America
Red= Republican, Blue=Democrat.
The Myth of The Liberal
Media
"Beyond the 2000 Election, this conservative media tilt has become
a dominant reality in modern U.S. politics. The imbalance also was not an
accident. It resulted from a conscious, expensive and well-conceived plan by
conservatives to build what amounts to a rapid-response media machine. This
machine closely coordinates with Republican leaders and can strongly influence -
if not dictate - what is considered news.
(UKIndependent)
07 March 2002
The came, they saw and they made love, not war. This is the story of how our human ancestors spread across the world, according to the most detailed study of our genetic heritage attempted so far.
Alan Templeton, professor of biology at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, has found convincing evidence to suggest that the history of human evolution is one of sexual interchange rather than the physical elimination of one group by another.
"Humans expanded again and again out of Africa, but these expansions resulted in interbreeding, not replacement, and thereby strengthened the genetic ties between human populations throughout the world," he said.
The study, a computer analysis of the DNA from people living in 10 different regions of the world, was more extensive than any previous research, Professor Templeton said.
The findings, published today in the journal Nature, add a new twist to the long-running dispute over whether modern humans are the result of a single migration out of Africa some 100,000 years ago, or the product of a series of migrations extending back over one million years to several regional homelands in Asia as well as Africa.
"The main conclusions are that human populations in Africa and Eurasia have not been genetically isolated from one another, but rather have been interchanging genes for least 600,000 years," Professor Templeton said.
"This 'gene flow' was restricted, primarily by geographical distance, which meant that local populations could and should show genetic differences, as they do today. But over a long time there was sufficient genetic interchange to insure that all humanity evolved as a single species."
Professor Templeton's research indicates that there were two important waves of migration out of Africa – one about 600,000 years ago when humans were represented by "archaic" species such as Homo heidelbergensis and the Neanderthals, and the other about 95,000 years ago, soon after the rise of anatomically modern Homo sapiens.
Professor Templeton said the earlier migration coincided with a significant expansion in brain size and the latter with the appearance of "modern" traits, such as smaller brow ridges, a rounded skull, a vertical forehead and a pronounced chin.
"This later set of traits is difficult to reconcile with a population replacement, but is compatible with this most recent out-of-Africa expansion event being characterised by interbreeding," he said.
Wed Mar 6,12:51 PM ET
MAZAR-E-SHARIF, Afghanistan (AP) - A form of hemorrhagic fever has broken out in eastern Afghanistan (news - web sites), reportedly killing 28 people and raising fears that the disease could spread, a U.N. official said Wednesday.
The number of deaths was not confirmed, and it was not immediately clear over what period they had occurred, said Farhana Faruqi, the head of the U.N. delegation in northern Afghanistan.
The outbreak took place in Tajwara village about 210 miles west of the capital of Kabul, said Faruqi. She said the disease was reported in the district last year.
"It is contagious, but so far only one village is affected," Faruqi told The Associated Press.
U.N. officials had informed the World Health Organization (news - web sites) about the outbreak, and WHO officials were believed to be planning to travel to the region to assess how to respond, Faruqi said.
There are several different kinds of hemorrhagic fever with varying levels of seriousness ranging from mild illness to death. Ebola (news - web sites) is one kind of hemorrhagic fever.
It was not immediately known what kind of hemorrhagic fever had broken out in Tajwara.
Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever broke out in Pakistan, Afghanistan's eastern neighbor, in late February. Doctors attributed the deaths of three people to the disease.
The virus that causes Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever — which is found in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe — is transmitted by ticks, which thrive on sheep and cattle. Infected people can transmit the virus by blood, saliva or droplets from sneezing.
The disease causes a sharp drop in platelets, which allow the blood to clot. Without rapid treatment by antivirus drugs and replacement of platelets, victims can bleed to death.
In Geneva, World Health Organization spokesman Iain Simpson said it was unlikely that the reported outbreak was Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever.
"This is really the wrong time of year for Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, because it's a tick-borne disease and the ticks normally die out in the winter," Simpson said.
He said the last cases of the disease in Afghanistan were in November, just ahead of the harsh winter season. Because the fever has an incubation period of up to three weeks, none of the recent reports could be linked to that outbreak, he said.
3-7-2 (The Guardian - London)
We live in a world that has become so desensitised by watching calamities unfold on global television - both natural and human-induced - that it takes something really spectacular even to get our attention.
And it usually has to be visually dramatic to register, much less elicit a deep emotional response - such as the tragic events of September 11.
Recently, I came across a frightening report published by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - the nation's most august scientific body. Yet, because there was no visually provocative content, the report had received only a couple of short paragraphs tucked away inside a few newspapers.
Here is what the academy had to say it is possible that the global warming trend projected over the course of the next 100 years could, all of a sudden and without warning, dramatically accelerate in just a handful of years - forcing a qualitative new climatic regime which could undermine ecosystems and human settlements throughout the world, leaving little or no time for plants, animals and humans to adjust.
The new climate could result in a wholesale change in the earth's environment, with effects that would be felt for thousands of years. If the projections and warnings in this study turn out to be prophetic, no other catastrophic event in all of recorded history will have had as damaging an impact on the future of human civilisation and the life of the planet.
A year ago the UN intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) issued a voluminous report forecasting that global average surface temperature is likely to rise by 1.4 to 5.8 degrees centigrade between now and 2100. If that projection holds up, we were told, the change in temperature forecast for the next 100 years will be larger than any climate change on earth in more than 10,000 years.
The impacts on the earth's biosphere are going to be of a qualitative kind. To understand how significant this rise in temperature is likely to be, we need to keep in mind that a 5 degrees centigrade increase in temperature between the last ice age and today resulted in much of the northern hemisphere of the planet going from being buried under thousands of feet of ice to being ice-free.
The UN study predicts that a temperature rise of 1.4-5.8 degrees centigrade over the course of the coming century could include the melting of glaciers and the Arctic polar cap, sea water rise, increased precipitation and storms and more violent weather patterns, destabilisation and loss of habitats, migration northward of ecosystems, contamination of fresh water by salt water, massive forest dieback, accelerated species extinction and increased droughts.
The IPCC report also warns of adverse impacts on human settlements, including the submerging of island nations and low-lying countries, diminishing crop yields, especially in the southern hemisphere, and the spread of tropical disease northward into previously temperate zones.
The newly released NAS report begins by noting that the current projections about global warming and its ecological, economic and social impacts cited in the UN report are based on the assumption of a steady upward climb in temperatures, more or less evenly distributed over the course of the 21st century. But that assumption, they say, may be faulty - there is a possibility that temperatures could rise suddenly in just a few years' time, creating a new climatic regime virtually overnight.
They also point out that abrupt changes in climate, whose effects are long lasting, have occurred repeatedly in the past 100,000 years. For example, at the end of the Younger-Dryas interval about 11,500 years ago, "global climate shifted dramatically, in many regions by about one-third to one-half the difference between ice age and modern conditions, with much of the change occurring over a few years".
According to the study"An abrupt climate change occurs when the climate system is forced to cross some threshold, triggering a transition to a new state at a rate determined by the climate system itself and faster than the cause." Moreover, the paleoclimatic record shows that "the most dramatic shifts in climate have occurred when factors controlling the climate system were changing". Given the fact that human activity - especially the burning of fossil fuels - is expected to double the CO2 content emitted into the atmosphere in the current century, the conditions could be ripe for an abrupt change in climate around the world, perhaps in only a few years.
What is really unnerving is that it may take only a slight deviation in boundary conditions or a small random fluctuation somewhere in the system "to excite large changes ... when the system is close to a threshold", says the NAS committee.
An abrupt change in climate, of the kind that occurred during the Younger-Dryas interval, could prove catastrophic for ecosystems and species around the world. During that particular period, for instance, spruce, fir and paper birch trees experienced mass extinction in southern New England in less than 50 years. The extinction of horses, mastodons, mammoths, and sabre-toothed tigers in North America were greater at that time than in any other extinction event in millions of years.
The committee lays out a potentially nightmarish scenario in which random triggering events take the climate across the threshold into a new regime, causing widespread havoc and destruction.
Ecosystems could collapse suddenly with forests decimated in vast fires and grasslands drying out and turning into dust bowls. Wildlife could disappear and waterborne diseases such as cholera and vector-borne diseases such as malaria, dengue and yellow fever, could spread uncontrollably beyond host ranges, threatening human health around the world.
The NAS concludes its report with a dire warning"On the basis of the inference from the paleoclimatic record, it is possible that the projected change will occur not through gradual evolution, proportional to greenhouse gas concentrations, but through abrupt and persistent regime shifts affecting subcontinental or larger regions - denying the likelihood or downplaying the relevance of past abrupt changes could be costly."
Global warming represents the dark side of the commercial ledger for the industrial age. For the past several hundred years, and especially in the 20th century, human beings burned massive amounts of "stored sun" in the form of coal, oil and natural gas, to produce the energy that made an industrial way of life possible. That spent energy has accumulated in the atmosphere and has begun to adversely affect the climate of the planet and the workings of its many ecosystems.
If we were to measure human accomplishments in terms of the sheer impact our activities have had on the life of the planet, then we would sadly have to conclude that global warming is our most significant accomplishment to date, albeit a negative one.
We have affected the biochemistry of the earth and we have done it in less than a century. If a qualitative climate change were to occur suddenly in the coming century - within less than 10 years - as has happened many times before in geological history, we may already have written our epitaph.
When future generations look back at this period, tens of thousands of years from now, it is possible that the only historical legacy we will have left them in the geologic record is a great change in the earth's climate and its impact on the biosphere.
12:04 07 March 02
NewScientist.com
In January, the true colour of the Universe was declared as somewhere between pale turquoise and aquamarine, by Ivan Baldry and Karl Glazebrook at John Hopkin's University in Baltimore Maryland.
They determined the cosmic colour by combining light from over 200,000 galaxies within two billion light years of Earth. The data came from the Australian 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey at the Anglo-Australian Observatory in New South Wales, Australia.
The new colour is much more subdued
Glazebrook now says the true colour this data gives is closer to beige. "I'm very embarrassed," he says, "I don't like being wrong."
The mistake was caused by a bug in the software Glazebrook had used to convert the cosmic spectrum into the colour the human eye would see if it was exposed to it. "There's no error in the science, the error was in the perception," says Glazebrook.
David Icke is going to have to start dressing like Robert Morley.
BRIDGEWATER -- A large blue object sighted in NJ sky by two witnesses on February 14, 2002. Both witnesses are adults and one witness Gordon Dillard is a college student and the other works in law enforcement. An NJ State Employee sent a report to NUFORC, while the other contacted MUFON. I personally talked to the second witness a college student from North Carolina who was driving through New Jersey early in the morning. They report seeing a glowing blue sphere over 40.34N 74.37 W in Somerset County. The witnesses were separated and saw the object from different locations in a fairly clear sky, around 1:00 AM. Gordon reports seeing a solid source of light from rear that was circular. The light was twenty feet in diameter and circular moving from west to east. It appeared to descend below the trees as observed from the highway. It was larger than fireworks, and seemed to be traveling too fast to stop. Gordon said, I! t looked like it landed in the wetlands. east to northeast of Exit 30, on Route 287. He went to the police station (24) to notify them of the incident, thinking it might have crashed. Gordon felt it moved too fast for a normal aircraft. Didn't seem to have the mass of a normal aircraft. The two individuals in two different localities reported seeing a large blue object about the size of a three-story building going east across the sky descending. Each witness separately provided a sketch of the object. Both sketches match almost identically in every detail even though the witnesses presumably do not know each other and have never met. The duration of sighting by the student was for less than a minute and he thought the object may have crashed in a watery area east of Route 287. ((NUFORC Note: We have requested copies of the illustrations, which we will attempt to post at www.ufocenter.com.)) Thanks to Gordon Dillard, MUFON, and NUFORC.
Wed Mar 6, 8:53 PM ET
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - International researchers have compiled what they say is the world's most complete database of lost, stolen and misplaced nuclear material -- depicting a world awash in weapons-grade uranium and plutonium that nobody can account for.
"It truly is frightening," Lyudmila Zaitseva, a visiting fellow at Stanford University's Institute for International Studies, said on Wednesday. "I think this is the tip of the iceberg."
Stanford announced its database as U.S. senators held a hearing in Washington to assess the threat of "dirty bombs," or radioactive material dispersed by conventional explosives.
The Stanford program, dubbed the Database on Nuclear Smuggling, Theft and Orphan Radiation Sources, is intended to help governments and international agencies track wayward nuclear material worldwide, supplementing existing national programs that often fail to share information.
The database includes illicitly obtained weapons-grade nuclear material as well as "orphaned" radiation sources -- scientific or medical material that may have been lost, misplaced or simply thrown away but which still poses a health and security threat.
"The danger presented is real and credible; it would not be a trivial undertaking by any means, but it is doable," testified Henry Kelly, president of the Federation of American Scientists.
Kelly's testimony included a disturbing study by the Federation of American Scientists of possible radiological attack scenarios. If terrorists could manage the very difficult task of obtaining a rod of cobalt used in food irradiation, and were able to survive transforming that rod into a powderlike form, a bomb containing that material could contaminate hundreds of square miles.
An explosion at the southern tip of Manhattan in New York could spread the cobalt in an oval stretching into southwest Connecticut, the FAS study said. Strict EPA guidelines would require either decontamination or destruction of structures within the oval. Even if officials used the less-stringent rules Russia imposed after the Chernobyl accident, dozens of blocks in lower and midtown Manhattan would be permanently closed in the cobalt scenario.
"Programs in nonproliferation, proliferation detection, counterterrorism and homeland security are closely linked and must not be selected 'either/or' or conducted in isolation from each other," Vantine testified.
Several witnesses said expanding radiation sensor networks to put "one on every lamp post" would be another simple but very effective measure in preventing radiological attacks. Since shielding a weapon's radioactivity would be difficult, the sensors could provide enough advance warning to thwart an attack.
"The monitoring technology is well-established, the power and maintenance requirements are likely to be minimal, and the specificity and robustness will be high," Koonin testified.
MOSCOW, Mar 05, 2002 (Itar-Tass via COMTEX) -- The earthquake that shook Central and South Asia last Sunday might have been triggered by super-modern weapons intensively used by the U.S. aviation in the seismically dangerous areas of Afghanistan, a source in a Moscow geo-physical research center has told Itar-Tass on condition of anonymity.
He said the supposition was confirmed by the unusually strong and lengthy tremors (up to one minute) that originated in the Hindu Kush Mountains and spread onto Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan and India. Even old residents of Kabul do not remember an earthquake similar to the Sunday tremor that exceeded 6 points on the Richter scale.
"A possible reason for the tremor was the American's large-scale use of powerful bombs, including the ones that are capable of starting avalanches in the mountains," the expert said.
I still think that that low depth downtown quake that occured a month or so after the attacks needs explanation.
Over the past few years, Monsanto, a chemical firm, has positioned itself as an agricultural company through control over seed - the first link in the food chain. Monsanto now wants to control water, the very basis of life.
In 1996, Monsanto bought the biotechnology assets of Agracetus, a subsidiary of W. R. Grace, for $150 million and Calgene, a California-based plant biotechnology company for $340 million. In 1997, Monsanto acquired Holden seeds, the Brazilian seed company, Sementes Agrocerus and Asgrow. In 1998, it purchased Cargill's seed operations for $1.4 billion and bought Delta and Pine land for $1.82 billion and Dekalb for $2.3 billion.
In India, Monsanto has bought MAHYCO, Maharashtra Hybrid Company, EID Parry and Rallis. Mr. Jack Kennedy of Monsanto has said, "we propose to penetrate the Indian agricultural sector in a big way. MAHYCO is a good vehicle." According to Mr. Robert Farley of Monsanto, "what you are seeing is not just a consolidation of seed companies, it's really a consolidation of the entire food chain. Since water is as central to food production as seed is, and without water life is not possible, Monsanto is now trying to establish its control over water. During 1999, Monsanto plans to launch a new water business, starting with India and Mexico since both these countries are facing water shortages."
Monsanto is seeing a new business opportunity because of the emerging water crisis and the funding available to make this vital resource available to people. As it states in its strategy paper, "first, we believe that discontinuities (either major policy changes or major trendline breaks in resource quality or quantity) are likely, particularly in the area of water and we will be well-positioned via these businesses to profit even more significantly when these discontinuities occur. Second, we are exploring the potential of non-conventional financing (NGOs, World Bank, USDA, etc.) that may lower our investment or provide local country business-building resources." Thus, the crisis of pollution and depletion of water resources is viewed by Monsanto as a business opportunity. For Monsanto, "sustainable development" means the conversion of an ecological crisis into a market of scarce resources. "The business logic of sustainable development is that population growth and economic development will apply increasing pressure on natural resource markets.
These pressures and the world's desire to prevent the consequences of these pressures, if unabated, will create vast economic opportunity - when we look at the world through the lens of sustainability, we are in a position to see current and foresee impending-resource market trends and imbalances that create market needs. We have further focussed this lens on the resource market of water and land. These are the markets that are most relevant to us as a life sciences company committed to delivering food, health and hope to the world, and there are markets in which there are predictable sustainability challenges and therefore opportunities to create business value."
Monsanto plans to earn revenues of $420 million and a net income of $63 million by 2008 from its water business in India and Mexico. By 2010, about 2.5 billion people in the world are projected to lack access to safe drinking water. At least 30 per cent of the population in China, India, Mexico and the U.S. is expected to face severe water stress. By 2025, the supply of water in India will be 700 cubic km per year, while the demand is expected to rise to 1,050 units. Control over this scarce and vital resource will, of course, be a source of guaranteed profits. As John Bastin of the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development has said, "Water is the last infrastructure frontier for private investors."
Monsanto estimates that providing safe water is a several billion dollar market. It is growing at 25 to 30 per cent in rural communities and is estimated to rise to $300 million by 2000 in India and Mexico. This is the amount currently spent by NGOs for water development projects and local government water supply schemes and Monsanto hopes to tap these public finances for providing water to rural communities and convert water supply into a market. The Indian Government spent over $1.2 billion between 1992 and 1997 for various water projects, while the World Bank spent $900 million. Monsanto would like to divert this public money from public supply of water to establishing the company's water monopoly. Since in rural areas the poor cannot pay, in Monsanto's view capturing a piece of the value created for this segment will require the creation of a non-traditional mechanism targeted at building relationships with local government and NGOs as well as through mechanisms such as microcredit.
Monsanto also plans to penetrate the Indian market for safe water by establishing a joint venture with Eureka Forbes/Tata, which controls 70 per cent of the UV Technologies. To enter the water business, Monsanto has acquired an equity stake in Water Health International (WHI) with an option to buy the rest of the business. The joint venture with Tata/Eureka Forbes is supposed to provide market access and fabricate, distribute, service water systems; Monsanto will leverage their brand equity in the Indian market. The joint venture route has been chosen so that "Monsanto can achieve management control over local operations but not have legal consequences due to local issues."
***** Another new business that Monsanto is starting in 1999 in Asia is aquaculture. It will build on the foundation of Monsanto's agricultural biotechnology and capabilities for fish feed and fish breeding. By 2008, Monsanto expects to earn revenues of $1.6 billion and a net income of $266 million from its aquaculture business. While Monsanto's entry into aquaculture is through its sustainable development activity, industrial aquaculture has been established to be highly non-sustainable. The Supreme Court has banned industrial shrimp farming because of its catastrophic consequences. However, the Government, under pressure from the aquaculture industry, is attempting to change the laws to undo the court order. At the same time, attempts are being made by the World Bank to privatise water resources and establish trade in water rights. These trends will suit Monsanto well in establishing its water and aquaculture businesses. The Bank has already offered to help. As the Monsanto strategy paper states: "We are particularly enthusiastic about the potential of partnering with the International Finance Corporation (IFC) of the World Bank to joint venture projects in developing markets. The IFC is eager to work with Monsanto to commercialise sustainability opportunities and would bring both investment capital and on-the-ground capabilities to our efforts."
Monsanto's water and aquaculture businesses, like its seed business, aimed at controlling the vital resources necessary for survival, converting them into a market and using public finances to underwrite the investments. A more efficient conversion of public goods into private profit would be difficult to find. Water is, however, too basic for life and survival and the right to it is the right to life. Privatisation and commodification of water are a threat to the right to life. India has had major movements to conserve and share water. The pani panchayat and the water conservation movement in Maharashtra and the Tarun Bharat Sangh in Alwar have regenerated and equitably shared water as a commons property. This is the only way everyone will have the right to water and nobody will have the right to abuse and overuse water. Water is a commons and must be managed as a commons. It cannot be controlled and sold by a life sciences corporation that peddles in death.
http://www.transnationale.org/anglais/sources/environnement/eau__water_control.htm
YOWUSA.COM, February 13, 2002
BY Marshall Masters
As of late, there seems to be many unusual events on Earth and in our solar system now. They seem all add up to the likelihood that a Planet X-class Kuiper Belt Object (XKBO) could fly past our planet sometime in the years to come, causing a global catastrophe beyond our wildest imagination. Like the proverbial elephant standing in the middle of the room, our government talks around it. Is this vacuum of official wisdom an intentional conspiracy designed to protect the interests of the wealthy and ruling elite? It wouldn’t be the first time, so why squander time on useless finger pointing and rhetoric?
Does our government lie to us? Tell me “no” and rest assured when I tell you the check is in the mail. Does our government crush the lives of honest citizens in the frenzy to maintain the secrecy of covert projects? Tell me “no” and rest assured when I tell you that all it needs is a tune-up. And the list goes on…
However, when we step back and take a hard look at global threats such as an XKBO, or global warming for that matter the whole issue boils down to us as individuals and what we will or will not do about it. That is, after we are no longer comfortable with our materialistic blinders.
When Karl Marx said, “religion is the opiate of the masses,” he had it all wrong. The fact is that materialism is the opiate of the masses. We like our comforts and so we voluntarily wear blinders to keep those pesky threat issues out of our line of sight. But then, one day we hit a bump in the road and turn our heads just enough to see something unsettling in the far distance. This is when we begin the 5-step process to achieving the state of Catastrophic Coherence.
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The 5 Steps to Catastrophic Coherence
Once we’ve lost our ability to be naively happy with our blinders we get zapped by something that could be a terrible consequence. It could be an asteroid impact, weapons of mass destruction or whatever. The bottom line is that whatever it is, it kicks you out of your soft materialistic slumber with all the tact of a Marine drill instructor suffering from hemorrhoids. This is when you begin the following 5-phase process of personal development:
Phase 1 – Oh Crap
Whatever it was that you saw just outside your personal blinders, is has managed to kick you out of your soft materialistic slumber. Consequently, the sudden realization that life could change for the worse in Titanic proportions hits you head-on.
How Phase 1 Begins: You’ve read or heard something that hits a deep hot button within your psyche and you begin memorizing every crack, dabble and color in the bedroom ceiling above your bed.
How Phase 1 Ends: After several sleepless nights, you finally decide to repaint the ceiling in your bedroom.
Phase 2 – Come See The Crap
A consistent hallmark of Phase 1 is that it is primarily an emotional event. Logic and reasoning would dictate that an informed decision is the best way to go, but this is still an emotional time. After all emotion is like sand. Whip it up into the air and you cannot see the horizon of logic – hence you are still lost.
As the saying goes, “misery loves company.” When people are lost, they want to share the experience so they can validate their own emotions. After all, why should you be the only one to know his bedroom ceiling needs repainting?
How Phase 2 Begins: You start sending incoherent E-mails to all of your friends and argue with your spouse or significant other, who just wishes you’d shut up about it.
How Phase 2 Ends: You wake up one day and realize that you’ve isolated yourself. Your friends stop returning your calls, and your spouse or significant other registers for 15 hours of night classes at the local Junior College to avoid you, and to be with other people who haven’t gone around the bend.
Phase 3 – But I’ve Got To Be Right?
The nice thing about being isolated from friends and family with whatever your catastrophe worry happens to be, is that it finally forces you to take a hard look at how you got there in the first place.
How Phase 3 Begins: Tired of being emotionally whipsawed by your own self-inflamed fears, you finally ask yourself, “Did I make an informed decision?” This is largely a solitary effort as your family and friends are still avoiding you, and talking about you behind your back in worried tones.
How Phase 3 Ends: You form two conclusions. First, what you thought was a legitimate threat is really a lot of hype written by some bozo trying to panic you into buying a book. These are easy to spot, as they always tell you in that the world will end with the next 18-24 months and where you need to send YOUR money.
The second conclusion is more profound and lasting. Whether or not a fear-mongering charlatan took you in is beside the point. The point is that your eyes have been opened and now for the first time, you see that this is a violent universe, that real threats do exist, and that you need to understand them.
Phase 4 – Oh God!
This phase as the song suggests, “is the loneliest number you’ll ever do.” At this point, you’re still a catastrophe pariah for your friends and family, but they are being to like you again because you finally shut up for some unearthly reason.
What they do not know, is that you’ve decided to make peace with your creator, regardless of what you call him, her or it.
How Phase 4 Begins: No matter how you got to this point, you know understand that you live in a dangerous universe and that being blind to this fact is just plain stupid. Further, no matter what anyone else thinks you’ve come the distance and if only you and God know it, then so be it -- you’re good with that.
How Phase 4 Ends: You thank God that someone or something ripped those damn stupid materialistic blinders off your head and from this point on, there is no going back. That is, unless you want to see a shrink for the rest of your life, which is a real option when you’re rich and famous.
Please note, for those of us who live on fixed incomes, gratuitous shrinks are no longer covered under our managed care Blue double-cross health plans. Consequently, we must accept a more affordable post-blinders reality.
Phase 5 – The Universe Is Unfolding As It Should!
As a poet said: “You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have the right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.” Sounds familiar – yes?
This famous poem titled "Desiderata," was reportedly written in 1692 and found in St. Paul's Church in Baltimore, Maryland.
But given that you’ve passed “Phase 3 – But I’ve Got To Be Right,” you’ve done your research and made an informed decision. You learned that the church was founded in 1692, but that the poem "Desiderata" was actually composed in 1927 by Max Ehrmann (1872-1945), a rector at St. Paul's Church.
The whole point of this phase, is that it makes all the personal grief and suffering you may have experienced in the previous four phases vanish.
How Phase 5 Begins: You feel a new sense of empowerment within yourself. You’ve looked the beast in the face, smelled its breath, and you held your ground. You know that you will survive and that the universe is truly “unfolding as it should,” regardless of whether or not it makes sense.
How Phase 5 Ends: The point is that it doesn’t end.
You can scream all you want about conspiracies but that is only an emotional crutch used to avoid the path to Phase 5 and being one with the universe. Why bother?
If an asteroid is to strike the Earth and kill 3 out of 5, none of the governments or schemers and their conspiratorial fancies will survive. They will be swept away like tears in the rain, just as the thousands of other connivers who populated the thousands of other civilizations on this planet that no longer exist.
Therefore, the issue is how do you survive!
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Why Phase 5 Is About Survival
Every survival expert in the world will tell you that those people who more likely to survive when faced with a sudden life-threatening situation are the ones who can think their way through it.
Will digging a bunker in your backyard and stocking it with a 10-year supply of canned goods ensure your safety? No, not necessarily because:
Your friends and neighbors, who once called you a stupid Noah before, are showing up at your door with guns and knives and demanding food because they have nothing to lose.
Dumb luck, your underground bunker with its 10-year supply of canned goods just happened to be ground zero. Go figure.
You die from a disease you did not anticipate.
The government confiscates your supplies for the greater good – at gunpoint. (OK, so we’re talking about a gunship-mounted, 20mm cannon with depleted uranium ammunition. Is that big enough?)
All you can really hope for is enough advance warning to move yourself and those you love (and who will listen to you) to safety. After that, whatever you can carry on your back for 10-miles without becoming a physical wreck. For some, that can be 200 lbs., for other 2. It all depends on your physical stamina and condition.
But then, what about all those folks you were trying convince back during “Phase 2 – Come See The Crap?”
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Save Yourself – Not The World
The key to coping with global threats and the follies of government conspiracies is that you stay focused on yourself. Do not try to save the world. Rather, find those like yourself who have begun their own journey towards self-empowerment. Share with them what you have learned, and what you want to explore. Above all, make informed decisions.
There is an old joke about a man who goes to his doctor, and the doctor says, “You’re going to die.” The man says, “Can I have a second opinion?” The doctor says, “Yes you may. You’re ugly too.”
The point of this anecdote is that making an informed decision means using multiple, non-related sources. Reading one book or Internet article with all the key issues is not good enough. Take the time to read more, many more!
While in the process of making an informed decision, share your findings with those of a similar interest. The simple act of composing a well thought out E-mail will shape those ideas floating around in your head into coherent thoughts upon which you and others can take action.
Please note the operative phrase, ”composing a well thought out E-mail.” This does not mean copying a dozen people with a slipshod and unsubstantiated slew of questionable hyperlinks with some thoughtless ditty like, “oh golly, you absolutely must spend your entire afternoon trying to find sense in this incoherent mess of hyperlinks because I think enough of you to swamp your E-mail in-box with half-baked nonsense.”
Simply put, share useful, usefully organized information with like-minded correspondents.
The final and most important point is that this 5-step process is a heuristic process, which means that you will learn from your mistakes. Expect to make mistakes and make sure you learn from them. Do this, and you will be able to read the poem “Desiderata” with a new sense of survival meaning, survival insight and survival empowerment.
Desiderata
Max Ehrmann (1872-1945).
Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and ignorant; they too have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble, it's a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism. Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.
By Pervez Hoodbhoy
Special Forum 43: December 19, 2001
I. Introduction
This essay is by Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy, professor of physics at Quaid-e- Azam University, Islamabad. Hoodbhoy offers a brief history of the rise and fall of the Islamic world and consequently argues that terrorism cannot be resolved simply through military domination. Rather, a critical re-examination of US imperial arrogance and Islamic religious fanaticism is imperative if the roots of terrorism is to be fully understood and an imminent "Century of Terror" to be avoided.
II. Essay By Pervez Hoodbhoy
"Muslims And The West After September 11"
By Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy (Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad)
America has exacted blood revenge for the Twin Towers. A million Afghans have fled US bombs into the cold wastelands and face starvation. B-52s have blown the Taliban to bits and changed Mullah Omar's roar of defiance into a pitiful squeak for surrender. Osama bin Laden is on the run (he may be dead by the time this article reaches the reader). But even as the champagne pops in the White House, America remains fearful - for good reason.
Subsequent to September 11th we have all begun to live in a different, more dangerous world. Now is the time to ask why. Like clinical pathologists, we need to scientifically examine the sickness of human behavior impelling terrorists to fly airliners filled with passengers into skyscrapers. We also need to understand why millions celebrate as others die. In the absence of such an understanding there remains only the medieval therapy of exorcism; for the strong to literally beat the devil out of the weak. Indeed, the Grand Exorcist - disdainful of international law and the growing nervousness of even its close allies - prepares a new hit list of other Muslim countries needing therapy: Iraq, Somalia, and Libya. We shall kill at will, is the message.
This will not work. Terrorism does not have a military solution. Soon - I fear perhaps very soon - there will be still stronger, more dramatic proof. In the modern age, technological possibilities to wreak enormous destruction are limitless. Anger, when intense enough, makes small stateless groups, and even individuals, extremely dangerous.
Anger is ubiquitous in the Islamic world today. Allow me to share a small personal experience. On September 12th I had a seminar scheduled at the department of physics in my university in Islamabad, part of a weekly seminar for physics students on topics outside of physics. Though traumatized by events, I could not cancel the seminar because sixty people had already arrived, so I said, "We will have our seminar today on a new subject: on yesterday's terrorist attacks". The response was negative, some were mindlessly rejoicing the attacks. One student said, "You can't call this terrorism." Another said, "Are you only worried because it is Americans who have died?" It took two hours of sustained, impassioned, argumentation to convince the students that the brutal killing of ordinary people, who had nothing to do with the policies of the United States, was an atrocity. I suppose that millions of Muslim students the world over felt as mine did, but probably heard no counter-arguments.
If the world is to be spared what future historians may call the "Century of Terror", we will have to chart the perilous course between the Scylla of American imperial arrogance and the Charybdis of Islamic religious fanaticism. Through these waters, we must steer by a distant star towards a careful, reasoned, democratic, humanistic, and secular future. Else, shipwreck is certain.
INJURED INNOCENCE
"Why do they hate us?" asks George W. Bush. This rhetorical question betrays the pathetic ignorance of most Americans about the world around them. Moreover, its claim to an injured innocence cannot withstand even the most cursory examination of US history. For almost forty years, this "naivete and self-righteousness" has been challenged most determinedly by Noam Chomsky. As early as 1967, he pointed that the idea that "our" motives are pure and "our" actions benign is "nothing new in American intellectual history - or, for that matter, in the general history of imperialist apologia."
Muslim leaders have mirrored America's claim and have asked the same question of the West. They have had little to say about September 11 that makes sense to people outside their communities. Although they speak endlessly on rules of personal hygiene and "halal" or "haram", they cannot even tell us whether or not the suicide bombers violated Islamic laws. According to the Virginia-based (and largely Saudi- funded) Fiqh Council's chairman, Dr. Taha Jabir Alalwani, "this kind of question needs a lot of research and we don't have that in our budget."
Fearful of backlash, most leaders of Muslim communities in the US, Canada, and Europe have responded in predictable ways to the Twin Towers atrocity. This has essentially two parts: first, that Islam is a religion of peace; and second, that Islam was hijacked by fanatics on the 11th of September 2001. They are wrong on both counts.
First, Islam - like Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, or any other religion - is not about peace. Nor is it about war. Every religion is about absolute belief in its own superiority and the divine right to impose itself upon others. In medieval times, both the Crusades and the Jihads were soaked in blood. Today, Christian fundamentalists attack abortion clinics in the US and kill doctors; Muslim fundamentalists wage their sectarian wars against each other; Jewish settlers holding the Old Testament in one hand, and Uzis in the other, burn olive orchards and drive Palestinians off their ancestral land; Hindus in India demolish ancient mosques and burn down churches; Sri Lankan Buddhists slaughter Tamil separatists.
The second assertion is even further off the mark. Even if Islam had, in some metaphorical sense, been hijacked, that event did not occur on 11 September 2001. It happened around the 13th century. A quick look around us readily shows Islam has yet to recover from the trauma of those times.
A DISMAL PRESENT
Where do Muslims stand today? Note that I do not ask about Islam; Islam is an abstraction. Moulana Abdus Sattar Edhi and Mullah Omar are both followers of Islam, but the former is overdue for a Nobel peace prize while the other is a medieval, ignorant, psychotic fiend. Edward Said, among others, has insistently pointed out, Islam carries very different meaning to different people. It is as heterogeneous as those who believe and practice it. There is no "true Islam". Therefore it only makes sense to speak of people who claim that faith.
Today Muslims number one billion, spread over 48 Muslim countries. None of these has yet evolved a stable democratic political system. In fact all Muslim countries are dominated by self-serving corrupt elites who cynically advance their personal interests and steal resources from their people. No Muslim country has a viable educational system or a university of international stature.
Reason too has been waylaid. To take some examples from my own experience. You will seldom encounter a Muslim name as you flip through scientific journals, and if you do the chances are that this person lives in the West. There are a few exceptions: Abdus Salam, together with Steven Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow, won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1979 for the unification of the weak and electromagnetic forces. I got to know Salam reasonably well - we even wrote a book preface together. He was a remarkable man, terribly in love with his country and his religion. And yet he died deeply unhappy, scorned by his country and excommunicated from Islam by an act of the Pakistani parliament in 1974. Today the Ahmadi sect, to which Salam belonged, is considered heretical and harshly persecuted. (My next-door neighbor, an Ahmadi, was shot in the neck and heart and died in my car as I drove him to the hospital. His only fault was to have been born in the wrong sect.)
Though genuine scientific achievement is rare in the contemporary Muslim world, pseudo-science is in generous supply. A former chairman of my department has calculated the speed of Heaven: it is receding from the earth at one centimeter per second less than the speed of light. His ingenious method relies upon a verse in the Qur'an which says that worship on the night on which the Qur'an was revealed, is worth a thousand nights of ordinary worship. He states that this amounts to a time-dilation factor of one thousand, which he puts into a formula belonging to Einstein's theory of special relativity.
A more public example: one of two Pakistani nuclear engineers recently arrested on suspicion of passing nuclear secrets to the Taliban had earlier proposed to solve Pakistan's energy problems by harnessing the power of genies. The Qur'an says that God created man from clay, and angels and genies from fire; so this highly placed engineer proposed to capture the genies and extract their energy. (The reader may wish to read the rather acrimonious public correspondence between Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and myself in 1988 on this subject, reproduced in my book "Islam and Science - Religious Orthodoxy And The Battle For Rationality," published in 1991).
A BRILLIANT PAST THAT VANISHED
Today's sorry situation contrasts starkly with the Islam of yesterday. Between the 9th and the 13th centuries - the Golden Age of Islam - the only people doing decent science, philosophy, or medicine were Muslims. For five straight centuries they alone kept the light of learning ablaze. Muslims not only preserved ancient learning, they also made substantial innovations and extensions. The loss of this tradition has proved tragic for Muslim peoples.
Science flourished in the Golden Age of Islam because there was within Islam a strong rationalist tradition, carried on by a group of Muslim thinkers known as the Mutazilites. This tradition stressed human free will, strongly opposing the predestinarians who taught that everything was foreordained and that humans have no option but surrender everything to Allah. While the Mutazilites held political power, knowledge grew.
But in the twelfth century Muslim orthodoxy reawakened, spearheaded by the cleric Imam Al-Ghazali. Al-Ghazali championed revelation over reason, predestination over free will. He refuted the possibility of relating cause to effect, teaching that man cannot know or predict what will happen; God alone can. He damned mathematics as against Islam, an intoxicant of the mind that weakened faith.
Held in the vice-like grip of orthodoxy, Islam choked. No longer, as during the reign of the dynamic caliph Al-Mamum and the great Haroon Al- Rashid, would Muslim, Christian, and Jewish scholars gather and work together in the royal courts. It was the end of tolerance, intellect, and science in the Muslim world. The last great Muslim thinker, Abd-al Rahman ibn Khaldun, belonged to the 14th century.
ISLAM UNDER IMPERIALISM
Meanwhile, the rest of the world moved on. The Renaissance brought an explosion of scientific inquiry in the West. This owed much to Arab translations and other Muslim contributions, but it was to matter little. Mercantile capitalism and technological progress drove Western countries to rapidly colonize the Muslim world from Indonesia to Morocco. Always brutal, at times genocidal, it changed the shape of the world. It soon became clear, at least to a part of the Muslim elites, that they were paying a heavy price for not possessing the analytical tools of modern science and the social and political values of modern culture - the real source of power of their colonizers.
Despite widespread resistance from the orthodox, the logic of modernity found 19th century Muslim adherents. Modernizers such as Mohammed Abduh and Rashid Rida of Egypt, Sayyed Ahmad Khan of India, and Jamaluddin Afghani (who belonged everywhere), wished to adapt Islam to the times, interpret the Qur'an in ways consistent with modern science, and discard the Hadith (ways of the Prophet) in favour of the Qur'an. Others seized on the modern idea of the nation-state. It is crucial to note that not a single Muslim nationalist leader of the 20th century was a fundamentalist. Turkey's Kemal Ataturk, Algeria's Ahmed Ben Bella, Indonesia's Sukarno, Pakistan's Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Iran's Mohammed Mosaddeq all sought to organize their societies on the basis of secular values.
However, Muslim and Arab nationalism, part of a larger anti-colonial nationalist current across the Third World, included the desire to control and use national resources for domestic benefit. The conflict with Western greed was inevitable. The imperial interests of Britain, and later the United States, feared independent nationalism. Anyone willing to collaborate was preferred, even the ultraconservative Islamic regime of Saudi Arabia. In time, as the Cold War pressed in, nationalism became intolerable. In 1953, Mosaddeq of Iran was overthrown in a CIA coup, replaced by Reza Shah Pahlavi. Britain targeted Nasser. Indonesia's Sukarno was replaced by Suharto after a bloody coup that left a million dead.
Pressed from outside, corrupt and incompetent from within, secular governments proved unable to defend national interests or deliver social justice. They began to frustrate democracy. These failures left a vacuum which Islamic religious movements grew to fill. After the fall of the Shah, Iran underwent a bloody revolution under Ayatollah Khomeini. General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq ruled Pakistan for eleven hideous years and strove to Islamize both state and society. In Sudan an Islamic state arose under Jaafar al-Nimeiry; amputation of hands and limbs became common. Decades ago the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was the most powerful Palestinian organization, and largely secular. After its defeat in 1982 in Beirut, it was largely eclipsed by Hamas, a fundamentalist Muslim movement.
The lack of scruple and the pursuit of power by the United States combined fatally with this tide in the Muslim world in 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. With Pakistan's Zia-ul-Haq as America's foremost ally, the CIA advertised for, and openly recruited, Islamic holy warriors from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Algeria. Radical Islam went into overdrive as its superpower ally and mentor funneled support to the mujahideen, and Ronald Reagan feted them on the lawn of White House, lavishing praise on "brave freedom fighters challenging the Evil Empire".
After the Soviet Union collapsed the United States walked away from an Afghanistan in shambles, its own mission accomplished. The Taliban emerged; Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda made Afghanistan their base. Other groups of holy warriors learned from the Afghan example and took up arms in their own countries.
At least until 11 September, US policy makers were unrepentant. A few years ago, Carter's U.S. national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was asked by the Paris weekly Nouvel Observateur whether in retrospect, given that "Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace todaym," US policy might have been a mistake. Brzezinski retorted:
What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
But Brzezinski's "stirred up Moslems" wanted to change the world; and in this they were destined to succeed. With this, we conclude our history primer for the 700 years until September 11, 2001.
FACING THE FUTURE
What should thoughtful people infer from this whole narrative? I think the inferences are several - and different for different protagonists.
For Muslims, it is time to stop wallowing in self-pity: Muslims are not helpless victims of conspiracies hatched by an all-powerful, malicious West. The fact is that the decline of Islamic greatness took place long before the age of mercantile imperialism. The causes were essentially internal. Therefore Muslims must introspect, and ask what went wrong.
Muslims must recognize that their societies are far larger, more diverse and complex than the small homogenous tribal society in Arabia 1400 hundred years ago. It is therefore time to renounce the idea that Islam can survive and prosper only in an Islamic state run according to Islamic "sharia" law. Muslims need a secular and democratic state that respects religious freedom, human dignity, and is founded on the principle that power belongs to the people. This means confronting and rejecting the claim by orthodox Islamic scholars that in an Islamic state sovereignity does not belong to the people but, instead, to the vice-regents of Allah (Khilafat-al-Arz) or Islamic jurists (Vilayat-e- Faqih).
Muslims must not look towards the likes of bin Laden; such people have no real answer and can offer no real positive alternative. To glorify their terrorism is a hideous mistake - the unremitting slaughter of Shias, Christians, and Ahmadis in their places of worship in Pakistan, and of other minorities in other Muslim countries, is proof that all terrorism is not about the revolt of the dispossessed.
The United States too must confront bitter truths. It is a fact that the messages of George W. Bush and Tony Blair fall flat while those of Osama bin Laden, whether he lives or dies, resonate strongly across the Muslim world. Bin Laden's religious extremism turns off many Muslims, but they find his political message easy to relate to - stop the dispossession of the Palestinians, stop propping up corrupt and despotic regimes across the world just because they serve US interests.
Americans will also have to accept that the United States is past the peak of its imperial power; the 50's and 60's are gone for good. Its triumphalism and disdain for international law is creating enemies everywhere, not just among Muslims. Therefore they must become less arrogant, and more like other peoples of this world. While the U.S. will remain a superpower for some time to come, it is inevitably going to become less and less "super." There are compelling economic and military reasons for this. For example, China's economy is growing at 7% percent per year while the U.S. economy is in recession. India, too, is coming up very rapidly. In military terms, superiority in the air or in space is no longer enough to ensure security. In how many countries can US citizens safely walk the streets today?
Our collective survival lies in recognizing that religion is not the solution; neither is nationalism. Both are divisive, embedding within us false notions of superiority and arrogant pride that are difficult to erase. We have but one choice: the path of secular humanism, based upon the principles of logic and reason. This alone offers the hope of providing everybody on this globe with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
for the Pentagon. Col. Gritz has repeatedly charged that former Navy SEAL and
undoubted CIA man Richard Armitage was heavily involved in Southeast Asian
narcotics trafficking with the late gangster Santos Trafficante.
2.In the 1980's, Caspar Weinberger's handwritten notes reflect that Gen. Colin
Powell and Richard Armitage (then assistant secretary of defense for
international security affairs) had detailed knowledge of the 1985 arms
shipment to Iran from Israeli stocks. Both men falsely testified that they did
not learn of this shipment until 1986.
3. In the aftermath of 9/11 Secretary of State Colin Powell leaned heavily on
his deputy and close friend Richard Armitage in dealing with Pakistan. Two
days after the terrorist attacks, Armitage met with Lieut. General Mahmoud
Ahmed of the Pakistani ISI who "happened" to be in town when the attacks
occurred. After that meeting, on September 13, 2001, Pakistan's Pres.
Musharraf confirmed that at Washington's behest he would send Ahmed to meet the
Taliban and negotiate the extradition of bin Laden. Ahmed traveled to Kandahar
and issued an ultimatum to Mullah Omar: turn over bin Laden without conditions
or face certain war with the United States and its allies.In fact, the
"failure" of this mission was actually part of Washington's design, as the
refusal to extradite bin Laden provided the pretext for a military intervention
that was already in the pipeline and deeply desired by various powers within
the administration, for broad strategic and economic reasons.
4.The Times of India reported on October 12, 2001, that Lt. Gen. Mahmud Ahmad
resigned his post as head of the ISI on October 8, after the FBI discovered
"that $100,000 were wired to hijacker Mohammad Atta from Pakistan ... at the
instance of Gen. Mahmud." October 8 was the date that the U.S. began bombing
Afghanistan, suggesting that this "resignation" was timed to be as unnoticed as
possible.
Updated on 2002-03-04 14:05:36
NEW YORK, March 04 (PNS): The intelligence agency of Pakistan, ISI, has no involvement in the kidnapping or murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl, said US Secretary of State Colin Powell. This statement has discouraged those elements that are engaged in creating impressions abroad that ISI had some kind of hand and attempted to cover-up the murder of Daniel Pearl.
In his Interview with CNN, Secretary of State, Mr Powell categorically said that he had seen no evidence to suggest that ISI was involved in the kidnapping and murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl. Secretary Powell repeatedly denied any involvement of ISI in the matter but also praised President Musharraf for making every effort to apprehend those responsible for the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl.
In a separate interview with CNN, Maleeha Lodhi, Pakistani Ambassador to US, also rejected such reports as 'Speculative' that ISI had any involvement in the Daniel Pearl case. Citing the efforts of Musharraf Government to apprehend the culprits in the case, Maleeha Lodhi said that ISI was an arm of the government and once a decision is taken, all in the government work to achieve the goals.
Associated Press Writer
March 5, 2002, 2:10 PM EST
LEESBURG, Va. -- Three months after DNA scientist Robert Schwartz was stabbed to death with a 2-foot sword and left with a ritualistic-looking X carved in the back of his neck, the case has turned out be less exotic than investigators thought, but chilling nonetheless
Schwartz's own daughter, a 21-year-old college student, is under arrest in the slaying along with three friends, ages 18 to 21, whose signed confessions are disturbing in both their macabre detail and the banality of their language.
"I made a big oopsy here," wrote the young man who allegedly drove that night.
Kyle Hulbert, an 18-year-old with an interest in vampires and a history of mental illness, told police in a rambling seven-page confession that he killed Schwartz to protect Clara Schwartz from her father, who "had poisoned her on several occasions with various chemicals."
Prosecutors and defense attorneys have said next to nothing about the case. Schwartz's relatives have said the notion he was poisoning or otherwise abusing his daughter is ludicrous.
The 57-year-old biophysicist worked at the Center for Innovative Technology in Herndon, a cornerstone of the region's high-tech corridor. He was a respected researcher in DNA sequencing and a contributor to the first national online database of DNA sequence information. His wife -- Clara Schwartz's mother -- died of cancer several year ago.
He was killed on Dec. 8 and his body was found two days later inside his farmhouse in Hamilton, about 40 miles west of Washington, D.C.
The investigation turned quickly to Hulbert, Michael Paul Pfohl and his girlfriend, Katherine Inglis. Neighbors had seen the group drive to Schwartz's home and get stuck in the mud. The three were charged with murder Dec. 12.
Clara Schwartz, a student at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, was later implicated and was arrested Feb. 1. Prosecutors said she was involved in the plot. But she was apparently not there during the slaying itself.
All four are being held without bail.
The mysterious X in Schwartz's neck had led to speculation among investigators that it was a ritual slaying. Friends and neighbors of Hulbert, Inglis and Pfohl said the three had an interest in medieval fantasy and wizardry, the most of the defendants had met each other at Renaissance festivals.
But investigators said the X was merely a coincidental stab wound, and Hulbert told investigators he did not remember making such a mark.
"It does not appear to be a ritualistic-style killing," Sheriff Steven Simpson said last month. "There's nothing to indicate there were any kind of intentional markings" on Schwartz's body.
Hulbert was allegedly the only one who entered the house; the two others waited in the car. According to one of the accounts, Schwartz, on his knees before Hulbert delivered the fatal blows, looked up and asked: "What did I ever do to you?"
In his confession, Hulbert referred to vampirism and the occult and said the taste of Schwartz's blood got into his mouth and "drove me into a frenzy."
Hulbert also wrote that he would have let Schwartz live "had I not seen the confession in his eyes" when confronted about abusing his daughter.
Lawyers for the four defendants have not returned calls or have declined to comment. At a hearing for Clara Schwartz, however, defense attorney Corinne Magee suggested that Hulbert's statement is unreliable because of his mental history.
Hulbert's father has said Hulbert suffers from schizophrenia. Hulbert told investigators he had stopped taking his medication a few days before the killings because he was having problems with Medicaid.
Copyright © 2002, The Associated Press
Tuesday, March 05, 2002
U.S. law-enforcement authorities knew as early as 1995 that Middle Eastern men were training at American flight schools and had discussed crashing planes into federal buildings, but did not follow up on the information, according to documents and interviews with American and Filipino authorities.
The information came to light during Filipino police questioning of Ramzi Yousef and Abdul Hakin Murad, the two men arrested in 1995 after a chemical fire at a Manila apartment accidentally revealed a major terror plot with ties to Usama bin Laden.
Murad and Yousef, who also had ties to the New Jersey-based group of terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, are serving life sentences in the United States for an elaborate plot to blow up a dozen U.S. trans-Pacific airliners in one day.
But secret Filipino records, as well as police and intelligence personnel in that country who spoke to the Associated Press, indicate that Murad's intentions were even grander.
"Murad's idea is that he will board any American commercial aircraft pretending to be an ordinary passenger, then he will hijack said aircraft, control its cockpit and dive it at the CIA headquarters," one Filipino police report from 1995 said.
"There will be no bomb or any explosive that he will use in its execution. It is a suicidal mission that he is very much willing to execute," it continued.
The Filipino authorities said that they gave the information immediately to the FBI office in Manila, but that the Americans disregarded the hijacking plans to focus on the better-developed and more immediately threatening airliner-bombing plot.
"We shared that with the FBI," said Robert Delfin, chief of intelligence command for the Philippine National Police. "They may have mislooked (sic) and didn't appreciate the info coming from the Philippine police."
FBI and other American law-enforcement officials, who spoke only on condition of anonymity, said that they considered Murad's suicide hijacking idea was half-baked, and in any case involved taking control of only a small single-engine plane that could not do much damage.
Murad, who later claimed he was tortured during his interrogations, also told Filipino authorities how he and a Pakistani friend had crisscrossed the United States, attending flight schools in New York, Texas, California and North Carolina on his way to earning a commercial pilot's license.
He identified to Filipino police approximately 10 other Middle Eastern men who met him at the flight schools or were getting similar training.
One was a Middle Eastern flight instructor who came to the United States for more training; another a former soldier in the United Arab Emirates. Others came from Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
None of the pilots match the names of the 19 hijackers from Sept. 11.
The U.S. officials said the FBI interviewed people at the flight schools named by Filipino police, but did not find evidence that any Middle Easterners other than Murad were plotting anything. With no other evidence to go on, they took no further action, the officials said.
FBI agents descended upon the flying schools in 1995, and returned to some of those locations immediately after Sept. 11.
"There were several of them [Middle Eastern pilot students] here. At one point three or four were here," said Laura Flynn, an assistant manager at Richmore Flight School in Schenectady, N.Y., where Murad and a friend attended in the mid-1990s.
"Supposedly they didn't know each other before, they just happened to show up here at the same time. But they all obviously knew each other," she said.
Flynn said FBI agents mentioned Murad was suspected in a bombing plot but did not say anything about a suicide hijacking. She said agents returned to the school after Sept. 11 "and asked about any of the foreign people, pulled some records."
The Filipino police investigation also uncovered links between Murad and Yousef and a Muslim cleric from Malaysia who has emerged in the past few months as a key figure in the investigation of last year's suicide hijackings.
Authorities in Malaysia have said they believe the cleric, who goes by the name Hambali, met with two of the Sept. 11 hijackers in 2000 and may be a central figure in terrorist groups with links to bin Laden that have emerged in southeast Asia. Authorities are seeking Hambali's arrest.
Delfin, the Filipino police intelligence officer, said when he saw the Sept. 11 attacks on television, Murad's disclosures immediately came to mind.
"This is it, this was what Murad was saying," Delfin said he remarked to other intelligence officials.
Rodolfo Mendoza, the former police intelligence official who oversaw Murad's interrogations, had the same reaction.
"It's exactly as what Murad said before, 'I will hijack a commercial plane and dive crash it,'" he said.
Murad told authorities he discussed the suicide hijacking idea with Yousef just a few months before their arrest and had not yet developed a specific plan, although they discussed targets like the CIA building and the Pentagon in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. The Pentagon was struck Sept. 11.
"I am telling you that I told Basit [Yousef] that there is a planning, what about we dive to CIA building," Murad is quoted in one transcript as telling police interrogators. "He told me OK, we will think about it."
Filipino police questioned his willingness to die. "You are willing to die for Allah or for Islamic [sic]?," one asked.
"Yes," Murad replied.
"Really?" the interrogator asked.
"Yes."
Later Murad offered some insight. "All my thinking was," he said, "that I should fight the Americans. I should do something to show them that we are, we could stay in their face."
— The Associated Press contributed to this report
Friday, February 22, 2002 -- A major U.S. ground assault on Iraq is only three or four weeks away, according to the intelligence news agency DEBKA-Net-Weekly.
Sources say late March, early April likely time frame
Beheading of St. John the Baptist is on: September 11
Finding of the Head of St. John the Baptist: Saturday 9 March
Mon Mar 4, 3:59 PM ET
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on Monday New York officials should have been told about alleged fears of a nuclear attack on the city last October as reported by Time magazine.
Time magazine reported on Sunday that a month after the Sept. 11 attacks, top federal officials feared a nuclear weapon obtained from the Russian arsenal was being smuggled into New York.
The White House's Counterterrorism Security Group, part of the National Security Council, was alerted to the danger through a report by an agent code-named DRAGONFIRE, according to the magazine, but New York officials and senior FBI officials were not informed in an effort to avoid panic.
"I do believe the New York City government should have been told" of the alleged nuclear threat, Bloomberg said.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said he was not notified and was "not unduly distressed that I was not."
"I don't think I could have done much with the information," Annan added. "What was important is that the authorities who have the responsibility for security did what had to be done."
The threat was later determined to be false, but the magazine said counterterrorist investigators went on their highest state of alert -- without coordinating plans with New York officials, including then Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
The thing is did we need to be told? I certainly spent weeks after 911 believing in a high possibility I'd see the final scene of Nicholas Roeg's "Insignificance" played out around me at any minute, excepting obviously for the attendance of Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein. However I do believe the elected mayor of the city should probably have been informed.
Sensors Deployed Near D.C., Borders; Delta Force on Standby
Sunday, March 3, 2002
Alarmed by growing hints of al Qaeda's progress toward obtaining a nuclear or radiological weapon, the Bush administration has deployed hundreds of sophisticated sensors since November to U.S. borders, overseas facilities and choke points around Washington. It has placed the Delta Force, the nation's elite commando unit, on a new standby alert to seize control of nuclear materials that the sensors may detect.
Ordinary Geiger counters, worn on belt clips and resembling pagers, have been in use by the U.S. Customs Service for years. The newer devices are called gamma ray and neutron flux detectors. Until now they were carried only by mobile Nuclear Emergency Search Teams (NEST) dispatched when extortionists claimed to have radioactive materials. Because terrorists would give no such warning, and because NEST scientists are unequipped for combat, the Delta Force has been assigned the mission of killing or disabling anyone with a suspected nuclear device and turning it over to the scientists to be disarmed.
The new radiation sensors are emplaced in layers around some fixed points and temporarily at designated "national security special events" such as last month's Olympic Games in Utah. Allied countries, including Saudi Arabia, have also rushed new detectors to their borders after American intelligence warnings. To address the technological limits of even the best current sensors, the Bush administration has ordered a crash program to build next-generation devices at the three national nuclear laboratories.
These steps join several other signs, described in recent interviews with U.S. government policymakers, that the Bush administration's nuclear anxieties have intensified since American-backed forces routed Osama bin Laden's network and its Taliban backers in Afghanistan.
"Clearly . . . the sense of urgency has gone up," said a senior government policymaker on nuclear, biological and chemical terror. Another high-ranking official said, "The more you gather information, the more our concerns increased about al Qaeda's focus on weapons of mass destruction of all kinds."
In "tabletop exercises" conducted as high as Cabinet level, President Bush's national security team has highlighted difficult choices the chief executive would face if the new sensors picked up a radiation signature on a boat steaming up the Potomac River or a truck heading for the capital on Interstate 95.
Participants in those exercises said the gaps in their knowledge are considerable. But the intelligence community, they said, believes that al Qaeda could already control a stolen Soviet-era tactical nuclear warhead or enough weapons-grade material to fashion a functioning, if less efficient, atomic bomb.
Even before more recent discoveries, some analysts regarded that prospect as substantial. Some expressed that view when the intelligence community devoted a full-day retreat to the subject early last year in Chantilly, Va., according to someone with firsthand knowledge.
A majority of those present assessed the likelihood as negligible, but none of the more than 50 participants ruled it out.
The consensus government view is now that al Qaeda probably has acquired the lower-level radionuclides strontium 90 and cesium 137, many thefts of which have been documented in recent years. These materials cannot produce a nuclear detonation, but they are radioactive contaminants. Conventional explosives could scatter them in what is known as a radiological dispersion device, colloquially called a "dirty bomb."
The number of deaths that might result is hard to predict but probably would be modest. One senior government specialist said "its impact as a weapon of psychological terror" would be far greater.
These heightened U.S. government fears explain Bush's activation, the first since the dawn of the nuclear age, of contingency plans to maintain a cadre of senior federal managers in underground bunkers away from Washington. The Washington Post described the features of the classified "Continuity of Operations Plan" on Friday.
Bush's emphasis on nuclear terrorism dates from a briefing in the Situation Room during the last week of October.
According to knowledgeable sources, Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet walked the president through an accumulation of fresh evidence about al Qaeda's nuclear ambition. Described by one consumer of intelligence as "an incomplete mosaic" of fact, inference and potentially false leads, Tenet's briefing raised fears that "sent the president through the roof." With considerable emotion, two officials said, Bush ordered his national security team to give nuclear terrorism priority over every other threat to the United States.
Tenet told Bush that Pakistan's nuclear weapons program was more deeply compromised than either government has acknowledged publicly. Pakistan arrested two former nuclear scientists, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Abdul Majid, on Oct. 23, and interrogated them about contacts with bin Laden and his lieutenants.
Pakistani officials maintain that the scientists did not pass important secrets to al Qaeda, but they have not disclosed that Mahmood failed multiple polygraph examinations about his activities.
Most disturbing to U.S. intelligence was another leak from Pakistan's program that has not been mentioned in public. According to American sources, a third Pakistani nuclear scientist tried to negotiate the sale of an atomic weapon design to Libya. The Post was unable to learn which Pakistani blueprint was involved, whether the transaction was completed, or what became of the scientist after discovery. Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is believed to include bombs of relatively simple design, built around cores of highly enriched uranium, and more sophisticated weapons employing Chinese implosion technology to compress plutonium to a critical mass.
At the October briefing, Bush learned of a remark by a senior member of al Qaeda's operational command. The operative had been an accurate, though imprecise, harbinger of al Qaeda plans in the past.
After U.S. bombing began in Afghanistan, an American official said, the same man was reliably reported to have said "there will be another attack and it's going to be much bigger" than the one that toppled the World Trade Center and destroyed a wing of the Pentagon on Sept. 11.
"What the hell did that mean?" the official said, recalling the stunned reaction of those briefed on the remark. Other reports reaching Washington described al Qaeda references to obtaining, or having obtained, special weapons. "The benign explanation is bucking up the troops" with false bravado, the official said, but the Bush administration took the report "extremely seriously."
Searches of al Qaeda sites in Afghanistan, undertaken since American-backed forces took control there, are not known to have turned up a significant cache of nuclear materials.
The New York Times reported that U.S. personnel in Afghanistan sent three suspected samples to American labs for analysis but found no significant radioactive source.
There is evidence that some of al Qaeda's nuclear efforts over the years met with swindles and false leads. In one case, officials said, the organization was taken in by scam artists selling "red mercury," a phony substance they described as a precursor, or ingredient, of weapons-grade materials.
If al Qaeda has a weapon or its components, U.S. officials said, its whereabouts would be the organization's most closely guarded secret. Addressing the failure of American searchers to find such materials in abandoned Afghan camps, one policymaker noted that "we haven't found most of the al Qaeda leadership either, and we know that exists."
The likeliest source of nuclear materials, or of a warhead bought whole, is the vast complex of weapons labs and storage sites that began to crumble with the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. Russia has decommissioned some 10,000 tactical nuclear weapons since then, but it has been able to document only a fraction of the inventory.
The National Intelligence Council, an umbrella organization for the U.S. analytical community, reported to Congress last month that there are at least four occasions between 1992 and 1999 when "weapons-grade and weapons-usable nuclear materials have been stolen from some Russian institutes."
Of those thefts, the report said, "We assess that undetected smuggling has occurred, although we do not know the extent or magnitude."
Victor Yerastov, chief of nuclear accounting and control for Russia's ministry of atomic energy, has said that in 1998 a theft in Chelyabinsk Oblast made off with "quite sufficient material to produce an atomic bomb."
An American official, commenting on that theft, said that "given the known and suspected capabilities of the Russian mafia, it's perfectly plausible that al Qaeda would have access to such materials." The official added, "They could get it from anybody they could bribe."
Col. Gen. Igor Valynkin, chief of the Russian organization responsible for safeguarding nuclear weapons, said on Oct. 27 that any claim Russia has lost an intact warhead is "barking mad."
The U.S. government is not accepting that assurance at face value. "We don't know with any confidence what has gone missing, and neither do they," said one American official.
Thefts of less threatening nuclear byproducts, especially isotopes of strontium, cesium and partially enriched uranium, have been reported more frequently. In November 1995, Chechen rebels placed a functioning "dirty bomb" using dynamite and cesium 137 in Moscow's Izmailovo park. They did not detonate it. Al Qaeda is closely aligned with the Chechens.
There are limits, "governed by the laws of physics," as one official put it, to American technology for detecting these materials. In broad terms they have to do with sensing radioactivity at a distance and through shielding, and with the balance between false positives and false negatives. There are classified Energy Department documents that catalogue what one of them called "shortcomings in the ability of NEST equipment to locate the target materials which if known by adversaries could be used to defeat the search equipment and/or procedures." The Post has agreed to publish no further details.
A division of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, known as NIS-6, is leading efforts to build an improved generation of sensors. Some will use neutron generators to "interrogate" a suspected object, and others are planned for long-range detection of alpha particles.
A measure of the government's grave concern is the time devoted by top national security officials to developing options for a crisis involving nuclear terrorism.
One hypothetical scenario, participants said, began with a sensor detecting what appeared to be the radiation signature of a nuclear weapon amid a large volume of traffic on a highway such as I-95.
According to two participants, the group considered how the Energy Department's NEST teams, working with Delta Force, might find and take control of the weapon without giving a terrorist time to use it.
Roadblocks and car-by-car searches, for example, would create chaos, require hours, and give ample warning to those hiding the device. But without roadblocks the searchers might fail to isolate the weapon within a radius defined by the limits of sensor technology. If commandos found the device, they could expect to encounter resistance. Would the president delegate to on-scene commanders a decision that might result in nuclear detonation? Which officials, meanwhile, should be evacuated? Would government inform the public of the threat, a step that would wreak panic without precedent in any country and complicate the job of finding the weapon?
"Evacuation is one of those issues you throw your hands up and say, 'It's too hard,' " said one participant in a tabletop exercise. "Nobody wants to make that decision, certainly not in advance."
Kelly taps military pros to reshape force vs. new threats
Daily News Police Bureau
In the two months since he became top cop for the second time, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly has launched a virtual revolution in a department long tied to tradition, all in the name of fighting terrorism.
He has brought a federal touch to the municipal force with the appointment of a retired Marine Corps general and a former CIA official, and he has hired an outside consultant to assess the department's response to the World Trade Center catastrophe.
Already, he says his historic shakeup of the department hierarchy is paying dividends.
Look out, terrorists — Ray Kelly's in charge.
Two weeks ago, a threat against the city came from outside the country, Kelly said, "and because of one of these gentlemen's contacts, they were able to reach into that country, contact people, track down the individual who made this threat and find out quickly it was a hoax."
Within a few hours, Kelly said, the crucial question of whether to deploy manpower to meet the threat was answered. "That we were able to make that judgment quickly was valuable," Kelly said.
"All our lives changed; the world changed," the commissioner said in an interview last week. "We're configuring the department to respond to the reality of post-Sept. 11. We have to accept we've been targeted four times."
Kelly said hiring retired Lt. Gen. Frank Libutti as deputy commissioner for counterterrorism marks the first time a city police force will have a military aspect.
"We're at war, and we have to be able to defend ourselves in a variety of ways," Kelly said. "The military experience is really perfect for what we have to do."
He told the City Council $700 million will be needed to restructure the department into a pro-active anti-terror force, with high-tech equipment and intense training for every cop on the force.
Libutti is charged with formulating that training; Kelly said it is still in the planning stages. "This is all emerging. This is unchartered waters for the city and for the federal government," he said.
Former spymaster David Cohen knows a thing or two about terror.
He enlisted David Cohen, a 35-year veteran spymaster and the former No. 4 man in the CIA, to restructure the NYPD's intelligence gathering.
"Before Sept. 11, the intelligence division was much more narrowly focused," Kelly said. "Now we want to get information and disseminate it in real time. He is a consummate professional ... his position is not an assignment that you pass through."
Kelly spent two hours Thursday with FBI Director Robert Mueller, discussing how to improve the NYPD-FBI Joint Terrorist Task Force, which is under Libutti's command.
Policing experts applauded the aggressive retooling.
"Sept. 11 wasn't the last strike," said Aaron Rosenthal, a former NYPD assistant chief. "To use the same cops in the same way would be ridiculous. ... These people have the expertise in the area he needs."
Eugene O'Donnell, a John Jay College professor who teaches law and police studies, said: "The same old infrastructure wouldn't cut it in a world where terrorism was a big issue. The NYPD establishment was woefully unable to gather intelligence and information and process it ... they needed to open doors to federal agencies, and the best way is with people with track records."
O'Donnell, a former cop, acknowledged that the NYPD culture is "so resistant to change," but change is necessary.
"Nobody had stopped the NYPD from surveilling people, doing wiretaps, getting informants," O'Donnell said. "They could put 1,000 people into fighting terrorism at the bat of an eye and it would have a minimal effect on the department. We have the cops and the expertise but they need new leadership and they need to break the old-fashioned mold."
"Historically in America, there's never really been a mixing of military and police," said John Timoney, former first deputy commissioner of the NYPD and former chief of police in Philadelphia.
As for Cohen, Timoney said, "Clearly, there has been a paucity of information coming from federal authorities ... so if this in some way gives the NYPD a leg up because they will trust him, it's great."
Timoney also noted that although Kelly is the ultimate NYPD insider — rising all the way through the ranks — turning to outsiders always has been his style.
Such as hiring McKinsey and Co. to assess police response to the twin towers attack.
He used the same firm 10 years ago to review the Internal Affairs Division after the notorious case of rogue cop Michael Dowd exposed its failures. A major restructuring of internal affairs resulted.
"They're a world-renowned consulting firm," Kelly said. "You need a certain objectivity; you can't do it internally. You can't ask people what happened to them, what their memories are of Sept. 11 and what their recommendations are. You need people outside the organization to ask them."
Kelly has his critics in the department, who say he emphasizes the failings of cops over their successes.
But the commissioner said he has seen no resistance to his changes, because the cops recognize the reality of terrorism as well as the professionalism of the new deputy commissioners. "Everyone is on board," Kelly said.
OCTOBER BULLETIN SAID AL-QAEDA TERRORISTS THOUGHT TO HAVE 10 KILOTON NUCLEAR WEAPON TO BE SMUGGLED INTO NEW YORK CITY
(Time.com)
Six months after Sept. 11, America has taken the fight to al-Qaeda. But behind the scenes, The CIA and FBI have been in a desperate scramble to fix a broken system before another strike comes BY ROMESH RATNESAR
Sunday, Mar. 03, 2002
For a few harrowing weeks last fall, a group of U.S. officials believed that the worst nightmare of their lives—something even more horrific than 9/11—was about to come true. In October an intelligence alert went out to a small number of government agencies, including the Energy Department's top-secret Nuclear Emergency Search Team, based in Nevada. The report said that terrorists were thought to have obtained a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon from the Russian arsenal and planned to smuggle it into New York City. The source of the report was a mercurial agent code-named dragonfire, who intelligence officials believed was of "undetermined" reliability. But dragonfire's claim tracked with a report from a Russian general who believed his forces were missing a 10-kiloton device. Since the mid-'90s, proliferation experts have suspected that several portable nuclear devices might be missing from the Russian stockpile. That made the dragonfire report alarming. So did this: detonated in lower Manhattan, a 10-kiloton bomb would kill some 100,000 civilians and irradiate 700,000 more, flattening everything in a half-mile diameter. And so counterterrorist investigators went on their highest state of alert.
"It was brutal," a U.S. official told Time. It was also highly classified and closely guarded. Under the aegis of the White House's Counterterrorism Security Group, part of the National Security Council, the suspected nuke was kept secret so as not to panic the people of New York. Senior FBI officials were not in the loop. Former mayor Rudolph Giuliani says he was never told about the threat. In the end, the investigators found nothing and concluded that dragonfire's information was false. But few of them slept better. They had made a chilling realization: if terrorists did manage to smuggle a nuclear weapon into the city, there was almost nothing anyone could do about it.
In the days after Sept. 11, doomsday scenarios like a nuclear attack on Manhattan suddenly seemed plausible. But during the six months that followed, as the U.S. struck back and the anthrax scare petered out and the fires at Ground Zero finally died down, the national nightmare about another calamitous terrorist strike went away.
The terrorists did not. Counterterrorism experts and government officials interviewed by Time say that for all the relative calm since Sept. 11, America's luck will probably run out again, sooner or later. "It's going to be worse, and a lot of people are going to die," warns a U.S. counterterrorism official. "I don't think there's a damn thing we're going to be able to do about it." The government is so certain of another attack that it has assigned 100 civilian government officials to 24-hour rotations in underground bunkers, in a program that became known last week as the "shadow government," ready to take the reins if the next megaterror target turns out to be Washington. Pentagon strategists say that even with al-Qaeda's ranks scattered and its leaders in hiding, operatives around the world are primed and preparing to strike again. "If you're throwing enough darts at a board, eventually you're going to get something through," says a Pentagon strategist. "That's the way al-Qaeda looks at it."
Thousands of al-Qaeda terrorists survived the U.S. military assault in Afghanistan and are beginning to regroup. Last weekend, U.S. forces attacked some 500 Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters holed up in the rugged, icy mountains outside the eastern town of Gardez, near the Pakistani border. The targets: four al-Qaeda training camps that were bombed last fall but, sources tell Time, have since been reoccupied by al-Qaeda. Over the past month, locals say, groups of armed men have moved into the area from the Pakistani border town of Miren-Shah. The latest battle involved at least 1,000 Afghan troops and 60 U.S. Special Forces, who advanced on an al-Qaeda encampment by taking control of roads around Shah-e-Kot. The lead forces were rebuffed by heavily armed al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters. U.S. aircraft, including B-52s, F-15Es, F-18s and AC-130 gunships, were called in to fire at enemy positions. At least one American was killed by hostile fire. "This could go on for several days," a Pentagon official said.
As Time reported in January, Western intelligence officials believe that al-Qaeda may now be under the control of Abu Zubaydah, a peripatetic aide of Osama bin Laden's who has run training camps in Afghanistan and coordinated terror cells in Europe and North America. A European terrorism expert says Zubaydah oversaw the training of 3,000 to 4,000 recruits in al-Qaeda terrorist camps, most of whom are "out there somewhere in the world right now." Zubaydah has instructed operatives to shave their beards, adopt Western clothing and "do whatever it takes to avoid detection and see their missions through," the expert says.
In the past six months, the Administration and Congress have mobilized massive amounts of government money, intelligence and personnel to track terrorists at home and abroad and tighten the country's protective net. But all nets have holes. A Time investigation found some good news—notably that the CIA, FBI and other intelligence and law-enforcement agencies are finally starting to work as a team. But in other critical areas, such as gathering and analyzing intelligence, strengthening homeland security and rounding up al-Qaeda, the U.S. has yet to solve its most grievous problems. Much of the more than $1 billion that Washington has poured into intelligence services since 9/11 is merely high-octane fuel flooding a leaky and misfiring engine. America's national security system is designed to fight Soviets rather than suicide bombers. Sources in the Pentagon, White House and Congress grumble that the CIA and the nation's other intelligence bureaucracy were caught flat-footed by the Sept. 11 attack—"It was an abject intelligence failure," a White House aide says—and many still doubt that the U.S. intelligence community is capable of seeing the next one coming.
Experts warn about mass contamination of the nation's food supply and nuclear attacks on major U.S. cities precisely because these remote threats are the ones for which adequate defenses are not yet in place. The Coast Guard is arming itself against a possible terrorist attempt to destroy a major U.S. coastal city by detonating a tanker loaded with liquefied natural gas. The Bush Administration is bracing for another disaster. "We're as vulnerable today as we were on 9/10 or 9/12," says presidential counselor Karen Hughes. "We just know more." Here is what Time has learned about America's vulnerabilities—and how the U.S. is working to bolster its defenses on four crucial fronts.
read on...
A Career In Microbiology Can Be Harmful To Your Health
3-3-2
(From The Wilderness Publications, www.copvcia.com)
(FTW) - In the four-month period from Nov. 12 through Feb. 11, seven world-class microbiologists in different parts of the world were reported dead. Six died of "unnatural" causes, while the cause of the seventh's death is questionable. Also on Nov. 12, DynCorp, a major government contractor for data processing, military operations and intelligence work, was awarded a $322 million contract to develop, produce and store vaccines for the Department of Defense. DynCorp and Hadron, both defense contractors connected to classified research programs on communicable diseases, have also been linked to a software program known as PROMIS, which may have helped identify and target the victims.
In the six weeks prior to Nov. 12, two additional foreign microbiologists were reported dead. Some believe there were as many as five more microbiologists killed during the period, bringing the total as high as 14. These two to seven additional deaths, however, are not the focus of this story. This same period also saw the deaths of three persons involved in medical research or public health.
· On Nov. 12, Benito Que, 52, was found comatose in the street near the laboratory where he worked at the University of Miami Medical School. He died on Dec. 6.
· On Nov. 16, Don C. Wiley, 57, vanished, and his abandoned rental car was found on the Hernando de Soto Bridge outside Memphis, Tenn. His body was found on Dec. 20.
· On Nov. 23, Vladimir Pasechnik, 64, was found dead in Wiltshire, England, not far from his home.
· On Dec. 10, Robert Schwartz, 57, was found murdered in his rural home in Loudoun County, Va.
· On Dec, 11, Set Van Nguyen, 44, was found dead in the airlock entrance to a walk-in refrigerator in the laboratory where he worked in Victoria State, Australia.
· On Feb. 8, Vladimir Korshunov, 56, was found dead on a Moscow street.
· And on Feb. 11, Ian Langford, 40, was found dead in his home in Norwich, England.
OOPS!
Prior to these deaths, on Oct. 4, a commercial jetliner traveling from Israel to Novosibirsk, Siberia was shot down over the Black Sea by an "errant" Ukrainian surface-to-air missile, killing all on board. The missile was over 100 miles off-course. Despite early news stories reporting it as a charter, the flight, Air Sibir 1812, was a regularly scheduled flight.
According to several press reports, including a Dec. 5 article by Barry Chamish and one on Jan. 13 by Jim Rarey (both available at www.rense.com), the plane is believed by many in Israel to have had as many as five passengers who were microbiologists. Both Israel and Novosibirsk are homes for cutting-edge microbiological research. Novosibirsk is known as the scientific capital of Siberia, and home to over 50 research facilities and 13 full universities for a population of only 2.5 million people.
At the time of the Black Sea crash, Israeli journalists had been sounding the alarm that two Israeli microbiologists had been recently murdered, allegedly by terrorists. On Nov. 24 a Swissair flight from Berlin to Zurich crashed on its landing approach. Of the 33 persons on board, 24 were killed, including the head of the hematology department at Israel's Ichilov Hospital, as well as directors of the Tel Aviv Public Health Department and Hebrew University School of Medicine. They were the only Israelis on the flight. The names of those killed, as reported in a subsequent Israeli news story but not matched to their job titles, were Avishai Berkman, Amiramp Eldor and Yaacov Matzner.
Besides all being microbiologists, six of the seven scientists who died within weeks of each other died from "unnatural" causes. And four of the seven were doing virtually identical research -- research that has global, political and financial significance.
QUE PASA?
The public relations office at the University of Miami Medical School said only that Benito Que was a cell biologist, involved in oncology research in the hematology department. This research relies heavily on DNA sequencing studies. The circumstances of his death raise more questions than they answer.
Que had left his job at a research laboratory at the University of Miami Medical School, apparently heading for his Ford Explorer parked on NW 10th Avenue. The Miami Herald, referring to the death as an "incident," reported he had no wallet on him, and quoted Miami police as saying his death may have been the result of a mugging. Police made this statement while at the same time saying there was a lack of visible trauma to Que's body. There is firm belief among Que's friends and family that the PhD was attacked by four men, at least one of whom had a baseball bat. Que's death has now been officially ruled "natural," caused by cardiac arrest. Both the Dade County medical examiner and the Miami Police would not comment on the case, saying only that it is closed.
A MEMPHIS MYSTERY
Don C. Wiley of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Harvard University, was one of the most prominent microbiologists in the world. He had won many of the field's most prestigious awards, including the 1995 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award for work that could make anti-viral vaccines a reality. He was heavily involved in research on DNA sequencing. Wiley was last seen around midnight on Nov. 15, leaving the St. Jude's Children's Research Advisory dinner held at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tenn. Associates attending the dinner said he showed no signs of intoxication, and no one has admitted to drinking with him.
His rented Mitsubishi Galant was found about four hours later, abandoned on a bridge across the Mississippi River, headed towards Arkansas. Keys were in the ignition, the gas tank full, and the hazard flashers had not been turned on. Wiley's body was found on Dec. 20, snagged on a tree along the Mississippi River in Vidalia, La., 300 miles south of Memphis. Until his body was found, Dr. Wiley's death was handled as a missing person case, and police did no forensic examinations.
Early reports about Wiley's disappearance made no mention of paint marks on his car or a missing hubcap, which turned up in subsequent reports. The type of accident needed to knock off the hubcaps (actually a complete wheel cover) used on recent model Galants would have caused noticeable damage to the sheet metal on either side of the wheel, and probably the wheel itself. No damage to the car's body or wheel has been reported.
Wiley's car was found about a five-minute drive from the hotel where he was last seen. There is a four-hour period in his evening that cannot be accounted for. There is also no explanation as to why he would have been headed into Arkansas late at night. Wiley was staying at his father's home in Memphis.
The Hernando de Soto Bridge carries Interstate 40 out of Memphis, across the Mississippi River into Arkansas. The traffic on the bridge was reduced to a single lane in each direction. This would have caused westbound traffic out of Memphis to slow down and travel in one lane. Anything in the other two closed lanes would have been plainly obvious to every passing person. There are no known witnesses to Wiley stopping his car on the bridge.
On Jan. 14, almost two months after his disappearance, Shelby County Medical Examiner O.C. Smith announced that his department had ruled Wiley s death to be "accidental;" the result of massive injuries suffered in a fall from the Hernando de Soto Bridge. Smith said there were paint marks on Wiley's rental car similar to the paint used on construction signs on the bridge, and that the car's right front hubcap was missing. There has been no report as to which construction signs Wiley hit. There is also no explanation as to why this evidence did not move the Memphis police to consider possibilities other than a "missing person."
Smith theorizes that Wiley pulled over to the outermost lane of the bridge (that lane being closed at the time) to inspect the damage to his car. Smith's subsequent explanation for the fall requires several other things to have occurred simultaneously:
· Wiley had to have had one of the two or three seizures he has per year due to a rare disorder known only to family and close friends, that seizure being brought on by use of alcohol earlier that evening;
· A passing truck creating a huge blast of wind and/or roadway bounce due to heavy traffic; and,
· Wiley had to be standing on the curb next to the guardrail which, because of Wiley's 6-foot-3-inch height, would have come only to his mid-thigh.
These conditions would have put Wiley's center of gravity above the rail, and the seizure would have caused him to lose his balance as the truck created the bounce and blast of wind, thus causing him to fall off the bridge.
SCIENCE IS MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD?
Robert M. Schwartz was a founding member of the Virginia Biotechnology Association, and the Executive Director of Research and Development at Virginia's Center for Innovative Technology. He was extremely well respected in biophysics, and regarded as an authority on DNA sequencing.
Co-workers became concerned when he didn't show up at his office on Dec. 10. He was later found dead at his home. Loudoun County Sheriff's officials said Schwartz was stabbed on Dec. 8 with a sword, and had an "X" cut into the back of his neck.
Schwartz's daughter Clara, 19, and three others have been charged in the case. The four are said to have a fascination with fantasy worlds, witchcraft, and the occult. Kyle Hulbert, 18, who allegedly committed the murder, has a history of mental illness, and is reported by the Washington Post to have killed Schwartz to prevent the murder of Clara. At the request of Clara Schwartz's attorneys, on Feb. 13 Judge Pamela Grizzle ordered all new evidence introduced about her role in the case to be sealed. She also issued a temporary gag order covering the entire case on police, prosecutors and defense attorneys.
BREATHE DEEPLY, AND CARRY A BIG STICK
Set Van Nguyen was found dead on Dec. 11 at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization's animal diseases facility in Geelong, Australia. He had worked there 15 years. According to an article on www.rense.com by Ian Gurney, in Jan. 20001 the magazine Nature published information that two scientists at this facility, using genetic manipulation and DNA sequencing, had created an incredibly virulent form of mousepox, a cousin of smallpox. The researchers were extremely concerned that if similar manipulation could be done to smallpox, a terrifying weapon could be unleashed.
According to Victoria Police, Nguyen died after entering a refrigerated storage facility. "He did not know the room was full of deadly gas which had leaked from a liquid nitrogen cooling system. Unable to breathe, Mr. Nguyen collapsed and died," is the official report.
Nitrogen is not a "deadly" gas, and is a part of air. An extreme over-abundance of nitrogen in one's immediate atmosphere would cause shortness of breath, lightheadedness, and fatigue -- conditions a biologist would certainly recognize. Additionally, a leak sufficient to fill the room with nitrogen would set off alerts, and would be so massive as to cause a complete loss of cooling, causing the temperature to rise, which would also set off alerts these systems are routinely equipped with.
A RUSSIAN, BRITISH INTELLIGENCE AND OLD CORPSES
In 1989, Vladimir Pasechnik defected from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) to Great Britain while on a trip to Paris. He had been the top scientist in the FSU's bioweapons program, which is heavily dependent upon DNA sequencing. Pasechnik's death was reported in the New York Times as having occurred on Nov. 23.
The Times obituary indicated that the announcement of Pasechnik's death was made in the United States by Dr. Christopher Davis of Virginia, who stated that the cause of death was a stroke. Davis was the member of British intelligence who de-briefed Dr. Pasechnik at the time of his defection. Davis says he left the intelligence service in 1996, but when asked why a former member of British intelligence would be the person announcing the death of Pasechnik to the US media, he replied that it had come about during a conversation with a reporter he had had a long relationship with. The reporter Davis named is not the author of the Times' obituary, and Davis declined to say which branch of British intelligence he served in. No reports of Pasechnik's death appeared in Britain for more than a month, until Dec. 29, when his obituary appeared in the London Telegraph, which did not include a date of death.
Pasechnik spent the 10 years after his defection working at the Centre for Applied Microbiology and Research at the UK Department of Health, Salisbury. On Feb. 20, 2000, it was announced that, along with partner Caisey Harlingten, Pasechnik had formed a company called Regma Biotechnologies Ltd. Regma describes itself as "a new drug company working to provide powerful alternatives to antibiotics." Like three other microbiologists detailed in this article, Pasechnik was heavily involved in DNA sequencing research. During the anthrax panic of this past fall, Pasechnik offered his services to the British government to help in any way possible. Despite Regma having a public relations department that has released many items to the press over the past two years, the company has not announced the death of one of its two founders.
FEBRUARY, BLOODY FEBRUARY
On Feb. 9 the news publication Pravda.ru reported that Victor Korshunov had been killed. At the time, Korshunov was head of the microbiology sub-facility at the Russian State Medical University. He was found dead in the entrance to his home with a cranial injury. Pravda reports that Korshunov had probably invented either a vaccine to protect against biological weapons, or a weapon itself.
On Feb. 12 a newspaper in Norwich, England reported the previous day's death of Ian Langford, a senior researcher at the University of East Anglia. The story went on to say that police "were not treating the death as suspicious." The next day, Britain's The Times reported that Langford was found wedged under a chair "at his blood-spattered and apparently ransacked home."
The February 12 story, from the Eastern Daily Press, reports that clerks at a store near Langford's home claim he came in on a daily basis to buy "a big bottle of vodka." Two of the store's staff also claim Langford had come into the store a few days earlier wearing "just a jumper and a pair of shoes." None of the store's staff would give their name.
It is hard to understand how a man can reach the highest levels of achievement in a scientific field while drinking "a big bottle of vodka" on a daily basis, and strolling around his hometown nearly nude. A Feb. 14 follow-up story from the Eastern Daily Press says police believe Langford died after suffering "one or more falls." They say this would account for his head injuries and large amount of blood found at the death scene.
THE HOWARD HUGHES MEDICAL INSTITUTE -- ANOTHER LINK?
There is another intriguing connection between three of the five American scientists that have died. Wiley, Schwartz, and Benito Que worked for medical research facilities that received grants from Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). HHMI funds a tremendous number of research programs at schools, hospitals and research facilities, and has long been alleged to be conducting "black ops" biomedical research for intelligence organizations, including the CIA.
Long-time biowarfare investigator Patricia Dole, Ph.D. reports that there is a history of people connected to HHMI being murdered. In 1994, Jose Trias met with a friend in Houston, Texas and was planning to go public with his personal knowledge of HHMI "front door" grants being diverted to "back door" black ops bioresearch. The next day, Trias and his wife were found dead in their Chevy Chase, Md. home. Chevy Chase is where HHMI is headquartered. Police described the killings as a professional hit. Tsunao Saitoh, who formerly worked at an HHMI-funded lab at Columbia University, was shot to death on May 7, 1996 while sitting in his car outside his home in La Jolla, Calif. Police also described this as a professional hit.
BEYOND THE BIZARRE
Early-October saw reports that British scientists were planning to exhume the bodies of 10 London victims of the 1918 type-A flu epidemic known as the Spanish Flu. An October 7 report In The Independent, UK said that victims of the Spanish Flu had been victims of "the world's most deadly virus." British scientists, according to the story, hope to uncover the genetic makeup of the virus, making it easier to combat.
Professor John Oxford of London's Queen Mary's School of Medicine, the British government's flu adviser, acknowledges that the exhumations and subsequent studies will have to be done with extreme caution so the virus is not unleashed to cause another epidemic. The uncovering of a pathogen's genetic structure is the exact work Pasechnik was doing at Regma. Pasechnik died six weeks after the planned exhumations were announced. The need to exhume the bodies assumes no Type-A flu virus sample exists in any lab anywhere in the world.
A piece on MSNBC that aired September 6 makes the British exhumation plans seem odd. The story refers to an article that was to be published the following day in the weekly magazine Science, reporting the 1918 flu virus had recently been RNA sequenced. Researchers had traced down and obtained virus samples from archived lung tissue of WWI soldiers, and from an Inuit woman who had been buried in the Alaskan permafrost.
HELP WANTED, SPIES, AND A LINK TO PROMIS
Almost immediately at the outset of the anthrax scare, the Bush administration contracted with Bayer Pharmaceuticals for millions of doses of Cipro, an antibiotic to treat anthrax. This was done despite many in the medical community stating that there were several cheaper, better alternatives to Cipro, which has never been shown to be effective against inhaled anthrax. The Center for Disease Control's (CDC) own website states a preference for the antibiotic doxycycline over Cipro for inhalation anthrax. CDC expresses concerns that widespread Cipro use could cause other bacteria to become immune to antibiotics.
It was announced Jan. 21 that the director of the CDC, Jeffrey Koplan, is resigning effective March 31. Six days earlier it was announced that Surgeon General David Satcher is also resigning. And there is currently no director for the National Institutes of Health -- NIH is being run by an acting director. The recent resignations leave the three most significant medical positions in the federal government simultaneously vacant.
After three months of conflicting reports it is now official that the anthrax that has killed several Americans since October 5 is from US military sources connected to CIA research. The FBI has stated that only 10 people could have had access, yet at the same time they are reporting astounding security breaches at the biowarfare facility at Fort Detrick, Md. -- breaches such as unauthorized nighttime experiments and lab specimens gone missing.
The militarized anthrax used by the US was developed by William C. Patrick III, who holds five classified patents on the process. He has worked at both Fort Detrick, and the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah. Patrick is now a private biowarfare consultant to the military and CIA. Patrick developed the process by which anthrax spores could be concentrated at the level of one trillion spores per gram. No other country has been able to get concentrations above 500 billion per gram. The anthrax that was sent around the eastern US last fall was concentrated at one trillion spores per gram, according to a Jan. 31 report by Barbara Hatch Rosenberg of the Federation of American Scientists.
In recent years Patrick has worked with Kanatjan Alibekov. Now known by the Americanized "Ken Alibek", he defected to the US in 1992. Before defecting, Alibek was the no. 2 man in the FSU's biowarfare program. His boss was Vladimir Pasechnik.
Currently, Ken Alibek is President of Hadron Advanced Biosystems, a subsidiary of Alexandria, Va.-based Hadron, Inc. Hadron describes itself as a company specializing in the development of technical solutions for the intelligence community. As chief scientist at Hadron, Alibek gave extensive testimony to the House Armed Services Committee about biological weapons on Oct. 20, 1999, and again on May 23, 2000. Hadron announced on Dec. 20 that as of that date, the company had received $12 million in funding for medical biodefense research from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, and the NIH. Hadron said it was working in the field of non-specific immunity.
In the 1980s Hadron was founded and headed by Dr. Earl Brian, a medical doctor and crony of Ronald Reagan and an associate of former Attorney General Edwin Meese. Brian was convicted in the 1980s on fraud charges. Both Hadron and Brian have been closely associated in court documents and numerous credible reports, confirmed since Sept. 11, with the theft of enhanced PROMIS software from its owner, the INSLAW Corporation. PROMIS is a highly sophisticated computer program capable of integrating a wide variety of databases. The software has reportedly been mated in recent years with artificial intelligence. PROMIS has long been known to have been modified by intelligence agencies with a back door that allows for surreptitious retrieval of stored data. [For more information on what PROMIS can do and its history, please use the search engine at www.copvcia.com.]
Given this unique capability, and Hadron s prior connections to PROMIS, it is a possibility that the software, by tapping into databases used by each of the victims, could have identified any lines of research that threatened to compromise a larger, and as yet unidentified, more sinister covert operation.
A PATTERN?
The DNA sequencing work by several of the microbiologists discussed earlier is aimed at developing drugs that will fight pathogens based on the pathogen's genetic profile. The work is also aimed at eventually developing drugs that will work in cooperation with a person's genetic makeup. Theoretically, a drug could be developed for one specific person. That being the case, it's obvious that one could go down the ladder, and a drug could be developed to effectively treat a much broader class of people sharing a genetic marker. The entire process can also be turned around to develop a pathogen that will affect a broad class of people sharing a genetic marker. A broad class of people sharing a genetic marker could be a group such as a race, or people with brown eyes.
SMALLPOX
An Oct. 17 story in USA Today reported that the US government wanted to order 300 million doses of smallpox vaccine. Apparently, that wish has been granted. On Nov. 28 a British vaccine maker, Acambis, announced that it had received a $428 million contract to provide 155 million doses of smallpox vaccine to the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). This was Acambis' second contract. The company is already in the process of producing 54 million doses. The US government has 15.4 million doses stockpiled, and HHS plans to dilute them five to one. The two contracts and the dilution program will bring the total HHS stockpile to 286 million doses.
Smallpox was officially declared eradicated by the World Health Organization in 1977, after treating the last known case in Merca, Somalia.
MEHPA -- MEDICAL FASCISM
A meeting of the Center for Law and the Public Health (CLPH) was convened on Oct. 5. This group is run jointly by Georgetown University Law School and Johns Hopkins Medical School, and was founded under the auspices of the Center for Disease Control (CDC). CLPH was formed one month prior to the 2000 Presidential election. The purpose of the October meeting was to draft legislation to respond to the then current bioterrorism threat.
After working only 18 days, on Nov. 23 CLPH released a 40-page document called the Model Emergency Health Powers Act (MEHPA). This was a "model" law that HHS is suggesting be enacted by the 50 states to handle future public health emergencies such as bioterrorism. A revised version was released on Dec. 21 containing more specific definitions of "public health emergency" as it pertains to bioterrorism and biologic agents, and includes language for those states that want to use the act for chemical, nuclear or natural disasters.
According to the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), after declaring a "public health emergency", and without consulting with public health authorities, law enforcement, the legislature or courts, a state governor using MEHPA, or anyone he/she decides to empower, can among many things:
· Require any individual to be vaccinated. Refusal constitutes a crime and will result in quarantine. · Require any individual to undergo specific medical treatment. Refusal constitutes a crime and will result in quarantine. · Seize any property, including real estate, food, medicine, fuel or clothing, an official thinks necessary to handle the emergency. · Seize and destroy any property alleged to be hazardous. There will be no compensation or recourse. · Draft you or your business into state service. · Impose rationing, price controls, quotas and transportation controls. · Suspend any state law, regulation or rule that is thought to interfere with handling the declared emergency.
When the federal government wanted the states to enact the 55 mph speed limit, they coerced the states using the threat of withholding federal monies. The same tactic will likely be used with MEHPA. As of this writing the law has been passed in Kentucky. According to AAPS, it has been introduced in the legislatures of Arizona, California, Delaware, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Michigan, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania and Tennessee. It is expected to be introduced shortly in Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, and Wisconsin. MEHPA is being evaluated by the executive branches in North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia and Washington, DC.
The research the microbiologists were doing could have developed methods of treating diseases like anthrax and smallpox without conventional antibiotics or vaccines. Pharmaceutical contracts to deal with these diseases will total hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars. If epidemics could be treated in non-traditional ways, MEHPA might not be necessary. Considering the government's actions nullifying many civil liberties since last September, MEHPA seems to be a law looking for an excuse to be enacted. Maybe the microbiologists were in the way of some peoples' or business' agendas.
We also know that DNA sequencing research can be used to develop pathogens that target specific genetically related groups. One company, DynCorp, handles data processing for many federal agencies, including the CDC, the Department of Agriculture, several branches of the Department of Justice, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the NIH. On Nov. 12 DynCorp announced that its subsidiary, DynPort Vaccine, had been awarded a $322 million contract to develop, produce, test, and store FDA licensed vaccines for use by the Defense Department. It would be incredibly easy for DynCorp to hide information pertaining to the exact make-up, safety, efficacy and purpose of the drugs and vaccines the US government has contracted for.
Reasons to suspect DynCorp of criminal behavior are not hard to find. Investigative reporter Kelly O Meara of Insight Magazine, in a story dated February 4, disclosed a massive US military investigation of how DynCorp employees in Bosnia had engaged in a widespread sex slave ring, trading children as young as eight and videotaping forced sexual encounters. She reviewed government documents and interviewed Army investigators looking into the activities which had spread throughout DynCorp's contract operations to service helicopters and warehouse supplies for the US military. Videos and other evidence of the crimes are in the Army s possession. And in a February 23rd story, veteran journalist Al Giordano of www.narconews.com reported that a class action suit had been filed in Washington, D.C. by more than 10,000 Ecuadorian farmers and a labor union against DynCorp for its rampant spraying of herbicides which have destroyed food crops, weakened the ecosystem and caused more than 1,100 documented cases of illness.
DynCorp's current Chairman, Paul Lombardi responded to the suit by sending intimidating letters in an unsuccessful attempt to force the plaintiffs to withdraw.
DynCorp has also been directly linked to the development and use of PROMIS software by its founder Bill Hamilton of Inslaw. DynCorp s former Chairman, current board member and the lead investor in Capricorn Holdings, is Herbert 'Pug' Winokur. Winokur was, until recently, Chairman of the Enron Finance Committee. He claimed ignorance as to the fraudulent financial activities of Enron s board even though he was charged with their oversight
(Rense.com)
More on Dr. Haider's identity and the death of Moscow associate.
3-4-2
TEMPE, AZ. - U.S. intelligence chiefs, led by CIA Director George Tenet, are to lobby President Bush to tell Israel to cancel its plan to appoint its current Mossad chief, Efraim Halevy, as its new envoy to Washington.
The chiefs will argue that Halevy has continued to wage an all-out operation to steal America's most secret intelligence.
They also believe he has continued to run a super-spook within the Bush Administration.
Known as "Mega," the spy first surfaced in February 1997.
"Two days after Valentine,s Day that year, the FBI was given an intercept by the National Security Agency (NSA) of a late night telephone conversation emanating from the Israeli embassy between a Mossad agent in the embassy and the service's then director-general, Danny Yatom," revealed Gordon Thomas, an internationally-recognized expert on intelligence matters and author of Seeds of Fire.
"The agent had asked for guidance as to whether he should go to 'Mega' for a copy of a letter written by Warren Christopher, then Secretary of State, to PLO Chairman Yassar Arafat," said Thomas. "The letter contained a set of assurances given to Arafat about the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the West Bank of Hebron. Yatom said this was something Mega could be used for."
The FBI launched a massive hunt to try and find Mega. The agency failed.
But Mega's shadow fell across the ill-starred relationship Monica Lewisnky had with President Bill Clinton.
In his impeachment report, public prosecutor Kenneth Starr noted that on March 29, 1997: "He (Clinton) told her (Lewinsky) that he suspected a foreign embassy was taping their conversations. The President told her that if anyone ever asked about their phone sex, she should say she knew that their calls were being monitored and they had put on the sex talk."
"Since then Mega disappeared into the Washington woodwork. But in the past year he has again been involved in passing on information to Israel. CIA and FBI sources had both told me that certain information that has come into the hands of Israel could only have been done by a person as high-level as they believe Mega to be," said Thomas.
Mega's identity is shared only by the incumbent director-general of Mossad.
Seeds of Fire published over 100 pages of documents - many of which show the full extent of Israeli intelligence operations in the U.S.
Some of the more damaging have taken place while Efraim Halevy has been running Mossad.
Thomas reveals that prior to 9/11 there were no fewer than seven Mossad units - comprised of some 30 agents - working to obtain data from Silicon Valley and other key areas, including Los Alamos.
Seeds of Fire contained the first detailed revelations of how Mossad penetrated the nuclear facility - and how the top-secret material was later passed on to China.
Thomas also shows how Halevy, an urbane 67-year-old, persuaded Beijing to allow Mossad to have first-look at the U.S. spy pane downed in the South China Sea last year.
It is these revelations that have sent U.S. intelligence chiefs to oppose Halevy's appointment as Israeli ambassador once the present incumbent, David Ivry retires in April.
They are believed to favor the appointment of Israel,s Deputy Defence Minister, Dalia Rabin, the daughter of the late prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin.
Another candidate could be Dore Gold. Helped by Benyamin Natanyahu, the former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations believes he could be a compromise candidate.
"Anybody but Halevy," a senior Washington intelligence source told Thomas.
Monday March 4, 2002
Since John Ashcroft became US attorney general last year, workers at the department of justice have become accustomed to his daily prayer meetings, but some are now drawing the line at having to sing patriotic songs penned by their idiosyncratic boss.
Mr Ashcroft, a devout Christian and a grittily determined singer, went public with one of his works last month, when he surprised an audience at a North Carolina seminary with a rendition of Let the Eagle Soar, a tribute to America's virtues, which continues: "Like she's never soared before, from rocky coast to golden shore, let the mighty eagle soar," and so on for four minutes.
The performance (which can be seen and heard at cnn.com/video/us/2002/02/25/ashcroft.sings.wbtv.med.html) was accompanied only by taped music, but Mr Ashcroft's staff are complaining that printed versions of the song are being distributed at meetings so that they will be able to join in.
When asked why she opposed the workplace singalong, one of the department's lawyers said: "Have you heard the song? It really sucks."
A group of Hispanic justice department employees were recently summoned to see the attorney general, and went along hoping that their boss might be making a special effort to promote diversity in the department's higher ranks.
Instead, they were asked to provide a hasty Spanish lesson to give the secretary a few phrases to use on a foreign delegation the next day. The Hispanic staff were then handed printed copies of Let the Eagle Soar and asked for volunteers to translate it.
This is not the first time Mr Ashcroft's subordinates have realised that this attorney general is unlike ordinary politicians. Each time he has been sworn in to political office, he is anointed with cooking oil (in the manner of King David, as he points out in his memoirs Lessons from a Father to His Son).
When Mr Ashcroft was in the Senate, the duty was performed by his father, a senior minister in a church specialising in speaking in tongues, the Pentecostal Assemblies of God. When he became attorney general, Clarence Thomas, a supreme court justice, did the honours.
In January, a pair of 12ft statues in the atrium of a justice department building were covered by a blue curtain, on orders from Mr Ashcroft's office because the female figure Spirit of Justice was bare-breasted, and the body of her male partner, Majesty of Law, was not sufficiently covered by his toga.
The cover-up has provoked an anti-Ashcroft campaign by the singer and film star Cher, who has toured the media circuit denouncing his puritanism. She asked the Washington Post: "What are we going to do next? Put shorts on the statue of David, put an 1880s bathing suit on Venus Rising and a shirt on the Venus de Milo?"
Perhaps the most bizarre wrinkle in the Ashcroft enigma emerged in November when Andrew Tobias, the Democratic Party treasurer and a financial writer, published an article on his website accusing the attorney general of harbouring superstitions about tabby cats.
According to the Tobias article, advance teams for an Ashcroft visit to the US embassy in the Hague asked anxiously if there were tabby cats (or calico cats as they are known in the US) on the premises.
"Their boss, they explained, believes calico cats are signs of the devil," Mr Tobias reported.
When asked about the veracity of the report, the justice department said that it had made Mr Ashcroft laugh. There has been no further comment on the matter.
A Scottish politician says a female assistant has received a toxic package.
Police believe it was sent by extremist Scottish nationalists who also targeted Cherie Blair.
Liberal Democrat MSP Mike Rumbles says the package was sent to the home of the worker at his constituency office in Banchory, Aberdeenshire.
She did not open the package, which contained a bottle of supposed aromatherapy oil, and was not harmed.
Mr Rumbles said: "I am extremely angry at this quite despicable act, the police are onto it and I hope they get the perpetrators as quickly as possible."
The MSP said he had been tipped off about the package by a newspaper in Glasgow yesterday afternoon. He immediately came off the phone to warn the woman helper not to open the container, which she had received that morning.
"As soon as I got off the phone from the News of the World, I was straight on to the phone to the woman. Luckily, I managed to warn her before she opened the bottle, although she had opened the parcel it was contained in."
Sources have also confirmed a package sent to 10 Downing Street containing highly-corrosive caustic soda had been addressed to the Prime Minister's wife.
Scotland Yard said it had received a call from a man claiming to be from the Scottish National Liberation Army saying 16 packages had been sent. Only two have been received so far. Scotland Yard has described the substance as "cynically dangerous".
A Scotland Yard spokesman says police are warning anyone who receives a suspicious package through the post to ring 999 immediately: "We believe this is especially applicable to members of the political parties and their members of staff."
Story filed: 13:43 Saturday 2nd March 2002
-A day-by-day account of how Osama bin Laden eluded the world's most powerful military machine.
(CSMonitor)
"We saw Osama while standing here in front of our guesthouse at 9 p.m. on that Tuesday," says Babrak Khan, a Jalalabad resident who once worked as a guard at a nearby base for Islamic militants. Mr. Babrak says he's sure of the time, because he listened to part of the BBC Pashto language news broadcast that begins at 9:30 p.m. in Afghanistan.
As Babrak and three other city residents describe it, bin Laden rapidly exited the sixth or seventh car, a custom-designed white Toyota Corolla with an elongated, hatchback, in a convoy of several hundred cars. Bin Laden cradled a Kalakov machinegun, a shortened version of a Kalashnikov, as he barked orders to his man.
A little later, he stood beside a mosque under a tree, surrounded by about 60 armed guards, but quite visibly nervous. Maulvi Abdul Kabir, the Taliban governor of Jalalabad, was holding his hand, as is customary for Muslim men who are spiritually close.
While the hunt for Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants has become increasingly invisible, it continues nonetheless. The ongoing fighting in Paktia Province, as well as the deployment of US troops to nations as far-flung as Georgia, Yemen, and the Philippines ensures that US pressure will stay on Al Qaeda's many cells - and that eyes around the world will remain open for "the Sheikh" and the $25 million bounty the US has attached to his head.
And while the US has taken justifiable pride in its ousting of the Taliban and supporting Afghanistan's fledgling interim government, President Bush's aim of catching the world's most wanted terrorist "dead or alive" has not been accomplished.
"There appears to be a real disconnect between what the US military was engaged in trying to do during the battle for Tora Bora - which was to destroy Al Qaeda and the Taliban - and the earlier rhetoric of President Bush, which had focused on getting bin Laden," says Charles Heyman, editor of Jane's World Armies. "There are citizens all over the Middle East now saying that the US military couldn't do it - couldn't catch Osama - while ignoring the fact that the US military campaign, apart from not capturing Mr. bin Laden was, up the that point, staggeringly effective."
Which finger did he bite?
Police round up a suspected terrorist cell in Italy and prevent a possible chemical attack on the U.S. embassy in Rome. But will leaks to the press hurt the investigation?
3-2-2 (Nukebusters.org)
Terrorism isn't even necessary according to Dr. Gordon Thompson. NRC has discovered that spent fuel can self-ignite. This is applicable at Indiat Point and everywhere, not "just" in Vermont.
There are many ways to sabotage a spent fuel pool, he said, and thousands of people have the necessary skill and knowledge.
"All that's necessary to ignite this fuel is just to discharge the water," he said. "(The fuel rods) will self-ignite and burn ... it's thought that it would be something like a smoking charcoal grill."
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has also found that spent fuel could self-ignite and burn. According to Thompson's analysis, an area slightly smaller than that of the three surrounding states -- about 25,000 square miles -- would be rendered uninhabitable by such a fire.
"It is clear," he said, "that this would be a disaster of historic proportions."
Terrorist Threat Real Say Expert
By Meggan Clark
Brattleboro Reformer Staff
3-1-2
BRATTLEBORO - A fire in the spent fuel pool at Vermont Yankee nuclear power station could render an area nearly the size of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts uninhabitable, a Cambridge, Mass., nuclear expert told local residents Thursday night.
The terrifying potential consequences of a terrorist attack on the Vernon reactor were spelled out in detail by Gordon Thompson, an Oxford University-educated expert who has done work for government and non-government organizations around the world. Thompson is the executive director of the non-profit Institute for Resource and Security Studies. His talk was sponsored by the Unitarian Universalist Church and the Peace and Justice Committee.
A sober, intent audience of more than 60 questioned Thompson for longer than two hours, seeking to understand whether the spent fuel will ever be taken away, how the risks can be mitigated, and where more information could be found.
Leaflets in favor of the non-binding town meeting referendum to block the proposed sale and shut Yankee down as soon as possible were in every hand. But there was only one overtly political comment, from a man who said his version of "Take Vermont Forward" was "Take Vermont Three Words: Shut Yankee Down."
"If you shut the plant down," Thompson replied, "the danger of the spent fuel will remain." Although President Bush has recommended that Yucca Mountain, in Nevada, be the site of a permanent repository for all the nation's high-level radioactive waste, it faces a number of technical and legal challenges. The earliest anyone predicts it could begin accepting spent fuel is 2010; some believe it will never be completed. The alternative is to maintain radioactive used fuel indefinitely on-site at the nation's reactors.
Vermont Yankee's spent fuel pool is a concrete swimming pool-like structure next to the reactor vessel, about 50 feet above the ground. More than 2,500 spent fuel assemblies, weighing about 700 pounds each, are stored there, cooled by circulating water tinged a deep blue with boron. The pool has been re-racked to hold many more assemblies than was originally intended, and is due to run out of space in 2008.
Because the water blocks virtually all of the assemblies' radioactivity, a visitor to the plant can stand at the edge of the pool and look straight down into it without harm.
But the top of the reactor building, which stands between the pool and the sky, was described by Thompson as "simply a sheet metal roof." And, although the industry claims that reactors and spent fuel pools are encased in 10 feet or more of steel and concrete, Thompson called this "at best a half-truth." There are many ways to sabotage a spent fuel pool, he said, and thousands of people have the necessary skill and knowledge.
"All that's necessary to ignite this fuel is just to discharge the water," he said. "(The fuel rods) will self-ignite and burn ... it's thought that it would be something like a smoking charcoal grill." The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has also found that spent fuel could self-ignite and burn.
According to Thompson's analysis, an area slightly smaller than that of the three surrounding states -- about 25,000 square miles -- would be rendered uninhabitable by such a fire. Although residents would not know that their environment was contaminated by tiny particles of radioactive material, Thompson said, "they will stick to your roof, your driveway, your clothes if you're outside, your lawn. Some of them will stay there for a very long time, for decades."
"It is clear," he said, "that this would be a disaster of historic proportions."
Until now, federal nuclear regulators have not investigated the potential consequences of a terrorist attack on a commercial reactor. Nor have the nation's reactors been designed to withstand or defend against an attack by terrorists as sophisticated as those of Sept. 11, or an attack by a hostile nation.
On Wednesday, Vermont Yankee spokesman Rob Williams described the reactor as "extremely strong" but said, "I want to make clear that we do not have an analysis for large aircraft."
"The enemies of the state are the purview of the defense department," Williams said.
Thompson said the best thing to minimize the risk would be to remove the spent fuel rods to dry cask storage, in which rods are placed in air-cooled casks outside. This would remove the risk of water loss, but it wouldn't remove all risk; an NRC study indicates that, if detonated with TNT, fuel in casks could also be very destructive.
Asked what he would like to see happen to operating reactors in the future, Thompson said he'd like to see "the public ... presented with an accurate picture of the risk and the true costs of nuclear power plants. That is not the case now."
Nefertiti Rocks Mars?-Or is it Elizabeth Taylor?
LONDON, March 4 (Reuters) - Hit musical "Buddy" has closed after 13 years,
more than 5,000 performances and 15 Buddy Hollys, becoming the latest
casualty in London's West End.
Confetti, tears and champagne greeted the final curtain call on Sunday of
one of Theatreland's most popular musicals about the life and song of the
American rock-and-roll legend who changed the face of music and died young
in a plane crash.
"It's heartbreaking. I've been 255 times over eight years," Christine
Judge, 34, from Portsmouth said. "I don't know what I'm going to do now."
Diana Valcourt flew over from Springfield, Massachusetts.
"This is the best party I've been to in years," she told Reuters. "I don't
want to leave."
"Buddy" played to about 10 million people worldwide and grossed more than
100 million pounds in Britain alone, show originator Laurie Mansfield said.
But many London shows, including the grand triumvirate of "Cats,"
"Starlight Express" and "Buddy," felt the pinch after the tourist fall-off
following the September attacks in the U.S.
"It's great now," said one audience member looking at gyrating groups of
bobby-soxed "Buddy" fans bidding their final farewell. "But I came on a
Wednesday recently and there were only 20 or 30 people."
"There was a trough after September 11. It definitely dipped for a couple
of months," said Michael Izzard from Bedford, who watched the
record-breaking show eight times last year.
But in the balloon-strewn, champagne cork-popping final performance, fans
packed into London's Strand Theatre, whooped, waved and danced in the
aisles.
"RAVE ON"
"Oh, Boy," "Peggy Sue," "Rave On" - Holly lookalike Gus MacGregor belted
out the fifties hits to a thousands-strong audience who lindy-hopped their
way their way around the theatre, skirts twirling and pigtails flapping.
"We're virgins. We've only been 15 times," said Bryan Smith, 48, who came
with his brother-in-law. Both sported Holly's signature thick, black-rimmed
glasses.
"I've been around 60 times," said Ainge Hargke who flew over specially from
Frankfurt. "I've made so many friends here."
"The fans are amazing. I'm more worried about them than I am about me,"
said MacGregor, who read out a fax from Holly's widow, Maria Elena thanking
the cast and fans for keeping Holly's "spirit alive."
Director, Rob Bettinson told Reuters: "I'm so sad. It's like watching your
life go by...The biggest feel-good show in the West End is moving out and
there's nothing to take its place."
And while confetti swirled from the ceiling and the cast took its final
bow, Claire Williams and Caroline Oliver, both 21, from Essex hugged each
other and sobbed. They went to their first "Buddy" when they were six --
and have watched more than 70 since.
"It's turned us into nice girls," Williams said. "Normal teenagers hung
round the streets, but not us, we were always into Buddy Holly."
3-1-02
Rev. Billy Graham openly voiced a belief that Jews control the American media, calling it a "stranglehold" during a 1972 conversation with President Richard Nixon, according to a tape of the Oval Office meeting released Thursday by the National Archives.
"This stranglehold has got to be broken or the country's going down the drain," the nation's best-known preacher declared as he agreed with a stream of bigoted Nixon comments about Jews and their perceived influence in American life.
"You believe that?" Nixon says after the "stranglehold" comment.
"Yes, sir," Graham says.
"Oh, boy," replies Nixon. "So do I. I can't ever say that but I believe it."
"No, but if you get elected a second time, then we might be able to do something," Graham replies.
Later, Graham mentions that he has friends in the media who are Jewish, saying they "swarm around me and are friendly to me." But, he confides to Nixon, "They don't know how I really feel about what they're doing to this country."
The newly released tapes cover the first six months of 1972, with the Vietnam War and the upcoming presidential campaign the backdrops for many conversations. The tapes touch subjects as varied as using a nuclear bomb on North Vietnam--a notion quickly derided by adviser Henry Kissinger--and settling a West Coast dock strike.
They also include all of the famous "smoking gun" conversation about the Watergate break-in, known for its damaging disclosures about a cover-up and its 181/2-minute gap.
The Nixon-Graham remarks came during a 90-minute session after a prayer breakfast the men attended on Feb. 1, 1972.
Scholars Surprised
"I find this rather stunning," said William Martin, a professor of religion and sociology at Rice University in Houston and author of "A Prophet With Honor: The Billy Graham Story."
"This is out of character with anything else I have heard Billy Graham say or be quoted as saying. It is disappointing," Martin said.
"What Graham said that day is inexcusable. Did it ever occur to him that he should have countered the president?" said Martin Marty, a religious historian at the University of Chicago who noted the distinction some conservative evangelicals and Pentecostals have made between supporting Israel but not American Jews.
"One really did not associate him with this," said Michael Kotzin, a vice president at the Jewish United Fund in Chicago. "Rather than try to direct Nixon in a different direction, he reinforces him and eggs him on when it came to these stereotypes, and that's troubling."
Graham, 83, is not in good health and indicated, through spokesman Larry Ross, that he could not respond because he did not recall the conversation.
Thursday's release of 426 hours brings to about 2,600, out of a total of 3,700, the hours of recordings either publicly disclosed or returned to the Nixon family because they were deemed strictly personal. Many recordings, including the Graham tape, are edited to exclude content believed to disclose national security information, constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of privacy or reveal trade secrets, among other matters.
Previous tapes have underscored the complexity of Nixon, including his insecurity and occasional nastiness. Apologists tend to cite his fits of bigotry as ancillary to his policy achievements, with the Nixon estate claiming that his harshness was often a display of faux machismo in the presence of H.R. Haldeman or his other top aide, John Erlichman.
While other prominent figures, such as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, then a Nixon aide, can also be heard on tapes during mean-spirited discourses by Nixon, many assumed a more passive role. Graham is unusual for being a distinguished outsider actively taking part.
Longtime Friendship
Graham and Nixon had become close friends during the Eisenhower administration, when Nixon was vice president. The friendship remained strong until Nixon was brought down by the Watergate scandal and resigned the presidency in August 1974.
Haldeman's diaries noted the conversation. He wrote that there was discussion "of the terrible problem arising from the total Jewish domination of the media, and agreement that this was something that would have to be dealt with."
He continues, "Graham has the strong feeling that the Bible says there are satanic Jews and there's where our problem arises." No such comments about the Bible are found on the tape released Thursday but, because it contains several long deletions, it's believed such remarks were excised.
The lengthy chat opens with Graham praising Nixon's prayer breakfast remarks. "There were a lot of people in tears when you finished this morning and it's very moving. That's the best I've heard you at one of those breakfast things."
After offering Nixon tips on preparing himself for big speeches, as well as strategy for his re-election campaign, Graham notes that he has been invited to lunch with editors of Time magazine. "I was quite amazed since this is the first time I've heard from Time since [Time founder] Henry Luce died."
"You meet with all their editors, you better take your Jewish beanie," Haldeman says.
Graham laughs. "Is that right? I don't know any of them now."
Hollywood and the Media
Nixon then broaches a subject about which "we can't talk about it publicly," namely Jewish influence in Hollywood and the media. He cites Paul Keyes, a political conservative who is executive producer of the NBC hit, "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In," as telling him that "11 of the 12 writers are Jewish."
"That right?" says Graham, prompting Nixon to claim that Life magazine, Newsweek, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and others, are "totally dominated by the Jews." He calls network TV anchors Howard K. Smith, David Brinkley and Walter Cronkite "front men who may not be of that persuasion," but that their writers are "95 percent Jewish."
Nixon demurs that this does not mean "that all the Jews are bad" but that most are left-wing radicals who want "peace at any price except where support for Israel is concerned. The best Jews are actually the Israeli Jews."
"That's right," agrees Graham, who later concurs with a Nixon assertion that a "powerful bloc" of Jews confronts Nixon in the media. "And they're the ones putting out the pornographic stuff," Graham adds. Nixon contends that "every Democratic candidate will owe his election to Jewish people," but he won't. Haldeman turns the subject to the White House press corps and the Gridiron Club, a bastion of the media establishment, both of which they say were mostly WASP once, but no more.
"It was the Merriman Smiths, the Dick Wilsons, the [James] Kilpatricks, all that kind of people. But you look at what covers the president today and it's really kind of scary," Haldeman says. Haldeman and Nixon cite by name reporters from the Los Angeles Times (David Kraslow), New York Times (Max Frankel), Washington Post (Stanley Karnow) and NBC (Herb Kaplow) but stumble on CBS.
"From CBS, Rather, Dan Rather, is Rather?" says Haldeman. A deletion then follows with the next voice heard being that of Graham, who alludes to A.M. Rosenthal, managing editor of The New York Times.
"But I have to lean a little bit, you know. I go and see friend of Mr. Rosenthal at The New York Times, and people of that sort. And all, I don't mean all the Jews, but a lot of the Jews are great friends of mine. They swarm around me and are friendly to me. Because they know I am friendly to Israel and so forth. They don't know how I really feel about what they're doing to this country."
Nixon says, "You must not let them know."
The conversation turns to religious magazines, postal rates and Nixon's uncharitable thoughts on certain Cabinet members. Graham then leaves and, a few minutes later, Nixon tells Haldeman, "You know it was good we got this point about the Jews across."
"It's a shocking point," says Haldeman, a frequent cheerleader during Nixon's diatribes.
"Well," says Nixon, "it's also, the Jews are irreligious, atheistic, immoral bunch of bastards."
How stoned did you have to be to find Rowan and Martin funny? They must have been loaded in the 60's.
A new biography tells the bizarre tale of the Jewish psychic who met with the future Führer for private sessions and predicted his rise.
Feb. 27, 2002 | In the weeks leading up to Adolf Hitler's appointment as Reichschancellor on Jan. 30, 1933, there was nothing inevitable about the Austrian corporal's ascension to power. Results of the 1932 November Reichstag elections were disappointing for his National Socialist Party, with the Nazis suffering losses in the German parliament while retaining about a third of the seats there.
Nazi coffers had been drained dry by the campaign. Hitler had endured significant defections from his movement and threatened suicide. Some Nazis began to wonder if he had the right stuff to be their Führer.
It was at this point that Hitler, falling back on his belief in the occult, called the most renowned clairvoyant in the land to his headquarters at the Hotel Kaiserdorf in Berlin for a private session. The man Hitler met with that day is the subject of a recent biography (the first in the English language), "Erik Jan Hanussen: Hitler's Jewish Clairvoyant," by Mel Gordon.
Hanussen, 43 at the time of the Hotel Kaiserdorf session, was a man whose name was synonymous with psychic phenomena in Central Europe. The Vienna-born con man/celebrity seer was known for predicting the future, casting prescient horoscopes and astounding audiences with his feats of hypnotism and mind reading. In Berlin, Hanussen was a rock star before there were rock stars, with a vast business enterprise trading on the voracious German hunger for all things paranormal.
Hitler became a Hanussenite when in March of 1932 the psychic's own weekly newspaper, Erik Jan Hanussen's Berliner Wochenschau, printed the startling prophecy that within one year's time the future Führer would become Reichschancellor. Most Berliners scoffed. For many, Hitler was a megalomaniacal clown.
But if the average Berliner thought Hanussen's prognostication absurd, Hitler certainly didn't. When Hanussen came to him that cold day in January, the Nazi leader was filled with dread anticipation, and kept the meeting secret should the results be negative. Hanussen placed Hitler on a seat in the middle of the room, examined his hands, counted the bumps on his head and sank into a mystical trance. The words he spoke filled the Führer with elation, says Gordon.
"I see victory for you," Hanussen said. "It cannot be stopped."
By the end of the month, Hitler had cut a deal with his enemies and become titular head of a coalition government. Hanussen's vision had given him hope in his hour of uncertainty. One can only wonder the intensity of his rage, if the raving anti-Semite had known at the time that the man he had adopted as his personal soothsayer, the chap nicknamed "the Prophet of the Third Reich," the decadent mystic who had just run his hands through his Aryan locks, was in fact ... a Jew. According to Gordon, a professor of theater arts at the University of California at Berkeley and author of such colorful tomes as "The Grand Guignol: The Theater of Horror and Terror," and "Voluptuous Panic: the Erotic World of Weimar Berlin," Hanussen started life as Hermann Steinschneider, with a birth certificate that read "Hebrew male." An unlikely beginning for one destined to become Hitler's favorite fortuneteller.
Gordon's complicated, fascinating tale is one familiar to many Germans, but completely unknown to Americans, save for some devotees of magic who regard Hanussen's name, acquired while his career was in its infancy, with a reverence second only to that of Harry Houdini's. Despite the 1988 film "Hanussen" by Hungarian director Istvan Szabo (starring Klaus Maria Brandauer in the strangely Aryanized title role), and a number of articles written in English by German émigrés in the 1930s and '40s, Americans have had almost no exposure to this bizarre tale of a Jew who played the part of psychic advisor to Hitler. No wonder the uninitiated roll their eyes when Gordon starts to talk about it.
"It's like saying, 'Hitler's favorite rabbi,' people are waiting for the punch line," confesses Gordon. "But it's not a joke. Hitler and Hanussen did meet about a dozen times between 1932 and 1933. Of course, if Hitler had known that Hanussen was Jewish, he would have disposed of him as fast as he could have. But it's not so much later that he was disposed of. After the Reichstag fire, everything changed."
The burning of the Reichstag on Feb. 27, 1933, for which German communists took the fall, paved the way for the consolidation of power in Hitler's hands and the suspension of all civil liberties. Eerily, the day before, Hanussen had predicted the event through a medium during the opening soiree of his newly minted pagan temple, the Palace of the Occult, a marble and gold-decked Taj Mahal of the black arts in Berlin decorated with astrological signs and religious statues. There, in the presence of Nazi officials and assorted VIPs, the seer claimed to see a "great house" in flames during a séance in his sanctum sanctorum, the Room of Glass. Hours later, the Reichstag was engulfed in a mysterious conflagration. "The Reichstag fire is such a big story -- the first mystery of WWII. It's still not resolved to this day," says Gordon, "sort of like a European Kennedy assassination question. Did Goebbels somehow have a communist patsy, Marinus van der Lubbe, ignite the Reichstag? Did the communists do it, or is there some other story? Something that started leaking out from the Nazi side from the very beginning was that Hanussen was responsible for it or had something to do with it."
Despite his Semitic origins, Hanussen had extremely close ties to the Nazi party, especially since his fateful augury that Hitler would somehow become Reichschancellor. He had lent hundreds of thousands of marks to high-ranking leaders of the Nazis, like Hermann Goering, and held IOUs from them. He had befriended Count Wolf Heinrich von Helldorf, the sadistic, depraved commander of Berlin's SA, and referred to Hitler as "my pal Adolf." Certainly, Hanussen could have had inside information of a Reichstag plot. Or perhaps he was even more directly involved.
Gordon relates that some conspiracy theorists believe Hanussen may have hypnotized the fall guy van der Lubbe to do his bidding, either with or without the help of Nazi conspirators. As far-fetched as the possibility sounds, one suddenly sees how the presence of Hanussen in this story becomes an uncomfortable dilemma for historians. To dwell too much on Hanussen's involvement smacks of indirectly tainting the primary victims of the Holocaust with assisting in Hitler's takeover of Germany and, subsequently, their own destruction.
Perhaps this was the reason Istvan Szabo's cinematic treatment of the Hanussen tale conveniently omits Hanussen's Jewishness. And it could account for the dearth of information on Hanussen in English-language texts. However, Gordon, who is himself Jewish, asserts his belief that Hanussen somehow participated in a plot to set fire to the Reichstag.
"My personal feeling is that all the evidence points to the fact that at the very least Hanussen was involved or he couldn't have known about it. Unless you believe in clairvoyance, which I don't. The other story is why he was killed. That is, he had to be eliminated because he knew too much," says Gordon.
There were other reasons why the Nazis wanted Hanussen dead. Goebbels and Goering both saw him as an interloper and a potential rival for the Führer's attentions, and there was the little matter of all those IOUs Hanussen had collected. Hanussen also, supposedly, had film footage of SA members involved in homosexual orgies. But perhaps more than anything, it was his Jewishness that made him a liability. The communist press had long published reports that Hanussen was Jewish, but it wasn't until the Reichstag fire bequeathed totalitarian powers to the Nazis and allowed them to eliminate the communists as a threat that they had the time to focus on Hanussen's bloodline.
Hanussen's time was up, and he knew it. In a missive written in invisible ink, he informed a colleague, "I always thought that business about the Jews was just an election trick of theirs. It wasn't." On the morning of March 25, 1933, Hanussen was arrested by the SA and summarily executed. His lifeless body was left in a field on the outskirts of Berlin.
So ended Europe's greatest oracle since Nostradamus. But questions endure. For instance, why would any Jew, even an assimilated Jew, collaborate with a pack of power-mad racists filled with hatred for his people? Moreover, is there some possibility that Hanussen possessed a sixth sense that allowed him to correctly predict Hitler's rise and the Reichstag blaze while blinding him to the inevitable consequences of his own dalliance with the fascists?
"One fellow Jewish clairvoyant Fred Marion asked Hanussen if he was afraid that if the Nazis came to power they would kill him if they found out he was a Jew," says Gordon. "Hanussen told him it was a problem, but that he wanted to convince Hitler that there are good Jews like us who aren't communists or capitalists. A vain thought, but he believed Hitler just needed his friendship to learn that there were good people everywhere."
As for Hanussen's purported extrasensory perception, Gordon ascribes Hanussen's psychic home runs to an amazing perspicacity on the part of "the Prophet of the Third Reich," which evidently failed him when it came to foreseeing his own demise. For Gordon, Hanussen also represents the mania for the occult that swept Germany at this time, as well as the dilemma of assimilated Jews when faced with the virulent anti-Semitism of Nazism.
"It's such a bizarre story that people wonder why they haven't heard of it before. They think it's either a Hitler diaries forgery or some great exaggeration of some tiny little thing of no consequence," says Gordon. "That's why I include so many pictures and inserts from Hanussen publications in the book. In Germany certainly, it's not a lost story, there's all kinds of stuff all the time on it. But in America, the typical person who watches the History Channel is unaware of it. That's why I wrote the book."
Summary: Drought has engulfed nearly a third of the United States, threatening to confront some places this summer with what experts say could be their worst water shortages in years.
25-Feb-2002
If current trends continue for the Northeast through Thursday, then the meteorological winter of 2001-02 will be the region's warmest on record, with an average temperature above freezing for the first time in 107 years of official record-keeping, say Cornell University climatologists. (Winter is defined meteorologically as Dec. 1 through Feb. 28 or Feb. 29.)
The Northeast's previous warmest winter was recorded 70 years ago with an average 32 degrees Fahrenheit between Dec. 1, 1931, and Feb. 29, 1932. The region's second-warmest winter, in 1997-98, had an average of 30.8 degrees.
"If you look at a climate map of the entire region, you'll see that more than half of the Northeast is having its warmest winter ever. Most of the rest of the region is having its second- or third-warmest winter. That's why I think this winter will go down as the warmest on record for the entire Northeast," says Keith Eggleston, senior climatologist at the Northeast Regional Climate Center (NRCC) at Cornell.
Eggleston says that while temperatures have been warmer than normal, this is not necessarily part of a larger, global-warming trend. Similar warm winters also occurred in the Northeast in the 1930s.
"The jet stream has been farther to the north than normal. Usually it is a little farther to the south," says Eggleston. "This pattern has been fairly consistent all winter long. The jet stream has been surprisingly stable, surprisingly consistent. So we're not getting the Canadian air or the severe cold outbreaks that we would normally see."
Here are the Northeast's warm spots: Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts, northern New Hampshire, southern Maine, most of New Jersey, eastern New York, eastern Pennsylvania, southwestern Pennsylvania, the panhandle of West Virginia, northern Maryland and the northern tip of Delaware.
Boston's record high average temperature of 36.7 degrees, set in 1931-32, is on the verge of being broken, says Eggleston. Using new proprietary software that evaluates historical climate data, the NRCC has projected the city's meteorological winter average temperature at 37 degrees.
Even a traditionally cool spot like Caribou, Maine, currently is averaging 18.3 degrees, making this the community's warmest winter on record. The NRCC projects that the average temperature for the winter, which includes the days remaining in February, will be 18.1 degrees, meaning that Caribou's old record of 17.7 degrees, set in 1959-60, will be broken. - By Blaine P. Friedlander, Jr.
The heightened solar flare activity must be part of it surely. Plus lingering WTC dust preventing formation of water droplets? The collective anxiety of a hundred millions minds healing not seen since the Great Depression?? A Geological hotspot?
December 13, 2001
Tectonic stresses immediately before an earthquake may create electrical effects that could be used to give early warning, a NASA scientist claimed yesterday
Speaking at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union yesterday, a scientist from NASA’s Ames Research Center says that signals from deep within the Earth could be used to give days’ warning of large earthquakes. "The challenge is to learn how to read and to decipher the signals" said Friedemann Freund. "The best way is to try to better understand the physics of the processes that underlie these signals. A step forward was the discovery of dormant electric charges in rocks in the Earth's crust."
"If the stress level is high, electronic charges appear that momentarily turn the insulating rock into a semiconductor" Freund said. "These charges are not easy to pin down. They move with impressive speed, as fast as 300 meters per second" he said. Freund has measured the semiconducting properties of rocks under stress. "Normally, these charges are dormant" he said. "But when rocks are squeezed, the charges wake up and flow out of the rock volume in which they were generated."
The flow of such a current geenrates a magnetic field, and as the current varies, electromagnetic radiation is also emitted. "The frequency of these electromagnetic waves will probably be very low, much lower than radio waves, but basically of the same nature" said Freund. "Scientists can pick them at the Earth's surface with suitable antennae or by measuring the magnetic-field pulses that go with them."
"What happens when the charges reach the Earth's surface? They will change 'the ground'" said Freund. "They should cause the Earth's surface to become positively charged over a region that may measure tens or even hundreds of kilometres. The Earth's ionosphere is bound to react" he said.
The ionosphere, lying above the atmosphere at about 90km, extends to about 300km into space. "When the surface of the Earth becomes positively charged, the charged plasma in the ionosphere must respond" said Dimitar Ouzounov, a scientist from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., who is working with Freund. The ionospheric plasma is very thin air containing many free electrons and positive ions. In the lowest layers of the ionosphere, where radio waves are reflected, the plasma is positively charged.
When the Earth's surface becomes positively charged, the plasma is pushed aside, and energetic electrons from the upper layers can penetrate more deeply into the lower ionosphere. This affects radio transmission, especially short-wave radio. This effect was noticed before the huge 1961 Chilean earthquake and the Good Friday earthquake in Alaska (1964).
"These ionospheric changes can also be studied from satellites. Russia, France and Japan are close to launching satellites dedicated to investigating these phenomena" Freund said. "But what has been lacking in the past was a physical explanation of how electric charges can be created in the Earth's crust. These are charges that move around, emit all kinds of signals, and can even reach the Earth's surface. There they give rise locally to very high electric fields, and change 'the ground' charge."
"When the rocks in the Earth's crust crackle and buckle under the onslaught of tectonic forces..." [as shown (left) at the Landers Fault, California (picture, John Simmons)] "...the charges that are dormant in them are set free. They give rise to a dazzling array of phenomena, long known to mankind and even part of folklore in earthquake-prone regions around the globe" said Freund. "These phenomena range from anomalous electric and magnetic signals, to 'earthquake lights' that illuminate the mountain tops and strange animal behaviour as well as ionospheric effects that impact how radio waves travel over long distances."
"It is both surprising and comforting that many seemingly disjointed or even inexplicable phenomena that point to impending earthquake activity seem to have just one cause - the awaking and spreading of normally dormant charges in the rocks deep in the Earth" he said.
"It is much too early and, in fact, unwise to expect that earthquakes would soon become predictable beyond the statistical probability that is currently the state-of-the-art" Freund said. "But one day, we'll learn to read the signals that the restless Earth emits before the rocks rupture with deadly force."
Ahh, but does "superheating" the ionosphere have the opposite effect? See HAARP project.
From a rural location in Alaska, controlled by "Big Oil", the US government is blasting billions of watts of high frequency microwave energy at our protective ionospheric shell which surrounds the earth. Their offical reason is "to see what it does". Several acres of Alaskan land have been dedicated to the construction of the HAARP array (you can actually find a picture of it online...)but it's real purpose runs from the practical (earth tomography (X-ray the earth to look for enemy submarines and secret underground bases)) through the hard to believe (transmission of electrical power without wires (Tesla's idea) through the insane (the complete disruption of global communications and mucking with weather patterns by shifting the jet stream).
This book is so well documented, often citing documents published by the US government itself, that it is absolutely convincing and frightening.
Anomalous Images of the Sun
We here at the Harbinger's Skywatch don't know what to make of these images of the Sun taken from SOHO/LASCO. We're hoping anyone out there who does will contact us so we can inform our readers just what the hell is going on. We've never seen anything like this.
What's Going on in our Skies?
Radar Rings, HAARP, Fireballs
UFO's, Earthquakes,
Lunar and Solar Anomalies
By Rusty and Deuce
Is there a connection our government isn't telling us about?
Recently, we here at the Harbinger have been monitoring anomalous "rings" or circles that have appeared on the various images that are posted frequently by the various websites around the internet that monitor the weather. As to what they are specifically, we can't be 100% sure yet.
But...
We have noticed that these images are right over military installations.
We have noticed that near the areas that these "rings" appear people have reported seeing strange lights, fireballs streaking across the sky, or UFO's.
We have also been monitoring data on the Earth's magnetic field and have noticed variations at the same time these anomalous "rings" appear on radar and satellite images. Is HAARP up to something?
We have also been monitoring increased earthquake activity in these areas.
We are also noticing strange things going on with the Sun and Moon.
Is all this just sheer coincidence? Perhaps. Take a look for yourself and draw your own conclusions. You just might think otherwise.
Forecaster Predicts Very Active Season
(The Associated Press)
DENVER - This year's Atlantic hurricane season will be more active than usual, one of the nation's leading hurricane forecasters predicts.
In their first forecast for the 2002 season, Colorado State University professor William Gray and his associates said they expect 13 named storms between June 1 and Nov. 30. They predicted that eight will become hurricanes and four will evolve into major or intense hurricanes.
''This upcoming hurricane season appears to have the potential for continued above-average hurricane activity,'' Gray said. ''We foresee an increased level of hurricanes forming in the deep tropics in 2002 and hurricane activity coming earlier than it did this year.''
The forecast is for the Atlantic Basin, which includes the North Atlantic, Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico.
The average numbers of storms between 1950 and 1990 was 9.3 named storms, 5.8 hurricanes and 2.2 major hurricanes per year.
Hurricane activity has been on the rise since the 1995 season, Gray said. The years 1995 through 2001 represent the most active seven-season period on record, with 93 named storms, 57 hurricanes and 27 major hurricanes.
Gray said just three of those 27 major hurricanes crossed the U.S. coastline. Typically, one in three major hurricanes crosses to land, but the Atlantic Basin has seen 19 consecutive hurricanes since 1999 that did not reach the coast.
''We've been extremely lucky,'' Gray said. ''But climatology will eventually right itself and we must expect a great increase in landfalling hurricanes in coming years.''
He said destruction from hurricanes could be greater in 2002 than in past years due to coastal population growth.
The forecast estimates that there is an 86 percent chance that one or more hurricanes of category 3, 4 or 5 will make landfall somewhere on the U.S. coast during 2002. Storms in those categories can do extensive damage. The average for the past century is 52 percent.
For the East Coast and the Florida Peninsula, the probability of a major storm reaching land in 2002 is 58 percent. The average for the past century in the region is 31 percent.
The Gulf Coast - from the Florida Panhandle westward to Brownsville, Texas - has a major storm landfall probability of 43 percent, compared with 31 percent, on average, for the century.
In 2000, the Colorado State team's final update in August called for 12 named storms and seven hurricanes, with three of them major or intense. The 2001 season wrapped up Nov. 30 with 15 named storms and nine hurricanes, four of them major or intense.
LONDON, March 3 (Reuters) - The British government said on Sunday that exhaustive testing had shown a new foot-and-mouth scare in the north of England to be a false alarm.
"Every time you see a cow drool, it sends a shiver down your body," said Chris Woods, a livestock farmer from Cumbria, the region that was worst hit last year.
Fri Mar 1,10:25 AM ET
NEW YORK - Manhattan is going Hollywood, with a planned $375 million studio and office tower that will be the first of its kind in the city.
The 15-story Studio City will offer more than an acre of Hollywood-style backlot on the ninth floor, with a view of the New York skyline and the Hudson River.
Planned on a West Side block between 10th and 11th avenues and 44th and 45th streets, the tower will provide production studios, equipment and offices to film, television and advertising companies.
"While there are studios all over the world, this is a vertical studio, with everything you need to go from pre-production to final production, without ever having to leave the building," Lee Tomlinson, who's in charge of marketing space in the building, said in announcing the project Thursday. "There's no other space that has both offices and production facilities in one building."
He said several international production conglomerates are negotiating to move to Studio City, which he hopes will start construction later this year and will take about two years to complete.
The sand-colored brick building will offer 700,000 square feet of office space, connected by elevators to design and lighting work spaces, a screening room, and seven sound stages equipped with the latest cameras, lenses and audio gear. It also will house a restaurant and a fitness center.
On the ninth-floor backlot, "you can put up sets, you can even put cars and shoot a street scene," says Richard Benowitz, one of Studio City's partners who conceived the idea for Studio City.
The Lehman Brothers investment banking firm is another financial partner in the deal, for which New York City has sold the land at an undisclosed price.
The Hollywood "bungalows" that traditionally served as homes-on-the-set for actors will be replaced by penthouse suites with living and sleeping areas, dressing rooms, and kitchens.
"New York is New York, and when people live here, they don't always want to go to Los Angeles to work," said Tomlinson, a California native.
Robert De Niro has long been making movies through Tribeca Productions in downtown Manhattan. The actor and his business partner, Jane Rosenthal, have organized the first Tribeca Film Festival, scheduled for May 8-12, which they hope will help the neighborhood rebound from the Sept. 11 attacks. I guess if they want to make a film set in a tall office building this will come in handy.
Scientists will gather in the French Alps at the weekend to discuss the complex problem of the poisonous and ever-lasting cowpat.
A medicine given to cows, sheep and horses before they go to summer pasture in the Alps has made their dung toxic and virtually indestructible.
Insects that normally feed on the droppings are dying in numbers, threatening the survival of birds and bats that eat the insects. A single cowpat left by an animal treated with the medicine is estimated to be capable of killing up to 20,000 dung-eating insects a week.
Professor Jean-Pierre Lumaret, from the University of Montpellier, an expert on the ecology of Alpine meadows, said: "A cow produces about 12 cowpats a day. If the dung does not decompose, it becomes like stone, which stops the grass from growing. In the Mediterranean area, we have seen cowpats [from treated animals] survive for four years or more." Cowpats from a herd of 100 cows add up to a lot of toxic dung over four years. They would eventually ruin a pasture, not only for insects, but also for cows, Professor Lumaret said.
The cause of the problem is believed to be a medicine called ivermectine, which is inserted in the form of a "bolus" or blob in the throat of the animal when it is sent to the high Alpine meadows for the summer. Small amounts of the medicine released daily protect the animals from parasites.
The aim of this weekend's conference, part of an "ecological fair" at Albenc in Isère, south-east France, is to persuade farmers and vets to use another kind of treatment.
High on a hill lives a deadly cowherd.
Appearing in Wiltshire in southern England, the heart of crop-circle country, it comprises 409 circles in a spiral pattern more than 450 meters across"dwarfing the 60-meter average diameter of this year's designs.
Lundberg says that the "sheer scale and complexity" of this opus has many people baffled. He estimates that for it to have been done in hours of darkness, the makers had to create circles at a rate of one every 30 seconds"with no time for preliminary survey work. "I know from previous experience," he says, "that after a certain length (about 60 meters) it's very difficult to hold a tape measure above the crop without it sagging." It is well designed I must admit. If they ever beam back a portrait of Lucille Ball I'd start to think there might be something to it.
9-4-1
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Orthodontists could soon be giving their patients more than they bargained for with their brand new braces: a mouthful of radioactive waste.
Under a Department of Energy plan, braces aren't the only product which could contain radioactive waste. Zippers, lawn chairs, hip replacements and countless other consumer products could include trace amounts of waste taken from nuclear reactors or weapons complexes and recycled into scrap metal.
The Department of Energy (DOE) sees the recycling as a way to clean up waste at decommissioned nuclear plants and weapons facilities, but environmental groups call the idea ridiculous.
"It's hard to imagine a nuclear enterprise more tone deaf to public concerns or a more cockamamie scheme than taking radioactive waste and disposing of it in consumer products," said Dan Hirsch, president of nuclear watchdog group Committee to Bridge the Gap.
The energy department will spend the next 12 months to 18 months studying the environmental and health risks of the plan, having held 12 public hearings in six cities this summer, said DOE spokesman Joe Davis,
Critics say recycling radioactive waste, even at low levels, is reckless. But energy officials say that the government needs to look at all options for getting rid of the growing pile of hazardous wastes. Proponents of the plan say that by spreading small, non-lethal amounts into recycled scrap, the need for large waste dumps could be avoided.
CONCERN IS HEALTHY
A moratorium was placed on radioactive recycling last year by former Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson after environmental groups protested the possible sale of 6,000 metric tons of contaminated nickel from the energy department's Oakridge nuclear facility in Tennessee to scrap metal dealers.
But under the Bush administration, the program is being revisited and the energy department is considering lifting the moratorium. But before that, it is required by law to conduct a thorough study on the safety risks of recycling radioactive waste.
The proposal does not specify any uses for scrap metal containing the radioactive waste, but metal industry executives say the material would go into the supply of scrap metal and could be used to make anything.
Even the study has proven problematic. The DOE recently dropped Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) -- which it initially chose to conduct the study and prepared a report -- because of its business partnership with British Nuclear Fuels Limited, the company that last year was going to contract with the government to help sell the waste from the Oakridge facility.
Hirsch of the Committee to Bridge the Gap said it was an enormous potential conflict of interest. SAIC's report "is quite dangerous in terms of arguing how much radioactivity would be acceptable for use in consumer products."
The energy department has not said who was hired to complete the study, but some are arguing that the level of radiation in any recycled materials would be too low to actually pose a health risk.
The Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade association representing some 260 companies in the nuclear power industry, has lobbied in favor of radioactive recycling and says the public may be overly concerned.
"Concern is healthy," said Felix Killar, director of material licenses for the institute. "But people need to understand the facts. This isn't truly radioactive waste. It's no more radioactive than any other material recycled in to consumer products."
Killar continues: "There isn't a place on Earth that is totally free of radioactivity."
A LITTLE RADIATION IS OK
John Wittenborn, attorney for the Metal Industries Recycling Coalition (MIRC), comprised of a variety of metal industry trade groups, says their polls indicate the public doesn't buy the idea that nuclear waste can be safely recycled into everyday products.
"We've spent a lot of time and effort to build the perception that products made from recycled materials are safe and good and that recycling itself is something that society should be in favor of," said Wittenborn, whose group strongly opposes recycling of radioactive waste into scrap metal.
Beyond the public image problem the industry would face in using the recycled waste, companies are concerned about the potential contamination of their mills and workers.
Wittenborn says it can cost from $5 million to $15 million to shut down, inspect by hand and then clean a steel mill that has registered radioactivity above a background level.
Recently, Wittenborn attended an energy department public hearing on the issue in Crystal City, Virginia where he presented his polling data and the metal industry's case.
In fact, those who have attended the hearings say most of the comments have opposed lifting the moratorium on radioactive recycling.
"The observer might ask 'Why does the DOE continue to propose to do this if no one is willing to come forward and testify on behalf of it?"' said Dan Guttman, executive director of President Clinton's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments,
"This is being cast as a question of convincing the hysterical public that a little radiation is OK"
Russian and U.S. scientists said on Monday, in an experiment that, if confirmed, represents a giant advance in nuclear physics.
LONDON, Feb 26 (Reuters) - British cabinet office officials discovered to their surprise that at the height of the Cold War there were no plans to inform the Queen in case of a nuclear attack, secret papers released on Tuesday showed.
Internal memos raced back and forth in 1965 to put right the embarrassing oversight, discovered as the cabinet office was updating the government War Book, which set out what Whitehall should do in the buildup to nuclear conflict.
"It appears to us that there are no War Book arrangements for informing the Queen, wherever she may be, of the major decisions taken during transition to war," cabinet office official W.I. McIndoe wrote in a draft letter dated March 1965.
"Clearly this is an omission which should be rectified."
In the same month another official, J.R. Stephens, said in a letter to his superior that the head of the royal family should be informed of an event of such magnitude.
"We agreed that there is a requirement for the Queen to be informed, wherever she may be, during the Precautionary Stage of decisions to implement the various stages and procedures for a transition to war," he wrote.
He revealed that neither the prime minister's office nor the cabinet office believed it was their responsibility to tell the queen, Britain's head of state, of impending war.
Her Majesty would need to be given guidance about some of the decisions during the runup to war, McIndoe explained.
BUILDUP TO NUCLEAR WAR
The files were released by the Public Record Office in London as part of a gradual opening up of official documents going back 30 years or more.
A handwritten memo accompanying one of the Cabinet Office letters gave a rare insight into how the British government envisaged reacting to a serious nuclear threat.
It begins with the code word "MacMorris," which meant putting all departments on war alert and preparing round-the-clock staffing.
Senior officials and ministers would then move to "Turnstile," a nuclear bunker in Wiltshire, southern England.
Britons would be rapidly relocated to avoid strikes on major cities, regional courts would be established, British people living abroad would be repatriated and armed forces would be assigned to NATO command.
The final phase -- full nuclear engagement -- is referred to simply as "Operation Visitation." Morris MacWhirter to see you Ma'am.
01-Mar-2002
Al-Qaeda’s attempts to acquire nuclear weapons may have been thwarted by Russian con men, according to the Pentagon.
After analyzing containers, computer discs and papers found in their deserted Afghanistan hideouts, intelligence officers found no trace of materials which could have been used to construct a nuclear bomb.
However, they did find some canisters painted with skull and crossbones that turned out to be harmless. The manufacture of the canisters was so crude that, had they been genuine, the sellers, as well as the terrorists, would have been exposed to dangerous levels of radiation just from handling them.
Intelligence officials speculate that the canisters could have been dipped in medical waste by black-market salesmen so that a Geiger counter would register radioactivity, making it seem as if they contained nuclear material.
A search of 110 different sites brought up just three containers that were considered dangerous enough to be sent back to the US for full analysis. “We did not find any type of serious radiological material,” an official says. “The stuff we found in Afghanistan was not the real stuff. They were swindled, like a lot of other people.”
General Tommy Franks, the U.S. commander of military operations in Afghanistan, says, “We have seen evidence that al-Qaeda had a desire to weaponize chemical and biological capability, but we have not yet found evidence that indicates they were able to do so.”
Nuclear experts say the con was probably done by crooks from the former Soviet Union. “There have been several similar cases in eastern Europe,” one source says. “There is not a lot of consumer protection in this area. Unless you're a chemical engineer with proper testing facilities, it’s impossible to tell whether you are getting what you’re supposed to be getting.”
The Pentagon’s findings don’t rule out the possibility that al- Qaeda units hasn’t obtained real bomb-making materials. Daryl Kimball, of the Arms Control Association, says, “It’s good news as far as it goes that they haven’t found anything but this does not mean that al-Qaeda have not taken stuff with them. The idea that al-Qaeda have powerful nuclear weapons has always been far-fetched. Even if they have a small quantity of plutonium and other material, there are still a lot of different engineering processes along the way before they could deliver anything. But there is still a possibility that they are looking to produce some kind of radiological weapon.”
A report to Congress by the National Intelligence Council confirms that real smuggling of nuclear materials has gone on from Russia over the past 10 years. The report says Russian nuclear sites are well protected against an external threat, but wide open to internal theft. Last August, an anonymous military officer said on Russian television that terrorists could easily seize a warhead, because nuclear storage sites are short-staffed, employees badly paid, and the alarm systems operate only half the time.
02-Jan-2002
Federal law enforcement officials are investigating whether sleeper cells or freelance agents of Osama bin Laden may have smuggled small, portable nuclear weapons or radiological bombs into the United States.
Rep. Chris Shays, R-Conn., chairman of the House subcommittee on national security, says, “It’s possible, and it’s very scary. If you asked me if bin Laden really had these weapons, I would say probably not, but, on the other hand, I wouldn’t be the least surprised if there were a nuclear explosion in Israel or the United States.”
One report currently being investigated by U.S. intelligence officials came from Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) sources who conducted an interrogation of a terrorist suspect in early November. Under coercion, the suspect said that agents of bin Laden had smuggled two portable nuclear weapons into the United States.
A U.S. government expert who had access to the Pakistani investigation said ISI provided “the highest levels of the U.S. government” with materials from their interrogation, including a summary of the suspect’s confession. The summary did not give the specific dates of the smuggling, the method, or time of entry. The suspect said only that the smuggling had been carried out.
“What was disconcerting about the (suspect’s) information was that he knew details of the activation of the weapons and their construction that are not in the public domain,” says the U.S. expert. It could be a nuclear backpack weapon “or some other Russian portable nuclear weapon.”
Rep. Shays says official records confirm that Russia produced 132 such weapons and that currently 48 remain unaccounted for. All disappeared from Russian arsenals. He says, “We know that bin Laden made strenuous efforts to buy these weapons, we know that security at some Russian nuclear arsenals was terrible, we know that some Russian officials were corrupt. We are told of attempted thefts and of plots that were foiled, but we are never told of the plots that succeeded.”
Peter Probst, formerly of the Pentagon’s Office of Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict says that there is “a great fear” within the Bush administration of a strike by bin Laden aimed at deactivating the U.S. government, using either a finished nuke or a radiological device -- a core of conventional explosive wrapped inside nuclear waste such as iodine 131. He says, “It would seem probable that some (bin Laden) deals for purchasing weapons did go through.”
On December 4, the FBI put 18,000 U.S. law enforcement agencies on “highest alert” because intelligence culled from sources around the globe indicated the United States could expect a new bin Laden attack between mid-December and the holidays. The alert continues. Since the September 11 attacks, Continuity of Government procedures have been in place that ensure that the president and vice president never occupy the same spot at the same time. They also provide for the orderly succession of power should a top U.S. leader be killed.
The FBI is monitoring the major port cities of the United States mainland including New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. They are checking any suspicious cash rentals of trucks or leases of private aircraft, including flight plans, since a small, portable nuclear weapon could be dropped by terrorists via parachute into a remote area and retrieved by other cell members. Air freight is also being carefully monitored because, according to Probst, “25 percent of air freight is carried by passenger aircraft and is never inspected.”
Stephen Flynn, senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, says, “The United States has 16,000 ships entering its ports every day. Adding in shipments entering by truck, train or air freight, the total of import shipments to the United States is 21.4 million per year. You could put a nuclear or a chemical weapon in a container aboard a ship leaving Karachi, and that ship will land at Vancouver or Oakland, San Francisco, or the Gulf Coast, and we would never know the difference.” He says that only 3 percent of ship containers ever get inspected.
Stefan Leader, president of Eagle Research and consultant for the Department of Energy, says bin Laden is known to own 23 ships registered to various companies in various countries. Once on the high seas, “such ships are really difficult to find from a defense point of view,” he says.
Russian backpack weapons are a priority in the current alert. Says one former senior CIA official, “It’s not a big reach at all to say that it’s probable that bin Laden has been able to obtain this system.” The Soviet nuclear backpack system was made in the 1960s for use against NATO targets in time of war. It consists of three “coffee can-sized” aluminum canisters, which must be connected before detonation.
According to information derived from Soviet defectors, the three aluminum canisters are carried in green canvas cases with pockets on the outside. All three must be connected to make a single unit in order to explode. The detonator is about 6 inches long and carried in a “knife-like sheaf.” It has a 3-to- 5 kiloton yield, depending on the efficiency of the explosion. It is kept powered during storage by a battery line connected to the canisters.
During the first week of October, Israel’s Mossad was reported to have detained a Palestinian attempting to enter Jerusalem from Ramallah who was wearing such a system on his back. The item was contained in a CIA Daily Threat Report. Initially, there were conflicting reports as to whether the pack contained a radiological weapon or a nuclear system. Sources who saw the Daily Report insist that the weapon was nuclear, not radiological.
Was the Palestinian been carrying a segment or the whole system? Israel has refused to comment, but a former senior CIA official says, “The system is very small and could be easily carried and used by one person.” There would be “no necessity to take it in segments.”
Probst says of the Mossad item, “I don’t discount the report at all. If bin Laden were going nuclear, a backpack weapon is the way he would go.”
The backpack system remains classified and is not the same as a nuclear suitcase bomb. A suitcase bomb is “as large as two footlockers,” said former CIA countererrorism chief Vincent Cannistraro. “Bin Laden hasn’t got any suitcase bombs. That’s just total crap.”
According to former Soviet military intelligence officer Stanislav Lunev, suitcase bombs are actually Soviet-made RA- 115s that can’t be transported by suitcase. According to an article titled “Osama Suitcase Bombs and Ex-Soviet Loose Nukes” written by Cary Sublette for the Federation of American Scientists, “They weigh about 60 pounds and have a yield of one kiloton. The dimensions of the suitcase bomb are 24”x16”x 8.” They are difficult to set up, says Lunev, because a small current of power is needed to store the weapon safely near its detonation site. This means the operator of the weapon would need to run a fine wire up to a power line. If someone discovered the wire powering the weapon and tried to trace it back, the wire is so fine it would break. If the battery in the weapon runs low, then the bomb is programmed to send a signal to a Soviet satellite or the nearest consulate. If any one tampers with it, the nuclear materials are disabled.
Shays says the Soviets even made small nuclear weapons “that look like rocks,” a fact confirmed by Lunev.
Larry Johnson, a former State Department counterterrorism official, says that while there should be concern over any nuclear threat, he believes that the present concerns are “exaggerated. It’s not like a nuclear weapon has an eternal shelf life. If you don’t use one by such and such a date, you’re likely not to be able to use it at all. Look at your lawn mower that you left in the garage all winter -- it requires some work before you can use it again.” What about the nukes the Soviets had purportedly hidden around the US to outdo a first strike? What if someone sold them the locations?
13-Feb-2002
Two deadly radioactive devices, left over from a Soviet-era generator, were discovered by three men gathering wood from a forest in Russia. The objects had melted the surrounding snow, and the men dragged them back to their camp for warmth. Exposure to the cylinders’ high levels of the radioactive element strontium-90 left the men nauseous, and they suffered radiation burns. One of the men is now in very serious condition, and may be transferred to a hospital in France.
“The cylinders may be small, but they are extremely radioactive," says Lothar Wedekind, of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The UN agency sent a team of experts to the former Soviet republic of Georgia to help take the nuclear devices to a safe place. “It’s crucial that they are removed to a safe place as soon as possible,” says Wedekind. The IAEA team will bring heavy protective shields to the area to encase the cylinders, then transport them to the Georgian capital, Tbilisi.
Russian, U.S. and French experts will meet in Tbilisi to discuss what to do with them. They will also discuss how to track down other discarded nuclear material in the area.
Since September 11, there have been fears that discarded nuclear material will be used to make a “dirty bomb,” which is capable of spreading high levels of toxic radiation. “This is a threat we have to take very seriously, particularly given the fact that there is likely to be more such material in Georgia,” says Wedekind.
The cylinders are not the first discarded nuclear devices to be discovered in Georgia. Three years ago, a fisherman found one in a river-bed which was polluted with large amounts of strontium-90.
Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2002
Washington and Moscow have long competed over ex-Soviet Georgia as a geopolitical prize. The war on terrorism may help America win the game
As a reward for backing the U.S. war on terrorism, Moscow expected American support for its own war in Chechnya — and to be treated as a geopolitical partner. That's why it will feel kicked in the teeth by the deployment of U.S. military advisers and helicopters to the former Soviet republic of Georgia on Wednesday — and unconfirmed reports that hundreds more may be on the way to support anti-terrorism efforts. "We think it could further aggravate the situation in the region, which is difficult as it is," Russian foreign minister Igor Ivanov said Wednesday. "That is our position and Washington is well aware of it."
For starters, the governments of Russia and Georgia have very different ideas on who the bad guys are. Moscow has long demanded the right to attack all Chechen fighters based inside Georgian territory, in particular a group of Chechen rebels sheltering in the Pankisi Gorge. Georgia, eager to break free of two centuries of Russian influence, has labeled the rebels "Chechen freedom fighters" — and has refused Russia permission to launch operations in the Pankisi.
Now they've invited the U.S. to come into Pankisi instead, to train Georgian forces for an ongoing anti-terrorism mission. The U.S. and Georgia say their target will be about a dozen Arab extremists based in the area, believed to be long-time volunteers with a militant Chechen faction (rather than stragglers from Afghanistan). But they won't be launching an all-out campaign against Chechen fighters in the Pankisi.
A can of worms is about to open in the Republic of Georgia. The Pankisky Gorge, bordering the Russian Federation, has long been a source of trouble between both republics. The Russian authorities are convinced that some of the Chechen war lords and their sympathizers have taken shelter across the border in Georgia and are more than annoyed that the Georgian authorities first denied their presence and subsequently said that the resident Chechens were merely harmless refugees.
The borders in the Caucasus are virtually undefendable. They often tend to be situated in mountainous regions without roads and with secure cover for those who choose to move from one republic to another with impunity. Smuggling in all its forms has long been a way of life. Weapons have gone into Chechnya via the Gorge in question and people certainly have come out the same way.
But it appears that the American authorities are intending to do something about the problem. Russian TV reported today that the Americans plan to send helicopters and Special Forces to the area to help the Georgian authorities deal with the illegal residents since it is believed that some of them are Al Qaida terrorists. Details are hard to come by but nothing is ever simple and straight forward. The border republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia are sure this move is a new ploy by the Georgian authorities to use the terrorist problem as a pretext to send troops into their regions. The Abkhazian P.M. has already requested that if Georgian troops enter his region, that a closer tie be formed with the Russian Federation and South Ossetia feels the same.
So once again questions about motivations have to be asked. The presence of Chechens in the Pankisky Gorge isn't in doubt. But are there terrorists from Al Qaida there? Will the Americans participate in a clear out operation or leave it to the Georgians? What will be the effect on the two border republics who have wanted to escape from Georgian domination? And what part are the Russians playing in all this? There are some believe that the result of such an operation will be at worst, the total collapse of the Georgian Republic. There appear to be as many agendas as there are players.
Mon Mar 4, 5:44 PM ET
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Apparently pregnant women can have their cup of coffee and drink it too. According to a group of Swedish researchers, consuming moderate amounts of caffeine while pregnant does not appear to have any effect on either the birth weight of the baby or the length of the pregnancy.
"The present study does not support an association between moderate caffeine consumption and reduced birth weight, gestational age or fetal growth," said study co-author Dr. Sven Cnattingius of the department of medical epidemiology at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.
Between 1996 and 1998, Cnattingius and his team recruited nearly 900 Swedish women--a group whom the authors describe as typically avid coffee drinkers--who were pregnant. Each of the women included in the study ultimately gave birth to a single baby.
The women were interviewed during the first trimester and then again during the third trimester. At both interviews, they were asked to report their caffeine intake just before and during pregnancy. The consumption of coffee, tea, chocolate, soft drinks and any caffeine-containing medications were all recorded. The participants were also asked for a history of chronic illness, eating habits, work schedule, education level, age, weight, height, alcohol intake, and smoking habits.
After reviewing birth weights of the newborns and the number of weeks they were carried before delivery, Cnattingius and his colleagues determined that exposure to caffeine had no effect on either outcome. An absence of such a connection held true when looking either at the total caffeine intake throughout the pregnancy or when looking at caffeine intake within any particular trimester.
Reporting in the March issue of American Journal of Epidemiology, the researchers also note that smoking in late pregnancy did appear to be associated with a reduction in birth weight; it did not seem to affect the length of the pregnancy.
Although the investigators acknowledged that the pregnant women who smoked tended to consume substantially higher amounts of caffeine, they found that it was the smoking and not the caffeine that directly impacted a newborn's birth weight.
Several other factors appeared to have some impact on fetal growth, the report indicates, including having previously had a low birth weight child, experiencing nausea and fatigue throughout a pregnancy, and the number of hours the mother logged at work each week.
Despite the lack of risk posed by caffeine found in this study, pregnant women need to take other considerations into account when deciding when to consume coffee, tea or chocolate, Cnattingius told Reuters Health.
He noted that his own previous research had established a connection between consuming caffeine in the first few months of pregnancy and an increased risk of miscarriage. Such an association has recently been a hot topic of debate, with some researchers countering that there is no hard evidence that caffeine plays any significant role in inducing spontaneous abortions.
"Taken together," said Cnattingius, "these studies imply that caffeine intake should be avoided in early pregnancy--while later during pregnancy moderate caffeine ingestion should not increase the risk of an unsuccessful pregnancy outcome."
SOURCE: American Journal of Epidemiology 2002;155:429-435. Courtesy of Starbucks R'n'D.
LONDON, Feb 27 (Reuters) - Britain must tighten airport security to stop illegal imports of meat from endangered African apes, London-based environmental groups said on Wednesday.
The UK Bushmeat Campaign said at least 1,000 tonnes of illegal meat was smuggled into Britain each year from West and Central Africa, carrying the threat of human and animal diseases such as Ebola and monkey pox.
Britain has barely recovered from last year's outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, believed to have come from abroad and possibly from smuggled meat.
"Just think of the economic impact that foot-and-mouth had in this country," Member of Parliament Barry Gardiner told a news conference launching the campaign.
"The disease risks are great. We need to make sure there is a secure control system at our airports," he said.
The Bushmeat Campaign said demand for animals hunted in the wild was growing in many Western cities.
More than five tonnes of the illegal meat was found in spot checks at London's Heathrow airport in 2000. Brussels, Paris, Frankfurt and Zurich have all struggled in recent years to stem the tide of passengers with illegal meat.
Bushmeat Campaign co-director Adam Matthews said the commercial trade of bushmeat rocketed in the past 10 years, threatening the extinction of some apes and monkeys.
He urged the British government to raise the issue at the next World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in September.
He also said Britain must break-up the network for meat product smuggling and clamp down on businesses linked to the bushmeat trade.
A London shop-keeper was jailed last May for selling the flesh of an endangered monkey species. He told the court that many African shops in Britain sold bushmeat.
The total value of the bushmeat trade has been estimated at $50 million annually. Between three and five tonnes of bushmeat are taken out of the Congo basin each year.
Trade in products of endangered species such as gorillas and chimpanzees is against international law.
Government confirms: “This is Noah’s Ark”
04/03/2002
HISTORY books in 23 countries may need to be rewritten in the light of new evidence that Chinese explorers had discovered most parts of the world by the mid-15th century.
Next week, an amateur historian will expound his theory - backed up by charts, ancient artefacts and anthropological research - that when Columbus discovered America in 1492, he was 72 years too late.
And so were other explorers, such as Cook, Magellan and Da Gama, whose heroic voyages took them to Australia, South America and India.
Instead, according to Gavin Menzies, a former submarine commanding officer who has spent 14 years charting the movements of a Chinese expeditionary fleet between 1421 and 1423, the eunuch admiral, Zheng He, was there first.
According to Menzies, it was Zheng He, in his colossal multi-masted ships stuffed with treasure, silks and porcelain, who made the first circumnavigation of the world, beating the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan by a century.
Menzies will present his findings at the Royal Geographical Society on March 15 before an invited audience of more than 200 diplomats, academics, naval officers and publishers. Their initial reaction, based on an outline of his thesis, ranges from excitement to scepticism.
But if the number of acceptances - 85 per cent - is anything to go by, he will not be ignored.
He originally intended to write a book about the significance of the year 1421 around the world. While researching it in Venice, he was shown a planisphere, dated 1459, which included southern Africa and the Cape of Good Hope.
Yet the Cape was not "discovered" as a sea route by Vasco da Gama until 1497. On the planisphere was a note in medieval Phoenician about a voyage round the Cape to the Cape Verde Islands in 1420 - and a picture of a Chinese junk.
Menzies felt he was on to something.
Using Chinese star charts and maps that pre-date the expeditions of Cook, Magellan, de Gama and Columbus, he has reconstructed what he believes is the epic voyage of Zheng He.
He says his knowledge of astro-navigation helped him to work out that the Chinese, using the brilliant star Canopus to chart their course, had sailed close to the South Pole.
He determined their latitude and went on to find literary and archaeological evidence to show that the Chinese had effectively circumnavigated the world.
Menzies, 64, admits that his greatest fear was being ridiculed.
He said: "When I started, I was terrified people would think I was a crank. But although my claim is complicated and stands history on its head, I am confident of my ground.
He added: "What nobody has explained is why the European explorers had maps. Who drew the maps? There are millions of square miles of ocean. It required huge fleets to chart them. If you say it wasn't the Chinese, with the biggest fleets and ships in the world, then who was it?"
Admiral Sir John Woodward, who served on submarines with Menzies in the 1960s and will be at his lecture, describes him as a brilliant maverick.
He said: "I was his teacher on a commanding officers' qualifying course and he was the cleverest, sharpest and best I had seen. He is not some mad eccentric but a rational man, good at analysis - and he certainly knows all about charts."
Chinese ocean-going supremacy in the first half of the 15th century is not in question.
The expeditionary junks were three times the size of Nelson's Victory and dwarfed the 16th century ocean-going European caravels. Under his patron, the Yong-le Emperor Zhui Di, Zheng He made seven great voyages to bring foreigners into China's tribute system.
When he returned in October 1423, China was in political and economic chaos. The treasure fleet, now considered frivolous, was mothballed, admirals pensioned off and shipyards closed.
Although most of the records of Zheng He's voyage were expunged, a few maps and star charts survived.
Menzies believes they were taken to Venice by a merchant traveller, Nicolo da Conti, who had joined one of the Chinese junks in India. In his travel book published in 1434, da Conti claims to have sailed to China via Australia - 350 years before Captain Cook.
Menzies argues that, on his way through Venice in 1428, the King of Portugal's eldest son obtained the salvaged maps and incorporated them into a map of the world.
The most controversial part of his theory is that copies of parts of this mappa mundi were used by da Gama, Magellan and Cook. Some of these still survive in museums: Patagonia (1513), North America (1507), Africa (1502) and Asia and Australia (1542).
The letters and logs of the European explorers - including Columbus - certainly acknowledge that they had maps, says Menzies. "They knew where they were going before they set out."
Using his knowledge of winds and tides, Menzies has located what he believes are nine Chinese leviathans wrecked in the Caribbean in December 1421.
Pictures of the hull ballast on the seabed show stones identical in shape and size to those found in a Chinese treasure ship recently excavated in the Philippines.
Menzies declines to name the uninhabited island because he believes some of the ships may still contain treasure and he wants to investigate them.
Gillian Hutchinson, curator of the history of cartography at the National Maritime Museum, is not persuaded that there is a provable link between the Chinese maps and those the Europeans used.
She says: "It is possible that Chinese geographical knowledge had reached Europe before the Age of Discovery. But Mr Menzies is absolutely certain of it, and that makes it difficult to separate evidence from wishful thinking."
Diplomats of the countries whose early history may be affected by his thesis are reacting with a surprising degree of warmth.
Gregory Baughen, first secretary at the New Zealand High Commission, says: "It sounds exciting. We're all ears. Chinese artefacts have been found around the coast for some time."
Luis de Sousa, press councillor at the Portuguese Embassy, says: "Magellan is in all the books and his descendants carry his name with -+pride. But if the Chinese circumnavigated the world first, which is quite possible, then let's give them their 15 minutes of limelight."
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