Creepy Disclosures Weblog

Creepy Disclosures Weblog- Archive#41


  • Perth Sunday Times (Australia), 2003/01/19, p. 44). Yes, this was a picture from SOHO, but didn't show any UFO! We believe similar "enhancements", possibly starting with other types of image artifacts (see below for details), are behind all of the recently published "UFO proof" claims. Claims without the time and date of the picture[s] are close to worthless, because the data processing cannot be verified by others. -NASA

  • Wal-Mart's influence grows
    Wed Jan 29, 7:32 AM ET
    Jim Hopkins USA TODAY
    We are a Wal-Mart Nation.
    Wal-Mart's influence on the U.S. economy has reached levels not seen by a single company since the 19th-century rise of Standard Oil, economists and historians say. Even if you don't shop at Wal-Mart, the retail powerhouse increasingly is dictating your product choices -- and what you pay -- as its relentless price cutting helps keep inflation low.
    Wal-Mart is the top seller of groceries, jewelry and photo processing. It is creating more of its own brands. Some, such as Ol' Roy dog food and Equate vitamins, quickly became the USA's top sellers. It is moving into banking, used car sales, travel and Internet access. It averages 100 million customers a week. That's 88.5 million more people than U.S. airlines fly in a week.
    Anyone whose stocks rose in the late 1990s owes Wal-Mart, the world's biggest company. It alone accounted for as much as 25% of the U.S. productivity gains from 1995-99, says consultant McKinsey & Co. Such gains drove corporate profits, thus stock prices. Wages in retailing, one of the biggest sources of new jobs in the '90s and current decade, are also affected by Wal-Mart. With 1.3 million workers, it is the world's largest private employer. It employs one of every 123 U.S. workers and nearly one of every 20 retail employees.
    ''I joke we're all going to be working for Wal-Mart someday,'' says economist Mark Zandi of consultant Economy.com.
    That may not be too far off.
    Although Wal-Mart is hitting speed bumps because of growing labor challenges, employment lawsuits and higher costs, few doubt it will stop besting competitors as it expands. While other retailers such as Home Depot, tech giants such as Microsoft and manufacturers such as General Electric played big parts in the 1990s productivity gains, Wal-Mart, with its massive buying power and technology advantage, played the biggest role, economists say. As it grows, its influence, largely unknown to consumers, will continue to seep into more parts of the USA and the global economies.
    ''Everyone knows Wal-Mart,'' says Jim Hoopes, a business history professor at Babson College, ''but nobody has a real sense of how big and how powerful it is.''
    Wal-Mart, responding to criticism over its growing influence, says it creates thousands of jobs a year and pays competitive wages and benefits. Its push for productivity is meant to keep prices low, benefiting its customers, says spokesman Tom Williams. ''We're doing good, but we could do better,'' he says.
    Few companies have moved so far so fast. Founded 40 years ago in rural Arkansas by Sam Walton, Wal-Mart has swelled to 4,300 stores in nine countries and annual revenue near $250 billion. Its computer network, a critical part of its success, rivals the Pentagon's.
    It is now the biggest customer for many of the world's leading consumer-products companies, including Kraft, Gillette and Procter & Gamble. At P&G, Wal-Mart accounts for 17% of annual revenue, up from 10% just five years ago. That makes those companies more dependent on Wal-Mart's success, more vulnerable should it stumble and more likely to respond to Wal-Mart's requests for lower prices and product changes.
    The chain's buying power is so immense that 450 suppliers have opened offices -- many in the 1990s -- near Wal-Mart headquarters in tiny Bentonville, Ark. As many as 800 more such offices are expected in the next five years. Sales representatives want to be near Wal-Mart buyers to beat the competition, says Rich Davis, a local economic development official. ''I've had them sit here and say, 'Look, if we're not here, our competitor will be,' '' Davis says.
    Setting prices, selection
    As such, Wal-Mart is increasingly affecting:
    * Product choices. P&G is dumping weak brands, such as Crisco and Jif peanut butter, sold to J.M. Smucker last year. It wants to focus on heavy hitters, such as Tide detergent, most desired by Wal-Mart and other big retailers, P&G says. That strategy helped P&G boost fiscal second-quarter net income 14% year-over-year to $1.5 billion, it said Tuesday.
    Other companies have likewise tweaked products so that they pass muster with Wal-Mart. Video game maker Planet Moon Studios two years ago wanted an industry group to give its Giants game a teen rating. Why? So it would be carried by Wal-Mart and others. Planet Moon changed the color of blood in the video to green from red, toned down the language and put a bikini on a topless character, says CEO Bob Stevenson. Without those changes, he says, ''The risk to sales was too high.''
    Wal-Mart is also challenging its suppliers by developing more of its own products, called ''private labels.'' It stepped up that effort in the mid-1990s as it expanded into vitamins, batteries and bathroom tissue. Its Great Value grocery line has 1,475 items, from beans to salsa, up from 194 two years ago.
    Wal-Mart says it is committed to keeping shelves full of well-known brands such as Kellogg cereals and Tide. But, in general, private-label profits run as high as 30%, vs. 15% on brand-name items, says Burt Flickinger, managing director of consultant Reach Marketing.
    Private-label products also promise Wal-Mart more profit as the chain expands abroad, because U.S. brands don't have the same clout there. In Europe and the United Kingdom, where Wal-Mart is battling for Britain's Safeway grocery chain, private-label goods are 50% of its sales vs. 25% in the USA.
    * Product prices. Big food companies including Kraft, which gets 10% of its revenue from Wal-Mart, have not been able to raise prices as quickly as they once did because of Wal-Mart's demands, says Jonathan Feeney, a consumer products analyst at investment firm SunTrust Robinson Humphrey. Kraft declined to comment.
    History has shown that suppliers suffer if they run afoul of Wal-Mart. Rubbermaid raised the prices it charged Wal-Mart in the mid-1990s because of an 80% jump in the cost of a key ingredient in its plastic containers. The retailer responded by giving more shelf space to lower-priced competitors, helping drive Rubbermaid into a 1999 merger with rival Newell, says John Mariotti, a former Rubbermaid executive. ''Rubbermaid earned Wal-Mart's wrath by not giving it the best deal,'' he says.
    * Employment. Wal-Mart's impact on wages was first felt in rural towns in the South and Midwest where Wal-Mart got its start. Often, it became the biggest employer overnight, setting wage rates for all retailers, experts say.
    Now, its impact on retail employment has spread nationwide, contributing to slower wage growth throughout the sector, economist Zandi says.
    Pay for retail workers rose 43% from 1990 to 2001, vs. 50% for non-retail workers, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis data. No one knows exactly how big a part Wal-Mart played, Zandi says. But its influence is ''undeniable'' because it created more jobs in the 1990s than any other company, he says. More retail jobs are on the way. Wal-Mart plans to add 800,000 workers in the next five years. U.S. retailers are expected to add 3.1 million jobs by 2010, the government says.
    Manufacturers, which pay more, will add fewer than 600,000 jobs in the same period. Labor unions that represent factory workers are alarmed. They say Wal-Mart, in demanding ever-lower prices from suppliers, has helped drive thousands of U.S. manufacturing jobs abroad, where labor costs are lower.
    Now they worry about Wal-Mart's push into the unionized supermarket industry. Wal-Mart has no unions. That means its employees earn less than those at competing supermarkets, says the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW).
    Wal-Mart's hourly pay averages $7 to $8 an hour, vs. $11 at Kroger, Safeway and other competitors with unions, says UFCW spokesman Greg Denier.
    Not true, says Williams, the Wal-Mart spokesman. While he would not disclose wages, which vary by market, he says Wal-Mart pay is close to or equal to union wages.
    * Productivity. Wal-Mart's key role in the 1995-99 economic boom came partly because of its legendary use of technology to analyze costs and speed delivery of goods from its 30,000 suppliers to dozens of sprawling warehouses, say retail and financial analysts.
    Wal-Mart says it has the USA's biggest private satellite communications network, one that links stores to Bentonville by voice, data and video. Suppliers tap directly into Wal-Mart's computers to track sales of everything from soup to nuts, which improves inventory controls and cuts costs.
    Other retailers, including Kmart, tried matching Wal-Mart's tech prowess but failed. Kmart filed for bankruptcy-court protection last year and is cutting 67,000 jobs and closing nearly 30% of its stores.
    Wal-Mart also teaches manufacturers to be more cost effective so product prices can stay down. For example, Wal-Mart might suggest that a supplier cut its labor costs by shipping toasters in their cartons, rather than packing them in bigger boxes and shrink-wrapping them onto shipping pallets, says James Champy, chairman of Perot Systems' consulting unit, which advises Wal-Mart suppliers.
    Such close communication between a retailer and supplier is unusual. But it's being adopted by more companies, including Dell Computer, as U.S. businesses seek more productivity to better compete globally.
    ''It's where the future of business has to be,'' Champy says.
    That future may also include fewer companies. To achieve economies of scale, more consumer products companies are merging. Wal-Mart's demand for low-cost products partly influenced Kellogg's purchase of Keebler in 2001, and the merger of Kraft and Nabisco in 2000, analyst Feeney says.
    Speed bumps ahead?
    Meanwhile, Wal-Mart's productivity continues driving its bottom line. The retailer is expected to report nearly $250 billion in annual revenue for the fiscal year ending Friday -- a 15% gain from the previous year, despite the so-so holiday shopping period.
    Expected earnings of $1.78 a share would be 19.5% higher than fiscal 2002, say analysts surveyed by Thomson First Call.
    The chain has 8% of all U.S. retail sales, excluding restaurants and auto dealers. That's up from 6% just five years ago, an ''incredibly significant'' gain, Zandi says.
    Still, that's not big enough to impose unjustified price increases, as some monopolies have done in the past, Zandi says. And Wal-Mart would likely need to be much bigger before it could stifle product innovation, retail analysts say.
    If Wal-Mart suddenly imploded like an Enron or WorldCom, no doubt stock markets would react. Consumer confidence would fall. Big Wal-Mart suppliers would be hurt. But other retailers would quickly grab Wal-Mart executives, customers and suppliers. Any disruption to the flow of goods would be temporary, retail experts say.
    A more likely scenario is that Wal-Mart's growth could be pinched as it digs deeper into urban areas, where wages are higher, competitors more numerous and scarce land more expensive. That's one reason the chain is rolling out smaller Neighborhood Markets grocery stores that are better suited for urban areas.
    Slower Wal-Mart growth could, though, muffle the still-tepid economic recovery. ''If only one company is adding 25% of our productivity,'' Hoopes says, ''it means a lot of other companies are not growing fast enough.''

  • When did President Bush decide to invade Iraq? Sept 17 2001 (WASHPOST)
    U.S. Decision On Iraq Has Puzzling Past
    Opponents of War Wonder When, How Policy Was Set
    Sunday, January 12, 2003
    On Sept. 17, 2001, six days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush signed a 2½-page document marked "TOP SECRET" that outlined the plan for going to war in Afghanistan as part of a global campaign against terrorism.
    Almost as a footnote, the document also directed the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq, senior administration officials said.
    The previously undisclosed Iraq directive is characteristic of an internal decision-making process that has been obscured from public view. Over the next nine months, the administration would make Iraq the central focus of its war on terrorism without producing a rich paper trail or record of key meetings and events leading to a formal decision to act against President Saddam Hussein, according to a review of administration decision-making based on interviews with more than 20 participants.
    Instead, participants said, the decision to confront Hussein at this time emerged in an ad hoc fashion. Often, the process circumvented traditional policymaking channels as longtime advocates of ousting Hussein pushed Iraq to the top of the agenda by connecting their cause to the war on terrorism.
    With the nation possibly on the brink of war, the result of this murky process continues to reverberate today: tepid support for military action at the State Department, muted concern in the military ranks of the Pentagon and general confusion among relatively senior officials -- and the public -- about how or even when the policy was decided.
    The decision to confront Iraq was in many ways a victory for a small group of conservatives who, at the start of the administration, found themselves outnumbered by more moderate voices in the military and the foreign policy bureaucracy. Their tough line on Iraq before Sept. 11, 2001, was embraced quickly by President Bush and Vice President Cheney after the attacks. But that shift was not communicated to opponents of military action until months later, when the internal battle was already decided.
    By the time the policy was set, opponents were left arguing over the tactics -- such as whether to go to the United Nations -- without clearly understanding how the decision was reached in the first place. "It simply snuck up on us," a senior State Department official said.
    The administration has embarked on something "quite extraordinary in American history, a preventive war, and the threshold for justification should be extraordinarily high," said G. John Ikenberry, an international relations professor at Georgetown University. But "the external presentation and the justification for it really seems to be lacking," he said. "The external presentation appears to mirror the internal decision-making quite a bit."
    Advocates for military action against Iraq say the process may appear mysterious only because the answer was so self-evident. They believe that Bush understood instantly after Sept. 11 that Iraq would be the next major step in the global war against terrorism, and that he made up his mind within days, if not hours, of that fateful day. "The most important thing is that the president's position changed after 9/11," said a senior official who pushed hard for action.
    "Saddam Must Go"
    A small group of senior officials, especially in the Pentagon and the vice president's office, have long been concerned about Hussein, and urged his ouster in articles and open letters years before Bush became president.
    Five years ago, the Dec. 1 issue of the Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine, headlined its cover with a bold directive: "Saddam Must Go: A How-to Guide." Two of the articles were written by current administration officials, including the lead one, by Zalmay M. Khalilzad, now special White House envoy to the Iraqi opposition, and Paul D. Wolfowitz, now deputy defense secretary.
    "We will have to confront him sooner or later -- and sooner would be better," Khalilzad and Wolfowitz wrote. They called for "sustained attacks on the elite military units and security forces that are the main pillar of Saddam's terror-based regime."
    In an open letter to President Bill Clinton in early 1998, Wolfowitz, Khalilzad and eight other people who now hold positions in the Bush administration -- including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld -- urged Clinton to begin "implementing a strategy for removing Saddam's regime from power."
    Many advocates of action were skeptical that Hussein could be contained indefinitely, even by repeated weapons inspections, and they viewed his control of Iraq -- and his possible acquisition of weapons of mass destruction -- as inherently destabilizing in the region. Many were also strong supporters of Israel, and they saw ousting Hussein as key to changing the political dynamic of the entire Middle East.
    During the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush and Cheney's position was not as clear-cut.
    In an interview on NBC's "Meet the Press," about one year before the Sept. 11 attacks, Cheney defended the decision of George H.W. Bush's administration not to attack Baghdad because, he said, the United States should not act as though "we were an imperialist power, willy-nilly moving into capitals in that part of the world, taking down governments." In the current environment, he said, "we want to maintain our current posture vis-à-vis Iraq."
    Bush, during the campaign, focused more on the dangers of nuclear proliferation than on the removal of Saddam Hussein. In a December 1999 debate among GOP presidential contenders, Bush backtracked when he said he'd "take 'em out" if Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Asked by the moderator whether he had said "take him out," Bush replied, "Take out the weapons of mass destruction."
    "Transformed by Sept. 11"
    In the early months of the Bush administration, officials intent on challenging Hussein sought to put Iraq near the top of the administration's foreign policy agenda. Many felt frustrated by the interagency debate. Defense officials seethed as the State Department pressed ahead with a plan to impose "smart sanctions" on Iraq and, in their view, threw bureaucratic roadblocks in the way of providing funds to the Iraqi opposition.
    "Even relatively easy decisions were always thrown up to the presidential level," said a Defense official.
    Meanwhile, at the White House, officials worked on refining the administration's Iraq policy, focusing especially on how to implement the official U.S. stance of "regime change" articulated by the Clinton administration. Bush was informed of the deliberations, but nothing had been settled when the terrorists attacked the Pentagon and World Trade Center.
    "Certainly, different people at different times were arguing for a more vigorous approach to Saddam," one senior official said. "But nobody suggested that we have the U.S. military go to Baghdad. That was transformed by Sept. 11."
    Iraq, and its possible possession of weapons of mass destruction, was on the minds of several key officials as they struggled to grapple with the aftermath of Sept. 11. Cheney, as he watched the World Trade Center towers collapse while he was sitting in front of a television in the White House's underground bunker, turned to an aide and remarked, "As unfathomable as this was, it could have been so much worse if they had weapons of mass destruction."
    The same thought occurred to other senior officials in the days that followed. Rumsfeld wondered to aides whether Hussein had a role in the attacks. Wolfowitz, in public and private conversations, was an especially forceful advocate for tackling Iraq at the same time as Osama bin Laden. And within days, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice also privately began to counsel the president that he needed to go after all rogue nations harboring weapons of mass destruction.
    But these concerns were submerged by the imperative of dealing first with Afghanistan. "I remember the day that we put the map on the table, and the color drained from everybody's face," one official said. "Afghanistan is not the place you would choose to fight."
    The Pentagon, while it was fighting the war in Afghanistan, began reviewing its plans for Iraq because of the secret presidential directive on Sept. 17. On Sept. 19 and 20, an advisory group known as the Defense Policy Board met at the Pentagon -- with Rumsfeld in attendance -- and animatedly discussed the importance of ousting Hussein.
    The anthrax attacks, which came soon after Sept. 11, further strengthened the resolve of some key administration officials to deal with Iraq. Cheney, in particular, became consumed with the possibility that Iraq or other countries could distribute biological or chemical weapons to terrorists, officials said.
    Though Cheney's aides said the vice president has been consistently concerned about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, others perceived a shift. "To his credit, he looked at the situation differently after Sept. 11 than he did before," one senior official said.
    Because the culprit behind the anthrax attacks has not been found, some administration officials still are convinced that Hussein had a role in the anthrax attacks. "It's hard to get away from the feeling that the timing was too much of a coincidence," one official said.
    Officials close to the president portray the Iraq decision as a natural outgrowth of concerns Bush raised during the presidential campaign, and they say he very quickly decided he needed to challenge Iraq after the terrorist attacks.
    But he didn't publicly raise it earlier because, in the words of one senior official, "he didn't think the country could handle the shock of 9/11 and a lot of talk about dealing with states that had weapons of mass destruction."
    "What a Fixation"
    In free-wheeling meetings of the "principals" during October and November, Rumsfeld and Cheney emphasized their suspicions of ties between rogue states, such as Iraq, and terrorists. Some of the conversations were prompted by intelligence, later discounted, that al Qaeda may have been on the verge of obtaining a "dirty bomb" that would spread radioactive material.
    By early November, Wayne Downing, a retired Army general who headed counterterrorism in the White House, on his own initiative began working up plans for an attack of Iraq, keeping his superiors informed of his progress. A Pentagon planning group also kept hard at work on possible options.
    "The issue got away from the president," said a senior official who attended discussions in the White House. "He wasn't controlling the tone or the direction" and was influenced by people who "painted him into a corner because Iraq was an albatross around their necks."
    After some of these meetings at the White House, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, skeptical of military action without the necessary diplomatic groundwork, would return to his office on the seventh floor of the State Department, roll his eyes and say, "Jeez, what a fixation about Iraq," State Department officials said.
    "I do believe certain people have grown theological about this," said another administration official who opposed focusing so intently on Iraq. "It's almost a religion -- that it will be the end of our society if we don't take action now."
    "Axis of Evil"
    Much of this activity -- and these concerns -- were hidden from the public eye. Bush barely mentioned Iraq in his address to the nation nine days after the Sept. 11 attacks. In fact, the administration did not publicly tip its hand until Bush made his State of the Union address on Jan. 28, 2002. Even then, officials did their best to obscure the meaning of Bush's words.
    Listing Iraq, Iran and North Korea, Bush declared, "States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred."
    "I will not wait on events, while dangers gather," Bush warned.
    State Department officials puzzled over drafts of the speech and ultimately concluded the words did not represent a policy shift, though some were worried the rhetoric would have diplomatic consequences. Powell "thought it rang an alarm bell since it would send waves out there to colleagues around the world," a State Department official said.
    Powell expressed concerns about the language to the White House, he said. "But he didn't push it hard."
    Briefing reporters at the White House, officials played down the importance of the "axis of evil." One senior White House official advised "not to read anything into any [country] name in terms of the next phase" of the war against terrorism. "We've always said there are a number of elements of national power" in the U.S. arsenal, the aide added, including diplomacy and sanctions. "This is not a call to use a specific element" of that power.
    Yet, in this period, Bush also secretly signed an intelligence order, expanding on a previous presidential finding, that directed the CIA to undertake a comprehensive, covert program to topple Hussein, including authority to use lethal force to capture the Iraqi president.
    Speculation continued to run high in the media that an attack on Iraq was imminent. But within the administration, some of the advocates were becoming depressed about the lack of action, complaining that it was difficult to focus attention on Iraq, especially as the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians spiraled out of control. In March, Cheney toured the Middle East on a trip dominated by questions from Arab leaders about the Israeli-Palestinian violence. But he also stressed the administration's contention that Iraq was a problem that needed to be addressed.
    "I Made Up My Mind"
    Then, in April, Bush approached Rice. It was time to figure out "what we are doing about Iraq," he told her, setting in motion a series of meetings by the principals and their deputies. "I made up my mind that Saddam needs to go," Bush hinted to a British reporter at the time. "That's about all I'm willing to share with you."
    At the meetings, senior officials examined new but unconfirmed evidence of Iraq's programs to build biological, chemical and nuclear weapons and considered connections between Baghdad and Palestinian terrorism. They argued over which elements of the Iraqi opposition to back, ultimately deciding to push for unity among the exiles and within the U.S. bureaucracy.
    By many accounts, they did not deal with the hard question of whether there should be a confrontation with Iraq. "Most of the internal debate in the administration has really been about tactics," an official said.
    Powell sent his deputy, Richard L. Armitage, who had signed the letter to Clinton urging Hussein's ouster, to many of the meetings. As a way of establishing Powell's bona fides with those eager for action, Armitage would boast -- incorrectly, as it turned out -- that Powell first backed "regime change" in his confirmation hearings.
    Serious military planning also began in earnest in the spring. Every three or four weeks, Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, commander of U.S. Central Command, would travel to the White House to give Bush a private briefing on the war planning for Iraq.
    On June 1, Bush made another speech, this time at West Point, arguing for a policy of preemption against potential threats. "If we wait for the threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long," Bush said. That month, two major foreign policy headaches -- a potential war between India and Pakistan and the administration's uncertain policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- were also resolved, freeing the White House to turn its full attention to confronting Iraq.
    Only later did it become clear that the president already had made up his mind. In July, the State Department's director of policy planning, Richard N. Haass, held a regular meeting with Rice and asked whether they should talk about the pros and cons of confronting Iraq.
    Don't bother, Rice replied: The president has made a decision.

  • Zalmay Khalilzad and the Bush Agenda
    by Jennifer Van Bergen
    (t r u t h o u t.com)
    January 13, 2001

    The appointment by the Bush Administration of Zalmay Khalilzad as special envoy to Afghanistan which was announced on December 31, 2001, only nine days after the U.S.-backed interim government of Hamid Karzai took office in Kabul, seems timely and logical. Khalilzad, a U.S. citizen born in Afghanistan with extensive knowledge of the region and experience, appears to be the right person for the job.
    Khalilzad's presence, however, is the fruit of an older agenda, one that reaches back at least to the Reagan era, and Khalilzad has more connections to that agenda than meets the eye.
    Simply put, Khalilzad's appointment means oil. Oil for the United States. Oil for Unocal, a U.S. company long criticized for doing business in countries with repressive governments and rumored to have close ties to the Department of State and the intelligence community.
    Zalmay Khalilzad was an advisor for Unocal. In the mid 1990s, while working for the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, Khalilzad conducted risk analyses for Unocal at the time it had signed letters of approval from the Taliban. The analyses were for a proposed 890-mile, $2-billion, 1.9-billion-cubic-feet-per-day natural gas pipeline project which would have extended from Turkmenistan to Pakistan. In December 1997, Khalilzad joined Unocal officials at a reception for an invited Taliban delegation to Texas.
    UNOCAL LONG CRITICIZED FOR BUSINESS PRACTICES
    Unocal, the world's ninth largest oil company according to the National Center for Policy Research, but according to the Los Angeles Times, smaller than America's "most powerful energy companies," has long been criticized for doing business with repressive foreign governments. Legal action was brought against Unocal in 1997 by Burmese refugees for human rights abuses which the refugees claimed were committed by the Burmese military hired by Unocal to protect their operations.
    Unocal has also been criticized for its business dealings in this country. A 1998 petition signed by Environmental, Human Rights and Women's Groups, asked California Attorney General to revoke Unocal's Charter, citing Unocal's record as a "repeat offender" of environmental, labor and deceptive practices laws. The petition claimed that Unocal was principally responsible for the notorious 1969 oil blowout in the Santa Barbara Channel and has since then polluted multiple sites from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Petitioners claimed that Unocal committed hundreds of violations of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, treated U.S. workers unethically and unfairly, engaged in a pattern of illegal deceptions of the courts, stockholders and the public, and "usurped political power," undermining U.S. foreign policy.
    According to the Los Angeles Times, Exxon filed a report in August 2001 with antitrust regulators which states that Unocal "subverted the standard-setting process" of the California Air Resources Board (CARB) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) "to obtain unlawful monopoly profits." The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is investigating a questionable patent Unocal obtained behind the backs of CARB and oil competitors after Unocal sat in on official meetings to establish cleaner-burning gasoline. FTC investigators say that the patent may have contributed to last summer's Midwest gasoline crisis.
    Other reports cite Unocal's open support of "the most brutal dictatorship" in Asia, General Suharto of Indonesia, where Unocal is one of the largest oil companies, a $5.5 million legal settlement of a citizens suit filed by the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund against Unocal for pouring poisonous wastewater into the San Francisco Bay, and Unocal's attempts to intimidate two native tribes in Montana into renewing its pipeline lease without basic environmental protections.
    There have been some claims that Unocal was getting briefings from the Department of State. Unocal denied any connection beyond that which a company doing business overseas would obtain from the DOS. However, a look at some of Unocal's CEOs and board members shows strong government ties. Charles Larson, former Commander in Chief of the U.S. Navy's Pacific Command sits on the board. So does Donald Rice, a former colleague of Khalilzad's at RAND Corp., who was Secretary of the Air force under Bush I. And Robert Oakley, U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan during the time the CIA was funneling money and weapons through the Pakistani intelligence service (ISI) to Afghan muhajeeden in the 1980s, later the U.S. special envoy to Somalia, worked subsequently for Unocal.
    CENTGAS - THE AFGHAN OIL CONNECTION
    Unocal was the "Development Manager" of the Centgas consortium. The purpose of Centgas was to build an 890-mile-long pipeline from Turkmenistan through Aghanistan to Pakistan.
    Centgas, or the Central Asia Gas and Pipeline Consortium, was a group formed in the mid-1990s which was made up of the government of Turkmenistan and six international companies: Delta Oil Company (Saudi Arabia), Indonesia Petroleum, ITOCHU Oil Exploration Co. (Japan), Hyandai Engineering & Construction Co. (South Korea), Crescent Group (Pakistan) and Gazprom (Russia). Unocal owned nearly half of the shares of Centgas.
    As Centgas' Development Manager, Unocal opened talks with the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. To show its good will, Unocal donated money to CARE projects in Afghanistan and provided support for earthquake relief efforts. (According to the CIA World Factbook, damaging earthquakes are known to occur in the Hindu Kush mountains, which run across the center of the country.)
    According to L.A. Weekly, Unocal also gave nearly a million dollars to the University of Nebraska's Center for Afghan Studies, which Unocal stated was not used to "provide pipeline constructions skills training." Unocal said the money was used to provide "basic job skills training and education" for Afghans and elementary schooling for their children. However, according to the Asia Times, the Center for Afghan Studies also at one time produced a study of oil and gas reserves in Central Asia, placing their total worth at around US$3 trillion. Thus, the Center was not only interested in helping Afghans obtain basic education and job skills.
    Thomas E. Gouttierre, the director of the Center for Aghan Studies, is an old friend of Zalmay Khalilzad. In fact, Gouttierre coached Khalilzad on a high school basketball team when "Zal" first visited America as an exchange student.
    The Clinton administration offered backing for Unocal's Centgas project, but after the U.S. bombed Aghanistan in 1998 in retaliation for the Embassy bombings, Unocal withdrew from the consortium, citing "sharply deteriorating political conditions."
    Unocal stated that it would only participate in a Centgas pipeline project "when and if" Aghanistan achieved the "peace and stability necessary to obtain financing from international agencies and a government that is recognized by the United States and the United Nations." In February 1999, Unocal denied reports published in Pakistan that it was considering rejoining Centgas, and Unocal continues to state on its Homepage that it has no plans to return to the consortium. Unocal spokesman, Mike Thatcher, stated last October that "We're not going to do it, but sooner or later, someone will."
    However, it is clear that the December 5, 2001 "Bonn Agreement," which establishes an interim Aghani government overseen by the United Nations, will fulfill Unocal's prerequisite of an "internationally recognized government." One representative of the Turkmenistan embassy told L.A. Weekly, "So we are hoping that once peace is restored in Afghanistan, building these pipeliness will again become a priority."
    ENTER KHALILZAD
    Khalilzad's appointment as special envoy to Afghanistan raises suspicions about the priorities of the Bush administration. Long-standing political and business ties connect Khalilzad to an oil agenda. The United States has been bombing Afghanistan in retaliation for terrorist attacks on this country. But Khalilzad's appointment makes it clear that oil is now -- and perhaps has been since before 9/11 -- behind U.S. Afghan policy.
    Zalmay Khalilzad was born about 50 years ago in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, 70 miles south of the Soviet border. While he was still young, his family moved to Kabul, where his Pashtun father worked in the government, which was then a monarchy, and Zalmay attended English-language schools.
    According to Thomas E. Gouttierre, the director for the Unocal-funded Center for Afghan Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, the Khalilzad family "certainly would have been people among the intellectual elite of the time."
    Gouttierre met Zalmay when the young Afghani first visited the United States as an exchange student through the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker charitable organization. Gouttierre coached him in basketball.
    He returned to Afghanistan to complete his high school, but earned his undergraduate degree from the American University in Beirut. At that time, Beirut was still the "Paris of the Middle East."
    Khalilzad obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1979 (the same year the Soviets invaded his homeland), where, according to the New York Times News Service, "he became the protege of a famous hard-line strategic thinker." There he also met an Austrain woman, Cheryl Benard, whom he married. Benard writes novels and co-wrote a book about revolutionary Iran with Zalmay
    In the early 1980s, Zalmay taught political science at Columbia University in New York, where he worked with Zbigniew Brzezinski. He was also executive director of the Friends of Afghanistan, a support group for the mujaheddins fighting the Soviets -- the same mujuaheddins later known to have spawned bin Laden.
    In 1984, Khalilzad became an American citizen and joined the State Department on a one-year fellowship. Khalilzad's background and language skills earned him a permanent position on the State Department's Policy Planning Council during the Reagen era. There he worked under Paul Wolfowitz, then Reagan's director of policy planning, now the No. 2 man at the Pentagon. In 1998, the two, having retained close ties, joined others in signing an open letter to Clinton that argued for the overthrow of Saddam.
    From 1985 to 1989, Zalmay served as special adviser to the undersecretary of state. He belonged to a small group of policymakers who advocated providing arms to the "resistance" fighters in Afghanistan.
    Khalilzad then consulted for the Rand Corp., a conservative think tank, on defense issues and returned to Washington when Bush I took office, taking up the post of assistant deputy under-secretary of defense for policy planning. Again he worked closely with Wolfowitz, then the Pentagon's No. 3 official.
    He also got to know Dick Cheney at the Defense Department during the Gulf War.
    During the Clinton years, Khalilzad returned to Rand and spent his time writing books and articles. After Bush II was elected, Cheney selected himm to head the transition team for defense. In May 2001, Bush appointed him the National Security Council official in charge of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. His direct superior was Condoleeza Rice, the national security adviser, who herself had served as an oil consultant for Chevron.
    ZALMAY, THE SOOTHSAYER
    Khalilzad's critics point out that Zalmay, who gave a speech upon his arrival in Kabul condemning the Taliban, had at one time, as a paid adviser to oil multinational Unocal, courted and defended them. Indeed, Khalilzad has changed his tune so often that one analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, Anatol Lieven, said, "If he was in private business rather than government, he would have been sacked long ago."
    But Khalilzad has long and consistently argued that America ignored Afghanistan at its peril. In an article that appeared in the winter 2000 issue of the Washington Quarterly, co-authored by Rand colleague Daniel Byman, Khalilzad and Byman issued a stern warning about Afghanistan being "a haven for some of the world's most lethal anti-U.S. terrorists" who "pose a threat to U.S. soliders and civilians at home and abroad, to the Middle East peace process, and to the stability of our allies in the region." The two recommended taking measures to weaken the Taliban and support the Northern Alliance.
    As Jacob Weisberg pointed out in a recent article on Slate News, "What's remarkable about Khalilzad's recommendations ...... isn't just how tragically prophetic they look in the light of Sept. 11. It's how closely they track the Bush administration's emerging Afghan policy."
    Another writer points out how "little has been said in the media about the promiment role being played in Afghan policy by officials who advised the oil industry on Central Asia."
    According to an article on an Islamic website, the December 5th "Bonn Agreement," which formed the U.N.-supervised interim government in Afghanistan, "consolidates American control over Afghanistan and lays the basis for uprooting Islam from it." The author claims that "America was not content with achieving the five aims announced by Bush to the masses before Congress shortly before the declaration of war against Afghanistan. Instead she went much further than this. The American government has begun to impose its actual mandate over Afghanistan under the cover of the United Nations and works to create a new Afghanistan, infuse it with western culture, [and] strengthen its chains to the hated wheel of American colonialism."
    "America has disregarded the leaders of the tribes, the people of influence, position and standing in Afghanistan and replaced them with a handful of traitorous agents, the majority of which are westerners infatuated by the western culture," the Islamic writer states.
    If the purpose of the bombing of Afghanistan, the purpose of the Bonn Agreement, the purpose of Khalilzad's appointment, is oil, should Americans be advised of our government's intentions? If this is the writing in the sand, and if our troops risk their lives for this, and thousands if not millions of Afghanis suffer and die, and millions of Muslims become even more alienated and angry, all for oil, where is the ballot box for us to place our vote in, where is Congress?

  • IMAGE: Gaudi design for WTC site gets second chance
    JAN 22 2003

    (AP)
    This rocket-like skyscraper, designed after a sketch by the Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi in 1908 for a New York hotel that was never built, may get a second chance. A Boston architect is leading the effort to incorporate Gaudi's vision into a plan to build a memorial at the site of the destroyed World Trade Center.

      

  • The real reason Tom Daschle didn’t run for president
    JANUARY 17 - 23, 2003
    LAWEEKLY
    by Doug Ireland
    The national press corps didn’t bother to tell you why Tom Daschle, the Democrats’ Senate leader, decided at the 11th hour not to run for president: In the end, he calculated that he couldn’t survive scrutiny of his persistent service to the clients of his wife. Linda Daschle has been one of the airline industry’s top lobbyists for two decades — when she wasn’t busy running the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which explains why, just 11 days after the 9/11 attacks, her husband rushed through the Democratic Senate, which he controlled, the $15 billion bailout for the airline industry, a notorious taxpayer rip-off.
    Right after then-Congressman Tom Daschle dumped his first wife for a younger, prettier one, the former Miss Kansas Linda Daschle went to work as chief lobbyist for the Air Transport Association, the airline industry’s main lobby; she then became the senior vice president of the American Association of Airport Executives; and these days hangs her hat at the pricey top Washington law/lobby shop Baker, Donelson, Bearman & Caldwell, headed by former GOP Senate leader and ex–Reagan chief of staff Howard Baker — where she peddles influence on behalf of a long list of lucrative aviation clients. The clients for whom Linda lobbied brought more than $5.86 million into Baker, Donelson in one three-year period, including Northwest Airlines ($870,000 from 1997 through 2001) and American Airlines ($1.26 million in fees). Northwest was already teetering on the edge of bankruptcy even before 9/11. American, which has had six fatal crashes since 1994 (not counting 9/11) and has been repeatedly fined by the FAA for a skein of safety violations, had the reputation as the most unsafe major U.S. carrier.
    Yet these two clients of Linda Daschle’s got nearly $1 billion from the airline bailout her husband pushed into law — thanks to which Northwest (which was the second largest contributor to Senator Daschle’s 1998 campaign, and which scooped up $404 million in government cash) actually posted a $19 million profit in the third quarter after the twin-towers attacks. And, as the lone senator to vote against the bailout, Illinois GOPer Peter Fitzgerald, decried, “The only people who got bailed out were the shareholders. The 1 million airline employees were left twisting in the wind.” So much for the populist noises that occasionally come from Senator Daschle’s mouth. The Daschles also made sure that the bailout exempted American (which has consistently lobbied against tougher airline safety standards) and other carriers with lousy safety records from any real liability to lawsuits from the families of 9/11 victims. Moreover, the General Accounting Office found that the airline industry’s representations to Congress to secure the bailout overstated its anticipated losses from 9/11 by as much as $5 billion.
    Before 9/11, Senator Daschle pushed through the sleazy deal in the backrooms of Capitol Hill that forced the FAA to buy defective baggage scanners from one of Linda’s other clients, L-3 International (from which Linda’s firm raked in $440,000 in the ’97–’01 period). Under a provision Linda’s husband had slipped into the 2000 budget for the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), the FAA was required to buy one of L-3’s scanners for every one it purchased from the company’s competitors. The L-3 scanners were found to be substandard by DOT’s inspector general; FAA tests of the scanners showed high failure rates; and most have not yet been installed because of their defects (the one at the Dallas–Fort Worth airport — another of Linda’s clients — leaked radiation), which is a major reason DOT says it won’t be able to screen all luggage for explosives for years to come.
    In one of those corporate-coddling moves for which the Clinton administration became infamous, President Bubba appointed Linda Daschle deputy administrator of the FAA, putting her in charge of regulating her once-and-future clients; and she wound up running the agency as acting administrator. This, of course, significantly boosted the Daschle family income by hyping the amount Linda could charge her clients when she left government service. She didn’t wait long to cash in. Example: While running the FAA, she awarded Loral Space Technologies (a major Democratic contributor that figured in the ’96 campaign-finance scandals) a nearly $1 billion contract from the federal government; after Linda passed through the revolving door to Baker, Donelson, Loral paid the lobby shop $740,000 in 2000-2001 for Linda’s services. When the FAA was pondering making mandatory a criminal-background check for all airport employees, Linda, who was then running the agency, vigorously opposed this common-sense move — echoing the position of the airline-industry lobby that had previously employed her.
    A particularly odiferous episode involved charges that the senator and his wife had tried to sabotage safety inspections of an air-charter firm owned by Murl Bellew, a Daschle family friend who taught Tom how to fly. The scandal erupted and triggered an official investigation when a Bellew small plane chartered by the Indian Health Service crashed in North Dakota, killing the pilot and three doctors en route to an Indian-reservation clinic. Forest Service inspectors had been arguing that Bellew’s firm should be banned from getting government contracts because the operation had been unsafe for years. Senator Daschle obligingly pushed legislation taking the Forest Service out of the business of inspecting small-plane carriers, and senior FAA bureaucrats said Linda had also tried to submarine a proposal to train Forest Service inspectors to conduct FAA investigations. An FAA inspector reported a cover-up: Documents showing the Daschles’ assiduous efforts to minimize inspections of Bellew’s planes were shredded by FAA officials under Linda’s thumb. While an I.G. report failed to find Linda guilty of any lawbreaking, there’s an old saying in Washington: The scandal isn’t what’s illegal, the real scandal is what’s legal.
    It’s a sign of how lazy, blinkered and source-coddling the Beltway’s national press corps is when one considers that none of all this made the dissections of the senator’s presidential withdrawal — even though a tough piece by the Washington Monthly’s Stephanie Mencimer in the January 2002 issue laying out much of it was still on newsstands. As she observed, “It doesn’t take Lee Atwater to see how Mrs. Daschle’s professional life might play out in a nasty re-election or presidential campaign: ‘Sen. Daschle’s wife lobbyist for nation’s most dangerous airline,’ or ‘majority leader’s wife lobbied to make airlines less safe.’”
    Linda Daschle has tried to pooh-pooh her obvious conflicts of interest as an influence peddler, telling The New York Times last August that the staff members she lobbies “are pretty junior and may or may not know who I am” — a mind-boggling, risible assertion. But her senator/leader husband has always refused to make public his and his wife’s tax returns, despite repeated press requests. As a presidential candidate, Tom Daschle could not have avoided giving the press a look at those returns — which would have spelled out just how much cash Linda brings in from her clients.
    And that, children, was the ticking time bomb that would inevitably have exploded if the senator had sought the White House — and is the bottom-line reason he chose not to run.
     
     

  • Scientist manipulate Human Brain with Powerful Magnetic Fields
    Boston Globe
    1/14/2003
    Just by pointing his super-magnets at the right spots on your head, Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone can make you go momentarily mute or blind.
    He can disrupt your working memory or your ability to recognize faces. He can even make it harder for you to say verbs while nouns remain as easy as ever.
    Weird, yes. Fringe, no.
    Pascual-Leone is one of the premier scientific pioneers exploring a new technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, which shuts down or revs up the electrical doings inside the brain by sending a potent magnetic field through the skull.
    This is no try-it-at-home parlor trick and no ''Relieve your Pain!'' magnetic bracelet or insole.
    Invented in 1985, modern-day magnetic stimulators charge up to a whopping 3,000 volts and produce peak currents of up to 8,000 amps - powers similar to those of a small nuclear reactor.
    That pulse of current flowing from a capacitor into a hand-held coil creates a magnetic field outside the patient's head. The field painlessly induces a current inside the brain, affecting the electrical activity that is the basis for all it does.
    The promise of TMS as a scientific tool seems similarly powerful. And it has generated a range of intriguing practical effects as well, from improving attention to combating depression, that have been published in reputable, peer-reviewed journals.
    ''From the point of view of cognitive neuroscience - understanding how brain activity relates to behavior - it is, in a way, a dream come true for all of us, because it provides a way to create our own patients, as it were,'' said Pascual-Leone, director of the Laboratory for Magnetic Brain Stimulation at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. ''You can create a very transient disruption of the brain. For a few milliseconds, it is as if those cells were not there. So you are able to ask questions about what role a particular brain part plays in a particular behavior.''
    More and more, TMS also appears to hold the potential for therapy to help with brain problems, including depression, Parkinson's Disease and stroke.
    Evidence, including a seminal paper by Pascual-Leone in 1996, has been mounting that repeated sessions of TMS can alleviate recalcitrant cases of depression, and without the nasty side effects of electroshock treatment.
    Hundreds of studies in the past decade have explored myriad potential TMS targets, including schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder. Most recently, a small study published last month found that applying TMS to parts of the brain involved in processing sound could temporarily reduce the endless buzzing-in-the-ears of tinnitus.
    Pascual-Leone and his colleagues plan to try TMS next month on patients whose ability to speak has been damaged by stroke. Preliminary work indicates that their brains, in trying to repair the damage, may have rewired themselves wrong. So blocking certain areas can actually help the patients speak better, he said.
    He has a full shopping list of other projects held up only by lack of money, including plans to expand on work using TMS to relieve chronic pain and to speed up the learning of physical skills. For all his own obvious excitement, Pascual-Leone's talk is constantly punctuated by caveats that TMS is too unproven for other people to get too excited.
    For the most part in those hundreds of studies, he said, he hears ''a premature ringing of the bells. It may help some people but it risks creating a lot of premature expectations that may not hold true in the end.''
    Still, he's not against a few flights of fancy. What if, he asked, TMS could block the brain activity associated with lying, and witnesses would get zapped before taking the stand? ''It opens up all kinds of cans of worms,'' he said.
    Or take the question of mental enhancement. Pascual-Leone was the first to demonstrate that TMS can not only block brain functioning, it can temporarily enhance it as well. In some studies, TMS has appeared to improve subjects' working memories, speed up their problem-solving, and sharpen their attention.
    Might it be possible, he wondered, to pre-activate a person's brain with TMS and enable them to learn faster? What if some day a student could rev up one part of his brain before French class and another before a piano lesson?
    TMS is far too crude and little-tried at this point to allow for such specific interventions. Still, the military is already aiming for TMS enhancement. Researchers at the Brain Stimulation Laboratory at the Medical University of South Carolina announced last year that they had received a $2 million government grant to develop a TMS device - probably a helmet - to sharpen the minds of sleep-deprived soldiers while they wore it.
    Ultimately, Pascual-Leone said, the field will likely move in the direction of developing such longer-term TMS devices. Already, repeated stimulations can apparently produce effects lasting for weeks afterward, by revving up underactive areas or quieting down overactive spots for long enough that the changes linger even after the stimulation stops.
    But these are still very early days. TMS is conveniently noninvasive - years ago, it took electrodes inserted in an open brain to produce similar results - and it appears to have virtually no side effects. But there is always risk with something so new, Pascual-Leone cautioned, in particular, risk that it could cause some unexpected long-term harm.
    Dr. John A. Cadwell of Cadwell Laboratories in Kennewick, Wash., which began producing a commercially viable TMS machine back in 1990, agreed: ''I think it's a good tool, but it's not one that should be sold at Wal-Mart just yet.''
    Inventors had been tinkering with the application of powerful magnets to the human brain since the end of the 19th century. But it was only in 1985 that Dr. Anthony T. Barker, a professor of medical physics at the University of Sheffield in England, finally created the first effective transcranial stimulator.
    Barker is a skeptic about any other medical claims for garden-variety magnets, he said, but he no longer doubts that TMS can affect mood, at the very least.
    ''I think it's going to be useful,'' he said. ''Whether it will be very, very useful, only time will tell.''
    Many of the initial volunteers for TMS experiments were the researchers themselves, on the principle that they should not ask subjects to do what they would not do themselves.
    ''I've probably had more zaps to my brain than anybody else on the planet,'' Barker said blithely.
    The beginning was not so blithe: There were real questions about whether TMS might induce some of the complications - memory loss, seizures - that electroshock can bring.
    Cadwell recalled that in the early days of testing a TMS machine, ''No one knew if we were going to be the next one to have a seizure, or if 12 years of medical residency would suddenly get blown away.''
    TMS did induce several seizures in participants in the early years, but researchers have since worked out technical safety rules that prevent them and established that no significant memory loss occurs.
    Pascual-Leone, 41, who did the first TMS safety study and wrote the first paper on TMS ethics, has zapped himself countless times, too. The zapping looks strange but not scary: When a post-doctoral student, Yukiyasu Kamitani, sat for a dress rehearsal of a TMS experiment the other day, it sounded like nothing more than a bag of microwave popcorn on its final pops, and felt, Kamitani said, like someone was lightly flicking his scalp.
    Still, though TMS is already starting to be offered in Canada (see www.mindcarecentres.com), it appears unlikely that it will arrive soon in American clinics.
    Cadwell, the American manufacturer, said that TMS devices are approved for clinical use in most other countries, but not by the FDA. So, he said, pronouncing the ultimate clinical death knell, ''It's not a billable procedure.''

  • WE KNOW IRAQ HAS BIO-CHEMICAL-WEAPONS - WE HAVE THE RECEIPTS
    BURYING UNCOMFORTABLE NEWS ON IRAQ
    by Michael Griffin
    Media Studies
    Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota
    POSTED OCTOBER 31, 2002 --
    In early September, British newspapers, including the Sunday Herald of Glasgow, printed information from reports by the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, which oversees American exports policy, and from U.S. Department of Defense documents that confirmed U.S. and British sales of chemical and biological weapons agents to Iraq during the successive administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, Sr. These U.S. Government records reveal that the U.S. sold materials, including anthrax, VX nerve gas, West Nile fever germs, and botulism (among other biological agents) right up until March of 1992, after the end of the Gulf War.
    According to the Sunday Herald, the Senate committee report states, "The United States provided the government of Iraq with 'dual use' licensed materials which assisted in the development of Iraqi chemical, biological and missile-system programs." And this assistance, according to the report, included "chemical warfare-agent precursors, chemical warfare-agent production facility plans and technical drawings, chemical warfare filling equipment, biological warfare-related materials, missile fabrication equipment and missile system guidance equipment."
    Many of those who have seen these Senate committee reports believe that the information contained in them makes up much of the "compelling evidence" that the current Bush administration claims to have that Iraq is in possession of dangerous weapons of mass destruction. It also may explain why the Bush and Blair administrations claim to have such evidence but refuse to reveal the evidence to the American or British publics. Neither leader wants this embarrassing information to become widely known. Neither wants to admit that it was the Western powers, and especially the U.S., that armed Saddam with these weapons of mass destruction; and that is why he has them.
    According to the Sunday Herald, Donald Riegle, Chairman of the Senate committee that made the report, said, "UN inspectors had identified many United States manufactured items that had been exported from the United States to Iraq under licenses issued by the Department of Commerce, and [established] that these items were used to further Iraq's chemical and nuclear weapons development and its missile delivery system development programs." He added, "the executive branch of our government approved 771 different export licenses for sale of dual -use technology to Iraq. I think that is a devastating record."
    Four weeks after this information (and more) was revealed in the British press, the Sunday, October 6, Minneapolis' Star Tribune carried five stories in the "A" news section on Iraq and U.S. moves toward war. On page A3 (with a prompt from the front page) two articles appear: "Bush steps up condemnation of Saddam," and "Saddam palaces cloaked in conflicting reports." These articles suggest that Saddam is hiding evidence of weapons in his eight palace compounds and that President Bush has stated U.S. resolve to overthrow "the cold-blooded killer" Saddam and then rebuild Iraq and its government.
    Page A5 reports on the Bush-Gephardt deal to gain Democratic congressional support for U.S. military action. And a report by Star Tribune Washington Bureau Chief David Westphal on page A8 summarizes the arguments being made by such analysts as Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, that invading and overthrowing the Iraqi government could be the first step in making the entire Middle East region more reliable and positively inclined toward the West.
    Finally, on page A28, stripped along the edge of a page mostly filled with advertisements (I missed it entirely my first time through the paper), was an Associated Press report entitled, "Iraq got early U.S. help on bioweapons program." This article reports information from the same 1994 Senate Banking Committee report, as well as a follow-up letter from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, verifying the U.S. transfer to Iraq of germs and bioagents such as anthrax, botulism toxin, gas gangrene, and other pathogens, including West Nile virus. The article notes that Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.VA. has been questioning the administration on these issues. "The disclosures put the United States in the uncomfortable position of possibly having provided the key ingredients of the weapons America is considering waging war to destroy, said Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.VA. Byrd entered the documents into the Congressional Record last month."
    The article further reports that Byrd questioned Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld about the germ transfers and at a recent committee hearing and asked, "Are we, in fact, now facing the possibility of reaping what we have sown?" Rumsfeld was evasive in his answer.
    How are we to explain the fact that U.S. involvement in transferring to Iraq the same weapons we accuse them of criminally possessing is not a story worthy of high visibility in the Star Tribune and other news media outlets? It would seem that such a story is not only worthy of front page treatment, if not front page headlines, but that U.S. involvement in helping to provide Iraq's weapons of mass destruction should be a central issue in the debate over going to war. It is understandable that the President would not want this to be part of the debate. But how do we explain the fact that mainstream news media do not seem to want it to be part of the debate, and are, in fact, effectively burying the story?
    Previous controversies pertaining to story placement (often the subject of Reader Representative Lou Gelfand's columns) would seem to pale by comparison. It is the responsibility of journalists to raise questions for public debate, especially when it concerns issues of life, death, and destruction. Ignoring this story for weeks, and then inconspicuously inserting it on page A28 certainly doesn't fulfill this responsibility.
    Michael Griffin teaches Media Studies at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and is the author of several studies on international news flows and representations of war. He also is on the board of Cursor.org.

  • ALENQUE, Mexico, Dec. 22 — Time ends here 10 years from now.
    (NYT)
     December 23, 2002
    Hailing the Solstice and Telling Time, Mayan Style
    ALENQUE, Mexico, Dec. 22 — Time ends here 10 years from now.
    The Long Count, the 5,200-year cycle of creation and destruction calculated by the Maya, the great astronomers and timekeepers who built this city 1,600 years ago, comes to a close on the winter solstice in 2012.
    It is probably not the end of the world. But it might be, says José Argüelles, president of the Foundation for the Law of Time.
    Born in Mexico in 1939, Mr. Argüelles brought the world the Harmonic Convergence, with simultaneous gatherings in 1987 of New Age tribes in places from the pyramids of Giza to Central Park, which aimed to save the world from destruction in 2012. He says it is high time to overthrow the Christian calendar, based on the sun, and to replace it with a 13-month, 28-day calendar, based on the moon and the Maya.
    If we harmonize time, "the effect on the human mind and nature will be of unimaginable consequence," Mr. Argüelles said in an e-mail message from his aerie on the slopes of Mount Hood in Oregon. If we do not, Western civilization is "programmed for apocalypse" at the end of the Long Count — Dec. 22 (or 23), 2012. Circle your calendars.
    This idea that time is out of joint, by most accounts, has thousands of adherents around the world. Mr. Argüelles says it rises from Pakal, who ruled Palenque from A.D. 615 to 683. His tomb, discovered in 1952, is regarded as one of the great finds in all pre-Columbian archaeology. Mr. Argüelles says he is a direct spiritual descendant of Pakal, who inspired him to create something new under the sun, or, rather, the moon.
    Lest it be seen as lunacy, remember that the calendars of Chinese, Jewish, Islamic and other peoples run on the moon. The Christian calendar used today only began in 1582, when Pope Gregory XIII revised the calendar created under Julius Caesar in 46 B.C.
    The problem was Easter, most mystic of Christian holidays, which must fall on the first Sunday after the spring equinox following the full moon. The Julian calendar had drifted off 10 days, so that the equinox was falling far too early. The English and their American colonies finally adopted the Gregorian calendar in the middle of the 18th century.
    The Mayan calendar, on the other hand, is still accurate to within about three seconds — closer to the mark than the Gregorian.
    Christopher Powell, 42, an archaeologist sitting atop Pakal's tomb at sunrise this solstice morning, said the accuracy came from "1,000 years of sky-watching and record-keeping to make the most sophisticated astronomical system of any ancient culture." The architecture of Palenque can be viewed as a chronometer that helped the Maya mark the passage of time.
    But there is a hitch in the New Age idea of making time anew, though it has brought thousands of would-be visionaries to Palenque from all over the world. On this solstice, the temples and tombs of Palenque were towers of Babel, with English, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch, Japanese and many other tongues spoken by travelers clutching Lonely Planet guides.
    The problem with the new calculus is both mathematical and moral. A modern apocalypse makes a good story for people living in millennial times, fearing for the fate of the world. "The more interesting the story, the better it sells," Mr. Powell said.
    There is little doubt that Palenque is, as Mr. Argüelles says, "one of the power places" of the planet. Few who admire Mayan art, architecture and astronomy disagree. "I always feel my consciousness change when I come here," Mr. Powell said.
    Enzo Iale, 57, of Rome, a self-described "researcher in human beings," has been coming here for 28 years. "It's a very powerful place," he said. "I'm here today because of the power of this place. This power could have been made by the Maya. Or it could have been here since the beginning of time. Why was Stonehenge built where it was? Why Rome? Why the Vatican? Why? Why?"
    Outsiders have been telling stories about Palenque and imposing their ideas on the Maya for centuries.
    The first Spanish military officer who explored Palenque, in 1784, thought it was a risen Atlantis, built by Rome or Carthage. A self-appointed count, Jean François Waldeck, lived in Palenque from 1831 to 1833 and wrote a best-selling book about Palenque that was almost entirely false.
    In 1968, a Swiss hotelier, Erich von Däniken, sold millions of copies of a book, "Chariots of the Gods," contending that ancient astronauts built the place, and he continues to sell television audiences on that idea.
    The grand old man of Palenque, Moises Morales, isn't buying any of it. Mr. Morales, 78, is a Mayanist, host of the Palenque Round Table, a gathering of scholars, and grand panjandrum of Panchan, an ethereal forest of cabanas and restaurants favored by world travelers. He once jammed a padlock at Pakal's tomb to keep Mr. von Däniken out.
    The meaning of the end of the Long Count?
    "It's nothing," Mr. Morales said. After all, the Maya say there were four Long Counts before.
    "It means nothing for the Chinese," he said. "Nothing for the Jews. Two thousand-twelve is nothing but the completion of a cycle."
    Nothing in the Mayan inscriptions at Palenque says this cycle is the last, and while Palenque was abandoned 1,100 years ago, the Maya live on, six million strong.
    The last word goes to Mr. Morales, whose friends find something timeless in him.
    "Palenque," he said, "is not a geographical or historical place. It's a beautiful toy to play with. It gives you whatever you want."

  • The ultimate Jewish conspiracy theory
    David Aaronovitch
    Wednesday January 15, 2003
    The Guardian
    God save us from conspiracy theorists, were Senator Joseph Lieberman to be elected US president in 2004. Things are quite bad enough as they stand, without a Jewish head of state in America. Fortunately, it looks as though George Bush will win, whoever his opponent is.
    For the past 40 years, the common explanation for US partiality towards Israel has been the power of the Jewish lobby. It is an explanation that, broadly, has united leftwingers and rightwingers. Why has the United States been so supine in the face of Israeli intransigence, and so uncaring in its attitude towards the plight of the Palestinians? Above all, why has it behaved in this way, when a more balanced approach might have served its long-term interests far better? The Jewish lobby, that's why.
    The lobby explanation has been outlined with great clarity by Mark Weber, who is director of the American Institute for Historical Review. In a long article, Weber brought together the comments and analyses of various Jewish academics, such as Benjamin Ginsberg of Johns Hopkins University, and writers such as Seymour Lipset and Earl Raab. Ginsberg, for example, wrote in his book, The Fatal Embrace: "Since the 1960s, Jews have come to wield considerable influence in American economic, cultural, intellectual and political life ... close to half its billionaires are Jews. The chief executive officers of the three major television networks and the four largest film studios are Jews, as are the owners of the nation's largest newspaper chain and the single most influential newspaper, the New York Times."
    Lipset and Raab gave further figures, noting (according to Weber) that Jews constituted "50% of the top 200 intellectuals ... 20% of professors at the leading universities ... 40% of partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington." Etcetera, schmetcetera. You get the idea.
    Naturally (says another convenient Jewish intellectual, Alfred Lilienthal), this Jewish connection, fostered by Jewish tribalism, has exerted an enormous pull on non-Jews. So, movies plus dosh plus tribalism equals Zionism in Washington, and who says so? Jews do.
    Weber, as one of America's leading Holocaust deniers, is perfectly happy, but I can see that old Ginsberg has terrific problems with the fact that Jews have cropped up in almost all of the major 19th and 20th-century political movements - many of them completely contradictory. They are cited as leading forces in liberalism, neo-conservatism, socialism, bolshevism and market capitalism. The only two movements that Jews don't seem to have led are fascism and Islamic fundamentalism. Still, they were the guys behind Reagan, the guys behind Clinton - either ever mutating, ever powerful (if you're a conspiracist), or ever disagreeing with each other if you're not.
    The other difficulty for non-conspiracists is that there just aren't that many Jews in America. Six million is the latest figure (3.9% of the population in Florida, and 128,000 out of 21 million in Dubya's Texas), and probably declining. The Muslim population is about 3.5 million and growing.
    The electoral-lobby thing doesn't work any more. Enter, lowered from the gods, another story. This is that Israel is currently being sustained in its Sharonite nastiness by a new lobby - the Christian right. This may seem strange in view of the ol'-time anti-semitism of many people, such as preacher/politician Pat Robertson, but the transmission is supposed to work like this.
    1. Lots of these Christian folks are dispensationalists, who believe that we are living in the sixth dispensation, and the seventh (shortly upon us) will be a millennium-long earthly reign, based in Israel. (Warning note: We have to have a rapture first, and their idea of rapture is different from that of most Guardian readers.)
    2. For this to happen, all the Jews have to go to Israel and then convert to Christianity or die.
    3. So they want the Jews to get the whole of Palestine, and quickly.
    4. George Bush is a born-again Christian, as are many of his cronies, so either 5. he believes all this stuff and bases his foreign policy on it, or 6. he bends to the dispensationalists because he needs their votes.
    I have read this account in several newspapers and, last Sunday, heard it delivered, uninterrogated, on Radio 4. And it just occurs to me that there might be other, less obviously ridiculous explanations for American policy on Israel over the years. They could include the legacy of the cold war - when the USSR sided with the Arab nations; a respect for Israeli democracy (flawed though it might be); a penchant for the underdog (now fading); and - above all - an identification with a pioneering people who made a life in a new land, and displaced another people in order to do it.
    I do accept, however, that this lacks the narrative drive of the other versions, and await the moment when we discover that Joe Lieberman is also the Grand Master of the Priory of Sion, who has bought his election with the fabulous Templar treasure, dug up at Rennes-le-Cateau. That's what I call a story.


  • Israel to kill in U.S., allied nations
    UPI Intelligence Correspondent
    From the Washington Politics & Policy Desk
    1/15/2003
    Israel is embarking upon a more aggressive approach to the war on terror that will include staging targeted killings in the United States and other friendly countries, former Israeli intelligence officials told United Press International.
    Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has forbidden the practice until now, these sources said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
    The Israeli statements were confirmed by more than a half dozen former and currently serving U.S. foreign policy and intelligence officials in interviews with United Press International.
    But an official at the Israeli Embassy in Washington told UPI: "That is rubbish. It is completely untrue. Israel and the United States have such a close and co-operative intelligence relationship, especially in the field of counter-terrorism, that the assertion is ludicrous."
    With the appointment of Meir Dagan, the new director of Israel's Mossad secret intelligence service, Sharon is preparing "a huge budget" increase for the spy agency as part of "a tougher stance in fighting global jihad (or holy war)," one Israeli official said.
    Since Sharon became Israeli prime minister, Tel Aviv has mainly limited its practice of targeted killings to the West Bank and Gaza because "no one wanted such operations on their territory," a former Israeli intelligence official said.
    Another former Israeli government official said that under Sharon, "diplomatic constraints have prevented the Mossad from carrying out 'preventive operations' (targeted killings) on the soil of friendly countries until now."
    He said Sharon is "reversing that policy, even if it risks complications to Israel's bilateral relations."
    A former Israeli military intelligence source agreed: "What Sharon wants is a much more extensive and tough approach to global terrorism, and this includes greater operational maneuverability."
    Does this mean assassinations on the soil of allies?
    "It does," he said.
    "Mossad is definitely being beefed up," a U.S. government official said of the Israeli agency's budget increase. He declined to comment on the Tel Aviv's geographic expansion of targeted killings.
    An FBI spokesman also declined to comment, saying: "This is a policy matter. We only enforce federal laws."
    A congressional staff member with deep knowledge of intelligence matters said, "I don't know on what basis we would be able to protest Israel's actions." He referred to the recent killing of Qaed Salim Sinan al Harethi, a top al Qaida leader, in Yemen by a remotely controlled CIA drone.
    "That was done on the soil of a friendly ally," the staffer said.
    But the complications posed by Israel's new policy are real.
    "Israel does not have a good record at doing this sort of thing," said former CIA counter-terrorism official Larry Johnson.
    He cited the 1997 fiasco where two Mossad agents were captured after they tried to assassinate Khaled Mashaal, a Hamas political leader, by injecting him with poison.
    According to Johnson, the attempt, made in Amman, Jordan, caused a political crisis in Israeli-Jordan relations. In addition, because the Israeli agents carried Canadian passports, Canada withdrew its ambassador in protest, he said. Jordan is one of two Arab nations to recognize Israel. The other is Egypt.
    At the time, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said, "I have no intention of stopping the activities of this government against terror," according to a CNN report.
    Former CIA officials say Israel was forced to free jailed Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmad Yassin and 70 other Jordanian and Palestinian prisoner being held in Israeli jails to secure the release of the two would-be Mossad assassins.
    Phil Stoddard, former director of the Middle East Institute, cited a botched plot to kill Ali Hassan Salemeh, the mastermind of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. The 1974 attempt severely embarrassed Mossad when the Israeli hit team mistakenly assassinated a Moroccan waiter in Lillehammer, Norway.
    Salemeh, later a CIA asset, was killed in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1976 by a car bomb placed by an Israeli assassination team, former U.S. intelligence officials said.
    "Israel knew Salemeh was providing us with preventive intelligence on the Palestinians and his being killed pissed off a lot of people," said a former senior CIA official.
    But some Israeli operations have been successful.
    Gerald Bull, an Ontario-born U.S. citizen and designer of the Iraqi supergun -- a massive artillery system capable of launching satellites into orbit, and of delivering nuclear chemical or biological payloads from Baghdad to Israel -- was killed in Belgium in March 1990. The killing is still unsolved, but former CIA officials said a Mossad hit team is the most likely suspect.
    Bull worked on the supergun design -- codenamed Project Babylon -- for 10 years, and helped the Iraqis develop many smaller artillery systems. He was found with five bullets in his head outside his Brussels apartment.
    Israeli hit teams, which consist of units or squadrons of the Kidon, a sub-unit for Mossad's highly secret Metsada department, would stage the operations, former Israeli intelligence sources said. Kidon is a Hebrew word meaning "bayonet," one former Israeli intelligence source said.
    This Israeli government source explained that in the past Israel has not staged targeted killings in friendly countries because "no one wanted such operations on their territory."
    This has become irrelevant, he said.
    Dagan, the new hard-driving director of Mossad, will implement the new changes, former Israeli government officials said.
    Dagan, nicknamed "the gun," was Sharon's adviser on counter-terrorism during the government of Netanyahu in 1996, former Israeli government officials say. A former military man, Dagan has also undertaken extremely sensitive diplomatic missions for several of Israel's prime ministers, former Israeli government sources said.
    Former Israel Defense Forces Lt. Col. Gal Luft, who served under Dagan, described him as an "extremely creative individual -- creative to the point of recklessness."
    A former CIA official who knows Dagan said the new Mossad director knows "his foreign affairs inside and out," and has a "real killer instinct."
    Dagan is also "an intelligence natural" who has "a superb analyst not afraid to act on gut instinct," the former CIA official said.
    Dagan has already removed Mossad officials whom he regards as "being too conservative or too cautious" and is building up "a constituency of senior people of the same mentality," one former long-time Israeli operative said.
    Dagan is also urging that Mossad operatives rely less on secret sources and rely more on open information that is so plentifully provided on the Internet and newspapers.
    "It's a cultural thing," one former Israeli intelligence operative explained. "Mossad in the past has put its emphasis on Humint (human intelligence) and secret operations and has neglected the whole field of open media, which has become extremely important."


  • The autopsy on the body of Joe Strummer has found that he died of a sudden cardiac arrest.
    (nme.com)
    The coroner Michael Rose who conducted the examination in Somerset yesterday (December 24) confirmed what had been suspected from the outset.
    Strummer collapsed at his Somerset home on Sunday Dec 22 after returning from walking his dog. His wife, Lucinda, found him and tried to revive him but could not.
    Born John Graham Mellor in Ankara, Turkey in 1952 the son of a British diplomat, he began his musical career playing with rock standards covers band the 101ers. He put together The Clash in the mid-70s with Mick Jones, bassist Paul Simonon and drummer Topper Headon in west London, helping the band emerge as one of the most important to burst from the 1976 punk explosion. Always political and edgy, public school educated Strummer and Jones swapped song-writing and singing duties within the band.
    Their third album, 'London Calling', a double LP, was widely seen as their finest and still continues to be hailed as one of the all-time great rock releases.
    After the Clash's split in the early 1980s, Strummer continued making music with a variety of projects, including a stint with the Pogues. His most recent band is Joe Strummer and the Mesceleros.
    Strummer also flirted with a brief film career appearing in Jim Jarmusch's 'Mystery Train' and Alex Cox's 'Straight To Hell'.
    Strummer had always turned down many lucrative offers to reunite The Clash.
    However, in recent weeks, rumours had grown that some sort of comeback was in the offing.


  • Sonar reveals centuries of shipwrecks But N.Y. keeping maps secret
    Kirk Johnson, New York Times Friday, December 20, 2002
    Nyack, N.Y. -- Scientists mapping the bottom of the Hudson River with sonar say they have found nearly every single ship that ever foundered in the river over the past 400 years or more. Not just some of them, or most of them, but -- astonishingly -- all of them, except for a few that may have been disturbed by dredging.
    The ghostly images provide a record of collisions and carelessness and storm-tossed fate -- most of it previously unrecorded and utterly unknown -- from the days of sail and steam through the diesel tugs and tankers on the river today. Altogether, more than 200 possible wrecks, spread out over 140 miles from the southern tip of Manhattan to Troy, have been identified.
    But don't ask where the wrecks are. It's a state secret.
    The sonar maps are the unexpected byproduct of a state-financed project to map the river's bottom for habitat and pollution-abatement studies, and because of the thoroughness of the research mandate -- every square foot of river deeper than 6 feet was scanned -- scientists feel confident that they missed almost nothing.
    But the sonar maps do not just locate the wrecks. They pinpoint them with the accuracy that only satellites and global positioning technology can achieve. And that level of precision, say state officials who have stamped the maps "confidential" and barred their publication, is precisely the problem. Centuries of maritime history, they say, would be up for grabs by salvagers and collectors before the state -- which claims ownership over everything on the river's bottom -- could even know what was at risk.
    "We don't want to ring the dinner bell for people who have ulterior motives and don't behave responsibly," said Mark Peckham, a historic preservation coordinator at the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, which led a team this month to begin assessing the first of the sites. State officials allowed a reporter and photographer to see the maps and accompany the research team on the condition that specific depths of the wrecks and other clues about their locations not be published.
    "These are important resources for understanding New York's history, and we really need to do the responsible thing," Peckham said.
    Some of the images are definitely hull-shaped; others are simply vague rectangular or oval lumps, entombed by decades or centuries of mud. Of the handful that have been tested so far for metallic content using a towed magnetometer, some have indicated the likely presence of an engine; others -- perhaps the oldest of the old -- show almost no metal.
    "This is like going into your grandmother's attic, which you thought was full of junk, and finding it's actually a museum," said Dr. Robin Bell, a senior research scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who has led the mapping team.
    Archaeologists say that while many of the wrecks probably have little historic significance -- several overturned barges, for example, have already been identified by their distinctive outline -- the likelihood is high that the river will yield at least a few long-held secrets.
    What appears to be a largely intact 19th century sailing sloop -- something that historians and sailors have hungered after for years and never found -- has been located in Haverstraw Bay, about 35 miles north of Manhattan, for instance, and the suspected remains of a half-dozen Revolutionary War vessels scuttled in 1777 have been tentatively identified farther north.
    The surveys have also turned up more mysterious structures, including a series of submerged walls more than 900 feet long that scientists say are clearly of human construction. They say the walls are probably at least 3,000 years old, because that was the last time the river's water levels were low enough to have allowed construction on dry land.
    "I think there are going to be really significant findings," said Warren Riess, a research associate professor of history and marine sciences at the University of Maine who has been asked by the state to help assess the sites. "A lot will be uninteresting too, but that's OK. That's science."
    Because the Hudson was never much of a pirates' nest or a conduit to gold and silver mining country, historians and maritime experts do not expect any lost chests of doubloons. The ships of the Hudson were the working stiffs of their day, and even after New York became the nation's busiest port in the mid- 1800s, the river's cargo was predominantly still the stuff of workaday capitalism: coal, furs, wood and iron. Many of the boats that sank were never even recorded, except perhaps on some merchant's ledger sheet. But some experts say that that humble portrait of ordinary life is perhaps the real potential value of the data.
    People should not expect haunting photographs, like the ones made famous at sites of deep-ocean wrecks like the Titanic, because for much of the time, in much of the Hudson, the visibility is only about 2 inches due to concentrations of marine life and mud. On an unusually pristine day, a diver might be able to see to the end of his or her arm -- never farther.
    That is also, perhaps, why many of the wrecks have not been found, even ones that sank in water only 30 to 40 feet deep. Fast currents and heavy river traffic also make diving or salvage work at the sites treacherous -- another fact that worries state officials, who say that publishing the locations could attract recreational divers who are not familiar with the river and its dangers.
    Figuring out what is best for science is not so easy either. Bell of the mapping team said state officials first suggested she leave the spaces blank where the wreck sites were found. But blank spots on maps otherwise filled with numbers about depths and sediment would probably be seen as a signal that something had turned up, she said. It was then suggested that numbers be made up to fill the blank spaces.
    "As a scientist, that really gave me the heebie-jeebies," she said. "You don't make up numbers."
    So for now, the publication of the maps is suspended, though state officials say that their goal is to open all the documents to the public eventually.
     

  • The Thermobaric Age
    aptly by Clay Risen
    http://www.flakmag.com/opinion/thermo.html
    Check out any far-right website these days and you're bound to find someone pressing the use of nuclear weapons in Afghanistan. Such opinions may never make it onto Hardball, or even the O'Reilly Factor, but it's a moot point - we've got something just as good. It's the BLU-82, our premier thermobaric weapon. And at a fraction of the cost and a cinch to build, thermobarics may just define the next era of warfare.
    "Thermobaric" denotes any weapon that creates massive amounts of destructive overpressure. Although there are several types, the fuel-air explosive is the U.S. military's thermobaric of choice, of which the BLU-82 is our top of the line. Also known as the "daisy cutter," "Big Blue" or the "commando vault," the BLU-82 is a 15,000 pound bomb that bears a striking resemblance to a 1960s-vintage spacecraft. It is rolled out the back of MC-130s and drifts to earth on a parachute. The parachute is important because the plane needs to put a lot of distance between it and the blast site, which will soon be shaken by a 4-mile-radius shockwave. As the bomb descends it blows a primary charge that releases an aerosol mixture; when it reaches the ground, a secondary explosive goes off, creating a massive fireball and overpressure. Everything - buldings, trees, small hills - is flattened. Anyone not in a hermetically sealed bunker is killed, either by the blast, the flames, the vacuum or flying debris.
    The Air Force dropped 11 daisy cutters in the Gulf Conflict, and British SAS troops who saw one of the explosions from miles away thought it was a tactical nuclear weapon. Indeed, there is no practical difference between nuclear and thermobaric weapons. Both weapons create similar overpressures, about 10,000 pounds per square foot at ground zero. They destroy indiscriminately over a wide area, ruin farmland and pose an enormous threat to civilian populations. And while thermobarics do not create residual radiation, they do leave behind sizeable amounts of toxic chemicals not burned off in the blast, which poison civilians and farmland.
    Nevertheless, the military has been more than candid about it's use of the daisy cutter in the current conflict, tossing its name out as if it were just one more toy in our dazzlingly sophisticated arsenal. In a clear attempt to win the understatement of the week award, deputy chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Peter Pace told The New York Times that "they make a heck of a bang when they go off."
    Clearly, there are some advantages to using thermobarics in Afghanistan.
    As they are essentially explosive clouds of gas, they are very effective against caves and tunnels and other hard-to-reach places, which abound in the Afghan mountains. And when used against Iraqi troop formations, the weapons were more than enough to convince thousands to defect.
    But putting aside the threat to civilian populations, there are severe disadvantages to using thermobarics. The Soviets used them in their own disastrous foray into the region 15 years ago; that, combined with the weapons' unfortunately mushroom-cloud-shaped explosion, risk creating all sorts of negative impressions among the civilian populations we are so eager to convince of our good-guyness. Our weapons, in effect, could backfire, propaganda-wise.
    Even more frightening is the possibility of thermobaric proliferation among terrorists and rogue nations. One of the central checks on the use of nuclear weapons is the fear that every time one goes off the threshold for the next is lowered, that nukes will become normalized and more attractive to would-be proliferators.
    But nuclear development is difficult because of the technical knowledge and resources necessary; such a barrier does not exist with thermobarics. The BLU-82 uses an aqueous mixture of ammonium nitrate, aluminum powder and polystyrene soap as a binder - simple materials that are fairly stable until put through an atomizer and ignited. Thermobaric weapons are already being used in Sri Lanka and a few other Third-World nations; how long before a terrorist sees thermobarics being used and decides they would be a good weapon to cart into the center of Jerusalem?
    Worse yet, unlike with other unconventional weapons - or most weapon types, for that matter - there exists no international restriction on thermobarics. Any country can manufacture them, and their continued use by the United States will only make them more attractive among countries looking to do a lot of damage for a minimal investment. To put it bluntly, without an international agreement against their use, it is only a matter of time before a thermobaric weapon falls into the hands of anti-American terrorists eager to pay us back for our use of those very weapons against Iraqi and Afghan populations.
    In any case, the more we use thermobaric weapons, the harder it will be for us to convince other nations not to use them down the road. Without recognizing it, the U.S. military is introducing the world to a cheap, ridiculously powerful weapon that could make future warfare an even messier, dangerous affair than it is now. Welcome to the Thermobaric Age.

  • Love-Sick Frankfurt Pilot Had Death-Wish
    (arizonacentral)
    Jan. 06, 2003
    BERLIN - The man who circled Frankfurt in a plane, bringing the city to a terrified standstill, had a death-wish over his love for an astronaut killed in the 1986 space shuttle disaster, a transcript showed Monday.
    A German investigator named the man as Franz Stephan Strambach, 31, a psychology student in Darmstadt, Germany, and said he had threatened to crash the plane into the European Central Bank tower in Frankfurt Sunday.
    As fighter jets scrambled, Strambach called the family of astronaut Judith Resnik in Baltimore via ground control, according to a transcript of the communications on the web site of Germany's Bild newspaper.
    He asked her brother Charles the name of their dog and whether he had seen his tribute Web page.
    Strambach maintained a Web page -- a collection of links to other sites -- about Resnik, who died when the U.S. space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after takeoff in January 1986. Sunday he said he wanted to draw attention to her with his action.
    ``I am flying over Frankfurt and will end my life today and be with Judith,'' Strambach told German N-tv during his flight.
    ``I really love Judith ... I am a big fan and hope that we will come together after all these years.''
    "I want to make my big idol Judith Resnik famous," the man, a German, told n-tv television from the plane via air traffic control radio frequencies.
    "She deserves more attention, she was the first Jewish astronaut, perhaps that's why she never got proper attention."
    ATTEMPT TO KEEP MEMORY ALIVE
    Strambach asked ground control to ask Resnik's brother: ``What does he think of my platonic love for her? And what about my attempt to keep her memory alive with my Web page?''
    Reached at his home in Owings Mills, Maryland, Monday, Charles Resnik told Reuters he had never heard of Strambach or his Web page before Sunday.
    ``There may be other fan clubs out there but hopefully this may be unique in the way it is carried out,'' said Resnik, the vice chairman of the Challenger Center for Space Science Education in Virginia.
    Police Monday said Strambach, who they called mentally unbalanced, faced possible charges of criminal extortion, disturbing the peace and making threats. He will go before a judge Monday.
    Sunday's flight forced the closure of Frankfurt airport, continental Europe's busiest, tall buildings were evacuated, roads and bridges closed and military Phantom jets patrolled the sky as the motorized glider circled for almost two hours.
    The alert ended when Strambach -- who received his pilot's license in 1989 but allowed it to expire in December 2000 -- landed at the main airport and was arrested.
    Strambach also provided Internet links to space-related themes. ``He was concerned about preserving nature,'' said Gerhard Eisenbeis, a Mainz University professor who had exchanged e-mail with Strambach on the problem of light pollution obscuring the view of the night skies from Earth. ``I can't imagine that he wanted to destroy anything.''
    ``I knew him as a very nice guy,'' said Andreas Haenel, head of the group Dark Sky and director of a planetarium in Osnabrueck. ``He was very knowledgeable.''

  • Eighty Whales Die In Mass Stranding On NZ Island
    1-8-3
    WELLINGTON (Reuters) - Eighty pilot whales have died after stranding themselves on a beach on a southern New Zealand island, a wildlife official said Wednesday.
    Conservation workers and residents are trying to save survivors of a pod of 159 pilot whales that swam ashore on Stewart Island, about 20 miles south of the South Island, Department of Conservation spokesman Tom O'Connor said.
    "They're pretty distressed...there's no wind and swell to splash on them so they're not in good order," he said.
    An attempt will be made to refloat the whales, which look like dolphins and grow up to 16 feet long and weigh as much as three tons, at the next high tide.
    New Zealand has one of the world's highest rates of whale strandings, which are thought to occur when the animals become disoriented or when a dominant animal leads others ashore.
    But the strandings are not clearly understood by scientists who believe illness or other types of trauma might also play a role.

  • British Publisher Robert Maxwell Was Mossad Spy New Claim On Tycoon's Mystery Death
    By Gordon Thomas And Martin Dillon
    The Mirror - UK
    12-6-2
    Eleven years after former Daily Mirror owner Robert Maxwell plunged from his luxury yacht to a watery grave, his death still arouses intense interest.
    Many different theories have circulated about what really happened on board the Lady Ghislaine that night in May 1991. Some believe the
    67-year-old tycoon simply slipped into the sea, perhaps after a few drinks.
    Others think Maxwell took his own life amid increasing troubles in his business empire - after his death investigators discovered he had been secretly diverting millions of pounds from two of his companies and from employee pension funds in an effort to keep solvent.
    But now, after two and a half years of investigative journalism, we believe we have unearthed the true story of Maxwell's death and can reveal how he was murdered by the Israeli secret service, Mossad.
    Our work, supported by documents, including FBI reports and secret intelligence files from behind the Iron Curtain, shows Maxwell had
    worked as a secret super spy for Mossad for six years.
    The Jewish millionaire and former Labour MP [born Ludvik Hoch
    in Czechoslovakia] died the way he had lived - threatening.
    He had threatened his wife. Threatened his children. Threatened the staff of this newspaper.
    But finally he issued one threat too many - he threatened Mossad.
    He told them that unless they gave him £400million to save his crumbling empire, he would expose all he had done for them.
    In that time, he had free access to Margaret Thatcher's Downing Street, to Ronald Reagan's White House, to the Kremlin and to the corridors of power throughout Europe.
    On top of that he had built himself a position of power within the crime families of eastern Europe, teaching them how to funnel their vast wealth from drugs, arms smuggling and prostitution to banks in safe havens around the globe.
    Maxwell passed on all the secrets he learned to Mossad in Tel Aviv. In turn, they tolerated his excesses, vanities and insatiable appetite for a luxurious lifestyle and women.
    He told his controllers who they should target and how they should do it. He appointed himself as Israel's unofficial ambassador to the Soviet Bloc. Mossad saw the advantage in that.
    Having learned many of the key secrets of the Soviet empire, Maxwell was given his greatest chance to be a super spy.
    Mossad had stolen from America the most important piece of software in the US arsenal. Maxwell was given the job of marketing the stolen software, called Promis.
    Mossad had reconstructed the software and inserted into it a device which enabled them to track the use any purchaser made of the it. Sitting in Israel, Mossad would know exactly what was going on inside all the intelligence services that bought it. In all, Maxwell sold it to 42 countries, including China and Soviet Bloc nations. But his greatest triumph was selling it to Los Alamos, the very heart of the US nuclear defence system.
    The more successful Maxwell became the more risks he took and the more dangerous he was to Mossad. At the same time, the very public side of Maxwell, who then owned 400 companies, began to unwind.
    He spent lavishly and lost money on deals. The more he lost, the more he tried to claw money from the banks. Then he saw a way out of his problems.
    He was approached by Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the KGB. Spymaster and tycoon met in the utmost secrecy in the Kremlin.
    Kryuchkov had an extraordinary proposal. He wanted Maxwell to help orchestrate the overthrow of Mikhail Gorbachev, the reformist Soviet leader. That would bring to an end a fledgling democracy and a return to the Cold War days.
    In return, Maxwell's massive debts would be wiped out by a grateful Kryuchkov, who planned to replace Gorbachev. The KGB chief wanted Maxwell to use the Lady Ghislaine, named after Maxwell's daughter, as a meeting place between the Russian plotters, Mossad chiefs and Israel's top politicians.
    The plan was for the Israelis to go to Washington and say that democracy could not work in Russia and that it was better to allow the country to return to a modified form of communism, which America could help to control. In return, Kryuchkov would guarantee to free hundreds of thousands of Jews and dissidents in the Soviet republics.
    Kryuchkov told Maxwell that he would be seen as a saviour of all those Jews. It was a proposal he could not refuse. But when he put it to his Mossad controllers they were horrified. They said Israel would have no part in such a madcap plan.
    For the first time, Maxwell had failed to get his own way. He started to threaten and bluster. He then demanded that, for past services, he should receive immediately a quick fix of £400million to bale him out of his financial difficulties.
    Instead of providing the money, a small group of Mossad officers set about planning his murder. They feared that he was going to publicly expose all Mossad had done in the time he worked for them. They knew that he was gradually becoming mentally unstable and paranoid. He was taking a cocktail of drugs - Halcion and Zanax - which had serious side effects.
    The group of Mossad plotters sensed, like Solomon, he could bring their temple tumbling down and cause incalculable harm to Israel. The plan to kill him was prepared in the utmost secrecy. A four-man squad was briefed.
    Then Maxwell was contacted. He was told to fly to Gibraltar, go aboard the Lady Ghislaine and sail to the Canary Islands. There at sea he would receive his £400million quick fix in the form of a banker's draft. Maxwell did as he was told.
    On the night of November 4, 1991, the Lady Ghislaine, one of the world's biggest yachts, was at sea. Unknown to its crew, the death squad had cast an electronic net over the yacht to block all radio transmissions. The security cameras on board had been switched off.
    After midnight there were only two men on the bridge. One hundred and twenty feet behind them, Maxwell appeared on deck.
    He had been instructed to do so in a previous message from Mossad.
    A small boat came alongside. On board were four black-suited men. Three scrambled on to the yacht. In a second it was all over.
    Two held Maxwell. The third plunged a syringe into his neck behind his ear. A measured dose of nerve agent was injected. Robert Maxwell was immobilised. He was lowered off the deck into the water.
    As Victor Ostrovsky, a former Mossad agent told us: "On that cold night Mossad's problems with Robert Maxwell were over."
    The incontrovertible facts about his murder are contained in a previously-unseen autopsy report by Britain's then-leading forensic pathologist Dr Iain West and Israel State Pathologist Dr Yehuda Hiss. Of all the documents in our possession, these reports confirm the truth about Maxwell's death.
    Gordon Thomas & Martin Dillon are authors of The Assassination of Robert Maxwell: Israel's Super Spy, published by Robson Books.
    http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=12419168&method=full&siteid=50143

  • Deadly spiders found in grapes
    AFP
    (Mon, 02 Dec 2002)

    A drive by British supermarket giant Tesco to reduce the amount of pesticides used on fruit could increase the chances of customers being confronted by deadly black widow spiders, newspapers reported on Wednesday.
    Three British women were shocked when the lethal arachnid was found in their grapes in separate incidents.
    Tesco spokesman Jonathan Church admitted it was possible that moves to introduce natural predators, including harmless spiders, on crops to replace pesticides could have allowed the spiders access to the fruit.
    But he denied the black widow, whose venom is 15 times more potent than a rattlesnake, was deliberately used by farmers in the US who supply the store.
    "The idea is to reduce pesticide use by introducing natural predators instead, but we do not use black widow spiders," Church said.
    He added that suppliers had now been told to step up checks on products before being exported.
    In one case a woman is reported to have discovered a black widow, which has distinctive red markings on its back, climbing up the side of a colander as she was rinsing grapes in her sink, the Daily Telegraph reported.
    Last week a dead black widow was said to have been found in another bunch of Tesco grapes, while last month the same type of spider was allegedly found alive among grapes in a fridge.

  • PHOTO:A huge dust cloud rolls over the Australian town of Griffith

    Sat Nov 30, 1:25 AM ET
    A huge dust cloud rolls over the Australian town of Griffith, 400 kilometers (248 miles) southwest of Sydney, Friday, Nov. 29, 2002, after high winds whipped up top soil dried from a prolonged drought. Australia is in the grips of a devestating drought, one of the worst on record, slashing agricultural production across the country. (AP Photo/Jamie Alexander)

  • Scheme to create human-rodent hybrid
    (AP)
    Dec 2 2002
    A panel of US and Canadian scientists raised the possibility of creating a human-mouse hybrid during talks this month on the future of stem cell research, The New York Times said on Thursday.
    The goal would be to test embryonic stem cells, which are touted as the potential material for treatment to banish a host of inherited human diseases.
    But several experts at the meeting warned such an experiment was unethical, premature and could dangerously backfire, it said.
    The meeting at New York Academy of Sciences on November 13 gathered nine researchers with the purpose of setting down quality guidelines for lines of stem cells that are being developed around the world.
    In one test that was discussed, human stem cells would be injected into an early mouse embryo when it was still a small ball of cells called the blastocyst, the report said.
    Scientists would then see whether the human stem cells showed up in all the mouse's tissues. That ability, known as pluripotentiality, is the hallmark of a true embryonic stem cell.
    If the human cells survived and developed, that could provide a useful lab tool. A mouse that had human cells in it could be exposed to human diseases, to understand exactly how these ailments develop and can be braked or reversed.
    Although the creatures would probably be mice with a few human cells and which would behave like rodents, the outcome of the experiment could be unpredictable, some said.
    One participant, Janet Rossant of Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, told the newspaper she did not consider the test necessary.
    If the injected human cells radically changed the mouse, it would be "something that most people would find unacceptable," she warned.
    Irving Weissman, an expert on stem cells at Stanford University, gave as an extreme example the possibility that a mouse making human sperm might accidentally be allowed to mate with a mouse that had created its eggs from human cells.
    But he also told the Time undesirable outcomes, like a mouse with a brain made of human cells or a mouse that generated human sperm, could be avoided by deleting certain genes from the human cells before injecting them into the animal.
    Stem cell research has been a controversial issue in the United States because the source for them comes from human embryos at the earliest stages of development.
    Federally financed researchers have only been allowed to work with so-called "presidential cell lines" that existed before an August 9, 2001 cutoff date set down by President George W. Bush.

  • Two unexplained “spikes” in the seismic record from Sept. 11 indicate huge bursts of energy shook the ground beneath the World Trade Center’s twin towers immediately prior to the collapse.
    (American Free Press)
    American Free Press has learned of pools of “molten steel” found at the base of the collapsed twin towers weeks after the collapse. Although the energy source for these incredibly hot areas has yet to be explained, New York seismometers recorded huge bursts of energy, which caused unexplained seismic “spikes” at the beginning of each collapse.
    These spikes suggest that massive underground explosions may have literally knocked the towers off their foundations, causing them to collapse.
    In the basements of the collapsed towers, where the 47 central support columns connected with the bedrock, hot spots of “literally molten steel” were discovered more than a month after the collapse. Such persistent and intense residual heat, 70 feet below the surface, in an oxygen starved environment, could explain how these crucial structural supports failed.
    Peter Tully, president of Tully Construction of Flushing, N.Y., told AFP that he saw pools of “literally molten steel” at the World Trade Center.
    Tully was contracted after the Sept. 11 tragedy to re move the debris from the site.
    Tully called Mark Loizeaux, president of Controlled Demolition, Inc. (CDI) of Phoenix, Md., for consultation about removing the debris. CDI calls itself “the innovator and global leader in the controlled demolition and implosion of structures.”
    Loizeaux, who cleaned up the bombed Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, arrived at the WTC site two days later and wrote the clean-up plan for the entire operation.
    AFP asked Loizeaux about the report of molten steel on the site.
    “Yes,” he said, “hot spots of molten steel in the basements.”
    These incredibly hot areas were found “at the bottoms of the elevator shafts of the main towers, down seven [basement] levels,” Loizeaux said.
    The molten steel was found “three, four, and five weeks later, when the rubble was being removed,” Loizeaux said. He said molten steel was also found at 7 WTC, which collapsed mysteriously in the late afternoon.
    Construction steel has an extremely high melting point of about 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit.
    Asked what could have caused such extreme heat, Tully said, “Think of the jet fuel.”
    Loizeaux told AFP that the steel-melting fires were fueled by “paper, carpet and other combustibles packed down the elevator shafts by the tower floors as they ‘pancaked’ into the basement.”
    However, some independent investigators dispute this claim, saying kerosene-based jet fuel, paper, or the other combustibles normally found in the towers, cannot generate the heat required to melt steel, especially in an oxygen-poor environment like a deep basement.
    Eric Hufschmid, author of a book about the WTC collapse, Painful Questions,* told AFP that due to the lack of oxygen, paper and other combustibles packed down at the bottom of elevator shafts would probably be “a smoky smoldering pile.”
    Experts disagree that jet-fuel or paper could generate such heat.
    This is impossible, they say, because the maximum temperature that can be reached by hydrocarbons like jet-fuel burning in air is 1,520 degrees F. Because the WTC fires were fuel rich, as evidenced by the thick black smoke, it is argued that they did not reach this upper limit.
    The hottest spots at the surface of the rubble, where abundant oxygen was available, were much cooler than the molten steel found in the basements.
    Five days after the collapse, on Sept. 16, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) used an Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) to locate and measure the site’s hot spots.
    Dozens of hot spots were mapped, the hottest being in the east corner of the South Tower where a temperature of 1,377 degrees F was recorded.
    This is, however, less than half as hot at the molten steel in the basement.
    The foundations of the twin towers were 70 feet deep. At that level, 47 huge box columns, connected to the bedrock, supported the entire gravity load of the structures. The steel walls of these lower box columns were four inches thick.
    Videos of the North Tower collapse show its communication mast falling first, indicating that the central support columns must have failed at the very beginning of the collapse. Loizeaux told AFP, “Everything went simultaneously.”
    “At 10:29 the entire top section of the North Tower had been severed from the base and began falling down,” Hufschmid writes. “If the first event was the falling of a floor, how did that progress to the severing of hundreds of columns?”
    Asked if the vertical support columns gave way before the connections between the floors and the columns, Ron Hamburger, a structural engineer with the FEMA assessment team said, “That’s the $64,000 question.”
    Loizeaux said, “If I were to bring the towers down, I would put explosives in the basement to get the weight of the building to help collapse the structure.”
    SEISMIC ‘SPIKES’
    Seismographs at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., 21 miles north of the WTC, recorded strange seismic activity on Sept. 11 that has still not been explained.
    While the aircraft crashes caused minimal earth shaking, significant earthquakes with unusual spikes occurred at the beginning of each collapse.
    The Palisades seismic data recorded a 2.1 magnitude earthquake during the 10-second collapse of the South Tower at 9:59:04 and a 2.3 quake during the 8-second collapse of the North Tower at 10:28:31.
    However, the Palisades seismic record shows that—as the collapses began—a huge seismic “spike” marked the moment the greatest energy went into the ground. The strongest jolts were all registered at the beginning of the collapses, well before the falling debris struck the Earth.
    These unexplained “spikes” in the seismic data lend credence to the theory that massive explosions at the base of the towers caused the collapses.
    A “sharp spike of short duration” is how seismologist Thorne Lay of University of California at Santa Cruz told AFP an underground nuclear explosion appears on a seismograph.
    The two unexplained spikes are more than 20 times the amplitude of the other seismic waves associated with the collapses and occurred in the East-West seismic recording as the buildings began to fall.
    Experts cannot explain why the seismic waves peaked before the towers actually hit the ground.
    Asked about these spikes, seismologist Arthur Lerner-Lam, director of Columbia University’s Center for Hazards and Risk Research told AFP, “This is an element of current research and discussion. It is still being investigated.”
    Lerner-Lam told AFP that a 10-fold increase in wave amplitude indicates a 100-fold increase in energy released. These “short-period surface waves,” reflect “the interaction between the ground and the building foundation,” according to a report from Columbia Earth Institute.
    “The seismic effects of the collapses are comparable to the explosions at a gasoline tank farm near Newark on Jan. 7, 1983,” the Palisades Seismology Group reported on Sept. 14, 2001.
    One of the seismologists, Won-Young Kim, told AFP that the Palisades seismographs register daily underground explosions from a quarry 20 miles away.
    These blasts are caused by 80,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate and cause local earthquakes between Magnitude 1 and 2. Kim said the 1993 truck-bomb at the WTC did not register on the seismographs because it was “not coupled” to the ground.
    “Only a small fraction of the energy from the collapsing towers was converted into ground motion,” Lerner-Lam said. “The ground shaking that resulted from the collapse of the towers was extremely small.”
    Last November, Lerner-Lam said: “During the collapse, most of the energy of the falling debris was absorbed by the towers and the neighboring structures, converting them into rubble and dust or causing other damage—but not causing significant ground shaking.”
    Evidently, the energy source that shook the ground beneath the towers was many times more powerful than the total potential energy released by the falling mass of the towers. The question is: What was that energy source?
    While steel is often tested for evidence of explosions, despite numerous eyewitness reports of explosions in the towers, the engineers involved in the FEMA-sponsored building assessment did no such tests.
    Dr. W. Gene Corley, who investigated for the government the cause of the fire at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco and the Oklahoma City bombing, headed the FEMA-sponsored engineering assessment of the WTC collapse.
    Corley told AFP that while some tests had been done on the 80 pieces of steel saved from the site, he said he did not know about tests that show if an explosion had affected the steel.
    “I am not a metallurgist,” Corley said.
    Much of the structural steel from the WTC was sold to Alan D. Ratner of Metal Management of Newark, N.J., and the New York-based company Hugo Neu Schnitzer East.
    Ratner, who heads the New Jersey branch of the Chi ca go-based company, sold the WTC steel to overseas companies, reportedly selling more than 50,000 tons of steel to a Shanghai steel company known as Baosteel for $120 per ton. Ratner paid about $70 per ton for the steel.
    Other shipments of steel from the WTC went to India and other Asian ports.
    Ratner came to Metal Management after spending years with a metal trading firm known as SimsMetal based out of Sydney, Australia.
     * Painful Questions (Item# 1051, $20, 160 pages, softcover) Is available from First Amendment Books, 645 Pennsylvania Avenue SE, Suite 100, Washington D.C. 20003. Call 1-888-699-6397 to order by Visa or MasterCard.

  • When Parents Say No to Child Vaccinations
    By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
    November 30, 2002
    (NYT)
    VASHON ISLAND, Wash. — Kate Packard, the school nurse here, has a nightmare she sums up in five words: "measles coming across the water."
    If measles did make the 20-minute ferry ride across Puget Sound from Seattle — hardly unthinkable, since a case occurred last year near a ferry terminal in West Seattle — public health officers say the whole Vashon Island school district could be shut down until the island's last case disappeared or an emergency vaccination drive took effect.
    Eighteen percent of Vashon Island's 1,600 primary school students have legally opted out of vaccination against childhood diseases, including polio, measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus, hepatitis B and chicken pox. The island is a counterculture haven where therapies like homeopathy and acupuncture are popular, and where some cite health problems among neighbors' children that they attribute to vaccinations.
    Most families opting out of vaccination here have obtained "philosophical exemptions" from normal vaccination requirements — exemptions that in Washington and several other states, including California and Colorado, can be claimed simply by signing a school form.
    Across the country, about 1 percent of all children are exempt from vaccination, said Dr. Walter A. Orenstein, director of the National Immunization Program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency's surveys suggest that more than 90 percent of all American children have had most shots, except for the new chicken-pox vaccine.
    But from Vashon Island to Boulder, Colo., to towns in Missouri and Massachusetts, there are "hot spots" where many children go unprotected. In a 1999 survey, 11 states reported increases in exemptions.
    Clusters of unvaccinated children are not only in potential danger themselves, health officials say, but are also a threat to the "herd immunity" that walls out epidemics, sheltering fetuses, infants too young to be immunized, old people with weakened immune systems and even vaccinated classmates who remain at risk because no vaccine is 100 percent effective.
    When only a few parents use "herd immunity" to let their children escape the small risks of vaccination, the system still works.
    But health officials become concerned in states like California, where it is easier for a parent to sign the waiver form than to have a child vaccinated. "People take the path of least resistance," said Daniel A. Salmon, a vaccination expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. "What I do to my child can put other children at risk." In 1989-90, measles broke out among unimmunized immigrant children in Southern California, causing 43,000 cases and 101 deaths.
    Vaccine resisters cite an array of reasons. "Sometimes it's distrust in government, feeling it's in bed with the vaccine industry and `everyone's making money off our kids,' " Mr. Salmon said. Sometimes the objections are religious, as among Christian Scientists and some Amish congregations. Sometimes a community is scared when a child is truly harmed by side effects; the live polio vaccine, for example, is thought to cause about eight deaths a year.
    Some parents are upset at the sheer number of injections a child must get — usually about 20 by age 2. Others are convinced — despite evidence to the contrary — that vaccines are highly likely to cause severe health problems, like seizures and autism.
    Here on Vashon Island, a community of 10,000, word spread quickly when the 10-month-old baby of Gail O'Grady, a midwife who also works at Minglement Natural Foods, died unexpectedly in his crib in 1984 two weeks after his first immunization; when Pam Beck's daughter Rachel suffered four years of seizures that began minutes after her first whooping-cough shot; when Nancy Soriano's son, Alex, developed autism after tetanus and polio vaccinations.
    Some doctors they consulted disagreed, but all three mothers were sure vaccines were to blame.
    Alex, Ms. Soriano said, changed from "a bright-eyed, happy, beautiful kid" to a severely autistic 4-year-old who "lived curled up in a ball, screaming and screaming and screaming." She says she has nearly cured him by removing milk and glutens from his diet.
    Public health specialists suggest that the resistance to vaccines is a consequence of the success of vaccinations: People, they say, no longer fear diseases they have never seen.
    "I remember how the fear of polio changed our lives — not going to the swimming pool in summer, not going to the movies, not getting involved with crowds," said Dr. Edward P. Rothstein, 60, a Pennsylvania pediatrician who helps the American Academy of Pediatrics make immunization recommendations. "I remember pictures of wards full of iron lungs, hundreds in a room, with kids who couldn't breathe in them. It affected daily life more than AIDS does today."
    Now, with the rare side effects of the live vaccine, "there's a risk of about eight kids a year dying, so people don't want to be vaccinated," he said, adding, "When polio was around, people gladly took that risk."
    Rubella, Dr. Rothstein went on, "is, for the most part, a nothing disease" — the reason to keep vaccinating against it is to protect fetuses. "In the 1960's," he said, "50,000 to 60,000 babies were born with small heads, or deaf, or blind or with cataracts" because their pregnant mothers had been exposed to rubella.
    All 50 states allow medical exemptions for children who are immuno-compromised or allergic to vaccines; 47 states — all but Arkansas, Mississippi and West Virginia — allow religious exemptions; and 17 allow personal or philosophical ones. But how many children receive the exemptions depends partly on how much red tape is involved, a study in the American Journal of Public Health found. In states where parents must go to a state office for exemption forms, get their signatures notarized or produce letters from a religious authority, exemption rates tend to be lower.
    The only states with exemption rates greater than 2 percent, the disease center said, are Michigan, Washington and Wisconsin.
    Still, health officials say that in recent years public sentiment has often run against vaccination. The news media publicize stories of autism, seizures and crib death that followed vaccination. More than a dozen Internet sites specialize in describing the dangers of vaccines.
    Vashon Island is both a commuters' haven served by high-speed ferries to Seattle and a home to the counterculture — a place where the telephone company's garage features a mural of a Frisbee-catching dog. Millionaires have shore homes while the self-named Rainbow People live in tents in the woods.
    In interviews, parents who have signed forms to exempt their children from vaccination appeared to be educated, attuned to their children's health and full of opinions about vaccines, though some cited "facts" that the disease center disputes. Most parents mixed unconventional therapies like homeopathy, acupuncture and chiropractic, and conventional medicines like antibiotics and painkillers, Most said they were suspicious of the vaccine industry.
    "I consider well-baby care to be a capitalist plot," Maryam Steffen, a mother of four said only half-kidding.
    If anyone would seem to be a living argument for tetanus vaccination, it is Camille Borst, 25. When she was 12, she stepped on a nail. Her mother, who opposes vaccination, did not take her to a hospital until her foot was so inflamed she could not stand on it. But Ms. Borst says proudly that she has not immunized her own children, Deven, 9, or Casper, 4.
    Her mother, Adrienne Forest, 47, who is home-schooling her grandchildren in a neat, shingled mobile home in a clearing of fir and alder trees, said she was sorry she let the hospital give Camille other vaccines. "It was a moment of weakness," she said. The nurses who angrily told her that Camille could have died "totally freaked me out," she said.
    From 1995 to 1999, said Ms. Packard, the school nurse, an epidemic here of whooping cough, which can be fatal in infants, hospitalized some infants and left some children with chronic asthma. Ms. Forest's grandson Deven had whooping cough two years ago and, she conceded, probably passed the disease to 10 other children, including an infant.
    "Yeah, that bothered me," Ms. Forest said. "But I called everybody and we studied up on what you can do to build up the immune system."
    The baby "did just fine," she said. "On Vashon Island, you have middle-class people who eat healthy and keep warm. If everyone was poor-poor, not breast-fed, not eating right — that might be a reason to vaccinate." But she and her daughter remain steadfastly opposed.
    Meg White, 45, though, now somewhat regrets not vaccinating. Three years ago, her whole family, including her infant son Julian, had whooping cough "really, really bad" for more than three months.
    "My son would turn all shades of purple," she said. "He stopped breathing several times and we took him to the hospital. My daughter was terrified of going to sleep because then it got worse. She would vomit all over the place. My husband cracked ribs from coughing."
    Now, Ms. White said, she would advise other mothers to vaccinate against whooping cough, polio and tetanus, but only with the newest vaccines. She still has not vaccinated Julian, now 3, against measles, mumps, rubella or chicken pox.
    Julian is in nursery school at Puddlestompers, whose director, Tressa Aspiri, also changed her mind about not vaccinating after her older children got whooping cough.
    She makes no recommendations to parents when they fill out the school's vaccination form, she said, though she feels that vaccines are safer than they were when her children were born in the mid-1980's.
    "I still feel strongly that it's the parents' choice," Ms. Aspiri said.

  • Vaccine Renaissance Outpaces Sickly Drug Industry
    LONDON (Reuters) - Vaccines, until recently a sleepy backwater in the global healthcare industry, are now outpacing drugs in terms of sales growth, the world's two largest vaccine makers said on Thursday.
    GlaxoSmithKline Plc and Aventis Pasteur, who both claim a 24-percent share of the $6.5 billion-a-year global vaccine market, said demand was being driven by new products, including combination jabs and new adult treatments.
    The infant sector currently accounts for two-thirds of vaccine sales but market dynamics are changing, helped by growing demand for flu shots among the elderly and increased use of vaccines by tourists visiting tropical countries.
    At the same time, the threat of bioterrorism in the wake of September 11, 2001, has spawned a new business in supplying vaccines against smallpox following fears that the deadly virus might be used as a weapon.
    The result has been the birth of a new generation of niche vaccine companies, typified by Britain's PowderJect Pharmaceuticals Plc and Acambis Plc, both of which will make their first profit this year.
    Jean Stephenne, vaccines head at GlaxoSmithKline Plc, told an ABN AMRO conference that global vaccine sales would rise by more than a fifth to about $8 billion by 2005, underlying a long-term trend which has seen a tenfold increase in sales since 1980, while drug sales have risen only five times.
    Both GSK and Aventis expect to clock up vaccine sales of around $1.6 billion this year.
    Adrian Howd, biotechnology analyst at ABN AMRO, said vaccines were now one of the fastest-growing areas of healthcare, with demand for new products outweighing supply, and the total market set to top $10 billion by 2010.
    Consolidation within the sector is likely, Howd says. The industry at present is highly fragmented, with more than 60 companies, but firms will seek critical mass to compete effectively.
    NEW PHASE
    "You're seeing the launch of a new phase in the industry today," said Paul Kirkconnell, corporate vice president of business development of Aventis Pasteur.
    He predicted the global vaccine market would double over the next decade after 14 percent compound annual growth in the 1990s. That compares with global drug sales of just eight percent in the year to September, according to healthcare information firm IMS Health. The revival of the vaccine industry, which was once dismissed as a low-margin and commoditized business by many big drugmakers, reflects a series of innovations ranging from new pediatric combinations to novel disease targets.
    Among new disease targets, Stephenne said he was particularly excited by experimental vaccines to prevent infection by the human papilloma virus (HPV) that causes cervical cancer.
    Both Merck and GSK have HPV vaccines in development that will compete in a market that Stephenne estimated would eventually be worth some $3 billion pounds a year.
    Professor George Dougan, director of the Center for Molecular Microbiology and Infection at Imperial College, London, said recent scientific progress had opened many new opportunities.
    These include the development of innovative drug delivery mechanisms and the use of new adjuvants, substances that are added to vaccines to enhance their effectiveness.
    Ultimately, vaccine developers could move to using DNA to trigger an immune response. Such DNA vaccines, if successful, would be simple to use and store, and might have therapeutic applications in treating patients already suffering from diseases, including cancer. ($1=.6364 Pound)

  • Retailers Use Hidden Cameras and One-Way Mirrors to Study How We Shop
    (ABCNEWS)
    Dec. 12 2002— Market researchers have studied Americans' shopping habits for years, but at one store in a downtown Minneapolis office building, they are taking it to a new level.
    As shoppers browse the furniture, clothing and gifts on sale at a store called Once Famous, researchers study them from behind one-way mirrors, tracking their movements through the store and their reaction to the products on display. Hidden cameras and microphones record shoppers' behavior for further study.
    The store functions as a regular retail outlet and turns a small profit, but it is in fact a state-of-the-art retail laboratory for a retail brand agency called FAME. The agency, which has its offices behind the one-way mirrors, uses social science techniques to study consumers' shopping habits for major retailers including Minneapolis-based Target and its Marshall Fields division.
    "Retail is all about anthropology. It's about customers in their natural environment," says FAME's president and founder, Tina Wilcox. "We're trying to get as close to reality as possible with a customer."
    Willing Guinea Pigs
    A blinking light at the entrance warns customers that they are being monitored for research purposes, but Wilcox says few customers object. "The comments we get from customers are, 'We're glad somebody finally asked us our opinion,'" she says.
    According to the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association, 70 percent of all purchases are impulse buys, meaning that the shopping environment can be as important a factor for retailers as a product's price and construction. If a retailer can increase a shopper's "dwell time" even by a minute or two, it boosts the chance that they will make a purchase, according to Wilcox.
    Conquering the ‘Dead Zone’
    In two recent tests, for instance, FAME researchers explored ways of drawing shoppers into "dead zones," areas of a store that customers tend to stay away from. In one case, they found that collecting various objects of the same color — red, in their experiment — into a single, bold display succeeded in drawing shoppers to the back of the store, a common dead zone.
    The bright red display succeeded in meeting what Wilcox calls the "squint test" — "If you squint your eyes, whatever you pick up in that squint is pretty much what registers when they're shopping." The items in the display had sales that were 15 percent to 20 percent higher than when they were scattered through the store.
    In another case, Wilcox's team found that placing a flickering electronic fireplace on the left side of the store successfully overcame shoppers' natural tendency to start shopping on the right. (In Britain, shoppers generally gravitate to the left side of a store. Researchers speculate that that might be because they drive on the left.)
    Men Are From Brookstone, Women Are From Victoria's Secret
    In a test designed to show how the two sexes shop differently, men and women acted very differently around an oversized, green, black and gold "throne chair." The men mostly kept their distance from the chair, asking questions about its construction and features and not sitting in it unless invited to by a salesperson. "They kind of look at furniture the way they would shop for a car," Wilcox said.
    Women, on the other hand, would touch the chair immediately, "almost to the point of caressing it," according to Wilcox. And they would sit in it. "Women get comfortable right away. They cross their legs. They sort of live in the chair," Wilcox said. One female visitor sat down and said to her friend, "OK, bring the wine."
    Wilcox says that women shop emotionally, and need "a more creative approach" than men. "They want the setting to be something that really intrigues them."
    Another phenomenon the FAME researchers have documented is that women often "visit" products they like three or four times before finally buying them — something seldom seen with men. Repeat visits give retailers the chance to sell women other, less expensive items in the meantime.
    Sometimes shoppers defy what would appear to be conventional expectations. For a major nationwide chain, Wilcox's team recently tested a line of teenage girls' T-shirts with slogans like "Prince of Wails," "Countess of Cranky" — and "Queen of Farts." Shoppers were divided over the Queen of Farts shirt, with some calling it "tacky." But in overall sales, it came in fifth out of 12, meaning that it will be on shelves next spring.
    Orange Juice and Cold Medicine
    Another company, Virginia-based Brickstream, uses advanced image-recognition software to allow retailers to track the movements of individual customers in their stores.
    The technology, which is in use in more than 100 stores nationwide, plots each customer's route on a floor plan of the store, recording how long they spend in each section, how long they wait on line, and what they buy. The company says it does not store information that allows the identification of individuals.
    For one client, Brickstream learned that people often buy orange juice — a low-profit item — and cold medicine — a high-profit item — in the same trip. The client moved the cold medicine next to the orange juice to encourage more sales.
    From the stores it has studied, Brickstream also found that the top reason people leave a store without making a purchase is the length of the checkout line when they get there — regardless of how fast it is moving. The number of people abandoning a line increases significantly after three minutes, the company has found.
    Going Inside the Home
    Other researchers focus on how consumers use products in their own homes. Believing that conventional focus groups are artificial and prone to influence by peer pressure, Bill Abrams left his job as a creative director at an ad agency in 1983 and formed a company specializing in "retail ethnography." The approach is based on ethnography, a scientific technique in which researchers study a small social group using close observation, ideally from inside the group.
    "People on their own turf tend to tell more of the truth and to reveal more, because they feel safer in their own surroundings," Abrams says. His firm, Housecalls Inc., goes into American's bedrooms and bathrooms to film them using personal products like dentures, hearing aids and cosmetics.
    For a recent study for Colgate-Palmolive, Abrams sent researchers into the homes of teenage girls in New Rochelle, N.Y., a suburb of New York City, to explore their relationship with their underarm deodorant — a $1 billion-a-year market.
    The researchers and their camera operators — all women — sought out the most popular girls and paid them a fee to let them into their homes. They then filmed the girls using their deodorant — how many swipes, for instance — and talking about them. They recorded what deodorant the girls used, where they kept them and whether they took them in their bag when they went out. They even asked whether the girls thought the products should be labeled "antiperspirant/deodorant" or "deodorant/antiperspirant."
    The New Rochelle interviews suggested a few things about teenage girls' attitudes to deodorant:
      That they see deodorant as something that can differentiate them from adults. One girl called her mother's brand "an older woman's" deodorant.
      That they talk to each other about what brand of deodorant to use, in a way that adults do not. "I got a lot of my friends hooked on Dove," one teen said.
      That a deodorant's scent is critical. "I don't change brands. I change scents," one girl said. "I think adults want what works best and kids want what smells best," said another.
    Abrams always cautions clients that his research based on small numbers and that they should test his findings in broader studies. But he said he would advise Colgate to bring out "a wardrobe of scents" for teens, so they could buy the same deodorant in three different scents, which they could use depending on how they felt on a given day.
     

  • After mild winters, a possible sea change
    Sun, Dec. 08, 2002
    (PhilapdelphiaInquirer)
    Some say a freshwater crimp in the Gulf Stream could bring a sudden shift to biting cold.
    By Anthony R. Wood
    Inquirer Staff Writer
    Scientists have been warning that the Earth is slowly heating up, that the recent run of gentle winters in the United States is no fluke, but the warm-up to the big meltdown.
    Now, however, comes a chilling prediction from some of the same experts. Before the climate gets balmier, they say, it could take a sudden turn toward the frigid - and stay that way for decades, if not centuries.
    In the Northeast, subzero temperatures could become standard winter fare, filling rivers with ice chunks, cutting short the growing season, and altering bird migrations. The cold and snow of the last week would feel like spring break.
    Behind that brutal scenario is a baffling ocean phenomenon that experts have watched with rising angst: an expanding mass of freshwater in the usually salty North Atlantic that has spread alarmingly in the last seven years. It now reaches south from Greenland to just off the coast of the Carolinas, an area of 15 million square miles.
    If the buildup continues, they say, it could impede the Gulf Stream, a major climate-maker that transports warm air to northern latitudes in winter. Were that critical current to be slowed by the freshwater, let alone stopped, average winter temperatures in the Northeastern United States and in Western Europe could abruptly plummet 10 degrees - a change not experienced by anyone alive today. A five-degree drop would be in store for the rest of the States.
    Exactly when it might occur, scientists generally are loath to speculate.
    "None of us could tell you whether that event happens next year or 100 years from now," said Raymond W. Schmitt Jr., senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, which has taken the lead in studying the freshwater pool.
    Researchers find themselves toeing a fine line between informing the public and setting off a panic, Schmitt added. The U.N. committee on global warming has put out the reassuring word that "such a shutdown is unlikely by 2100." But John Gagosian, head of Woods Hole, had not even cold comfort to offer in a recent paper.
    "In just the past year, we have seen ominous signs that we may be headed toward a potentially dangerous threshold," Gagosian wrote. "If we cross it, Earth's climate could switch gears and jump very rapidly - not gradually - into a completely different mode of operation."
    One climate scientist suspects the Gulf Stream already is slowing down. At a time when other glaciers around the world are in retreat, the Scandinavian glacier has been growing. Andrew Weaver, of the University of Victoria, British Columbia, says it may be the result of less warm air reaching that far corner of the North Atlantic.
    The prospect of a deep freeze, whether sooner or later, so concerns the British government that it is sinking $30 million into figuring out what's going on in The Pond. For while no one disputes the freshening is real, no one is sure why it is happening.
    Some researchers believe that, ironically, global warming could be to blame, that melting Greenland glaciers and Arctic sea ice could be diluting the salt water of the North Atlantic. Others theorize it could be a phase in a natural cycle, one that ice-core evidence suggests might have happened several times in the last 100,000 years - and perhaps as recently as America's colonial era.
    Oceans are turbulent, chaotic places, and their circulation is at least as complex as the atmosphere's.
    The Gulf Stream, which originates in the Caribbean, is no exception. Oceanographers typically describe it as part of a "conveyor belt," because in order to keep the current moving, the cold, salty water in the North Atlantic must sink beneath it. That creates a void that is filled by the rush of more Gulf Stream water. And so it moves north-northeast toward Iceland at about 5 m.p.h., warming the overlying atmosphere for more than 2,000 miles.
    The heated air moderates the frigid blasts out of Canada before they can reach London, Paris or Rome. Without the Gulf Stream, London would feel like Montreal, but gloomier.
    Fresher water is a threat to the conveyor because it is lighter and sinks so slowly that the Gulf Stream could sputter and even stop.
    "If you don't sink that [cold] water and move it into the south, there's no reason for the Gulf Stream to move the warm water to the north," said James Wright, a Rutgers University paleoceanographer. The current "would turn toward Portugal and go to the Canary Islands."
    Even subtle changes in salinity can have a substantial effect on the rate at which water sinks, said Weaver, of the University of Victoria. On average, a gallon of seawater contains 4.7 ounces of salt. Even the freshest water in the ocean still has about 4.2 ounces per gallon - far from potable, but fresh enough to potentially affect the Gulf Stream.
    Conveyor-belt disruptions and sudden climate changes are nothing new - only the realization that they have occurred, says Richard B. Alley, a professor of geosciences at Pennsylvania State University.
    Conventional wisdom used to hold that climate change, like aging, happened gradually. In the last 15 years, however, researchers studying ice cores dating back 100,000 years have documented sudden shifts.
    "Large, abrupt and widespread climate changes occurred repeatedly in the past across most of the Earth, and many followed closely after freshening of the North Atlantic," said Alley, who is also chairman of the National Research Council's Committee on Abrupt Climate Change, which published a report last spring.
    Perhaps the most famous of these was the "Younger Dryas" event, so named for the Arctic shrub that appeared in temperate European climes during a dramatic cooldown about 12,000 years ago, 6,000 years after the last Ice Age. And it happened in a hurry, a matter of just a few years.
    Changes in the Gulf Stream also are suspect in the onset of the so-called Little Ice Age, which began in the 15th century and ended about 1850. That coincided with Gen. George Washington's encampment at Valley Forge during the fatally frigid winter of 1777-78; the winter of 1779-80 was even worse. It also encompassed the era of Washington Irving and frosty images of skaters on the lower Hudson in December. No one skates there these days.
    While abrupt shifts may be nothing new, this one would be unprecedented in one important respect: Science is trying to get to the bottom of it. But even as researchers measure the freshwater mass by dropping instrument packs into the ocean, one thing is certain: They won't be able to stop it.
    Any human effort to control the buildup, Weaver said, would be "like one person standing on a railroad track trying to stop a train."
     

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