Creepy Disclosures Weblog

Web notables, scary news and hypochondria.

Edited by Grindlestick

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Creepy Disclosures Weblog- issue#47

  • Sharansky - Bush's Hero And Inspiration
    2-1-5
    JERUSALEM (Reuters) - It's been a long and lonely road for former Soviet dissident Natan (Anatoly) Sharansky who has for years been ridiculed for his political theories of spreading democracy across the globe to obtain world peace.
    But the former Soviet "refusenik," who is now a cabinet minister in the Israeli government, no longer walks alone. His companion in his campaign to democratize the world is no less than President Bush.
    To have the ear of the most powerful leader in the world after decades of having his political ideology dismissed as naive and eccentric is a pleasant change for the diminutive Ukrainian-born mathematician.
    "I am sorry that there are so few people who believe in these ideas but it's nice to think that one of these very few people is the president of the United States," said 57-year-old Sharansky in an interview at his office in Jerusalem.
    Not only did Bush read Sharansky's new book "The Case for Democracy" with avid interest days after it was published, but he gave a copy to his top adviser Condoleezza Rice and said he personally bought a copy for British Prime Minister Tony Blair .
    "This is a book that ... summarizes how I feel. I would urge people to read it," Bush told CNN.
    Bush was so taken with the book that he summoned Sharansky to the White House in November. The president spent an hour in the Oval Office discussing Sharansky's ideology based on his years as a dissident and prisoner in the Soviet Union.
    "I told him (Bush): 'You are the real dissident. Politicians look at polls -- what is popular, what is not popular. A dissident believes in an idea and goes ahead with it ... even when there are so many people who disagree,"' Sharansky said.
    Palestinians and Israeli peace activists see him as betraying the values of freedom and human rights he says he holds dear because he has not fought Israeli occupation and has helped prop up a succession of right-wing Israeli governments.
    Even Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told him: "They are good ideas but they don't belong to this part of the world.."
    BUSH: SHARANSKY'S GREATEST FAN
    So it was with a feeling of vindication that Sharansky heard Bush's inauguration address on Jan. 20 in which he called for "expansion of freedom" around the world and an end to tyranny, phrases which could have been taken from the pages of his book.
    "I was very excited not only because the words were so familiar and the ideas were so important. (But) the ideas were expressed with such confidence ... not by an academic but by the leader of the free world who was going to implement them."
    Sharansky's theories on "liberty" and "freedom" germinated while working as an aide to leading Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov in the 1970s and during his eight years in a Siberian jail after the Soviet authorities convicted him as a spy and traitor.
    He became a symbol for the movement to free Soviet Jews and under enormous international pressure, particularly from the United States, was released in 1986 as part of a prisoner swap with Moscow. He immediately immigrated to Israel.
    There a painfully thin Sharansky, despite being force fed at a Soviet hospital before his release, was greeted as a national hero. He later formed a party for Russian immigrants which joined the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996.
    He resents being pigeonholed as a "right-winger" despite opposing the 1993 Oslo peace accords with the Palestinians. He says his political views are conceptually different from anything on the Israeli political spectrum today.
    "Today I am called a right-wing extremist. Tomorrow I will be called a left-wing extremist," he said. "I am a refusenik."
    He says he would give the Palestinians "all the rights in the world" once they instituted full democracy which he believes would ensure the existence of a Palestinian state at peace with Israel.
    The gist of Sharansky's view is that the "free world" should encourage countries to democratize by linking international standing and aid to their record on human rights and freedom of speech.
    It was such linkage through the 1975 Helsinki Agreements that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, he said.
    STILL A "REFUSENIK"
    Sharansky said he firmly believes the world would be more stable and extremism would fizzle out if all peoples, including those in the Middle East, enjoyed freedom and democracy.
    As with Bush's speech, Arab academics are somewhat skeptical about Sharansky's view.
    "I can't swallow that he was a champion of human rights in the Soviet Union and when he came over here he forgot his past and was part of the scheme of occupying another people," Palestinian political analyst Ali al-Jarbawi told Reuters.
    Sharansky says he has been misrepresented as a hard-liner when he is simply committed to his belief that there will never be peace without democracy in the Arab world and elsewhere.
    Sharansky does not spare criticism for the United States, saying it tried to appease countries such as Saddam Hussein 's Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Washington, he said, should have linked relations and aid with improved human rights and democracy.
    His advice to Bush is to ignore skeptics and stick to your ideals. "Dissidents are always alone ... You can only hope the logic of history is on your side. That is what happened in the Soviet Union and that is what I hope will happen in the Middle East."

  • Halliburton to halt its Iran operations
    1/29/2005
    http://www.aljazeera.com/me.asp?service_ID=6801
    Halliburton chairman and CEO Dave Lesar announced Friday that the company has decided to wind down its operations in Iran and separate KBR, its engineering and construction subsidiary from the parent.
    Lesar made his announcement on Friday while he was speaking to analysts in a conference call after the company disclosed its 4th quarter loss narrowed to $201 million from a loss of $947 million in the same period last year.
    Halliburton operates in Iran through a foreign-owned subsidiary, which is permitted as long as the Americans dont have a hand in or influence that business.
    Currently, a federal jury is investigating whether the Houston-based company violated a U.S. ban on trade with Iran.
    Lesar defended the company’s services in Iran, saying that they are legal, but they are "miniscule" when compared with the company's other work. He added that Iran's business environment "is not conducive to our overall strategies and objectives."
    "We have decided to wind down our operations there while fulfilling our existing contracts and commitments," Lesar said on the conference call.
    Halliburton will return to Iran only if U.S. lifted its sanctions and more of its major customers went there, Lesar said.
    "It's not a huge market for them," Dan Pickering, an analyst with Pickering Energy Partners, said of the Iran pullout. "Halliburton's probably getting tired of being a punching bag on various issues and Iran was one that they could eliminate and are doing so."
    Last September, Halliburton said it would consider selling KBR once its multibillion-dollar settlement of thousands of asbestos and silica claims was finalized.
    Lesar said Friday he would recommend to Halliburton's board that KBR be separated, but didn't elaborate on how or when this would happen.
    KBR is U.S.'s largest contractor in Iraq, with more than $10 billion in work orders from the Army to provide troop with support and rebuild Iraq's oil industry.
    A lot of agencies are now investigating accusations of overbilling, as Vice President Dick Cheney ran Halliburton from 1995-2000. However, the company denies wrongdoing, calling itself a political target.


  • The truth is out there: declassified reports of UFO sightings reveal 88 sightings last year
    03 February 2005
    http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/story.jsp?story=607253
    Details of Britain's most recent UFO sightings are revealed in previously secret documents disclosed to The Independent .
    The files, released under the Freedom of Information Act, show that, last year, the Ministry of Defence's UFO unit received 88 reports from military staff and members of the public worried about unexplained objects in our skies.
    The classified files help to complete a picture of the scale of UFO sightings first revealed by this paper last month. These updated "X-files" show the most recent observations were made on 15 January this year following two separate reports from Chatteris, Cambridgeshire, and Whitstable, Kent. The reports refer to "strange lights seen in the sky".
    Other sightings give more detail. A report from Devizes in Wiltshire on 24 September last year records an object that: "Looked liked a big ball of fire coming down from the sky with a tail and sparks coming off the end of it." Another, from Somerset the week before, states: "The object looked like a great bright light and was really intense, like a ball of fire coming down from the sky, rapidly moving towards the ground."
    Although such reports might be discounted as meteor showers or other astronomical phenomena, other sightings are not so easy to dismiss. A report from Surrey on 20 May last year describes a UFO as having "grooves and windows" but no room for humans. Even the MoD inspector notes that the "witness had seen the object so clearly".
    Many of the other sightings refer to UFO's changing colour, speed and shape. The most common colours are yellow, orange or black.
    A report from Goole, East Yorkshire, recorded in April last year, noted: "The object looked like a boomerang and was stationary over a power station. An aircraft was circling the object."
    In the same month, a UFO observer from Seaforth, Merseyside, noted: "I saw a UFO with a cluster of four bright lights in a ring shape on it. Three beams of white light shone upwards and disappeared."
    These latest files to be declassified by the MoD are not as complete as reports from mid-1976 and 1977 released last month. Hundreds of documents previously kept secret by the Ministry of Defence's special UFO department, known as S4F, detail many reports of a possible visit by extraterrestrial life-forms. One is made by an RAF pilot and two NCOs at RAF Boulmer, Northumberland.
    In July 1977 Flt-Lt A M Wood reported "bright objects hanging over the sea''. The MoD document adds that the RAF officer said the closest object was "luminous, round and four to five times larger than a Whirlwind helicopter". The UFOs were reported to be three miles out to sea at a height of about 5,000ft.
    The officer, whose report is supported by Cpl Torrington and Sgt Graham, said: "The objects separated. Then one went west of the other, as it manoeuvred it changed shape to become body-shaped with projections like arms and legs." The report describes Flt-Lt Wood as "reliable and sober".
    That account was deemed so sensitive to the national interest that the MoD had delayed its release for an extra three years. But under the Freedom of Information Act, which came into force on 1 January, the file has been declassified.

  • Fireball seen over Madrid
    Fri Jan 28 2005
    MADRID (AFP) - Residents of the area near Madrid airport reported seeing a ball of fire explode and disintregrate in skies over the Spanish capital overnight, security services said.
    Emergency services received telephone calls about 10:30 pm (2130 GMT) Thursday reporting the object, described by some callers as looking like a meteorite, which was seen exploding and disintegrating.
    Subway employee Jose Antonio Lopez told EFE news agency that when he went home from work, some 50 kilometres (30 miles) from the capital, he saw a "huge, very red incandescent ball giving off a huge flash then disappeared after a few seconds."
    "It was a mass of red fire falling vertically," he said, suggesting it could have been a meteorite.

  • Andaman quakes leave seismologists worried
    Friday, 28 January , 2005, 17:54
    Mumbai: Unusual events "unheard of in the history of seismology" have been recorded in the Andaman and Nicobar islands, with more than 120 such events being recorded in the last one month, according to seismologists.
    The seismology department of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre and the Earth Sciences Department of the Indian Institute of Technology here have recorded over 120 such unusual events in the islands following the December 26 earthquake measuring 8.9 on the Richter scale that triggered tsunamis which wreaked havoc in several parts of the country.
    Of these events recorded at BARC's Gouribidnur station in Karnataka, at least over 33 events were above 5 on the Richter scale, they said, adding "this is unusual and alarming as large amount of energy is being released so frequently."
    Eleven events with surface wave of magnitude 5, indicating large amount of energy close to Nicobar Islands was also recorded, the seismologists said.
    "Since yesterday, 16 events which range from 5.2 to 5.8 on the Richter scale have been recorded," they said.
    "Whether these events are foreshocks or aftershocks - it is not clear, and has to be taken up seriously and the data analysed as fast as possible," the scientists said.
    "Both `strike slip and `dip slip are taking place simultaneously and these factors have to be taken very seriously both by scientists and authorities," they added.
     
  • Man offers $10,000 for Pedro Mountain Mummy
    http://www.casperstartribune.net/articles/2005/02/03/news/wyoming/3b6d4aad0120fde187256f9c00839d78.txt
    In the name of poking holes in the theory of evolution, a Syracuse, N.Y., man says he will pay $10,000 for one of the most mysterious artifacts ever dug up in Wyoming -- the Pedro Mountain Mummy.
    John Adolfi says he wants the Pedro Mountain Mummy, sometimes referred to as Pedro, in order to conduct DNA tests, X-rays, and magnetic resonance imaging on the little fellow.
    Conducting such tests, however, is no easy matter, as the mummy vanished in 1950.
    Although the mummy has not been seen in public for 55 years, several photos and many descriptions of the anomalistic artifact remain.
    According to these descriptions and photos, it is the size and proportions that make the mummy freakish and pique Adolfi's interest in it.
    In the seated position in which Pedro is frozen, he stands only 7 inches tall. If he were to stand up, it was estimated Pedro would only stand 17 inches. And seated or standing, he only weighs three-quarters of a pound.
    Adding to the Pedro Mountain Mummy enigma is the fact that he is proportioned much more like an adult than an infant.
    According to Adolfi's hypothesis, conducting modern scientific tests on the mummy will reveal that Pedro was an adult at the time of his death. This would mean he was one of the "little people" -- a mythical tribe of savage pygmies who haunted Wyoming's mountains, according to Arapaho and Shoshone tales.
    These little people, Adolfi postulates, were a species of hominid primates which current evolutionary paradigms fail to take into account.
    Adolfi admits that proof of a previously unknown prehistoric relative of man would not disprove evolution, as the recently discovered remains of Homo floresiensis, the "Hobbits" found in Indonesia, did not disprove it.
    But, Adolfi says, proof of a new hominid species would poke holes in the paradigm evolutionists have created regarding human origins.
    Pedro is also a fun artifact, and offering a reward for it is a great way for Adolfi's Web site (www.biblelandstudios.com) to kick off a worldwide treasure hunt in which rewards will be offered for all kinds of artifacts that go against the accepted scientific and historic paradigms.
    In future months rewards will be offered for pieces or photos of Noah's Ark and for evidence of giant humans who Adolfi says once roamed Earth, he said.
    The tale of Pedro
    The Pedro Mountain Mummy was first discovered by Cecil Mayne in 1932.
    Mayne was prospecting for gold near Pathfinder Reservoir when an explosion he detonated revealed a small cave, according to a Oct. 21, 1932, article in the Casper Tribune-Herald. Inside the cave Mayne found the mummified remains of what looked like a tiny human.
    Debate about the mummy's nature started soon after it was found. Some said it was a hoax. Others said it was the mummified remains of a baby. And others said it was one of the little people spoken about in Indian legends, according to Casper Tribune-Herald stories from 1932.
    The mummy somehow made its way to Meeteetse, where it was displayed at Jones Drug Store for some years.
    In the mid-1940s a Casper used car salesman named Ivan Goodman spied Pedro in the Meeteetse store and bought it for several thousands of dollars.
    Soon Goodman was using Pedro to attract people to his lot. The mummy also served as a sort of mascot for Goodman's auto dealership, and its image was placed in advertisements, according to a Casper Shopper story from March 9, 1977.
    While in Goodman's hands, the mummy attracted the attention of several Eastern scientists. And in 1950 these scientists conducted the most extensive scientific study of the mummy ever.
    X-rays revealed Pedro to have adult-like vertebrae and teeth, according to a Casper Tribune-Herald story from March 5, 1950.
    Based on these findings, it was apparently concluded the mummy was an adult.
    "After an exhaustive study by the scientists it was agreed that it was the only specimen known of a human race of that type which perhaps dated back a million years," Goodman was quoted as saying in the March 5, 1950, edition of the Casper Tribune-Herald.
    Perhaps the study turned out to be a bit too exhaustive for Goodman, as he died later in 1950.
    When Goodman died the mummy passed into the hands of New Yorker Leonard Wadler, according to a July 7, 1979, Casper Star-Tribune article.
    Soon after, Wadler and his mummy vanished.
    According to Adolfi, Wadler moved to Florida and died in the Sunshine State in the 1980s.
    If the Pedro Mountain Mummy is to be found, Adolfi said, it will probably be discovered in Florida.
    Although Adolfi hopes Pedro will turn out to be a separate species of hominid, recent studies suggest the artifact, although odd, doesn't relegate the currently accepted account of human origins to the trash bin.
    According to studies done by George Gill, an anthropology professor at the University of Wyoming, X-rays taken in the 1950s of Pedro reveal him to be an infant who suffered from anencephaly, a birth defect in which only the brain stem develops.
    Further testing on a female pygmy mummy brought to Gill revealed it also was an anencephalic infant.
    Although Adolfi is only offering the $10,000 reward for the mummy unearthed in 1932, he is interested in buying other pygmy mummies for lesser amounts, he said.

  • Report: U.S. Conducting Secret Missions Inside Iran
    Jan 16, 12:33 PM (ET)
    WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran to help identify potential nuclear, chemical and missile targets, The New Yorker magazine reported Sunday.
    The article, by award-winning reporter Seymour Hersh, said the secret missions have been going on at least since last summer with the goal of identifying target information for three dozen or more suspected sites.
    Hersh quotes one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon as saying, "The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible."
    One former high-level intelligence official told The New Yorker, "This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush administration is looking at this as a huge war zone. Next, we're going to have the Iranian campaign."
    The White House said Iran is a concern and a threat that needs to be taken seriously. But it disputed the report by Hersh, who last year exposed the extent of prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
    "We obviously have a concern about Iran. The whole world has a concern about Iran," Dan Bartlett, a top aide to President Bush, told CNN's "Late Edition."
    Of The New Yorker report, he said: "I think it's riddled with inaccuracies, and I don't believe that some of the conclusions he's drawing are based on fact."
    Bartlett said the administration "will continue to work through the diplomatic initiatives" to convince Iran -- which Bush once called part of an "axis of evil" -- not to pursue nuclear weapons.
    "No president, at any juncture in history, has ever taken military options off the table," Bartlett added. "But what President Bush has shown is that he believes we can emphasize the diplomatic initiatives that are underway right now."
    COMMANDO TASK FORCE
    Bush has warned Iran in recent weeks against meddling in Iraqi elections.
    The former intelligence official told Hersh that an American commando task force in South Asia is working closely with a group of Pakistani scientists who had dealt with their Iranian counterparts.
    The New Yorker reports that this task force, aided by information from Pakistan, has been penetrating into eastern Iran in a hunt for underground nuclear-weapons installations.
    In exchange for this cooperation, the official told Hersh, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has received assurances that his government will not have to turn over Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb, to face questioning about his role in selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
    Hersh reported that Bush has already "signed a series of top-secret findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as 10 nations in the Middle East and South Asia."
    Defining these as military rather than intelligence operations, Hersh reported, will enable the Bush administration to evade legal restrictions imposed on the CIA's covert activities overseas.

  • UK Secretly Backs US Plans To Remove Nuclear Chief
    The Independent - UK
    12-19-4
    The British government, while publicly supporting the efforts of Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the UN's nuclear watchdog, to stop Iran developing nuclear weapons, is secretly backing US plans to remove him.
    The US State Department and the CIA were last week reported to have tapped phone conversations with Iranian officials by Dr ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in an attempt to gather information that could discredit him.
    The Bush administration believes that Dr ElBaradei is taking too soft a line on Iran. In public Britain is closer to the IAEA position than Washington's: with Germany and France, it has led an EU initiative to persuade Iran to freeze its nuclear development. While the US refuses to rule out the use of force, the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, has described bombing Iran's facilities as "inconceivable".
    It had been assumed that Britain was also well-disposed towards Dr ElBaradei, who has said he plans to seek a third term next year as IAEA chief, but a well-placed Whitehall source revealed that officials had secretly backed US moves to replace him. The Foreign Office gave its support to the plan weeks ago, and the Department of Trade and Industry, in charge of Britain's nuclear regulation, was also behind the move, according to the source.
    Dr ElBaradei has angered Britain and the US by contradicting their claims that Iraq was seeking to reconstitute its nuclear programme. The Foreign Office refused to comment, but behind the scenes it is justifying its decision to back the Americans on a technicality known as the "Geneva rule". This says senior UN officials should serve no more than two terms, which would bring Dr ElBaradei's tenure to an end next summer.
    Some of the IAEA's 35 board members are understood to want the 62-year-old Egyptian to stay on for a third term. To prevent his re-election, the US, backed by Britain, need to obtain 12 votes against him. The Washington Post reported last week that the US campaign is being driven by John Bolton, the hardline under-secretary of state for arms control, adding that the Americans would like to see Alexander Downer, the Australian Foreign Minister, as the new IAEA chief.
    Mr Downer has acknowledged being approached about the job, but is thought to be unwilling to mount a direct challenge to Dr ElBaradei, who has worked for the IAEA for 20 years. The dozens of taps on his phone are not thought to have uncovered any evidence to use against him. A spokes-woman for the Vienna-based IAEA said she was not surprised that Dr ElBaradei's phone had been tapped, but refused to comment further.
    Tehran, however, has said "it does not matter" who heads the IAEA. "We are not co-operating with the people of the IAEA, but ... with an international agency," said Hassan Rowhani, of Iran's Supreme National Security Council.
    © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
    http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=594476

  • Increasing US Media Concern About Global Weather Chaos
    Earthquakes and Meteor Explosions in Atmosphere
    By Sorcha Faal
    ...and as reported to her Russian Subscribers
    1-13-5
    I have received information today from an American about a Western media report about the current events happening in the world titled "Is something wrong with Mother Earth?" that was broadcast over their national television news collective NBC. I am led to understand also that this media collective has the attention of the greater part of the American public who view television newscasts, so this is my reason for attempting to understand this work of fiction.
    This report begins by saying, "Consider the recent evidence: 1.) The violent Indian Ocean earthquake and the resulting tsunami that left parts of 11 nations devastated. 2.) November's powerful 6.2 earthquake in Costa Rica that killed eight people. 3.) Three volcanoes in Guatemala all simultaneously active for the first time in 31 years."
    The report then asks the question, "Should we be worried?" to which the reply given by NASA scientist Dr. David Adamec says, "The world is not coming to an end, and things are fine."
    "Adamec studies the Earth and says there is no scientific data to suggest all this violence from the Earth, at the same time, is unusual." This report continues and then adds, "The planet is alive and we have a hot core and every once in a while there are weak zones in the crust and we see things like volcanoes and earthquakes happen along those things. It's just a normal part of what a planet does."
    The report then asks, "But wait a minute - what about all the wicked weather?" To which a professor, Dr. Chuck Connor from the University of South Florida, replies, "There's no causal relationship there at all, the current bad, bad weather we've been having is not influenced by volcanoes or earthquakes."
    Though it is hard for any of us here to believe, or even understand, this is the extent of the information about these current events that this television news collective reported on to the American people.
    Could this news collective have included these events of the past few weeks too?
    On December 4th in the New England Region of the United States where it is says, "the bright flash light up the clouds, three seconds later came the boom"
    On December 6th over Australia where it was reported, "An eerie, constant, low rumbling sound accompanied the explosions." From 'fireballs'.
    On December 12th the reports from the Washington D.C. Region of the United States that says, "It looked like a ball of fire falling out of the sky.".
    On December 13th the report of the fireball that lit up the skies of China 'turning night into day'.
    On December 16th from the Utah Region of the United States where it was reported, "Meteor May Have Fallen in Salt Lake"
    On December 19th where in Indonesia a news report was headlined, "Meteor suspected amid unexplained sightings and blast in Indonesia"
    On December 21st where an unknown asteroid, and since named 2004 YD5, was discovered flying past the earth and under our satellites.
    On January 5th where in the Wisconsin Region of the United States a news report says, "Authorities in north central Wisconsin received dozens of reports Tuesday evening of bright flashes of light in the sky, as from an explosion, and they said it likely came from meteor activity."
    On January 7th where in the Alaskan Region of the United States a news report says, "Juneau residents saw a fiery ball traversing the sky."
    On January 12th where in India it is reported, "I saw a huge ball of fire in the air. It raced down to the earth so fast that before I could do anything."
    But, if they had presented these events for consideration they would have also had to have shown that these sightings contradict The American Meteor Society, and as they have stated, "Due to the combination of all of these factors, only a handful of witnessed meteorite falls occur each year."
    This report also failed to mention the Great Antarctica Earthquake that occurred on December 24th, was measured at a magnitude of 8.2,and which is one of only 12 of this magnitude that has occurred on earth since 1990, and one of the most powerful since 1900.
    Of course the 9.0 earthquake event that occurred in the Indian Ocean was mentioned, but because it was not connected with the Great Antarctica earthquake event the people would not look for any connections between them. And a connection there is between them, and also the Atlantic Ocean, in the that these events are occurring in those areas of the world having anomalous magnetic features, and as I had previously written about in my report of January 10th, "Continuing Earth Changes Cripple American Submarine and Pose New Dangers for the American Continents". (Even as I am writing these words I am hearing about a large earthquake event occurring in the Atlantic Ocean Region.)
    The report continues with, "Three volcanoes in Guatemala all simultaneously active for the first time in 31 years," but does not mention at all the active reports of volcanic activity from their own governments scientific organization, the USGS, and which include: Andaman Islands, Veniaminof, USA, Colima, Mexico, Karymsky, Russia, Kilauea, USA, Manam, Papua New Guinea, Shiveluch, Russia, Soufriere Hills, Montserrat, Spurr, USA, St. Helens, USA, Suwanose-jima, Japan and Tunguraha, Ecuador. Neither was it mentioned that Italy's Mt. Etna had also erupted, though the lava flow has stopped and now only gas is escaping.
    Also not mentioned was the continued issues, some mysterious and still unexplained, involving the Yellowstone Region of the United States and where a new report is circulating that says, "The American people are not being told that the explosion of this 'super volcano' could happen at any moment."
    This report also mentioned the great rains and snows presently occurring in the western regions of the United States but failed to put this information within the context of the overall present conditions of the earth's weather systems, such as:
    November 14th, Record Cold in Boston, November 27th, Record snow is Israel, November 30th, Record Cold in California, December 1st, Record Cold in Nevada, December 1st, Record Heat in Australia, December 2nd, Rare Winter Typhoon Taiwan, December 2nd, Mysterious fog covers 86,800 square miles of China, December 3ed, Super Typhoon in Philippines, December 3ed, Record Heat in Canada, December 5th, Record Rain in California, December 12th, Worst Floods in 40 years in Malaysia, December 15th, 50 Foot Waves Hit Hawaii, December 16th, Record Cold in Florida, December 17th, Hurricane force winds hit California, December 17th, Hurricane Force Winds hit France, December 19th, Record Heat in Montana, December 19th, Mysterious Light Brightens Arctic, December 19th, Coldest in 50 years in Israel, December 19th, Hurricane Force Winds in England, December 19th, Hurricane Force Winds in Germany, December 21st, Fog Covers Northern India, December 21st, Hurricane Force Winds in Canada, December 21st, Hurricane Force Winds in Montana, December 23ed, Catastrophic Storms Hit South Africa, December 23ed , Hurricane Force Winds in Finland, December 23ed, Worst Strom in Ohio History, December 23ed , Big Storms Shatter Records in Kentucky, December 23ed , Massive Storms Hit Canada, December 23ed , Massive Storm Spans Sea of Japan, December 24th, Severe Storms Leave Most of Finland Without Power, December 24th, 2km Thick Fog Layer Covers Large Areas of India, December 24th, Massive Storms Leaves Thousands Stranded in Scotland, December 25th, South Florida Covered in Fog, December 25th, First White Christmas in 86 Years for Texas Town, December 26th, Millions wake up to White Christmas in England, December 28th, Alaska Rains 212% above Normal, December 28th, Heavy Rains and Floods Kill 20 in Iran, December 29th, Rare Winter Heat Wave in Midwest US Continues, December 30th, United Arab Emirates Has First Snow in Recorded History, January 3ed, Lighting Causes Brushfires in Australia, January 4th, Floods, Rain Devastate South Africa, January 4th, Storms Leave Thousands Without Power in Australia, January 4th, Coldest December in 59 Years for New Zealand, January 4th, Lightning Kills 8 in South Africa, January 4th, Lightning Kills 27 in India, January 5th, Extremely High Alaskan Temperatures, January 6th, Freeze and Record Lows Strand Thousands in US, January 8th, Mighty Cyclone Approaches Kamchatka, January 8th, Storms Pound Northern Europe, January 8th, Record High Temperatures in Russia, January 9th, Hurricane Force Winds in Denmark and Sweden, January 9th, Europe's 'Tsunami', January 10th, Record Rains Continue in California, January 10th, Strongest Storm in 40 Years Hits Russia, January 11th, Record Heat, No Snow in Many Parts of Europe and January 12th, Winter storm leaves behind damage worth EUR millions in Finland.
    This list should only be remarkable for what is not included, not what is. To include all the significant and record setting, weather events for just this time period alone, November 14th to January 12th, would take many hundreds of pages.
    Also not noted here have been these past year's worldwide record numbers of floods, tornados, hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons that have served to make this past years events the costliness in human history, as reported by the world's largest insurance company Munich Re. Munich Re board member Stefan Heyd has also said that the weather extremes "underline our long-standing demand for prompt and rigorous measures against global climate change. After the disappointing outcome of the recent climate summit in Buenos Aires, time is running out."
    Now of these things we of our people know, but to the Western people? They hear such things, and as I have quoted earlier, "Things are fine" and "There's no causal relationship there at all, the current bad, bad weather we've been having is not influenced by volcanoes or earthquakes."
    But we can find in their own children's studies the knowledge that "We have a closed atmospheric system which means all the water on our planet is finite and has been recycled for billions of years.", as it states correctly on this website for primary children.
    The knowledge of their University students is of course much greater, and includes this example about these facts, "Volcano eruptions of a large magnitude can impact global climate, reducing the amount of solar radiation reaching the earth's surface, lowering temperatures in the troposphere, and changing atmospheric circulation patterns" (Wolfe, 1). Sulfuric gases convert to sulfate aerosols which may linger up to four years in the atmosphere. On June 15, 1991, Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines, causing extensive consequences in the environment. "The direct radiative effect of volcanic aerosols causes general stratospheric heating and tropospheric cooling, with a tropospheric warming pattern in the winter" (Wolfe, 1). This demonstrates that volcanic aerosols force fundamental climate mechanisms that play an important role in the global change process."
    We know too that this is in fact not what the American scientist exactly said, but was the intention of the wording of his comments, for the uneducated to draw an imaginary correlation between volcanic eruptions and 'bad' weather. Hence, 'since the one isn't occurring the other can't be caused by it'.
    This provides to you an excellent example of how the Western people have so separated themselves from the world that they have no knowledge left of how every thing is in fact connected to every other thing in life, and everything is life.
    What are to us the simplest concepts of life, and living, as human beings are to them the hardest to understand because they have no knowledge of how to conceptualize the wholeness of all, and their part of the wholeness. Like a drop of water from the ocean on their finger tip they believe that is all they are. But inside of them also is the knowledge that their 'drop' of life will return to the ocean and therein lies their deepest fear, where is the drop when it returns to the ocean?
    Even my writings to them, of which this is a part of, they fail to connect the knowledge of them all. They instead keep each of them as separate pieces without knowing that the greater knowledge of knowing is in the wholeness of all of them, not in any single one.
    In many of the letters I receive from them there comes through in their words to me a form of absolute madness that you could only understand by knowing the effects of caging animals. Even in this report from their television collective, NBC, you can see how even in these days the bars of their mental and spiritual prison are continuing to be built around them.
    But many also are those who are in the knowing of our messages and our meanings, and continue to warn others also, even to much ridicule and scorning. This is good and also how it must be, as we know.
    © January 13, 2005, EU and US all rights reserved.
    Sorcha Faal
    [email protected]

  • Grass flourishes in warmer Antarctic
    December 26, 2004
    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0%2C%2C2087-1415627%2C00.html
    GRASS has become established in Antarctica for the first time, showing the continent is warming to temperatures unseen for 10,000 years.
    Scientists have reported that broad areas of grass are now forming turf where there were once ice-sheets and glaciers.
    Tufts have previously grown on patches of Antarctica in summer, but the scientists have now observed bigger areas surviving winter and spreading in the summer months. Some fear the change portends a much wider melting of the ice-cap that formed at least 20m years ago.
    Pete Convey, an ecologist conducting research with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), said: “Grass has taken a grip. There are very rapid changes going on in the Antarctic’s climate, allowing grass to colonise areas that would once have been far too cold.”
    Convey said many species of wildlife were at serious risk from such rapid change including penguins, seals, cold-water fish and giant sea spiders.
    The findings come at a politically sensitive time with Europe and America clashing over the latter’s refusal to sign up to the Kyoto treaty to limit greenhouse gas emissions. The confrontation may worsen with Tony Blair saying he is determined to push the issue up the international agenda when Britain assumes the presidencies of the European Union and the G8 countries next year.
    The latest research was carried out on the Antarctic peninsula, which juts northwards towards Cape Horn, and the islands around it. More strongly influenced by changes in sea and air temperatures than the rest of Antarctica, these areas are an excellent place to measure effects of climate change.
    Measurements over the past three decades show these are among the fastest-warming places on earth, with winter temperatures already 5C higher than in 1974. Many glaciers and ice-sheets are melting.
    Convey said Antarctic hair grass and another species called pearlwort were the only complex plants capable of surviving on the Antarctic mainland. He said: “In the past they were at the limit of their range. They used to appear sporadically with one or a few plants growing in sheltered north-facing areas where birds or the wind dropped the seeds but they never did very well.
    “What we are seeing now is dense swards or lawns forming and both plants growing much further south than ever before. It is quite remarkable.”
    Research by Convey and his colleagues suggests one of the main reasons for the change is that the rising temperatures have brought forward the start of the Antarctic spring and delayed the onset of autumn, enabling the grass to produce mature seed which germinates and becomes established.
    Antarctica has not always been ice-bound. It once had a temperate climate and was covered in dense vegetation. The Antarctic Peninsula was then joined to South America, creating a continuous land barrier along which warm water flowed southwards from the tropics. This water warmed Antarctica in the same way that the Gulf Stream now warms parts of Britain and northern Europe.
    About 30m years ago, however, movements of the Earth’s crust carried South America northwards, cutting off the warm water. It was replaced by the circumpolar current in which extremely cold water flows in a constant circle around Antarctica, keeping it frozen and isolated.
    John King, principal investigator for the BAS climate change programme, said: “We have also seen a sharp increase in the Roaring Forties, the powerful westerly winds that prevail around the Antarctic. One theory is that global warming is strengthening these winds.”
    King and his colleagues believe such trends could continue, possibly even raising winter temperatures on the peninsula from their past average of -10C to near freezing. Eventually this could give the peninsula a climate comparable to that of Scandinavia.
    A further climate alert is to be raised by Professor Lloyd Peck, Convey’s colleague at BAS. He will deliver a stark warning in the Royal Institution’s annual Christmas lectures on Channel 4 this week. Peck said this weekend: “Climate change in Antarctica is a warning of the globally catastrophic changes that will follow unless we act now.”
     
  • Rumors Of US Evacuation In Antarctica - Russia Helping?
    The Boom Shelter.com
    1-10-5
    What's happening at Antartica?
    According to inside Aussie news reports, the US has decided to evacuate its base at McMurdo in the Antartic and has requested the Russians to also send its icebreaker the 'Krasin' to assist evacuation. The Krasin, which I believe is one of their biggest, is reported to be presently south of the equator under full steam to meet a US icebreaker. The story goes that 2 large icebergs are grounded in McMurdo Bay preventing supplies reaching the Base.
    There's something wrong with that story.
    This time of the year is favorable for all manner of activity at Antartica. The Russian tourist ship the icebreaker 'Kapitan Khlebnikov' is probably at the Antartic with tourists now. Or at least it is capable of cancelling the tourists and rushing from its permanent dock in New Zealand or Tasmania to evacuate staff.
    These big icebreakers are probably engaged to remove huge quantities of instruments and people. Why are they rushing to remove instruments, equipment, etc, and people??
    It is doubtfull that the grounded 2 icebergs would halt supplies. What is incoming...might be a good question with this story??
    I am suspecting, more than anything incoming, is that ice is shearing off the Antartic land mass and the Base is draining out to sea.
    http://theboomshelter.com/
    Russian, US Icebreakers To Help McMurdo In Antarctica
    December 30, 2004
    ST. PETERSBURG (Interfax-Northwest) - The Krasin icebreaker of Russia and an icebreaker of the U.S. Coast Guard will start a joint operation to help the U.S. McMurdo station in Antarctica on January 20, head of the Russian Antarctica expedition Valery Lukin told Interfax on Thursday.
    "Five icebergs have run aground near the station and ice cannot flow out from the bay. The ice is 3.5 meters thick in the bay, and the station supply is difficult," Lukin said.
    McMurdo is the largest station in Antarctica, which can host about 5,000 people at the same time.
    http://www.interfax.ru/e/B/0/28.html?id_issue=10736710

  • Record Warm Winter Stirs 600 Sleepy Estonian Bears
    Fri Jan 14, 2005 09:16 AM ET
    TALLINN (Reuters) - Estonia's warmest winter for two centuries has woken some of its 600 bears several months early from hibernation, wildlife experts said on Friday.
    The bears' early reappearance has raised concerns for the survival of this year's cubs.
    "It has been very warm and wet and many flooded rivers have forced bears out of their dens and out of hibernation," said Kalev Manniste, a senior official at the Baltic country's State Forest Service.
    "Just a few days ago a hunter was telling me that he saw a she-bear with a very small cub walking across the field," he told Reuters.
    "The cub the hunter saw looked too small to survive the winter."
    She-bears normally give birth to tiny walnut-sized cubs during their winter hibernation and suckle them for months as they grow, before the spring thaw awakens the mother and she leaves her den.
    Local media and hunters writing on Internet sites say that across the country bears are moving about the forests at a time when they normally sleep and would not be seen for another two to three months.
    Temperatures have stayed above freezing, compared with the average temperature of 23 degrees for January.
    Neighboring Russia's normally ferocious winter has also been mild. Interfax news agency reported this week that a bear in a zoo awoke from hibernation two months early, while another did not go to sleep at all.

  • Moscow Melts in Record Warm Spell
    Thursday, January 13, 2005. Page 3.
    http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2005/01/13/011.html
    Ice sculptors, under sheets to prevent their work from melting, carving out blocks of ice at the Moscow Zoo on Wednesday. The city is seeing its warmest spell in January in recorded history.
    Moscow is enjoying the warmest January in recorded history, and the weather is expected to continue to look more like April for the next few days as balmy Atlantic winds sweep across European Russia and keep temperatures comfortably above freezing.
    "These have been the warmest first 10 days of January since the beginning of weather monitoring in the country in 1879," Tatyana Pozdnyakova of the Moscow weather bureau said Wednesday. "Usually air temperatures begin rising above zero after March 27. This temperature is characteristic of the first days of April."
    The average temperature from Jan. 1 to Jan. 10 was 0.5 degrees Celsius, while the normal temperature would be minus 8.5 degrees, Pozdnyakova said.
    Temperatures hit a high of 5.2 degrees on Sunday, breaking a record of 2.9 degrees set for Jan. 9 in 1976, she said. A record was also set Saturday when temperature rose to 5.1 degrees. The previous record for Jan. 8 was 3.7 degrees in 1932.
    The first 10 days of 2005 may be the warmest spell in more than a century, but the temperature never reached the record high of 5.6 degrees set in 1992.
    The warm weather is expected to last through Saturday, with a chance of snowfall Sunday and Monday. By the middle of next week, temperatures will be fluctuating between minus 5 and minus 15 degrees, Pozdnyakova said.
    Warm air traveled to Russia with the same Atlantic storm that brought gale-force winds and flooding this month to large swaths of Europe, including St. Petersburg and the Pskov and Kaliningrad regions, Pozdnyakova said.
    A low pressure front drew air from North Africa and the Equator over the Atlantic and spread it over Europe so quickly that the air was prevented from cooling, she said.
    This winter is so warm that a bear in St. Petersburg Zoo has woken from her hibernation two months early, while another has not gone to sleep at all, Interfax reported Wednesday. A major hockey match was postponed in St. Petersburg on Tuesday because the rink melted, Sovietsky Sport reported.
    In Moscow, several ice sculpture exhibitions have melted, including the Olimpiiskaya Simfoniya on Vasilievsky Spusk that opened Jan. 5 to tout Moscow's bid to host the 2012 Olympics.
    Similar warm spells occur every five to seven years, the Federal Weather Monitoring Center said Tuesday.
    Pozdnyakova said the warmth this year may be an effect of global warming. "Climatic changes chiefly affect winters," she said.
    Moscow is better known for its bitterly cold winters, which are credited with helping Russians defeat Nazi troops when temperatures dropped to minus 43 degrees during the Battle of Moscow on Jan. 3, 1942, and for driving Napoleon's army out of Moscow in 1812.
    Moscow's coldest spell for January was recorded in 1893, when the temperature averaged minus 23 degrees.
     

  • Syria-Russia Missile Deal Cause Of Russia-Israel Crisis
    By Haaretz Service
    http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/526031.html
    1-12-5
    A recent mystery crisis in Israeli-Russia relations - the subject of wide speculation with its details remaining classified - was sparked by Moscow's plans to sell Syria missiles capable of striking at nearly any target within Israel, the Moscow daily Kommersant reported Wednesday. It said the Iskander-E missile has a target radius capable of reaching nearly all of Israel within reach, including the nuclear reactor site outside Dimona.
    Only the southern Negev and Eilat would be out of range.
    Israeli military officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, have expressed concern that the missiles would get into the hands of Hezbollah and disrupt the military balance in the Middle East.
    The Russian daily reported that Israel recalled its ambassador in Russia over the deal.
    Israel has briefed the American administration on the crisis in its relations with Russia. Israel did not ask the United States to intervene, even though the Americans have dealt with this matter in the past.
    Consultations held by the political echelon in Jerusalem resulted in a decision to attempt to solve the matter through direct talks with Moscow, and not to get help from the U.S. for the time being.
    Meanwhile, tension is mounting in Jerusalem ahead of Syrian President Bashar Assad's first visit to Moscow, on January 24. Assad will meet with President Vladimir Putin and discuss bilateral cooperation in various fields. Putin is scheduled to meet with U.S. President George W. Bush about a month later in Slovakia.
    The Kommersant report was based on recent Haaretz accounts of a severe crisis in relations between the Sharon and Putin governments.
    The Iskander is a relatively new weapons systems, having been developed in the 1990s. Two years ago, Damascus sought to purchase 18 of the systems, but the matter was delayed by final testing of the missile. The tests were completed in August.
    Rumors of cause of crisis As reported in Haaretz last week, the crisis in Israeli-Russian relations was the focus of a special meeting that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon convened 10 days ago with Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz and the heads of the intelligence community. The meeting ended with the Foreign Ministry being assigned to take charge of reviewing the matter and suggesting ways of resolving the problem.
    A first discussion took place early this week at the Foreign Ministry, with representatives of all relevant branches in attendance, but no recommendations have been submitted yet to the political echelon.
    Political sources in Jerusalem Tuesday denied the Channel 2 news report that the reason for the diplomatic crisis is Putin's anger over alleged intervention in the Ukrainian elections by people in Israel, and their support for his political rivals. The political sources said the problem stemmed from something completely different which concerns Russia's conduct.

  • Four Endangered Whales Found Dead in the Past Six Weeks; Marine Scientists Investigating
    The Associated Press
    BOSTON Jan 13, 2005 — Four endangered whales have been found dead in the past six weeks including two just this week, scientists said.
    A dead North Atlantic right whale was spotted off the coast of Georgia on Wednesday, a day after one was found off Nantucket Island in Massachusetts. Two were found in late December off Virginia and Nantucket.
    Tony LaCasse, a spokesman for the New England Aquarium, said biologists hope to perform autopsies on the whales found this week to determine the causes of death.
    "What we do know is losing that number of animals in such a short period of time puts us generally on a slippery slope to extinction," he said.
    There are currently between 325 and 350 of the whales known to scientists. That's an improvement from 2000, when the population was counted at about 300.

  • Pentagon reveals rejected chemical weapons
    15 January 2005
    From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
    THE Pentagon considered developing a host of non-lethal chemical weapons that would disrupt discipline and morale among enemy troops, newly declassified documents reveal.
    Most bizarre among the plans was one for the development of an "aphrodisiac" chemical weapon that would make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other. Provoking widespread homosexual behaviour among troops would cause a "distasteful but completely non-lethal" blow to morale, the proposal says.
    Other ideas included chemical weapons that attract swarms of enraged wasps or angry rats to troop positions, making them uninhabitable. Another was to develop a chemical that caused "severe and lasting halitosis", making it easy to identify guerrillas trying to blend in with civilians. There was also the idea of making troops' skin unbearably sensitive to sunlight.
    The proposals, from the US Air Force Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, date from 1994. The lab sought Pentagon funding for research into what it called "harassing, annoying and 'bad guy'-identifying chemicals". The plans have been posted online by the Sunshine Project, an organisation that exposes research into chemical and biological weapons.
    Spokesman Edward Hammond says it was not known if the proposed $7.5 million, six-year research plan was ever pursued.
    Close this window
    Printed on Fri Jan 14 18:50:18 GMT 2005

  • Earth's pronounced wobble gave advance warning of quake!
    TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ FRIDAY, JANUARY 07, 2005 09:45:09 PM ]
    http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/984135.cms
    AHMEDABAD: Mother Earth may have given out warning signals much before the December 26 earthquake of 9.0 magnitude that struck off Sumatra in Indonesia, unleashing tsunami waves,which caused destruction all over the Asian continent.
    A leading Indian seismologist, Dr J G Negi said that the observations made between October 15 and November 30 by the US-based International Earth Rotation Service (IERS) had revealed early signals of increase in the earth's wobble. "During this period, the wobble deviation from the expected position for this period was approximately 0.75 degrees which is significant," he said.
    These wobbles are changing rotation of the earth and are known as ‘Chandler Wobble' with cycles of 14 months and 6.5 years. Earth's wobble is normally supposed to increase during monsoon because of increased oceanic and atmospheric circulations and decrease around this time. But the wobble was more pronounced before the December 26 earthquake.
    These wobble deviations were followed by earthquake in the southern hemisphere near Macquarie Trench near New Zealand on December 23 with a magnitude of 8.1. The earthquakes above 8 magnitude are called great earthquakes and occur once a year on an average. But on December 26, only three days later, the northern hemisphere experienced an quake of 9.0 magnitude in northern Sumatra.
    "The wobble of the earth's rotation clearly anticipated these two big events," Negi said. He recalled that there is a revolutionary theory, which was given in 1967 by L Mansinha and D L E Smiley, two scientists from Canada,which says that wobbles are co-seismic with great earthquakes.
    In the case of the recent events in December 2004, Negi said, "The big question is whether earth got jolted after these two earthquakes or did the prior jolting of the planet, as was shown in the increased wobble, build up pressure to cause great earthquakes in both the hemispheres within three days."
    It is already known that the earthquake that unleashed deadly tidal waves on Asia was so powerful it made the earth wobble on its axis. US geological survey expert Ken Hudnut said last week "We can detect very slight motions of the earth and I would expect that the earth wobbled in its orbit when the earthquake occurred due the massive amount of energy exerted and the sudden shift in mass."
    Negi says such post-quake wobbling was expected as an earthquake of such magnitude would "change the natural oscillations of the earth." These oscillations, he said, change even during the monsoon when very large water bodies are formed.
    "The earth is not a steady ball and wobbling can happen during change in the movement of inertia when the mass starts moving differently with respect to the centre of the earth," he said.
    However, the Indian scientist now feels that the Mansinha-Smiley theory on the co-relation between wobbling and earthquakes should be studied in greater detail as it could open up new avenues in earthquake prediction. Besides, he said, the IERS data is showing an increase in oscillations in the earth's rotation and "this shows that the earth is more disturbed than before."
     
  • Osama bin Laden - - Had Some Help
    Category: News & Opinion (General) Topic: Government
    Synopsis: A research summary for educational purposes in "Liberty Issues"
    Source: Original Summary
    Published: January 9, 2005 Author: ratcat
    For Education and Discussion Only. Not for Commercial Use.
    http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=news_politics&Number=293256097#Post293256097
     According to the U.S. government and the 9/11 Commission, an Islamic man in Afghanistan, known as Osama bin Laden, used his terrorist organization, known as al Qaeda (haters of freedom) to carry out the terrorist attacks on September 11. Let's look at what was involved in bringing about one of the most diabolical terrorist attacks in history.
    The players:
    Osama bin Laden - freedom fighter in Afghanistan, established military training camps in Afghanistan and forced out the Soviets with the full support and funding of the U.S. Congress and the CIA. Al Qaeda fighters were later used in the Balkans by the Clinton Administration to overthrow Serbia.[1]
    Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld - presides over NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, which uses ground-based radar, airborne radar, satellites, fighter aircraft, "proven command structures" and intelligence capabilities to enforce control of the skies over the United States and Canada.[2]
    The President of the United States George W. Bush - presides over the Pentagon, NORAD, and all intelligence agencies.
    Dennis Hastert (R,IL), Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives - has oversight over executive agencies to ensure that taxpayer money is used legally and appropriately.
    The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) - collects, evaluates, and disseminates foreign intelligence to assist the President and senior U.S. Government policymakers in making decisions relating to national security.
    Vice President of the United States Dick Cheney - directed the response to 9/11 from the White House emergency bunker.
    The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) - the investigative arm of the Dept. of Justice, responsible to protect and defend the United States against terrorist and foreign intelligence threats and to uphold and enforce the criminal federal laws of the United States.
    The National Security Agency (NSA) - part of the Dept. of Defense, responsible for the collection and analysis of global communications, including radio and the internet. Operates Echelon to monitor civilian telephone, fax and data traffic.
    John Ashcroft, Attorney General of the United States, Dept of Justice (DOJ) - investigates and prosecutes violations of federal laws, represents the interests of the president.
    Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) - responsible for the safety of civil aviation, regulates and controls the air traffic system, regulates commercial air space.
    * Fifteen of the nineteen alleged hijackers were able to obtain visas at the U.S Consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia so they could enter the United States. Three used Visa Express where no interviews were required.[3] The Jeddah Consulate had previously been used by the CIA to bring bin Laden recruits into the U.S. for training, to be returned to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets.[4]
    * In June of 2001, the FAA rescinded a 40-year-old rule allowing pilots to carry guns into the cockpit.[5]
    * Sec. of Defense Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs of Staff changed the long-standing rules on how hijackings should be handled on June 1, 2001.[6] Effective after that date, NORAD had to obtain approval directly from Rumsfeld in order to respond to off-course aircraft - which as a matter of routine occurred 67 times in the 8 months prior to 9/11. On the morning of 9/11, Rumsfeld was in his "usual intelligence briefing" in the Pentagon and "continued his briefing" [7] until he smelled smoke in his office.
    * After the alleged al Qaeda operatives entered the U.S., they entered flight schools at several different locations. Several attended U.S. military training facilities, such as the Defense Language School at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama,[8] and the Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida.[9]
    * Dennis Hastert, Speaker of the House, and several other members of Congress refused to meet with FBI agents who wanted to tell what they knew about a planned terrorist attack on lower Manhattan. John Ashcroft's Dept. of Justice intervened. David Schippers, Chicago attorney and previous Clinton impeachment investigator, called several members of Congress (including Hastert) begging them to take testimony from the FBI agents before the terrorist act occurred.[10] The agents were later threatened with prosecution by the DOJ if they went public with what they knew.[11]
    * In July of 2001, a CIA official was reported to have met with Osama bin Laden, who was receiving treatment for kidney problems at an American hospital in Dubai. France's Le Figaro newspaper and Radio France International reported that bin Laden checked into the American Hospital Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, a 100-bed, acute-care general hospital, July 4 and stayed until July 14. He arrived from Quetta, Pakistan, accompanied by his personal doctor, four bodyguards and a male nurse. Bin Laden received many visitors: local dignitaries and family members, including the CIA agent,[12] Larry Mitchell, who was widely recognized locally. Mitchell was recalled to the U.S. shortly thereafter. At the time, bin Laden was wanted by the U.S. government for possible involvement in the USS Cole bombing. The CIA dismissed the report as "absurd." When questioned, both news agencies stood by their reports.[13] The urologist who is said to have treated bin Laden, Dr. Terry Callaway, refused to answer any questions.[12]
    * An FBI informant in San Diego, California, provided housing and assistance to two of the alleged hijackers: al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi. The informant claimed he had no way of knowing that they were going to carry out a terrorist attack [14] and had not provided their full names to the FBI. When their names were placed on the Terrorist Watch List in Aug, 2001, the FBI couldn't find al-Mihdhar even though his name was in the San Diego phone book [15] and they had one of their informants housing him. When the Joint House-Senate Intelligence Committees wanted to question the FBI informant about his role, the FBI refused. To this day, the informant has not been questioned. A senior member of the FBI’s Congressional Affairs Staff stated “the Administration would not sanction a staff interview with the source." The FBI provided the informant with a Dept. of Justice lawyer at taxpayers' expense.[16] Of course, they didn't need to worry about the 9/11 Commission demanding to question him.
    * The CIA did not put al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi's names on the Terrorist Watch List until August 24, 2001, even though they had information identifying them as suspected terrorists with visas to enter the U.S. for 18 months previous.[17] The CIA began surveillance on Khaled al-Mihdhar in late 1999. In testimony before the Joint Congressional Inquiry, CIA Director Tenet stated that the CIA had learned after 9/11 that "in the mid-90s, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar traveled to Bosnia" [18] where they participated in U.S.-funded clashes between Muslims and Serbs.[1] At that time, the Clinton Administration overthrew the Serbian government.
    * The NSA delayed translation and dissemination of information obtained in wiretapped phone calls concerning al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi until after 9/11. The NSA had information associating al-Hazmi with the bin Laden network. NSA Director Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden said even though the NSA did not share the 1998-99 interceptions, U.S. intelligence by the year 2000 had al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar "in our sights. We knew of their association with al Qaeda."[19] In addition, the NSA intercepted on Sept. 10, 2001, the messages, "The match begins tomorrow" and "Tomorrow is zero hour" but didn't translate them until Sept. 12.[20]
    * FBI and military intelligence agents in Washington were prevented from investigating members of the Bin Laden family in the U.S. prior to 9/11. FBI documents, marked secret and coded 199, leaked to BBC Newsnight and The Guardian in Nov. 2001, show that an investigation of Abdullah bin Laden and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth was shut down. Intelligence sources in Washington told the Guardian: "There were always constraints on investigating the Saudis." They said the restrictions became worse after the Bush administration took over.[21] On June 1, 2004, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth in Alexandria, Virginia was raided by agents of the FBI, U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Joint Terrorism Task Force.[22]
    * Aug. 6, 2001: Pres. Bush received a “presidential daily brief” in Crawford, Texas, that mentioned the possibility of an airline hijacking as a domestic threat.[23]
    * FBI agents in Minneapolis were denied a warrant on a suspected Islamic terrorist said to be the 20th hijacker. Zacarias Moussaoui, a French Muslim, was arrested on immigration charges on Aug. 16, 2001 after an official at the Pan Am International Flight Academy he was attending called the FAA and FBI saying, "Do you realize how serious this is? This man wants training on a 747. A 747 fully loaded with fuel could be used as a weapon!"[24] The FBI agents wanted to search Moussaoui's computer and personal effects but were denied a warrant by FBI headquarters. The agents requested information from French Intelligence, which indicated that Moussaoui had terrorist connections with al Qaeda. This information was forwarded to FBI headquarters and eventually to the Justice Dept. (DOJ) where they declined to submit it to the FISA court to obtain a warrant on a foreign national. On the day after 9/11, the same information was submitted to the FISA court and a warrant was issued.[25] Michael Maltbie, the FBI supervisory special agent who delayed the request for a warrant was later promoted to field supervisor.[26]
    * In Aug, 2001, Raytheon engineers successfully landed a unpiloted Boeing 727 by remote control at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. The purpose of the pilotless system was to allow ground controllers to take over the controls of a hijacked aircraft.[27] A combination of GPS Satellite and ground signals were used to orient the aircraft. Raytheon is the manufacturer of the pilotless Global Hawk surveillance aircraft. On Sept 12, 2001, Raytheon issued a statement that four of their high-level officials and engineers were listed among the dead passengers of Flight 11 which was reported as hijacked and crashed on 9/11.[28]
    * In the days before 9/11, unusually high numbers of put options were purchased for the stocks of AMR Corp. and UAL Corp., the parent companies of American Airlines and United Airlines. Investors who engage in such short-selling are betting that the price of the stock will fall. Between September 6 and 7, the Chicago Board Options Exchange saw purchases of 4,744 put options on United Airlines, but only 396 call options. Assuming that 4,000 of the options were bought by people with advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, the "insiders" would have profited by almost $5 million. The Chicago Board Options Exchange announced that it was investigating reports of unusual trading activity prior to 9/11.[29] According to the Associated Press, unusually high levels of put options were also purchased on Raytheon, Continental, Delta, Northwest, Southwest, USAirways, and Boeing. Security and Exchange Commission Chairman Harvey Pitt told Congress that the agency's "No. 1 priority" was to pursue its worldwide investigation of possible trading by people associated with the terrorists. If such trading did occur, "We will do everything within our power to track those people down and bring them to justice,"[30] In July, 2004, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced that it "did not develop any evidence suggesting that anyone who had advance knowledge of the September 11 attacks traded on the basis of that information."[31][32]
    * On the morning of 9/11, Sen. Bob Graham (head of Senate Intelligence Committee) and Rep. Porter Goss (head of House Intelligence Committee) had breakfast with General Mahmoud Ahmad, head of Pakistani Intelligence, who had earlier directed that $100,000 be wired to Mohamad Atta, terrorist ringleader.[33]
    * Numerous military exercises, war games and anti-terrorism drills were scheduled for 9/11. FAA and NORAD tracking radar were unable to identify real aircraft from simulated war game aircraft.
    - OPERATION NORTHERN VIGILANCE: Planned months in advance of 9/11. It ensured that on 9/11 NORAD jet fighters were transferred to Alaska and Canada to monitor a Russian Air Force exercise, reducing the number of military aircraft available to protect the east coast.[34] Simulated information for the exercise was fed into NORAD radar screens.
    - BIOWARFARE EXERCISE TRIPOD II: referred to by Rudolph Giuliani in his public testimony to the 9/11 Commission (no transcript has been released to the public). FEMA arrived in New York City on September 10th to set up a command post at Pier 29 to prepare for a biowarfare exercise scheduled for September 12. As a result, The FEMA Urban Search and Rescue Team was in place on 9/11.[35]
    - OPERATION VIGILANT GUARDIAN: simulated hijacked planes in the northeastern U.S. Lt. Col. Dawne Deskins, NORAD unit's airborne control and warning officer, was overseeing the exercise. At 8:40 am she took a call from Boston Center which said it had a hijacked airliner. Her first words were, "It must be part of the exercise."[36]
    - OPERATION NORTHERN GUARDIAN: Few details are available but it appears to have involved deployment of aircraft from Langley Air Force Base to Iceland.[37] In late August, 2001, six jets and 70 people deployed to Iceland for Operation Northern Guardian. Another six jets and 115 people deployed to Turkey to enforce the northern Iraqi no-fly zone. The members in Operation Northern Guardian in Iceland returned Dec. 3rd, 2001.[38]
    - John Fulton, CIA, gave a presentation at a Law Enforcement Seminar on June 6, 2002 that on the morning of September 11th 2001, he and his team at the CIA were running a pre-planned simulation to explore the emergency response issues that would be created if a plane were to strike a building.[39][40]
    - The FAA ordered the Pittsburgh air traffic control tower evacuated at 9:49 a.m. Flight 93 crashed (or was shot down) in Shanksville, Pennsylvania at 10:06. [41]
    - United Flight 175 (second aircraft to hit the Trade Towers) changed transponder codes (its flight identification) twice in one minute.[42]
    -Not one of the four hijacked pilots entered the 4-digit hijack code to signal they had been hijacked.[43]
    - At least six air traffic controllers who dealt with two of the hijacked airliners made a tape recording that same day describing the events, but the tape was destroyed by the quality-assurance manager without anyone making a transcript of it or even listening to it.[44] The manager crushed the cassette in his hand, shredded the tape and dropped the pieces into different trash cans around the building, according to the inspector general of the Transportation Dept.
    * The ignored testimony of Sec. of Transportation Norman Mineta: "During the time that the airplane was coming into the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President, 'The plane is 50 miles out.' 'The plane is 30 miles out.' And when it got down to 'the plane is 10 miles out,' the young man also said to the Vice President, 'Do the orders still stand?' And the Vice President turned and whipped his neck around and said, 'Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?"[45]
     
    Blue line to green arrow: depicts the high-speed spiral dive of Flight 77, turning 330 degrees at 530 MPH to strike the part of the Pentagon being renovated.[46] Red arrows depict easier, higher populated targets bypassed by the "terrorists."
    * The official story is that the black boxes (voice and data recorders) from Flight 11 and Flight 175 were never retrieved from the World Trade Tower wreckage. However, firefighters Mike Bellone and Nicholas DeMasi say they assisted the FBI in retrieving three of the four black boxes in December, 2001. When recently interviewed by the American Free Press, Bellone said, "They confronted me and told me not to say anything. I said, 'Give me a good reason.' When they couldn't, I told them I wouldn't shut up about it. Why should I? I have nothing to hide and nothing to gain. It's the truth and Nick and I are sticking to our story as we always have."[47]
    _____________________________________________________
    [1]Craig, Sen. Larry E. and Jade West, "Clinton-Approved Iranian Arms Transfers Help Turn Bosnia into Militant Islamic Base," U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee, Jan 16, 1997, Link
    [2]NORAD website, www.norad.mil
    [3]Pound, Edward, "The Easy Path to the United States for Three of the 9/11 Hijackers," U.S. News and World Report, Dec 12, 2001, Link
    [4]Palast, Greg, "Did Bush Turn a Blind Eye to Terrorism?", BBC, Nov 6, 2001, Link
    [5]Dougherty, Jon, "Armed Pilots Banned 2 Months Before 9-11," WorldNetDaily, May 16, 2002, Link
    [6]Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Instruction, "AIRCRAFT PIRACY (HIJACKING)," J-3 CJCSI 3610.01A, June 1, 2001, PDF Link
    [7]Sheehy, Gail, "Four 9/11 Moms Battle Bush," The New York Observer, Aug 25, 2003, Link
    [8]Reza, H.G. and Evan Halper, "Suspected Hijackers: 19 Quiet Lives That Shattered the World," Los Angeles Times, Sept 15, 2001, Link
    [9]Wehrfritz, George and Catharine Skipp, "Alleged Hijackers May Have Trained at U.S. Bases, " MSNBC, Newsweek, Sept 15, 2001, Link
    [10]"Interview of David Schippers, Attorney," Alex Jones Radio Show, Oct 10, 2001, Link
    [11]"Wall Street Journal: FBI Director Mueller Should Resign," NewsMax.com, May 31, 2002, Link
    [12]Richard, Alexandra, "The CIA met Bin Laden while undergoing Treatment at an American Hospital last July in Dubai," Le Figaro, Oct 11, 2001, Link
    [13]Bryant, Elizabeth, "Radio Reports New CIA-Bin Laden Details," Radio France International, UPI, Washington Times, Nov 1, 2001, Link
    [14]Thornton, Kelly, "Chance to Foil 9/11 Plot Lost Here, Report Finds," San Diego Union Tribune, July 25, 2003, Link
    [15]Isikoff, Michael and Daniel Klaidman, "The Hijackers We Let Escape," MSN, Newsweek, June 5, 2002, Link
    [16]Graham, Sen. Bob, Intelligence Matters - – the CIA, the FBI, Saudi Arabia, and the Failure of America’s War on Terror, Random House, 2004
    [17]Hill, Eleanor, Staff Director, "The Intelligence Community's Knowledge of the September 11 Hijackers Prior to September 11, 2001," U.S. Senate Select Committee Investigation on Intelligence, Sept 20, 2002, Link
    [18]"Unclassified Version of Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet's Testimony before the Joint Congressional Inquiry into Terrorist Attacks Against the United States," June 18, 2002, link
    [19]"NSA Knew About 9/11 Hijackers Two Years Before Attacks," CNEWS, Canada, July 23, 2003, Hayden Testimony before the U.S. Joint Congressional Inquiry, Link
    [20]Bash, Dana, "Messages Intercepted by U.S. on Sept. 10 Revealed," CNN, Link
    [21]Palast, Greg, "Officials Told to 'Back Off' on Saudis before September 11," BBC, Newsnight, The Guardian (London), Nov 17, 2001, Link
    [22]Markon, Jerry, "U.S. Raids N. Va. Office Of Saudi-Based Charity," Washington Post, June 2, 2004, Link
    [23]Isikoff, Michael and Michael Hirsh, "What Went Wrong," MSNBC, Newsweek, May 27, 2002, Link
    [24]Gordon, Greg, "Eagan Flight Trainer Wouldn't Let Unease about Moussaoui Rest," Minneapolis Star Tribune, Dec. 21, 2004, LinkLink
    [26]Sperry, Paul, "Has FBI Promoted 9-11 Ball-dropper?" WorldnetDaily, June 7, 2002, Link
    [27]"US Safety System: Kidnapped Machines Land Independently, " Der Spiegel [German newspaper], October 28, 2001, Link
    Link
    Note: Holloman is a German Air Force Base in the U.S.
    [28]"Raytheon Mourns Loss of Employees," Press Release, Sept. 12, 2001, Link
    [29]"International Probe of Unusual Trading Before Attacks," Associated Press, Sept. 19, 2001, Link
    [30]"Stock-trading probe expands to Canada," San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 3, 2001, Link
    [31] Zwirn, Ed, "No 9/11 ''Insider Profits,'' SEC Finds," CFO.com, July 27, 2004, Link
    [32] See also "Suspicious Trading Activity," 911review.org/Wget/ Link
    [33]Escobar, Pepe, "9-11 and the Smoking Gun," Asian Times, Apr. 8, 2004, Link and Link
    [34] Simmie, Scott, "The Scene at NORAD on Sept. 11: Playing Russian War Games ," Toronto Star, Dec 9, 2001, Link
    [35] Holland, Gregor, "Long Debunked 'Rumor' Validated by Giuliani," UnansweredQuestions.org/Scoop, June 3, 2004, Link
    [36] Seeley, Hart, "Amid Crisis Simulation, 'We Were Suddenly No-Kidding Under Attack'," Newhouse News Service, Jan. 25, 2002, Link
    [37] Pevey, Tech. Sgt. Marina, "71st Fighter Squadron Wins Air- Superiority Award," June 13, 2002, Air Combat Command News Service, Link
    [38]Frankenfield, Capt. Ben, “27th Wins AF Best Air Superiority Squadron,” July 1, 2003, Link
    [39] Seminar Presented by the National Law Enforcement and Security Institute, Lecturer John Fulton, CIA, June 6, 2002, Link
    [40] Lumpkin, John, "Agency Was to Crash Plane on 9/11," Associated Press, First Coast News, Aug 22, 2002, Link
    [41]Ackerman, Jan, "Local Officials Rethink Recently Made Plans to Deal with Terrorism," Pittsburgh Post Gazette, Sept 23, 2001, Link
    [42] 9/11 Commission Report, W.N. Norton and Co., 2004, page 7 and 21, Link
    [43]Johnson, Glen, "Probe Reconstructs Horror, Calculated Attacks on Planes," Boston Globe, Nov 23, 2001, Link
    [44]Wald, Matthew, “FAA Official Scrapped Tape of 9/11 Controllers’ Statements,” New York Times, May 6, 2004, Link
    [45] "Testimony of Sec. of Transportation Norman Mineta before the 911 Commission," May 23, 2003, Link
    [46] 9/11 Commission Report, W.N. Norton and Co., 2004, page 9-10.
    [47]Szymanski, Greg, "Black Box Cover-Up," American Free Press, Dec. 12, 2004, Link
    Edited by ratcat on 01/09/05 02:15 PM.
     

  • Explosive BBC Doc Exposes Decades-Old Neocon Deceits Hyping Terror For Fun, Profit - And Power
    By Thom Hartmann
    12-28-4
    http://www.silt3.com/index.php?id=573
    What if there really was no need for much - or even most - of the Cold War?
    What if, in fact, the Cold War had been kept alive for two decades based on phony WMD threats?
    What if, similarly, the War On Terror was largely a scam, and the administration was hyping it to seem larger-than-life?
    What if our "enemy" represented a real but relatively small threat posed by rogue and criminal groups well outside the mainstream of Islam?
    What if that hype was done largely to enhance the power, electability, and stature of George W. Bush and Tony Blair?
    And what if the world was to discover the most shocking dimensions of these twin deceits - that the same men promulgated them in the 1970s and today?
    It happened.
    The myth-shattering event took place in England the first three weeks of October, when the BBC aired a three-hour documentary written and produced by Adam Curtis, titled "The Power of Nightmares http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/3755686.stm
    If the emails and phone calls many of us in the US received from friends in the UK - and debate in the pages of publications like The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,12780,1327904,00.html are any indicator, this was a seismic event, one that may have even provoked a hasty meeting between Blair and Bush a few weeks later. According to this carefully researched and well-vetted BBC documentary, Richard Nixon, following in the steps of his mentor and former boss Dwight D. Eisenhower, believed it was possible to end the Cold War and eliminate fear from the national psyche. The nation need no longer be afraid of communism or the Soviet Union.
    Nixon worked out a truce with the Soviets, meeting their demands for safety as well as the US needs for security, and then announced to Americans that they need no longer be afraid. In 1972, President Richard Nixon returned from the Soviet Union with a treaty worked out by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the beginning of a process Kissinger called "détente."
    On June 1, 1972, Nixon gave a speech in which he said, "Last Friday, in Moscow, we witnessed the beginning of the end of that era which began in 1945. With this step, we have enhanced the security of both nations. We have begun to reduce the level of fear, by reducing the causes of fear-for our two peoples, and for all peoples in the world." But Nixon left amid scandal and Ford came in, and Ford's Secretary of Defense (Donald Rumsfeld) and Chief of Staff (Dick Cheney) believed it was intolerable that Americans might no longer be bound by fear.
    Without fear, how could Americans be manipulated? Rumsfeld and Cheney began a concerted effort - first secretly and then openly - to undermine Nixon's treaty for peace and to rebuild the state of fear and, thus, reinstate the Cold War. And these two men - 1974 Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Ford Chief of Staff Dick Cheney - did this by claiming that the Soviets had secret weapons of mass destruction that the president didn't know about, that the CIA didn't know about, that nobody but them knew about. And, they said, because of those weapons, the US must redirect billions of dollars away from domestic programs and instead give the money to defense contractors for whom these two men would one day work.
    "The Soviet Union has been busy," Defense Secretary Rumsfeld explained to America in 1976. "They've been busy in terms of their level of effort; they've been busy in terms of the actual weapons they 've been producing; they've been busy in terms of expanding production rates; they've been busy in terms of expanding their institutional capability to produce additional weapons at additional rates; they've been busy in terms of expanding their capability to increasingly improve the sophistication of those weapons. Year after year after year, they've been demonstrating that they have steadiness of purpose. They're purposeful about what they're doing."
    The CIA strongly disagreed, calling Rumsfeld's position a "complete fiction" and pointing out that the Soviet Union was disintegrating from within, could barely afford to feed their own people, and would collapse within a decade or two if simply left alone. But Rumsfeld and Cheney wanted Americans to believe there was something nefarious going on, something we should be very afraid of. To this end, they convinced President Ford to appoint a commission including their old friend Paul Wolfowitz to prove that the Soviets were up to no good.
    According to Curtis' BBC documentary, Wolfowitz's group, known as "Team B," came to the conclusion that the Soviets had developed several terrifying new weapons of mass destruction, featuring a nuclear-armed submarine fleet that used a sonar system that didn't depend on sound and was, thus, undetectable with our current technology. The BBC's documentarians asked Dr. Anne Cahn of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency during that time, her thoughts on Rumsfeld's, Cheney's, and Wolfowitz's 1976 story of the secret Soviet WMDs. Here's a clip from a transcript of that BBC documentary:
    "Dr ANNE CAHN, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 1977-80: They couldn't say that the Soviets had acoustic means of picking up American submarines, because they couldn't find it. So they said, well maybe they have a non-acoustic means of making our submarine fleet vulnerable. But there was no evidence that they had a non-acoustic system. They're saying, 'we can't find evidence that they're doing it the way that everyone thinks they're doing it, so they must be doing it a different way. We don't know what that different way is, but they must be doing it.'
    "INTERVIEWER (off-camera): Even though there was no evidence.
    "CAHN: Even though there was no evidence.
    "INTERVIEWER: So they're saying there, that the fact that the weapon doesn't exist.
    "CAHN: Doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. It just means that we haven't found it."
    The moderator of the BBC documentary then notes:
    "What Team B accused the CIA of missing was a hidden and sinister reality in the Soviet Union. Not only were there many secret weapons the CIA hadn't found, but they were wrong about many of those they could observe, such as the Soviet air defenses. The CIA were convinced that these were in a state of collapse, reflecting the growing economic chaos in the Soviet Union. Team B said that this was actually a cunning deception by the Soviet régime. The air-defense system worked perfectly. But the only evidence they produced to prove this was the official Soviet training manual, which proudly asserted that their air-defense system was fully integrated and functioned flawlessly. The CIA accused Team B of moving into a fantasy world."
    Nonetheless, as Melvin Goodman, head of the CIA's Office of Soviet Affairs, 1976-87, noted in the BBC documentary,
    "Rumsfeld won that very intense, intense political battle that was waged in Washington in 1975 and 1976. Now, as part of that battle, Rumsfeld and others, people such as Paul Wolfowitz, wanted to get into the CIA. And their mission was to create a much more severe view of the Soviet Union, Soviet intentions, Soviet views about fighting and winning a nuclear war."
    Although Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld's assertions of powerful new Soviet WMDs were unproven - they said the lack of proof proved that undetectable weapons existed - they nonetheless used their charges to push for dramatic escalations in military spending to selected defense contractors, a process that continued through the Reagan administration.
    But, trillions of dollars and years later, it was proven that they had been wrong all along, and the CIA had been right. Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz lied to America in the 1970s about Soviet WMDs.
    Not only do we now know that the Soviets didn't have any new and impressive WMDs, but we also now know that they were, in fact, decaying from within, ripe for collapse any time, regardless of what the US did - just as the CIA (and anybody who visited Soviet states - as I had - during that time could easily predict). The Soviet economic and political system wasn't working, and their military was disintegrating. As arms-control expert Cahn noted in the documentary of those 1970s claims by Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Rumsfeld:
    "I would say that all of it was fantasy. I mean, they looked at radars out in Krasnoyarsk and said, 'This is a laser beam weapon,' when in fact it was nothing of the sort. ... And if you go through most of Team B's specific allegations about weapons systems, and you just examine them one by one, they were all wrong."
    "INTERVIEWER: All of them?
    "CAHN: All of them.
    "INTERVIEWER: Nothing true?
    "CAHN: I don't believe anything in [Wolfowitz's 1977] Team B was really true."
    But the neocons said it was true, and organized a group - The Committee on the Present Danger http://www.fightingterror.org - to promote their worldview. The Committee produced documentaries, publications, and provided guests for national talk shows and news reports. They worked hard to whip up fear and encourage increases in defense spending, particularly for sophisticated weapons systems offered by the defense contractors for whom neocons would later become lobbyists.
    And they succeeded in recreating an atmosphere of fear in the United States, and making themselves and their defense contractor friends richer than most of the kingdoms of the world.
    The Cold War was good for business, and good for the political power of its advocates, from Rumsfeld to Reagan.
    Similarly, according to this documentary, the War On Terror is the same sort of scam, run for many of the same reasons, by the same people. And by hyping it - and then invading Iraq - we may well be bringing into reality terrors and forces that previously existed only on the margins and with very little power to harm us.
    Curtis' documentary suggests that the War On Terror is just as much a fiction as were the super-WMDs this same group of neocons said the Soviets had in the 70s. He suggests we've done more to create terror than to fight it. That the risk was really quite minimal (at least until we invaded Iraq), and the terrorists are - like most terrorist groups - simply people on the fringes, rather easily dispatched by their own people. He even points out that Al Qaeda itself was a brand we invented, later adopted by bin Laden because we'd put so many millions into creating worldwide name recognition for it.
    Watching "The Terror of Nightmares" is like taking the Red Pill in the movie The Matrix.
    It's the story of idealism gone wrong, of ideologies promoted in the US by Leo Strauss and his followers (principally Wolfowitz, Feith, and Pearle), and in the Muslim world by bin Laden's mentor, Ayman Zawahiri. Both sought to create a utopian world through world domination; both believe that the ends justify the means; both are convinced that "the people" must be frightened into embracing religion and nationalism for the greater good of morality and a stable state. Each needs the other in order to hold power.
    Whatever your plans are for tonight or tomorrow, clip three hours out of them and take the Red Pill. Get a pair of headphones (the audio is faint), plug them into your computer, and visit an unofficial archive of the Curtis' BBC documentary at the Information Clearing House website http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/video1037.htm (The first hour of the program, in a more viewable format, is also available here http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/november2004/ 121104powerofnightmares.htm
    For those who prefer to read things online, an unofficial but complete transcript is on this Belgian site http://www.acutor.be/silt/index.php?id=573
    But be forewarned: You'll never see political reality - and certainly never hear the words of the Bush or Blair administrations - the same again.
    ===
    Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. http://www.thomhartmann.com

  • The making of the terror myth
    Since September 11 Britain has been warned of the 'inevitability' of catastrophic terrorist attack. But has the danger been exaggerated? A major new TV documentary claims that the perceived threat is a politically driven fantasy - and al-Qaida a dark illusion.
    Friday October 15, 2004
    The Guardian
    Since the attacks on the United States in September 2001, there have been more than a thousand references in British national newspapers, working out at almost one every single day, to the phrase "dirty bomb". There have been articles about how such a device can use ordinary explosives to spread lethal radiation; about how London would be evacuated in the event of such a detonation; about the Home Secretary David Blunkett's statement on terrorism in November 2002 that specifically raised the possibility of a dirty bomb being planted in Britain; and about the arrests of several groups of people, the latest only last month, for allegedly plotting exactly that.
    Starting next Wednesday, BBC2 is to broadcast a three-part documentary series that will add further to what could be called the dirty bomb genre. But, as its title suggests, The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear takes a different view of the weapon's potential.
    "I don't think it would kill anybody," says Dr Theodore Rockwell, an authority on radiation, in an interview for the series. "You'll have trouble finding a serious report that would claim otherwise." The American department of energy, Rockwell continues, has simulated a dirty bomb explosion, "and they calculated that the most exposed individual would get a fairly high dose [of radiation], not life-threatening." And even this minor threat is open to question. The test assumed that no one fled the explosion for one year.
    During the three years in which the "war on terror" has been waged, high-profile challenges to its assumptions have been rare. The sheer number of incidents and warnings connected or attributed to the war has left little room, it seems, for heretical thoughts. In this context, the central theme of The Power of Nightmares is riskily counter-intuitive and provocative. Much of the currently perceived threat from international terrorism, the series argues, "is a fantasy that has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services, and the international media." The series' explanation for this is even bolder: "In an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power."
    Adam Curtis, who wrote and produced the series, acknowledges the difficulty of saying such things now. "If a bomb goes off, the fear I have is that everyone will say, 'You're completely wrong,' even if the incident doesn't touch my argument. This shows the way we have all become trapped, the way even I have become trapped by a fear that is completely irrational."
    So controversial is the tone of his series, that trailers for it were not broadcast last weekend because of the killing of Kenneth Bigley. At the BBC, Curtis freely admits, there are "anxieties". But there is also enthusiasm for the programmes, in part thanks to his reputation. Over the past dozen years, via similarly ambitious documentary series such as Pandora's Box, The Mayfair Set and The Century of the Self, Curtis has established himself as perhaps the most acclaimed maker of serious television programmes in Britain. His trademarks are long research, the revelatory use of archive footage, telling interviews, and smooth, insistent voiceovers concerned with the unnoticed deeper currents of recent history, narrated by Curtis himself in tones that combine traditional BBC authority with something more modern and sceptical: "I want to try to make people look at things they think they know about in a new way."
    The Power of Nightmares seeks to overturn much of what is widely believed about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. The latter, it argues, is not an organised international network. It does not have members or a leader. It does not have "sleeper cells". It does not have an overall strategy. In fact, it barely exists at all, except as an idea about cleansing a corrupt world through religious violence.
    Curtis' evidence for these assertions is not easily dismissed. He tells the story of Islamism, or the desire to establish Islam as an unbreakable political framework, as half a century of mostly failed, short-lived revolutions and spectacular but politically ineffective terrorism. Curtis points out that al-Qaida did not even have a name until early 2001, when the American government decided to prosecute Bin Laden in his absence and had to use anti-Mafia laws that required the existence of a named criminal organisation.
    Curtis also cites the Home Office's own statistics for arrests and convictions of suspected terrorists since September 11 2001. Of the 664 people detained up to the end of last month, only 17 have been found guilty. Of these, the majority were Irish Republicans, Sikh militants or members of other groups with no connection to Islamist terrorism. Nobody has been convicted who is a proven member of al-Qaida.
    In fact, Curtis is not alone in wondering about all this. Quietly but increasingly, other observers of the war on terror have been having similar doubts. "The grand concept of the war has not succeeded," says Jonathan Eyal, director of the British military thinktank the Royal United Services Institute. "In purely military terms, it has been an inconclusive war ... a rather haphazard operation. Al-Qaida managed the most spectacular attack, but clearly it is also being sustained by the way that we rather cavalierly stick the name al-Qaida on Iraq, Indonesia, the Philippines. There is a long tradition that if you divert all your resources to a threat, then you exaggerate it."
    Bill Durodie, director of the international centre for security analysis at King's College London, says: "The reality [of the al-Qaida threat to the west] has been essentially a one-off. There has been one incident in the developed world since 9/11 [the Madrid bombings]. There's no real evidence that all these groups are connected." Crispin Black, a senior government intelligence analyst until 2002, is more cautious but admits the terrorist threat presented by politicians and the media is "out of date and too one-dimensional. We think there is a bit of a gulf between the terrorists' ambition and their ability to pull it off."
    Terrorism, by definition, depends on an element of bluff. Yet ever since terrorists in the modern sense of the term (the word terrorism was actually coined to describe the strategy of a government, the authoritarian French revolutionary regime of the 1790s) began to assassinate politicians and then members of the public during the 19th century, states have habitually overreacted. Adam Roberts, professor of international relations at Oxford, says that governments often believe struggles with terrorists "to be of absolute cosmic significance", and that therefore "anything goes" when it comes to winning. The historian Linda Colley adds: "States and their rulers expect to monopolise violence, and that is why they react so virulently to terrorism."
    Britain may also be particularly sensitive to foreign infiltrators, fifth columnists and related menaces. In spite, or perhaps because of, the absence of an actual invasion for many centuries, British history is marked by frequent panics about the arrival of Spanish raiding parties, French revolutionary agitators, anarchists, bolsheviks and Irish terrorists. "These kind of panics rarely happen without some sort of cause," says Colley. "But politicians make the most of them."
    They are not the only ones who find opportunities. "Almost no one questions this myth about al-Qaida because so many people have got an interest in keeping it alive," says Curtis. He cites the suspiciously circular relationship between the security services and much of the media since September 2001: the way in which official briefings about terrorism, often unverified or unverifiable by journalists, have become dramatic press stories which - in a jittery media-driven democracy - have prompted further briefings and further stories. Few of these ominous announcements are retracted if they turn out to be baseless: "There is no fact-checking about al-Qaida."
    In one sense, of course, Curtis himself is part of the al-Qaida industry. The Power of Nightmares began as an investigation of something else, the rise of modern American conservatism. Curtis was interested in Leo Strauss, a political philosopher at the university of Chicago in the 50s who rejected the liberalism of postwar America as amoral and who thought that the country could be rescued by a revived belief in America's unique role to battle evil in the world. Strauss's certainty and his emphasis on the use of grand myths as a higher form of political propaganda created a group of influential disciples such as Paul Wolfowitz, now the US deputy defence secretary. They came to prominence by talking up the Russian threat during the cold war and have applied a similar strategy in the war on terror.
    As Curtis traced the rise of the "Straussians", he came to a conclusion that would form the basis for The Power of Nightmares. Straussian conservatism had a previously unsuspected amount in common with Islamism: from origins in the 50s, to a formative belief that liberalism was the enemy, to an actual period of Islamist-Straussian collaboration against the Soviet Union during the war in Afghanistan in the 80s (both movements have proved adept at finding new foes to keep them going). Although the Islamists and the Straussians have fallen out since then, as the attacks on America in 2001 graphically demonstrated, they are in another way, Curtis concludes, collaborating still: in sustaining the "fantasy" of the war on terror.
    Some may find all this difficult to swallow. But Curtis insists,"There is no way that I'm trying to be controversial just for the sake of it." Neither is he trying to be an anti-conservative polemicist like Michael Moore: "[Moore's] purpose is avowedly political. My hope is that you won't be able to tell what my politics are." For all the dizzying ideas and visual jolts and black jokes in his programmes, Curtis describes his intentions in sober, civic-minded terms. "If you go back into history and plod through it, the myth falls away. You see that these aren't terrifying new monsters. It's drawing the poison of the fear."
    But whatever the reception of the series, this fear could be around for a while. It took the British government decades to dismantle the draconian laws it passed against French revolutionary infiltrators; the cold war was sustained for almost half a century without Russia invading the west, or even conclusive evidence that it ever intended to. "The archives have been opened," says the cold war historian David Caute, "but they don't bring evidence to bear on this." And the danger from Islamist terrorists, whatever its scale, is concrete. A sceptical observer of the war on terror in the British security services says: "All they need is a big bomb every 18 months to keep this going."
    The war on terror already has a hold on western political culture. "After a 300-year debate between freedom of the individual and protection of society, the protection of society seems to be the only priority," says Eyal. Black agrees: "We are probably moving to a point in the UK where national security becomes the electoral question."
    Some critics of this situation see our striking susceptibility during the 90s to other anxieties - the millennium bug, MMR, genetically modified food - as a sort of dress rehearsal for the war on terror. The press became accustomed to publishing scare stories and not retracting them; politicians became accustomed to responding to supposed threats rather than questioning them; the public became accustomed to the idea that some sort of apocalypse might be just around the corner. "Insecurity is the key driving concept of our times," says Durodie. "Politicians have packaged themselves as risk managers. There is also a demand from below for protection." The real reason for this insecurity, he argues, is the decay of the 20th century's political belief systems and social structures: people have been left "disconnected" and "fearful".
    Yet the notion that "security politics" is the perfect instrument for every ambitious politician from Blunkett to Wolfowitz also has its weaknesses. The fears of the public, in Britain at least, are actually quite erratic: when the opinion pollsters Mori asked people what they felt was the most important political issue, the figure for "defence and foreign affairs" leapt from 2% to 60% after the attacks of September 2001, yet by January 2002 had fallen back almost to its earlier level. And then there are the twin risks that the terrors politicians warn of will either not materialise or will materialise all too brutally, and in both cases the politicians will be blamed. "This is a very rickety platform from which to build up a political career," says Eyal. He sees the war on terror as a hurried improvisation rather than some grand Straussian strategy: "In democracies, in order to galvanize the public for war, you have to make the enemy bigger, uglier and more menacing."
    Afterwards, I look at a website for a well-connected American foreign policy lobbying group called the Committee on the Present Danger. The committee features in The Power of Nightmares as a vehicle for alarmist Straussian propaganda during the cold war. After the Soviet collapse, as the website puts it, "The mission of the committee was considered complete." But then the website goes on: "Today radical Islamists threaten the safety of the American people. Like the cold war, securing our freedom is a long-term struggle. The road to victory begins ... "
    · The Power of Nightmares starts on BBC2 at 9pm on Wednesday October 20 2004.

  • Rare Icebergs Spotted Off New Zealand
    CBC News
    1-6-5
    AUCKLAND, New Zealand -- Icebergs have been sighted in New Zealand waters for the first time in 57 years, prompting a warning to shipping in the region.
    Participants in a global yachting race have also been warned to stay away from the potentially dangerous chunks of ice.
    The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research says 15 icebergs have been spotted in the Southern Ocean, about 700 kilometres off New Zealand's South Island.
    Some of them measure up to three kilometres wide.
    It is the first time icebergs have been spotted in local waters since 1948.
    - With files from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation
    Copyright © CBC 2005

  • Strange Lights, Explosions: Now It's the US
    05-Jan-2005
    http://www.unknowncountry.com/news/?id=4353
    Two weeks ago, we were reporting unusual lights and explosions over Indonesia. A month ago, the phenomenon appeared over China and Australia. Now, the phenomonon is being reported over Wisconsin
    In all three [previous cases, the events were attributed to meteors. In all three cases, they were followed by earthquakes. Last Sunday, an extraordinary 47 quakes struck China as the horrendous Sumatra 'great quake' caused the tsunami that has killed at least 155,000 people and injured half a million. A quake between Tasmania and Antarctica preceeded the Sumatra quake by four days
    Now police in north central Wisconsin are receiving numerous reports of bright flashes and explosions in that area, that are once again being attributed to meteors. After one of the flashes and explosions, residents observed a persistent glow in the woods, but nothing was found. FAA officials in Minneapolis-St. Paul attributed the events to probable meteors.
    Wisconsin is not considered an earthquake prone area. The most powerful earthquakes known to have taken place in the US in recorded history are known as the New Madrid sequence, which took place in 1811 and 1812.

  • Post tsunami, mysterious blasts amplify terror in Talala
    http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/980708.cms
    TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ TUESDAY, JANUARY 04, 2005 09:56:51 PM ]
     RAJKOT: An unusual fear psychosis has gripped some villages of Talala area of Junagadh district, where several local residents began living outdoors after claiming to have heard some mysterious "blasts" and felt frequent "tremors".
    Coming close on the heels of the tsunami terror-floods, the villagefolk are interpreting the incidents as ominous of something more horrific and have begun living outdoors, especially in Haripar village where the frequency of the blasts is reported to be high. Talala is some 40 kms away from the Gir Asiatic lion sanctuary. But forest officials say there was no unusual behaviour spotted among the wild animals during this period.
    A resident of Haripar, Bhanuben Odhavdas says, "we are really worried, after seeing the devastation in south India, which seems magnified after our experiences of the 2001 earthquake". She claimed that she was spending the nights on the verandah of the house. "We have stopped watching the news and are now worried that these incidents could forebode another earthquake", adds Bhanuben.
    Similar unexplained "blasts" were reported from Jamnagar district too, over a year back. Another resident of Haripar, Seema Godhara says "on Monday night there were major tremors making it difficult for us to sleep. Between 8.15 and 8.20 pm there were four vibrations and these were followed by blasts. Godhara, who is planning to vacate her home, recounts, "there was a vibration and everything began shaking, even the street animals began running helter-skelter.We spent the whole of Monday night outside, by a bonfire, because of the chill". She says her house has also developed cracks since the tremors went on well after midnight.
    A senior official from the Junagadh collectorate said that large-scale migrations had been reported from Haripar and nearby villages. Talati of Haripar, K C Solanki says that the frequency of the "blasts" had increased since Monday and claimed there were 22 "blasts" during the day continuing through the night."
    Senior seismologist (retd) from Pune Meteorological department, Arun Bapat who was in Haripar last month, on account of these reports, told TNN from Pune, "I have asked the district administration to install a sensor equipment to record these tremors since the equipment installed at Bhavnagar failed to record them". He adds that although he heard the "blasts" during his visit, the tremor was not felt. While assuring that these blasts had nothing to do with an earthquake, Bapat said that he could comment only on the basis of the data recorded by this sensor, which was yet to be installed.
    "There was a tremor but no one is willing to believe us," laments Rajesh Unadkat from Talala. The blasts are reported to have begun since the last week of November. However, ever since then many people have left the villages and have shifted to Junagadh and other places, say collectorate sources.
     

     
     

  • Small Asteroid Passes Between Satellites and Earth
    Senior Science Writer
    posted: 22 December 2004
    http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/asteroid_close_041222.html
    Astronomers spotted an asteroid this week after it had flown past Earth on a course that took it so close to the planet it was below the orbits of some satellites.
    The space rock was relatively small, however, and would not have posed any danger had it plunged into the atmosphere.
    The object, named 2004 YD5, was about 16 feet (5 meters) wide, though that's a rough estimate based on its distance and assumed reflectivity. Had it entered the atmosphere, it would have exploded high up, experts figure.
    Satellite territory
    The asteroid passed just under the orbits of geostationary satellites, which at 22,300 miles (36,000 kilometers) altitude are the highest manmade objects circling Earth. Most other satellites, along with the International Space Station, circle the planet at just a few hundred miles up.
    2004 YD5 is the second closest pass of an asteroid ever observed by telescope, according to the Asteroid/Comet Connection, a web site that monitors space rock discoveries. The closest involved a rock that flew by last March and was not announced until August.
    2004 YD5 was discovered Tuesday, Dec. 21 by Stan Pope, who volunteers his time to examine images provided by the FMO (Fast Moving Object) project, an online program run by the University of Arizona's Spacewatch Project. After the initial detection, other observers noted the object's position during the day and its path was then calculated back. Closest approach occurred on Dec. 19.
    The rock approached Earth from near the Sun and so would have been nearly impossible to detect prior to close passage. It soared over Antarctica -- underneath the planet, Washington State University researcher Pasquale Tricarico told the Asteroid/Comet Connection.
    Astronomers are aware of this significant blind spot for asteroids that approach Earth while in the glare of the Sun. Only a space telescope could detect such objects before they arrive.
     Asteroids orbit the Sun, mostly in a belt between Mars and Jupiter. Some are redirected closer to the Sun, often by gravitational nudges provided by the planets. Earth has been hit by devastatingly large asteroids many times in the distant past. Astronomers say sooner or later the planet will be struck again, but the odds of a large impact occurring in any given century are extremely small.
    This has been an interesting year for asteroid encounters.
    On March 18, a giant boulder about 100 feet (30 meters) wide passed just above the orbits of geostationary satellites. Its path was bent about 15 degrees by Earth's gravity. The asteroid, 2004 FH, was discovered a mere three days prior.
    On Sept. 29, the largest asteroid ever known to pass near Earth, named Toutatis, roamed by at about four times the distance to the Moon. Astronomers had known for years the flyby would occur, since Toutatis is 2.9 miles (4.6 kilometers) long and had been in Earth's vicinity before.
    But many near misses by small asteroids likely go unnoticed, astronomers say, because the entire sky is not continuously monitored. Such small asteroids have been detected only in recent years as more sophisticated telescopes have been hooked up with digital cameras.
    And some asteroids come even closer, entering the atmosphere. Most never reach the ground because they break apart under the stress of entry. One study of data collected by U.S. military satellites logged 300 in-air asteroid explosions.
    2004 YD5 was announced Tuesday evening by the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass, where comet and asteroid observations from around the globe are digested.

  • Blasts in Indonesian cities possibly meteor - media
    20 December 2004
    JAKARTA: Several loud blasts were heard in the Indonesian capital Jakarta and two nearby towns on Sunday, but one radio report said it could have been a meteor shower.
    Police, on high alert after warnings from Western governments of possible terror attacks over the Christmas and New Year period, said they had no information on the blasts. A presidential spokesman also said he had no details.
    Local Metro TV reported residents heard the blasts around 7.30am in Jakarta, the satellite city of Tangerang, and also Serang in West Java province. El Shinta radio said it could have been a meteor shower.
    One caller to El Shinta from Bogor, just south of Jakarta, reported seeing a large object, suspected to be a meteor, hit the earth in the distance.
    More than two hours after the blasts were heard, there were no reports of any casualties or damage, indicating the cause of the explosions was probably not bomb attacks. Local news radio and TV stations were paying little attention to the explosions.
    Western governments, especially Australia, have warned an international hotel could be targeted for attack, possibly one of the three Hiltons in the world's most populous Muslim nation.
    In Washington, the US State Department issued a fresh warning late last week for Americans to avoid non-essential travel to Indonesia, saying "the terrorist threat continues and may increase over the December-January holiday period".
    "Reports indicate that terrorists are planning attacks against a wide variety of targets," the State Department said.
    Police have tightened security across the country.
    Islamic militants from Jemaah Islamiah, seen as the regional arm of al Qaeda, have launched bomb attacks in recent years in Indonesia, hitting nightclubs in Bali, the JW Marriott Hotel in Jakarta as well as the Australian embassy in the capital.
    In the worst attack, 202 people were killed in Bali when militants bombed two nightclubs two years ago. Among the dead were 88 Australians.
    On Friday, police found nine homemade bombs packed into cylinders on a bus in West Java. They have detained 15 people including the bus driver over the discovery in the West Java capital Bandung, 140km southeast of Jakarta.
    Police deployed an additional 18,400 personnel for Christmas and New Year to protect churches and entertainment centres across Indonesia.

  • Explosions over Jakarta
    19-Dec-2004
    http://www.unknowncountry.com/news/?id=4324
    On December 13, Unknowncountry reported a UFO explosion over the Chinese city of Lanzhou, and similar explosions took place over Jakarta last night. In both cases, it has been assumed that the objects were meteors, but it is unsual that the same general area of the planet would be struck by exploding meteors over a week period. Normally, meteor showers are spread across the surface of the planet as it rotates.
    At 7:30 this morning Jakarta time, local military radars recorded an object incoming from above. Moments later, a loud explosion was heard over the city, and witnesses reported seeing a bright object streaking toward the ground. A witness in Bogor south of Jakarta reported that he had seen the object hit earth.
    In recent weeks, the US State Department has been warning that a terrorist attack was possible in Indonesia, but no casualties were reported after the explosions, which were believed due to the incoming objects.
    Meteor sounds are generally described as whining, whistling, or screaming noises as the objects pass through the atmosphere. Explosions are not unusual, and meteors also at times create sonic booms.
    The peak of the annual Geminid meteor shower took place on December 13. The Geminids are not generally associated with large, explodiing bolides.

  • Israeli Spying On US Unravels -
    Franklin Sings Like Canary
    By Youssef M. Ibrahim from Dubai, United Arab Emirates
    The Washington Times - UPI
    12-24-4
    The latest spy tale in Washington, D.C., involving Larry Franklin, an intelligence analyst at the Defense Department, and some of Israel's most important lobbyists in America, is becoming deeper by the week.
    Spy stories are always like that, but this one packs an intricate tale of a trusted ally betraying America, a White House intent on using the misstep to leverage its influence, and an American intelligence community that feels it has been made to wear horns.
    Clearly, Israel has aroused the formidable bull and will be made to pay a price. One can speculate from what we already know.
    It started in late July this year, when a Catholic Pentagon analyst, Franklin, telephoned a Jewish acquaintance of his who worked at a pro-Israel lobbying group, the very influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
    The two men knew each other professionally. They spoke of U.S. policies on Iran and Iraq periodically. That call was monitored by American intelligence authorities who did not like what they heard, and it led to a chain of events including an investigation of passing secret intelligence information to Israel via intermediaries.
    A report published by The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) last week asserts that matters have progressed to a point that a grand jury investigation is underway and may lead to the indictment of several prominent Jewish lobbyists in the United States on charges of passing secret information to Israel.
    Other reports and leaks published in the U.S. media suggest that Franklin has been singing like a canary under questioning and has agreed to deliver facts and testimony against pro-Israeli lobbyist friends in return for some leniency.
    Still more reports suggest that he was all along a plant, a tool, used by the American intelligence community to ensnare the Israelis and their network of spies among the vast community of 52 American Jewish organizations totally devoted to control American Middle East policies for the benefit of Israel.
    The JTA report speaks of some serious damage already done. It states: "With senior officials at America's top pro-Israel organization facing the specter of federal indictments, staffers at other groups are beginning to waver in their support and are warning that the mounting legal scandal could damage the political credibility of the entire Jewish community."
    You see, there is an iron-clad agreement that Israel shall never spy on its best friend and greatest financial backer in the world, America, particularly as American intelligence cooperates broadly with Israeli intelligence for free.
    But whenever greed and hubris take over, Israelis have gotten themselves and their friends in trouble. With this particular White House of George W. Bush, which takes no prisoners, the price Israel may be forced to pay is make some concession to the Palestinians.
    Immediately after his re-election, Bush said he had "accumulated enough capital" in his first term that he plans to use it in his second term to advance the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians.
    Among other things, he may indeed have been hinting, friends in the intelligence community tell me, at the "Franklin" affair.
    Bush does not need to have an outcome to this investigation. He just needs to have a process whereby accusations keep hanging in the air, while he demands to cash in his capital. Bush is like that. He plays hard, even with friends. Even with Israel.
    As usual, Israel is denying all charges, which is a mistake because in espionage and affairs of state, it is very important to manage a catastrophe once it has happened, not go into denial.
    At the moment, the U.S. intelligence community -- including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and other counter-spying organizations -- are going for a kill, knowing their president needs to hold cards in hand against friends and foes.
    For these guys this is also payback time, especially as the Israelis are once again caught with their hands inside American top-secret files.
    The fierceness of their response was demonstrated back in 1985, when Jonathan Pollard, a Jewish American naval intelligence analyst, was arrested he was crying like a baby at the gate of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. Pollard had been an Israeli agent, meeting with Israeli handlers for years supplying super-secret documents from naval intelligence. When he was caught, and sought refuge with his wife, the Israelis would not even open the door for him in his hour of need. He was dragged away screaming and kicking, with his wife, to jail.
    Pollard is now serving a life sentence without parole as a spy. Two American presidents, Bill Clinton and the current George Bush, have firmly rejected repeated Israeli and Jewish lobby requests to pardon him. The U.S. intelligence community has said, "No way." Scores of petitions and Web sites offering daily support and calls for a pardon have not made a dent in this seemingly iron will. And intelligence sources, to make sure Pollard stays in jail, periodically leak reminders to their media friends that he has done irreparable harm to the vital interests of the United States.
    The real message to Israel and its supporters is: "Thou shall not spy against America." It seems to be the same message being delivered now over the Franklin affair to American Jewish Organizations.
    But the episode also appears to have become a bargaining chip that the White House and the intelligence community will squeeze like a lemon to get Israeli concessions with the full support from a chastised American Jewish lobby. If no such support is forthcoming, the administration seems to signal more investigations, a trial, indictments, etc.
    Stay tuned.
    Youssef M. Ibrahim, a former Middle East correspondent for the New York Times and Energy Editor of the Wall Street Journal, is Managing Director of the Dubai-based Strategic Energy Investment Group. He can be contacted at [email protected]

  • UAE sees snow for first time ever
    Thu Dec 30,12:09 PM ET
    Mideast - AFP
    DUBAI (AFP) - Snow has fallen over the United Arab Emirates for the first time ever, leaving a white blanket over the mountains of Ras al-Khaimah as the desert country experienced a cold spell and above-average rainfall.
    Dubai airport's meteorology department told AFP that snow fell over the Al-Jees mountain range in Ras al-Khaimah, which is the most northerly member of the UAE federation.
    The English-language Gulf News reported that the mountain cluster, 5,700 feet (1,737 metres) above sea level, "had heavy night-time snowfall for the past two days as a result of temperatures dropping to as low as minus five Celsius (23 Fahrenheit)" and stunning the emirate's residents.
    On Monday, 12.6 millimetres (half an inch) of rain fell on the desert emirate of Dubai, where it hardly ever rains, as police reported 500 accidents on its roads in 24 hours, including one fatality, as a result of a three-day downpour.
    A cold spell has hit the country this week, with the mercury plunging to 12 degrees Celsius (53.6 Fahrenheit) in Dubai on Wednesday night.
    The meteorology department, however, said the chilly weather in Dubai, where summer temperatures reach 50 Celcius (122 Fahrenheit), will probably end by next week.

  • FACTBOX-World's worst natural disasters
    LONDON, Dec 30 (Reuters) - The death toll from the Asian
    tsunami, triggered by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off Indonesia,
    stood at 125,282 people, government and health officials said.
    The following is a list of some of the worst earthquakes,
    floods and other natural disasters on record:

    Date Type Location Fatalities

    1887 Flood China, 1 million

    Huang He, or Yellow River

    1556 Quake China, Shaansi 830,000

    1737 - Quake India, Calcutta 300,000

    1970 - Cyclone East Pakistan, (Bangladesh) 300,000

    1976 - Quake China, Tangshan 255,000

    1138 - Quake Syria, Aleppo 230,000

    1920 - Quake China, Gansu 200,000

    c.893- Quake Iran, Ardabil 150,000

    1923 Quake Japan, Kanto 143,000+

    1991 - Cyclone Bangladesh 138,000

    2004 Quake/Tsunami Sumatra 125,282

    1948 Quake Turkmenistan 110,000

    1908 Quake/Floods Italy, Messina est.70,000-100,000

    1815 - Eruption Indonesia, Tambora volcano 92,000

    1902 - Eruption Martinique, Mt. Pelee 35-40,000

    1883 - Eruption/Tsunami

    Indonesia, Krakatoa 36,000

    2003 - Quake Iran, Bam 31,000

    Many thousands were killed in the Great Tokyo Fire caused
    by the earthquake.

  • Did Tasmanian tremor act as a catalyst for tsunami?
    Indo-Asian News Service
    Sydney/Colombo, Dec 27 (IANS) Did the smaller and earlier tremor last week off Tasmania in Australia trigger the tsunami that devastated many areas in South and Southeast Asia.
    An Australian seismologist said the Indo-Australian tectonic plate had shifted, triggering first the smaller earthquake off the Tasmanian coast last Thursday and then Sunday's catastrophic one.
    Geoscience Australia seismologist Cvetan Sinadinovski said the initial earthquake, 700 km southeast of Hobart, might have been the catalyst for the devastating tremors to hit Indonesia, but it was not a direct cause.
    There are 12 plate boundaries on earth that move around. Earthquakes take place when these plates collide.
    "This earthquake in Indonesia is on the same plate as the earthquake near Tasmania. It just happened on the other side, where the Australian plate collides with the Philippine plate," Sinadinovski said.
    "It is not uncommon that an earthquake on one side of a plate would trigger an earthquake on the other side," The Australian daily quoted him as saying.
    Indonesia was a hotspot for earthquake activity because that is where three of the earth's tectonic plates meet, Sinadinovski said.
    The Indo-Australian plate moves about seven centimetres north each year, putting enormous pressure on the points where it connects with the Philippine and China plates.
    Sinadinovski said Sunday's earthquake was the release of energy accumulated during the latest plate collisions.
    Although Indonesia was the country closest to the earthquake's epicentre, Sri Lanka was the worst hit by the subsequent tidal waves.
    "Because of the earthquake's mechanism and the orientation of the islands, which form certain channels in the water, Sri Lanka was in the direct path of the generated waves," he said. "It was the focus point."
    Meanwhile, C.B. Dissanayake, senior geologist at Sri Lanka's Peradeniya University, warned that the island nation was no longer safe from earthquakes as a new plate boundary phenomenon was being formed south of the country.
    Sri Lanka is located inside the Indo-Australian plate but "it is breaking up right near the south of Sri Lanka. Therefore, this kind of geological change may cause earthquakes," the Daily News newspaper quotes him as saying.
    "Sri Lanka is no longer safe from earthquakes. A recent research conducted by James Cochran, a scientist at the Doherty University in the US has also predicted this new plate phenomenon developing in south of Sri Lanka", according to Dissanayake.
    Sinadinovski said the timing of the earthquakes was coincidental and not at all cyclic.
    "Earthquakes are not connected to the weather or to the calendar year. They are connected to long geological processes, the Australian reported.
    Thursday's Australian quake, which at its epicentre measured 8.1 on the Richter scale, hit at the Macquarie Rise in the Pacific Ocean, seismologists said.
    Its impact was felt about 900 km to the northwest, on the Tasmanian coast, but apparently not 400 km to the south on remote Macquarie Island, where Australian scientists slept through it.
    Sinadinovski said buildings in Tasmania shook for up to 15 seconds, but no injuries were reported.
    And there was little danger of significant structural damage to buildings from a quake so far out to sea.
    "If it happened underneath a population centre in Australia, this would probably have destroyed a whole city," Sinadinovski said.
    Indo-Asian News Service
     

  • Penguins escape huge earthquake
    Friday, 24 December, 2004, 14:59 GMT
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4123927.stm
    An earthquake on a remote Antarctic archipelago home to 850,000 King Penguins was the strongest on earth in four years, seismologists say.
    The quake hit 400km (250 miles) off the Macquarie Islands on Friday, measuring 8.1 on the Richter scale.
    Penguins appear to have escaped a major disaster as the quake occurred deep under the sea, far from inhabited land.
    There were no tsunamis, or large tidal waves, because the quake moved horizontally rather than vertically.
    The tremors were felt in Tasmania, 1000km (600 miles) away, but because the epicentre was 10km underground, few observers noticed the initial quake.
    Buildings on the islands shook for 15 seconds, seismologist Cvetan Sinadinovski said.
    "If this had happened underneath a population centre it would probably have destroyed a whole city," he said.
    The quake was the biggest anywhere on earth since an 8.4-magnitude tremor off the coast of Peru in June 2001. That killed 74 people.
    Friday's earthquake was caused by the collision of two of the major tectonic plates which make up the earth's crust layer, the Indo-Australian and the Pacific plates.
    The last quake of a similar magnitude in the Macquarie region was in 1924, Mr Sinadinovski said.
    Despite its size, 22 staff of the Australian Antarctic Division slept through the tremors.
    "Nobody felt anything," a spokesman said.

  • 10 BIGGEST QUAKES SINCE 1900
    Chile, 1960: 9.5
    Alaska, 1964: 9.2
    Alaska, 1957: 9.1
    Kamchatka, 1952: 9.0
    Near Ecuador, 1906: 8.8
    Alaska, 1965: 8.7
    Tibet, 1950: 8.6
    Kamchatka, 1923: 8.5
    Indonesia, 1938: 8.5
    Kuril Islands, 1963: 8.5
    Source: US Geological Survey

  • Indonesian 'hobbit' legends may be factual
    December 26 2004 at 11:00AM
    By Chris Brummitt
    Mount Ebulo, Indonesia - Nellis Kua is too old to remember his exact age, but his eyes light up when he talks of the gang of hobbit-like creatures his grandparents told him once lived in the forest on the slopes of this still smoking Indonesian volcano.
    "They had these big eyes, hair all over their body and spoke in a strange language," said Kua, his skin leathered by a lifetime tending coffee and chilli pepper crops under the harsh tropical sun.
    "They stole our crops, our fruit and moonshine. They were so greedy they even ate the plates!"
    'This is all a little hasty'
    Kua and other elders said the creatures, known locally as the "Ebu Gogo" or the "Grandmother who eats everything", were last seen on the central Indonesian island of Flores around 300 years ago.
    The story had previously been dismissed as a legend - along with other tales of "little people" living in isolated rainforests that are common elsewhere in Indonesia and Southeast Asia.
    But a stunning archaeological find deep in a limestone cave on Flores has meant sceptics are having to take the tales more seriously.
    An Indonesian-Australian scientific team announced recently they had found a skull and bones belonging to a new human dwarf species they said lived on the island until 12 000 years ago.
    Homo florensius stood just one-metre-tall, used hand tools and had a brain smaller than a chimpanzee's. The find raised questions as to whether Homo Sapiens were the sole human inhabitants of the earth for tens of thousands of years as had been previously assumed, and whether the two groups ever met.
    'Until 2003, nobody knew this creature existed'
    The discovery was feted around the world, but in recent weeks, several experts have questioned the team's findings, among them Indonesia's most prominent paleontologist, Professor Teuku Jacob.
    Jacob, who is currently studying the fossils, says he believed the skull belonged to a human being suffering from a rare brain-shrinking disorder.
    "This is all a little hasty," Jacob said. "From what I have seen, this not a new species, or even subspecies. It is just one individual with microcephaly."
    Members of the Indonesian-Australian team are standing by their initial findings, which captured the public imagination amid comparisons to the fictional hobbits of JRR Tolkien's stories, including The Lord Of The Rings.
    Using the tale of the "Ebu Gogo" to bolster their case, some team members have speculated that homo florensius may have lived on Flores until much later than 12 000 years ago, possibly as recently as a couple of hundred years ago.
    Australian research team member Dr Richard Roberts said it was "not out of the question" that some of the creatures could still be living in some remote corner of the heavily-forested island.
    "Until 2003, nobody knew this creature existed," said Roberts. "Now we know it did, it opens up all these possibilities that were closed to people's minds. The exciting part now will be to find some of these lost creatures."
    The team is planning to return to the island next year to scour a series of limestone caves close to Kua's village to look for more recent evidence of homo florensius.
    The scientific discovery has led a stream of adventurous tourists to visit the cave at Liang Bua village, where the fossils were unearthed. The island last made international headlines in 1992 when it was hit by an earthquake that killed 3 000 people. So far, access to the scientific dig site is unrestricted.
    The cave, which is around 120km east of Kua's village, extends 40m into an escarpment and is as tall as a two-storey house. It lies at the end of a long, bumpy road that winds through coffee plantations and tin-roofed villages.
    "I'm a sucker for this stuff," said Daniel Ruff, a 78-year-old tourist from Hayward, California, who made the trip recently. "For me, when I saw that cave it was mission accomplished."
    The tourist office in Ruteng, the town nearest the cave, says the region plans to display the fossils, or copies of them, in a museum, but only after it finds the funds to build one.
    The story of the Ebu Gogo has been known to anthropologists for years. It is rich in detail and has few mythical elements - factors that indicate is has a basis in fact, experts say.
    "When I first heard these stories I was a bit sceptical," said Gert D van den Bergh, a Dutch researcher. "But the difference with the Ebu Gogo is that the local villagers talk about them as if they were an actual part of the fauna and that they have no supernatural powers."
    Another distinguishing element to the story is that it ends with the villagers killing most or all of the Ebu Gogo. In other tales of "little people", the creatures are normally said to still be alive.
    According to local stories it was villagers, not some natural disaster, that provided the catastrophic event that led to the Ebu Gogo's extinction.
    Kua and other village elders said their ancestors - sick of the Ebu Gogo's constant scavenging - chased the creatures into a cave high on the volcano, then handed them bales of straw, which the creatures thought was a gift to keep them warm.
    But the villagers concealed hot coals in the final bale of straw, which caught fire inside the cave, killing all the creatures except one male and one female, Kua said.
    The couple, which escaped from the rear of the cave, were last seen heading west - the direction of the cave at Liang Bua where the bones were found. - Sapa-AP

  • 169 Whale, Dolphin Strandings in New Zealand, Australia
    November 30, 2004
    Reuters
    SYDNEY, Australia (Reuters) -- Scientists and wildlife officials continued to search on Tuesday for what may have caused a series of mass strandings which left 169 whales and dolphins dead on Australian and New Zealand beaches in the past three days.
    Authorities and volunteers worked through Monday night to save dozens of whales and dolphins after three separate beachings in Australia and New Zealand.
    By Tuesday, 96 long-finned pilot whales and bottle-nosed dolphins had died after the first beaching on Sunday at King Island, midway between the Australian mainland and the southern island state of Tasmania.
    Tasmanian wildlife officer Shane Hunniford said another 19 long-finned pilot whales had died in a separate beaching on Monday on Maria Island, 60 km (37 miles) east of the Tasmanian capital Hobart.
    He said 43 whales had beached themselves on Maria Island but officials had managed to save 24 that had been found alive.
    Across the Tasman Sea in New Zealand, a mass grave was dug on a beach at Opoutere, 100 km (62 miles) east of Auckland on the North Island, for 53 dead pilot whales. Officials said 73 whales had become stranded there on Sunday, but 20 were saved.
    Of those 20, more were expected to die because many were too weak to follow the others out to sea.
    "Some of them had suffered pretty significantly on the beach," New Zealand conservation department manager John Gaukrodger told reporters.
    Later on Tuesday, a 33-foot (10-meter) sperm whale washed up on a beach west of Auckland. Officials said they were not sure if the whale had died at sea and washed up or had stranded itself. They said it was not linked to the Opoutere beaching.
    Hunniford said it was unlikely there was any connection between the Australian and New Zealand beachings, with the mass strandings no more than just unfortunate coincidences.
    "If you look at spaceship Earth, Tasmania and New Zealand both stick out into the Southern Ocean and that's a playground for whales and dolphins," Hunniford told Reuters.
    "There are a number of theories. We're not pinning our hat on any of them," he said of the Tasmanian beachings.
    The Australian government also said on Tuesday that it would establish a national database on whale strandings.
    "We are not sure why these tragedies happen but it's important that we coordinate existing scientific work to establish the reasons why these creatures become stranded," Environment Minister Ian Campbell said in a statement.
    Bob Brown, leader of Australia's Greens party, said earlier on Tuesday that ocean seismic tests for oil and gas should be stopped until the whale migration season ends.
    Brown, a senator in the Australian parliament, said "sound bombing" of ocean floors to test for oil and gas had been carried out near the sites of the Tasmanian beachings recently.
    He said in a statement that research data on the possible impact of such practices on marine life was inconclusive. http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/11/30/australia.whales.reut/

     

  • Astronomers rule out asteroid risk in 2029
    MSNBC
    Updated: 8:06 p.m. ET Dec. 27, 2004
    After issuing an unprecedented "yellow alert" for a potential cosmic collision, astronomers said further observations showed that a recently discovered asteroid had no chance of hitting Earth in the year 2029.
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    Monday's announcement, issued by the Near Earth Object Program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, capped a high-priority search for data about the space rock, which was discovered in June and designated 2004 MN4.
    At one point, astronomers said the uncertainty factor about 2004 MN4 allowed for a 1-in-40 chance of a collision on Friday, April 13, 2029. That led them to give the asteroid a rating of 4 on the 1-to-10 Torino scale that is used to gauge the threats posed by near-Earth asteroids and comets. Until 2004 MN4, no object had been graded higher than 1.
    The asteroid is thought to be about 1,400 feet (430 meters) long. That's not large enough to create a mass-extinction event, like the one that scientists say contributed to the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. But if the asteroid were to hit the wrong place at the wrong time, it could cause a giant tsunami wave or deliver a nuclear-scale blast.
    Fortunately, the alert led astronomers to check their archives for images of the asteroid that might have gone unnoticed at the time. Guided by the latest data about 2004 MN4's orbit, the Arizona-based Spacewatch Project spotted the rock on five images made back on March 15, said Donald Yeomans, manager of the Near Earth Object Program.
    "When we added those five observations, the impact probability in 2029 went to zero," Yeomans told MSNBC.com.
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    The 2029 event is still worthy of note, however, because it could rank among Earth's closest encounters with a potentially hazardous asteroid observed in modern times. Yeoman said the minimum distance would be 10 to 12 Earth radii — which translates to 40,000 to 48,000 miles, or 64,000 to 77,000 kilometers.
    "It's going to be quite impressive," Yeomans said.
    The encounter is so close that Earth's gravitational pull will bend the asteroid's orbit, adding uncertainty to the orbital calculations beyond 2029.
    "However, our current risk analysis for 2004 MN4 indicates that no subsequent Earth encounters in the 21st century are of any concern," Yeomans and his colleague, Paul Chodas, said in the advisory sounding the all-clear.

  • Major Climate Change Occurred 5,200 Years Ago: Evidence Suggests That History Could Repeat Itself
    Ohio State University
    Date: 2004-12-24
    URL: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/12/041219142907.htm
    COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Glaciologist Lonnie Thompson worries that he may have found clues that show history repeating itself, and if he is right, the result could have important implications to modern society.
    Thompson has spent his career trekking to the far corners of the world to find remote ice fields and then bring back cores drilled from their centers. Within those cores are the records of ancient climate from across the globe.
    From the mountains of data drawn by analyzing countless ice cores, and a meticulous review of sometimes obscure historic records, Thompson and his research team at Ohio State University are convinced that the global climate has changed dramatically.
    But more importantly, they believe it has happened at least once before, and the results were nearly catastrophic to emerging cultures at the time. He outlined his interpretations and fears today at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.
    A professor of geological sciences at Ohio State and a researcher with the Byrd Polar Research Center, Thompson points to markers in numerous records suggesting that the climate was altered suddenly some 5,200 years ago with severe impacts.
    He points to perfectly preserved plants he discovered that recently emerged from the Quelccaya ice cap in the Peruvian Andes as that glacier retreats. This monstrous glacier, some 551 feet (168 meters) deep, has shown an exponentially increasing rate of retreat since his first observations in 1963.
    The plants were carbon-dated to determine their age and tests indicated they had been buried by the ice for perhaps 5,200 years. That suggests that somehow, the climate had shifted suddenly and severely to capture the plants and preserve them until now.
    In 1991, hikers found the preserved body of a man trapped in an Alpine glacier and freed as it retreated. Later tests showed that the human – dubbed Oetzi – became trapped and died around 5,200 years ago.
    Thompson points to a study of tree rings from Ireland and England that span a period of 7,000 years. The point in that record when the tree rings were narrowest – suggesting the driest period experienced by the trees – was approximately 5,200 years ago.
    He points to ice core records showing the ratio of two oxygen isotopes retrieved from the ice fields atop Africa’s Mount Kilimanjaro. A proxy for atmospheric temperature at the time snow fell, the records are at their lowest 5,200 years before now.
    He lists the shift by the Sahara Desert from a habitable region to a barren desert; major changes in plant pollen uncovered from lakebed cores in South America, and the record lowest levels of methane retrieved from ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica and all occurred at the same time – 5,200 years ago.
    “Something happened back at this time and it was monumental,” Thompson said. “But it didn’t seem monumental to humans then because there were only approximately 250 million people occupying the planet, compared to the 6.4 billion we now have.
    “The evidence clearly points back to this point in history and to some event that occurred. It also points to similar changes occurring in today’s climate as well,” he said.
    “To me, these are things we really need to be concerned about.” The impact of a climate change of that magnitude on a modern world would be tremendous, he said. Seventy percent of the population lives in the world’s tropics and major climate changes would directly impact most of them.
    Thompson believes that the 5,200-year old event may have been caused by a dramatic fluctuation in solar energy reaching the earth. Scientists know that a historic global cooling called the Little Ice Age, from 1450 to 1850 A.D., coincided with two periods of decreased solar activity.
    Evidence shows that around 5,200 years ago, solar output first dropped precipitously and then surged over a short period. It is this huge solar energy oscillation that Thompson believes may have triggered the climate change he sees in all those records.
    “The climate system is remarkably sensitive to natural variability,” he said. “It’s likely that it is equally sensitive to effects brought on by human activity, changes like increased greenhouse gases, altered land-use policies and fossil-fuel dependence.
    “Any prudent person would agree that we don’t yet understand the complexities with the climate system and, since we don’t, we should be extremely cautious in how much we ‘tweak’ the system,” he said.
    “The evidence is clear that a major climate change is underway.”

  • UAE sees snow for first time ever
    Thu Dec 30,12:09 PM ET
    Mideast - AFP
    DUBAI (AFP) - Snow has fallen over the United Arab Emirates for the first time ever, leaving a white blanket over the mountains of Ras al-Khaimah as the desert country experienced a cold spell and above-average rainfall.
    Dubai airport's meteorology department told AFP that snow fell over the Al-Jees mountain range in Ras al-Khaimah, which is the most northerly member of the UAE federation.
    The English-language Gulf News reported that the mountain cluster, 5,700 feet (1,737 metres) above sea level, "had heavy night-time snowfall for the past two days as a result of temperatures dropping to as low as minus five Celsius (23 Fahrenheit)" and stunning the emirate's residents.
    On Monday, 12.6 millimetres (half an inch) of rain fell on the desert emirate of Dubai, where it hardly ever rains, as police reported 500 accidents on its roads in 24 hours, including one fatality, as a result of a three-day downpour.
    A cold spell has hit the country this week, with the mercury plunging to 12 degrees Celsius (53.6 Fahrenheit) in Dubai on Wednesday night.
    The meteorology department, however, said the chilly weather in Dubai, where summer temperatures reach 50 Celcius (122 Fahrenheit), will probably end by next week.

  • Methane Burps: Ticking Time Bomb
    Published on Thursday, December 16, 2004 by Baltimore Sun (Common Dreams)
    By John Atcheson
    The Arctic Council's recent report on the effects of global warming in the far north paints a grim picture: global floods, extinction of polar bears and other marine mammals, collapsed fisheries. But it ignored a ticking time bomb buried in the Arctic tundra.
    There are enormous quantities of naturally occurring greenhouse gasses trapped in ice-like structures in the cold northern muds and at the bottom of the seas. These ices, called clathrates, contain 3,000 times as much methane as is in the atmosphere. Methane is more than 20 times as strong a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.
    Now here's the scary part. A temperature increase of merely a few degrees would cause these gases to volatilize and "burp" into the atmosphere, which would further raise temperatures, which would release yet more methane, heating the Earth and seas further, and so on. There's 400 gigatons of methane locked in the frozen arctic tundra - enough to start this chain reaction - and the kind of warming the Arctic Council predicts is sufficient to melt the clathrates and release these greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
    Once triggered, this cycle could result in runaway global warming the likes of which even the most pessimistic doomsayers aren't talking about.
    An apocalyptic fantasy concocted by hysterical environmentalists? Unfortunately, no. Strong geologic evidence suggests something similar has happened at least twice before.
    The most recent of these catastrophes occurred about 55 million years ago in what geologists call the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), when methane burps caused rapid warming and massive die-offs, disrupting the climate for more than 100,000 years.
    The granddaddy of these catastrophes occurred 251 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, when a series of methane burps came close to wiping out all life on Earth.
    More than 94 percent of the marine species present in the fossil record disappeared suddenly as oxygen levels plummeted and life teetered on the verge of extinction. Over the ensuing 500,000 years, a few species struggled to gain a foothold in the hostile environment. It took 20 million to 30 million years for even rudimentary coral reefs to re-establish themselves and for forests to regrow. In some areas, it took more than 100 million years for ecosystems to reach their former healthy diversity.
    Geologist Michael J. Benton lays out the scientific evidence for this epochal tragedy in a recent book, When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time. As with the PETM, greenhouse gases, mostly carbon dioxide from increased volcanic activity, warmed the earth and seas enough to release massive amounts of methane from these sensitive clathrates, setting off a runaway greenhouse effect.
    The cause of all this havoc?
    In both cases, a temperature increase of about 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit, about the upper range for the average global increase today's models predict can be expected from burning fossil fuels by 2100. But these models could be the tail wagging the dog since they don't add in the effect of burps from warming gas hydrates. Worse, as the Arctic Council found, the highest temperature increases from human greenhouse gas emissions will occur in the arctic regions - an area rich in these unstable clathrates.
    If we trigger this runaway release of methane, there's no turning back. No do-overs. Once it starts, it's likely to play out all the way.
    Humans appear to be capable of emitting carbon dioxide in quantities comparable to the volcanic activity that started these chain reactions. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, burning fossil fuels releases more than 150 times the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by volcanoes - the equivalent of nearly 17,000 additional volcanoes the size of Hawaii's Kilauea.
    And that is the time bomb the Arctic Council ignored.
    How likely is it that humans will cause methane burps by burning fossil fuels? No one knows. But it is somewhere between possible and likely at this point, and it becomes more likely with each passing year that we fail to act.
    So forget rising sea levels, melting ice caps, more intense storms, more floods, destruction of habitats and the extinction of polar bears. Forget warnings that global warming might turn some of the world's major agricultural areas into deserts and increase the range of tropical diseases, even though this is the stuff we're pretty sure will happen.
    Instead, let's just get with the Bush administration's policy of pre-emption. We can't afford to have the first sign of a failed energy policy be the mass extinction of life on Earth. We have to act now.
    John Atcheson, a geologist, has held a variety of policy positions in several federal government agencies.
    © 2004 Baltimore Sun
    Article found at :
    http://www.energybulletin.net/newswire.php?id=3647
    Original article :
    http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1215-24.htm


  • Sept 11 conspiracy theorist poses $130,000 challenge
    Thursday, December 16, 2004. 12:01pm (AEDT)
    A millionaire activist who believes the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001 were and "inside job" is offering a $130,000 reward to anyone who can prove him wrong.
    Jimmy Walter has spent more than $3.9 million promoting the conspiracy theory and is offering the reward to any engineering student who can prove the World Trade Centre buildings crashed the way the Government says they did.
    "Of course, we expect no winners," Mr Walter, 57, heir to an $14.3 million fortune from his father's home-building business.
    He accuses figures in government, the military and business of involvement in the September 11 attacks.
    Mr Walter says a panel of expert engineers will judge submissions from the students.
    Next month he also launches a nationwide contest seeking alternative theories from college and high school students about why New York's World Trade Centre collapsed.
    The contest offers $13,000 to the best alternative theory, with 100 runner-up awards of $1,300. Winners will be chosen next June.
    Various official investigations give no credence to Mr Walter's theory.
    A September 11 commission spokesman said its policy was not to comment on criticism of the official report into the attacks.
    Mr Walter insists there had to be explosives planted in the twin towers to cause them to fall as they did and also rejects the official explanation for the damage done at the Pentagon.
    "We have all the proof," said Mr Walter, citing videotapes and testimony from witnesses.
    "It wasn't 19 screw-ups from Saudi Arabia who couldn't pass flight school who defeated the United States with a set of box cutters," he said.
    He dismissed the official September 11 commission report, saying: "I don't trust any of these facts."
    - Reuters

  • 2004 Among Hottest Years on Record, Scientists Say, Part of Warming Trend That Began in 1990
    The Associated Press
    BUENOS AIRES, Argentina Dec 16, 2004 — The year 2004, punctuated by four powerful hurricanes in the Caribbean and deadly typhoons lashing Asia, was the fourth-hottest on record, extending a trend since 1990 that has registered the 10 warmest years, a U.N. weather agency said Wednesday.
    The current year was also the most expensive for the insurance industry in coping worldwide with hurricanes, typhoons and other weather-related natural disasters, according to new figures released by U.N. environmental officials.
    The release of the report by the World Meteorological Organization came as environmental ministers from some 80 countries gathered in Buenos Aires for a United Nations conference on climate change, looking at ways to cut down on greenhouse gases that some say contribute heavily to Earth's warming.
    Scientists say a sustained increase in temperature change is likely to continue disrupting the global climate, increasing the intensity of storms, potentially drying up farmlands and raising ocean levels, among other things.
    Michel Jarraud, the World Meteorological Organization secretary-general, said the warming and increased storm activity could not be attributed to any particular cause, but was part of a global warming trend that was likely to continue.
    Scientists have reported that temperatures across the globe rose an average of 1 degree over the past century with the rate of change since 1976 at roughly three times that over the past 100 years.
    The World Meteorological Organization said it expects Earth's average surface temperature to rise 0.8 degrees above the normal 57 degrees Fahrenheit in 2004, adding this year to a recent pattern that included the four warmest years on record, with the hottest being 1998.
    The month of October also registered as the warmest October since accurate readings began in 1861, said the agency, which is responsible for assembling data from meteorologists and climatologists worldwide.
    During the summer, heat waves in southern Europe pushed temperatures to near-record highs in southern Spain, Portugal and Romania, where thermostats peaked at 104 degrees while the rest of Europe sweltered through above-average temperatures.
    The extreme weather of 2004 extended to storms.
    The Caribbean had four hurricanes that reached Category 4 or 5 status those capable of causing extreme and catastrophic damage. It was only the fourth time in recent history that so many were recorded. The hurricanes of 2004 caused more than $43 billion in damages in the Caribbean and the United States.
    The worst damage was on Haiti, where as many as 1,900 people died from flooding and mudslides caused by Tropical Storm Jeanne in September.
    Japan and the Philippines also saw increased extreme tropical weather, with deadly typhoons lashing both islands. Japan registered a record number of typhoons making landfall this year with 10, while back-to-back storms in the Philippines killed at least 740 people in the wettest year for the globe since 2000, the U.N. agency said.
    Statistics released at the climate change conference showed that natural disasters across the world in the first 10 months of the year cost the insurance industry just over $35 billion, up from $16 billion in 2003.
    Munich Re, one of the world's biggest insurance companies, said the United States tallied the highest losses at more than $26 billion, while small developing nations such as the Caribbean islands of Grenada and Grand Cayman were also hit hard.
    Other parts of the world also witnessed extreme weather, with droughts occurring in the western United States, parts of Africa, Afghanistan, Australia and India. Jarraud, of the U.N. weather agency, said the droughts were part of what appears to be a surge over the last decade.
    The prolonged rising temperatures and deadly storms were matched by harsh winters in other regions.
    Peru, Chile, and southern Argentina were all hit with severe cold and snow during June and July.
    Jarraud said the high temperatures like those seen in parts of Europe this year were expected to inch up in the coming years.
    Citing recent studies by European climatologists, Jarraud said heat waves in Europe "could over the next 50 years become four or five times as frequent as they are now."

  • Forecasters face losing key tools
    By Alex Kirby
    BBC News website environment correspondent
    Meteorologists fear they are losing one of their essential forecasting tools - microwave frequencies uniquely able to "see" through clouds from satellites.
    They say commercial applications, for example mobile phones and collision avoidance systems, are ruining them.
    The use of the bands in this way causes interference and contaminates the data from the satellites, making it useless.
    Not only weather forecasting is put at risk, but also a better understanding of how climate change is developing.
    Progress in both forecasting and climate studies depends on observations from space of the Earth's surface and atmosphere.
    Unequal competition
    Many of these observations depend in turn on using microwave frequency bands, which are increasingly in demand for terrestrial use.
    Examples include mobiles, wireless networking, other long-distance radio communications, and remote triggering devices. New military communications technologies are reported to pose another threat.
    Dr Stephen English is manager of the satellite radiance assimilation group at the UK Met Office.
    He told the BBC: "Microwave observations are vital because they see through cloud - this is not possible in any other frequency band.
    "We only need a few narrow-frequency bands for Earth remote-sensing, but most of these are unique, so there is no alternative.
    Gone already
    "These bands are primarily used for temperature, water vapour, sea ice, clouds (ice and liquid), and rainfall and snowfall estimation.
    "We use them as well for monitoring surface snowpack, soil moisture and sea surface temperature."
    A meteorologists' working group on frequency management says protecting key regions of the microwave spectrum for passive remote-sensing is "a dramatic challenge", because of "the huge pressure of the commercial and military telecoms".
    Two important bands (6.8 GHz and 10.7 GHz) have been lost already for use over land, but in the next few years the threat is likely to spread to other bands.
    There is particular concern about protecting the 23.6-24 GHz band, which has the unique property of being sensitive to water vapour but not to liquid water.
    Dr English said: "There is no other frequency where this occurs. But car 'radars' will now be allowed to broadcast in this frequency band."
    Data lost
    An instrument called the advanced microwave scanning radiometer, carried on Nasa's Aqua satellite, monitors rainfall as it "sees through" the cloud above the rain.
    Land and sea look very different at this frequency (in the image, right, taken in mid-October, the ocean appears black where it is not raining, and magenta or blue where it is).
    Blobs of red and yellow over the main urban areas show radio frequency interference (RFI), which is much hotter than actual surface or atmospheric temperatures over the UK in October.
    Dr English said: "The 'hot spots' are easy to spot, but more worrying is the fact that smaller variations may be RFI, or they may be due to rain.
    "The truth is we can't tell. Therefore the channel is rendered useless not only in the hot spots but everywhere, because we can no longer uniquely interpret the variations in terms of rainfall.
    "Of course, over the ocean man-made signals are limited, so we still regard this channel as useful over the ocean, but it's no longer useful over land."
    Experts say this band should not be jeopardised under any circumstances, and all emissions able to cause interference should be prohibited.
    The UN body which is the final arbiter on frequency use is the International Telecommunication Union.
    Dr Steve Foreman of the Met Office told the BBC: "We're in a David and Goliath situation, arguing to the ITU for the safety and humanitarian uses of frequencies against some applications with very strong financial backing."
    Story from BBC NEWS:
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/sci/tech/4104355.stm

  • Why Are So Many Insiders Selling?
    November Sales Rates Reach Highest Level in More Than Four Years
    AP
    NEW YORK (Dec. 15) - While corporate leaders tout the benefits of investors owning their stocks, many executives seem to be running for the doors themselves.
    Corporate insiders are selling fast and buying very little.
    Selling of shares by insiders - which includes executives and other top officers and directors at a company - has been rampant in recent months, with sales rising to their highest level in more than four years in November.
    While no one can pinpoint an exact reason for that run-up, the implication is troubling since big insider selling is often considered bearish for the overall market as well as for individual stocks.
    Of course, not all insider selling should be construed as a bad sign. Some stock sales may just be routine or may be executives wanting to free up money to cover personal expenses or to help pay the taxes on shares they buy after exercising options. And in some sectors, namely technology, stock compensation is often the bulk of executive pay, so they sell their stock for income.
    In addition, November has historically been a busy time for insider selling. That's because it comes after most companies have reported their third-quarter earnings and restrictions for selling have been lifted. In addition, some executives sell in November for tax purposes.
    Still, insider-trading trackers at Thomson Financial say the recent selling bonanza is "particularly noteworthy."
    Some $6.6 billion in insider stock sales took place last month, the highest level since the $7.7 billion in sales tallied in August 2000, according to Thomson. Contrast that with the $144 million worth of stock that was bought by insiders last month.
    The most selling came from in the financial sector, where executives sold $882 million of their own stock in November, and health care companies, whose insiders sold $734 million worth of shares. Selling in both sectors was double the five-year monthly average, according to Thomson.
    On a company-specific basis, consider what has gone on at networking company Avocent Corp., where company statements seem to contradict insiders' actions. On Nov. 1, the company announced a buyback plan for up to two million shares and said in a news released that the purchase of the stock "represents a solid investment for our shareholders."
    Apparently, the company's insiders seemed to have ignored that memo. In the month following the announcement, they sold 578,565 shares out of an aggregate of 645,756 insider shares sold during the last 12 months, according to Vickers Weekly Insider, a newsletter that tracks trading by company executives.
    There was no buying during that time period.
    To be fair, much of the selling came as executives exercised their stock options, not surprising given that its shares have climbed 30 percent in the last two months reaching their highest level since last winter. In addition, the company's officers were blocked from making stock transactions from December 2003 through April of this year because of Avocent's acquisition of OSA Technologies Inc., according to vice president and chief accounting officer Edward Blankenship.
    Yet, as Vickers editor David Coleman points out: "If they thought the stock would continue to climb, wouldn't it be in their interest to hold on to it rather than immediately get out?"
    Looking beyond companies where executives say one thing but do something else, Coleman points to other warning signs that investors should use to gauge potentially negative signs associated with insider selling. He suggests looking out for insiders who have sold their stock at times that don't coincide with when they exercise options, or those who sell above and beyond the amount that they have exercised.
     "If they thought the stock would continue to climb, wouldn't it be in their interest to hold on to it rather than immediately get out?"
    -David Coleman
    Sometimes, though, investors refuse to heed such warnings.
    Take, for instance, the surge in shares of homebuilder NVR Inc., which has seen its stock jump from just over $432 a share at the start of the year to now trade about $730 apiece. That rise has come despite expectations for a slowdown in the housing market as interest rates begin to climb.
    Also troublesome with that giant stock run-up is that NVR's insiders have been bailing out of the stock big time. They have sold more than $220 million in shares this year alone.
    Among those selling: NVR CEO Dwight Schar, who hasn't purchased any stock since June 2002, only exercised just over 83,000 shares this year and has sold about 265,000 shares at a market value of about $155 million, according to Thomson. The company declined to comment on its insider selling, said NVR spokesman Dan Malzahn.
    At least so far, NVR's investors have ignored the insiders' moves, and haven't been hurt by that decision. Whether that luck continues will surely be tested in the months ahead.
    12-15-04 08:49 EST

  • Mystery surrounds Yushchenko ailment
    http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/11/25/yushchenko.ailment.ap/index.html
    VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- What ails Viktor Yushchenko?
    As Ukraine's popular pro-Western opposition leader claimed victory Tuesday in hotly contested presidential elections, the mystery surrounding an appearance-altering illness that twice prompted him to check into a Vienna hospital persisted.
    Yushchenko accused the Ukrainian authorities of poisoning him. His detractors suggested he'd eaten some bad sushi.
    Adding to the intrigue, the Austrian doctors who treated him have asked foreign experts to help determine if his symptoms may have been caused by toxins found in biological weapons.
    Medical experts said they may never know for sure what befell Yushchenko.
    But the illness, whatever it was, has dramatically changed his appearance since he first sought treatment at Vienna's private Rudolfinerhaus clinic on September 10.
    Known for his ruggedly handsome, almost movie star looks, Yushchenko's complexion is now pockmarked. His face is haggard, swollen and partially paralyzed. One eye often tears up.
    Doctors at Rudolfinerhaus declined to comment Tuesday. By the time Yushchenko checked out of the clinic last month after returning for follow-up treatment, physicians said they could neither prove nor rule out that he had been poisoned.
    Dr. Nikolai Korpan, who oversaw Yushchenko's treatment in Vienna, said the cause of his illness remained "totally open.''
    Doctors were unable to confirm suspicions of poisoning because Yushchenko first checked into the clinic four days after the symptoms appeared -- too late for tests to show if poisoning had occurred, Korpan said.
    At Rudolfinerhaus, Yushchenko underwent a week of intensive treatment for several illnesses, including acute pancreatitis, a viral skin disease and nerve paralysis on the left side of his face, Korpan said.
    Clinic director Michael Zimpfer said doctors were unable to explain some of Yushchenko's symptoms, particularly his strong backaches.
    He said they could not rule out stress or a viral infection.
    Yushchenko's doctors in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, said they had determined that "chemicals not of a food origin'' had triggered the illness.
    Zimpfer and the clinic's chief physician, Dr. Lothar Wicke -- who requested police protection after receiving an anonymous threat while treating Yushchenko -- later asked for outside help from "a specialist in military operations and biological weapons,'' the Austria Press Agency reported.
    Yushchenko's medical files since have been sealed and turned over to Austrian prosecutors, local media reported.
    Authorities have not said whether they planned to investigate further or merely turn over their findings to Ukraine.
    Earlier this month, Volodymyr Syvkovych, the head of a 15-member Ukrainian parliamentary commission that investigated the mysterious illness, said a forensic medical examination found no traces of "any biological weapons'' in Yushchenko's blood, nails, hair or urine.

  • Pepper-spray attack at jammed Times Sq. Toys R Us
    11/27/04
    http://www.nydailynews.com/front/breaking_news/story/256722p-219882c.html
    THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
    At least three people were hospitalized and others suffered irritated eyes when someone released pepper spray at Toys R Us’ flagship store during the busy holiday shopping weekend, fire and police spokesmen said.
    Police were reviewing video camera footage to find out who discharged the spray inside an elevator at the toy chain’s Times Square store about 3:10 p.m. Saturday.
    Firefighter Kevin Nolan said five shoppers injured by pepper spray were taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital and 17 others were treated at the scene or refused medical attention. Detective Gary Cillo, a police spokesman, said three people had been injured and nine had refused medical attention.
    Susan McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for Toys R Us, said the incident was under investigation but declined to elaborate. “We are cooperating fully with the police,” she said.
    The 110-square-foot store, which opened in November 2001, features an 60-foot indoor ferris wheel.
    Originally published on November 27, 2004
     

  • Reports: British Thwart Terror Attacks
    11/22/04
    LONDON (AP) - British security services thwarted planned Sept. 11-style terror attacks on Heathrow Airport and skyscrapers in Canary Wharf, a financial district of London, according to two media reports.
    But the stories, which cited unidentified sources, did not say when or where the plots were uncovered, or how close they came to being carried out.
    The plans to crash planes into the two targets were among four or five attacks planned by terrorists linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network, ITV News said Monday night and the Daily Mail newspaper reported in its Tuesday editions.
    ITV News also said that British authorities had disrupted training programs for suicide pilots.
    Officials at Britain's Home Office and Metropolitan Police in London refused to comment. A spokesman at Prime Minister Tony Blair's Downing Street office said: ``We never comment on security matters.''
    A year and a half ago, British troops in armored vehicles surrounded Heathrow Airport. Blair's government said that the action came in response to specific intelligence.
    Last summer, Pakistan gave British officials intelligence suggesting that al-Qaida had plotted to attack Heathrow airport. The information was found on the computers of two accused members of Osama bin Laden's terror network arrested in Pakistan. The computers held images of Heathrow.
    On Nov. 8, the head of the MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, said that counterterrorism efforts have helped to prevent attacks in Britain since the Sept. 11, 2001, but she offered no details.

  • Phone masts 'confusing' homing pigeons
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4038179.stm
    Friday, 23 January, 2004, 14:51 GMT
    Which way now? Could the pigeon's skills fall foul of new technology?
    A growing number of homing pigeons are getting lost due to interference from the new "unseen enemy" of mobile phone masts, racing experts claim.
    The birds' natural instincts are being confused by radiation signals from an increasing number of transmitters, the Royal Pigeon Racing Association said.
    Racers say anecdotal evidence shows poor returns over the last two years.
    Pigeons are thought to find their way home using landmarks and the earth's magnetic field.
    Peter Bryant, of the RPRA, said its Stray Birds Committee had proposed attaching a GPS tracking device to pigeons to investigate the problem.
    During the World War II thousands of aircraft carried two pigeons in case the plane was downed. Now they're facing this unseen enemy.
    But currently the device - which would have to be strapped on like a rucksack - is too heavy for a pigeon to carry.
    "It's fine with eagles and albatross, but for the poor little pigeons it would hamper their return," said Mr Bryant.
    He said it was impossible to estimate how many pigeons were vanishing because of the transmitters.
    "During the World War II, thousands of aircraft carried two pigeons in case they the plane was downed so they could send messages," he said.
    "The birds were also parachuted to the Resistance. Now they're facing this unseen enemy in the form of mobile phone masts."
    Pigeon fancier Anne Pitkeathly, 50, from the Isle of Wight, said she was losing more and more birds.
    "When I started I was told I would lose baby birds but never the big ones.
    "A lot of people think it's mobile phone masts."
    She claimed one of her pigeons had recently reacted badly after being near a mast, saying it was "stressed" and "trying to be sick".
    Previous research by German scientists in 1999 suggested that short wave radiation had an "undefined negative" impact on homing pigeons.
    It was found that exposed birds took longer to get home, flew at lower levels and were reluctant to go near transmitters.
    Between 50,000 to 60,000 pigeons are estimated to have gone missing last year due to problems such as bird of prey attacks and poor weather, the RPRA said.
     
     
     
  • Pigeon home after New York detour
    2 July, 2003, 09:07 GMT 10:07 UK
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/merseyside/3037652.stm
    Billy might have stowed on a ship for part of his trip
    A racing pigeon who took a wrong turn on his way from France to Merseyside and ended up in New York has finally come home to roost.
    Billy the pigeon was only due to fly the 425 miles from Calais to his home in Merseyside in the race three weeks ago.
    But he took a remarkable 3,321 mile detour and ended up on New York pigeon fancier Joseph Ida's terrace among his flock of 100 racing birds.
    Billy now has to spend a month in quarantine before getting back to his creature comforts.
    "You could see that he had been out," said Mr Ida, who added that Billy looked a little tired, thin and run down. It was a pleasure to have a VIP - a very important pigeon - on board
    British Airways spokesman
    Saving Billy another marathon journey over the Atlantic, bosses at British Airways agreed to bring him home for free.
    The pigeon touched down at Manchester Airport on Wednesday morning following a six-hour flight from JFK International Airport, and was reunited with his owner John Warren, of Bootle, Merseyside.
    Billy will have to spend 31 days in quarantine before returning home.
    A British Airways spokesman said: "He had a pleasant flight. It was a pleasure to have a VIP - a very important pigeon - on board."
    The spokesman said Billy was "very perky" following the flight in a pressurised hold.
     

  • Bees survived dino extinction
    23 November, 2004
    Bees were found trapped in amber from the time of the dinosaurs
    New evidence shows tropical honeybees survived the post-impact winter 65 million years ago that is thought to have helped kill off the dinosaurs.
    An asteroid is thought to have hit our planet at the end of the Cretaceous Period, throwing up dust that blocked sunlight and dragged down temperatures.
    Honeybees trapped in amber before the asteroid strike are nearly identical to their modern relatives, data shows.
    Details were given at the Geological Society of America's 2004 meeting.
      I'm not trying to say an asteroid impact didn't happen...I'm just trying to narrow down the effects
    Jacqueline Kozisek, University of New Orleans
    The asteroid or comet that created the Chicxulub impact structure in Mexico occurs at the boundary between two geological periods: the Cretaceous and the Tertiary.
    This geological boundary marks a mass extinction that wiped out dinosaurs and many other groups of organisms.
    The finding throws up all sorts of questions, researchers say, because current models of the post-impact winter suggest global temperatures fell far enough to have killed off honeybees and many of the flowering plants they lived off.
    Modern tropical honeybees have an optimal temperature range of 31-34C (88-93F) in order to maintain vital metabolic activities.
    This is also the range that is best for their food source: nectar-rich flowering plants.
    Temperature sensitive
    Based on what is known about the Cretaceous climate and modern tropical honeybees, Jacqueline Kozisek of the University of New Orleans, US, estimated that any post-impact winter event could not have dropped temperatures more than 2-7C (4-13F) without wiping out the bees.
    Current theories about the Chicxulub impact winter estimate drops of 7-12C (13-22F) - too cold for tropical honeybees.
    If no modern tropical honeybee could have survived years in the dark and cold without flowering plants, says Kozisek, something must be amiss with the impact winter theory.
    "I'm not trying to say an asteroid impact didn't happen," said Kozisek. "I'm just trying to narrow down the effects."
    Kozisek dug through the scientific literature to find out what survived the massive extinction event.
    "I made a list of all survivors and picked those with strict survival requirements," said Kozisek.
    She determined what those survival requirements were by calling on studies of the most similar organisms living today.
    She found that tropical honeybees had changed little in 65 million years.
    Amber-preserved specimens of the oldest tropical honeybee Cretotrigona prisca are almost indistinguishable from some of their modern counterparts. This means they could even be their ancestors, researchers think.
     

  • Discovery puts humans in South Carolina 50,000 years ago
    November 18, 2004
    USA Today
    Artifacts found in a hillside along the Savannah River indicate that modern humans inhabited North America as long as 50,000 years ago, a discovery that challenges long-held theories on the migration of our ancient ancestors.
    The find reported Wednesday by archaeologist Albert Goodyear of the University of South Carolina flies in the face of the conventional scientific view that homo sapiens — with the same bone structure and brain size as today's people — moved into North America within the past 12,000 years. Until then, a 23,000-year-long Ice Age was thought to have blocked travel across Alaska's Bering Strait.
    "Fifty thousand years ago is mind-boggling. It challenges a lot of theories," Archaeology magazine's Eric Powell says. "All of our models of how humans migrated will have to be reconsidered if this holds up," he says.
    Goodyear and his colleagues have been exploring the ancient flint quarry in Allendale County, S.C., since 1998, unearthing a hearth, flint blades and tool chips.
    The age estimate of the deepest artifacts is based on measures of radioactive carbon traces found in oak, conifer, buckeye and other plants buried alongside them.

  • The mast crusaders
    Mandy's children are having nosebleeds. Andy sleeps with metal plates by his bed. Beat bobbies are reporting strange illnesses. They all blame the new police radio system
    By Terry Kirby
    23 November 2004
    http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/story.jsp?story=585672
    The ill-fated Cornish revolt of 1497 began in the pretty, isolated village of St Keverne on the Lizard peninsula, as a protest over unjust taxes levied by London. Now, its population has rebelled once more against an idea imposed from afar, which they believe could have been far more damaging than any mere financial loss.
    This time the population has had more success than in 1497, when its leaders were executed. They have won their point and become one of the few communities in the country to be without a Tetra radio mast. "It's not as though we aren't already chock-a-block with radio masts and aerials around here: there's the BT Satellite Earth Station at Goonhilly, and RAF Culdrose up the road," says John Gough, spokesman for the anti-Tetra campaigners. "But when we saw they were going to put up a Tetra mast, we decided to find out about it on the internet. We were immediately very concerned." More than 350 people out of a total population of only 1,600 lodged objections to the local planning committee, which rejected the application to erect the 50ft-high mast on farmland near the village.
    It was the experiences of others elsewhere that motivated the St Keverne campaign. They learnt of stories like that of Andy Davidson in Worthing who, suffering headaches and insomnia, had to sleep with metal plates around his head; and of the 80 people around Dursley in the Cotswolds who claim to have suffered similar problems, one of whom has covered her bedroom windows with metal mesh to stop the symptoms. They also learnt of Mandy Keeling and her family in Bognor Regis, whose sickness and sleeplessness ended when the local Tetra mast was taken down.
    You may not have heard of Tetra masts, but there's almost certainly one near you. If not, it's on the way. Tetra - Terrestrial Trunked Radio - is the new police communications network that is replacing their outdated, unreliable VHF system. It gives officers a mobile phone and two-way radio in the same handset, and is being implemented around the country by O2 Airwave, previously part of BT, which has a £2.9bn, 15-year contract with the Home Office to supply all 51 forces in England, Wales and Scotland through a network of around 3,500 masts. Around 40 forces have been supplied so far, but the system will not be fully operational until May 2006.
    Around 70 per cent of Tetra masts have been, or will be, built on sites already in use; some replace old masts, others are added to existing ones. The remainder are new masts, such as St Keverne, requested by police to improve communications in remote areas. The Home Office says it chose the Tetra system, which is used in 65 countries, in preference to others such as the French-based Tetrapol, used in about 28 countries, because it is technically superior. It was criticised by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee for failing to incorporate financial safeguards in case the health fears proved justified, and by the EC for refusing to accept tenders from non-Tetra operators.
    But the programme's completionnext year is unlikely to be the end of Tetra installations. O2 Airwave is short-listed for the contracts to supply the fire and ambulance services; this may lead to further masts. If Airwave is not awarded the multimillion-pound contracts when the decisions are announced over the next two months, it will be seen as a victory for anti-Tetra campaigners and evidence of a lack of official faith in the Tetra network.
    Although the health fears surrounding Tetra are linked to concerns about mobile-phone masts, the symptoms that affect some people appear consistent - sleep deprivation, nausea, headaches, ear pressure, nosebleeds. They seem to stop when the Tetra exposure ends. They occur, it is claimed, because the masts transmit and receive signals on the 400 MHz frequency, which are pulsed at 17.65Hz. In 2000, the Government's report on mobile-phone safety by Sir William Stewart, a former chief scientific adviser, recommended that frequencies around 16Hz - the frequency at which the human brain transmits signals - be avoided as a precaution, even though there was no confirmed health risk.
    Campaigners say the apparent link between cause and effect underlines their concerns about Tetra. In Bognor Regis 44-year-old Mandy Keeling began to vomit last New Year's Eve. "It was the day, I later learnt, that the Tetra mast 150 yards from my home began transmitting. I had two months of nausea, headaches and poor sleep. Doctors could do nothing. Then I heard about the mast. I was cynical about it at first. I thought, 'Pull yourself together.' I've lived here for 12 years, and there are other mobile masts, but none had made my brain vibrate." By now her two sons, aged nine and 19, were suffering, too; the younger one had nosebleeds.
    She went knocking on doors and discovered neighbours had been affected as well. They campaigned to have the mast taken down; eventually, the company agreed. The mast was dismantled in May. Keeling was transformed: "I felt better within a month, and we're all perfectly healthy now. Except when I go near a Tetra mast somewhere else."
    What seems clear is that, if Tetra does have an affect, it is only triggered in those who are sensitive to low-frequency radio waves are directly exposed. After months of sleeplessness and headaches, Andy Davidson's solution was to take a couple of metal plates and place them around his pillow to block out the signals from the transmitter across the playing-field; both the mattress and the plates were earthed. It worked. "It may be strange, but it's the only way I can get a decent night's sleep," he says. But his wife and children have not suffered, and a survey of more than 400 local people showed that, while around 40 per cent had suffered from sleeplessness and/or headaches since the mast arrived, everyone else was OK. Davidson is now moving house.
    His case is one of hundreds of examples collected by Tetrawatch, the national campaign against Tetra, which has gathered force as Tetra has been rolled out around the country over the past three years. Tetrawatch argues that the system is untested; is being imposed secretively; is shunned by many other European countries, including France; and that health fears are being underplayed by the Government in the same way that, say, the link between CJD and BSE was in the early 1990s.
    John O'Brien, the spokesman, stressed that the Tetra system in this country is different to both Tetrapol and other Tetra systems elsewhere, because to meet police requirements it uses the pulsed technique, which is feared to create the symptoms. "This is an untried and untested system. There is something different about this type of Tetra system compared with other mobile transmissions systems, and that is why we're worried about it." And concern isn't confined to people living near base stations - a number of landowners, including Lord Cowdray and the Duke of Norfolk, have refused to allow Tetra masts on their land.
    And then there are the police officers, who are being exposed every day. When Tetra first began, the Police Federation, which represents lower-ranking officers, commissioned a report by an independent physicist, Barrie Trower. He predicted the occurrence of cancers resulting from Tetra and warned that the system could lead to "more civilian deaths in peacetime than all the terrorist organisations put together". But it was too late. Tetra was already being rolled out around the country.
    One of the first forces to go "live" was Lancashire, in 2001. Within a short space of time, more than 170 officers out of a force of 3,500 were reporting the typical symptoms. But, says Steve Edwards, chairman of the local branch of the Police Federation, complaints have tailed off. "If my members were suffering on a daily basis, they would be knocking on my door every day. They are not. Opinion is divided. I can't tell members it's safe, but I can't say it's definitely going to damage their health."
    But concerns remain. In Leicestershire, PC Neil Dring, an otherwise healthy motorcycle officer, suffered headaches and nosebleeds soon after being issued with his Tetra handset. He developed oesophageal cancer and died this summer. His family believe the cancer was linked to his handset, which he wore strapped to his body. Another officer in the force has also developed the same relatively unusual cancer.
    It is not, says Steve Edwards, as though the Tetra handset is even the answer to all police communication needs. "Tetra hasn't delivered yet. It's encrypted, so it's more secure than VHF, but it can't yet do all the things we were told it would, like send photos, link to the police national computer, or allow communication between officers in different forces. We hope it will be better when the whole system is up and running."
    Medical opinion is divided. On one side are the "establishment" scientists, such as Professor Colin Blakemore, chief executive of the Medical Research Council, who say there's no evidence that Tetra is unsafe; on the other, independent consultants such as Dr Gerard Hyland, a former head of physics at the University of Warwick, who believe otherwise. "We could be seeing a pandemic of brain tumours in 10 years," he told The Ecologist recently. Earlier this year, the National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB), the independent watchdog, concluded: "Although areas of uncertainty remain about the biological effects of low-level RF radiation... current evidence suggests it is unlikely that the special features of signals from Tetra mobile terminals and repeaters pose a hazard to health."
    Curiously, The Ecologist pointed out, there is now what some see as evidence of official backtracking on the Stewart report. Professor Blakemore, a member of the NRPB's advisory group and the Stewart committee, said16Hz radio waves provide "no cause for alarm. I still hold to both of my previous statements. In principle, it would have been better if 16Hz pulsing could have been avoided. But that was said in the context of the strict precautionary approach of the Stewart report." Professor Lawrie Challis, deputy chairman of the Stewart committee, said the 16Hz warning was made in recognition of the existence of "unreplicated research from the 1970s", and there was "no evidence that 17.65Hz modulation of the emission from Tetra phones would lead to any adverse health effects".
    Tetrawatch questions the NRPB's independence from the vested interests of the Home Office and the mobile-phone industry. Answering the criticisms, Home Office ministers and Airwave cite the technical virtues of Tetra, and refer health concerns to the conclusions of the NRPB. The Home Office says some symptoms suffered are, like those associated with mobile-phone masts, often related to stress caused by a perception of risk, rather than the reality; whether some people are genuinely sensitive to certain radio waves, it says, must be the subject of further research. It has also commissioned a 10-year study of police handsets by Imperial College London. But Tetrawatch says if its fears are justified, any results will come too late.
    Airwave adds that gaining the fire and ambulance contracts would help to provide an integrated national system with only "minimal" increase in the number of masts; that it operates within recommended NRPB safety levels; and that the handsets pulse, the masts do not. But such assurances are not enough for Mandy Keeling: "If a food you could buy on the high street had all these concerns raised about it, it'd be off the shelves straight away."
    Back in St Keverne, John Gough, a 69-year-old retired research chemist, believes they have saved the village from an experiment with uncertain consequences: "I'm a scientist and was a radar mechanic in the Army, so I know a bit about radiation. Nobody can give us any assurances about the long-term effects of low-level frequencies, and I don't see why anybody, anywhere, should be used as a guinea pig for this."

  • Baseball, Football, Bloodline All Failed Kerry Bid
    Thu Nov 4, 2004
    WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Forget misleading exit polls. The Washington Redskins, Burke's Peerage and even the candidate's height fell short when it came to forecasting the outcome of Campaign 2004.
    President Bush (news - web sites)'s victory over Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry (news - web sites) in the U.S. presidential race took the wind from the sails of a whole host of beloved election superstitions.
    The taller candidate usually wins. But Kerry, at 6 feet, 4 inches (193 cm), towers over Bush, at 5 feet, 11 inches (180 cm).
    In every presidential election since 1936, the White House has changed hands if the Redskins lost their final home game before Election Day, and the National Football League team lost to the Green Bay Packers by 28-14, at home, on Oct. 31.
    But the sporting omen was no touchdown for Kerry.
    Burke's Peerage said Kerry was a distant cousin to Britain's Queen Elizabeth and had more royal blood than any presidential candidate in U.S. history, including Bush, who has plenty of blue blood of his own.
    Burke's also said the candidate with more royal blood wins.
    Some omens are so unusual they're hard to ignore.
    Democratic pulses ran high when Boston's -- and Kerry's -- beloved Red Sox baseball team cast off a stigma more dire even than the "liberal" label days before the vote.
    Surely the team's first World Series (news - web sites) victory in 86 years, breaking the "Curse of the Bambino" said to have been inflicted when the team sold the legendary Babe Ruth to the Yankees, would have augured well for a senator from Boston?
    But, not.
    Of course, some indicators were right on the mark.
    Bush Halloween masks outsold Kerry ones, proving he would be re-elected.
    One venerable omen almost pinpointed the popular vote. Scholastic News, a children's magazine that has conducted student presidential election polls since 1940, and been right in all but two of them, said its readers had picked Bush with 52 percent -- he nabbed about 51 percent on Tuesday.
    The real soothsaying may involve domestic policy of an apolitical sort: the U.S. magazine "Family Circle" holds a first-lady cookie recipe contest in honor of each presidential election.
    This year, Laura Bush's oatmeal-chocolate-chunk cookies triumphed over Teresa Heinz Kerry's pumpkin spice ones.


  • Surprise CO2 rise may speed up global warming
    By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor
    11 October 2004
    http://news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/story.jsp?story=570734
    The rate at which global warming gases are accumulating in the atmosphere has taken a sharp leap upwards, leading to fears that the devastating effects of climate change may hit the world even sooner than has been predicted.
    Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO2 ), the principal greenhouse gas, have made a sudden jump that cannot be explained by any corresponding jump in terrestrial emissions of CO2 from power stations and motor vehicles - because there has been none.
    Some scientists think instead that the abrupt speed-up may be evidence of the long-feared climate change "feedback" mechanism, by which global warming causes alterations to the earth's natural systems and then, in turn, causes the warming to increase even more rapidly than before.
    Such a development would mean the worldwide droughts, agricultural failure, sea-level rise, increased weather turbulence and flooding all predicted as consequences of climate change would arrive on much shorter time-scales than present scenarios suggest, and the world would have much less time to co-ordinate its response.
    Only last month, Tony Blair expressed anxiety that global warming's dire effects would arrive not just in his children's lifetime, but in his own, and would "radically alter human existence".
    The feedback phenomenon has already been predicted in the supercomputer models of the global climate on which the current forecasts of warming are based. A key aspect is the weakening, caused by the warming itself, of the earth's ability to remove huge amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere by absorbing it annually in its forests and oceans, in the so-called carbon cycle. (The forests and oceans are referred to as carbon "sinks".)
    Hitherto, however, that weakening has been put decades into the future.
    The possibility that it may be occurring now is suggested in the long run of atmospheric CO2 measurements that have been made since 1958 at the observatory on the top of Mauna Loa, an 11,000ft volcano in Hawaii, by the American physicist Charles Keeling, from the University of California at San Diego.
    When he began, Dr Keeling, who is still in charge of the project and who might be said to be the Grand Old Man of CO2 , found the amount of the gas present in the atmosphere to be 315 parts per million by volume (ppm); today, after the remorseless increase in emissions from power stations and motor vehicles over the past four and a half decades, the figure stands at 376ppm.
    This growth is what most scientists believe is causing the earth's atmosphere to warm up, as the increasing CO2 retains more and more of the sun's heat in the atmosphere, like the panes of a greenhouse.
    But the worry now is not merely the swelling volume of CO2 but the sudden leap in its increase rate. Across all 46 years of Dr Keeling's measurements, the average annual CO2 rise has been 1.3ppm, although in recent decades it has gone up to about 1.6ppm.
    There have been several peaks, all associated with El Niño, the disruption of the atmosphere-ocean system in the tropical Pacific Ocean that causes changes to global weather patterns. In 1988, for example, the annual increase was 2.45ppm; in 1998, 2.74ppm; both were El Niño years.
    Throughout the series those peaks have been followed by troughs, and there has been no annual increase in CO2 above 2ppm that has been sustained for more than a year. Until now.
    From 2001 to 2002, the increase was 2.08ppm (from 371.02 to 373.10); and from 2002 to 2003 the increase was 2.54ppm (from 373.10 to 375.64). Neither of these were El Niño years, and there has been no sudden leap in emissions.
    The greater-than-two rise is also visible in two separate sets of CO2 measurements made by America's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, at Mauna Loa and other stations around the world.
    At the weekend, Dr Keeling told The Independent the rise was real and worrying as it might indeed represent the beginnings of a feedback.
    He said it might be associated with the Southern Oscillation, a pattern of high and low atmospheric pressure previously always associated with El Niños, or it might be something new.
    "The rise in the annual rate of CO2 increase to above two parts per million for two consecutive years is a real phenomenon," Dr Keeling said.
    "It is possible this is merely a reflection of the Southern Oscillation, like previous peaks in the rate, but it is possible it is the beginning of a natural process unprecedented in records.
    "This could be a decoupling of the Southern Oscillation from El Niño events, which itself could be caused by increased CO2 in the atmosphere; or it could be a weakening of the earth's carbon sinks. It is a cause for concern."
    Leading British scientists and environmentalists agree. "If this is a rate change [in the CO2 rise], of course it will be very significant," said Dr Piers Forster of the meteorology department of the University of Reading. "It will be of enormous concern, because it will imply that all our global warming predictions for the next 100 years or so will have to be redone. If the higher rate of increase continues, things will get very much worse. It will makes our predicament even more catastrophic."
    Tom Burke, a former government adviser on green issues who is now an academic and environmental adviser to business, said: "This series of CO2 measurements is the world's climate clock, and it looks as if it may be ticking faster,"
    "That means we are running out of time to stabilise the climate. Governments and business will both have to invest dramatically more if we are to avoid the global warming catastrophe that Tony Blair has warned against."


  • Man Charged With Aiding Shoe Bomber
    Feds Charge Muslim Convert With Attempted Murder
    10/04/04
    AP
    WASHINGTON (Oct. 4) - U.S. authorities brought charges Monday against a British man they claim conspired with admitted al-Qaida member Richard Reid to use shoe bombs to blow up planes in midair.
    A federal grand jury indictment unsealed in Boston charges Saajid Badat, 25, with attempted murder, trying to destroy an aircraft and other counts related to the alleged conspiracy with Reid, who also is a British citizen and Muslim convert.
    Reid's attempt to blow up a Paris-to-Miami flight on Dec. 22, 2001, was thwarted by attendants and passengers after he tried to light a fuse leading to the concealed plastic explosives in his sneakers.
    According to the indictment, Badat "admitted that he was asked to conduct a shoe bombing like Reid" when he was arrested in Britain last November. Bomb components similar to Reid's - including an explosive compound known as TATP - were found at his home, the indictment said.
    "The alert passengers and crew of Flight 63 prevented Richard Reid from carrying out his deadly mission," said Attorney General John Ashcroft. "The resulting investigation led us and our British colleagues to Badat."
    Badat, a British citizen, pleaded innocent last month to similar British charges and faces trial there beginning Feb. 28.
    Reid is serving a life prison sentence in the United States after pleading guilty in Boston federal court to the airline bomb plot. The American Airlines flight was diverted to Boston after Reid was subdued. No one was hurt.
    Badat also faces a potential life sentence if convicted on all U.S. charges.
    After Badat's arrest, the Homeland Security Department and FBI each issued warnings that al-Qaida was still interested in using personal items to bomb aircraft. It is now commonplace for U.S. travelers to remove their shoes for screening before boarding a commercial flight.

  • London's Dirty-Bomb Plot
    British authorities suspect that a cell of Islamic terrorists where trying to harvest radioactive material from smoke detectors
    Sunday, Oct. 03, 2004
    TIME magazine
    When British authorities broke up a cell of suspected Islamic terrorists in August, the arrests sent reverberations across the Atlantic. Among the evidence found with the suspects were reconnaissance reports on major U.S. financial sites—including the New York Stock Exchange and the World Bank in Washington.
    But senior U.S. law-enforcement officials tell TIME they are continuing to follow the case closely and are learning even more disturbing details about what the group may have been plotting.
    Reports on the British investigation, now circulating among U.S. law-enforcement agencies, assert that the group was trying to construct a crude radiological dirty bomb. The arrests (which followed a yearlong surveillance operation, code-named Operation Spangle) turned up a cache of household smoke detectors, which the British suspect the group wanted to cannibalize for their minute quantities of americium-241, a man-made radioactive chemical.
    Officials tell TIME it's extremely unlikely that enough americium could be harvested from smoke detectors to create a device potent enough to inflict radiation sickness, let alone kill people. But others argue that spewing even a small amount of radioactive material into a crowded stadium or subway station could trigger sensitive radiation sensors, incite panic and cause long-lasting contamination.
    Law-enforcement officials tell TIME that information from computer files seized with the group revealed plans for specific attacks in London, including "blowing up high-rise buildings housing multinational companies" by driving bomb-laden cars into underground garages. Other targets included the Heathrow Express, a rail line between the airport and London, and an unspecified synagogue. There were also plans for "hijacking a gasoline tanker and smashing it into a building." The British cell leader, Dhiren Barot—a.k.a. Issa al-Hindi—traveled to New York City in early 2001, according to The 9/11 Commission Report, "to case potential economic and 'Jewish' targets." U.S. officials hope to learn from the continuing investigation whether a sleeper cell remained in the U.S. to carry out these missions.


  • When The Sun Lost Its Heat
    Evidence Of Sudden Solar Cooling Found In Fossils
    The Independent - UK
    http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/story.jsp?story=566685
    10-2-4
    Just under 3,000 years ago, a group of horse-riding nomads, known as the Scythians, started to venture east and west across the Russian steppes. At about the same time, African farmers began to explore their continent, and Dutch farmers abandoned their land and moved east. All over the world people became restless and started to move - but why? Archaeologists have never found a clear answer, but now one scientist thinks the explanation may lie on the surface of the Sun.
    Bas van Geel, a biologist from the University of Amsterdam, believes that the Earth's climate took a dramatic turn about 2,800 years ago, due to a quiet period in the Sun's activity, making the tropics drier and the mid-latitudes colder and wetter. Previously damp areas, like parts of the Netherlands, became flooded and uninhabitable, while very dry, desert-like areas, such as southern Siberia, became viable places to live. Meanwhile, in the tropics, land dried out and created savannahs where lush forests had grown before. "People living where the changes were most dramatic were forced to move," he explains.
    Until now, climate scientists haven't taken too much notice of the changes in the activity of the Sun, believing them to be small fry compared with the effects of greenhouse gases and wobbles in the Earth's orbit. But now a growing number of scientists are convinced that fluctuations in the activity on the Sun's surface (such as flares, sunspots and gas boiling off) may be amplified, causing significant changes to the Earth's climate. Van Geel has gathered evidence that supports the idea that such solar activity is an important influence on our climate, and he has also shown how people are affected when the Sun decides to have a snooze.
    Over the past 10 years, van Geel and his colleagues have been studying fossil plants in peats and muds from all over the world. They have been measuring carbon 14, the heaviest isotope of carbon, which is used to date things. Carbon 14 is created in the atmosphere when high-energy cosmic rays smash into nitrogen atoms. Carbon 14 atoms then team up with oxygen and become radioactive carbon dioxide, which is then absorbed by all living things. Once the plant or animal dies it stops interchanging its carbon with the atmosphere and, over time, the carbon 14 decays. Because scientists know approximately how quickly carbon 14 decays they can work out how old an object is. But this isn't the whole story.
    The level of carbon 14 in the atmosphere varies according to how many cosmic rays are bombarding the Earth. When the Sun is very active, cosmic rays are deflected by the strong solar wind. This means that as well as indicating how old something is, carbon 14 can give scientists an idea of how intense the cosmic ray flux was. And this is just what van Geel has been using carbon 14 for. By measuring the detailed variations of the isotope of carbon at different levels in peat deposits, he can estimate the ups and downs in the intensity of the cosmic rays hitting the Earth at the particular time that the peat was formed from dead plant matter in wetlands.
    "I use the carbon 14 as an indicator of solar activity because an increase in it means an increase in the cosmic ray flux and, therefore, a decrease in solar activity," he explains.
    He has shown that, about 2,800 years ago, there was an abrupt, worldwide, increase in carbon 14 levels, which occurred at the same time as climate change. He believes the increase in carbon 14 means that solar activity suddenly declined. But how can little blips on the Sun's surface have such a drastic effect on the Earth's climate?
    Proponents of the solar activity theory have come up with two possible mechanisms that might be transmitting the effects of fluctuations in activity on the Sun's surface.
    The first is that changes in solar activity alter the level of cosmic rays hitting the Earth, which influences cloud formation. Clouds affect climate by altering the amount of sunlight reflected back into space, and by varying the level of rainfall.
    Alternatively, changes in solar activity affect the amount of ultra-violet radiation leaving the Sun, which may have an impact on the amount of ozone created in the higher levels of the atmosphere. Ozone influences how much solar energy is absorbed by the atmosphere, and, indirectly, affects atmospheric circulation and associated weather.
    Teaming up with archaeologists has enabled van Geel to back up his theory by showing that many people were migrating at this time. Along with Dutch specialists, he has found that farming communities in west Friesland suffered increasing rainfall about 2,800 years ago. They resorted to building homes on artificial mounds, but eventually they were washed out of their farms and had to move to drier places. Meanwhile, work in Cameroon has shown that there was an arid crisis that started at about the same time. This dry patch caused some of the forest to die and savannahs to open up. These openings in the forest made it easier for people to move. Archaeological remains show that farming communities began to migrate inland.
    Most recently he has worked with Russian archaeologists to show that, also about 2,800 years ago, the Scythian people took advantage of a wetter climate to explore east and west across the steppe landscapes that lie north of Mongolia. Prior to this, the land had been hostile semi-desert, but the extra moisture turned it into green, grassy steppes, enabling these nomadic tribes to travel towards both China and south-east Europe.
    Without a doubt there was a change in climate about 2,800 years ago, and it seems that this encouraged, or even forced, many groups of people to move. But was this a one-off change, or has solar activity played havoc with the climate at other times, too?
    "Carbon 14 records show a major decrease in solar activity roughly every 2,300 years," says van Geel. "The most recent time this happened was during the 'little ice age', which peaked around 1650." At this time frost fairs were held on the Thames, harvests were poor all over Europe and glaciers marched down mountains.
    Taking a look at the Sun right now reveals that we are in a period of high activity, with many sunspots, solar flares and an increasing magnetic field of the corona (the Sun's outer atmosphere). Van Geel and other proponents of the solar activity theory believe this high solar activity could be behind the global warming we have experienced over the last 50 years. "My impression is that there is an over-estimation of the greenhouse effect," says van Geel. It is controversial, but if he is right, then there is little we can do to control the Earth's climate. Instead, we can make the most of the sunshine and, perhaps, start preparing for the next chill in western Europe - due to peak about AD3950.


  • Laser injures Delta pilot's eye
    By Bill Gertz
    THE WASHINGTON TIMES
    September 29, 2004
    A pilot flying a Delta Air Lines jet was injured by a laser that illuminated the cockpit of the aircraft as it approached Salt Lake City International Airport last week, U.S. officials said.
    The plane's two pilots reported that the Boeing 737 had been five miles from the airport when they saw a laser beam inside the cockpit, said officials familiar with government reports of the Sept. 22 incident. The flight, which originated in Dallas, landed without further incident at about 9:30 p.m. local time.
    A short while later, however, the first officer felt a stinging sensation in one eye. A doctor who examined the pilot determined that he had suffered a burned retina from exposure to a laser device, the officials said.
    Transportation Security Administration (TSA) spokeswoman Yolanda Clark confirmed the incident, but declined to provide details.
    "TSA is aware of the incident, and we are working with the airline in conducting an investigation to try and determine the cause of the incident," Miss Clark said.
    She would not say whether TSA considers the incident a possible security threat to commercial aircraft. Other officials said the incident was serious enough that the pilot will be unable to fly for at least a week.
    "So far, it doesn't sound like there will be permanent [eye] damage," one official said.
    The identity of the pilot could not be learned, and Delta spokesman Anthony Black declined to comment.
    Officials were unsure of the source of the laser and could not determine whether the exposure was deliberate or accidental.
    John Mazor, a spokesman for the Air Line Pilots Association, said commercial pilots have been exposed to laser illumination.
    "The Air Line Pilots Association has received reports in the past of incidents where lasers penetrated cockpits and, in at least one case, caused injury," Mr. Mazor said.
    Several years ago, a pilot flying into a Western airport was hit by a light from a laser light show. The causes of the other incidents are not known, he said.
    Asked whether a laser aimed at pilots could cause a plane to crash, Mr. Mazor said: "I think that's highly improbable. In every case in the past, the flights landed safely."
    Military personnel also have suffered eye damage from laser illumination.
    In one case, Naval Lt. Cmdr. Jack Daly and Canadian helicopter pilot Capt. Pat Barnes suffered eye injuries hours after an aerial surveillance mission to photograph a Russian merchant ship that had been shadowing the ballistic-missile submarine USS Ohio in Washington state's Strait of Juan de Fuca.
    The Navy recently turned down an appeal from the Defense Department inspector general to award Cmdr. Daly a Purple Heart for the incident. Cmdr. Daly, who retired from the service last year, continues to suffer eye pain and deteriorating vision.
    During congressional testimony in 1999, he warned of laser threats to pilots.
    "Numerous documented cases regarding the use of lasers against aircraft, civilians and military personnel exist, as well as does an all-too-lengthy list of the injuries that have resulted from the accidental and intentional misuse of these devices," Cmdr. Daly told a House Armed Services subcommittee.
    He noted that incidents of lasers being directed at commercial airliners during takeoff and landings have raised fears that "this in fact may be a new form of terrorism."
    "Lasers are easily obtainable and can be self-manufactured weapons in the terrorist arsenal, which essentially can effect a soft-kill solution and leave virtually no detectable evidence," he said.

  • King Solomon's Tablet of Stone
    The authenticity of many Holy Land artefacts is thrown into doubt.
    2nd October 2004
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/solomon_trans.shtml
    2001. A clandestine meeting of leading Israeli archaeologists are shown a remarkable artefact. It's a stone tablet, apparently from 1,000BC. The writing on its face describes repairs to the temple of King Solomon. It is the first archaeological evidence ever found of this legendary building.
    The relic caused a sensation. But this was only just the start.
    For authentification, the tablet was taken to the Geological Survey of Israel. Here, after a battery of tests, including radiocarbon dating, scientists officially pronounced the stone to be genuine. The tests even revealed microscopic particles of gold in the outer layer of stone. These were apparently the result of the tablet surviving the fire which, according to the bible, destroyed the temple when the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem in 586BC.
    The stone tablet was offered for sale to the Israel Museum, home to many of Israel's greatest treasures. Rumours suggested the asking price was as high as $10million.
    Suspicions aroused
    But the museum needed to know where the stone had come from. Even its owner was a mystery. To make matters more complex, the stone itself had disappeared again. The Israeli Antiquities Authority wanted answers. A nine month search for the mysterious stranger who had first appeared with the stone eventually led them to a private detective who had been hired by a well known antiquities collector, Oded Golan.
    Golan insisted he too was just a front man for another collector. But the authorities were suspicious. He was known to be the owner of the James Ossuary, another extraordinary artefact which had appeared a couple of years earlier. This was a burial box with an inscription linking it to Jesus' brother.
    The authorities raided Golan's apartment and recovered both the ossuary and the elusive stone. It was time to establish once and for all if both were genuine. So they set up a committee of linguists and scientists to examine them.
    Looking at the stone, several linguists said 'fake'. Some of the Hebrew, they claimed, was not ancient. Other experts claimed that so little is known of ancient Hebrew that it's impossible to be sure.
    The geological evidence
    The committee turned to geology. Dr Yuval Goren, a geo-archaeologist and head of the Archaeological Institute at Tel-Aviv University, soon found evidence that a team of sophisticated forgers had led the earlier experts astray.
    The patina on the stone had in fact been manufactured artificially
    The charcoal particles which produced the convincing radiocarbon date had been added by hand
    The gold fragments hinting at an ancient fire were a clever final addition
    The authorities presented their conclusions. They announced that the stone tablet, and the James Ossuary, were elaborate fakes.
    But who was producing these fakes and how? Dr Goren decided to piece together how the stone tablet had been made. He tracked the origin of the stone itself - apparently a building block taken from a Crusader castle. It was even possible to work out how the fake patina had been manufactured and the ingredients used. What was clear was the team of forgers included experts in a range of disciplines.
    More fakes suspected
    When the police took Oded Golan into custody and searched his apartment they discovered a workshop with a range of tools, materials, and half finished 'antiquities'. This was evidence for an operation of a scale far greater than they had suspected.
    Investigators have established that collectors around the world have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for artefacts that came through Oded Golan's associates. Dozens of these items have now been examined by Dr Goren, and all have been revealed to be forgeries. Police now suspect that artefacts made by the same team of forgers have found their way into leading museums around the world.
    Some archaeologists have now concluded that everything that came to market in the last 20 years without clear provenance should be considered a fake. Many of these objects, like the stone tablet which started the investigation, were cynically playing on the desire of many of the collectors to see the bible confirmed as history. For those in search of the temple of Solomon - their goal is as far away as ever.
     

  • War-Gaming the Mullahs
    The U.S. weighs the price of a pre-emptive strike
    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6039135/site/newsweek/
    Sept. 27 2004 issue - Unprepared as anyone is for a showdown with Iran, the threat seems to keep growing. Many defense experts in Israel, the United States and elsewhere believe that Tehran has been taking advantage of loopholes in the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and is now within a year of mastering key weapons-production technology. They can't prove it, of course, and Iran's leaders deny any intention of developing the bomb. Nevertheless, last week U.S. and Israeli officials were talking of possible military action—even though some believe it's already too late to keep Iran from going nuclear (if it chooses). "We have to start accepting that Iran will probably have the bomb," says one senior Israeli source. There's only one solution, he says: "Look at ways to make sure it's not the mullahs who have their finger on the trigger."
    After the Iraq debacle, calls for regime change without substantial evidence of weapons of mass destruction are not likely to gain a lot of traction. But if the allegations are correct, Iran is only one of the countries whose secret nuclear programs hummed along while America waged a single-minded hunt for WMD in Iraq. Another is North Korea, which hasn't stopped claiming that it's turning a stockpile of spent fuel rods into a doomsday arsenal. And arms-control specialists are increasingly alarmed by Brazil's efforts to do precisely what Iran is doing: use centrifuge cascades to enrich uranium—with a couple of key differences. Unlike Iran, Brazil has never signed the NPT's Additional Protocol, which gives expanded inspection rights to the International Atomic Energy Agency. And unlike Iran, Brazil is not letting the IAEA examine its centrifuges. If the Brazilians go through with their program, it's likely to wreck the landmark 1967 treaty that made South America a nuclear-free zone. But the White House has shown scant concern about the risk.
    The Iran crisis is more immediate in the eyes of the Bush administration, in part because Iran is among the president's "Axis of Evil." Israel, which has long regarded Iran as a more dire threat than Iraq, is making thinly veiled threats of a unilateral pre-emptive attack, like its 1981 airstrike against Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor. "If the state decides that a military solution is required, then the military has to provide a solution," said Israel's new Air Force chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Elyezer Shkedy, in a newspaper interview last week. "For obvious reasons," he added, "we aren't going to speak of specifics." U.S. defense experts doubt that Israel can pull it off. Iran's facilities (which it insists are for peaceful purposes) are at the far edge of combat range for Israel's aircraft; They're also widely dispersed and, in many cases, deep underground.
    But America certainly could do it—and has given the idea some serious thought. "The U.S. capability to make a mess of Iran's nuclear infrastructure is formidable," says veteran Mideast analyst Geoffrey Kemp. "The question is, what then?" NEWSWEEK has learned that the CIA and DIA have war-gamed the likely consequences of a U.S. pre-emptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities. No one liked the outcome. As an Air Force source tells it, "The war games were unsuccessful at preventing the conflict from escalating."
    Instead, administration hawks are pinning their hopes on regime change in Tehran—by covert means, preferably, but by force of arms if necessary. Papers on the idea have circulated inside the administration, mostly labeled "draft" or "working draft" to evade congressional subpoena powers and the Freedom of Information Act. Informed sources say the memos echo the administration's abortive Iraq strategy: oust the existing regime, swiftly install a pro-U.S. government in its place (extracting the new regime's promise to renounce any nuclear ambitions) and get out. This daredevil scheme horrifies U.S. military leaders, and there's no evidence that it has won any backers at the cabinet level.
    The NPT has never banned uranium enrichment. That didn't stop the United States, France, Germany and Britain from offering a draft resolution at last week's IAEA Governing Council meeting, demanding that Iran immediately cease such activity. Other council members quickly challenged the provision's legality. Some members of President George W. Bush's own party are throwing up their hands at such clumsy doings. "This administration's nonproliferation strategy consists of flailing around with a two-by-four," says one disgusted Republican elder statesman. And even the administration must realize that its Iran options are limited now by the chaos already overtaking Iraq.


  • 4 Arrested in London on Terrorism Charges
    09/25/04
    LONDON (AP) - Antiterrorist police arrested four men in London, acting on information from a newspaper which claimed it had foiled a terror plot, officials said Saturday.
    Metropolitan Police said three men were arrested Friday at a hotel at Brent Cross in north London, and a fourth man was arrested later at his home.
    Police said the four men were held on suspicion of the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism, and were being questioned Saturday.
    Police said they were acting on information supplied by the News of the World, the Sunday tabloid which is Britain's largest-selling newspaper.
    The newspaper said reporter Mazher Mahmood had been in touch with a man who said he represented someone from Saudi Arabia who was seeking to purchase radioactive materials for a ``dirty bomb.''
    Metropolitan Police press office declined to comment on that element of the News of the World account.

  • British man denies alleged plot to blow up plane
    LONDON, Sept 24 (Reuters) - A British terror suspect denied on Friday that he had been plotting to blow up a plane.
    Sajid Badat, 25, appeared at London's Old Bailey court via video link from a top security jail where he is being held.
    He pleaded not guilty to an accusation "that between January 1, 1999 and November 28, 2003, (he) conspired with another or others to place or cause to be placed on an aircraft in service a device or substance which was likely to destroy the aircraft, or was likely so to damage it as to render it incapable of flight."
    He also denied other charges of possessing a safety fuse, a length of detonating cord and a quantity of pentaerythritol tetranitrate, one of the strongest known high explosives.
    Tight legal restrictions mean no further details of the alleged plot can be made public at this stage.
    Badat, who was arrested in the southwestern town of Gloucester last November, was remanded in custody to stand trial on February 28 next year.

  • Rumors Swirling After Florida Hurricanes
    Sat Sep 25, 2004
    By MITCH STACY, Associated Press Writer
    TAMPA, Fla. - The rumors swirling throughout Florida after back-to-back hurricanes were every bit as fierce and destructive as the storms themselves.
    There was the one after Charley hit — started by a woman whose ex-husband heard it from a fire marshal — that corpses were stacked like cord wood in two refrigerated semi trailers.
    And the gas-rationing one out of Tampa as Ivan approached, touching off a rush by motorists to get their $5 limit before the storm. It was so rampant that Gov. Jeb Bush had to take to the airwaves to quash it. An "urban legend," he called it.
    But all the hearsay comes to no surprise to those who know something about rumors and how they get started.
    "Natural disasters are a major incubator for rumors," said Gary Fine, an expert on the psychology of rumors at Northwestern University in Chicago. "They work so well because the events are both important and ambiguous, and often in times of great stress people lose their critical ability."
    Rumors tend to start early after the disaster when information is scarce and emotions are raw, Fine said. And in those situations, people might not be inclined to believe what the government is telling them.
    "In the midst of things, people are looking for any kind information about what's going to happen next," Fine said. "So a neighbor will tell them something that they're just speculating or guessing about, and the person who hears it takes it as fact. We're searching for any kind of news we can get our hands on, and we're not very particular about what the source is."
    Such was the case in Palm Beach County after Frances, when rumors that fuel and basic supplies were available at one place or another had desperate residents speeding through darkened streets to reach gas stations and stores that were either closed or didn't exist.
    After Ivan, an account of three sisters being killed in the storm spread through Perdido Bay on the Florida-Alabama border. All were alive and well.
    According to the tale, the Butgereit sisters, ages 11, 14 and 18, were found dead in the lagoon behind the family's heavily damaged home, and their bodies were fished out late at night so not to panic people.
    The family, which had gone to Tallahassee to escape the storm, had to rush home and go to police and the morgue to straighten it out. They ended up greeting people who stopped by the house to pay their respects.
    Post-disaster rumors often spread because the stories seem plausible, said John Llewellyn, a communications professor at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., who teaches a class on rumor and urban legend.
    For example, when hurricane victims devastation all around them, it's not a stretch to believe that hundreds of people were killed in horrible ways.
    "It's not an offense against the state of public education or common sense, it's more evidence of how difficult that particular situation is for people," Llewellyn said.
    After Andrew in 1992, rumors abounded that hundreds of bodies were secretly being trucked out of town in refrigerated trucks to minimize panic and protect tourism. And after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists attacks, rumors quickly spread of terrorist confessions, commercial airlines being shot down by American fighters, and even one about a firefighter on the 83rd floor of one of the World Trade Center towers who survived the collapse of the building.
    Pensacola News-Journal opinion editor Carl Wernicke fielded some of the rumor calls after Ivan and finally wrote a column this week debunking them.
    "For some reason, people always think there's a real story out there that they're not getting," he said.
    The atrocious anecdotes included a tornado killing 157 people when it tore the roof off a local hospital (that one came from the wife of a sheriff's deputy), a 40-foot tidal wave washing bodies into a river, and morgue workers secretly preparing hundreds of bodies for burial.
    Ivan and its aftermath killed 23 people in Florida. Charley claimed 31 lives in Florida.
    "Often we will accept those claims that in any other situation would be kind of ludicrous," said Fine, the Northwestern professor. "To suggest that the government is stockpiling bodies is not the kind of thing Floridians would have thought plausible two months ago."

  • MYSTERY 'MINI-MONSTER' WASHED UP
    http://www.whitehaven-news.co.uk/leisure/viewarticle.asp?id=133786

    SEASIDE MYSTERY: The body of the strange marine creature washed up on Parton shore – the old beer can gives you an idea of its sizePicture: John Story
    By David Siddall
    PARTON residents are baffled by what has been described as a “mini Loch Ness Monster” washed up on their beach.
    Joan Singleton, from Firth View was strolling on the foreshore near to where Lowca Beck flows out to sea when she came upon the “monster”.
    She alerted friends, saying she had never seen anything like it.
    Jack Southam, skipper of the Whitehaven sea angling charterboat Riptide, said on seeing a photograph of it: “I have never seen anything like this in all my years at sea.”
    Another Parton resident told The Whitehaven News: “It seems to have a seal’s body, the tail of a whale, fins on top and sides, but also claws and really sharp teeth.”
    Do you have any clues what this peculiar beastie might be? Call our newsdesk on (01946) 595136.
    Isn't the Nuclear Power Plant Seascale near here?

  • In a secret Paris cavern, the real underground cinema
    Jon Henley in Paris
    Wednesday September 8, 2004
    The Guardian
    Police in Paris have discovered a fully equipped cinema-cum-restaurant in a large and previously uncharted cavern underneath the capital's chic 16th arrondissement.
    Officers admit they are at a loss to know who built or used one of Paris's most intriguing recent discoveries.
    "We have no idea whatsoever," a police spokesman said.
    "There were two swastikas painted on the ceiling, but also celtic crosses and several stars of David, so we don't think it's extremists. Some sect or secret society, maybe. There are any number of possibilities."
    Members of the force's sports squad, responsible - among other tasks - for policing the 170 miles of tunnels, caves, galleries and catacombs that underlie large parts of Paris, stumbled on the complex while on a training exercise beneath the Palais de Chaillot, across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower.
    After entering the network through a drain next to the Trocadero, the officers came across a tarpaulin marked: Building site, No access.
    Behind that, a tunnel held a desk and a closed-circuit TV camera set to automatically record images of anyone passing. The mechanism also triggered a tape of dogs barking, "clearly designed to frighten people off," the spokesman said.
    Further along, the tunnel opened into a vast 400 sq metre cave some 18m underground, "like an underground amphitheatre, with terraces cut into the rock and chairs".
    There the police found a full-sized cinema screen, projection equipment, and tapes of a wide variety of films, including 1950s film noir classics and more recent thrillers. None of the films were banned or even offensive, the spokesman said.
     A smaller cave next door had been turned into an informal restaurant and bar. "There were bottles of whisky and other spirits behind a bar, tables and chairs, a pressure-cooker for making couscous," the spokesman said.
    "The whole thing ran off a professionally installed electricity system and there were at least three phone lines down there."
    Three days later, when the police returned accompanied by experts from the French electricity board to see where the power was coming from, the phone and electricity lines had been cut and a note was lying in the middle of the floor: "Do not," it said, "try to find us."
    The miles of tunnels and catacombs underlying Paris are essentially former quarries, dating from Roman times, from which much of the stone was dug to build the city.
    Today, visitors can take guided tours around a tightly restricted section, Les Catacombes, where the remains of up to six million Parisians were transferred from overcrowded cemeteries in the late 1700s.
    But since 1955, for security reasons, it has been an offence to "penetrate into or circulate within" the rest of the network.
    There exist, however, several secretive bands of so-called cataphiles, who gain access to the tunnels mainly after dark, through drains and ventilation shafts, and hold what in the popular imagination have become drunken orgies but are, by all accounts, innocent underground picnics.
    The recent discovery of three newly enlarged tunnels underneath the capital's high-security La Santé prison was put down to the activities of one such group, and another, iden tifying itself as the Perforating Mexicans, last night told French radio the subterranean cinema was its work.
    Patrick Alk, a photographer who has published a book on the urban underground exploration movement and claims to be close to the group, told RTL radio the cavern's discovery was "a shame, but not the end of the world". There were "a dozen more where that one came from," he said.
    "You guys have no idea what's down there."

  • Quake scientist vows to learn from mistakes
    Third prediction is not a charm for seismic research team as temblor forecast window closed
    The Desert Sun
    September 7th, 2004
    COACHELLA VALLEY> -- On the day a high-profile desert earthquake prediction officially became a false alarm the researcher behind the forecast pledged to improve the methodology behind his work.
    The promise came in the form of a statement by seismic researcher Vladimir Keilis-Borok that said the forecast, and the work that went into it, was helpful even though the particular prediction proved to be a false alarm.
    "We will learn from our mistakes how to improve the prediction methodology," Keilis-Borok wrote in a statement that was withheld until the forecast window for his California prediction slammed shut at 12:01 a.m. Monday morning. "If we made no mistakes, it would mean the problem is easy; and it is not easy, to put it mildly."
    Keilis-Borok and a team of about 30 scientists from the United States, Russia, Japan, France, Italy and Israel were behind a prominent earthquake forecast. The prediction called for a magnitude 6.4 or greater earthquake somewhere in Southern California desert in the nine-month time window leading up to Sept. 5.
    The method behind it involved studying past behavior of the Earth’s crust and using the data to predict future activity.
    Basically, the team watches faults and bases predictions on how closely small quakes are clustered in time and distance.
    They’d applied the method successfully in predicting the the 6.5-magnitude San Simeon earthquake that occurred Dec. 22 and a magnitude 8.1 earthquake struck Hokkaido Sept. 25.
    The California forecast covered about a 12,000-square-mile swath of desert from Baker to the Mexico border.
    It included the Coachella Valley, where a rupture along the San Andreas fault could trigger a magnitude 8.0 or greater quake that would rock the entire region.
    Keilis-Borok said additional research could lead to more precise predictions.
    "We hope to reduce the areas of alarm by a factor of five, maybe 10; and the duration of alarms from nine months to one or two," he said.
    Stephen Park, a University of California, Riverside geophysics professor who studies earthquake prediction, was hopeful the attention Keilis-Borok generated with the forecast would propel more research on the subject.
    "If we are doing science right we are always at that borderline between the known and the unknown," Park said.
    But John Vidale, interim director of UCLA’s Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, said the fact that Keilis-Borok’s streak of success was broken at two will take some steam from future forecasts.
    "If he had hit three in a row then people would have essentially had to pay attention to his predictions," Vidale said.
    But Vidale also said the obvious level of public interest in earthquake forecasting, a practice that had been considered a dying art among many seismic researchers, might embolden other scientists to revive the practice.
    "I think it is going to make people bolder," he said.
    During an interview shortly before the prediction window closed, Keilis-Borok compared his methodology to gathering intelligence in a war.
    After the forecast was proved false, he reiterated the point.
    "Even predictions with a considerable rate of false alarms could be used to strongly reduce casualties, economic losses and damage to the environment," Keilis-Borok said. "Our team always expected from the start that some of our predictions would be false alarms; we are also confident that many will be correct."

  • First, Find The Forger
    Published: Sep 24, 2004
    William Safire is a columnist for The New York Times.
    ``Whoever, having devised any scheme or artifice to defraud transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.'' - U.S. Criminal Code, Chapter 63, Section 1343.
    WASHINGTON - At the root of what is today treated as an embarrassing blunder by duped CBS journalists may turn out to be a felony by its faithless sources.
    Some person or persons conceived a scheme to create a series of false Texas Air National Guard documents and append a photocopied signature to one of them. The perpetrator then helped cause the fraudulent file to be transmitted by means of television communication to millions of voters for the purpose of influencing a federal election.
    That was no mere ``dirty trick''; it could be a violation of the U.S. criminal code. If the artifice had not been revealed by sharp-eyed bloggers, a national election could have been swung by a blatant falsehood.
    Who was the forger? Did others conspire with him or her to present a seeming government document - with knowledge of its falsity and with intent to defraud, which is a felony in Texas? Who was to benefit and how?
    CBS News belatedly apologized and agreed to appoint independent examiners. That's a start.
    The government and the courts have no business forcing journalists to reveal sources. But no ethic requires a journalist to protect a source who lied. Accordingly, Dan Rather went to the Texas ranch of his source and telecast Bill Burkett's admission of having falsely ``thrown out the name'' of someone who gave him the false evidence. Burkett now claims his real source was some hard-to-find mystery woman.
    What benefit did the Bush-hating Burkett gain from CBS in return for his fake documents? One plausible answer: He got coveted access to someone high up in the Kerry campaign.
    We learned last week that Burkett had reached Kerry's convention introducer, former Sen. Max Cleland, to plead for access to higher-ups so as to launch a ``counterattack.'' Cleland confirms getting the call and says he told him to try the DNC (where Terry McAuliffe, as former prosecutor Joseph DiGenova noted on MSNBC, carefully denied a role only in the preparation of the documents).
    When his call to headquarters was not returned, Burkett then asked Mary Mapes, the CBS producer, to help him gain the top-level Kerry access he so highly valued.
    Only days before the telecast, Mapes or some other ``60 Minutes'' staff member delivered the goods: Their ``unimpeachable'' source was paid off with a call from Joe Lockhart, the Clinton press aide newly hired to strip nuance out of Kerry's message. With the number supplied by CBS, Lockhart called Burkett. We don't know what was said, but the call from on high was payoff in itself.
    What should CBS do now? First, release Rather's interview with Burkett in its entirety; viewers are entitled to the outtakes now. Next, let Mary Mapes, at the center of all this, speak to reporters. Third, expend some Viacom resources to track down the possible original sources, including the man whose name Burkett says he ``threw out'' to mislead CBS.
    Appointing independent reviewers should not be a device to duck all others' questions; that's Kofi Annan's trick to stonewall his oil-for-food scandal. But lacking the power of a grand jury's subpoena or testimony under oath, victimized CBS cannot put real heat on the perpetrator or conspirators. We have hard evidence of crimes by low-level operatives here - from wire fraud to forgery - as well as the potential of high-level political involvement. Is no prosecutor prepared to enforce the law?
    Conservatives should stop slavering over Dan Rather's scalp, and liberals should stop pretending that noble ends justify fake-evidence means. Both should focus on the lesson of the early '70s: From third-rate burglaries to fourth-rate forgeries, nobody gets away with trying to corrupt American elections.


  • Pre-emptive Paranoia- Was CBSnews set up?
    By MAUREEN DOWD
    OP-ED COLUMNIST NEW YORK TIMES
    September 16, 2004
    Here's how bad off the Democrats are: They're cowering behind closed doors, whispering that if it should ever turn out that Republicans are behind this, it would be so exquisitely Machiavellian, so beyond what Democrats are capable of, they should just fold and concede the election now - before the Republicans have to go to the trouble of stealing it again.
    There's no evidence - it's just a preposterous, paranoid fantasy at this point. But it speaks to the jitters of the Democrats that they're consumed with speculation about whether Karl Rove, the master of dirty tricks and surrogate sleaze, could have set up CBS in a diabolical pre-emptive strike to undermine damaging revelations about Bush 43's privileged status and vanishing act in the National Guard, and his odd refusal to take his required physical when ordered.
    In this vast left-wing conspiracy theory, Mr. Rove takes real evidence on W.'s shirking and transfers it to documents doomed to be exposed as phony (thereby undermining the real goods), then funnels it through third parties to Dan Rather, Bush 41's nemesis on Iran-contra. A perfect bank shot.
    The secretary for W.'s squadron commander in the Texas Guard told The Times that the information in the disputed memos is correct - it's just the memos that seem fake.
    "It looks like someone may have read the originals and put that together,'' said a lucid 86-year-old Marian Carr Knox, who was flown up to New York yesterday by beleaguered CBS News executives.
    She told Mr. Rather that her boss, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, wrote a "cover-your-back file,'' a "personal journal'' to keep a record about the politically connected Bush in his charge. She said the contents of that mirrored the CBS documents, but she said those documents were not on the right forms and contained Army terms rather than Air National Guard argot. She confirmed that young Bush had disobeyed a direct order from Colonel Killian to take a physical.
    "It was a big no-no to not follow orders,'' she said, adding that the Bush scion's above-the-rules attitude caused some snickers and resentment among fellow officers.
    Those who suspect Mr. Rove note that when he was Bill Clements's campaign strategist in a 1986 governor's race in Texas, he was accused of bugging his own office to distract from a debate, according to James Moore and Wayne Slater, authors of "Bush's Brain.'' They said it turned the election because after that, the Democrat could not get any attention.
    Was the same scenario playing out yesterday evening on CNN? After a five-minute report on the CBS memo controversy, CNN spent about 30 seconds reporting that two more marines had been killed in Iraq.
    House Republicans started clamoring for a Congressional inquiry into the documents used by "60 Minutes,'' saying it might be an attempt to manipulate the election. (Isn't that what the Democrats are scared the Republicans are doing?)
    These same Republicans never wanted investigations into missing W.M.D., why Congress passed a Medicare bill based on faulty figures, Abu Ghraib or even whether those Swiftie guys were lying, for Pete's sake.
    The Democratic paranoia is a measure of the intimidation the West Wing is wielding in a race where John Kerry can't seem to take advantage of any of the Bush administration's increasingly calamitous blunders.
    The administration has been so dazzling in misleading the public with audacious, mendacious malarkey that the Democrats fear the Bushies are capable of any level of deceit.
    Iraq is a vision of hell, and the Republicans act as if it's a model kitchen. The president and vice president brag about liberating Iraqis and reassure us that they are stopping terrorist violence at its source and inspiring democracy in the region by bringing it to blood-drenched Iraq.
    But what they haven't mentioned is that they have known since July that their rosy scenarios are as bogus as their W.M.D. That's when the president received a national intelligence estimate that spelled out "a dark assessment of prospects" for stability and governance in Iraq in the next 18 months, as Douglas Jehl wrote in today's Times. Worst-case estimates include civil war or anarchy.
    Unlike the president, the young men and women trying to stay alive in the unraveling chaos of Iraq can't count on their daddies to get them out of the line of fire.

  • FBI Probes Pentagon Spy Case
    Aug. 27, 2004
    CBS News has learned that the FBI has a full-fledged espionage investigation under way and is about to -- in FBI terminology -- "roll up" someone agents believe has been spying not for an enemy, but for Israel from within the office of the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon.
    60 Minutes Correspondent Lesley Stahl reports the FBI believes it has "solid" evidence that the suspected mole supplied Israel with classified materials that include secret White House policy deliberations on Iran.
    At the heart of the investigation are two people who work at The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a powerful pro-Israel lobby in Washington.
    The FBI investigation, headed up by Dave Szady, has involved wiretaps, undercover surveillance and photography that CBS News was told document the passing of classified information from the mole, to the men at AIPAC, and on to the Israelis.
    CBS sources say that last year the suspected spy, described as a trusted analyst at the Pentagon, turned over a presidential directive on U.S. policy toward Iran while it was, "in the draft phase when U.S. policy-makers were still debating the policy."
    This put the Israelis, according to one source, "inside the decision-making loop" so they could "try to influence the outcome."
    The case raises another concern among investigators: Did Israel also use the analyst to try to influence U.S. policy on the war in Iraq?
    With ties to top Pentagon officials Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, the analyst was assigned to a unit within the Defense Department tasked with helping develop the Pentagon's Iraq policy.
    Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been made aware of the case. The government notified AIPAC today that it wants information about the two employees and their contacts with a person at the Pentagon.
    AIPAC told CBS News it is cooperating with the government and has hired outside counsel. It denies any wrongdoing by the organization or any of its employees.
    An Israeli spokesman said, "We categorically deny these allegations. They are completely false and outrageous." The suspected spy has not returned repeated phone calls from CBS News.

  • Chronology Of The Israeli Pentagon Spy Case
    The Crimes Of Iran-Contra Have Never Ended
    By Jeffrey Steinberg
    Executive Intelligence Review
    8-29-4
    A funny thing happened, early in May, when President Bush met with Jordan's King Abdullah II in Washington. According to news accounts, the Jordanian ruler provided the President with a dossier, revealing that Ahmed Chalabi--the head of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) and the darling of the neo-cons in the Office of Vice President Dick Cheney, the civilian apparatus at the Pentagon, and such Beltway think tanks as the American Enterprise Institute and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA)--was passing top secret U.S. government material to the most radical ayatollahs in Iran.
    It is no secret that the Jordanian government has had deep misgivings about Chalabi's prominent role in the postwar Iraq occupation government. Chalabi has a 22-year jail sentence awaiting him in Jordan, as the result of massive fraud at his Petra Bank in the 1990s. The Jordanian Ambassador in Washington and King Abdullah II have both publicly accused Chalabi, and his INC, of being behind the bombing of the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad in August 2003.
    The King's dossier bolstered intelligence already in the hands of the CIA and the National Security Agency, indicating, among other things, that Chalabi's so-called Free Iraqi Force was heavily penetrated by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. National Security Agency (NSA) intercepts had revealed much deeper ties between Chalabi and radical factions within the Islamic Republic than had been known to American officials previously.
    The dossier, provided by King Abdullah, checked out, and, as a result, the White House ordered Coalition Provisional Authority boss Paul Bremer to raid Chalabi's home, and the INC offices. That raid occurred on May 20, catching both Chalabi, and some of his neo-con allies in Washington, flatfooted.
    On May 24, the {New York Times}, {Time}, and {Newsweek} all reported that U.S. Federal investigators are now conducting a high-priority criminal probe, to determine who in the Pentagon was passing classified documents on to Chalabi. Although the news accounts did not name any names, they all reported that there is a narrow list of people with access to the secrets, who were also close collaborators and boosters of Chalabi.
    Among the leading candidates to join convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Jay Pollard in the hoosegow, or at least, in the hall of shame, are: Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith; Near East South Asia/Office of Special Plans head William Luti; Feith deputies Harold Rhode, Abram Shulsky and Michael Rubin; Office of Special Plans staffer Col. Bill Brunner; and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. All have been known to maintain intimate ties to Chalabi. Another Irangate ``veteran'' and Chalabi booster, Elliott Abrams, who was convicted of perjury (and later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush), was named the top NSC official on the Middle East in late 2002, a post he still holds.
    The authoritative Republican Party insiders newsletter, {The Big Picture}, reported on May 24, that, following the raids, an angry Chalabi phoned the Pentagon, and demanded to speak to his longtime friend and patron Wolfowitz. Wolfowitz refused to take the call. Wolfowitz's snub mirrored the actions of other neo-cons, who are desperately clinging to their positions in the corridors of power at the Defense Department and the Office of the Vice President--and are, therefore, anxious to cleanse themselves of links to the now thoroughly discredited Chalabi.
    Even Mark Zell, the longtime law partner of Doug Feith, announced his break with Chalabi, accusing the INC chief of reneging on his vow to seize power in Baghdad, recognize the government of Israel, and reopen the oil pipeline between the Iraqi fields and the Israeli port of Haifa. Following the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, Zell, a West Bank-based lawyer, had formed a Baghdad business partnership with Salem Chalabi, Ahmed's nephew and business front man, which reportedly arranged contracts for Israeli security firms for postwar ``reconstruction'' and security missions in ``liberated Iraq.''
    Several well-placed U.S. and Israeli sources have claimed that the Chalabi-Zell firm arranged subcontracts, that allowed as many as 50 Israeli interrogators to work in Iraq. In January 2004, ``Jack'' London, the CEO of CACI--a northern Virginia-based company that provided interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison--traveled to Israel on a business junket, to drum up joint-venture business with Israeli security firms. According to a former top U.S. national security official, both CACI and Titan, the two American firms implicated in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, have had longstanding business dealings with Israeli high-tech companies. The Feith and Zell international law firm recently established a Washington-based front, FIST, dedicated to pairing up Israeli and American high-tech companies for joint venture contracts on homeland security and Defense Department outsourcing.
    Other neo-cons outside of government, including Michael Ledeen, Richard Perle, Kenneth Timmerman and Laurie Mylroie, are equally hysterical, defending Chalabi, and even touting his work with the Iranians as being in the interests of the United States.
    One particularly bizarre item surfaced, as this particular neo-con group scrambled to defend their longtime Iraqi asset. Following the raid on Chalabi's home and offices, two attorneys, John Markham and Colette Goodman, fired off an angry letter of protest to the Bush Administration. Goodman, with the international law firm of Shea and Gardner, is the official registered lobbyist for the INC, according to papers on file with the Department of Justice. A leading attorney at Shea and Gardner is R. James Woolsey, the Clinton era CIA Director, who, as a member of the Bush Administration's Defense Policy Board, has been one of the biggest promoters of the urban legend that Saddam Hussein was behind the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on Washington and New York.
    Lawyer John Markham, a longtime leading member of the overtly Satanic cult known as the Process Church, was later a Justice Department attorney, responsible for railroad prosecutions of Lyndon LaRouche. Markham, at the Boston U.S. Attorney's office, was a leading protege of William Weld, the Boston Brahmin who ran the ``Get LaRouche'' drive, and was later defeated by John Kerry in a bid to enter the U.S. Senate.
    - It Didn't Stop With Iran-Contra -
    Beyond the latest falling out among neo-con thieves and the bizarre resurfacing of John Markham, lies a much deeper scandal: The Iran-Contra crimes of the 1980s never ended. The usual suspects--in Washington, in Israel and in Iran--just merely went underground, for much of the Clinton era, only to resurface, with a vengeance, under the Cheney-Bush regime.
    Indeed, the very same American, Israeli and Iranian neo-con liars and shady arms dealers who brought you the Ollie North Irangate saga, have been caught, engaged in the same dirty dealings, all over again.
    Chief among the Iran-Contra veterans, who are up to their eyeballs in the present Irangate II caper, is Michael Ledeen, the self-professed ``universal fascist,'' who is also, according to several U.S. intelligence community sources, a prime suspect in the scheme to forge Niger government documents, purporting that Iraq was seeking uranium precursor to build nuclear bombs. A U.S. Federal grand jury is probing the forgery scheme.
    In December 2001, Ledeen first moved to revive the Reagan-Bush era Iran connection, setting up a meeting between two Pentagon civilian neo-cons and Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms dealer, whom the CIA denounced as a criminal and a liar. Three days of meetings took place in Rome, involving Harold Rhode, Larry Franklin, Ghorbanifar, and two still-unidentified officials of the Iranian regime. According to an Aug. 9, 2003 {Washington Post} account, the Iranians were offering to help the United States in the war on terror. Citing an official Pentagon statement the previous day, the Post reported, ``The first contact, in late 2001, had been formally sanctioned by the U.S. government in response to an Iranian government offer to provide information relevant to the war on terrorism.''
    Rhode and Ledeen go back 20 years, according to Ledeen's own acknowledgements, in a recent book. Both are proteges of leading British intelligence operative Bernard Lewis. And both are also prime boosters of Chalabi. Following the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Rhode was dispatched from Washington to Baghdad, to be the contact point between the Office of Special Plans and the INC chief.
    Franklin, a Defense Intelligence Agency officer, was assigned to the Near East/South Asia shop at the Pentagon, where he served as the Iran desk officer, reporting to Bill Luti.
    While official Pentagon statements claimed that there was no followup to the Rome talks, Ghorbanifar, in a Dec. 22, 2003 interview with {Newsweek}'s Mark Hosenball, reported that he maintained contact with Rhode and Franklin ``five or six times a week'' up through June 2003, when he had a second meeting with Rhode in Paris. Pentagon officials later admitted that there were also meetings in Rome during 2002.
    Word of those meetings with Ghorbanifar got back to Secretary of State Colin Powell, who reportedly hit the ceiling, and went to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and National Security Advisor Condi Rice to demand that all contacts with the discredited Ghorbanifar be severed.
    Ghorbanifar had been used by Reagan-Bush National Security Council staffer Oliver North, as the intermediary between the Iranian government and Israel. Ledeen, then a consultant to the NSC, had promoted Ghorbanifar as a trustworthy asset. As part of an elaborate scheme to win the release of American hostages in Lebanon, Ghorbanifar had brokered the secret sale of 508 TOW missiles to Iran. Proceeds from the missile sales were illegally funneled to the Contra rebels, waging a U.S. and Israeli-backed insurgency against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. In October 1986, a plane carrying arms to the Contras was shot down over Nicaragua, and an American crew member was captured, along with documents and other evidence of the American covert backing for the rebels. This began what became the ``Iran-Contra scandal.''
    When word of the Ledeen-Ghorbanifar-Pentagon machinations in 2001-2003 surfaced, Powell also accused Feith of running an illegal channel to the Iranian regime, undercutting his own sanctioned, but secret diplomacy with Iranian officials in Geneva, Switzerland.
    But as late as August 2003, Ledeen and Ghorbanifar were at it again, pressing their allies in Feith's office to open up contacts with the U.S. occupation forces in Iraq. This time, Ghorbanifar claimed he had Iraqi Shi'ite contacts who could lead U.S. weapons inspectors to Iraqi weapons grade nuclear material, which had been smuggled into Iran. He claimed that his sources had ``saved American lives'' by providing details of Iranian terror plots against American GIs in Afghanistan.
    When the so-called source insisted on a $250,000 payoff before he would reveal where the nuclear material was hidden, the deal fell through. Ledeen still insists that Ghorbanifar's information was solid.
    By the time the 2003 schemes came to light, Ghorbanifar was also peddling a different tale about his dealings with Pentagon officials Rhode and Franklin. No longer was he a broker of ``war on terrorism'' collaboration between Tehran and Washington. According to Newsweek reporter Mark Hosenball, who interviewed Ghorbanifar in Paris in November 2003, ``Ghorbanifar, a former Iranian spy who helped launch the Iran-Contra affair, says one of the things he discussed with Defense officials Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin, at meetings in Rome in December 2001 (and in Paris last June with only Rhode), was regime change in Iran. Ghorbanifar says there are Iranians capable of organizing a peaceful revolution against the ruling theocracy. He says his contacts know where Saddam Hussein hid $340 million in cash. With American help, he says, this money could be retrieved and half of it could be used to overthrow the ayatollahs. (The other half would be turned over to the United States.) Ghorbanifar says he told his U.S. interlocutors that ousting the mullahs would be a breakthrough in the war on terror because top al-Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden, are in Iran.''
    One senior U.S. intelligence source told {EIR} that, were it not for Colin Powell pitching a fit, the Irangate II schemes would have gone a lot further. The extent to which this descent into Hell actually gripped the Bush-Cheney Administration is now a question for Federal investigators to ferret out.

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