to ABC that Ms. Fleming was working to promote Lipitor. "It was clearly stated to a producer," said Vanessa McGowan, a Pfizer spokeswoman.
Susan Lipton, Ms. Fleming's agent, said the skater wanted to tell people how to lower cholesterol because heart disease had killed her father and sister.
"It is something that is near and dear to her," Ms. Lipton said. "Peggy would never endorse a product that she does not take."
August 23, 2002
GENEVA (AP) - Zambia will have to accept donations of genetically modified food if it wants United Nations help to feed its starving population, the head of the U.N. food agency said Friday.
"There is no way that the World Food Program can provide the resources to feed these starving people without using food that has some biotech content," James Morris told reporters.
To underscore the point, Morris released a joint policy statement of the major U.N. food and health agencies - the World Food Program, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization - saying they believe genetically modified foods are safe.
The statement was issued amid debate about the use of biotech goods in food aid, particularly in southern Africa, where nearly 13 million people are at risk of starvation.
The WFP estimates that almost 2.5 million people in Zambia alone could starve if they do not receive urgent aid. But the Zambian government so far has refused to accept donations of food that is genetically modified. That includes food from the United States, which currently is supplying three-quarters of the food WFP has to distribute.
Zambia is concerned that the food may be a health risk, or that grains of cereal may be used for planting, contaminating crops that are not genetically modified and risking trade with the European Union. The EU has strict rules on imports of biotech crops.
"We respect their right to not use what we bring," Morris said. But, he added, "if external food resources are not made available for them, there will be widespread starvation and ultimately death, no question."
19th August 2002
(AP)
Russian satellites have discovered a river flowing 700 feet under the Sahara.
It carries enough water to supply 50,000 people and is said to surge with "colossal power".
No-one is certain of the source of the river near the desert city of Atar in Mauritania, north west Africa.
The Daily Express reports experts believe the river could help boost the economy of the whole country, most of which is sand and rocky desert.
It says the find was made by satellites which provided multi-dimensional and high precision photographs of the Earth's surface.
They were then analysed to predict underground resources. The water was discovered in a desert about 150 miles east of the Atlantic coast.
The Mauritanian government then asked Russian scientists to test for water near Atar.
They discovered a water current in a borehole at the spot identified by the satellites.
The paper quotes an expert on the project saying: "Such a fountain in the Sahara is really a world miracle."
August 25 2002
(canada.com)
An amateur astronomer says a huge, black object glided over Cow Bay in Canada early Tuesday morning, blocking out the stars and bringing with it an unnatural silence.
The woman watched a meteor, streaking from the Big Dipper, disappear behind an unidentified flying object in the clear night sky about 2:15 a.m.
“Suddenly, the sky started to go black, like someone was pulling a black curtain across the sky,” the woman, who doesn’t want her name published, wrote to Bedford’s Don Ledger, a pilot and part-time UFO researcher.
The object was triangular, and travelling very slowly, with the point at the back, she said. It seemed to be about 600 metres up — the height of planes from Shearwater airbase that fly over her house — and eventually covered the 25-metre clearing she was standing in, next to her home. Ledger calculates the triangle would be about 240 metres along each side.
And then there was the quiet.
“Pheasants that live on the other side of her fence, that are normally rustling around, got quiet; crickets stopped chirping … The normal night noises just stopped,” Ledger said, recounting the woman’s experience.
He hasn’t ruled out a military aircraft, but thinks it would be virtually impossible to make something that large travel that slowly unless it was lighter than air, like a blimp.
It certainly couldn’t be an American B-2 stealth bomber, although they are triangular in shape, Ledger said.
The stealth bombers emit a rumbling sound difficult to pinpoint, but not difficult to hear, he said.
“If you’ve ever seen one, you know they’re not silent,” he said.
A B-2 is about 21 metres in length, with a wingspan of about 52 metres.
The sighting is similar to others Ledger has heard of. In August 2000, a Halifax police officer reputedly saw a huge black triangle about 200 metres long fly overhead, but Ledger hasn’t tracked him down. Another person Ledger spoke to said he had seen a large black triangle near Pugwash in 1988.
When Ledger posted details of the sighting on the National UFO Reporting Center Web site (http://www.nwlink.com/~ufo
cntr/), one ufologist was intrigued by the quieting effect, Ledger said.
The ufologist e-mailed him with an account of two people who had seen a black triangle overhead, but when they tried to speak, they couldn’t hear each other, in spite of the silence.
A rash of triangular UFO sightings took place in Belgium around 1990, with many of the triangles exhibiting glowing lights, Ledger said.
One man photographed a UFO, and two Belgian air force F-16s followed one, but they were outpaced, even though the planes can travel at Mach Two, according to Ledger.
could become a health risk if let loose. (dfw.com)
field that vaporizes grenades and shells on impact has reportedly been developed by the UK Ministry of Defence.
Here's a good picture of the formation and an interview with the land owner. (earthfiles.com)
crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947? If you do, the government cover-up worked. Here's what really happened. (alienresistance.org)
08/23/02
HELENA, Mont., Aug 23 (Reuters) - A 22-year-old Montana woman has been charged with seeking to mail poisoned soft drinks to Britain's Prince William and U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy.
Tashala Hayman, 22, of Vaughn, Montana, north of Great Falls, stands charged with one count of mailing poison with intent to kill and one count of identity theft, officials said Friday.
Hayman appeared Wednesday at a detention hearing before federal magistrate Carolyn Ostby, who ruled her to be both dangerous and a flight risk and denied bail. An arraignment on the charges is set for Monday.
The Helena, Montana, Independent Record reported that Mark Seyler, an FBI agent based in Helena, testified that a package containing the poisoned soda and addressed to Kennedy, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts, was found last Thursday in the U.S. Capitol mail system by the FBI.
Cascade County Sheriff John Strandell told Reuters that Hayman came to his attention two weeks ago, after Spokane, Washington postal authorities informed him that she had ordered two pounds (0.9 kg) of sodium cyanide and left a Vaughn forwarding address.
"We got a search warrant for her house, and that's when we found the package addressed to Prince William," said Strandell.
He said that the package contained a bottle of Coca Cola and a handwritten note saying, "Have a Coke and a smile." The soft drink contained an undetermined amount of cyanide, Strandell said.
Acting on a tip from the Vaughn postmaster that Hayman had recently mailed a package to Senator Kennedy, Strandell notified the FBI.
Hayman rented a trailer house in Vaughn six months ago after moving from Spokane. According to Seyler, she had no previous criminal history.
But Hayman was recently charged in Great Falls with using a stolen debit card to buy a 9 mm handgun, while the identity theft charge arose when authorities determined that she was downloading blank social security cards on a personal computer and attempting to use false social security numbers.
By Michael Evans, Defence Editor
(Times Of London)
August 24, 2002
A TEAM of Americans and Russians have removed more than 100lb of highly enriched uranium from a nuclear research facility in Yugoslavia in a secret operation to prevent it being seized by terrorists.
The dawn “raid” on the Vinca Institute of Nuclear Sciences in Belgrade, protected by Yugoslav Army helicopters and 1,200 heavily armed troops, was the first joint effort by the US and Russia to retrieve weapons-grade nuclear material supplied by Moscow to research centres around the world. Under a Moscow-Washington agreement, America will help to finance a programme to retrieve all the research uranium from 17 countries formerly allied with the Soviet Union.
Since the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington and the discovery in Afghanistan of al-Qaeda plans to develop crude nuclear devices, the programme became a priority. A recent report by Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government in Washington said that there were 345 operating or idle research reactors in 58 countries that had highly enriched uranium that could be converted for use in a weapon by terrorists.
Matthew Bunn, one of the authors, said security at the research facilities ranged from “excellent to appalling”. He named the 16 other countries with Russian nuclear fuel as North Korea, China, Libya, Egypt, Uzbekistan, Romania, Ukraine, Belarus, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Kazakhstan, Syria, Vietnam, Latvia and Bulgaria.
The 48.1kg of highly enriched uranium — enough for at least two bombs — had been kept at the Vinca Institute since the 1970s. It was put in sealed containers and loaded into a lorry. Three lorries, two of them decoys, left with military escorts for Belgrade’s international airport.
The fuel, in the form of 5,000 rods of highly enriched uranium, was flown out of Belgrade in a Russian transport aircraft to Dimitrovgrad, southeast of Moscow, where it will be reprocessed, converting the 80 per cent enriched uranium into material that cannot be used in a bomb. The operation had been planned for a year. The media tycoon Ted Turner funded the operation with a £3.3 million donation from the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a non-proliferation foundation of which he is co-chairman.
Approval required a vote of the Yugoslav parliament, which was sworn to secrecy because of the fear that terrorists might try to hijack the fuel. Half Belgrade was closed off while the fuel was removed. The operation took 17 hours.
The next operation will be at a research facility in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, after the Government signed an agreement with Washington and Moscow. The Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency was involved in the removal negotiations.
There had been concerns that the plan had leaked out, because several Yugoslav scientists involved in research work at the Vinca Institute had written to a Belgrade newspaper complaining that a “national treasure” was to be removed.
The IAEA has written to all the recipient countries to ask if they would co-operate in a “take-back” programme.
8-22-2
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two uranium fuel plants in Virginia and Tennessee must immediately adopt stricter anti-terrorist measures such as more guards, vehicle barriers and patrols, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said on Thursday.
The plants, owned by BWX Technologies Inc. and Nuclear Fuel Services, take enriched uranium and make it into fuel for nuclear reactors.
The NRC said it ordered the two enrichment plants to adopt similar measures already put in place by U.S. nuclear power plants as a precaution after the Sept. 11 attacks.
The agency did not disclose details of its order, but said it included requirements for "increased patrols, augmented security forces and capabilities, additional security posts, installation of additional physical barriers, vehicle checks at greater standoff distances, enhanced coordination with law enforcement and military authorities, and more restricted site access controls."
The NRC in June said it was analyzing what devastation might occur if a fuel-laden commercial airliner crashed into a nuclear power reactor. The agency is also considering whether to order plants to conduct more frequent drills against potential sabotage or terrorist attacks.
Some U.S. lawmakers and activist groups are concerned that a Sept. 11-type attack against a nuclear plant or enrichment plant could release deadly radioactive materials.
Senate Democrats have endorsed a plant to federalize the privately employed security guards at plants, but that approach is opposed by the NRC and U.S. utilities.
Nuclear power plants provide about 20 percent of the nation's electricity.
SUNDAY MAY 05, 2002
(DRUDGE)
WASHINGTON TIMES reporter and bestselling author Bill Gertz is preparing to begin the fight of his life -- when next week he exposes, in unprecedented detail, America's intelligence failures.
MORE
Gertz has obtained highly classified documents and dispatches from within the CIA, the FBI and other national security agencies which detail a stunning collapse of intelligence on terrorists.
The CIA demanded to meet with Gertz's publisher, REGNERY.
The agency pleaded with the publisher not to reprint the leaked documents -- but the context of those docs will remain in the book, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.
Gertz is set to preview his controversial work BREAKDOWN on Sunday during ABC's THIS WEEK.
[The book ranked #1238 on AMAZON's hit parade Friday morning.]
Meanwhile, one senior Bush administration source challenged Gertz's patriotism for making public such sensitive information during wartime.
"Do we really need a book for sale in every store in America that outlines our weaknesses?" asked the administration source, who asked not to be named for this report. "If Mr. Gertz is trying to embarrass the country, I would simply ask, 'What is to gain?' And where is his loyalty?"
For his part, Gertz hopes his outline of dramatic intelligence failures [which cross several administrations] serves as a wake up call to citizens who watched helplessly as their nation was attacked by terrorists last year.
Bureaucrats with politically correct policies have left the United States dangerously exposed, warns Gertz, chapter after chapter after chapter.
(Associated Press)
8-22-2
WASHINGTON - In what the government describes as a bizarre coincidence, one U.S. intelligence agency was planning an exercise last Sept. 11 in which an errant aircraft would crash into one of its buildings. But the cause wasn't terrorism - it was to be a simulated accident.
Officials at the Chantilly, Virginia-based National Reconnaissance Office had scheduled an exercise that morning in which a small corporate jet would crash into one of the four towers at the agency's headquarters building after experiencing a mechanical failure.
The agency is about 4 miles (6 kilometers) from the runways of Washington Dulles International Airport.
Agency chiefs came up with the scenario to test employees' ability to respond to a disaster, said spokesman Art Haubold. No actual plane was to be involved ó to simulate the damage from the crash, some stairwells and exits were to be closed off, forcing employees to find other ways to evacuate the building.
"It was just an incredible coincidence that this happened to involve an aircraft crashing into our facility," Haubold said. "As soon as the real world ( news - Y! TV) events began, we canceled the exercise."
Terrorism was to play no role in the exercise, which had been planned for several months, he said.
Adding to the coincidence, American Airlines Flight 77 ó the Boeing 767 that was hijacked and crashed into the Pentagon ( news - web sites) ó took off from Dulles at 8:10 a.m. on Sept. 11, 50 minutes before the exercise was to begin. It struck the Pentagon around 9:40 a.m., killing 64 aboard the plane and 125 on the ground.
The National Reconnaissance Office operates many of the nation's spy satellites. It draws its personnel from the military and the CIA ( news - web sites).
After the Sept. 11 attacks, most of the 3,000 people who work at agency headquarters were sent home, save for some essential personnel, Haubold said.
An announcement for an upcoming homeland security conference in Chicago first noted the exercise.
In a promotion for speaker John Fulton, a CIA officer assigned as chief of NRO's strategic gaming division, the announcement says, "On the morning of September 11th 2001, Mr. Fulton and his team ... were running a pre-planned simulation to explore the emergency response issues that would be created if a plane were to strike a building. Little did they know that the scenario would come true in a dramatic way that day."
The conference is being run by the National Law Enforcement and Security Institute.
8-25-2
(RENSE.com)
9-5-2
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Virginia health officials said on Thursday they were investigating two reported cases of malaria in Loudoun County involving two teens who contracted the disease without traveling overseas.
The teenagers live in the same suburban area west of Washington and have no recent history of travel outside of the United States, leading officials to suspect that infected mosquitoes passed on parasites picked up from a visitor to the county.
"I would say most likely that somebody was in the community for a finite period of time who was a visitor from a malaria endemic region," Virginia state epidemiologist, Dr. John Marr told reporters at a news conference.
Humans get malaria from the bite of an infected mosquito.
The Virginia cases involve a 15-year-old boy who began feeling ill on Aug. 12 and a 19-year-old woman who became ill on Aug. 20, health officials said.
"The day that I went into the hospital I had a temperature of 105.8 and that was an emergency, so my mom took me into the hospital. And after about a few hours in the emergency room they diagnosed me with malaria," Jonathan Braden, 15, told local television.
The young woman, who was not identified, was treated on an out-patient basis and both patients were doing well, the health department said.
In a precautionary move, the county launched a campaign to cut down on mosquitoes through the spreading of larvicide and was considering spraying to eradicate adult mosquitoes, the health department said.
"It may take a week or two, or more after someone's been infected to start showing symptoms so we can't rule out ... that another case will show up," said Dr. David Goodfriend, Director of the Loudoun County Health Department. "What we want to make sure of is that we don't get any new infections starting from this point on."
Malaria occurs in over 100 countries and territories. Most cases in the United States are in immigrants and travelers returning from malaria-risk areas while a few cases of malaria are transmitted by locally infected mosquitoes, health officials said.
Sun Sep 1, 2002
ATLANTA (AP) - A heart transplant patient's diagnosis of West Nile virus is raising questions about how the virus spreads and whether blood donors could unknowingly transmit it.
Federal experts and the American Red Cross met Sunday to determine how to deal with the potential threat.
"We've known for some time that there is a theoretical possibility that people can get this through blood or organ transplants," said Tom Skinner, a spokesman with Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . "It's highly unusual but it's certainly possible."
Officials with the Food and Drug Administration said they issued an alert to blood banks two weeks ago to exercise extra caution when screening donors, said Dr. Jesse Goodman with the FDA.
"We have been very active and tried to anticipate the possibility of something like this," Goodman said.
Four people, who were not identified, might have been infected with West Nile virus after receiving the kidneys, heart and liver of a woman who died in Georgia in early August after a car accident, the CDC said.
Three of the four patients developed symptoms of encephalitis, the inflammation of the brain and central nervous system, which is the most serious consequence of West Nile virus.
One of the four recipients, who was in Atlanta, has died, said Dr. James Hughes, director of the CDC's National Center for Infectious Disease.
Standard pathology tests from an autopsy confirmed the recipient had encephalitis. Tests are ongoing to see if the recipient was infected with West Nile, which causes encephalitis.
Another recipient from Jacksonville, Fla., showed symptoms of encephalitis Sunday, said Dr. John Agwunobi, the Florida Secretary of Health.
The heart recipient, a 63-year-old man, was diagnosed with West Nile last week. He was upgraded from critical to serious condition Sunday, said Evelyn Lichterman, an administrator at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami.
Officials were sure the man didn't contract the disease the disease from a mosquito in Miami-Dade County, said Mary Jo Trepka, epidemiology director with the Miami-Dade health department.
Officials say it is unknown whether the Georgia organ donor was already infected through blood transfusions in the emergency room. The CDC is backtracking to trace donors who contributed the transfused blood, the blood products made from those donations and any other patients who may have received blood or blood products from those donations, Hughes said.
Samples from the four transplant recipients were sent to the CDC's lab in Fort Collins, Colo., Hughes said. Tests results are expected within the week.
There is no test yet that can quickly or accurately identify the presence of the West Nile virus. Patients are diagnosed on the basis of their immune response to the virus.
However, researchers at the CDC are trying to find a way that will cut down the time from when infection occurs and when a response to the virus can be measured, the CDC said. Presently, it takes about 15 days between the time infection occurs and when the response can be measured.
Officials say they remain optimistic that the chances West Nile can spread through blood is low because there have been no confirmed cases to date.
There are also no known cases either of person-to-person transmission of other diseases in the same family as West Nile called the arboviral encephalitides: St. Louis encephalitis, La Crosse encephalitis and Eastern and Western equine encephalitis.
While there has been no confirmation that West Nile was passed by blood donation, there are cases on the record in which mosquito-borne diseases have been passed by blood transfusion or transplant.
Last year, a CDC review of blood-donation problems turned up 93 patients who contracted mosquito-borne malaria after blood transfusions.
Cases have also been reported in which dengue, another mosquito-borne disease, was transmitted to a health care worker by a needle-stick and between siblings after a bone-marrow transplant.
Still, officials at the American Red Cross say it is important for the public not to fear donating or accepting blood transfusions.
Every unit of blood donated goes through up to 12 tests to ensure patient safety, including tests for HIV and hepatitis C.
(WASHPOST)
By Betsy Karasik
August 30, 2002
This morning I suddenly realized that there are no crows outside my window. I was listening to a National Public Radio story on the West Nile virus, in which an interviewee mentioned that the first thing that happens when West Nile invades an area is that all the crows die. And then it struck me like a wave of nausea: The crows that have populated my block for as long as I can remember had disappeared. I scanned the skies for their jet black silhouettes and strained my ears to hear their calls. Nothing. Silence. Despite the traffic, my busy block of P Street seemed suddenly and eerily empty.
Some people detest crows for being predators of songbirds or simply for their noisy, aggressive personalities. I am in the other camp. I admire crows for their impressive size, powerful build, well-documented intelligence, devotion to their families and the lush blue-black sheen of their plumage. In winter, their stark forms add a haunting element to the bare landscape. Some scientists believe that, along with parrots, their intelligence rivals that of dogs and even primates. Last spring a pair of crows built a nest and raised their hatchlings in the branches of an old elm tree right outside my fifth-floor window. The dedication and effort they devoted to this task provided daily entertainment and inspiration. True, their vocalizing would wake me briefly about 5 a.m. every day, but I never begrudged them their enthusiastic greeting of the dawn.
I am a painter who spends many hours working directly in front of my windows. I found company and solace in the birds I came to consider my crows. I never tired of watching their comical hopping and athletic flight or speculating as to the meaning of their raucous calls. Of all the birds that occurred in this area, they struck me as the most animated, the most complex and by far the most interesting to watch. The pair with the nest often sat close together for long periods, one bird using its powerful beak to preen the other bird's head with the utmost delicacy. Often I would grab the binoculars to watch more closely, admiring their beauty, vigor and devotion to mates.
They were my friends, but now they are gone. And the thing that really stings is that I can't even recall precisely when they disappeared. So preoccupied was I with my own life that I never recognized the mortal struggle raging outside my window. While I was intent on blending paints to achieve a more convincing curve to the eyelid or shadow under the nostril in a portrait, my crows were falling victim to a hideous virus that attacked every organ of their bodies. Somewhere beyond my line of sight, they were collapsing and dying. Based on what we know of the strength of crows' pair bonding and familial ties, I don't think it illogical to believe that the survivors were left confused and bereaved until they, too, succumbed. I know there is nothing I could have done to save them, but I regret that they died beyond the reach of my pity.
The world has seen countless holocausts, natural and human-engineered. West Nile is one of many insect-borne diseases whose spread is theoretically facilitated by such factors as global warming and modern travel. While its effect on the human population has, thankfully, not been nearly as widespread as on other species, we are just beginning to appreciate its virulence. Animals on our continent have had no time to develop immunity to West Nile, and scientists really don't know the extent to which it will decimate birds and potentially other species.
Perhaps there is far more to fear from West Nile than the dying of the crows, but their absence has left a gaping hole in the world outside my window. I scan the skies and rooftops once occupied by their glossy black forms and tell myself that before long they will repopulate my area. After all, the species is known as the "common crow." But then I contemplate the passenger pigeon. From what I have read, it was so numerous in the early 1800s that the species consisted of more individuals than all other North American birds combined. Unchecked hunting and habitat destruction quickly took their toll, and a mere 100 years later the passenger pigeon was extinct in the wild. The last passenger pigeon, a female named Martha, died in the Cincinnati zoo about 1 p.m. on Sept. 1, 1914. Experts are already concerned that West Nile could have catastrophic effects on small populations of endangered birds, such as whooping cranes. But I can't help wondering whether, like the 19th-century Americans who watched the decline of the ubiquitous passenger pigeon with utter disbelief, I am witnessing the disappearance of the crow from the American landscape.
The writer is a Dupont Circle artist.
28 August 02
(New Scientist)
Britain's sparrows and starlings are dying from an unknown disease. While tests have ruled out West Nile virus, which is transmitted by mosquitoes and has killed several people in the US this year, researchers have no idea what is to blame or if humans could be affected.
Ornithologists in Scotland have reported several cases of a strange neurological condition since 1994. Young birds with the disease can't fly, instead walking round in tight circles, doing somersaults and twisting their heads bizarrely.
Now the swollen brains of birds that died of the disease have been analysed for the first time, because of fears it might be West Nile.
"I'm glad to say it wasn't that or any of the related viruses," says Tom Pennycott of the Scottish Agricultural College's Veterinary Science Division in Ayr. But so far his team has drawn a complete blank when it comes to identifying the disease.
Conservationists were already concerned about the widespread decline in the numbers of sparrows and starlings across Britain.
But the mystery disease is unlikely to be the cause, because the only cases so far have been in Scotland. "We've not found an answer to the decline, but we've found a new mystery," says Pennycott.
"We're not talking big numbers, but it's certainly there and it might be the tip of the iceberg," he adds.
Pennycott may have found other clues about the cause of the decline. In work not yet published, he found the salmonella food-poisoning bacteria in two-thirds of the dead sparrows brought to him.
A paper in this week's Nature, however, blames the decline on changes in farming practices that mean there's less food for birds in winter.
Aug. 27, 2002
(UKTelegraph)
ANTANANARIVO - The death toll in a flu epidemic on the giant Indian Ocean island of Madagascar has surged to more than 700, with reported cases rising above 18,000, health officials said on Tuesday.
The illness has swept across five out of six provinces on the island -- which is larger than France -- since it first appeared in June, hitting malnourished villagers the hardest.
``The province of Antananarivo has also been affected by the severe flu, which has hit other regions in Madagascar since June, killing more than 700 people as of Monday,'' Samuel Andriamparany, a top government health official, told reporters.
Health officials say the illness -- known as ``raporapo'' on the island -- claims 95 percent of its victims from among impoverished peasants with no access to modern medical care.
The U.N.'s Geneva-based World Health Organization (Nasdaq:W) said on August 13 that 444 had died and a further 13,300 cases had been reported since the illness appeared.
Many of the victims are children suffering from a poor diet on the island off southeast Africa, one of the world's poorest countries.
Madagascar has only just emerged from six months of political crisis, which devastated the already shaky economy on the island of 16 million, plunging many into deeper poverty.
The WHO had earlier said the number of deaths had surged in the past two weeks to 671, with reported cases nearly doubling to 22,646.
The agency said the worst hit region was Fianarantsoa in the southeast. Government officials say that only the northern province of Antsiranana has been spared.
But a WHO spokeswoman said that some of the sharp rise in recent days could simply reflect better monitoring of the situation by health officials.
``The explanation...could be improved surveillance between the ministry and the WHO,'' spokeswoman Fadela Chaib told reporters.
A WHO team of experts is in Madagascar advising the Health Ministry on measures needed to contain the epidemic.
Samples taken from victims of the illness have shown it to be Type A influenza. The infectious illness causes severe headaches, followed by neck and chest pains.
(11/2/02)
Florida Gainesville Sun
Hundreds of body parts were removed Thursday from the Lake City office of a neurologist whose Gainesville home was filled with heads, brains, spines and other specimens.
The parts found in the Neurological Sciences Center of Dr. Joseph James Warner, 49, are believed to be from the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Lake City and from the University of Florida College of Medicine, police and VA officials said.
Warner has not been charged with the Lake City case. He was charged Tuesday with storage/preservation of human remains and domestic battery in the Gainesville case. Both are misdemeanors.
Lake City Police Capt. Gary Laxton said his department began investigating Warner after speaking with Gainesville Police.
"In part of his office that was kept locked, we found a small laboratory and it was just full of all kinds of body parts, the full range," Laxton said.
"There were some brains, hearts, skulls and heads, a couple of arms with part of the shoulder still attached. I'm saying hundreds, but we had - it just seems like forever - a bunch of little jars with obvious parts of some sort in it."
Laxton said some of the body parts came from the VA Medical Center in Lake City and others from UF.
Warner got a medical degree from UF in 1979 and was a courtesy professor with a laboratory at UF. Warner worked at the Lake City VA Medical Center from December 1989 to October 1996.
John Pickens, spokesman for the VA hospitals in Lake City and Gainesville, said the VA's Inspector General's Office sent a team to Warner's Lake City office to take custody of the specimens and move them to the Lake City VA hospital.
"We've prepared a storage area, and the specimens will be under exclusive control of the (Inspector General's Office) until a thorough investigation can be completed to determine what all these specimens are and how many of them are actually VA property," he said. "At this point we know that Dr. Warner had no authority to remove any VA property. We have very strict research protocols.
"Dr. Warner was working on a research project for neuroanatomy. I suspect that that research would have included examination of specimens, but there is not a lot of research conducted at the Lake City VA."
Warner was at GPD on Thursday with his attorney, Chief Assistant Public Defender John Kearns. Cpl. Keith Kameg said Warner was asked to come to the station to talk with detectives, but declined to talk when he got there.
Police, working with a UF human identification experts, continued to catalog and collect the body parts at Warner's house at 3211 NW 38th St. on Thursday.
Information surfaces
Police first learned the house was full of body parts when called there Monday night in regard to a domestic battery complaint involving Warner and his wife, Debra Warner.
He was arrested early Tuesday morning after police began finding containers full of parts.
Warner has been married at least four times and has had several live-in girlfriends. Debra Warner and one former girlfriend said he force-fed them drugs, was physically abusive and verbally abusive, and was extremely controlling.
A former girlfriend named Kim, who asked only her first name be used, said Warner used only a fraction of the body parts for research.
"When I first walked in the door, there were 15 buckets of brains in the doorway," she said. "He wasn't studying all those brains. He was collecting them. He never opened one of those buckets in the 10 months I lived in that house."
She added that she wants to contact all of Warner's former wives and recent former girlfriends for support.
Dedicated researcher
Colleagues of Warner said neuroanatomy was his passion.
Dr. Stephen Nadeau is the staff neurologist at the VA Medical Center in Gainesville and a University of Florida professor of neurology.
He said he first became acquainted with Warner when Warner was a medical student rotating through the neurology service where Nadeau was the resident.
More recently, Warner contributed to a medical neuroscience text for which Nadeau is the principal author.
"In all my professional interactions with him over the years, I have found him to be honest, decent, altruistic and an incredibly enthusiastic anatomist and teacher," Nadeau said Thursday.
'Impressive' work
Nadeau cited the atlas Warner produced last year, describing it as "unquestionably an impressive piece of work, designed to help students understand the incredibly complex structure of the human brain.
As principal author of another textbook for medical students, due out next year, Nadeau said he invited Warner to contribute some of his illustrations.
"I am sure zillions of hours of work over many years went into producing that atlas," Nadeau said. "It is Joe's eccentricity that he brought his work home.
"If you talked to Joe about it, he'd say, 'This is my life's work.' Neuroanatomy is his passion, his amusement, his goal, his life."
The neurologist added, "If I was doing something as extensive as Joe Warner, I suppose it would have occurred to me to ask if it was OK to take things home.
"But he was probably carried away by the excitement of his endeavor and it didn't occur to him."
Warner has had extensive spinal surgery. According to a 1997 article in the St. Petersburg Times, Warner was the focus of an investigation by the VA Inspector General's Office regarding his ability to properly tend to patients because his spinal trouble limited his mobility.
Warner asserted that VA managers knew his spinal condition, which sometimes limits him to a wheelchair, made him unable to perform rigorous medical procedures.
He says they nonetheless assigned him responsibilities of medical officer of the day, the Times reported.
The VA's inspector general concluded that dying patients may have missed a "second chance" because the hospital assigned a physician who was unable to revive patients or perform other rigorous procedures, according to the Times.
Reuters
WASHINGTON - A gigantic meteorite that slammed into the Earth 3.5 billion years ago may have caused such devastation that it affected the evolution of life, researchers reported Thursday.
Twice as big as the asteroid believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, the meteorite would have kicked up a thick layer of rock and dust that coated the whole planet and caused tidal waves that wiped clean the early continents, the researchers reported Friday in the journal Science.
The team, at Stanford University in California and Louisiana State University, pieced together evidence from ancient rock layers found in Australia and South Africa.
''We have no idea where the actual impact might have been,'' said Donald Lowe, a Stanford geology professor who helped write the study.
Louisiana State University geologist Gary Byerly said the meteorite they studied was one of several that would have struck around the same time, when the Earth was new and relatively hot, and populated only by bacteria.
''They are all probably objects in the size range of 20 to 50 kilometers in diameter. That's two to five times larger than the object that caused the dinosaur extinction 65 million years ago,'' Byerly said in a telephone interview.
''These impacts were very large. They really changed the course of the evolution of Earth,'' he said. The study did not suggest exactly what the changes might have been.
EMERGING BACTERIA
Lowe said it is not clear what effect the impacts would have had on the emerging bacteria. Unlike large animals such as dinosaurs, bacteria can exist in extreme conditions. Today they are found deep in the sea where no light reaches, buried miles under the Earth, in Antarctic ice and in hot sulfur springs.
''There isn't a big extinction event you can identify as cut-and-dried as the extinction of the dinosaurs,'' Lowe said.
The layers of sediment the geologists studied were in South Africa's Barberton greenstone belt and western Australia's Pilbara block. Both sites include rocks formed more than 3 billion years ago when the planet was just a billion years old.
These deposits contain zircons and rare metals, such as iridium, which are common in meteorites.
''Zircons are a geologist's best friend. They are very resistant to change and they contain information about the age of things all the way back to the beginning of the solar system,'' Byerly said.
Special U.S. Geological Survey equipment at Stanford dated the zircons to 3.47 billion years ago.
''We can study these very old events by going to these few places on Earth where these old rocks exist,'' Byerly said.
A DIFFERENT WORLD
The rock -- almost certainly from the asteroid belt that orbits between Mars and Jupiter -- would have hit an Earth very different from the planet of today, Byerly and Lowe said.
''There were probably no large continental blocks like there are today, although there may have been microcontinents -- very small pieces of continental-type crust,'' Lowe said. The ocean would have been fairly shallow -- about 2 miles deep.
''It would have taken only a second or two for a meteor that's 20 kilometers in diameter to pass through the ocean and impact the rock beneath,'' Lowe said.
''That would generate enormous waves kilometers high that would spread out from the impact site, sweep across the ocean and produce just incredible tsunamis -- causing a tremendous amount of erosion on the microcontinents and tearing up the bottom of the ocean.''
Byerly said some evidence of this widespread erosion has been found at the Australian site. The sediment they looked at would have come both from the meteorite itself and from the crater it would have blasted out.
REUTERS Reut10:46 08-22-02
However Navy Dismisses Arctic Sightings
The Halifax Herald Limited
By The Canadian Press
8-19-2
Ottawa - Canada's Arctic seems to be competing for a place in the X-Files with reports of mysterious objects plying its frigid waters, strange footprints detected near shorelines and an unusual absence of marine animals.
Over the past couple of years, there have been at least a dozen sightings of unusual objects moving along or just below the surface of the water in the North, according to newly released Canadian Forces records.
Last September, Inuit hunters and members of the Canadian Rangers, the military's locally recruited force of aboriginals, reported what they believed was a foreign submarine checking out Canada's Arctic territories.
Most of the sightings took place last August and September near Pond Inlet on Baffin Island, where, on 11 occasions, witnesses reported seeing large waves and strange objects in the water.
Mysterious footprints were also found along the water's edge near where the objects were sighted. Marine animals had largely disappeared from the area.
Another object was seen by an RCMP officer in August 1999, and later by a group of hunters in Cumberland Sound off Baffin Island. Again, there was a noticeable lack of marine animals in the area at the time.
"I'm pretty convinced (foreign submarines) are operating there," says the recently retired commander of Canadian Forces Northern Area, Col. Pierre Leblanc.
While he was the top military officer in the Arctic, he tried to warn senior defence leaders in Ottawa that it would be only a matter of time before other nations started to eye Canadian northern territory, which is rich in resources such as diamonds and fresh water.
Two Canadian Navy submariners sent to investigate last year's sighting near Pond Inlet suggested that strong currents or wind could have caused the unusual waves reported by the Inuit.
Navy Cmdr. Mike Considine said all unusual sightings are checked out, and in the case of the Pond Inlet incidents, there was little to suggest foreign boats were operating in the area.
"We didn't find any evidence that there were submarines," he said.
Fri Aug 23, 8:42 AM ET
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Swedish scientists have found a tiny, mysterious particle in the spinal marrow fluid which may be a new form of life and which could help explain the cause of schizophrenia.
"They may be involved in the development of the disease or may result from the disease process in brains of schizophrenic patients," the researchers said in an abstract of the study published on Friday.
Schizophrenia is a widespread and debilitating form of mental disease with symptoms ranging from delusions and an altered sense of self to apathy and social withdrawal. It affects around one percent of people.
Lennart Wetterberg, professor of psychiatry at Stockholm's St. Goran Hospital and one of the co-authors of the study, said the full significance of the findings was not yet clear and more research was needed.
"We have viruses, bacteria and prions -- this could be an entirely new form of life," he told Reuters.
But he said this was just one theory, and it was still uncertain what form of life the particles, which are bigger than ordinary viruses but smaller than bacteria, represented.
The study, published in Neuroscience Letters, was made on the basis of spinal fluid obtained by lumbar puncture from 22 schizophrenic patients and 38 control patients.
The study found spherical particles -- only 100,000th of a millimeter in size -- in the spinal fluid of 20 of the 22 patients with schizophrenia against only two of the 38 controls, it said.
The particles did not include bacterial DNA material and had so far not replicated in culture.
"They are not any of the usual viruses or bacteria that have been found," Wetterberg said. "They are more like something like the prion which is causing mad cow disease -- but it took 15 years until it was found out what that really was."
He said it was too early to speculate whether the particles were a cause of schizophrenia or whether the disease caused them, and a bigger number of people would have to be studied.
"We have found the first link in a chain, and whether my excitement increases or decreases depends on the answer to the next step," he said.
(westpress.co.uk)
06 September 2002
Scientists believe they may be a step closer to finding the cause of the debilitating disease dubbed yuppie flu.
Achemical imbalance in the brain which affects the cell membrane may be the cause of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), also known as ME, according to research by a team of London scientists.
Chronic Fatigue affects an estimated 243,000 people of all ages in the UK with a range of symptoms including muscle pain, memory loss and exhaustion. It can leave victims bedridden, sometimes for years.
Now doctors believe CFS sufferers cannot properly metabolise a fat known as phospholipid, resulting in nerve damage.
The key to treating the affliction could be a chemical found in fish oil known as EPA.
Dr Basant Puri, from the Hammersmith Hospital in London, who led the research said:
"This study suggests that if patients with CFS take a high-EPA fatty acid supplement, then this should have a beneficial action on the chemical imbalances we have identified." The findings are published in the medical journal Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica but the patient group Action for ME greeted the news with caution.
Group spokeswoman Samantha Radford, from Wells, said the results were interesting but not considered a major breakthrough as the study involved only eight CFS sufferers.
She said: "It has not answered any of the big questions yet.
Further research is needed." For 12-year-old Andrew, of Portishead, unlocking CFS's secrets can't come too soon.
Since being struck down by the illness two years ago, Andrew has not played football or had the strength to swim in the past 18 months.
He manages to attend classes at Gordano School for a third of normal hours and musters the energy to socialise with friends once a week.
Andrew's mother Sue looks forward to the day when doctors can properly explain and treat the disease.
"We do not know what causes it or how to treat it, " Sue said yesterday. "We manage his available energy but there is no magic cure."
ABCNEWS.com
Aug. 28 2002
Researchers at the University of Toronto's sleep clinic have found that the human brain creates its own internal music, and that same music can be used to fight a common problem that affects millions of people across the continent: anxiety insomnia.
By playing their own "brain music" back to them, researchers were able to get persons with sleeping disorders to fall asleep more quickly, and to sleep more soundly, according to psychiatrist Leonid Kayumov, director of the clinic.
Of course, this "music," which consists of an audible "printout" of sleep-inducing brain waves, doesn't exactly sound like Barry Manilow, and you can't buy it at your local record store.
‘Odd’ Lullaby
"It sounds odd," Kayumov says. "You wouldn't recognize it as music. Sometimes there are harmonic frequencies, sometimes it's total cacophony." Sometimes, he adds, it sounds a little like Chinese, sometimes it sounds a little like a melody.
"I find some people have nicer music," he says.
But each of us produces our own brain music, and each is different.
Kayumov, who discussed his clinic's research at a recent annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Society in Seattle, says up to 40 percent of the general population suffers from some kind of insomnia, and most of those problems "may be related to stress anxiety." Balancing the checkbook, or dealing with a problem at work or home, may keep us from falling asleep in the evening, or cause us to wake up a long time before the alarm clock goes off.
Kayumov and his colleagues excluded people from the study who have severe neurological disorders that keep them awake, and concentrated instead on ordinary folks who have trouble sleeping. Ten persons who had suffered from insomnia for at least two years were selected for the study, and they were taken into the lab in the university's Western Hospital and hooked up to a portable device that zeroes in on brain waves.
Promising Results
The device produces a graph that looks a little like an electrocardiogram, but it portrays brain waves, not heart functions. The two are different in that brain waves are a much faster frequency, producing about 70 fluctuations per second.
"Basically, it gives you kind of a printout of the brain," he says.
That printout is fed into a computer, which produces an audio track that corresponds to the frequency and patterns of the brain wave. And that, he adds, is the music of the brain.
"What is music?" he asks. "It is organized sound oscillations which change in rhythm, volume, amplitude, tones and so on. The same analogy applies to brain activity. It's electrical oscillations. And using computerized algorithms we convert them into sound. So it's a printout of the brain, but expressed in sounds."
Each participant was given a recording of the sound and sent home with instructions to listen to it just before bedtime if they have trouble falling asleep, or during the night if they can't stay asleep. Four weeks later, they returned to the clinic for further testing.
The participants showed dramatic improvement over placebo participants who listened to someone else's brain music instead of their own.
"For the placebo group, the improvement was only about 15 percent as compared to 75 to 85 percent for the experimental group. So it's a highly significant statistical difference," Kayumov says. It also shows that brain music is highly individualistic.
It worked, he adds, because the sleep music was lower in frequency than other brain waves and induced kind of a relaxed, meditative condition. In other words, each subject's brain recognized its own lullaby and reacted accordingly.
The "music" was so different from other brain waves that the researchers are now experimenting with creating sound tracks that will help curb such things as bed wetting among children.
Even far more serious mental problems might be helped by similar techniques, he says.
"Even the diseased brain has such enormous reserves that we can use the brain activity, even from a diseased brain, to heal it," he says. An anti-anxiety response, for example, can be produced even in someone who is seriously impaired by reproducing sounds that stimulate relaxation.
Relaxation in a CD
A research sample of 10 persons is not a large group, but the project builds on numerous other related studies at the clinic, and Kayumov believes the results are quite convincing. The long-range goal, he says, is to move the technology from the research lab to the clinic.
Hopefully, some day people with serious sleep disorders will be able to check into a clinic and leave an hour or so later with a compact disc, loaded with sounds that originated in their own brains. Those sounds will be used to generate brain waves that induce relaxation, leading to sleep.
And here's the neat part. It won't become addictive. There won't be any serious side effects, like those caused by various medications that are now available.
All it will be is music, created in the person's own brain. How about that for a relaxing tune?
By Jeffrey Steinberg
Executive Intelligence Review
www.larouchepub.com/eiw
8-22-2
Source: Time magazine, issue dated August 26, 2002, "How an unpaid conservative board that hold private meetings and puts nothing in writing gets heard at the Pentagon--Inside the Secret War Council," by Mark Thompson; time.co]
TIME magazine, in the current newsstand and online editions (dated Aug. 26, 2002), carries a nasty swipe at Richard Perle and the Defense Policy Board flap around the July 10 now-infamous Murawiec Saudi-bashing session. The author, Mark Thompson, took up the "LaRouche issue" in a way that will have many neo-cons around Washington running for cover.
After going through a lengthy description of the Defense Policy Board, which has gained unprecedented notoriety under the chairmanship of Perle, Thompson wrote, "Lawrence Korb, a Reagan-era Pentagon official, thinks the board is `a net loss for the Administration because many people think it represents the Administration's views.' That's why when Perle invited Laurent Murawiec, a senior Rand Corp. analyst, to give a briefing on the kingdom, it stirred up such a fuss. `I didn't know what he was going to say, but he had done some serious research on Saudi Arabia,' Perle told TIME.
"In fact, Murawiec's work for Rand has not focused on Saudi Arabia," TIME continues. "Perle's ignorance of Murawiec's talking points matched his unfamiliarity with his briefer's past. Back in the 1980s, Murawiec worked for political extremist and perpetual presidential aspirant Lyndon LaRouche as an editor of LaRouche's magazine, {Executive Intelligence Review}. By the end of last week, LaRouche was denouncing both his former associate and `suspected Israeli agent Richard Perle' for pushing the U.S. toward war with the Islamic world."
Earlier in the article, which was the two-page national lead of the print edition of TIME, the author quoted an unnamed member of the Defense Policy Board, who said, "I thought the briefing was ridiculous, a waste of time, and the quicker he left, the better." Thompson made clear that the Murawiec briefing, despite Perle's denials, was Perle's operation. "Beneath the brass plating, the board's impact is harder to discern. Though its quarterly, two-day sessions take place in Rumsfeld's inner sanctum, the board's two full-time employees run the operation from another floor. Perle sets the agenda and briefers.... In effect, the board has become Perle's podium."
Inside The Secret War Council
How an unpaid conservative board that holds private meetings and puts nothing in writing gets heard at the Pentagon
By Mark Thompson in Washington Time.com
If you could slip past the soldiers toting M-16s at the door, the Pentagon's 17 miles of corridors might remind you a little of an inner-city apartment building: every other door is plastered with alarms, fortified latches and ugly combination locks. You would buzz past signs bearing mysterious acronyms - WELCOME ABOARD J3/SMOO - that blur rather than clarify what's cooking behind those doors. Asked what goes on inside, officers get that "Don't ask, don't tell" look - and don't even reply.
So it was alarming when one secret agency's work spilled into the open recently, only to be dismissed by almost everyone involved. Meeting last month in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's private conference room, a group called the Defense Policy Board heard an outside expert, armed only with a computerized PowerPoint briefing, denounce the Saudis for being "active at every level of the terror chain, from planners to financiers, from cadre to foot soldier, from ideologist to cheerleader." Such claims have been on the rise since Sept. 11, when 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. Relatives of those killed in the attacks filed suit last week seeking $1 trillion from, among others, three Saudi princes who allegedly gave money to groups supporting the terrorists. But the Pentagon briefer's solution to the Saudi problem was provocative in the extreme: Washington should declare the Saudis the enemy, he said, and threaten to take over the oil wells if the kingdom doesn't do more to combat Islamic terrorism. "I thought the briefing was ridiculous," a board member said, "a waste of time, and the quicker he left the better." When the briefing leaked to the press, it sent diplomatic tremors ricocheting to Riyadh.
This is the kind of outside-the-Pentagon-box thinking that routinely takes place inside the Defense Policy Board, the Secretary's private think tank in a building where helmets often trump thinking caps. Chaired by Richard Perle - a Reagan Pentagon official whose hard-line views won him the title "Prince of Darkness"--the board gives its 31 unpaid members something every Washington player wants: unrivaled access without accountability. Perle uses his post as a springboard for his unilateralist, attack-Iraq views to try to whip the Bush Administration into action. But despite its name, the board does not make policy. As the Saudi episode shows, it can do something far scarier: give a false impression of it.
That wasn't the point when the Pentagon set up the board in 1985 to advise the Defense Secretary on key issues of the day. Unlike many of the department's ancillary agencies, it toils in the shadows. Its classified sessions combine outsiders' briefings with internal discussions on military deep-think. Is the Pentagon buying the right weapons? Is the U.S. cozying up to the right nations? Is the U.S. military pivoting properly in the wake of Sept. 11? Each member's access to top-secret U.S. intelligence gives the board's opinions a cachet not enjoyed by Washington's public think tanks, which churn out reports on such topics.
Beneath the brass plating, the board's impact is harder to discern. Though its quarterly, two-day sessions take place in Rumsfeld's inner sanctum, the board's two full-time employees run the operation from another floor. Perle sets the agenda and briefers. The members take no votes, do not strive to reach a consensus and write no reports. Instead, they wrap up each session sharing what they have learned with Rumsfeld, who is free to ignore what he is told.
Rumsfeld has given some of the Republican right's most outspoken (and forsaken) hawks a place to nest. Among them: former Vice President Dan Quayle, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and ex-CIA and Pentagon boss James Schlesinger. True, there are also centrist Republican members, like Henry Kissinger. But the board has an undeniably hard-nosed tilt: seven of the 31 members have ties to the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Previous boards had at least a few members with views sharply opposed to the incumbent Administration - Perle was on the board through Clinton's two terms - but this one lacks Democratic firepower. The sprinkling of Democrats includes token moderates and those, like former CIA chief James Woolsey, who are hawks within their own party.
In effect, the board has become Perle's podium. It rarely achieved any notice before he assumed the chairmanship last year, but now his position there lends weight to his public pronouncements. His recent column in the London Daily Telegraph titled "Why the West Must Strike First Against Saddam Hussein" identified him as "chairman of the Defence Policy Board."
But board members, serving at Rumsfeld's pleasure, are like a choir preaching to the pastor. The board "is just another p.r. shop for Rumsfeld," says Michael O'Hanlon, a defense expert with the Brookings Institution. "It gives his ideas more currency." O'Hanlon admits, though, that he would "jump at the chance" to serve on it for the access to the nation's top Defense officials. But Lawrence Korb, a Reagan-era Pentagon official, thinks the board is "a net loss for the Administration because many people think it represents the Administration's views."
For the remainder of the article:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,338628,00.html
August 20, 2002
(The Guardian)
Of all the many nonsenses affecting American aviation at present, the most absurd by far is the post-September 11 regulation imposed solely on flights to and from National Airport (or, as the Republicans try to insist, Reagan National) in Washington that bars anyone leaving their seat for the half-hour of flying time nearest the capital.
No matter that you are old, young, sick or simply bursting. No matter that half an hour in the air takes you hundreds of miles away. No matter that the rule does not apply at Washington's other airport, Dulles (about two minutes' flying time from National), nor at any of the hundreds of other American airports near potential terrorist targets. The flight path at National goes close to the centre of Washington and the leaders' safety is paramount. As we saw when the president's jet zigzagged across the country in the hours after the attacks, members of the ruling elite are concerned about the safety of all Americans, but somewhat more concerned about their own. This fits, to a startling extent, with their personal histories.
Traditionally, the left has always had an inferiority complex about military experience. In Britain, Ted Heath (a wartime artillery colonel) used to patronise Harold Wilson (who spent the war in Whitehall) on the subject. Here in 1996 Bob Dole (badly wounded in the second world war) played the same card against the unheroic Bill Clinton. But as the Bush administration paints itself into an ever-tighter corner with its Iraq rhetoric, it is instructive to note the astonishing extent to which those so anxious to stage the next war managed to be absent from the last one.
The US is now mainly governed by men in their mid-50s, ie the Vietnam generation - except that this lot missed being the Vietnam generation. The enterprisingly original New Hampshire Gazette (www.nhgazette.com) maintains a "Chickenhawks" database to tell their stories. Most of the allegations fit with facts recorded elsewhere.
Not everyone is implicated: Colin Powell's military record is solid, of course, which may help explain his distaste for fighting; and Donald Rumsfeld, an older man, was a naval aviator, albeit in the undramatic mid-50s. Otherwise, it starts with the president, who missed Vietnam by securing a cushy number in the Texas air national guard after (so everyone assumes) his congressman father pulled strings to get him in. It is less well-known that Dick Cheney avoided the draft by getting deferments, first because he was a student, then because he was married. "I had other priorities in the 60s than military service," he has said. Fine. Me too, Dick. Some people have got other priorities now. How about you?
Consider Washington's two most prominent superhawks: Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy) and his adviser Richard Perle. Who's Who in America is curiously vague about their precise whereabouts in the late 1960s, though it is fairly clear where they were not. As the shrewd and sceptical Republican senator Chuck Hagel said last week: "Maybe Mr Perle would like to be in the first wave of those who go into Baghdad."
The two Democrat leaders in Congress, Dick Gephardt and Tom Daschle, served; their Republican counterparts, Trent Lott and Dick Armey, did not. Tom DeLay, the most powerful hawk in the House of Representatives, missed Vietnam too: he was working as a pest exterminator. Reportedly, he once complained that he would have served; but, he said, all the places were taken up by ethnic minorities.
There are similar stories about almost every other prominent rightwing Republican of recent vintage. Newt Gingrich, ex-Speaker of the House, went the Cheney route; Kenneth Starr, Clinton's legal nemesis, had psoriasis; Jack Kemp, Dole's running mate in 1996, was unfit because of a knee injury, though he heroically continued as a National Football League quarterback for another eight years; Pat Buchanan had arthritis in his knees, though he soon became an avid jogger.
The best story concerns Rush Limbaugh, the ferociously bellicose radio personality, who allegedly had either "anal cysts" or an "ingrown hair follicle on his bottom". It is not my custom to mock others' ailments, but anyone who has listened to Limbaugh's programme can imagine the dripping scorn he would bring to the revelation that a prominent Democrat had skipped a war over something like that. Also, in his case, a pain in the arse is peculiarly appropriate.
Admission: I did not serve in Vietnam either. My country was not there, and did not ask me, or anyone else. Like those named above, I was unenthusiastic about that war. Unlike most of them, I am profoundly alarmed about the one now being plotted.
By Mark Steyn
25/08/2002
(UKTelegraph)
You can hardly open an American newspaper these days without finding another "senior Republican" "breaking ranks" with President Bush over toppling Saddam: House Majority Leader Dick Armey, Senator Chuck Hagel, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, former Secretary of State Larry Eagleburger…
To hear The New York Times tell it, the entire Bush Sr administration except for Dad is out in the street chanting: "Hell, no, we won't go!", and it's only be a matter of time before Pop himself joins in ("Bush Says He Cannot Support Bush").
In Baghdad, Saddam is no doubt wondering why the massed ranks of Nixon/Ford/Reagan/Bush grandees are so eager to kick a sitting Republican President over his sole surviving policy on the eve of tight midterm elections in which control of both the House and Senate are at stake.
Presumably, he has written it off as a laughably crude psy-ops disinformation campaign by the Great Satan designed to sucker him into easing up on the anthrax production and getting back to work on his latest romantic novel.
But in America, alas, the naysayers are being taken seriously, even Dick Armey and Chuck Hagel. A couple of months ago, Congressman Armey's latest wheeze was that the entire Palestinian population should be removed from the West Bank, a policy initiative The New York Times thought it kindest not even to mention. But there's nothing like disagreeing with your own President to transform a Republican from a laughing stock into a respected geopolitical thinker.
It even works with Senator Hagel, who recently explained his opposition to Bush's "axis of evil" concept: "I think the reaction the President has gotten from our allies and almost every nation around the world is that words have meaning, meanings mean commitments, and commitments lead to expectations. And sometimes those expectations turn into unintended consequences." It is, in every sense, hard to argue with that.
That leaves the wise old foreign policy owls. When it comes to unsavoury foreigners, Eagleburger, Scowcroft and Kissinger are all famously "realist", though there's a fine line between realism and inertia. A decade ago, Brent Scowcroft advised Bush, Sr to stick with Gorbachev and the preservation of the Soviet Union over Yeltsin and a democratic Russia.
Last autumn, he argued in favour of leaving the Taliban in power. Inevitably Scowcroft now supports letting Saddam be because, if we start a war, "We could have an explosion in the Middle East. It could turn the whole region into a cauldron."
I agree. The only difference is that I think an explosion is long overdue and turning the whole region into a cauldron is a necessary step toward reforming it. But you can't expect Scowcroft, a stability junkie, to accept such a premise.
Just over a year ago, I sat next to him at dinner and it wasn't so much that he disagreed with this or that Administration initiative as that he was congenitally suspicious about the very concept of initiatives. He believes everything - the Soviets, the Taliban, Saddam - can be "managed".
It was managers like Scowcroft who eschewed decisive victory in the Gulf War in favour of "inspections regimes". Indeed, Saddam's eternal participation in an ongoing field study of dictatorship makes him the reductio ad absurdum of foreign-policy "management".
That's why Henry Kissinger's contribution is the most important. Despite the best efforts of The New York Times, the good doctor is not opposed to war with Iraq. He states explicitly that there's an "imperative for pre-emptive action" and sooner rather than later.
Not only does Kissinger not break ranks with Bush, but, more remarkably, he breaks ranks with himself, acknowledging that Kissingerian "realism" is no longer sufficient in an age of enemies unsusceptible to concepts like "deterrence".
To Henry Kissinger, the President's "pre-emption" doctrine is a repudiation of international relations as understood since the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. But in a world where enemies with no negotiable demands can strike without warning, the Treaty of Westphalia no longer seems inviolable. Kissinger wants a "comprehensive strategy" drawn up for this new world, but at least he recognizes he's in one. Scowcroft's in September 10th.
That's the nub of it. Bush and Cheney themselves came to office with a realist, managerial view of affairs, and it's only as the true horrors of the Middle East have revealed themselves after September 11th that "realism" has been revealed to be totally divorced from reality.
Unlike his dad, Bush, Jr has acquired a "vision thing" without going looking for one: it just sort of snuck up on him as the awesomeness of the task post-9/11 became clear. It's a huge vision - to remove the real "root cause" of terrorism by remaking the Middle East - and for the moment it's too huge to be fully spelled out in the face of opposition by Colin Powell's State Department and others.
But one thing's for sure, if a fellow ever needed a sign he was on the right track, the criticisms of "senior Republicans" this past fortnight are surely it.
(Socialist TheNation)
September 2, 2002
Almost thirty years ago, a prominent group of neoconservative hawks found an effective vehicle for advocating their views via the Committee on the Present Danger, a group that fervently believed the United States was a hair away from being militarily surpassed by the Soviet Union, and whose raison d'être was strident advocacy of bigger military budgets, near-fanatical opposition to any form of arms control and zealous championing of a Likudnik Israel. Considered a marginal group in its nascent days during the Carter Administration, with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 CPD went from the margins to the center of power
Just as the right-wing defense intellectuals made CPD a cornerstone of a shadow defense establishment during the Carter Administration, so, too, did the right during the Clinton years, in part through two organizations: the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and the Center for Security Policy (CSP). And just as was the case two decades ago, dozens of their members have ascended to powerful government posts, where their advocacy in support of the same agenda continues, abetted by the out-of-government adjuncts from which they came. Industrious and persistent, they've managed to weave a number of issues--support for national missile defense, opposition to arms control treaties, championing of wasteful weapons systems, arms aid to Turkey and American unilateralism in general--into a hard line, with support for Israel right at its core.
(Filed: 18/08/2002)
(UKtelegraph)
With the sequels to the Matrix in the offing, Roger Highfield poses some interesting philosophical questions about artificial intelligence
For once, Hollywood science fiction appears to be trailing behind developments in the real world. As the publicity for the sequels to the blockbuster film The Matrix are being aired on a clutch of official and unofficial websites, it emerges that we might already be living in a computer simulation, analogous to the one popularised by the original high-kicks, high-concept Matrix film.
The Matrix depicted humans farmed for energy by computers that, in return, ensnared their minds in a vast simulation that made even Keanu Reeves's acting look convincing - almost. This premise has a profound and universal appeal, having been explored elsewhere, for instance in The Truman Show, Dark City and even on the holodeck of the Starship Enterprise.
While Reeves and Laurence Fishburne were busy working on Matrix Reloaded in Sydney earlier this year, back to back with another gravity-defying sequel, Matrix Revolutions, Dr Nick Bostrom, a Swedish philosopher at Yale University, has leap-frogged developments in the fictional world of films by concluding that the idea of an alternative computer-generated way of life might not be sci-fi but sci-fact.
Dr Bostrom, who will conduct research at Oxford University later this year and has outlined his ideas in a forthcoming paper submitted to the journal Philosophical Quarterly, envisages three scenarios if a society develops to the point that it becomes technologically possible to mimic consciousness in a machine.
First, an extinction event might wipe out that civilisation before artificial consciousness is achieved. In this pessimistic case, we have no reason to suppose that we are in a simulation. Real life remains real - until it ends for good.
Second, the advanced civilisation will not be interested in running simulations, or may lay down laws to prohibit them. But there is another outcome, one possible in a century or so on Earth if human technology continues its pace of development. Civilisation will one day simulate consciousness - if it hasn't already - and then go on to simulate universes for artificial consciousness to inhabit. "If the last possibility is true, then it could already have happened and we are almost certainly living in a simulation," Dr Bostrom said, estimating the probability at "about 20-25 per cent".
If that is true (he has cunningly ignored the decades-old debate over whether artificial intelligence is really achievable) the chances are that it has already happened and we are living in a glorified computer game, a "historical simulation" run by our ancestors for their amusement, or even by film corporations of the future. Disturbingly for scientists, the physics of the universe that we can see may not even resemble the physics of the real world of the simulators. Of course, Dr Bostrom concedes that we may be part of the pre-simulation real world or "original history", rather than a "posthuman civilisation". But given how many simulations there will be over the lifetime of the universe, the odds are stacked against it.
What do we do now? Get on with our lives, even if they are unreal. Dr Bostrom believes that, since we don't know the purpose of our world, there is no point trying to impress the "creator". He said: "The least misleading advice would be to get on with your business as you would have done before."
Others have mused on whether reality is actually virtual. Dr Robin Hanson, from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, in the Journal of Evolution and Technology, says that if your life is a computer simulation, you should do everything possible to avoid being deleted.
First consider the possible purposes of the simulation. If it is for entertainment, then you should be jolly, extrovert, sexy, wild, bizarre, pathetic and heroic. If the simulation is for the creator to participate in, then "suck up to celebrities".
On the other hand, if the creator is playing God and dishing out rewards and punishments for behaviour, one should lead a blameless life. Being a martyr may be a good thing, since that may make your story so compelling that your descendants may want to simulate you again and again.
But Dr Hanson, an economist, says that it may not do for everyone to realise that they are in a simulation. If that happened the whole model would start to look staged, and the creator may have second thoughts about running the simulation.
For that reason, he says, keep the matter that we inhabit a hypercomputer to yourself and a few friends. Perhaps we should even boycott the Matrix sequels - or at least not take them too seriously - lest our creator pulls the plug.
(Filed: 05/07/2001)
(UKTelegraph)
The film A.I. has sparked a debate on artificial intelligence, so Roger Highfield asked leading researchers if man could build a machine with emotions
AFTER decades of stigmatisation on our movie screens, robots are about to reveal their caring side in A.I., the celluloid offspring of two master film makers, Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg.
A robot under development by Dr Stefan Schaal's team at the Computational Learning and Motor Control Lab, University of Southern California
The mechanical and electronic stars of science fiction films have, at their best, been tireless servants, such as Robby the Robot (Forbidden Planet), Huey, Dewie and Louie (Silent Running) and C-3PO and R2-D2 in the Star Wars movies.
But the most popular theme explored by film makers is that researchers seeking the foundations of intelligence and consciousness might unleash a super race. Most people now identify artificial intelligence with demonic supercomputers (The Forbin Project, The Matrix and 2001), killer cyborgs (Terminator), runaway replicants (Blade Runner) and androids-with-attitude (Westworld).
They are about to get a better press in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, a film inspired by the Brian Aldiss short story Super-Toys Last All Summer Long (aimovie.warnerbros. com).
Kubrick developed a 90-page treatment and then fiddled around with it for more than 15 years. At one point, he asked Spielberg to direct it, an invitation that was declined. But after Kubrick's death in 1999, Spielberg adopted A.I. and brought it to life.
Meeting the robots: Haley Joel Osment and Jude Law in the film A.I.
Kubrick had planned, as Spielberg says, "to take a step beyond the sentient relationship that HAL 9000 has with Bowman and Poole, and tell a kind of future fairy tale." The film, which will be released here in September, is a robotic version of Pinocchio, the marionette who yearns to be a real boy. But its leading character is not a puppet. He is a robot, the first designed to feel emotions and to give love.
He was conceived after a scientist laid down a challenge: "I propose that we build a robot who can love . . . a robot that dreams." Is this goal far fetched? I asked leading AI researchers whether machines will ever show emotions that we can recognise in humans - such as anger, boredom, loneliness and happiness.
Prof Stevan Harnad
(University of Southampton )
In a sense, if you ask whether machines can show emotions that we can recognise, you are answering your own question! How do we "recognise" that anything has emotions? By (1) recognising what it feels like for ourselves to have emotions and by (2) being unable to tell apart the candidate, whatever it is, from the rest of us, who feel emotions, because it acts completely indistinguishably from the rest of us (for a lifetime, if need be).
In other words, once we build a robot that can pass what AI researchers call the Turing Test, (that is, a robot whose behaviour is completely indistinguishable from our own), we will have no better or worse reason for believing that it has emotions than we have for believing it of one another. (How could we possibly have a better reason? We are not mind-readers even with one another! The only one we know for sure has emotions is our own self. With everyone else, it is just Turing-Testing.)
For any system - natural or synthetic, human or nonhuman, man-made or not - if its behavioural powers are equivalent to and indistinguishable from our own, we have no better (or worse) reasons for inferring that it can (for example) fall in love than we can of one another. We could be wrong, of course; but we could be wrong about one another too (and the premise is that we can't tell the difference).
This is called by philosophers the "other-minds" problem. The only one with whom one can know for sure is oneself. It would also be useful to get machines to respond to our keystrokes, voice and other behaviour, including behaviour correlated with emotions (impatience, irritability, fear, and so on). But this is a different matter from building machines that feel.
www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/harnad
Dr Dave Cliff
(senior research scientist, Hewlett-Packard Labs, Bristol )
I don't have a strong reason to say machines will "never" have emotions but I do think it's likely to be a very, very long time before machines have such emotions in any real sense. Probably not in my lifetime, but I'm prepared to be pleasantly surprised.
One tricky issue is that we humans have a strong tendency to assign emotions to things that probably don't have them; we might talk about an angry bee or even a happy car. So it may not take much to fool people into thinking that a machine has emotions, even if the designers of that machine know it's all a trick and that the machine has no such emotions. As far as I know, deciding if anything really has emotions (as opposed to being something that tricks people into thinking it has emotions) is a problem that philosophers have been considering for many years, and they're still worrying about it.
For sure, having machines that respond at an emotional level to humans, and that humans find emotionally engaging, would improve a whole range of our current interactions and experiences with machines. In the office and the factory and the high street and the home, there is no shortage of machines that could be improved this way.
www.hpl.hp.co.uk
Dr Rosalind Picard
(author of Affective Computing, MIT Media Laboratory, near Boston)
Machines already show emotions - the Macintosh has been smiling at people for years when it boots up properly. But showing emotions is not the same as feeling them. Machines can fake the appearance of having emotions better than people can fake it - by giving the appearance of an expression that has no underlying true feelings attached. It is easy to have a machine yell at somebody by recording an expression from a human and having the machine play it - or giving the machine an animated face or robotic head that expresses anger. Displaying emotions by machine is relatively easy. However, knowing which emotions to express, and when it is appropriate to express them - that is hard, and it will be a long time before machines are good at this.
Some machines may need to have internal mechanisms like emotion for reasons that might surprise people. Emotions help regulate a lot of things we do that we might not realise. For example - the emotion system is at work in your decision to keep reading - to be interested or bored, irritated or amused. You don't have to look or act emotional for emotions to be involved. Emotions are involved even in intelligent, rational behaviour.
We are building machines that try to recognise people's frustration with them, and then respond respectfully - such as by apologising, and offering to show the user how to turn off an annoying feature. A dog recognises feelings better than a computer can, and is smarter when responding to them. We would like to build computers that are at least as good as a dog at understanding if you dislike or like what they did.
www.media.mit.edu/affect
Prof Aaron Sloman
(University of Birmingham, head of the Cognition and Affect project )
The answer is obviously yes - machines can show emotions. You are a machine. You show emotions. Machines have been showing (and even having) emotions for centuries. It is not clear exactly what kind of machine you are, or I am, or a monkey is, or a flea is. So it is not clear what sorts of machines can have or show what sorts of emotions.
Actually showing emotions is trivial: toy dolls have been doing that when squeezed for a long time. Having them is harder. Emotions are a biological phenomenon (though obviously some are overlayed with much cultural baggage).
There is no reason to believe that biological mechanisms, states, processes cannot be implemented in machines, since all organisms are machines. We don't know what sorts of machines, except that besides manipulating matter, and energy, as more familiar machines do, organisms are all much involved with manipulation and use of information.
Producing synthetic characters that look as if they are falling in love was done years ago by Disney. Self-animating ones will take a little longer, though simple versions already exist.
To go beyond mere appearances requires something deeper, including the right sort of information processing architecture to support all the states and processes involved in what you think of as love (which may not be what someone else thinks of as love - people think they know what they mean by words like "emotion", "love", "experience", "consciousness" and so on, but mostly they are kidding themselves). This will happen for entertainment purposes, and there's nothing wrong with that.
But I think it would be wrong and dangerous to allow machines to show love, when it is used to deceive or manipulate. Emotions are a very fashionable topic among AI people. Unfortunately many lack the philosophical training to clarify the concepts they are using and the psychological knowledge required to grasp phenomena referred to as "emotions". Just because something can be done, it does not follow that it can be done soon, or easily.
www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/
Sat Aug 24, 2002
(Associated Press)
TAMPA, Fla. (AP) - A podiatrist who allegedly wanted to destroy mosques and other Muslim centers had so many explosives in his home that he could have accidentally destroyed the 200-unit townhouse complex where he lives, police said.
Dr. Robert J. Goldstein planned to use guns and the explosives to destroy an Islamic education center and dozens of mosques, prosecutors said.
"If one of those bombs were to have gone off, that townhouse would have been destroyed," ATF Special Agent Carlos Baixauli said. "If the others exploded, we would have lost most of that townhouse complex."
Goldstein, 37, was arrested and charged Friday with possession of a non-registered destructive device and attempting to use an explosive to damage and destroy Islamic centers. Goldstein was being held Saturday without bond at Hillsborough County Jail.
Deputies found a typed list of approximately 50 Islamic places of worship in the Tampa and St. Petersburg area and elsewhere in the state during a search of Goldstein's Seminole home, prosecutors said.
Police were first called to Goldstein's home before dawn Friday after the man's mother contacted them and asked that they make a safety check. Goldstein's wife, Kristi, said her husband was threatening to kill her, according to an affidavit.
It took police 30 minutes to coax Goldstein out of the home, and he was placed in custody under the Baker Act, which allows involuntary commitment for psychiatric evaluation.
In Goldstein's home, rigged with trip wires and surveillance cameras, police found explosive devices including hand grenades and a 5-gallon gasoline bomb with a timer and a wire attached, said Pinellas County Sheriff's Detective Cal Dennie.
They also found a cache of weapons, including .50-caliber machine guns and sniper rifles. Goldstein had licenses for the guns and no criminal record, Dennie said.
Police said they also found an 11-point plan for attacking an Islam education center that outlined details including what Goldstein would wear, how he could get rid of fingerprints and how he would engage in hand-to-hand combat if necessary.
"Set timers for approximately 15-20 minutes to allow for enough time to get out of area, but to confirm explosions has (sic) been successful," the outline said, according to authorities. "The amount of explosives should be ample to take down the building(s)."
Residents of the complex were evacuated as a safety precaution during the search.
A message left at Goldstein's medical office was not returned Friday. Goldstein's home does not have a listed phone number.
(The Associated Press)
TAMPA, Fla. Aug. 24 — A doctor suspected of hatching an elaborate plot to blow up dozens of mosques and an Islamic education center had enough expertise and firepower to carry it out, police said Saturday.
Robert J. Goldstein, a foot specialist, possessed an arsenal powerful enough to level the 200-unit town house complex where he lives and a detailed "mission template" full of instructions, officials said.
"He was just a smart guy," said sheriff's Detective Cal Dennie. "He knew his stuff. It was like a James Bond thing."
Authorities were still investigating Saturday, said Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Special Agent Carlos Baixauli. He wouldn't give details. Representatives of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Tampa didn't immediately return calls.
Goldstein, 37, was arrested Friday and charged with possession of a non-registered destructive device and attempting to use an explosive to damage and destroy Islamic centers. He was being held Saturday without bail.
When police searched his home, they found a cache of up to 40 weapons, including .50-caliber machine guns and sniper rifles. They also uncovered more than 30 explosive devices, including hand grenades and a 5-gallon gasoline bomb with a timer attached.
"If one of those bombs were to have gone off, that town house would have been destroyed," Baixauli said. "If the others exploded, we would have lost most of that town house complex."
Deputies also found a typed list of approximately 50 Islamic places of worship in the Tampa and St. Petersburg area and elsewhere in the state, prosecutors said.
Police were called to Goldstein's home before dawn Friday after the man's mother asked that they make a safety check. Goldstein's wife, Kristi, said her husband was threatening to kill her, according to an affidavit.
Dennie said Goldstein's wife cooperated with investigators, but he did not give details.
It took police 30 minutes to coax Goldstein out of the home, which was rigged with trip wires and surveillance cameras. He was placed in custody under a state law that allows involuntary commitment for psychiatric evaluation.
At a hearing before a federal magistrate Friday, Goldstein sobbed loudly and responded to questions in low mumbles. His attorneys said Goldstein needed medications that he had been taking.
"We do have some preliminary concerns about his competency," said attorney Myles Malman of Hollywood. He didn't immediately return a call seeking comment Saturday.
The 11-point "mission template" for attacking the Islam education center covered everything from what he would wear to getting rid of fingerprints and dealing with hand-to-hand combat if necessary.
"Set timers for approximately 15-20 minutes to allow for enough time to get out of area, but to confirm explosions has (sic) been successful," the template reads. "The amount of explosives should be ample to take down the building(s)."
The director of an Islamic society whose mosque was found on Goldstein's list said worshippers will increase their vigilance.
"We have to open our eyes," said Mohammad Sultan, director of the Islamic Society of Tampa Bay.
Goldstein's fellow podiatrists were stunned by the arrest. One said Goldstein did not mingle with fellow doctors when they were treated by medical supply companies.
"We never saw him," said Edward Bratton, 47, president of the Pinellas County Podiatry Association.
Tue Aug 20,12:17 PM ET
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - A Democratic congressman criticized President Bush Tuesday for withholding more than $300 million for security at Energy Department installations, saying they could be targets for terrorists.
"The Department of Energy , by its own admission, does not have adequate resources to provide security at these facilities," said Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts.
In March, the Energy Department twice asked the Bush administration for $379 million in emergency security funding.
"The department's remaining safeguards and security budgets are not sufficient to implement the security posture requirements that appropriately respond to the Sept. 11 attacks," DOE budget officer Bruce Carnes wrote in a letter to administration budget officials.
Although the administration requested just $26.7 million for this purpose, Congress appropriated $360 million. However, Bush decided last week to spend only the roughly $26 million initially sought.
Bush announced that, in the interest of budget austerity, he was refusing to spend some $5.1 billion that Congress had appropriated for various purposes.
Amy Call, spokeswoman for the White House Office of Management and Budget, said the president had to choose whether to spend all or none of the $5.1 billion, and he considered $4 billion of it to be wasteful.
She said the National Nuclear Security Administration received $653 million to protect nuclear facilities and shipments in the current year, a sharp increase from the $411 million spent on security throughout the Energy Department last year.
And NNSA spokesman Bryan Wilkes said the agency is confident that its nuclear weapons facilities are secure.
"Do we want more money? Sure. Could we use it? Sure. Who couldn't? But are things any less safe without more money? Certainly not," he said.
Markey said he plans to try to add $300 million to the energy and water appropriations bill when Congress returns in September.
He said the budget needs are more egregious in light of Energy Department figures he obtained that said the number of guards protecting nuclear materials and facilities has been slashed by 40 percent.
Between 1992 and 2001, DOE whittled its security forces from 7,091 employees to 4,262, Markey said. Among those hit were the Strategic Petroleum Reserves in Louisiana, where security forces were reduced from 233 to 113. Security personnel at the Nevada Test Site were cut from 276 to 115. Rocky Flats, a former nuclear weapons plant outside Denver, had security forces cut from 380 to 154.
Wilkes said security was scaled back as facilities shut down after the Cold War, but hundreds of guards have been hired since Sept. 11, which is not reflected in Markey's figures.
"Any implication that nothing has changed in our security since Sept. 11 is patently ridiculous," Wilkes said.
While the bulk of the cuts in security forces came during the Clinton administration, Markey said the administration of the first President Bush also bears responsibility for underfunding security.
The security cuts were among the findings in a report Markey prepared, based on more than 200 pages of documents he requested from DOE. Much of the material was classified and could not be released.
Markey also said records showed computer hackers have broken into DOE computers numerous times since 1999. The breaches varied in their severity, but some were "root-level" compromises, which meant the hacker had enough access that a virus could be installed.
Wilkes said the hacking was not a coordinated effort. He said no classified or sensitive information was compromised and said that safeguards have been added to prevent future such attacks.
August 02
NewScientist.com news service
The 1997 Hong Kong flu outbreak, which killed one third of its victims, resulted from a single mutation that allowed the virus to disable part of the body's immune system.
"If this mutated gene is put into an ordinary strain of flu you turn it into a nasty virus," says Robert Webster, of St Jude Children's Hospital, Memphis, whose team did the research. "It provides an explanation for the virulence of the H5N1 Hong Kong epidemic and possibly for the 1918 epidemic."
Alan Hay of the National Institute of Medical Research in London says Webster's work is a significant step towards enabling epidemiologists to forecast the virulence of a flu virus by its genetic make-up. "We don't know how this virus manages to disable the body's interferon system. This is something we need to know as soon as possible," he says.
There are three strains of flu, known as A, B and C. Type A is usually responsible for large outbreaks, and constantly shifts its appearance to defeat the body's immune system.
In 1918, a subtype of the strain killed 30 million people world-wide. Unusually, most of the victims were young people. Type A and B strains of the virus cause 100,000 hospitalisations and 20,000 deaths each year in the US alone.
The Hong Kong outbreak in 1997 was caused by the subtype H5N1. It infected 18 people and killed six. Swift intervention and the slaughter of the island's entire chicken population - which acted as a reservoir for the virus - halted the spread of the disease.
Webster says his work shows why the virus proved to be so deadly.
His team found that a single mutation in one base pair of the NS1 gene allows the virus to evade the anti-viral effects of two controlling factors of the immune system: interferons and tumour necrosis factor alpha.
This mutation ensured that the resulting protein has an aspartic acid molecule switched to glutamic acid. Researchers do not know how such a small mutation can have such a big impact on the pathogen's virulence.
"This clearly can't be the whole story," said Webster. "There must be other factors at work but our work shows that if you transfer this gene into a benign form of the virus then you make a nasty disease."
Other researchers have suggested a link between H5N1's virulence and another gene, known as PB2. This protein is believed to be involved with viral reproduction.
Tue Aug 20,2002
Associated Press
SAN DIEGO (AP) - Investigators believe the San Diego-based Sept. 11 hijackers who helped crash an airliner into the Pentagon initially were sent to California to pinpoint targets in the Navy's largest West Coast port, a federal law enforcement source told The Associated Press.
Investigators believe al-Qaida operatives Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar, who arrived in California in January 2000, most likely were assigned to identify San Diego-based Navy ships to attack, said the federal official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
In October 2000, al-Qaida attacked the Navy warship USS Cole in Yemen.
Alhazmi and Almihdhar were aboard American Airlines Flight 77 when it crashed into the Pentagon, but concern about a plot to target warships in San Diego did not die with them.
In May, the FBI began checking with dive shops in the city and around the country to see if al-Qaida operatives had been taking scuba training. Special operations Navy divers and San Diego Harbor police started training in July to spot potential terrorist threats in the port, and the U.S. Coast Guard ( news - web sites) has asked recreational boaters to look for and report any suspicious activity.
San Diego is home to two nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and five nuclear-powered submarines, as well as the headquarters of the SEALs, the Navy's special operations force. A signature feature of the region is the two-mile bridge that links San Diego to Coronado.
The city served as a base for a "high number of hijackers and associates who lived, worked and studied" in the area, James Nagel, a special agent with the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security, has said in court documents.
John Iannarelli, an FBI spokesman in San Diego, said his agency is investigating the extent of the hijackers' support network in or near the city. He would provide no further details.
In a recent interview, Gov. Gray Davis said "the FBI has shared with us the probability of at least a couple cells active in California."
An al-Qaida training manual recovered by police in England lays out the organization's missions. Topping the list is gathering information about "the enemy, the land, the installations." No. 6 is "blasting and destroying the places of amusement, immorality and sin," and No. 8 is "blasting and destroying bridges leading into and out of the cities."
Last month, authorities in Spain seized videos of the Golden Gate Bridge, Disneyland and Universal Studios from suspected al-Qaida terrorists.
Just days before their Jan. 15, 2000, arrival in the United States, Alhazmi and Almihdhar traveled to Malaysia to meet with an al-Qaida lieutenant named Tawfiq Attash Khallad, labeled the mastermind of the USS Cole attack. Those who attended the meeting scouted potential targets, the law enforcement source said.
Investigators in San Diego have divulged little of what they've learned about Almihdhar and Alhazmi. The pair attended a local mosque, worked at a gas station and took a few flight lessons. Almihdhar flew home to Saudi Arabia, but returned in the summer. By the end of 2000, they were gone.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, authorities questioned anyone who met with them and rounded up a handful of Middle Eastern men as material witnesses, three of whom were charged with crimes unrelated to terrorism.
Thu Aug 22,2002
CHICAGO (Reuters) - They say diamonds are forever. And now the dearly departed can be, too.
A Chicago company says it has developed a process for turning cremated human remains into diamonds that can be worn as jewelry.
"We're building on the simple fact that all living creatures are carbon-based and diamonds are carbon-based," said Greg Herro, head of LifeGem Memorials.
The blue diamonds are the answer to people who think a tombstone or an urn full of ashes is not personal enough. And they are portable, Herro said.
Herro, who describes himself as an entrepreneur, said he has spent the past three years refining the process, successfully making a diamond from cremated human remains in July.
A small thimbleful of carbon can be made into 0.25 carat diamond, for which LifeGem would charge $4,000. A full karat would cost $22,000.
HEAT AND PRESSURE
The ash is first purified in a vacuum induction furnace at about 5,400 degrees. It is then placed in a press under intense pressure and heat, replicating the forces that create a natural diamond. It takes about 16 weeks.
Synthetic, or man-made, diamonds have been manufactured from carbon since the mid-1950s, when General Electric Co. developed the process for making small diamonds for industrial uses.
Avrum Blumberg, a chemistry professor at DePaul University in Chicago, said it is feasible to make a quality diamond from the carbon in a cremated human.
"If it's done slowly and with a great deal of care, one could have a reasonably high-quality diamond," Blumberg said.
In a telephone interview, Herro said his diamonds are of the same quality that "you would find at Tiffany's."
He said that he has had two of the diamonds certified for quality by European Gemological Laboratory, an independent laboratory that vouches for the quality of diamonds. The diamonds were submitted anonymously by a partner who sells synthetic diamonds to avoid any bias in the appraisals.
In a news release, Herro said that EGL would certify LifeGem's diamonds, though EGL said it has no formal relationship with LifeGem.
"At this time, EGL USA does not have enough information about this new product to comment about the use of the EGL name in conjunction with it." Mark Gershburg, director of EGL USA, said in a prepared statement in response to inquiries. But he said it is impossible to distinguish LifeGem synthetic diamonds from other synthetic diamonds.
A SERVICE FOR THE FAMILY
LifeGem's Web site lists a handful of funeral homes in the United States that will offer the service to customers.
One is Fergerson Funeral Home in North Syracuse, New York. Funeral director Patricia Fergerson said nobody has asked that a loved one be turned into a diamond yet. But the funeral home sees this as another service it can offer.
Meanwhile, an Illinois man with emphysema has signed up with LifeGem.
About 26 percent of U.S. residents who died were cremated last year. But Herro has his eye on a growth market. "Japan is at 98 percent," he said.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Cohen criticized people in the Pentagon for their tendency "to whine to the press" about their doubts surrounding an Iraq attack.
The Guardian's Brian Whitaker reports on the closely-knit and well-financed network of hawkish think tanks whose views and TV appearances are supplanting all other experts on Middle Eastern issues.
Media Transparency follows the money from conservative philanthropies to groups that Whitaker cites, including the American Enterprise Institute, Hudson Institute, Middle East Forum, and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
See the extensive list of newspaper articles and op-ed pieces that Washington Institute members have placed during the last year, and the speakers represented by Eleana Benador, who Whitaker calls "a sort of theatrical agent for experts on the Middle East and terrorism."
In a profile of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs JINSA and the Center for Security Policy CSP, Jason Vest writes that "For this crew, 'regime change' by any means necessary in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority is an urgent imperative."
August 18, 2002
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON — Oedipus, Shmoedipus.
Why cite a Greek hero when we can cite the president's favorite British hero?
In "Goldmember," Austin Powers has "Earn Daddy's Respect" on his To Do list. So the teary but still groovy spy confronts his prodigal father, played by Michael Caine.
"Got an issue?" Daddy breezily responds. "Here's a tissue."
Tissue issues between the two Bush presidents spilled into public view on Thursday when that most faithful family retainer, Brent Scowcroft, wrote a jaw-dropping op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal headlined "Don't Attack Saddam."
Mr. Scowcroft gave the back of his hand to conservatives' strenuous attempts to link Saddam to 9/11.
Bellicose Bushies have yet to offer a sustained and persuasive rationale for jumping Saddam, beyond yammering about how "evil" he is, as if he had a monopoly on that.
In the Journal, Mr. Scowcroft, one of the team that drew that fateful line in the sand a decade ago, ticked off all the reasons why invading Iraq makes no sense: it would jeopardize, and maybe destroy, our global campaign against terrorism; it would unite the Arab world against us; it would require us to stay there forever; it would force Saddam to use the weapons against us or Israel.
"Scowcroft is now more critical of Bush's foreign policy than Sandy Berger, which is mind-boggling," says Bill Kristol, a Bush I veteran who edits The Weekly Standard.
No one who knows how close Mr. Scowcroft is to former President Bush — they wrote a foreign policy memoir so symbiotic they alternated writing paragraphs — believes he didn't check with Poppy first. Did 41 allow his old foreign policy valet to send a message to 43 that he could not bear to impart himself?
The father is hypersensitive about meddling and reluctant to give advice. He doesn't want his pride to get in the way of his son's making up his own mind on what's right.
"It's a very strange relationship," a former aide to the father says. "He's so careful about his son's prerogatives that I don't think he would tell him his own views."
But Bush the elder must be fed up with being his son's political punching bag. On everything from taxes to Iraq, the son has tried to use his father's failures in the eyes of conservatives as a reverse playbook.
It must be galling for Bush père to hear conservatives braying that the son has to finish the job in Iraq that the father wimped out on.
His proudest legacy, after all, was painstakingly stitching together a global coalition to stand up for the principle that one country cannot simply invade another without provocation. Now the son may blow off the coalition so he can invade a country without provocation.
Junior could also have made the case that Dad's tax increase, which got him into so much trouble, led to 10 years of prosperity. Instead he has philosophically joined the right-wingers who erroneously think that the tax increase caused a recession.
But W. has spent his life running from his father's long shadow, trying to usurp Dad's preppy moderate Republicanism with good ol' boy conservative Republicanism.
Poppy bequeathed his son, a foreign affairs neophyte, his own trusted Desert Storm team, with Dick Cheney as surrogate father.
But Mr. Cheney brought in Don Rumsfeld, an old rival of Poppy's, and he was joined at the Pentagon by Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. This group is far more conservative, unilateral, ideological and belligerent than the worldly realists: 41, Scowcroft, Colin Powell and James Baker.
"The father and Scowcroft were about tying the coalition and the New World Order with a neat little bow," a Bush I official said. "Wolfowitz and Perle are: `We're the new sheriff in town. We'll go it alone.' "
The Bush I moderates worry that the Bush II ideologues will use terrorism as an alibi for imperialism. Bush II thinks Bush I is trapped in self-justification.
Mr. Kristol writes in the upcoming Weekly Standard that Mr. Scowcroft and Mr. Powell are "appeasers" who "hate the idea of a morally grounded foreign policy that seeks aggressively and unapologetically to advance American principles around the world."
What does that make the old man? The Chamberlain of Kennebunkport?
Who needs a war plan? We need family therapy.
Mon Aug 26,10:17 AM ET
A 15-foot thresher shark is seen leaping out of the water in Bar Harbor, Maine on August 10, 2002, in one of two pictures made by a local, avid photographer. Michael Leonard was on a nature cruise aboard the four-masted windjammer the 'Margaret Todd', when the occurrence, considered rare in these waters, took place off the coast of Maine. (Michael Leonard/Reuters)
Mon Aug 26, 9:29 AM ET
LONDON (Reuters) - More than half of Britons would like to emigrate from their homeland, fed up with the price of living and terrible weather, and would prefer to live in the United States or Spain, a survey published Monday said.
Fifty-four percent of Britons surveyed by pollsters YouGov for the Daily Telegraph newspaper said they would like to settle abroad if they were free to do so.
Similar polls found just 42 percent wanted to emigrate in 1948 shortly after World War II, and only 40 percent in 1975.
Of those wanting to leave Britain behind, the United States was the most popular destination followed by Australia.
However, if language wasn't a barrier -- Britons are the worst linguists in Europe according to an EU poll -- then Spain would be their preferred country of residence followed by France, with the U.S. pushed back into third place.
The survey found that being able live more cheaply and the chance of new opportunities were cited as the main reasons for moving abroad. Unsurprisingly the notoriously wet and shifty British climate was the next most popular reason for leaving.
However, the much maligned British cuisine was less of a problem with only 25 percent citing it as a problem.
The biggest draw for staying in Britain was being with family and friends, whilst the second most common reason was Britain's proud history.
Thu Aug 22,11:05 AM ET
Peruvian five-year-old Lina Medina (right), accompanied by her 11-month-old-son Gerardo and Doctor Lozada, who attended her son's birth, are shown in this 1939 file photo taken in Lima's hospital. When her child was born by Caesarean section in May 1939, Medina made medical history, and is still the youngest known mother in the world. (CARETAS via Reuters)
It has become synonymous with the terrorist attacks of September 11 - but what is the origin of the name al-Qaida? Giles Foden on how Bin Laden may have been inspired by Isaac Asimov's Foundation
Saturday August 24, 2002
The Guardian
In October last year, an item appeared on an authoritative Russian studies website that soon had the science-fiction community buzzing with speculative excitement. It asserted that Isaac Asimov's 1951 classic Foundation was translated into Arabic under the title "al-Qaida". And it seemed to have the evidence to back up its claims.
"This peculiar coincidence would be of little interest if not for abundant parallels between the plot of Asimov's book and the events unfolding now," wrote Dmitri Gusev, the scientist who posted the article. He was referring to apparent similarities between the plot of Foundation and the pursuit of the organisation we have come to know, perhaps erroneously, as al-Qaida.
The Arabic word qaida - ordinarily meaning "base" or "foundation" - is also used for "groundwork" and "basis". It is employed in the sense of a military or naval base, and for chemical formulae and geometry: the base of a pyramid, for example. Lane, the best Arab-English lexicon, gives these senses: foundation, basis of a house; the supporting columns or poles of a structure; the lower parts of clouds extending across a horizon; a universal or general rule or canon. With the coming of the computer age, it has gained the further meaning of "database": qaida ma'lumat (information base).
Qaida itself comes from the root verb q-'-d : to sit down, remain, stay, abide. Many people appear to think al-Qaida's name emerged from some idea of a physical base - a command centre from where Bin Laden and other leaders could direct operations. "We've got to get back to al-Qaida on that one," it's possible to imagine a footsoldier saying. Bin Laden himself has spoken, post-September 11, of being in "a very safe place". There have also been stories that his father had a vernal estate called al-Qaida in Yemen or Saudi Arabia. Could there be a sense in which the name of the organisation represents a notion of the eternal home in the consciousness of its fugitive leader?
On the surface, the most improbable explanation of the name is that Bin Laden was somehow inspired by a Russian-born writer who lived most of his life in the US and was once the world's most prolific sci-fi novelist (born in 1920 in Smolensk, Asimov died in New York in 1992). But the deeper you dig, the more plausible it seems that al-Qaida's founders may have borrowed some rhetoric from Foundation and its successors (it became a series) and possibly from other science fiction material.
As Nick Mamatas argued in an article on sci-fi fans in Gadfly magazine, "even the terror of September 11th had science fictional overtones: it was both an attack on New York from a tin-plated overlord with delusions of grandeur and a single cataclysmic event that seemingly changed everything, for ever".
Science fiction has often featured "evil empires" against which are set utopian ideas whose survival must be fought for against the odds by a small but resourceful band of men. Such empires often turn out to be amazingly fragile when faced by intelligent idealists. Intelligent idealists who are also psychopaths might find comfort in a fictional role model - especially one created by a novelist famous for castigating that "amiable dunce" Ronald Reagan: the president who prosecuted the CIA's secret war in Afghanistan.
The Empire portrayed in Asimov's novels is in turmoil - he cited Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as an influence. Beset by overconsumption, corruption and inefficiency, "it had been falling for centuries before one man really became aware of that fall. That man was Hari Seldon, the man who represented the one spark of creative effort left among the gathering decay. He developed and brought to its highest pitch the science of psycho-history."
Seldon is a scientist and prophet who predicts the Empire's fall. He sets up his Foundation in a remote corner of the galaxy, hoping to build a new civilisation from the ruins of the old. The Empire attacks the Foundation with all its military arsenal and tries to crush it. Seldon uses a religion (based on scientific illusionism) to further his aims. These are tracked by the novel and its sequels across a vast tract of time. For the most part, his predictions come true.
Seldon, like Bin Laden, transmits videotaped messages for his followers, recorded in advance. There is also some similarity in geopolitical strategy. Seldon's vision seems oddly like the way Bin Laden has conceived his campaign. "Psycho-history" is the statistical treatment of the actions of large populations across epochal periods - the science of mobs as Asimov calls it. "Hari Seldon plotted the social and economic trends of the time, sighted along curves and foresaw the continuing and accelerating fall of civilisation."
So did Bin Laden use Foundation as a kind of imaginative sounding-board for the creation of al-Qaida? Perhaps reading the book in his pampered youth, and later on seeing his destiny in terms of the ruthless manipulation of historical forces? Did he realise much earlier than anyone else that the march of globalisation would provide opportunities for those who wanted to rouse and exploit the dispossessed?
In the Arab newspaper al-Hayat, the Muslim intellectual Yussuf Samahah put it like this: "Anyone who believes that his [Bin Laden's] 'ideas' and the new phenomenon [globalisation] are contradictory would be mistaken, because while globalisation is gradually uniting the planet, it is causing many introverted and revivalist reactions which use the tools that globalisation provides to give the impression that they are not only fighting it but will ultimately defeat it." Using something like game-theory, Asimov's Hari Seldon worked on exactly such principles, taking into account, across time, the dynamic between intergalactic megatrends and local reactions to them.
If Bin Laden did read Asimov, when was it? It is clear that from an early age he consumed western products and media, until a fundamentalist reversion occurred when he met the Palestinian preacher Abdullah Azzam, who was to be a crucial influence.
As Bin Laden's best biographer, Yossef Bodansky, puts it, he "started the 1970s as did many other sons of the affluent and well-connected - breaking the strict Muslim lifestyle in Saudi Arabia with sojourns in cosmopolitan Beirut. While in high school and college, Osama visited Beirut often, frequenting flashy nightclubs, casinos, and bars. He was a drinker and womaniser, which often got him into bar brawls."
If Bin Laden did read Foundation, it most likely would have been in these wild years, when he was aping western habits. Maybe he read an English version, bought in one of Beirut's English-language bookshops, or during a trip to the US or London (where he bought property in Wembley).
Was there any science fiction for him to read in Arabic? A search dating from 1972 to the present of the Index Translationem, Unesco's register of translated books, reveals a reasonable amount of classic fantastic fiction in Arabic: The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. But so far as 20th-century science fiction is concerned, a search found only two clear-cut examples: a 1985 Kuwait book which collected Ray Bradbury's Pillar of Fire and The Fog Horn and a 1988 Iraqi edition of Colin Wilson's The Mind Parasites.
Maybe, says Dennis Lien from the University of Minnesota, who made the search, the fabled Arabic edition of Foundation was published prior to 1972 and has not been reprinted since, but passed from hand to hand. "I suppose one could argue that since Asimov was Jewish it may have become politically incorrect in the Islamic world to reprint his books, but the same argument would apply against their being printed to any great degree in the first place."
In the wake of September 11, the spectre of another science-fiction novel, Frank Herbert's Dune, was also raised as a possible influence on Bin Laden's self-mythology. It features a mysterious man whose followers, Arabic-speaking sons of the desert, live in caves and tunnels. They engage in a religious jihad against a corrupt imperialist civilisation.
The case that science fiction, and in particular Asimov, could have had an effect on Bin Laden is strengthened by their better documented effects on other psychopathic personalities. Japan's Aum Shinrikyo sect - which released 11 packets of deadly sarin gas into the Tokyo subway in 1995 - was also apparently trying to build a community of scientists modelled on the members of Asimov's Foundation. "Aum's bible was, believe it or not, the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov," says David Kaplan, author of The Cult at the End of the World, a book on the sect, or "guild" as it styled itself.
This is backed up by others. According to Yoichi Clark Shimatsu, former editor of the Japan Times Weekly, "The ultimate purpose of the guild, said the sect's science minister Hideo Murai, before he was murdered by a Korean gangster, is to rebuild civilisation after a cataclysm and to combat the powerful globalist institutions that are bringing on an apocalypse."
In 1995, after the subway attacks, a coded letter arrived at the magazine Takarajima 30. Believed to have been from Aum sympathisers, it gives a sense of how seriously the sect's members took Asimov and science fiction more generally. The letter, which promised an attack on the Tokaimura nuclear reprocessing plant, embedded its threat in a passage of literary criticism.
Shimatsu explains: "The letter was a rebuttal to an essay by Susan Sontag in which she claims the sci-fi film genre is based on a fascination with catastrophe in the age of the bomb. Instead, this critic asserted, science fiction is really about surviving catastrophe, and is therefore optimistic - and the key to the genre is the longing for a sense of scientific community resembling the craft guilds of the past.
"A professor of American literature at one of Tokyo's top universities, a specialist in science fiction, immediately recognised the passage as the work of literary critic Frederic Jameson. It was obviously selected as a defense of the Aum sect's effort to build a community of scientists modelled after Isaac Asimov's Foundation series."
A small, unplanned nuclear reaction took place at the Tokaimura plant in 1999, the same year the Japanese government cracked down on the sect. There had been other, more minor incidents. All are generally attributed to human error, but Shimatsu believes they may be connected to a second, resurgent wing of Aum working in the nuclear industry on Asimovian lines. "Aum enjoys a huge following within Japan's nuclear establishment, which is riddled with believers from millennialist sects. Another clue is contained in Asimov's masterpiece. After the visible First Foundation was crushed by the Galactic Empire, the invisible Second Foundation persisted to eventually win the universal struggle."
One can't blame Asimov for fuelling the swollen fantasies of the murderous. It is the last thing this committed pacifist ("violence is the last refuge of the incompetent") would have wanted. He may not be the only famous sci-fi author to have been taken up by lunatics, anyway. Killer cultist Charles Manson's favourite book is said to have been Stranger in a Strange Land, written by Asimov's rival for the imaginative future Robert Heinlein.
More generally, the space opera sub-genre of science fiction offers the possibility of a massive expansion of self-mythologising will-to-power. In a 1999 New Yorker article on galactic empires, Oliver Moreton beamed up French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, author of The Poetics of Space, to explain all this: "Immensity is a philosophical category of daydream. Daydream undoubtedly feeds on all kinds of sights, but through a sort of natural inclination, it contemplates grandeur. And this contemplation produces an attitude that is so special, an inner state that is so unlike any other, that the daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity." A world, one might add, in which knocking down the twin towers with passenger jets seems a possibility that can be realised.
As a genre, science fiction can't claim exclusive villainous effect. Other figures of extreme public animus have been influenced by different types of novels. Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who held science in contempt, told his family that he'd read Conrad's The Secret Agent "about a dozen times" in his Montana hut, and is thought to have modelled himself on Conrad's anarchist. He also registered under the name "Conrad" in the Sacramento hotel from which he's believed to have sent his bombs.
Earth First!, the militant US environmental gang, claim inspiration from Edward Abbey's 1975 novel, The Monkey-Wrench Gang, in which eco-guerrillas sabotage dams and bridges. Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh was a fan of neo-Nazi William Pierce's The Turner Diaries, which tells of a group that blows up the FBI headquarters in Washington.
As, in that very same biscuit-brown building in Federal Plaza, more "Most Wanted" pictures of Bin Laden were being pinned up in the wake of September 11, the Asimov/al-Qaida story was spreading. There was a piece in the Ottawa Citizen. On Ansible, one of the most popular science-fiction websites, hip sci-fi novelist China Miéville was quoted: "An expert on the Middle East told me about a rumour circulating about the name of Bin Laden's network. The term al-Qaida seems to have no political precedent in Arabic, and has therefore been something of a conundrum to the experts... Unlikely as it sounds, this is the only theory anyone can come up with."
The expert Miéville was referring to is Fred Halliday, who teaches international relations at the LSE. Trying to define al-Qaida, Halliday included the Asimov connection as a glancing aside in the "keywords" section of Two Hours that Shook the World, a book about September 11: "The term has no apparent antecedents in Islamic or Arabic political history: explanations range from a protected region during the communist era in Afghanistan, to it being an allusion to the Bin Laden family's construction company, to the title of a 1951 Isaac Asimov novel which was translated into Arabic as al-Qaida."
Many readers of Gusev's original website posting disagreed with its thesis entirely. "Asimov's story hinges on a secular extrapolation of human history based on mathematics," says John Jenkins, an expert on the author. "It's an idea which would make a Muslim extremist cringe." A letter to the most important British science-fiction magazine, Interzone, pointed out that the German title of Karl Marx's preparatory musings on capital, Grundrisse, can also be translated as "base" or "foundation".
Fantasy has certainly been an element in other terror campaigns, as in the influence of Celtic myths of nationhood on Irish Republicanism. Fergal Keane brought a quotation from Yeats into his contribution to the BBC's 9/11 book The Day that Shook the World: "The heart fed on fantasy, grown brutal from the fare." What Yeats was indicating, says Keane, "was the power of mythology in the shaping of the terrorist's consciousness". To be capable of sustaining a savage war, he went on, "it is necessary to narrow the mind, make it subject to a very limited range of ideas and influences".
That would seem to cut out Asimov. But other reasons why al-Qaida might be so called are no less mysterious. After all, communiques issued by Bin Laden and his associates never use the name. Instead they refer to themselves as the "World Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and the Crusaders", the "Islamic Army for the Liberation of Holy Places" and so on.
The first use of al-Qaida in western media was in 1996 in an American newspaper report which identified it as another name of the Islamic Salvation Foundation, one of Bin Laden's jihadi charities. The term only came into general usage after the group's bombing of the US embassies in East Africa in 1998, when the FBI and CIA fingered it as an umbrella organisation for various projects of Bin Laden and his associates - many of which grew out of ideas originally hatched by Abdullah Azzam, who'd been killed by a car-bomb in Peshawar in 1989.
The network grew exponentially. By the time Bin Laden was expelled from Sudan in 1996, his roster of jihadis had been computerised. Flying back to Afghanistan on a C-130 transport plane, he is said to have had with him, along with his wives and 150 supporters, a laptop computer containing the names of the thousands of fighters and activists who would help him further expand his struggle against the west. This qaida ma'lumat, this "information base", seems a very plausible source of the name.
Dr Saad al-Fagih, a Saudi dissident and former Afghan mujahideen, thinks the term is over-used: "Well I really laugh when I hear the FBI talking about al-Qaida as an organisation of Bin Laden." Al-Qaida was just a service for relatives of jihadis, he said, speaking to the American PBS show Frontline. "In 1988 he [Bin Laden] noticed that he was backward in his documentation and was not able to give answers to some families asking about their loved ones gone missing in Afghanistan. He decided to make the matter much more organised and arranged for proper documentation."
Fascinatingly, the acclaimed biography of Bin Laden by Yossef Bodansky, director of the US Congressional Task Force on Terrorism, hardly mentions the name al-Qaida. Written before September 11, it does so only to emphasise that al-Qaida is the wrong name altogether: "A lot of money is being spent on a rapidly expanding web of Islamist charities and social services, including the recently maligned al-Qaida. Bin Laden's first charity, al-Qaida, never amounted to more than a loose umbrella framework for supporting like-minded individuals and their causes. In the aftermath of the 1998 bombings in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam, al-Qaida has been portrayed in the west as a cohesive terrorist organisation, but it is not."
There's no doubt that the name came to prominence in part because America needed to conceptualise its enemy. This is certainly what Bodansky thinks now. "In the aftermath of September 11," he says, "both governments and the media in the west had to identify an entity we should hate and fight against."
Rohan Gunaratna, research fellow at the centre for the study of terrorism and political violence at the University of St Andrews, takes a different view. In an important recent book on al-Qaida, he argues that the name came from political theory, citing the concept of al-Qaida al-Sulbah (the solid base) formulated in an essay by Abdullah Azzam, Bin Laden's intellectual mentor. The solid base provided a platform, Gunaratna writes, for the "sole purpose of creating societies founded on the strictest Islamic principles".
Al-Qaida al-Sulbah mixes a type of revolutionary vanguardism, borrowed from European political philosophy, with Islamic martyrdom: it's the pioneering vanguard that must, in Azzam's phrase, after "a long period of training and hatching", be prepared to "jump into the fire". And there may be another borrowing: the essay reads like nothing so much as Hari Seldon's plans for his foundation. Perhaps it was Azzam, after all, who read Asimov.
· Zanzibar, Giles Foden's novel about the 1998 embassy bombings, is published by Faber at £14.99 on September 2
May 23, 2002
(ChristianScienceMonitor)
MONTEREY, CALIF. – News reports indicate that Al Qaeda, ousted from its camps in Afghanistan, is now on the loose, spreading terror around the world.
Several recent attacks have been claimed by or attributed to the terrorist network, including an assault on a Jewish synagogue in Tunisia, multiple explosions in Yemen last month (including one at the US Embassy compound), attacks in the Philippines, and a fire in the Milan metro.
But is Al Qaeda really behind all these attacks? Analysts cite differences in modus operandi compared with alleged past attacks, as well as more probable perpetrators in those recent incidents. Still, Al Qaeda is likely to be the top suspect in future incidents. Victims, including states, may even blame Al Qaeda for political reasons, namely to gain US sympathy and support.
Would-be terrorists the world over may be inspired to perpetrate attacks, seeking to feel they are part of what they perceive as a large, powerful terrorist movement. The public perception that Al Qaeda is running wild is likely to increase fear, especially among Americans.
Such concern, when translated into a heightened vigilance about one's surroundings – particularly in light of this week's warnings about future attacks in the US – may not be a completely bad thing. But unchecked public fear, taken to an extreme, could immobilize citizens, jeopardize civil liberties, and lead America into too many fights abroad.
The United States and its allies in the war on terrorism must defuse the widespread image of Al Qaeda as a ubiquitous, super-organized terror network and call it as it is: a loose collection of groups and individuals that doesn't even refer to itself as "Al Qaeda." Most of the affiliated groups have distinct goals within their own countries or regions, and pose little direct threat to the United States. Washington must also be careful not to imply that any attack anywhere is by definition, or likely, the work of Al Qaeda.
This phenomenon of "exaggerated enemy" is not new.
In 1983, three spectacular suicide bombings in Beirut were claimed by the previously unknown "Islamic Jihad." Numerous subsequent attacks were attributed to the group. And while the intelligence community concluded that "Islamic Jihad" was a nom de guerre for the Lebanese Hizbullah, it was clear that many of the subsequent attacks were unrelated to the militant Shiia organization.
Still, the campaign succeeded in creating the image of an invincible force, and "Islamic Jihad" became a symbol to follow – much as Al Qaeda is today.
The US must be careful about its use of the term "Al Qaeda." Meaning "the base" in Arabic, it originally referred to an Afghan operational base for the mujahideen during the Soviet occupation in the '80s.
In the current context of Osama bin Laden's terror network, this name was imposed externally by Western officials and media sources. Mr. bin Laden has, in fact, never mentioned "Al Qaeda" publicly.
In the quest to define the enemy, the US and its allies have helped to blow it out of proportion. Posters and matchbooks featuring bin Laden's face and the reward for his capture in a dozen languages transformed this little-known "jihadist" into a household name and, in some places, a symbol of heroic defiance.
By committing itself to eradicating terrorism, the Bush administration has put itself in a difficult position, especially if "Al Qaeda" begins popping up all over the map. While the US government must be diligent in protecting its citizens, it cannot try to extinguish every terrorist flame that appears without further encouraging the phenomenon as well as exhausting its resources. America must choose its battles wisely.
Resisting immediate attribution of attacks to Al Qaeda is the first step in defusing the enemy. While the Bush administration has not necessarily been blaming all post-9/11 attacks on Al Qaeda, it has passively allowed others to claim themselves as Al Qaeda or to blame it.
By allowing Al Qaeda to become the top brand name of international terrorism, Washington has packaged the "enemy" into something with a structure, a leader, and a main area of operation.
An invisible, amorphous enemy may be even more frightening. But we must be honest with the facts in order to construct a viable long-term strategy to combat terrorism.
• Kimberly A. McCloud and Adam Dolnik are research associates at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey Institute of International Studies.
Are they sure it wasn't Frank Herbert's Dune?
The nation's first urban gunshot location system is a tool for proactive communities to reduce gunfire. ShotSpotter uses a series of microphones in a specified area to instantly record and accurately pinpoint the location of gunfire. BCS is teaming with Trilon Technology LL and Dialogic Communications Corporation (DCC) in providing this total solution to the reduction of excessive gunfire in an area. BCS is creating the complete interface used by the police dispatcher to identify the location and to telephone area residents using DCC’s The Communicator This will allow witnesses and victims of a crime to easily report it and get help.
more....
Development in Crime Tech Helps Cops Pinpoint Site of Gunfire
Due to a developing technology called Shotspotter, police can figure out exactly where a gun was fired. And they can do that faster than a panicky person's fingers can dial 911.
(ABCNEWS.com)
L O S A N G E L E S, July 5 — In big cities, reports of crime and gunfire don’t bring the police to their feet as quickly as they should.
Now, thanks to a developing technology called Shotspotter, police can figure out exactly where a gun was fired. And they can do that faster than a panicky person’s fingers can dial 911.
“We’d drive around the neighborhood [and] we wouldn’t know, ‘Does this guy have the gun’?” said Deputy Thomas Fortier of the Los Angeles County Police Department. “Here, a gunfire event has occurred at this particular location about six to eight seconds before the dispatcher saw it here, and then the dispatcher can come over and play the sounds of that event.”
Now, technology tells the police when something’s going on, even when residents won’t. This system combines cutting-edge acoustic technology with computer programs used by nuclear power plants to track gunshots down, and possibly stop them.
Spotting Shots
Shotspotter consists of eight microphones, scattered on rooftops and utility poles, eight per square mile. Sharp, loud noises activate the microphones, which triangulate the location of the noise by comparing when they received the sound and how loud it was when it reached each microphone. They’re accurate to within about 40 feet, according to Los Angeles County Sherriff’s Deputy Darren Harris.
“We’re fascinated,” says Lt. Sid Heal, the officer in charge of the program. “We’re detecting things we never knew existed. Thirty percent of the gunshots are coming from one house. We think we’ll get a dramatic reduction.”
Once the location has been identified, the system can also be used to identify a surrounding area and call every resident, asking for information.
In Willowbrook, Calif., a neighborhood of one-story homes in Los Angeles County, near Watts and Compton, residents hear plenty of loud noises. One resident, retiree Martha Blaine has heard so many in recent days that she doesn’t bother to report them to police.
“I’ve heard some shots, all right. But I just considered, maybe it’s coming up to the Fourth of July ... maybe it was the fireworks, ”Blaine said.
In a six month experiment, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department installed Shot Spotter in an area where they had a lot of gunfire. But they found out there is much more than they thought: Only one in ten gunshots incidents are reported by the public.
“In about ten weeks we have confirmed about 260 confirmed gunshots in one square mile,” Heal said.
Officers listen to a sound bite of the sound to pick out which are gunshots and which are firecrackers. The gunshots then show up on a map that officers can print out and use to track down the culprits.
Once the location has been pinpointed, the system can also be used to identify a surrounding area and call every resident, asking for information.
Los Angeles isn’t the first area to use the Shotspotter system from Los Altos, Calif.-based Trilon Technologies, but they’re the first to combine it with callback features used by nuclear power plants and tornado-warning services. Police circle houses near the gunshot on a computer, which then calls all the residents of those homes, asking them to call the cops and tell them about the noise.
Finally, the callback system from Dialogic Communications in Franklin, Tenn., gives officers an aerial photo of the gunshot location.
“You can see as you zoom in if that’s a street, a house, a side yard or a front yard where the gunshot came from,” says Dave Krikac, a vice president of marketing at Dialogic.
Testing, Testing
Unfortunately, Shot Spotter has been slow to catch on, and it has not been that useful for convicting criminals.
The program is also supposed to function as a deterrent, so the shooters know police are listening. But although police officials say they spread the word with meetings and flyers, there hasn’t been much awareness in the community of Shotspotter, says Glenda Wina, spokeswoman for Los Angeles County Supervisor Yvonne Burke. None of the longtime Willowbrook residents ABCNEWS.com spoke to said they were aware of the project. They liked the idea once they’d heard about it.
“I approve of that very much. There’s a lot going on that we don’t know about,” said retired Willowbrook resident Burdette Harris.
But Shotspotter may fail in Los Angeles; it’s run out of money. Police need to continue the test and they’ve used up the funding, Heal said. Police are asking politicians for more money and if the department doesn’t find any by June 30, he said, they’re going to have to take the project down. The system would cost $85,000 to run for the next six months. Not everyone is sold on the new technique, particularly privacy experts who worry that the microphones could be listening into to more than they should.
Any technology which records civilians without their permission must be looked at skeptically, says James Love, director of Ralph Nader’s Consumer Project on Technology.
“What’s surprising is that it’s a rather extensive deployment for something that hasn’t resolved into too much law enforcement activity—but a lot of data is being collected,” he said.
But Heal and privacy advocate Simson Garfinkel, author of Database Nation say the system is designed to assuage some concerns. The microphones can’t pick up conversations, only ‘acoustical spikes’ like gunshots, truck backfires, and loud, sharp screams. They only record for eight seconds at a time. And the police are being open about this surveillance tool, rather than hiding it from the community — a plus in Garfinkel’s eyes.
The key is to keep the data open to the public, Garfinkel says.
“We have very few protections with what is done with the information once it is obtained. We should have access to that database of gunshots,” he said.
Eyes on You
For the future, maybe Americans should look to England, where civilians are under almost constant surveillance.
“We have cameras everywhere, absolutely everywhere. We rely very heavily on [closed circuit] TV as a crimefighting tool,” says Alex Hathaway, spokeswoman for London’s Metropolitan Police.
London has done Willowbrook one better. In the high-crime borough of Newham, an advanced facial-recognition computer system continually scans through surveillance images for pictures of wanted criminals. When it comes up with a good match, it tells police to check the tape.
The police have no monopoly on video cameras in London. Local city councils run cameras. Shops put cameras in their doorways. Britons are constantly being watched. According to Hathaway, that makes them feel safer.
“The received wisdom is that CCTV [closed-circuit television] cameras in town centers do bring crime down, because people know they’re being watched,” she said.
How long before they start listening for keywords?
(ABCNEWS)
March 10 2002
In the borough of Newham — one of the English capital’s toughest neighborhoods — a system of 250 video cameras monitors the mean streets, and a computer scans the images in real time, alerting police when it recognizes the face of a known criminal.
That’s one application of biometric technology, which is coming (if it hasn’t already) to a street, ATM, or office building near you. From banks in Texas to doorways in New York, companies are using fingers, hands, faces and eyes to replace keys and personal identification numbers, or PINs.
I.D. You Can’t Lose
Voiceprint and fingerprint reading technologies have been around for decades in high-end government applications. But several companies are now bringing biometrics into the consumer sphere. Bank United, a Houston-based bank with 141 branches throughout Texas, has replaced ATM cards with iris scanners in three of its branches.
Iris scanners use an ordinary video camera to take a picture of the eye and check more than 200 data points against data on file. Every iris is unique, and unlike with retinal scanners, an iris check doesn’t actually shine a light into your eye.
“The customers have loved it. … We’ve even had a number of people who came to our bank just because it had that capability,” bank spokesman Vern Stockton said.
Iris scans are more secure than ATM cards — it’s a lot harder to lose your eye or have it be stolen. And they’re more convenient, with a scan taking only about three seconds, less time than it would take even to enter a PIN.
Gotta Hand It to ’Em — Face It
The most common form of biometric scanning right now is hand geometry, which takes measurements from a person’s hand to allow them access to a building, for example. The Immigration and Naturalization Service uses hand scanners to speed business travelers through customs, and some New York building-management companies use them in place of key cards.
“There are always questions, especially when you have a lot of attorneys in your building, but we’ve never had any problems with the system,” a spokeswoman for Boston Properties said.
The face-recognition system in London is developed by Visionics, which also sells systems to Las Vegas casinos to spot known card sharks. The Visionics system boils a face down to an 84-byte file of 14 reference points — mostly around the eyes and at the temples — and can scan through thousands of possible matches a minute, according to company spokesman Meir Kahtan.
It has some trouble with identical twins, but it can’t be defeated by a pair of sunglasses.
“A bushy beard is not an issue. Glasses are not an issue. It’s looking for very specific points,” he said.
Systems Aren’t Perfect
One drawback to the new high-tech ID systems is that cheaper biometrics systems can be “spoofed,” according to a report in PC Magazine last year.
The magazine tested 11 inexpensive biometric systems designed to secure laptops and networks against non-users, in place of standard log-on ID names and passwords.
“We tried to gain entry using a mask we created by printing a digital image from a color printer. This didn’t work. But then we cut a nose hole in the mask and placed the mask on someone with a somewhat similar nose.” This fooled two face-recognition systems, the magazine reported.
That’s why one top biometrics company advocates having multiple systems that check each other. Keyware Technologies of Massachusetts is developing a smart-card system for Dutch nightclubs that combines card, face-recognition, and fingerprint systems. The cards will tally drink checks, collect frequent-clubber points and keep rowdy patrons from being able to get back in once ejected.
What About Privacy?
But the idea of corporations and governments assembling biometric data enrages some privacy advocates. What if, for instance, your grocery store tells your car insurance company (based on shared fingerprint data) that you’ve been buying a lot of alcohol, and the insurance company raises your rates? The idea might sound far-fetched, but its point is valid.
The industry supports proposed state laws forcing companies to keep biometric information to themselves, and has encouraged manufacturers to come up with voluntary privacy codes.
Carol Migden, a California state assemblywoman, has proposed one of several bills to stop companies and agencies from sharing data. Previous attempts to pass this type of legislation have failed so far after resistance from retailers, the health care industry and law enforcement officials, said her chief of staff, Michael Miller.
“If you have any privacy at all in your life, having somebody able to track your every move, your purchases, what you’re doing … this can lead to really egregious situations of privacy being invaded,” he said.
Both technological solutions and legislative regulation are needed, says Ann Cavoukian, data privacy commissioner for the government of Ontario in Canada.
“Let’s say that all the different arms of government decided to use your fingerprint. They could then link all the information about you into a very comprehensive profile, because a biometric is a biometric is a biometric,” she said.
Encryption to the Rescue
But encryption technology may provide one answer. Encrypted biometrics use personal data as a private key to lock information, ensuring a user’s identity but making it impossible for devices to share results, as each device generates a different set of numbers.
“It preserves the benefits of the biometric, a secure form of identification, while preserving a privacy component,” Cavoukian said.
Keyware’s Elizabeth Marshall said the safest method of insuring privacy is to keep no databases at all. Her company’s smart cards simply prove that a cardholder is the person claims he or she claims to be, by checking a scan on the fly against data hidden in the card. No database is needed, because the only check is whether the stored data on the card matches up with the person holding it.
“If your bioprints are [only] with you on a card, nobody has access to that data,” because the data is never saved or compiled anywhere, she said.
(TheSun.co.uk)
Fri, Aug 30, 2002
Pervert Stan Balderson was seen running from cow to cow wearing only a T-shirt, tennis shoes and sunglasses.
The sheriff’s office set up surveillance cameras and spotted him being intimate with the animals after a fed-up neighbour complained about his lewd activities.
It was the first time Balderson had been caught, but police said he had been to the field in Nomini Grove, Virginia, US, many times before.
He was convicted of bestiality by a judge who gave him a two-year suspended jail sentence and placed him on probation.
Attorney Peggy Garland said finding an appropriate punishment for the old man was very difficult.
“What do you do with an 80-something-year-old who would do something like this?” she said.
Police said the property owner knew Balderson, but had never given him permission to be in the field or to go anywhere near the cows.
July 7, 2002
(UKGuardian)
Terrorists are planning a series of spectacular attacks on American, British and Israeli targets to coincide with the anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Centre on 11 September last year.
Intelligence agencies in the UK, southern Asia and the Middle East are detecting an increased volume of communications between suspected al-Qaeda cells as the organisation, led by the fugitive Saudi-born dissident Osama bin Laden, accelerates efforts to pull off a major operation in the days around the anniversary of the New York and Washington attacks.
According to sources in Pakistan, al-Qaeda activists there have been given a three-month deadline to work with associates from local hardline Islamist organisations to target Western interests in the region.
British intelligence sources told The Observer that the UK is third on the list of al-Qaeda's preferred targets - after the US and Israel, and confirmed last night that credible reports of planned al-Qaeda attacks had grown.
'The threat remains high and the background noise has been growing over recent weeks. It's a question of when, rather than if, they will attempt another spectacular,' said one Whitehall source.
Western security agencies predominantly rely on communications intercepts, which they correlate with tip-offs from informers and information from questioning arrested suspects to alert them to forthcoming attacks. Increases in the volume of communications between known al-Qaeda suspects also suggest that action may be imminent.
Abu Zubaydah, the top al-Qaeda operative arrested in March in Pakistan, has told his American interrogators that the terrorist group was planning a wide range of 'mass casualty attacks'.
Bin Laden is believed to be hiding in the rugged mountains that line the frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Many of his followers remain in Pakistan.
Last week four al-Qaeda gunmen and three paramilitary policemen died in a shoot-out near Kohat, on the borders of the semi-autonomous tribal areas where an estimated 300 al-Qaeda fighters are hiding.
Investigators in Karachi, probing last month's bomb attack on the US consulate in the city, believe that al-Qaeda operatives are now linking up with local Islamic terror and crime groups to carry out their attacks.
The new warning is the second such alert issued by intelligence services in the last seven months. The CIA and MI6 issued a warning at the end of last year after interrogations of al-Qaeda suspects in Camp X-Ray in Cuba revealed that the al-Qaeda high command had regrouped after the bombing of Afghanistan and was already planning attacks across the world.
Moroccan intelligence sources told The Observer last month that they had been told by their American and British counterparts that al-Qaeda reconnaissance cells had been sent from Afghanistan after the bombing of the Tora Bora mountain HQ last December with detailed instructions to carry out attacks on Western and Jewish targets.
As a result the Moroccans were last month able to foil a 'spectacular' designed to hit British and American troops in the Strait of Gibraltar by arresting a cell of three Saudi al-Qaeda operatives. Following the destruction of their support infrastructure in Afghanistan last autumn, bin Laden's operatives have dispersed throughout the region and into the Middle East.
Aug 27,2002
LONDON (Reuters) - Osama bin Laden is firmly back in command of al Qaeda and the group is digging in for guerrilla attacks on U.S. troops in Afghanistan , an Arab journalist with close ties to the militant's associates said on Tuesday.
Abdel-Bari Atwan, editor of the London-based daily al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper, said al Qaeda associates recently told him the network had regained confidence after facing intense U.S. bombing and was ready to fight U.S. troops over the long haul.
"Al Qaeda were shattered during the U.S. bombing so it was difficult for bin Laden to stay in control. Now they said he is fully in command again and they have regrouped and are organized again," Atwan told Reuters.
"Al Qaeda people say they are relaxed now and they will fight a war of attrition against U.S. soldiers," added Atwan, who interviewed bin Laden in 1996 and keeps in contact with his associates and followers.
Bin Laden was in good health and "safe" and was planning new attacks on the United States, he was told, but his whereabouts were not disclosed.
The United States launched strikes on Afghanistan last year to flush out al Qaeda and hunt down bin Laden, its prime suspect in the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, and punish the Taliban regime that protected him.
But remnants of al Qaeda and their Taliban allies have continually frustrated the U.S.-led coalition by hiding in mountains, melting into the local population or fleeing into neighboring Pakistan or Iran.
Atwan said that the al Qaeda and Taliban had re-established links that were severed when the United States began its military campaign in Afghanistan.
"They are working together again. They are organizing," he said.
There is no trail, meanwhile, leading to bin Laden.
Bin Laden's associates told Atwan that the Saudi-born militant was well, "safe" and planning new attacks on the United States. They did not say where bin Laden was currently living.
"My sense is that he will time any new attack to coincide with a U.S. attack on Iraq. He would want to capitalize on this to appeal to the Arab street so he will probably delay any attacks until the United States moves on Iraq," said Atwan.
"He will probably want to be seen as the only Arab standing up to the United States when the United States attacks Iraq."
Bin Laden made a series of defiant videotapes broadcast on television as U.S. warplanes pounded Afghanistan. But he has recently stayed out of sight.
His associates said Bin Laden, who has a $25 million U.S. bounty on his head, was well protected but his entourage was small in order to avoid capture, said Atwan.
"He is the master of disguise and he is making sure that he is not giving anything away so he travels in a small group," he said.
Bin Laden's top aide Ayman al-Zawahri, the Egyptian-born chief strategist of al Qaeda, was with him along with a small group of militant bodyguards, Atwan was told.
Wattana's father Prayoon found the crocodile as a hatchling in a local pond three years ago and it has grown to over one-meter in length and weighs 40 kg (88 pounds). The crocodile is pampered with a diet of fresh chicken, has his sharp teeth brushed every day by Wattana and his father, and lives indoors with their two pet dogs. REUTERS/Jason Reed
08/27/2002
WASHINGTON (AP) — Several intelligence sources have indicated that terror suspect Jose Padilla learned how to build a radioactive bomb after being directed to a safehouse in Pakistan by a senior leader of al-Qaeda, according to a previously classified government memo.
But the memo, written by Defense Department adviser Michael Hobbs and released Tuesday by the Justice Department, states that other intelligence shows Padilla was not a member of al-Qaeda and that there was no timetable for an attack.
Hobbs wrote that some of the people who provided information on Padilla may be trying to mislead the U.S. government.
The memo was included with a government court filing in which Justice Department attorneys defended the military's detention of Padilla without trial.
Padilla's attorney, Donna Newman, had asked the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to order the government to give Padilla a trial.
In the government's response, officials revealed for the first time how they came to suspect Padilla of being involved in a plot. Two al-Qaeda prisoners held outside the United States fingered Padilla, the memo says.
In 2001, Padilla approached senior al-Qaeda lieutenant Abu Zubaydah with a proposal to conduct terrorist attacks within the United States, the memo states.
Zubaydah, who is now in the custody of the U.S. military, directed Padilla to travel to Pakistan for training in wiring explosives from al-Qaeda operatives. There, Padilla researched how to construct a "dirty bomb" — a device that spreads radiation without causing a nuclear explosion.
Hobbs writes in the memo that Padilla met with al-Qaeda officials twice. In 2002, he and al-Qaeda officials discussed the possibility of blowing up gas stations or hotels in a series of coordinated attacks on the United States, the memo states.
Some of that information has been corroborated, the memo says, but some "confidential sources have not been completely candid. ... Some information provided by the sources remains uncorroborated and may be part of an effort to mislead or confuse U.S. officials."
The memo states that one of the sources recanted much of the information he provided and one source was being treated with "various types of drugs to treat medical conditions."
Newman, the attorney, did not return calls from The Associated Press late Tuesday.
Some law enforcement officials have suggested that Padilla was not strongly tied to al-Qaeda and was probably sent to the United States with little support. Critics in Congress have accused the Bush administration of overblowing Padilla's arrest in May to divert attention from questions about terrorism-related intelligence failures.
Padilla, 31, is being held in a military brig in South Carolina as an enemy combatant, a legal designation allowing the government to jail him without formal criminal charges. Newman has argued in court that he is being held illegally and should be released.
Investigators have said they believe Padilla, a Muslim convert and a former Chicago gang member, ventured overseas in search of clerics connected to the most radical branch of Islamic fundamentalism.
In early June, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced from Moscow that Padilla had been arrested at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago.
GeoStorm is a state of the art, severe weather early warning system developed through an alliance with Dialogic Communications Corporation (DCC), BCS and Baron Services, Inc., who is one of the world’s premier manufacturers of real-time, site-specific weather monitoring systems.
Using the data from the Baron’s doppler radar to determine the storms projected path, GeoStorm is able to quickly notify the public through DCC’s world leading telephone notification system, The Communicator!®
more....
First Automated Severe Weather Early Warning System Issue Alerts Residents and Businesses in Path By Telephone
2/22/1999
Franklin, TN -- Dialogic Communications Corporation (DCC) announces the release of the first geographically based automated storm notification system, GeoStorm?. DCC’s alliance with Baron’s Services, Inc. and Bradshaw Consulting Services (BCS) allows GeoStorm to be the first severe weather early warning system to combine incipient storm detection with the ability to quickly identify residents and businesses in danger then simultaneously alert them via telephone notification.
"Since the company’s inception, Baron Services has been dedicated to providing life-saving technologies that enable early severe weather detection for the public," said Bob Baron, President of Baron Services. "Our relationship with DCC gives us another excellent avenue for pursuing this goal."
Baron’s Services, the industry-leading provider of patented storm tracking and real-time, site specific weather technologies, provides GeoStorm with its pinpoint weather data. Baron’s software detects approaching severe weather utilizing Doppler radar, determines the storm’s path and transmits that data to GeoStorm.
GeoStorm then identifies and downloads the name and phone number of every household and business in danger using ESRI’s MapObjects solution from BCS. The phone numbers are processed through a powerful call-out engine, which begins rapid notification of residents. GeoStorm can also execute alert scenarios by contacting emergency response teams with messages and instructions concurrently with the general community alert. All call-out activity is documented with real-time status screens and comprehensive reports.
"GeoStorm is a great leap forward in storm alert technology," asserted Dave Krikac, DCC’s Vice President of Marketing. "Telephone notification is simply a more reliable way to broadcast a warning than current methods like sirens and tv/radio bulletins." As has been demonstrated in the recent past, emergency alert sirens can fail, malfunction or be destroyed during severe storms, and sirens that do function are not heard by all residents, leaving many vulnerable and unaware of imminent danger.
GeoStorm, however, operates from a safe central location and can be set to activate automatically. The system can be hooked to a UPS (uninterruptible power source), but it also has offsite back-up capabilities, enabling cities to continue call-outs in the event of power failure. After any unavoidable utility outage or other disturbance, GeoStorm resumes the call-out(s) in the exact place it was suspended.
GeoStorm’s ability to rapidly identify and alert jeopardized areas greatly improves a community’s chance to prepare before disaster strikes. This dramatically reduces the risk of damage to property and the loss of lives. As the Federal Emergency Management Association (FEMA) estimates, for every dollar spent in damage prevention, two are saved in repairs.
DCC continues to be a pioneer in interactive notification solutions since its establishment in 1982. The company is located in Franklin, Tennessee, a suburb of Nashville. Its notification software is currently used by over 500 emergency management agencies, police/fire departments and other business, industry and government operations, both nationally and internationally. For more information regarding DCC and its products visit www.dccusa.com
Sept 9, 2001 The Indian Week
On another mandala, a fully equipped outdoor Vedic observatory, similar to the Jantar Mantar in Delhi, has already been set up. This observatory has the full complement of 10 instruments that measure astronomical events such as precise solar time, movements of the equinox, solstice, decline of Venus and so on. "It took us four years of travel to different parts of India to obtain these instruments," said Fitz-Randolph. "By spending a little time at the observatory and gazing at it, an individual can correct his imbalance in relation to the cosmos," he said, when asked about its relevance.
August 30, 2002
(LondonTimes)
15 Saudis were among the September 11 hijackers. Now their Government hopes a gift of the Kentucky Derby winner will heal families wounds.
SAUDI ARABIA is considering giving a million-dollar racehorse to the families of the September 11 victims in an extraordinary attempt to improve relations with the United States.
The gift is part of a $5 million (£3.3 million) public relations campaign mounted by the Saudi Government to rescue its country’s reputation in America after it emerged that 15 of the hijackers were Saudi nationals. The Saudis are reported to be considering handing over the horse, which won this year’s Kentucky Derby, as part of commemoration celebrations planned for Ground Zero.
However, there was a risk last night that the planned gesture could backfire. Not only is the horse named, perhaps a little inappropriately, War Emblem, but the victims’ families signalled that the gift could add insult to injury.
“I’ve heard this offer, and it’s not even a start,” said Steve Push, who lost his wife in the Pentagon and founded Families of September 11th. “What, so 3,000 families would own this horse collectively? They need a new PR consultant.”
Mr Push said he held Saudi Arabia responsible for the attacks and was not interested in any humanitarian gestures from the Saudi Royal Family.
One group of more than 300 relatives is suing Saudi Arabia for $300 billion on charges that the Government is involved in terrorism.
War Emblem was bought in May by the late Prince Ahmed bin Salman, a member of the Saudi Royal Family, three weeks before the Kentucky Derby. The thoroughbred entered the mile and a quarter race with odds of 20-1, but came through well and won, making its owner the first Arab to win the race. War Emblem went on to win another major race, the Preakness Stakes, shortly before Prince Ahmed died in July.
Details of the Saudi offer, reported in yesterday’s New York Times, were supposed to have been kept quiet until a final deal was announced.
It is not known how the value of the horse, now estimated to be worth well over $1million, would be divided up, nor whether the gift would include stud rights, which is where the real value lies.
The Saudis, whose officials in Washington were last night not answering calls, would not want to risk embarrassment by publicly announcing an offer which is then rejected.
Last October Rudolph Giuliani, the Mayor of New York, returned a gift of $10million from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal after the prince criticised US policy on the Palestinians.
In all, the Saudi Government has spent ten times its usual budget on trying to improve its image in the United States this year and has hired several top PR firms to try to persuade the American public that it is still an ally.
Osama bin Laden “could have put any nationality he wanted on those airplanes. He purposefully chose Saudis in order to give this operation a Saudi face and drive a wedge between us and America,” Adel al-Jubeir, an adviser to the Saudi Government and a key figure in the PR drive, said. “And you know what? He almost succeeded.”
At stake for the desert kingdom are its financial investments in the United States, its ties with a key ally and the fate of thousands of Saudis at US campuses who say they have suffered discrimination since September 11.
The Saudis have adopted the techniques of a US political campaign and have launched television advertisements nationwide, hired a new publicity team and sent officials on speaking tours. In one ad, the Saudi and US flags are raised together while a narrator intones: “In the war on terrorism we all have a part to play. Our country has been an ally for over 60 years.”
There is no evidence that the campaign is succeeding. An opinion poll last week found 63 per cent of Americans had a negative image of Saudi Arabia, compared with 50 per cent in May. If America launches a strike against Iraq which is not supported by the Saudis, it really would take more than a racehorse to improve relations.
War Emblem’s story is one of rags to riches. He was bought for $20,000 (£13,000) as a yearling, but after he won the Illinois Derby Prince Ahmed paid a reputed $1 million in a private deal earlier this year. His new owner collected an instant dividend when War Emblem won the Kentucky Derby, one of the biggest flat races in the US calendar, by four lengths. He then went on to win the Preakness Stakes, the second leg of the American Triple Crown.
However, his attempt to become the first horse since Affirmed, in 1978, to complete the Triple Crown by winning the Belmont was compromised when he stumbled coming out of the stalls and finished a disappointing eighth.
Prince Ahmed described him as “one of the best horses I’ve had. He’s like finding gold in Saudi Arabia”.
Aug. 27, 2002, 10:32PM
Associated Press
MARBELLA, Spain -- It's the hottest hour of the day at the Puente Romano beach club when a girl of 13 dashes out of the hotel gardens, throwing a black cloak over her flowing hair, T-shirt and jeans and leaving the topless sunbathers behind.
Sarah al-Kabbani, child of Saudi royalty, is obeying the muezzin's call to prayer, and she's running late.
King Fahd, leader of one of the world's strictest Muslim nations, has come to his vacation residence in Marbella, the Mediterranean capital of sun and sin, bringing along thousands of members of the House of Saud.
As usual, Saudi princes and princesses are expected to snap up Hermes scarves and Rolex watches by the display case, slap down millions on roulette tables and boogie into the night with the bejeweled blondes at the Olivia Valere discotheque.
It's a lifestyle strictly prohibited in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam, where boys and girls are forbidden to hold hands in public and the constitution is based on Islam's holy book, the Quran.
This summer the gap between the monarchy's practices and preachings is under greater scrutiny than usual, as war talk rumbles through the Middle East and Saudi Arabia wrestles with the fallout from terrorism and the fact that 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were Saudis -- devotees of Osama bin Laden and his campaign to topple a monarchy he views as America's corrupt puppet.
Saudi royalty has been part of the Marbella glitterati ever since the 1970s Arab oil boom. When Fahd built his summer residence atop an artificial hill overlooking the city, the White House look-alike mansion shocked a city whose gaudy architecture makes Beverly Hills look staid.
Called An-Nada, or the Dew, the palace got a facelift in time for Fahd's arrival Aug. 14 from Switzerland, where he has another residence.
Although princes vacation in the palace every summer, the House of Saud has virtually transplanted itself here for the first visit in three years by the 81-year-old sovereign, who handed over authority to Crown Prince Abdullah after suffering a stroke in 1995.
Fahd, who now uses a wheelchair, hardly ever comes into town. However, he sends aides on shopping sprees or summons merchants to bring their most exclusive offerings to the palace.
Shopkeepers have stocked up on luxury items, expecting the royals to spend some $5 million a day during the month or more that they stay here.
"Every time they come here they turn this place on its head," said Antonio Mena, who sells $250 silk scarves in one of Puerto Banus Marina's exclusive shops while moonlighting as personal gym trainer for Fahd's 27-year-old niece, Princess Hadza.
Mena added that last year the Saudis went to a Cartier jewelry shop "and spent more than 60 million euros in a single day." A euro is roughly a dollar.
The Saudi men seem to have more fun. The women wear veils and waterproof robes, even on Marbella's topless beaches. A woman riding a Jet Ski while covered head-to-toe in a black robe is not an uncommon sight.
But after Friday prayers were over at the Abdulaziz al-Saud mosque, Sarah al-Kabbani tore off her garment and wove her way on foot through a traffic jam of Mercedes sedans back to the Puente Romano, where suites cost $1,270 a night.
There's plenty of ways kids can have good clean fun in Marbella, such as hanging out or going to movies. But when Sarah started to talk about them, a man in sunglasses appeared, scolded her in Arabic for talking to a reporter and sent her away.
He turned out to be a royal family member named Adnan al-Fadda. Then, after indignantly knocking down the gossip in Marbella about Saudi men and blonde escorts for hire, he turned to Sept. 11.
It had nothing to do with the political situation in Saudi Arabia, he said. He refused to believe that any of the hijackers were Saudi citizens, and maintained the attacks were an Israeli-CIA plot.
"Do you know how many Jews in the World Trade Center didn't go to work that day?" he said, repeating a conspiracy theory rampant in the Arab world.
(Right-wing NewsMax.com)
8-27-2
Just hours after President Bush reportedly assured Saudi chief of state Crown Prince Abdullah of the "eternal friendship" between the U.S. and the Saudi kingdom on Tuesday, the kingdom's leading English language newspaper Arab News published a cartoon on its Web site trashing Vice President Dick Cheney as an Israeli puppet.
Juxtaposed next to a favorable report on President Bush's meeting with Saudi U.S. ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan at Bush's Crawford, Tx. ranch, ArabNews.com's "Daily Cartoon" for Wednesday shows Cheney ripping a photo of Saddam Hussein in half as an antenna protrudes from his head. http://www.arabnews.com/system/html/cartoon/280802.jpg
Cheney's antenna is depicted as receiving its signal from a remote control panel operated by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The caption above Cheney reads:
"It is not necessary to obtain permission from Congress to hit Iraq... Only from the Knesset."
Speaking to a veterans group Monday, Cheney warned that the U.S. would not wait till Saddam Hussein had obtained nuclear weapons to take action against Iraq.
In contrast to the anti-Cheney cartoon, an accompanying ArabNews.com report touts President Bush's warm telephone conversation with Prince Abdullah on Tuesday.
"US President George W. Bush yesterday called Prince Abdullah, the regent, by telephone to reaffirm the 'eternal friendship' between the United States and Saudi Arabia," ArabNews.com said.
(UKIndependent)
30 August 2002
An accidental discovery on the seabed could provide proof that an American sailor, not a Japanese pilot, fired the first shot in the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 that launched the Pacific War.
American marine researchers have discovered what almost certainly is the two-man Japanese midget submarine that was sunk by the destroyer USS Ward shortly before hundreds of Japanese aircraft devastated the US Pacific fleet as it lay at anchor, sinking or damaging 21 American warships, and killing almost 2,400 people.
The 78ft submarine was found a few miles from Pearl Harbor itself during a test dive by the Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory. Eyewitness accounts have long spoken of a submarine skirmish before the aerial onslaught.
The sunken mini-sub has a bullet hole in its conning tower, and both torpedoes are intact. The remains of the two crewmen are believed to be still inside. "It's the shot that started World War II between the Americans and the Japanese," said John Wiltshire, director of Hawaii Undersea Research.
New Jersey Record
8-26-2
A New Jersey girl whose mental development stopped at 2 months old after a routine immunization has received a $4.7 million settlement from a national trust fund.
More than $3 million of the award will go to an annuity that will pay for the child's care as long as she lives. Its payout could exceed $61 million if she lives to 71, said Mindy Michaels Roth, the Glen Rock attorney who brought the case in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.
The payment to the girl, now 9 years old but with the mental ability of a 2-month-old, comes from the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, funded by a 75-cent tax on each vaccination. Congress created the fund in 1986, at a time when a growing number of lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers was driving them out of the marketplace, and more parents were choosing not to immunize their children because they feared harmful side effects.
"It removes a tremendous weight as to how we'll care for [our daughter] financially,'' said the girl's father, who lives in Central Jersey and asked that the family not be identified. "As finite human beings, we die. Who's going to care for her? This eliminates that burden'' because her eventual care in a nursing home is provided for, he said.
Congress established the program to stabilize the supply of vaccines and free money for research on safer alternatives.
The program also created a less expensive method to resolve claims outside the normal court system.
Since its inception, the fund has settled more than 5,500 claims, and awarded nearly $1.4 billion. Awards range up to $9.1 million. This year's average has been $800,000.
The fund provides compensation for injuries from all vaccines mandated by the federal government: diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (DTP); measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR); polio, hepatitis B, chickenpox, and H. influenza Type B.
This month, the pneumococcal vaccine was added to the list, and it became easier for parents whose babies suffered a bowel blockage following the rotavirus vaccine to secure compensation. Injuries from smallpox and anthrax vaccines are not covered by the fund.
Legislation is also pending, Roth said, to consider autism as a possible vaccine-related injury.
Some people believe the rising incidence of autism is partly attributable to the growing number of vaccines administered before a child's immune system is mature. In particular, they cite the mercury used as a component in some vaccines as a possible toxin.
However, a recent Institute of Medicine report concluded there was insufficient evidence to accept or reject a link between thimerosal, a mercury component in some vaccines, and autism and other developmental and neurological disorders.
Of the 4 million children each year who receive multiple vaccines, about 10,000 adverse reactions are reported to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Most of those reactions are minor, but about 15 percent report incidents of hospitalization, disability, life-threatening illnesses, or death. Those reports do not prove the vaccine caused the problem, however.
The Central Jersey girl, the youngest of four children, was a bright, healthy 2-month-old when she visited a pediatrician in September 1993, her mother said. While there, she was given a vaccination for diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (DTP).
Eleven hours later, her mother noticed odd eye movements as she changed the baby's diaper. She put the baby to bed and went to sleep, she said. When she awoke the next morning, she realized her daughter hadn't cried for her 3 a.m. feeding.
She found the baby "red in the face, foamy at the mouth, and having difficulty breathing,'' the mother said. The baby didn't have a fever, however, and the pediatrician advised her to keep an eye on the situation.
The baby was very lethargic, her parents said. Later, as her father held her in his arms, she started to shake - the first of many seizures. As the seizures increased, she was hospitalized.
"It was very frightening,'' the girl's mother said.
At first, neither the family nor the doctors connected her problems with the vaccination. "It's a highly emotional state,'' the father said. "It takes time to wrestle with this. ... There are all sorts of different distractions.''
At first, they didn't know her condition would be permanent. Health-care professionals tried to give them hope.
Only through careful questioning did the parents learn the likely long-term prognosis for their daughter. They hoped that her condition would not be permanent, but they realized they had to plan as if it were.
When a pediatric neurologist told them he believed the girl's problems were linked to the vaccine, he suggested they might seek compensation from the fund. That was when they learned the urgency of filing such a claim.
The fund operates with strict time limits, and the family said it spoke publicly to help make others aware of the potential for compensation and its timetables.
A child injured by a vaccine must file a claim within three years after the first symptoms appear.
The family of a child who dies must file within two years of the death.
No lawsuits concerning vaccine injuries can be filed in a civil court, the law says, until after a claim has been filed with the vaccine compensation program and the litigant has decided to reject its award.
As a result, the number of lawsuits filed against vaccine manufacturers has plunged since the fund's inception: four suits against DTP makers in 1997, compared with 255 in 1985.
In New Jersey, four attorneys are listed by the Court of Federal Claims for filing vaccine-related claims with the program. Roth and her partner, Drew Britcher of Britcher, Leone & Roth, are two of them.
"People need to know to get to the fund,'' Roth said. "They have this child. They have huge medical bills.
They'll be capped-out on their insurance. There is a place to go. If you don't go there, you aren't going to go anywhere. You will be dismissed from state court, and have no recourse.''
The program, which operates with a special master, pays attorney fees regardless of whether the claim succeeds or fails. The fees are based on an hourly rate of $175, plus expenses - not a percentage of the settlement, as in malpractice cases. Awards for pain and suffering are capped at $250,000.
The child is the sole beneficiary of the award, not the family. If the child dies, the annuity established as part of the award reverts to the compensation fund.
Nine years after the Central New Jersey girl's DTP shot, she continues to suffer seizures and to be affected by swelling in the brain.
"In physical development, she's a 9-year-old girl,'' said her father, chuckling that she may turn out to be the tallest member of the family. Mentally, or cognitively, however, "her development was arrested at two months.''
She cannot control her own movements, and is blind. The family cares for her at home.
Among their first purchases from the settlement is a specially equipped van, with a ramp and space for her wheelchair.
The girl weighs 47 pounds; lifting her in and out of the car has become increasingly difficult.
The van hasn't arrived yet, her mother said, "but we feel better already, just having ordered it.''
8-26-2
(UKTelegraph)
Britain has stepped up its surveillance of Pakistani activities in the country following reports that Islamabad has been secretly buying from here equipment for making nuclear weapons.
Special high-grade metals have been smuggled out of the country and are believed to have reached an uranium enrichment plant in Kahuta, near Islamabad, a media report said today.
The discovery has infuriated the British foreign office, which had assurances from Pakistan that it was not shopping in Britain for weapons of mass destruction or related equipment.
The British security agency MI5 is said to have already stepped up its surveillance of Pakistani activities in UK, including diplomats in London involved in the procurement of military equipment, according to a report in the influential Sunday Times.
At least one consignment of 47 tons of high-strength aluminium worth £150,000 was sent to Pakistan from a British firm. The material, made to a standard known as 6061 T6, is used to make centrifuges for converting uranium ore to bomb-grade uranium 235.
"This is not the kind of aluminium you use for soft drink cans, it has a very limited number of applications," the paper quoted a source. Two people now face prosecution for alleged evasion of export controls.
Customs and excise officers discovered the aluminium had been secretly shipped to khan research laboratories in pakistan, which manufactures nuclear weapons.
The mi5 visited the blackburn-based company that sold the material and warned that pakistan and other states may try to circumvent an export ban.
- article by Mark Vallen, www.art-for-a-change.com, July 2002.
John Densmore, former Drummer for the legendary DOORS, recently went public with a horror story about a certain foreign Car manufacturer. Without the band's permission, the company used a DOORS song in an ad campaign promoting the auto maker's latest model. Densmore wants fans of the DOORS to know that he opposes the selling off of the band's legacy to the highest bidder, no matter how high the offer. Densmore understands that his music was the soundtrack to millions of people's lives, and that matters to him. Today we are witnessing the best of Rock music being transformed into a tidal wave of advertising jingles. Now comes the latest outrage.... Jaguar Motors is using a CLASH song to promote their new line of luxury cars. Unbelievable but true.
Jaguar, in using the CLASH song London Calling as an advertising jingle for their latest automotive line, obviously means to appeal to the people who grew up in the 1980's. My girlfriend asked me sarcastically, "does it give you a warm and fuzzy feeling to know you are part of a target audience?" I answered, "No, but I get a warm and fuzzy feeling knowing I'm a target." When the CLASH released "London Calling"in 1979, my L.A. Punk friends and I swooned over it's menacing sound ("London calling to the faraway towns, now that war is declared-and battle come down"). The song was one of the band's most chilling works. Ominous and dark, it foretold of the Western World collapsing in a spasm of war and out of control technologies, it addressed our fears of government repression ("London calling, see we ain't got no swing, 'cept for the ring of that truncheon thing").
Ford Motor Company's Jaguar North America unit launched a July 2002 summer ad campaign called "London Calling." The ad firm handling the account would not disclose the cost of the campaign targeting "a younger audience." But George Ayres, vice president of marketing for Jaguar, said the 2002 budget "isn't necessarily bigger" than the $66.7 million spent in 2001. In the "London Calling" television advertisement there are images of a quaint London that reinforce a tourist's perception of British heritage... Big Ben, the Parliament Building, etc. The latest model Jaguar moves slowly down cobblestone streets. A pretty young woman is seen in an old style red phone booth as the silver colored Jaguar glides by. The musical backdrop to this facade is none other than the CLASH song, with Joe Strummer's gravely panicked voice wailing the refrain.
I first heard the CLASH in 1977... their premiere U.K single, appropriately titled "1977", had a profound transformative effect on me ("No Elvis, Beatles, or the Rolling Stones, in 1977!"). Back in those sleepy days for Rock 'n Roll, Punk was really shaking things up, and the CLASH headed the vanguard. Their first album wasn't released in the U.S., since American Record Companies thought their sound "too rough." Needless to say the group received no airplay on U.S. radio stations, and the band quickly became known to those in the underground Punk scene as "the only band that matters." The explosive delivery and lyrical content of that first album infused Punk with political intensity. Songs like "White Riot", "Hate & War", and "London's Burning", blasted away our complacency.
The incendiary antiwar lyrics of "I'm so bored with the U.S.A" ("Yankee dollar talk, to the dictators of the world, in fact it's giving orders, and they can't afford to miss a word!), were on the lips of a new generation yearning for change. When the CLASH sang "Remote Control", hundreds of thousands took it to heart ("Big business it don't like you, it don't like the things you do, you got no money, you got no power, they think you're useless, and so you are, Punks!"). By the time their second album (Give 'em enough rope) was released in 1979 they were becoming big news in the U.S. They made things difficult for themselves when in 1980 they released "Sandinista", a double album that extended a hand of support to the Nicaraguan Revolution while the Reagan White House was busy trying to destroy it. Over the years the band cranked out a steady stream of rock anthems that were like battle cries against the status quo... "Garageland", "Career Opportunities", "Capital Radio", "Washington Bullets", "Clampdown", "Guns of Brixton", and "The Call Up."
The point really is, the music of the CLASH served as a backdrop for the turmoil of the late 1970's and early 80's. They sang their opposition to war, police violence, the arms race... and we believed them. Their music provided the necessary strength to keep resisting the madness all around us. In 1977, when the band first stormed it's way into public consciousness with a rough and tumble, jangly, take no prisoners approach to Rock music... thousands of young musicians and fans were inspired to follow suit. We were going to change the world. The snotty, brash, and anti-authoritarian Punk movement was born. Was that legacy blown to smithereens by the simple act of the CLASH allowing one of their sharpest songs to become nothing more than a jingle for luxury cars? Was Punk just a charade orchestrated and manipulated by unscrupulous businessmen? Was it all for nothing?
We shouldn't condemn a movement based on the folly of it's adherents or detractors. People have been selling out their beliefs ever since Judas accepted 30 pieces of silver as payment for his betrayal. Any movement should be critiqued based on the strength of it's principles... not it's followers. CRASS, another extremely influencial English Punk band, hit the nail right on the head with the lyrics to their self released 1978 song, Punk is Dead. "CBS promote the CLASH, but it ain't for revolution, it's just for cash. Punk became a fashion just like Hippy used to be, and it ain't got a thing to do with you or me!" The CLASH notwithstanding, Punk actually stood for something, and many still embrace those original core ethics. A healthy distrust of the rich and powerful, opposition to conformity and apathy, a commitment to freedom of expression, and a belief that we need to be "more than a witness" when it comes to life and history. I still have the button I wore on my leather jacket back in 1977. It reads, "Can't buy my soul."
14 August 02
(NewScientist.com)
Testis tissue from goats and pigs has been grafted onto the backs of mice and shown to produce normal sperm, capable of fertilising eggs.
It is the first time testis tissue from such distant species has produced mature sperm when grafted in mice. "It might work for primates or even humans," claims Ina Dobrinski of the University of Pennsylvania, one of the co-authors of the study.
If so, the technique could be used to preserve the reproductive potential of male cancer patients about to undergo therapies that would destroy their ability to make sperm.
Men often freeze sperm samples before receiving chemotherapy, but young boys cannot do this because they do not produce mature sperm. If it works in humans, the technique would allow testis tissue grafted from boys to mature and produce sperm.
Infectious particles
The mouse grafting technique also has an advantage over another option for preserving fertility - testicular transplants. These involve re-implanting preserved germ cells into the testes after cancer remission.
But the grafting approach "would eliminate any possibility of passing cancer cells back to the patient," says reproductive biologist Michael Griswold from Washington State University.
However, it is possible that the grafting procedure could introduce mouse-derived infectious particles into human embryos, making some scientists wary of the idea. "I would very much hesitate to say that it's something we should be doing," says reproductive biologist Roger Gosden of the East Virginia Medical School.
Castrated mice
In the study, Dobrinski and colleagues placed small pieces of testis tissue from newborn goats or pigs just under the skin on the backs of castrated mice. Two to four weeks later, they found that more than half of the 477 grafts had survived and were producing normal-looking goat or pig sperm.
When they injected the graft-derived sperm directly into eggs they saw clear signs of fertilisation, indicating that the sperm function normally. The researchers also found that the procedure worked just as well with testis tissue that had been refrigerated for two days or frozen for several weeks.
Gosden has tried transplanting human testes tissue into mice, but was not successful. However, Dobrinski believes the technique could soon be used to preserve the germ lines of endangered species, including rare animals that usually die in captivity before reaching sexual maturity. "We think that's a very real application," she says.
She adds that mice with human testis tissue grafts would also be useful to scientists who want to test the effects of toxic substances and new contraceptives on human sperm production.
Sep 3, 2002
LONDON - In a surprising vote of no-confidence in his own city, Mayor Ken Livingstone said Tuesday that he feels safer in New York than in London.
"I do feel safe in London, but I don't feel as safe as I did when I went to New York," Livingstone told reporters, adding that crime seemed much worse now than when he was a child. "I want to be back to something more like I grew up with. We have lost the visible (police) presence on the streets."
Crime has been increasing in London over the past several years, with muggings and other street crimes rising and robberies doubling in the autumn of 2001 compared with the previous year.
The rise has had intense news coverage and become a major political issue, but despite perceptions, serious, violent crime remains far lower than it is across the Atlantic.
The 641 murders New York recorded in 2001 — police do not include the nearly 3,000 dead in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center — were an impressive drop from the all-time high of 2,262 in 1990.
But they still dwarfed London's 171 homicides in fiscal 2001, and guns and gun crime remain relatively rare here, unlike in New York.
Nonetheless, model Elizabeth Hurley made headlines this week by saying New York had a far more visible police presence than London.
"Liz Hurley has laid down a clear agenda for us all," the mayor said, adding that he hoped to "catch up" with New York.
"The most disturbing fact, I think, is that in over half of the cases the Met (London police) would like to bring to court, witnesses whom they wish to rely on are too frightened to give evidence," he added.
Livingstone said the number of police in London was increasing and would exceed 28,000 by the end of the fiscal year. He added that the fear of crime was much higher in London than crime itself.
4 September, 2002
(BBCNEWS)
British autumn: It now lasts beyond October
Spring was three weeks early this year and autumn is likely to be late.
The call of the first cuckoo was five days premature while autumn leaves should fall a week or so late.
The majority of climate scientists would agree that there are already signs of a warming climate
Dr Tim Sparks
The Woodland Trust says higher than average temperatures from January to April are to blame, and points the finger at climate change.
It will have serious consequences for animals, insects and trees, says the charity.
The study was carried out in collaboration with the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) in Monks Wood, Cambridgeshire.
It is based on data gathered by 17,000 volunteers since 1998, and historical records spanning 50 years.
Leaf loggers
Dr Tim Sparks of the CEH said the most astonishing finding was how much earlier spring came in 2002 compared with 2001.
"The majority of climate scientists would agree that there are already signs of a warming climate and this is having a knock-on effect on our plants and animals," he told BBC News Online.
As well as plants flowering early in spring, autumn too is breaking with tradition.
Bluebells appeared early in 2002
Last year, autumn was at least a few days late.
Oak trees changed colour more than a week late, while beech trees lost their leaves 12 days later than usual.
Meanwhile, some people in the mildest parts of the UK had to mow their lawns all year round.
The Woodland Trust is calling for more volunteers to help monitor natural events this autumn.
People are being asked to record the departure of swifts and swallows, and leaf fall of native trees by logging on to www.phenology.org.uk.
Associated Press
Friday, September 6
Moscow — The Russian Emergency Situations Ministry claimed credit for a light drizzle that cleared the air over the Russian capital Friday, giving residents a break from the thick, acrid smog that engulfed the city.
"Yes, we did it," ministry spokesman Viktor Beltsov said proudly.
Mr. Beltsov said an ionizer intended to draw rain clouds was switched on Thursday atop a ministry building in western Moscow — and that it did the job. Early Friday, a light drizzle freshened up the air, bringing long-sought relief after several rainless weeks. Wildfires in the countryside surrounding the capital have created intense smog.
Mr. Beltsov said the ministry kept the device working Friday in an effort to attract more rain. It was the first time the ministry used the equipment, developed by its research institute, he said.
The institute's director, Mikhail Shakhramanian, said on ORT television Thursday that the device, a metal cage criss-crossed by tungsten wire, emits a vertical flow of oxygen ions that stirs the air and raises humidity.
Meteorologists warned that more substantial, genuine rain would be needed to put out the forest and peat bog fires blazing around Moscow. The weather was expected to remain dry over the weekend, but rains were forecast for early next week.
Ironically, the city government did everything it could over the weekend to prevent a downpour. Cloud-seeding planes were used to disperse any potential rain that might have disrupted City Day celebrations.
The smog that hung over the city through much of the summer peaked Thursday, cutting visibility to just a few hundred metres, slowing traffic to a crawl and suspending flights at some Moscow airports. On their way to work, Muscovites coughed as they inhaled the smoke that shrouded buildings and even filled subway stations.
Despite the drizzle, the carbon monoxide level in Moscow was more than twice admissible levels Friday, the Emergency Situations Ministry said. Doctors suggested people stay indoors if possible, and some schools cancelled classes Friday.
Hi-lands.com
A chance visit to a web site has produced the best underwater pictures of 'Nessie' in 27 years.
Aug. 28, 2002
TRUCKEE, Calif. (AP) - Bubonic plague has forced the early closure of Donner Memorial State Park near Truckee.
California parks officials confirmed the plague in two squirrels in the area. They say a cat from the park campground also was showing plague symptoms.
Ranger Mark Hoffman said the park was closed early for the season on Tuesday. He said the day-use and camping area will be closed until spring but the Donner Party museum will remain open.
``The health department will come in and trap animals and they also will dust for fleas,'' Hoffman told the Reno Gazette-Journal. ``They will work to knock it down and then come back in a month and check to see how well they did.''
Officials for the Nevada County Health Department said the park closure was voluntary. They say a large rodent population had been reported in the area and that several squirrels were dying.
Last year, a chipmunk tested positive for plague at Lake Tahoe. Nevada records show plague has infected chipmunks and squirrels in all of Nevada's counties.
Bubonic plague, which is carried by fleas in foothills, mountains and along coastal areas can affect mammals, including humans, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. People usually get plague from being bitten by a rodent flea that is carrying the plague bacterium or by handling an infected animal, according to the CDC.
Millions of people died from the plague in Europe during the Middle Ages when buildings were inhabited by flea-infested rats.
Today, antibiotics are effective against plague, although it can still cause death if a person is not treated promptly.
Since 1978, 38 cases of the plague has been reported in humans in California. Symptoms include fever, chills, nausea, weakness and swollen glands.
``We get plague reports every summer in the Sierra, but Donner is the first park to be closed this year,'' said Vicki Kramer, chief of vector-borne diseases for the California health department. ``The Truckee area has a history of infected animals.''
She said the most recent human plague case reported was in 2000 when a Kern County, Calif., man survived the disease.
Thu Sep 5,10:07 AM ET
By Matthew Green
NAIROBI (Reuters) - Martha Njoki jumped when she heard a thud on the corrugated iron roof of her shack.
Seconds later, she was confronted with a familiar sight.
"I heard a bang on the roof, and when I went outside to look, I saw it was a plastic bag full of human waste," she said, gesturing toward her dwelling in the slums of Nairobi.
"You might just be relaxing in your house, then you hear a noise on your roof and someone has thrown a bag of sewage up there," said Njoki, 27, wrinkling her nose with disgust.
There are only five toilets for the more than 2,000 people living in the slum known as "Ghetto" -- a fetid labyrinth of claustrophobic dirt lanes and streams of stinking effluent.
For most people here, the "flying toilets" are the only way of answering nature's call: you simply use a plastic bag, then fling it as far out of sight as possible.
World leaders at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg pledged on Wednesday to halve the number of people in the world who do not have access to basic sanitation by 2015.
Walk into "Ghetto," or any one of scores of slum settlements housing two million people in the Kenyan capital, and the scale of the task for one African city alone seems staggering.
At almost every turn, a sickly sweet stench of urine wafts from between the huts. Barefoot children play by trenches frothing with scum. The edges are strewn with telltale bags.
"First thing in the morning, the flying toilets are rampant," said Njoki, as a gaggle of other women in a courtyard nodded in agreement. "Sometimes you are walking down the path and you see human waste, people have just thrown it there."
Consider that Njoki and her neighbors are just a handful of 2.4 billion people worldwide who lack access to decent sanitation, and the scale of the Earth Summit pledge seems even more mind-boggling.
In Njoki's neighborhood, the only sign of hope comes not from the government -- who consider much of the slums a virtual no-go zone -- but from residents determined to help themselves.
On the edge of the sea of rusting iron roofs stands the only public toilet around.
Four women got together to build the facility three years ago -- paying off their investment with the two shillings ($0.02) a time paid by 50 or so visitors each day.
On Sundays, when the toilet attendants say many residents decide to treat themselves, the number of users rises to 100.
September 6, 2002
(Sordid Japanese newsite:http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/waiwai/)
Watching Japanese television variety shows generally gives a good explanation as to how the TV came to be known as the idiot box. People have been complaining for years about the quality of programming and demanding improvements.
But Fuji TV, one of Japan's biggest private networks, has managed to come up with a show where stars brazenly milked every sick trick they could with a cow and now everybody down to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government is beefing about how low the small screen can go.
Shukan Gendai (9/14) notes the problem occurred when Fuji aired a late night program on Aug. 3 called "Honno no Haikingu! (Hiking Instinctively!)," and it turned out to be an exercise in blatant animal abuse.
"Honno no Haikingu!" is a program written and produced by young network employees and showcases a variety of supposed comedians and bikini-clad beauties performing an array of tricks meant to tickle viewers' funny bone. But on the night in question, stars on the show carried out some beastliness on a bovine so horrid most could only think it was bull. It wasn't. Shukan Gendai gives an account of the udderly disgraceful performance.
"Honno no Haikingu!" hosts gathered late one night at Yomiuriland, a suburban Tokyo amusement park. With the two hosts were a cow and its calf. The hosts were apparently trying to "show" the cows the park's latest attractions.
First, the hosts dragged the calf toward a Haunted House ride. The calf, however, balked and tried to back away. Undeterred, the performers dragged the poor cow into the attraction and left it alone. They burst into raucous laughter as a "ghost" appeared that thoroughly cowed the cow.
The abuse didn't stop there. Next the hosts placed a helmet on the calf's head and placed it in a trailer attached to a go-cart. Once the cart's engine started, the startled bovine panicked, again drawing belly laughs from the show's stars.
Finally, one of the hosts tried to shove vegetables he had been eating into the calf's mouth. The cow resisted and ended up with a scratch on its snout. Having undergone enough, the calf lashed out and knocked over the host, sending him flailing into the ground.
Callers flooded Fuji TV and government bodies with complaints about the calf's treatment.
"On the first weekday after the program aired, we received numerous complaints from people who had seen how poorly the animal was treated. Television has an enormous influence on people. We issued a warning, telling the network to refrain from broadcasting programs that involve animal abuse, as well as requesting they treat animals respectfully," a spokesman for the metropolitan government tells Shukan Gendai. "It's the first time in several years that I can recall a TV network being reprimanded because of complaints made about its content."
Bandai Corp., a toymaker that sponsored "Honno no Haikingu!" has also ended its connection with the show.
"Some people within the company complained that the treatment of the cow amounted to abuse," a Bandai spielmeister tells Shukan Gendai. "After viewing what happened on the show, Bandai instructed its advertising agency not to buy space for the program ever again."
Fuji TV, however, is defiant. It says people can complain till the cows come home, but it won't back down. A spin doctor denies the metropolitan government reprimanded the network.
"It was a show that was supposed to give information about the amusement park's attractions. There was no intentional abuse of animals whatsoever. We explained that to the metropolitan government," the spokesman tells Shukan Gendai. "The government did contact us about the show, but I haven't heard of either the metropolitan government or the Minato Municipal Government issuing a warning."
But a longtime Fuji TV employee speaking anonymously says the network should cop the flack.
"Everybody's really nervous about making programs with animals in case they're accused of abuse. If a show is to run in prime time, producers will always remind staff not to do anything that could be constituted as animal abuse. Even when another company is making a show for the network, a network producer will go along to watch over the production process to ensure nothing untoward happens," the insider tells Shukan Gendai. "With this show, though, it was a self-made job by Fuji. They didn't check what was going on with enough thoroughness. Fuji TV can't complain if people accuse it of being lax in its awareness of animal abuse."
(MSNBC.com)
Sept. 4 — Inside a cold, foreboding structure of brown sandstone in New Haven, Conn., lives one of the most heavily shrouded secret societies in American history. Yale’s super-elite Skull and Bones, a 200-year-old organization whose roster is stocked with some of the country’s most prominent families: Bush, Harriman, Phelps, Rockefeller, Taft, and Whitney. Journalist Alexandra Robbins, herself a member of another of Yale’s secret societies, interviewed more than a hundred Bonesmen and writes about the rituals that make up the organization. Read an excerpt from her book ‘The Secrets of the Tomb’ below.
THE LEGEND OF SKULL AND BONES
Sometime in the early 1830s, a Yale student named William H. Russell—the future valedictorian of the class of 1833- traveled to Germany to study for a year. Russell came from an inordinately wealthy family that ran one of America’s most despicable business organizations of the nineteenth century: Russell and Company, an opium empire. Russell would later become a member of the Connecticut state legislature, a general in the Connecticut National Guard, and the founder of the Collegiate and Commercial Institute in New Haven. While in Germany, Russell befriended the leader of an insidious German secret society that hailed the death’s head as its logo. Russell soon became caught up in this group, itself a sinister outgrowth of the notorious eighteenth-century society the Illuminati. When Russell returned to the United States, he found an atmosphere so Anti-Masonic that even his beloved Phi Beta Kappa, the honor society, had been unceremoniously stripped of its secrecy. Incensed, Russell rounded up a group of the most promising students in his class-including Alphonso Taft, the future secretary of war, attorney general, minister to Austria, ambassador to Russia, and father of future president William Howard Taft-and out of vengeance constructed the most powerful secret society the United States has ever known.
The men called their organization the Brotherhood of Death, or, more informally, the Order of Skull and Bones. They adopted the numerological symbol 322 because their group was the second chapter of the German organization and founded in 1832. They worshiped the goddess Eulogia, celebrated pirates, and plotted an underground conspiracy to dominate the world.
Fast-forward 170 years. Skull and Bones has curled its tentacles into every corner of American society. This tiny club has set up networks that have thrust three members into the most powerful political position in the world. And the group’s influence is only increasing-the 2004 presidential election might showcase the first time each ticket has been led by a Bonesman. The secret society is now, as one historian admonishes, ” ‘an international mafia’. . . unregulated and all but unknown.” In its quest to create a New World Order that restricts individual freedoms and places ultimate power solely in the hands of a small cult of wealthy, prominent families, Skull and Bones has already succeeded in infiltrating nearly every major research, policy, financial, media, and government institution in the country. Skull and Bones, in fact, has been running the United States for years.
Skull and Bones cultivates its talent by selecting members from the junior class at Yale University, a school known for its strange, Gothic elitism and its rigid devotion to the past. The society screens its candidates carefully, favoring Protestants and, now, white Catholics, with special affection for the children of wealthy East Coast Skull and Bones members. Skull and Bones has been dominated by about two dozen of the country’s most prominent families—Bush, Bundy, Harriman, Lord, Phelps, Rockefeller, Taft, and Whitney among them—who are encouraged by the society to intermarry so that its power is consolidated. In fact, Skull and Bones forces members to confess their entire sexual histories so that the club, as a eugenics overlord, can determine whether a new Bonesman will be fit to mingle with the bloodlines of the powerful Skull and Bones dynasties. A rebel will not make Skull and Bones; nor will anyone whose background in any way indicates that he will not sacrifice for the greater good of the larger organization.
As soon as initiates are allowed into the “tomb,” a dark, windowless crypt in New Haven with a roof that serves as a landing pad for the society’s private helicopter, they are sworn to silence and told they must forever deny that they are members of this organization. During initiation, which involves ritualistic psychological conditioning, the juniors wrestle in mud and are physically beaten—this stage of the ceremony represents their “death” to the world as they have known it. They then lie naked in coffins, masturbate, and reveal to the society their innermost sexual secrets. After this cleansing, the Bonesmen give the initiates robes to represent their new identities as individuals with a higher purpose. The society anoints the initiate with a new name, symbolizing his rebirth and rechristening as Knight X, a member of the Order. It is during this initiation that the new members are introduced to the artifacts in the tomb, among them Nazi memorabilia—including a set of Hitler’s silverware-dozens of skulls, and an assortment of decorative tchotchkes: coffins, skeletons, and innards. They are also introduced to “the Bones whore,” the tomb’s only full-time resident, who helps to ensure that the Bonesmen leave the tomb more mature than when they entered.
Members of Skull and Bones must make some sacrifices to the society—and they are threatened with blackmail so that they remain loyal—but they are remunerated with honors and rewards, including a graduation gift of $15,000 and a wedding gift of a tall grandfather clock. Though they must tithe their estates to the society, each member is guaranteed financial security for life; in this way, Bones can ensure that no member will feel the need to sell the secrets of the society in order to make a living. And it works: No one has publicly breathed a word about his Skull and Bones membership, ever. Bonesmen are automatically offered jobs at the many investment banks and law firms dominated by their secret society brothers. They are also given exclusive access to the Skull and Bones island, a lush retreat built for millionaires, with a lavish mansion and a bevy of women at the members’ disposal.
The influence of the cabal begins at Yale, where Skull and Bones has appropriated university funds for its own use, leaving the school virtually impoverished. Skull and Bones’ corporate shell, the Russell Trust Association, owns nearly all of the university’s real estate, as well as most of the land in Connecticut. Skull and Bones has controlled Yale’s faculty and campus publications so that students cannot speak openly about it. “Year by year,” the campus’s only anti-society publication stated during its brief tenure in 1873, “the deadly evil is growing.”
The year in the tomb at Yale instills within members an unwavering loyalty to Skull and Bones. Members have been known to stab their Skull and Bones pins into their skin to keep them in place during swimming or bathing. The knights (as the student members are called) learn quickly that their allegiance to the society must supersede all else: family, friendships, country, God. They are taught that once they get out into the world, they are expected to reach positions of prominence so that they can further elevate the society’s status and help promote the standing of their fellow Bonesmen.
This purpose has driven Bonesmen to ascend to the top levels of so many fields that, as one historian observes, “at any one time The Order can call on members in any area of American society to do what has to be done.” Several Bonesmen have been senators, congressmen, Supreme Court justices, and Cabinet officials. There is a Bones cell in the CIA, which uses the society as a recruiting ground because the members are so obviously adept at keeping secrets. Society members dominate financial institutions such as J. P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, and Brown Brothers Harriman, where at one time more than a third of the partners were Bonesmen. Through these companies, Skull and Bones provided financial backing to Adolf Hitler because the society then followed a Nazi-and now follows a neo-Nazi—doctrine. At least a dozen Bonesmen have been linked to the Federal Reserve, including the first chairman of the New York Federal Reserve. Skull and Bones members control the wealth of the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford families.
Skull and Bones has also taken steps to control the American media.
Two of its members founded the law firm that represents the New York Times. Plans for both Time and Newsweek magazines were hatched in the Skull and Bones tomb. The society has controlled publishing houses such as Farrar, Straus & Giroux. In the 1880s, Skull and Bones created the American Historical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Economic Association so that the society could ensure that history would be written under its terms and promote its objectives. The society then installed its own members as the presidents of these associations.
Under the society’s direction, Bonesmen developed and dropped the nuclear bomb and choreographed the Bay of Pigs invasion. Skull and Bones members had ties to Watergate and the Kennedy assassination. They control the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission so that they can push their own political agenda. Skull and Bones government officials have used the number 322 as codes for highly classified diplomatic assignments. The society discriminates against minorities and fought for slavery; indeed eight out of twelve of Yale’s residential colleges are named for slave owners while none are named for abolitionists. The society encourages misogyny: it did not admit women until the 1990s because members did not believe women were capable of handling the Skull and Bones experience and because they said they feared incidents of date rape. This society also encourages grave robbing: deep within the bowels of the tomb are the stolen skulls of the Apache chief Geronimo, Pancho Villa, and former president Martin Van Buren.
Finally, the society has taken measures to ensure that the secrets of Skull and Bones slip ungraspable like sand through open fingers. Journalist Ron Rosenbaum, who wrote a long but not probing article about the society in the 1970s, claimed that a source warned him not to get too close.
“What bank do you have your checking account at?” this party asked me in the middle of a discussion of the Mithraic aspects of the Bones ritual.
I named the bank. “Aha,” said the party. “There are three Bonesmen on the board. You’ll never have a line of credit again. They’ll tap your phone. They’ll. . . ”
. . .The source continued: “The alumni still care. Don’t laugh. They don’t like people tampering and prying. The power of Bones is incredible. They’ve got their hands on every lever of power in the country. You’ll see—it’s like trying to look into the Mafia.”
In the 1980s, a man known only as Steve had contracts to write two books on the society, using documents and photographs he had acquired from the Bones crypt. But Skull and Bones found out about Steve. Society members broke into his apartment, stole the documents, harassed the would-be author, and scared him into hiding, where he has remained ever since. The books were never completed. In Universal Pictures’ thriller The Skulls (2000), an aspiring journalist is writing a profile of the society for the New York Times. When he sneaks into the tomb, the Skulls murder him. The real Skull and Bones tomb displays a bloody knife in a glass case. It is said that when a Bonesman stole documents and threatened to publish society secrets if the members did not pay him a determined amount of money, they used that knife to kill him. This, then, is the legend of Skull and Bones.
It is astonishing that so many people continue to believe, even in twenty-first-century America, that a tiny college club wields such an enormous amount of influence on the world’s only superpower. The breadth of clout ascribed to this organization is practically as wide-ranging as the leverage of the satirical secret society the Stonecutters introduced in an episode of The Simpsons. The Stonecutters theme song included the lyrics:
Who controls the British crown? Who keeps the metric system down? We do! We do. . .
Who holds back the electric car? Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star? We do! We do.
Certainly, Skull and Bones does cross boundaries in order to attempt to stay out of the public spotlight. When I wrote an article about the society for the Atlantic Monthly in May 2000, an older Bonesman said to me, “If it’s not portrayed positively, I’m sending a couple of my friends after you.” After the article was published, I received a telephone call at my office from a fellow journalist, who is a member of Skull and Bones.
He scolded me for writing the article—”writing that article was not an ethical or honorable way to make a decent living in journalism,” he condescended —and then asked me how much I had been paid for the story. When I refused to answer, he hung up. Fifteen minutes later, he called back.
“I have just gotten off the phone with our people.” “Your people?” I snickered.
“Yes. Our people.” He told me that the society demanded to know where I got my information.
“I’ve never been in the tomb and I did nothing illegal in the process of reporting this article,” I replied.
“Then you must have gotten something from one of us. Tell me whom you spoke to. We just want to talk to them,” he wheedled. “I don’t reveal my sources.”
Then he got angry. He screamed at me for a while about how dishonorable I was for writing the article. “A lot of people are very despondent over this!” he yelled. “Fifteen Yale juniors are very, very upset!” I thanked him for telling me his concerns.
“There are a lot of us at newspapers and at political journalism institutions,” he coldly hissed. “Good luck with your career”—and he slammed down the phone.
Skull and Bones, particularly in recent years, has managed to pervade both popular and political culture. In the 1992 race for the Republican presidential nomination, Pat Buchanan accused President George Bush of running “a Skull and Bones presidency.” In 1993, during Jeb Bush’s Florida gubernatorial campaign, one of his constituents asked him, “You’re familiar with the Skull and Crossbones Society?” When Bush responded, “Yeah, I’ve heard about it,” the constituent persisted, “Well, can you tell the people here what your family membership in that is? Isn’t your aim to take control of the United States?” In January 2001, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd used Skull and Bones in a simile: “When W. met the press with his choice for attorney general, John Ashcroft, before Christmas, he vividly showed how important it is to him that his White House be as leak-proof as the Skull & Bones ‘tomb.’”
That was less than a year after the Universal Pictures film introduced the secret society to a new demographic perhaps uninitiated into the doctrines of modern-day conspiracy theory. Not long before the movie was previewed in theaters—and perhaps in anticipation of the election of George W. Bush—a letter was distributed to members from Skull and Bones headquarters. “In view of the political happenings in the barbarian world,” the memo read, “I feel compelled to remind all of the tradition of privacy and confidentiality essential to the well-being of our Order and strongly urge stout resistance to the seductions and blandishments of the Fourth Estate.” This vow of silence remains the society’s most important rule. Bonesmen have been exceedingly careful not to break this code of secrecy, and have kept specific details about the organization out of the press. Indeed, given the unusual, strict written reminder to stay silent, members of Skull and Bones may well refuse to speak to any member of the media ever again.
But they have already spoken to me. When? Over the past three years. Why? Perhaps because I am a member of one of Skull and Bones’ kindred Yale secret societies. Perhaps because some of them are tired of the Skull and Bones legend, of the claims of conspiracy theorists and some of their fellow Bonesmen. What follows, then, is the truth about Skull and Bones. And if this truth does not contain all of the conspiratorial elements that the Skull and Bones legend projects, it is perhaps all the more interesting for that fact. The story of Skull and Bones is not just the story of a remarkable secret society, but a remarkable society of secrets, some with basis in truth, some nothing but fog. Much of the way we understand the world of power involves myriad assumptions of connection and control, of cause and effect, and of coincidence that surely cannot be coincidence.
(Rense.com)
9-5-2
CNN spiked Connie Chung's widely-publicized "expose" on Yale University's Order of Skull & Bones, chapter 322, which counts among its membership President George W. Bush and his father and grandfather before him, and influential aide and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Brent Scowcroft, and Connie Chung ain't talking. The program--billed at CNN's Web site to air 8:00pm ET, September 4, did not materialize; in its place was a story of a murder trial in Florida. Contacted repeatedly at CNN studios, representatives of Ms. Chung and producers of Connie Chung Tonight were either "unavailable" or had "no comment."
The Order of Skull & Bones forms the nucleus of the private Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and Trilateral Commission--which are, themselves--the guiding forces behind the drive toward an United Nations-run World Government. Each year at Yale, since 1832, 15 sophomores are "tapped" for consideration into this secret society, whose headquarters, called "the Tomb," lie underground, beneath Yale's campus; contained within the Tomb are computer facilities which are said to rival NORAD in sophistication. And although initiates are sworn to secrecy, a complete membership roster, initiation rites and Bones history was furnished to the late Dr. Antony Sutton in 1981.
Dr. Sutton, who died this year at the age of 84, was at the time a Research Fellow at the prestigious Hoover Institution of Stanford University. His ardent anti-communist/anti-globalist views and reputation for impeccable research doubtless attracted the attention of the disgruntled Bonesman, and with the records, Sutton eventually produced America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order or Skull & Bones, the definitive expose on that which lies at the core of a conspiracy to enact Global Government, via the destruction of America's Constitutional republican political system.
Ms. Chung's TV program would probably have been a puff piece anyway, but the 11th-hour spiking of her Skull & Bones broadcast is a glaring example of the Pravda-like protection of the Establishment that is the so-called "mainstream media."
The September 4: Announcement from CNN:
Connie Chung Tonight: A secret society -- and President Bush is a member! Connie exposes what's hidden behind the walls of Yale University. (8 p.m. ET)
(Salon.com)
Aug. 30, 2002
Scarcely two weeks after the Justice Department was found to be referring volunteers in its Operation TIPS domestic-spy program to Fox TV's "America's Most Wanted" crime hotline, Attorney General John Ashcroft is making plans to farm out the TIPS hotline to a different private organization.
The Richmond, Va.-based nonprofit company, called the National White Collar Crime Center, confirmed Wednesday that it is discussing plans with the Justice Department to operate a hotline that would take calls from citizens that the department signs up in its planned Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS) spy program. Civil libertarians are outraged by the plan to privatize the operation. "It's troubling that the Justice Department would go out of its way to try to get around the Fourth Amendment and the Freedom of Information and Privacy Act this way," says John Whitehead, president of the conservative Rutherford Institute.
Meanwhile, a battle is shaping up in Congress over efforts to block funding for the TIPS program entirely. Last month, the House of Representatives passed its version of the Homeland Security bill with a measure added by Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, that prohibited federal funding for programs that would have American citizens spying on each other. But an effort by Sen. Pat Leahy, D-Vt., to do the same thing with the Senate's version of the bill was stymied by Senate Government Operations Committee Chair Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn.
(haaretzdaily.com)
05/09/2002
NEW YORK - New York City has called on the former chiefs of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the Israeli Mossad to head an anti-terrorism task force within its fire department, which, it says, functioned below par when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center on September 11 last year, news reports said Wednesday.
A former head of the CIA, James Woolsey, and Shabtai Shavit, a former Mossad director, would evaluate the fire department's technical capabilities to deal with terrorist threats, including its communications technology, a statement from city government said.
The two former spook directors will be assisted by a team of American officials who have worked previously in the fields of health, nuclear physics and fire-fighting.
The task force members were chosen by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who earlier announced his intention to revamp the fire department.
"Today, the universe of potential dangers and emergencies facing New Yorkers has changed and increased dramatically," said Nicholas Scoppetta, the chief of the fire department, "and so, the department has to change also."
Evaluations and studies of the department's performance in the rescue operations on and after the September 11 terrorist attacks showed that the department had been caught unprepared by the magnitude of the events.
Its leadership was disorganized and fire-fighters were equipped with outdated radio communication gear, which failed them when the center's Twin Towers collapsed.
Fire-fighters made up 343 of the more than 2,800 people who died in the attack on the World Trade Center.
(counterpunch.org)
9/03/02
Israeli cyber warfare professionals targeted human rights and anti-war activists across the USA in late July and August temporarily disrupting communications, harassing hundreds of computer users, and annoying thousands more. The Israeli hackers targeted Stephen "Sami" Mashney, an Anaheim, California, attorney active in the effort to raise awareness of the plight of Palestinians. "People have found an alternate way to communicate through the Internet," Mashney, a Palestinian-American, told the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, "and this attack is backfiring on the hackers. Many people are being educated."
Mashney, who co-manages a popular pro-Palestinian e-mail list hosted by Yahoo! logged onto his Internet accounts on July 31 to find hundreds of e-mail messages from angry Americans. He quickly realized that hackers had appropriated or "spoofed" his e-mail addresses and identity and sent out a message titled "Down With America" in his name. The message named and included contact information for 16 well-known human rights activists and falsely claimed the activists wished to be contacted by anyone desiring advice or assistance in fomenting and carrying out anti-American, anti-Christian, or anti-Jewish activities. In an obvious attempt to damage Mashney's reputation, the hackers appended his name, law office telephone number, and website address to the spurious e-mail.
As Mashney was looking up the telephone number of the local FBI office to report the hackers' crime, his phone rang. It was the FBI calling, from Washington, with questions about the forged e-mail message. Mashney later met with FBI agents in California.
"I answered all their relevant questions," said Mashney, who notes that the hackers' attacks continued unabated for weeks and expanded to include other new and innovative methods of harassment that were used against many other activists associated with Free Palestine and other public and private e-mail lists.
Dr. Francis A. Boyle, professor of International Law at the University of Illinois College of Law, is a human rights activist who served on the board of Amnesty International USA. A member of Free Palestine and other activist lists, Dr. Boyle was also targeted by Israeli hackers who sent counterfeit e-mails in his name. Again, the hackers' intention was to sow confusion, provoke animosity, damage a reputation, and restrict ability to communicate. When Boyle returned from a vacation in mid August, he found 55,000 e-mails waiting for him. Like Mashney, Boyle spent days sorting through the messages, writing personal apologies to those offended by the bogus e-mails, and deleting thousands of bounced messages. Unflappable, Boyle takes it all in stride.
"You can't keep the Irish down," wrote Boyle in an e-mail message to this reporter. Israeli hackers also targeted Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh, associate professor at the Yale University School of Medicine. The hackers forwarded to some 1,500 members of the Yale community e-mails that Qumsiyeh had sent to a private list of activists. Many of his university colleagues were annoyed, but Qumsiyeh, too, feels that the hackers are doing the Zionist cause more harm than good. Qumsiyeh said the hackers' efforts have generated new networking opportunities among activists and groups who did not know of each other's existence before the hackers targeted them. Monica Terazi is director of the New York office of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC). Terazi's e-mail privileges were yanked by Yahoo! for a time after hackers "spoofed" her e-mail address and identity to send a message to some 80 Yahoo! groups. Terazi, like Mashney, spoke with the FBI about the new Israeli cyber warfare tactics, which have piqued the interest of Internet communications professionals. For a story published August 23, Terazi wrote to Wired News reporter Noah Shachtman, "While these e-mails are a nuisance, offensive and intimidating, the FBI didn't find anything illegal: There haven't been threats that rise to the level of a hate crime, no money has been stolen, public safety has not been endangered and, as far as we can tell, our computers have not been hacked or 'technically intruded into' as one agent put it." The offensive messages are all protected by the First Amendment, said Terazi. By mid August, the Israeli hackers had begun to target activists in Iowa, where it seems the Israeli hackers have "technically intruded" into computers. It is also likely their helpers here have forwarded addresses from private lists to Israel. Iowa activists report that people and organizations on their private e-mail lists: family members, friends, acquaintances, media contacts, government officials, interfaith relations organizations, activists, and activist organizations suddenly found themselves receiving tens, hundreds, or thousands of anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian "spam" e-mails per day. Many on private e-mail lists reported receiving anti-Arafat cartoons and racist diatribes, along with e-mail that aggressively connected to a web site that took control of their computers, turned the screen white, and made it necessary to shut down and re-start the computer. Some also reported that their e-mail addresses had been "spoofed" and their on-line identities appropriated for the distribution of racist messages.
Darrell Yeaney, a Presbyterian campus minister who retired after serving at the University of Iowa, is active in Friends of Sabeel, an ecumenical Christian organization that supports the ministry of Sabeel, the center for Palestinian Ecumenical Liberation Theology. He and his wife, Sue, now serve as co-moderators for the Middle East Peacemaking Group in Iowa. The Yeaneys report that the hackers appropriated their address and sent out spurious e-mail in their names. Ames-based activist, author, and editor Betsy Mayfield, whose work has appeared in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, was busy with plans for a mid-September Des Moines film festival, "Boundaries: The Holy Land," when the hackers turned their attentions to her computer. Several Ames women whose only association with the crisis in the Holy Land is their commitment to the Ames Interfaith Council (AIC) reported being shocked by the sudden appearance of pornographic e-mail and racist diatribes on their computer screens.
Many Iowans were targeted for harassment by the hackers, and hundreds of others suffered varying degrees of inconvenience because they were somehow connected to the cause of peace and justice in the Middle East. Similar scenarios played out in other states across the USA. The scale of the Israeli cyber warfare campaign, the number of targets, and the variety of techniques used, coupled with specifically targeted intrusions calculated to provide additional target addresses for the application of the hackers' various forms of harassment, suggest a sophisticated, coordinated, government-sponsored program designed to impact directly upon the communications abilities of the human rights and pro-Palestinian anti-war activism communities in the USA. When the Israeli hackers "spoofed" the AIC's e-mail address, they invited a response they did not expect. Because the AIC list was hosted by Iowa State University (ISU), because the world's first electronic digital computer was invented at ISU in a Physics Department laboratory in the early 1940s, and because he has represented the ISU Muslim Student's Association on the AIC cabinet, ISU Physics Department computer administrator Dr. Bassam Shehadeh decided to track the hackers down.
"The hackers access the internet via an ISP called
"Afterwards, the hackers compromise another service system here in the USA by passing the e-mail message with Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), using HELO verb. The hackers don't have a valid principal host but overcome that by using a bracketed Internet Protocol number (IP address) at a location anywhere on the web. Web hosting servers tricked into transferring these e-mails include Digital Cube, Inc., Verizon DSL Network, and Iowa Online Web Access located in Washington, Iowa," said Shehadeh Shehadeh and other computer professionals working in the USA report that ISPs and companies with IP addresses are typically very cooperative when notified that their equipment is being misused. Most act promptly to end the hackers' access.
Given widespread and systematic destruction of electronic communications facilities by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) in the West Bank in recent months, the continued existence of Palnet facilities suggests that the Israeli government had reason to permit Palnet's continued operation and raises questions about the ability of Palnet's owners to refuse service to Israeli hackers or otherwise interfere with their activities.
This particular campaign in Israel's cyber war seemed to have been curtailed, at least temporarily, on August 29, soon after Shehadeh tracked the hackers to the West Bank ISP and, finally, to an Israeli phone number, while other computer professionals in the USA, along with some of the targeted activists themselves, quietly contacted management representatives at various IP addresses around the globe and notified them that their facilities were being abused.
September 07, 2002
(haaretzdaily.com)
With anti-Semitic attacks on the increase, many French Jews believe only the far right can bring order back to their country.
Paris has four Jewish radio stations, which broadcast news from Israel and from the Jewish world. Radio Shalom is one of them. In the past year, the station has become the Western Wall for worried Jews, who go on air to share their fears. Most of them speak about the distress they have endured in the wake of incidents of an anti-Semitic nature. All have expressed disappointment with the government, which didn't take the incidents seriously.
Listeners have complained particularly about the way in which French journalists report about what is happening in Israel. Many were appalled at the one-sided nature of the reports and were sure they are fueled by blatantly anti-Semitic sentiments. The French Jews are in distress of a kind they haven't experienced in the past. The terrorist attacks have greatly strengthened their identification with Israel, but this identification has cost them dearly.
Since the beginning of the intifada, there have been hundreds of anti-Semitic incidents. Synagogues have been set on fire, Jewish institutions damaged, anti-Semitic slogans written on walls, curses hurled at people who look Jewish. Jews have become very afraid and their fear has intensified because of the weakness revealed by the government.
This situation explains the fact that during the days preceding the first round of the presidential elections, a debate arose in the Jewish community on whom to vote for. Quite a number of Jews voted for Le Pen because of his hostile attitude toward the Muslims in the country. They forgave him his blatantly anti-Semitic statements and supported him because he was the only candidate who promised to bring order to the country and to suppress the violence introduced by the immigrants into the fabric of life in France.
Rabbis who were asked their opinion defined the rise of Le Pen as a divine miracle. Some of them specifically called on the Jews to vote for him, assuming that his election would bring chaos to the country and accelerate the immigration of the Jews to Israel. The leaders of the Likud suggested casting a blank ballot, because the two leading candidates - Chirac and Jospin - have conducted an anti-Israel policy.
`An anti-Semitic government'
The day after the first round of elections, Radio Shalom devoted two hours to listeners' comments. During the broadcast, listeners told of their dilemmas and some expressed quiet support for Le Pen. Some went on the air to describe how it feels to be a Jew in France these days. One of them, an 11-year-old boy, spoke about his fears. "I want to tell you that some bad men attacked me in the bus," he said in a confident voice. "People sitting in the bus didn't help me, and that scared me the most. The people who attacked me were Arabs, and they warned me that if they saw me again on the bus, they would beat me up. I called you to ask you what I should do. Should I hide the fact that I'm a Jew?"
A woman called and said angrily, "I heard some Jewish intellectuals who spoke against Le Pen and I was ashamed, and the worst part is that they are asking us to vote for Chirac because Le Pen is dangerous. I want to remind you who is more dangerous and I want to remind you who helped build the atomic reactor in Iraq. Who if not Chirac? We can't forget how Chirac danced in Ramallah with Arafat, and how he spoke against Israel. Not to mention [French Foreign Minister] Hubert Vedrine, who speaks against Israel all the time. It's true we have to stop Le Pen, but we Jews have to be happy that he gave the French a slap in the face."
Another listener said, "I'm speaking emotionally because I am ashamed of our community leaders and of some of our intellectuals. I saw many demonstrations against Israel and at all of them there were only leftists - Jews and Christians and Muslims. Nor did I see Le Pen demonstrating against Israel. I'm not afraid of a government of the National Front because it won't allow people to demonstrate and call out `Death to the Jews.' I beg all the Jews who are listening to me. Don't vote for Chirac, who is a hypocrite and a Jew-hater. Cast a blank ballot. And anyway, how do you know that Le Pen will be a bad president?"
A resident of Lyon said, "They have been attacking the Jews for the past year and a half, and the government doesn't do anything. The political leaders haven't lifted a finger to protect the Jews. The media didn't take our complaints seriously either. For me, this proves we have an anti-Semitic government and anti-Semitic media. They tell us to vote for a man like Chirac? How can I? I want to tell you that I'm very happy that Le Pen made it to the second round, because now the French people will stop lecturing Israel and the whole world. Chirac is the worst, in my opinion. If he refuses to speak to Le Pen or to meet with him, why does he attack Ariel Sharon so that he'll meet with Arafat? Le Pen is still a French patriot, whereas Arafat is a Palestinian terrorist."
Good wishes to Le Pen
So anyone who expected general opposition to Le Pen on the part of French Jews was mistaken. The Jews of the elite, who are highly integrated into the fabric of French society, did in fact see in the rise of the leader of the extreme left an existential threat to their status, as well as to the status of France. They harnessed their power, and their influence, and joined their friends in the country's elites in order to block his way.
But on the other hand, as the monologues on Radio Shalom demonstrate, there was no shortage of Jews who developed a sympathetic attitude toward Le Pen, and identified with his extremist messages, especially those directed toward the Muslim immigrants. These are Jews from the middle and lower classes, who live in cities on the periphery, in neighborhoods for foreigners and for immigrants from the Maghreb [Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia]. Most of the anti-Semitic incidents took place in the neighborhoods where those Jews live. The synagogues where they pray have become a target for Muslim rage. Their children, who wear skullcaps or a Magen David [Star of David] around their necks, are the ones who felt threatened. These Jews saw in Le Pen a clear answer to the insecurity that has come to dominate their everyday lives.
The day after Le Pen made it to the second round, many Jews in Nice and in Marseilles in the south, and in the satellite cities of Paris, were seen smiling. In these mixed areas, the rate of support for Le Pen was over 30 percent. The Jews greeted each other on the way to synagogue and whispered good wishes to Le Pen on his journey to capturing the Elysees Palace. "I was really ashamed when they told me they had voted for Le Pen," said S., an activist in a Jewish organization in Nice, "but they explained that they had done it so that the Arabs would learn a lesson and would be afraid to lift their heads."
Two days ago, after hearing the news of Le Pen's defeat in the second round, a Jew from Marseilles called me. Sadness was discernible in his voice. "I so much wanted him to be elected," he sighed, referring to Le Pen. "The fact is that during the two weeks between the two election rounds, there were no attacks against us. We could walk around the city freely, with heads held high. The Arabs were even afraid to leave their homes. I'll tell you the truth, I enjoyed seeing them sitting in the cafes with long faces."
To the Jews on the periphery, Le Pen symbolized an answer to a Jewish problem that the government has refrained from dealing with. To the Jews of the elite, Le Pen symbolized a living reminder that their status is not what it used to be. They were afraid that their Jewishness, which has become so intermingled with the values of the Republic, will once again become their distinguishing characteristic. Le Pen has often used a television appearance or a public speech to point out the Jewishness of some journalist or other who had developed an animosity toward him. Whereas the leaders of the other parties blurred the distinctions between communities and faiths as though these differences had never existed, Le Pen made sure to emphasize them. That was the secret of his strength. There were Jews who were happy about it, there were others who were terrified by it.
Looking for insurance
But the support of some Jews for Le Pen is certainly not the entire picture. Up to a year ago, almost no Jews were seen at the aliyah [immigration to Israel] meetings organized by the Jewish Agency. In the past year, interest has increased, and recently many Jews have packed their bags, fearing the increasingly anti-Semitic atmosphere. In a meeting organized by the Jewish Agency last week in Marseilles, about 5,000 Jews showed up. The organizers had expected only hundreds. "The Jews are looking for an insurance policy," explained Tamar Sam-Esh, Israel's consul general in Marseilles, who attended the event.
A Jewish psychoanalyst who lives in Nice said he had never considered leaving the land of his birth, but recently has begun to consider emigrating. "It happened to me a few months ago," he said. "I saw an anti-Israel demonstration. I stood to the side in order to see what was happening. Suddenly, in the middle of the protest, the demonstrators began to shout: `Death to the Jews!' I couldn't believe my ears. I felt like crying. A week earlier, a synagogue in the city was set on fire. I said to myself: Mon Dieu, what is happening to this country? I went to the police to complain, but nobody was interested. Now, after Le Pen's election results, I am definitely considering emigrating."
A senior Jewish journalist said his world fell apart when he heard about Le Pen's success. He was especially fearful in light of the weakness that has seized the government as far as the Muslim immigrants are concerned. "They set the tone in the country," he explained. "The government doesn't dare start up with them, in order to receive their votes. How have we reached a situation where they point at us in the street? How can we live in a country where 20 percent of the citizens would like to see the Jews leave?"
In recent weeks, he was appalled when he watched his colleagues' reports on television about the Israeli attack in Jenin. Already on the first day they rushed to claim that a massacre had been carried out in the camp, and described the Israelis as murderers. "A hatred of Israel that borders on anti-Semitism has developed among the French journalists," he said. "There is a new bon ton that Israel is responsible for all the problems in the world, and therefore it must be defamed. I have reached the point where I can't watch any more news on television. How much can I hear that Israel is the bad boy of the world? How much can I hear about the suffering of the Palestinians?"
We sat in his new office and he chain-smoked, restless and delivering rapid-fire remarks. "I tell myself as clearly as possible," he raised his voice, "that if, God forbid, Jean-Marie Le Pen receives over 35 percent of the vote, I am packing and leaving my country. That will be the end. From my point of view, the extreme right with such broad popular support, that's the end of Jewish life in France." Le Pen, as we know, received about 18 percent of the vote.
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Well, that's a nifty little thing.
(http://www.atlasusa.org/)
(located Fairfax, Viginia)
Since 1981 Atlas has been the leading international organization for supporting independent think tanks advancing freedom.
INSTITUTE SPOTLIGHT: Minaret of Freedom
In the early 1990's Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad, a Ph.D. in astrophysics, made the critical decision to devote his efforts to promoting free markets among Muslims. In particular, he was interested in correcting the vast (too-often tragic) misunderstandings of Islam among Westerners.
Ahmad met other Muslim free-marketeers in the Atlas network at a workshop in 1993, including Atilla Yayla of the Association for Liberal Thinking (Turkey) and Nizam Ahmad of Making Our Economy Right (Bangladesh). They argued that free market organizations in the Muslim world would benefit enormously from the existence of a sister organization in the United States. A market-oriented Muslim think tank in America would be free to pursue the links between free markets and Islamic law that the statist and anti-Islamist authoritarian governments would never tolerate. In addition, because of the awe in which so many of the Muslim world hold America, the mere fact that an Islamic think tank in America was seriously engaged in such pursuits would legitimize similar efforts in their own counties.
With over five million Muslims in the United States (it is the country's fastest growing religion due to a combination of immigration, conversion and birth rate), with the rise of globalization, and with the obvious need for better understanding between the Muslim world and the West, Ahmad felt that the time was ripe for an Islamic free market think tank in America. Thus was born the Minaret of Freedom Institute (MFI), with guidance from Atlas on issues of organization and fund-raising, in 1993.
The mission of the MFI is to discover and publish the politico-economic policy implications of Islamic law and their consequences on the economic well-being of the community, to promote the establishment of free trade and justice (an essential common interest of Islam and the West), to educate Islamic religious and community leaders in economics and in the fact that liberty is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for the achievement of a good society, and to wage unending holy struggle "against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
These goals are implemented by independent scholarly research into policy issues of concern to Muslim countries and/or to Muslims in America; publication of scholarly and popular expositions of such research; translation of appropriate works on the free market into the languages of the Muslim world with introductions and commentaries by Muslim scholars; and the operation of a scholars exchange program both to allow institute associates to make presentations to academics and policy makers in Muslim countries and to permit libertarian Muslims from abroad to spend time in contact with market-oriented Muslim scholars in America and to have access to resources not available in their home countries.
In the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, many people pointed the finger of blame squarely at Muslims in general. Their accusations, misunderstandings, and general ignorance of Islam and Muslims point to the importance of the MFI's work. Since that time, Ahmad has represented MFI in numerous public forums: television programs like the Today show and BBC News; major newspapers such as The Washington Post; the Voice of America and other radio stations from Texas to Massachusetts; and events organized by Johns Hopkins University's School for Advanced International Studies, the Federalist Society, the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, and of course Atlas's 2nd Annual Liberty Forum. Ahmad and other MFI board members also have participated in numerous presentations to church groups and government agencies and the MFI cosponsored a special interfaith prayer service for the victims of the September 11 attacks.
The MFI has a primary interest in economic freedom. This has led to both popular works and academic research publications. An example of the former is a book called Islam and the Discovery of Freedom that combines a chapter from Rose Wilder Lanes' classic The Discovery of Freedom with Ahmad's commentary providing historical and scriptural citations supporting Ms. Lane's thesis that Islamic civilization played an important role in the development of liberty. An example of the latter is Ahmad's paper on the history of Islamic political economy, "An Islamic Perspective on the Wealth of Nations," originally delivered at an international Islamic conference in Malaysia and recently published in The Economics of Property Rights, a volume in the Edward Elgar series of critical writing on economics.
The MFI is the only U.S. Muslim think tank that emphasizes, not only democracy and development, but liberty in all its aspects: civil, political and economic. Information on MFI's many activities can be obtained at its Web site www.minaret.org.
Our dual mission at the Minaret of Freedom Institute is to educate Muslims on the importance of liberty and free markets to a good society, while educating non-Muslims about the beliefs and contributions of Islam and the political realities of conflict between the two cultures. Accordingly we condemn in the strongest terms the Baruch-Goldstein like attack on a Christian Church in Pakistan in which two Americans were killed by grenades. We call on the Pakistani authorities to biring the perpetrators to swift justice with this reminder from the Qur'an: "...Did not God check one set of people by means of another there would surely have been pulled down monasteries churches synagogues and mosques in which the name of God is commemorated in abundant measure. God will certainly aid those who aid His (cause); for verily God is Full of Strength Exalted in Might (Able to enforce His Will)." (22:40, A. Yusuf Ali, trans.)
2002 award for most obvious CIA front goes to....
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