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Editorial: Seeing isn't believing
Tuesday June 27, 2006
The Guardian
A year on from 7/7, wild rumours are circulating about who planted the bombs and why. Some people even claim this picture of the four bombers was faked. Mark Honigsbaum, who accidentally triggered at least one of the conspiracy theories, investigates...
A CCTV image of the London bombers at Luton station on July 7. Photograph: Getty
On July 10 last year, Bridget Dunne opened the Sunday newspapers eager for information about the blasts that had brought death and mayhem to London three days earlier. Like many people that weekend, Dunne was confused by the conflicting reports surrounding what had initially been described as a series of "power surges" on the tube. Why were the Metropolitan Police saying that these surges, which were now being attributed to bombs, had occurred simultaneously at 8.50am, when they had originally been described as taking place over the space of 26 minutes?
Dunne, a 51-year-old foster carer, was also having trouble squaring the Met's statement on July 8 that there was "no evidence to suggest that the attacks were the result of suicide bombings" with the growing speculation that Islamic suicide bombers and al-Qaida were to blame for the blasts that had hit the London underground and a bus in Tavistock Square. The Met Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, had talked himself of "these people who oppose our way of life".
"I'm not a conspiracy theorist," insists Dunne. "I was just trying to make a cohesive, coherent story from the facts."
But while the papers that Sunday were full of interviews with people who had survived the bombs, and there was plenty of speculation about Osama bin Laden's involvement, Dunne could find nothing about the times of the tube trains in and out of King's Cross on the morning of July 7.
When, a few days later, police released the now famous CCTV image of Shehzad Tanweer, Mohammad Sidique Khan, Jermaine Lindsay and Hasib Hussain entering Luton station, her suspicions deepened. How had police identified the bombers so quickly? And how was it that amid the carnage of twisted metal and bloody body parts they had been able to recover credit cards and other ID placing the men at the scene of the crime?
Suspecting something was not right, Dunne, who lives in Camden, north London, wrote to her local paper. "Do you think we are being told the truth over these bombings?" she asked. "There are so many unanswered questions that just don't make any sense."
Dunne's letter was immediately picked up by a blogger called Blaugustine and within days she found herself the recipient, via the internet, of other intriguing snippets, such as the claim that on the morning of 7/7 a former Scotland Yard anti-terrorism branch official had been staging a training exercise based on bombs going off simultaneously at precisely the stations that had been targeted.
Convinced more than ever that something was not right, Dunne decided to share her thoughts with her new friends on the internet.
"I have only one reason for starting this blog," she wrote last August. "It is to ascertain the facts behind the events in London on and since the July 7 2005 ... That the times of trains were totally absent from the public domain was one of the factors which led to my suspicions that what we were being told happened was not what actually happened."
It was a few days after the blasts that I first became aware of the disconnect between what most people believe and accept happened on 7/7 - that four British-born Muslim men decided, of their own volition and for reasons that we may never fully understand, to detonate a series of suicide bombs on the London underground - and what people like Dunne suspect happened.
Like many Londoners, I never reached my office on the morning of July 7 but arrived at the tube at 9.30am to find it already closed. Dispatched by the Guardian's newsdesk directly to Edgware Road, I arrived just as passengers from the bombed westbound Circle line train were emerging from the temporary triage centre that had been set up in Marks & Spencer by a former firefighter, Paul Dadge.
As with other major London crime scenes - the Israeli embassy bombing in Kensington, the Paddington rail crash, the Brixton nail bombing - the situation was one of confusion and flux. The police had only just begun to cordon off the station, while the fire brigade was attributing the incident to a power surge, even though it was already obvious to all but the greenest commuter that three simultaneous incidents on the tube made little sense even by London underground's woeful performance standards.
I asked passengers what they had seen and experienced and was told by two survivors from the bombed train that, at the moment of the blast, the covers on the floor of their carriage had flown up - the phrase they used was "raised up". There was no time to check their statements as moments later the police widened the cordon and I was directed to the opposite pavement, outside the Metropole hotel.
Moments later, Davinia Turrell, the famous "woman in the mask", emerged from M&S together with other injured passengers and I followed them into the hotel. It was from there that at around 11am I phoned a hurried, and what I now know to be flawed, audio report to the Guardian. In the report, broadcast on our website, I said that it "was believed" there had been an explosion "under the carriage of the train". I also said that "some passengers described how the tiles, the covers on the floors of the train, flew up, raised up".
It later became clear from interviewing other passengers who had been closer to the seat of the explosion that the bomb had actually detonated inside the train, not under it, but my comments, disseminated over the internet where they could be replayed ad nauseam, were already taking on a life of their own.
"Did July 7 bombs explode under trains?" read a posting that referred to my report a few weeks later. "Eyewitness accounts appear to contradict the theory that suicide bombers were responsible for killing 39 [sic] passengers on London's tube network that day."
Another went even further: "How Black Ops staged the London bombings: Staged terror events - like magic tricks - rely on misdirection to throw people off the track ... The bombs on the underground were not in the tube carriages. They were under the floors of the carriages."
Soon, internet chatrooms and blog sites were buzzing with even more bizarre theories: the bombers thought they were delivering drugs but were deceived, set up and murdered; or they thought they were carrying dummy "bombs" designed to test London's defences; or the plot was monitored by any number of secret services, from M15 to the CIA to Mossad, who let it happen in order to foment anti-Muslim feeling. Then there are the claims by 9/11 conspiracy theorists that 7/7, like the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, were all part of a cunning scheme to further the pro-Iraq war agenda of the Bush/Blair governments and the "New World Order".
In the past week we have had two more claims. The first came in a book by US journalist Ron Suskind, alleging that Khan was considered so dangerous by the FBI that in 2003 the US placed him on a "no fly list" - a claim that was promptly rubbished by the FBI as a case of mistaken identity.
Then, on Saturday, this paper reported that a computer technician who helped to encrypt emails at an Islamic bookshop in Leeds where Khan and Tanweer used to hang out became so alarmed by their calls for jihad that in October 2003 he delivered a dossier to West Yorkshire anti-terrorist police. Martin Gilbertson's claims have not been denied. West Yorkshire police simply admitted it couldn't say whether or not his dossier had "made its way into the intelligence system".
Given such confusion, the proliferation of 7/7 conspiracy theories is hardly surprising. Ever since the Kennedy assassination, people's faith in the official narratives surrounding seismic political events has been steadily eroding. In their place have come what Don DeLillo, in Libra, his brilliant psychological novel about Kennedy's assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, calls "theories that gleam like jade idols". Such theories are seductive precisely because, as DeLillo puts it, they are "four-faced, graceful". Employing a 20/20 hindsight whose starting point is always cui bono - who benefits? - they masquerade as an interrogation of the facts but are actually a labyrinth of mirrors.
But whereas in 1988, when Libra was published, it took years for conspiracy theories to come together through the sluggish medium of print and telephone, today such networks can be created instantaneously with a few clicks of a mouse.
At first sight, Dunne appears as far removed from this paranoid ether-world as you could imagine. Ushering me into her flat, she says she would dearly love to "turn the clock back to before July 7, before I had all these questions" and, for a moment, I believe her.
"Before my letter was published in the Camden New Journal, I had little idea of how the internet or blogs worked," she tells me. "I was surprised to discover how many people shared my concerns."
Today, however, Dunne appears extremely internet savvy. She has invited a colleague to our meeting - a blogger with long dark hair who gives his name only as the Antagonist. From Dunne's blog you can link directly to the Antagonist and other bookmarked sites including that of the July 7 Truth Campaign.
At first glance this appears to be an objective guide to everything that happened on 7/7 and afterwards. But click a little deeper and it soon becomes apparent that the campaign, with its linked people's inquiry forum and petition calling for the release of "all the evidence" about 7/7, considers the official Home Office account, in which the blame is laid squarely on the four suicide bombers pictured entering Luton station, to be just a "story".
The first "hole" in the narrative is the Home Office's claim that on July 7 the quartet boarded a 7.40am Thameslink train to King's Cross. According to Dunne, when an independent researcher visited Luton and demanded a train schedule from Thameslink, he was told that the 7.40am had never run and that the next available train, the 7.48, had arrived at King's Cross at 8.42 - in other words too late for the bombers to have boarded the three tube trains that exploded, according to the official timings, eight minutes later at Aldgate, Edgware Road and Russell Square.
The next problem is the CCTV picture. If you look closely at the image, Dunne says, you will see that the railings behind Khan, the man in the white baseball cap, appear to run in front of his left arm while another rail appears to slice through his head. "It's just a theory but some people believe the image was faked in Photoshop," she tells me.
To Dunne's way of thinking, this theory is bolstered by the fact that police have never released the further CCTV footage showing the four emerging on to the concourse at King's Cross where, according to the home office narrative, they are seen hugging and appear "euphoric". Then there is the "fact" that in the only other CCTV sequence of the bombers taken on June 28 (the day police believe they made a test run to London), only three men - Khan, Tanweer and Lindsay - are seen entering Luton station. Hasib Hussain, who would detonate a rucksack bomb on the top deck of the No 30 bus, providing the only above-ground image of what Sir Ian Blair would later call "the largest criminal inquiry in English history", is nowhere to be seen.
"I know people who have spoken to Hasib Hussain's family," says Dunne. "He was in the middle of his college career. He was taking driving lessons. I don't have a conspiracy theory, but until I've seen all the evidence and can personally join the dots I can't say that he or any of these men were suicide bombers."
Dunne and the Antagonist aren't the only ones who would like to see all the evidence. Rachel North, who was travelling in the front carriage of the Piccadilly line train with Lindsay when he detonated his bomb deep beneath Russell Square, and who miraculously escaped with only minor injuries, has also called for an independent public inquiry.
But unlike Dunne she does not think there is any mystery about what happened. "We all know what happened," she says. "We were there. What we want to know is why it happened."
She says that conspiracy theorists have repeatedly twisted her words to make out there was no bomb on her train and even that she is a professional M15 disinformation agent. When she challenged these claims, she says she was subjected to vitriolic abuse. As a consequence, she refuses to have anything to do with the July 7 Truth Campaign or related sites, arguing that they risk undermining the legitimacy of survivors' calls for a public inquiry.
"I have had endless run-ins with these people," she says. "Some of them are fairly well intentioned, if eccentric, others hugely offensive. I worry that they are making all of us look like conspiracy theorists and/or traumatised people who shouldn't be taken seriously."
She argues that given that inquests have yet to be held, and the ongoing mass-murder inquiry, it is hardly surprising that the police have withheld evidence from the public domain. Quite apart from the distress that the release of CCTV images might cause relatives, North says she has been told there are people in the background of the King's Cross CCTV sequence whom police are still trying to trace.
Police have also kept back details of what the bombers were wearing in order to be sure that witness statements taken from people who may have seen them on the Thameslink train can be corroborated. "Train timetables rarely bear any relation to real life," says North dismissively. "Where conspiracy theorists go with this is that the train never ran, so the bombers were never on the train, or the bombers were lured to Luton and then taken away and killed and their body parts were placed on the tube later to incriminate Muslims. They just take these small anomalies, which is what you will get in any rolling, multi-sourced news investigation, and make it into evidence of a conspiracy."
North isn't the only person with first-hand experience of 7/7 whose testimony has been called into question. Paul Dadge, the "hero of Edgware Road" (it was his idea to set up the temporary triage centre in M&S), who was photographed leading Davinia Turrell from M&S to the Metropole hotel, has also been on the receiving end. On internet bulletin boards people have questioned why he is wearing blue surgical gloves in the picture (reproduced on the cover of G2) and wonder why Turrell, who is now 25, appears "so old" and where she got the mask from.
"Basically, people were saying the picture was made up by the government to forward the campaign against terrorism in Iraq," Dadge tells me when we meet near his office in west London.
Dadge never reached work on 7/7 but was forced to interrupt his journey at Baker Street. Travelling on a westbound Hammersmith & City line train just behind the bombed Circle line train, he left the station at 8.53am and began walking towards Paddington when he noticed the fire engines heading towards Edgware Road and decided to investigate. To this day, his abiding memory, like my own, is one of confusion and chaos. In his testimony to the London Assembly, Dadge told the inquiry team looking into the failings of the emergency response that he felt he had no choice but to take command of the situation as the police were clearly overstretched and it was "becoming difficult to establish who was passing public, and who was involved in the incident".
For the record, Dadge who works for the internet provider AOL and whose job there, ironically, involves monitoring discussion threads, says he was not part of any "black ops" but obtained the gloves from a paramedic in M&S. The same paramedics provided Turrell with the mask to protect her burns. Yet although Dadge, like North, has been a target for vitriol - some objected to his being described as a hero - he doesn't seem to mind.
"I don't read the conspiracy theories and get upset," he says. "I read them and I'm intrigued."
Indeed, it is natural after an event as cataclysmic and unexpected as 7/7 to want to interrogate what happened. But interrogation is not the same as understanding, and after a certain point you must move on.
As I leave Dunne's flat, she tells me that she and the Antagonist are in the process of refining the July 7 Truth Campaign site and are still uncovering new "facts". "I can't explain it but something shifted for me that day," she says.
When I get home, I decide to take a look. Under the heading Some Hypotheses is a list of alternative theories. Number one is "al-Qaida mastermind recruited British Muslims as suicide bombers". Number three is "homegrown and autonomous action by four British Muslims with no mastermind." But it is hypothesis eight that attracts my attention: "The four men were chosen or lured to be patsies in a classic 'false flag operation'."
Beneath the headline is an extract from a newspaper interview with a passenger on the Aldgate train, reporting that the metal around the hole in the bomb carriage was "pushed upwards as if the bomb was underneath the train". But it is the next entry that I find most alarming. Highlighted in blue is the sentence: "Mark Honingsbaum [sic] also recorded several witnesses speaking of explosions under the floor of the train."
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Red, White, and Blue
Americans rank No. 1 in patriotism survey
By MEGAN REICHGOTT
Associated Press
Tue Jun 27, 2006
CHICAGO - When it comes to national pride, Americans are No. 1, according to a survey of 34 countries' patriotism. Venezuela came in a close second in the survey, released Tuesday by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.
People rated how proud they were of their countries in 10 areas: political influence, social security, the way their democracy works, economic success, science and technology, sports, arts and literature, military, history, and fair treatment of all groups in society.
In the U.S., "the two things we rank high on are what we think of as the political or power dimension," said Tom W. Smith, a researcher at the university. "Given that we're the one world superpower, it's not that surprising."
Patriotism is mostly a New World concept, the researchers said. Former colonies and newer nations were more likely to rank high on the list, while Western European, East Asian and former socialist countries usually ranked near the middle or bottom.
The U.S. ranked highest overall and in five categories: pride in its democracy, political influence, economy, science and military. Venezuela ranked highest in four categories: sports, arts and literature, history, and fair treatment of all groups in society.
Eric Wingerter, a Washington spokesman for the Venezuelan government, said many Venezuelans believe President Hugo Chavez has helped create a new sense of national pride. "There's been a real emphasis on rediscovering what it means to be Venezuelan," he said.
Chavez rails against the U.S. government and the Bush administration in particular.
Ireland came in at No. 3, followed by South Africa and Australia.
Cultural differences might explain the lower rankings for the three Asian countries on the list - Japan (18th), Taiwan (29th), and Korea (31), Smith said.
"It is both bad luck and poor manners to be boastful about things there," Smith said.
Countries that were part of the former Soviet Union or in the former Eastern Bloc ranked lower because they are still struggling to find new national identities, Smith said. Hungary was the highest Eastern European country on the list at 21.
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Senate rejects flag burning ban
BBC News
28/06/2006
Flag burning was upheld as an act of free speech in 1989
The US Senate has failed to approve a constitutional amendment which would ban the burning of the American flag.
The proposal, backed by President George W Bush who said it was an important issue, failed by one vote.
The measure has been seen as an attempt by the Republican majority to attract support of conservative voters ahead of November's mid-term elections.
But many Republicans say the flag is a cherished symbol of freedom and value which needs to be protected.
This is not the first time that the Senate has attempted to rally around the flag in this way since the US Supreme Court ruled that burning the Stars and Stripes is an example of free speech and protected by the US constitution.
On this occasion though, the vote could not have been closer.
Just one more senator on board and a ban on the desecration of the American flag would have been sent to individual states for ratification - a very rare occurrence indeed.
'Unpatriotic'
There have been only four recorded acts of flag burning in the United States this year but this did not stop the Senate from spending two days debating the issue.
A majority of Republicans argued that the Stars and Stripes is a cherished symbol of US freedom and values which needs protection.
But Democratic opponents dismissed the amendment as the latest attempt by Republicans to appeal to their conservative base ahead of November's mid-term elections by painting those who voted against the bill as unpatriotic.
Fourteen Democrats backed the measure in the end, earning the praise of President Bush who said he continued to believe that the American people deserved the opportunity to express their views on this important issue.
Comment: It is truly amazing, and a testimony to the depths of delusion to which the US political system has sunk, to realise that these people are actually SERIOUS when they say that the US flag is an important symbol of freedom! And to think that this bill was defeated by just ONE vote, with 14 Democrats voting FOR it! How's that for bipartisan politics!
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Bush jogs with wounded soldier
By JENNIFER LOVEN
Associated Press
Tue Jun 27, 2006
WASHINGTON - President Bush took a jog Tuesday with a soldier who lost part of both legs in Iraq, following through on a bedside promise even the president had doubts about at the time.
Despite a slight drizzle, Bush and Staff Sgt. Christian Bagge took a slow jog around a spongy track that circles the White House's South Lawn. About halfway through their approximately half-mile run, Bush and Bagge paused briefly for reporters.
"He ran the president into the ground, I might add," Bush said, as the two gripped hands in an emotional, lengthy shake. "But I'm proud of you. I'm proud of your strength, proud of your character."
The president met the soldier on a New Year's Day visit to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, where Bagge had been recuperating from his injuries for months. Bagge, now 23 and a native of Eugene, Ore., was in a convoy hit by roadside bombs a year ago in the remote Iraq desert south of Kirkuk.
Bagge's left leg was amputated just above the ankle, and his right leg ends just above the knee.
He told Bush during their January visit that he wanted to run with him. Bush was an avid runner who had mostly traded the activity for mountain biking in the last couple of years because of knee problems.
"I looked at him, like, you know, there's an optimistic person," Bush said. "It's an amazing sight for me to be running with a guy who, last time I saw him, was in bed wondering whether or not - I was wondering whether or not he'd ever get out of bed."
But, the president added, in tribute to the hard work Bagge did to realize this goal, "There was no doubt in his mind that he would."
"It's a privilege," commented Bagge, who had changed in the Oval Office into a special set of prosthetic legs that he uses to jog.
And then the pair took off for the remainder of their run.
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New Media Luring Money Away From Networks
By STUART ELLIOTT
The New York Times
June 28, 2006
ADVANCE advertising sales for the fall television season will probably be down for a second year in a row, reflecting the growing impact of new media outlets on broadcasters.
Estimates are that the five networks will sell $8.9 billion to $9 billion in commercial time ahead of the 2006-7 season, in what is known as the upfront market.
That compares with an estimated $9.1 billion sold in the upfront market last year, before the start of the 2005-6 season, and an estimated $9.3 billion in the upfront market two years ago, ahead of the 2004-5 season.
"I'm surprised it's two years in a row," said Wayne Friedman, West Coast editor at MediaPost Communications, which covers the media business through online (mediapost.com) and offline publications. "Most of the time, it's the networks holding all the cards."
Along with TV, newspapers and other traditional media are scrambling to adjust as marketers step up efforts to reach consumers in newer ways that include Web sites, podcasts and video-on-demand.
"The broadcast environment remains tough," Debra Schwartz, a media analyst for Credit Suisse, wrote in a report.
The totals are not complete because only three of the five networks - the new CW, Fox Broadcasting and NBC - have completed their sales. Fox, part of the News Corporation, and CW, owned by the CBS Corporation and Time Warner, finished late last week.
NBC, part of the NBC Universal division of the General Electric Company, finished on Monday.
-The remaining two networks - ABC, owned by the Walt Disney Company, and CBS - are still negotiating with advertisers and agencies. They are expected to finish by Friday, if not sooner.
"People would like to go off for the Fourth of July and be done," said an executive at one network.
In some recent years, when demand from advertisers was particularly strong, the upfront market was completed by Memorial Day.
In other, less frenetic years, the bargaining continued until around Independence Day. Occasionally, when demand was especially soft, the upfront market muddled through the summer and ended by Labor Day.
For decades, the broadcasters took in more during each upfront market than the one before, except when recessions dampened advertiser demand. That reflected a relentless focus on using mass media to reach consumers quickly.
Now, marketers' desire to explore alternatives, particularly digital media, is leading them to divert ad dollars from television or to add money to their budgets specifically for new media.
That significant change has not escaped the attention of the broadcast networks. They are offering marketers opportunities to buy commercial time or ad space in places away from the TV set.
NBC, for instance, has booked an estimated $50 million in digital revenue separate from the broadcast airwaves, said Randy Falco, president and chief operating officer at the NBC Universal Television Group in New York.
An additional $200 million in commercial time that NBC sold during the upfront market was attached to digital deals, Mr. Falco said. NBC sold an estimated $1.9 billion in commercial time in the upfront market, about even with last year.
"We feel very good about where we are, being flat in a down market," Mr. Falco said.
The NBC total of $1.9 billion includes an estimated $200 million in revenue from its new "Sunday Night Football" broadcasts, and the preshows, which start in September. Some industry analysts are reluctant to count football revenue in the upfront market results along with revenue from entertainment programming. Others, however, willingly include it in a network's total.
Estimates are that when ABC is finished, it will have sold about $2.2 billion in commercial time, an increase from the estimated $2.1 billion it sold during the upfront market last year.
ABC is radically remaking its prime-time schedule for 2006-7, hoping to build on the success of series like "Desperate Housewives," "Grey's Anatomy" and "Lost" with nine new series for the fall (and an additional half-dozen waiting in the wings for midseason).
When CBS is done, estimates call for its total to reach $2.4 billion, about the same as last year. That would give CBS the lead among the broadcasters in total sales for the second year in a row.
CBS fared well in 2005-6 with returning shows like "Without a Trace" and scored with several new series like "Ghost Whisperer," "How I Met Your Mother" and "The Unit."
-Fox sold about $1.8 billion in commercial time, compared with $1.6 billion last year. Fox enjoyed high ratings with mainstay series like "American Idol" and "24" and newcomers like "Prison Break."
"Fox is the champion when it comes to charging a premium to reach the 18-to-49 audience," said Mr. Friedman of MediaPost, referring to the age group most coveted by advertisers.
CW, which is replacing the UPN and WB networks, sold about $650 million in commercial time. Last year, WB sold about $625 million and UPN sold about $250 million.
Because ratings for UPN and WB during the 2005-6 season fell below expectations, few analysts expected CW to do better in the upfront market than matching the WB performance last year.
During the upfront market, networks sell anywhere from 65 percent to 90 percent of the commercial time in the coming season. They hold back the remainder to sell during the season in what is called the scatter market.
"The big question now is really what the scatter market is going to be like," Mr. Friedman said. "Many media buyers are saying they want to wait for the scatter market to evaluate the new-media opportunities the networks are offering."
Given the challenging environment the broadcasters are facing, they may consider it a victory that the upfront market is not much lower than last year's.
"We believe that when the dust settles on the upfront market, total broadcast upfront-dollars results will be somewhere in the middle of bullish and bearish," William Drewry, another analyst for Credit Suisse, wrote in a report.
Or as Mr. Friedman put it: "Considering all the alternatives, that the upfront still has the power to do what it does is not so bad. If I were the networks, I'd take the money and run."
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Most Americans don't know Canada is their biggest oil supplier
Last Updated Tue, 27 Jun 2006 16:01:07 EDT
CBC News
A new poll suggests the vast majority of Americans are unaware that Canada is the largest foreign supplier of crude oil to the U.S.
The Canadian American Business Council (CABC) - which represents some of the biggest private sector companies in both countries - said its survey of 1,000 Americans found that only four per cent of respondents thought Canada was the country that provided them with more oil than anyone else.
The survey also found that 41 per cent of Americans asked would support replacing oil from unstable areas of the world with oil from Canada "even if doing so resulted in higher prices for U.S. consumers."
"The findings suggest a foundation of American public support for meaningful initiatives to expand Canadian energy supplies to the U.S.," said CABC chairman Randoph Dove in a statement.
"As more and more Americans recognize Canada as a secure source of energy resources, this support should only increase," he said.
The release of this poll came just as energy-rich Alberta launched a massive lobbying effort in Washington to get across its message that Canada - and especially Alberta - has a stable and secure supply of oil that it's eager to sell the U.S.
Exhibits about Alberta and its vast oil sands deposits occupy a prominent place in this year's Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington.
That's drawn criticism from an environmental lobby group, the National Resources Defence Council, which says the industry and government-sponsored exhibits at the festival make no mention of the "devastating environmental consequences" the council says oil sands mining creates.
The survey was conducted by Vitale & Associates, who interviewed 1,000 people from June 13 to 15. It has a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points.
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US state of Tennessee carries out 2nd execution since 1960
www.chinaview.cn 2006-06-28 18:50:10
WASHINGTON, June 28 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. state of Tennessee carried out its second execution since 1960 early on Wednesday, putting a convicted murderer to death by lethal injection.
Sedley Alley, 50, was pronounced dead at 3:12 a.m. (0712 GMT)on Wednesday at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in west Nashville. His execution was implemented after a federal appeals court panel lifted a stay grant.
Alley was convicted of raping and murdering 19-year-old Marine Suzanne Marie Colins near a U.S. Navy base north of Memphis in 1985.
He claimed during trial that he was not responsible for the murder as he had multiple personalities, but the jury convicted him of the crime in March 1987.
He recanted his confession in 2004 claiming he was innocent, which he said could be proved by DNA tests. This got him a reprieve from the scheduled execution on May 17 to seek court permission for testing.
However, his lawyers failed to persuade the courts to release crime-scene evidence for the testing.
The last Tennessee execution after the 1960 electric chair execution was carried out on a convicted child rapist and murderer in 2000.
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Sweeping up the Waianae Coast
By Crystal Kua and Alexandre Da Silva
The Honolulu Star Bulletin
June 27, 2006
Three city beach parks on the Waianae Coast will undergo major renovation sometime after September, possibly forcing relocation of hundreds of homeless people.
"I want to make it clear here: It's not a targeted approach here at the homeless. We're really talking about cleaning up our parks," Mayor Mufi Hannemann said yesterday.
The mayor's announcement about the cleanup of beach parks in Maili, Nanakuli and Keaau comes months after advocates for the homeless criticized his administration's handling of the night closure of Ala Moana Park that led to 200 homeless people being displaced. The administration said it needed to close the park to do a major cleanup and renovation of the park.
"I think the fact that we're waiting until September will allow for plenty of dialogue and discussion to take place in terms of the state weighing in, social services providers providing us with some suggestions and then obviously the community," Hannemann said.
Hannemann's announcement also came the day before Gov. Linda Lingle is scheduled to hold a meeting tonight in Waianae to discuss homelessness along the Leeward Coast.
Linda Smith, the governor's senior policy adviser, said the Lingle administration is worried about city sweeps at parks and beaches in Waianae that could displace the homeless.
"Whether that will directly affect people who are residing in some of those parks and using them as shelters is too early to be able to say because we don't know the areas that the city plans to approach," Smith said. "But that is certainly one of our concerns."
Smith said although the Lingle administration was able to house many homeless who used to stay at Ala Moana park in a temporary shelter, Waianae might call for a different solution.
"That doesn't mean that the kind of lessons that we learn in the downtown area are appropriate for the people out in the Waianae Coast," she said.
The city first plans a $350,000 renovation of Waianae District Park, but the park will not be closed at night because there is no one currently living in that park.
The work will include repairs to the multipurpose building, painting and minor repairs to the gymnasium and outdoor play courts.
The city then will turn its attention to the three beach parks where the work will include painting and repairing the comfort stations, picnic tables and other buildings. Parking lot and beach roads and curbs will be repaired and re-striped. Workers will also do landscaping as well as painting and repairing of lifeguard towers and repairing sprinklers.
"We want to get back to what taxpayers would like to see with their dollars that our parks should be available for everyone and not just for one segment of the community," Hannemann said.
But Hannemann said that the situation on the Waianae Coast is "a very different situation with respect to many people having been there for many, many, many, many years, that we need to be cognizant of that."
Area residents also said the homeless situation is compounded by the fact that some of those living on the beach have relatives in neighboring communities.
"Our families already come to beach -- some of them live there already," said Waianae resident Maile Hallums.
"This is about the homeless," Hallums emphasized.
Kiki Paglioti, a 49-year-old mother of three, has been sleeping alone in a sea-rusted tent sheltered by mounds of sand in Nanakuli for about eight years. She said homeless people should not be blamed for broken bathrooms and sinks because they would never damage the only places where they can shower.
She said people camping at parks and beaches should be allowed to stay because they have nowhere else to go and are not harming anybody.
She said that since the city started closing Ala Moana Beach Park, more people have been moving to her area and inching closer to Farrington Highway.
"We used to have all the tents in front of the park. We would tell people to stay out of sight, out of mind," said Paglioti, who was evicted from a spacious home for not paying rent for three months while having problems with a boyfriend.
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Police Shoot Man at Las Vegas Airport
By KATHLEEN HENNESSEY
Associated Press
June 28, 2006
LAS VEGAS - Police shot and wounded a man at the city's airport Tuesday after he grabbed a 3-year-old boy at knifepoint and sprinted through a security checkpoint, authorities said.
The 25-year-old man snatched the boy at a toy store in an unsecured area just outside a gate area at McCarran International Airport, officials said. The child was not harmed and was returned to his mother.
The man ran about 20 yards, making it through an exit lane before being confronted by three officers. One officer used a Taser gun to stun the man, police said.
He dropped the child, then charged at the officers, said police spokesman Jose Montoya. Two officers fired once each.
The man was taken to a hospital, Montoya said. His condition was not immediately known, and police did not identify him. No motive was disclosed.
"The system worked," said Elaine Sanchez, airport spokeswoman. "As soon as the breach occurred, the police were in place, and the system worked."
The man had been browsing alone in a Kid's Wear & Toys store for three or four minutes before snatching the child as he and his mother played with toy cars near the back of the store, said Blanca Gomez, a store employee.
"I turned around and saw him run. The lady, she was screaming, 'My baby, my baby!" said Gomez, adding that the man and the mother did not appear to know each other. "It was fast; it was scary."
The airport checkpoint was shut down for about 10 minutes, but there were no delays or interruptions of service at the airport, one of the nation's busiest, Sanchez said.
The shooting is believed to the first at an airport since two federal air marshals fatally shot a passenger at Miami International Airport in December. In that case, the man uttered bomb threats and tried to reboard a plane. It was later learned he had bipolar disorder.
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Security guard shoots man at hotel
WWLTV.com
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
New Orleans Police said a security guard shot a man in the face at a hotel in the Central Business District Tuesday morning.
The shooting happened around 7 a.m. at a hotel in the 100 block of St. Charles Avenue, according to police spokesman Capt. John P. Bryson.
Witnesses said the guard got into an argument with a visitor, 30-year-old Erik R. Beelman, over whose prior military service record was more veracious. The two men began pushing and shoving before throwing punches.
The guard, who Bryson said identified himself as Christopher Marlowe, then pulled out a .40 caliber handgun and shot Beelman once in the face.
Bryson said Marlowe was arrested and booked with aggravated battery. Meanwhile, Beelman was taken to a local hospital where he's listed in critical condition.
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Neocon Nightmare
Americans Target of Massive Domestic Spying Network
Sue Bushell, CIO
27/06/2006 10:41:56
In the US that would make the best custodian of telephone records the telephony companies. It is not yet clear how well those principles have been observed by the US government under its massive domestic surveillance program, yet American's privacy has been put under serious threat nevertheless. USA Today revealed last month that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by "best custodians" AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth.
As American angst over their government's massive domestic spying program soars, the Victorian Privacy Commissioner has warned responsible handling of personal information will increasingly require deft application of the "best custodian principle".
Commissioner Paul Chadwick told the Institute of Public Administration Australia last month the best custodian of a large set of personal data is usually its original collector.
While under the principal various parts of government or the private sector may be authorized to refer to one or more of the large datasets for legitimate purposes, the custodian should always maintain a central role, he warned.
"In the case of the electoral roll, the best custodian is the Electoral Commissioner. For registers of births, deaths and marriages, it is the Registrar. For police databases, it is the police forces that compile them," Chadwick said.
In the US that would make the best custodian of telephone records the telephony companies. It is not yet clear how well those principles have been observed by the US government under its massive domestic surveillance program, yet American's privacy has been put under serious threat nevertheless. USA Today revealed last month that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by "best custodians" AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth.
USA Today claimed the program reached into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans - few of them suspected of any crime. While the NSA has apparently not been listening to or recording conversations, it has been using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, according to USA Today sources.
"It's the largest database ever assembled in the world," one person in the know claimed, adding the agency plans "to create a database of every call ever made" within the nation's borders.
And while the "data custodians" haven't hand over customer names, addresses or other personal information to the government, USA Today notes the phone numbers the NSA collects can easily be cross-checked with other databases to obtain that information.
And political insiders Web site Capitol Hill Blue claims newly-sworn CIA head General Michael Hayden plans to build an even vaster domestic spying network that will "pry into the lives of most Americans around the clock".
Founder and Publisher Doug Thompson claims President George W Bush told Hayden to "take whatever steps necessary" to monitor Americans 24/7 by listening in on their phone calls, bugging their homes and offices, probing their private lives, snooping into their financial records and watching their travel habits.
He claims sources within the CIA, FBI, NSA and Pentagon have warned about Hayden's plans for an expanded, consolidated spy network aimed at Americans, not terrorists, and violating numerous laws that prohibit such activities against citizens of the United States.
According to one longtime CIA operative who may retire early rather than participate in what he sees as an illegal extension of the spy agency's activities: "What Hayden plans to do is not only illegal, it is immoral."
Thomson claims Hayden, who oversaw the NSA's monitoring of phone calls and emails of Americas, plans to consolidate much of the country's domestic spying into a new desk at the CIA, calling it a "domestic terrorism prevention" operation.
And this will almost certainly lead to problems. It's not just that the sheer size of the database will make identifying a presumably small population of terrorists immensely difficult - one blogger likened it to "trying to find a needle in a haystack by adding a million haystacks."
But as Chapman also pointed out last month, there are special data security risks associated with large unique datasets, including the dangers of copying large amounts of personal data onto CDs, or performing large transfers online (e.g. using XML) without robust security measures such as encryption.
He adds: "Experience suggests that where large datasets are put into the hands of those unfamiliar with them, data security problems can grow, even if inadvertently."
All this suggests the spying program is likely to be controversial for a very long time to come.
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Flashback: Bush sets up domestic spy service
BBC
Thursday, 30 June, 2005
US President George W Bush has ordered the creation of a domestic intelligence service within the FBI, as part of a package of 70 new security measures.
The White House says it is enacting the measures to fight international terrorist groups and prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
The authorities will also be given the power to seize the property of people deemed to be helping the spread of WMD. An independent commission recommended the measures earlier this year.
The new measures form part of Mr Bush's overhaul of US intelligence agencies, aimed at bolstering the fight against terrorism and weapons proliferation.
FBI overhaul
The FBI is to be re-organised, and will include another new intelligence body called the National Security Service.
It will assume responsibility for intelligence work within the US, and combine the Justice Department's intelligence, counter-terrorism and espionage units.
Correspondents say the measure is designed to help dissolve the barriers between the FBI and the CIA.
John Negroponte, who was given the new job of US director of national intelligence in April, will be charged with putting the changes into effect.
Other measures include:* An executive order allowing US authorities to seize the assets of any person or any company thought to be aiding the spread of WMD, targeting specifically eight companies including two from North Korea, one from Iran and one from Syria
* The establishment of a national counter-proliferation centre, to centralise US efforts to stop the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons
* Giving control of all overseas human intelligence operations to the CIA
* Seeking the creation of a new assistant attorney general position to centralise responsibility for intelligence and national security at the Justice Department.
'Win for the people'
The Silverman-Robb Commission handed its report to Mr Bush in March.
The commission found that US intelligence on Iraq's WMD had been wrong, and it recommended to the president 74 ways in which the US intelligence effort could be improved.
Mr Bush has now accepted 70 of those recommendations.
White House homeland security adviser Frances Townsend said the new measures were a "win for the American people".
"A stronger, more vibrant intelligence community produces better intelligence products upon which good decisions can be made," she said.
Democrats gave a cautious welcome to the measures.
"The FBI will not get ahead of the terrorist threat if it doesn't have a fully dedicated intelligence service, and now it will," California Representative Jane Harman told CNN.
"But this will require a massive culture change within the FBI, because the guns and badges and the mind-set of the FBI don't totally fit with the challenges of countering terrorism."
The BBC's Adam Brookes in Washington says Americans have long resisted the growth of domestic intelligence agencies, believing they pose a threat to civil liberties.
But Mr Bush can ill-afford politically to see another intelligence failure like that in Iraq on his watch, he says.
Comment: It has been about a year since this article appeared, and there has been no news on the NSS, which is a rather appropriate name when you think about it. Does the NSS exist? If so, why haven't we heard anything more about it?
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GOP bill targets NY Times
By Patrick O’Connor and Jonathan Allen
The Hill
June 28, 2006
House Republican leaders are expected to introduce a resolution today condemning The New York Times for publishing a story last week that exposed government monitoring of banking records.
The resolution is expected to condemn the leak and publication of classified documents, said one Republican aide with knowledge of the impending legislation.
The resolution comes as Republicans from the president on down condemn media organizations for reporting on the secret government program that tracked financial records overseas through the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), an international banking cooperative.
Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-Ariz.), working independently from his leadership, began circulating a letter to House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) during a late series of votes yesterday asking his leaders to revoke the Times's congressional press credentials.
The Standing Committee decides which organizations and reporters can be accredited, according to the rules of both the House and Senate press galleries. Members of that committee are elected by accredited members of those galleries.
"Under no circumstances would we revoke anyone's credentials simply because a government official is unhappy with what that correspondent's newspaper has written," said Susan Milligan, a reporter for the Boston Globe, which is owned by the Times, who also serves the standing chairwoman of the Standing Committee of Correspondents. "The rules say nothing about the stories a newspaper chooses to pursue, or the reaction those stories provoke. The Times clearly meets our standards for credentials."
The Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal all reported the existence of the program on their websites last Thursday.
President Bush criticized the reports during a press event Monday, calling the disclosure "disgraceful" and a "great harm" to national security. Vice President Dick Cheney, who voiced support for the program over the weekend, followed Bush's criticism with harsh words of his own.
In an open letter responding to these criticisms, Times Executive Editor Bill Keller wrote that a free press was the key check on government's abuse of power.
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European secret services helped CIA terror transfers: report
AFP
28/06/2006
European secret services colluded in the detention and secret transfer of terrorist suspects in or across the continent, the author of a key report on the CIA rendition flights said.
Dick Marty, a Swiss parliamentarian who compiled the report for the Council of Europe rights watchdog, said there was no doubt of collaboration.
After formally receiving the report, the pan-European body's parliamentary assembly adopted a resolution noting the "spider's web" of disappearances and unlawful inter-state transfers.
It said countries knowingly helped the United States in illegal operations or turned a blind eye, and had done their best to ensure the details remained secret.
The resolution also urged European nations to examine bilateral agreements with the United States, especially if they hosted US military bases, to ensure they conformed to human rights standards.
"It has been proved that agents from national intelligence services colluded in the handing over and the transportation of persons suspected of terrorism," Marty told the assembly.
Questioned at a news conference afterward, Marty singled out Bosnia, whose government admitted to the inquiry that it had handed six suspects of Algerian origin into US hands in January 2002.
He also pointed to Italian complicity in the February 2003 abduction of the former imam of a Milan mosque, Osama Mustafa Hassan - also known as Abu Omar - who was flown to Egypt where he alleged he was tortured.
In that case, Italian prosecutors hope to put 22 alleged CIA operatives on trial in absentia before the end of the year.
The United States has criticised Marty's report - published on June 7 but presented Tuesday to the Council of Europe - as listing unproven allegations, insisting it has done nothing wrong and that renditions are perfectly legal.
The report said 14 European states had colluded in or tolerated the secret transfer of terrorist suspects by the United States.
It named Bosnia-Hercegovina, Britain, Italy, Macedonia, Germany, Sweden and Turkey as "responsible, at varying degrees ... for violations of the rights of specific persons."
Seven other countries - Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Spain - were also guilty of collusion, it added.
The resolution said the cooperation had "spawned a system that is utterly incompatible with the fundamental principles of the Council of Europe."
"We must have a judicial world order with our friends and allies the United States, but it must be based on values led, in particular, by the Council of Europe," Marty said.
Franco Frattini, vice president of the European Commission, admitted there was little that could be done on a European basis about individual countries' secret services.
Nevertherless, "we must clarify in stricter detail what should be allowed or not," he added.
Reacting to the report, human rights groups urged nations involved to stop helping with renditions and to press the United States to halt the practice.
"European governments should be ashamed of their participation in illegal detentions and they must end their involvement at once," said Joanne Mariner, of Human Rights Watch.
In a statement, the groups, which included Amnesty International, demanded independent public inquiries to probe government involvement in renditions and secret transfers.
They listed 12 recommendations, including beefed-up legislation protecting human rights; changing aviation policy so that aircraft cannot carry prisoners through a state without authorisation; and a pledge not to return suspects to countries where they may face torture even if there are diplomatic assurances they would not be mistreated.
The Strasbourg-based Council of Europe, which is separate from the European Union, was set up after World War II to promote democracy and human rights. It has 46 member states.
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Study shows US electronic voting machines vulnerable
By Thomas Ferraro
Reuters
Tue Jun 27, 2006
WASHINGTON - The nation's three most commonly purchased electronic voting machines are all vulnerable to fraud, a study released on Tuesday found.
The study also concluded, however, that steps could be taken to reduce the chances of hackers breaking into these systems and undermining the integrity of state and national elections.
"These machines are vulnerable to attack. That's the bad news," said Michael Waldman, executive director of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School.
"The good news is that we know how to reduce the risks and the solutions are within reach," Waldman said.
The Brennan Center Task Force on Voting System Security, an initiative of the Brennan Center, conducted the study, which it called the most comprehensive study of electronic voting machines to date.
Larry Norden, chairman of the task force of government and private scientists, voting machine experts and security officials said about 80 percent of voters will vote on one of these electronic systems in November mid-term elections.
Norden said he hopes the study will prompt states and Congress to begin mandating that security measures recommended by the task force be part of the protocol for every county in the United States.
Rep. Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat who has introduced legislation to upgrade security for electronic voting machines, arranged to attend a news conference on Capitol Hill on Tuesday where the report was to be released.
Holt's bill has 192 cosponsors, most of them fellow Democrats, an aide said. He introduced the bill last year and it remained unclear whether Congress would enact it into law.
The measure would require all voting machines to produce a paper record voters could inspect to check the accuracy of their votes and election officials could use to verify votes in the event of a computer malfunction or other irregularity.
"Anything of value should be auditable," said Holt.
"Votes are valuable, and each voter should have the knowledge and the confidence that his or her vote was recorded and counted as intended."
Comment: Ah, the mainstream media. They're only a few years late on this story...
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US Capital First To Try To Test Entire City For HIV
AFP
June 27, 2006
Washington - The first attempt to test an entire city for HIV kicked off Tuesday in Washington D.C., the US capital, which has the highest HIV infection rate in the United States, officials said. "This is the only attempt to get a whole population of a city to know their HIV status," District of Columbia spokeswoman Marcela Howell told AFP.
The six-month effort was expected to cost some eight million dollars to test as many of Washington's 560,000 residents as possible.
The city's call to test residents aged 14-84 raised some eyebrows, especially due to the cost.
"Fourteen is the age many become sexually active," Howell said. "HIV numbers are going up 55 and up, so we're not going to make any arbitrary cutoff as to people's sexual activity."
The campaign is meant to encourage testing and to include HIV screening as part of standard medical checkups.
"We want to make it as routine as blood pressure and diabetes tests," she said.
Howell said there was no single reason the US capital has such a high HIV rate.
"It is a metropolitan city; education has not reached a lot of people about safe sex; poverty. We haven't reached people with enough information," she said, adding that the US Congress, which has direct control over the city, has banned use of local funds for needle exchange programs among drug addicts.
Chip Lewis, a spokesman for the privately funded Whitman-Walker Clinic in Washington, estimated that one million people in the United States are HIV positive.
"And one third don't know they are HIV positive," Lewis said.
"Once someone comes in and tests positive, their doctor's medical treatment can help them live many years," he said.
Testing HIV positive "is not the death sentence it used to be." HIV is the virus which can lead to AIDS.
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VA asking for more money after data theft
By HOPE YEN
Associated Press
Wed Jun 28, 2006
WASHINGTON - Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson promised Congress on Tuesday he could turn his agency into a "model for information security" but said lawmakers will have to be patient.
Nicholson also said the Bush administration was asking for at least $160.5 million in emergency funds for credit monitoring and other measures to protect veterans and military troops whose sensitive personal information was stolen from a VA employee's laptop computer.
Besides covering monitoring for about half of the 17.5 million people whose Social Security numbers were compromised, the money would pay for out-of-pocket expenses ranging from $10,000 to $20,000 for those whose identities are stolen, Nicholson told a House panel.
Under questioning, Nicholson acknowledged that much more money may be needed to revamp information security at the VA and other agencies. He also left the door open to providing veterans more than one year of free credit monitoring following the May 3 burglary at a VA data analyst's home.
"Unfortunately, a very bad thing happened," Nicholson told a House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees VA spending.
"I think we can turn VA into the model for information security," he added. "I will not try to mislead you and delude. This will not be easy and it will not be overnight."
Of the $160.5 million requested for monitoring, Nicholson said, about $29 million will be taken from VA funds budgeted in 2006 to cover personnel costs at the Veterans Benefit Administration. That money would not have been used this year due to hiring plans that already had been pushed back to 2007, he added. The other $131.5 million would be reallocated from other areas of the White House budget.
"It will take some belt tightening. It will not come out of veterans' benefits," Nicholson said.
No reports of identity theft have been reported in connection with the May 3 theft of a computer from the data analyst's home in suburban Maryland. The laptop contained names, birth dates and Social Security numbers for up to 26.5 million people.
Last week, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved $160 million in emergency funds to pay for credit monitoring. It is one of many expected payments as the government struggles with fallout from data thefts and other breaches now crossing at least six agencies.
Earlier in the hearing, the House panel was urged to spend whatever necessary to avoid undue hardships for data theft victims.
David McIntyre, president and CEO of TriWest Healthcare Alliance, which administers the Pentagon's health care program in 21 Western states, proposed creating a central government "nerve center" to assist agencies after any such security breach.
"Unfortunately, as we have all come to realize, the question is not whether another incident of information theft will occur but when," McIntyre said. "Events such as these are happening with increased regularity - and, surely, spending a few million to prepare is preferable to spending hundreds of millions to react."
Rep. James Walsh, R-N.Y., chairman of the House subcommittee, chastised the VA for waiting three weeks to notify veterans about the theft. "This represents a significant lapse of time that could have been vital to protect identity theft," Walsh said.
In his testimony, Nicholson called the burglary a "wake-up call" that should not have come at the expense of veterans, some of whom have challenged the free monitoring in court as potentially inadequate. He said about half of the affected veterans were expected to take the government's offer.
Separately, the VA asked a federal judge to revise his order barring the VA from publicizing its free credit monitoring offer. The VA said it wished to continue providing information to veterans through its Web site and call center and had no intention of asking veterans to relinquish their rights to a potentially larger payout in court.
U.S. District Judge William Bertelsman in Kentucky scheduled a hearing for Friday to determine whether the VA should revise its deal.
The class-action lawsuits, which are pending in Covington, Ky., and Washington, seek free monitoring and other credit protection for an indefinite period as well as $1,000 in damages for each person - or up to $26.5 billion total.
Stacy Hinners, an attorney representing veterans, said veterans did not wish to shut down the call center and Web site but simply wanted the VA to be clear what rights veterans would have if they accepted the free offer.
Veterans groups and lawmakers from both parties have criticized the VA for the theft and noted years of warnings by auditors that information security was lax. The data analyst - who was in the process of being dismissed - had taken the information home on a personal laptop for three years.
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Zionist Occupation
Purim will never be the same
Last update - 06:33 09/06/2006
By Ruth Meisels
w w w . h a a r e t z . c o m
"Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence" by Elliott Horowitz, Princeton University Press, 340 pages, $35
Allow me to begin with a confession: For as long as I can remember, I never liked the holiday of Purim, with its story of the massacre of the gentiles and its message of revenge and rejoicing at the downfall of others. As if hanging Haman's 10 sons were not enough, the Book of Esther goes on to boast that "the other Jews that were in the king's provinces gathered themselves together, and stood for their lives, and had rest from their enemies, and slew of their foes seventy and five thousand" (Esther 9:16). In addition, we read Esther's appalling request that the Jews of Shushan be granted another day to act "according unto this day's decree" - i.e., to slaughter their non-Jewish neighbors brutally. To eliminate any doubt, the author of the Book of Esther emphasizes that this was not a case of self-defense, and that "no man could withstand them; for the fear of them fell upon all people" (9:2). And so every year all that's left for me to do is to grit my teeth during the synagogue reading of the Megillah, taking comfort in the fact that historically, at least, the veracity of this story is very much in doubt.
But then, just after the holiday this year, Elliott Horowitz's book, "Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence," fell into my hands, and I was glad to find in it allies for my aversion to Purim. Since the mid-19th century, I learned, criticism of the Book of Esther seeped into liberal Jewish circles, especially in Victorian England, and various leaders of the community sought to play down the killing and the element of revenge that underlies the holiday.
A "Bible reader adapted for the use of Jewish schools and families," published in 1877 and endorsed by the chief rabbi of Britain, Nathan Marcus Adler, left out many of the gory details that appear in the final chapters of the Book of Esther. Claude Goldsmid-Montefiore, a great nephew of Sir Moses Montefiore, created a stir in 1888 when he published an article in the London-based Jewish Chronicle, harshly criticizing the message of Purim. Choosing his words with care, he declared that he "would not be sorry" if the festival "were to gradually lose its place in our religious calendar."
In his later comments on the Book of Esther in "The Bible for Home Reading," published in 1896, Montefiore was perhaps the first Jew to describe the events of its final chapters as "a massacre of unresisting Gentiles." "If the Bible had not included the Book of Esther," he concluded, "it would have gained rather than lost in religious value and moral worth."
But 19th-century liberals were not the first to criticize the Book of Esther. Censure first came from ecclesiastic circles, and especially the Protestant Church. Back in 1543, in his infamous essay entitled "On the Jews and Their Lies," Martin Luther remarked on how much the Jews "love the Book of Esther, which so well fits their bloodthirsty, vengeful, murderous greed and hope." Elsewhere, he described the book as "too Jewish," and in a seemingly unholy alliance with Jewish liberals hundreds of years later, Luther wrote that he wished the book had never existed. Over the generations, his disciples continued to portray it as the most bloodthirsty, and hence the most "unchristian," book in the Old Testament.
In the Jewish world, however, criticism of the Book of Esther was always a minority view, not reflective of the mainstream. And it is the mainstream approach that stands at the basis of Horowitz's central - and provocative - thesis regarding Jewish violence against non-Jews, especially, though not exclusively, on the festival of Purim.
In contrast to the anti-Semitic stereotype of the Jew as weak, passive and effeminate, Horowitz postulates that throughout the ages, Jews committed their share of violence, which has always peaked around Purim. Even if the bloody account in the Book of Esther lacks historical credence, the very fact that the acts described in it were glorified every year created a tradition of vengeance and violence, as well as the opportunity to act those feelings out.
It is true that Zionism, especially after Israel's occupation of the territories following the Six-Day War in 1967, allowed Jewish violence against the Arab "Amalekites" to flourish, but according to Horowitz, the seeds for such behavior were planted long before. Haman "the Agagite" is described in the Book of Esther as a scion of the Amalekites - a label applied over the years to the Romans, the Armenians, the Christians, the Nazis and in our day, by many rabbis, to the Arabs. And Amalek, as is well known, must be wiped out.
Mocking Jesus
In the year 408 C.E., the Roman emperor Theodosius II issued an edict prohibiting the Jews from "setting fire to Aman in memory of his past punishment, in a certain ceremony of their festival, and from burning with sacrilegious intent a form made to resemble the saint cross in contempt of the Christian faith." In other words, the custom of mocking Jesus and the cross in Purim processions, which Horowitz discusses at length in the second half of the book, was already common in the fifth century C.E. Theodosius' edict, explains Horowitz, did not put an end to the anti-Christian traditions of the holiday. The combination of a narrative of divine salvation of the Jews and the vengeance taken on their enemies with the carnival atmosphere and the drinking that is characteristic of Purim, led to behavior that was very different from the stereotype of the meek Diaspora Jew.
The second half of the book begins with various accounts of Jewish debasement of the cross during the Middle Ages, not only on Purim. Horowitz cites dozens of instances, many of them conspicuously missing from modern Jewish historiography, of symbolic Jewish violence - or "violence against symbols," to be more exact - that included setting fire to, and spitting and publicly urinating on, the cross. Such acts often ended in "martyrdom," i.e., the death of the perpetrator, or harm to the entire community. These are the "reckless rites" that give the book its title, and are linked to Mordechai's stubborn but unexplained refusal to bow down to Haman in the Book of Esther.
To return to the present, in October 2004 a student at the Har Hamor yeshiva in Jerusalem, Natan Zvi Rosenthal, spat at the Armenian archbishop as he was walking in a holiday procession in Jerusalem's Old City, carrying a large cross. This incident, which sparked a public outcry and was reported widely in the local media, is portrayed in the book as a link in the long chain of Jewish violence against Christianity and Christian symbols. (To complicate matters further, the Armenians have been described in Jewish writings since the 10th century as descendents of Amalek.) Rosenthal's shameful act must thus be viewed in its historical context: as a direct continuation of the Jewish tradition of public disdain for the cross.
Unconcealed agenda
In the final chapters of the book, Horowitz broadens the historical discussion, moving from violence against Christian symbols to physical violence against Christians themselves. The most serious charge discussed at length here is that Jews participated in the massacre of tens of thousands of Christian captives in Jerusalem in the year 614 C.E., after the Persian conquest of the city.
Other incidents cited by the author are few and far between: the murder of a Christian boy during a Purim parade near Antioch, Syria in the fifth century C.E.; the 12th-century execution on Purim of a Christian who murdered a Jew in Brie, in northern France (carried out with the approval of the authorities); and a violent incident within the community, when a Jewish couple accused of adultery in 14th-century Provence was physically assaulted at a Purim parade. What is interesting here, more than the incidents themselves, is Horowitz's brilliant historiographical analysis of what inspired the documentation of these incidents - from the enthusiasm of a handful of Christian historians seeking to draw attention to Jewish violence, to the efforts of modern Jewish historians to whitewash and downplay them.
Meanwhile, the author himself makes no attempt to conceal his own agenda. On the contrary, in his introductory chapter he lays all his cards on the table: "I have therefore chosen, somewhat recklessly, to begin not at the beginning but at the end," drawing our attention to the lessons for today that emerge from his historical research. Since Baruch Goldstein's massacre of Muslims at prayer at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron on Purim 1994, he writes, "for me and for many others, Purim has never been the same." In effect, it was this event that brought him to widen the scope of his study, which had originally been planned to end with the 19th century. His moral compass is Mordechai's warning to Esther: "For if thou holdest thy peace at this time" (4:14).
As a Jewish historian, Horowitz felt that he could no longer hold his peace and not speak up about the connection between the legacy of Jewish violence and the current actions of "Jews in the Holy Land [who] are still avenging the 'old and new quarrel' against those they consider to be 'Amalekites,' [while] their malice is hardly as impotent as it was in the distant days of Theodosius II."
Horowitz quotes rabbis and settler leaders who equate the Palestinians with Amalek. He describes the Purim processions in Hebron that are becoming more violent from year to year, ever since a group of Jews moved into the Beit Hadassah neighborhood to "renew" Jewish settlement in the city in 1981 - and chose to do so, significantly, on Purim.
Toward the end of his sweeping study, Horowitz returns to his breaking point - the massacre at the Tomb of the Patriarchs - and concludes with sadness: "The continued celebration of Purim in the streets of central Jerusalem after the news broke of the bloody massacre in Hebron [is] one particular instance in which I would agree with [Samuel Hugo] Bergman's prophetic assertion that the holiday's continued observance is best understood as a consequence of the 'deep decay of our people.'"
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Israeli army enters Gaza
Guardian Staff and agencies
Wednesday June 28, 2006
The Israeli army entered southern Gaza today in an attempt to prompt the release of an Israeli soldier taken hostage by Palestinian militants.
Tanks and soldiers began taking up positions in two locations east of the town of Rafah under the cover of tank shells. Palestinians dug in behind walls and sand embankments, bracing for a major offensive.
An Israeli army spokeswoman confirmed the troops had moved into Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing.
A Hamas leader urged fighters to confront the Israeli soldiers, Reuters reported. "Fight your enemies, who came to their deaths. Grab your rifles and resist," Nizar Rayan said in a radio message.
It was the first Israeli ground offensive in Gaza since it pulled out of the territory last summer, tearing down all 21 Jewish settlements and evacuating all troops.
Israeli planes also attacked three bridges and the main Gaza power station, knocking out electricity in most of the coastal strip.
The Israeli military said that the object of the attacks on the bridges in Gaza was "to impair the ability of the terrorists to transfer the kidnapped soldier".
No casualties were reported in any of the attacks.
Israeli military officials said that the prime minister, Ehud Olmert, had approved a "limited operation" for southern Gaza, aimed at "terrorist infrastructure".
The strikes came amid intensive diplomatic efforts in the Arab world and by the UN. The US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, urged Israel to "give diplomacy a chance".
Israeli TV reported that international mediators involved in talks with the kidnappers had given up, saying negotiations were going nowhere. An Egyptian official said that talks with Hamas officials in Gaza were "on hold" but insisted negotiations were still taking place with Hamas leaders in Syria.
Hamas yesterday agreed to surrender control of the Palestinian government in favour of a power-sharing administration committed to a negotiated two-state settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
It struck a deal with the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, who belongs to the rival Fatah party, that commits all parties in the Palestinian government to recognise Israel.
But Israel said only freedom for the captive soldier, Corporal Gilad Shalit, 19, could defuse the crisis, not a political agreement.
Cpl Shalit was abducted by Palestinian militants during a raid on an Israeli army post near Gaza on Sunday in which two Israeli soldiers and two militants were killed.
"We want to bring our soldier home, that is our only goal," said the Israeli minister of national infrastructure, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, a retired general and former defence minister.
"The goal is not to search [for Cpl Shalit], the goal is to cause them to send Gilad home ... They have to understand we won't just sit quietly."
The Israeli justice minister, Haim Ramon, said Israel would try to assassinate a Hamas leader based in Damascus, Khaled Mashaal, who Israel believes gave the order for the kidnapping.
"He is definitely in our sights ... he is a target," Mr Ramon told army radio. "Khaled Mashaal, as some who is overseeing, actually commanding the terror acts, is definitely a target."
Overnight, Israeli planes fired at least nine missiles at Gaza's only power station, cutting electricity to 65% of the Gaza Strip, engineers at the station said.
The attack raised the spectre of a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, as water pumps in the strip are powered by electricity. Some power in Gaza City was restored by tapping into electricity supplied by Israel in northern Gaza.
Warplanes also flew low over Gaza City, rocking the city with sonic booms and shattering windows.
Early today, Israeli warplanes attacked one of the bridges for a second time, Palestinian security officials said. A public works official said it would take three months to repair the main bridge linking northern and southern Gaza, a coastal area that is home to about 1.3 million Palestinians.
Masked militants from various armed factions took up defensive positions around Gaza City in the northern part of the strip, instructing drivers to turn off headlights.
Militants said they fired a rocket at the Israeli village of Nahal Oz, where Israeli forces are concentrated in a staging area.
An Associated Press reporter saw tanks moving on the Israeli side of the border fence.
In the Shajaiyeh neighborhood of Gaza City, not far from the fence, armed militants took up positions across from the blaring headlights of Israeli vehicles, and Israeli attack helicopters hovered overhead. Earlier today, Israeli forces fired machine guns at the empty streets, witnesses said.
The militants told residents to leave the area. They piled gasoline-soaked tires in the streets. Earlier, bulldozers blocked some of the main roads with piles of sand and dirt to try to slow down Israeli tanks.
The militants who seized Cpl Shalit have demanded the release of hundreds of Palestinian women and children held in Israeli jails in exchange for information about the captured soldier.
Complicating matters was a new claim by the Hamas-linked Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), one of the three groups that carried out Sunday's assault, that it had also kidnapped a Jewish settler in the West Bank.
An Israeli police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld, told Associated Press the report was being taken "very seriously," and military officials said there was "rising fears" the claim was true.
After Israel launched its Gaza assault, the PRC threatened to kill its hostage.
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Israel launches air strike after talks for release of soldier fail
Last Updated Tue, 27 Jun 2006 22:07:01 EDT
CBC News
Israeli planes attacked three bridges in northern Gaza late Tuesday following reports that negotiations have failed to secure the release of an Israeli soldier abducted by Palestinian gunmen in the Gaza Strip.
Israeli tanks and troops have also entered Gaza and are reported to be taking up positions in two locations east of Rafah.
Israel had been massing troops and armour around Gaza since Sunday and had been threatening a ground invasion of the Palestinian territory if militants refused to release Cpl. Gilad Shalit.
But officials with the Israeli Defence Force told CBC News that they are operating under the assumption that Shalit is still alive and that the attack on the bridges was to prevent him from being transported out of the Gaza Strip.
Earlier Tuesday, Israeli television Channel Two said that there is "zero chance" that the talks would secure the release of Shalit, increasing the chance of a major Israeli offensive against Gaza.
Israel has already sealed the borders of the long narrow strip that is home to more than one million Palestinians. Early Wednesday warplanes hit Gaza's power station, cutting electricity to the district.
Shalit, 19, was abducted Sunday after Palestinian gunmen dug a 600-metre tunnel under the Gaza border and attacked a remote guard post. Two Israeli soldiers were also killed in the attack.
The military wing of the ruling Hamas party - Izzedine al-Qassam - as well as the Popular Resistance Committees and the Army of Islam, all claimed responsibility for the attack.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has refused a demand for the release of about 500 Palestinian women and children detained in Israel in exchange for information about the captured soldier.
Egyptian, Jordanian and French diplomats have been trying to negotiate Shalit's freedom. Shalit also holds French citizenship.
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Israel not to let Abbas out of Gaza Strip: 'Total closure' clamped
AFP
June 28 2006
JERUSALEM - Israel will not allow Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to leave the Gaza Strip, part of the closure clamped on the territory after the abduction of an Israeli soldier, military officials said on Tuesday.
Israel massed tanks and troops on the Gaza border and threatened harsh military retaliation for a raid on Sunday by Palestinian militants. They tunnelled under the border and attacked an Israeli army post at a crossing point, killing two soldiers and capturing a third.
In a speech on Monday, Mr Olmert announced the total closure on Gaza. "This is the first in a series of steps which we will consider, with patience but determination, and without compromise, in order to make it clear to everyone that this terror must stop," he told Jewish leaders in Jerusalem.
As part of the siege, Israel closed four crossings with the Gaza Strip and thus blocked all traffic of goods into and out of the area, the army said.
On Tuesday it emerged that the travel ban included Abbas, who usually enjoys free passage between Gaza and the West Bank through Israel.
Israeli military officials said that Abbas would not be allowed to return to the West Bank, as part of an Israeli closure on the Gaza Strip meant to press the militants to release the soldier, who is believed alive. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity since they were not authorized to talk to reporters.
A spokesman for Mr Abbas, Nabil Abu Rdeneh, said that the Palestinian leader had not yet tried to leave the coastal area, since he was closely following efforts to release an Israeli soldier kidnapped by Palestinian militants during an attack against Israel on Sunday.
The closure imposed on Sunday has prevented hundreds of Palestinian merchants from leaving the area and Palestinian fisherman from sailing off the Mediterranean coast, the army said.
Also, hundreds of Palestinians trying to get into the Gaza Strip were stranded on Tuesday on the Egyptian side of the border at the Palestinian-controlled Rafah crossing, which was closed since European monitors could not reach the area through an Israeli crossing, said the director of security at the Palestinian crossings, Salim Abu Safiah.
According to a U.S.-mediated agreement, the Palestinians agreed to have EU monitors stationed at Rafah when they took over the crossing after Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip last summer.
The closure of Rafah meant that many Palestinians who need medical treatment abroad were unable to leave Gaza, Abu Safiah said.
Israel said it was allowing Palestinians with medical needs to exit through the Erez crossing between northern Gaza and Israel.
PRISONER RELEASE: Israel rejected a demand by Palestinian militants to release Palestinian women and youths in its prisons in return for information on the abducted Israeli soldier.
Izz el-Deen al-Qassam, the governing Hamas movement's armed wing, along with the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) and the Islamic Army, said Israel would not get information about the soldier unless it freed all jailed Palestinian women and youths.
"The question of releasing prisoners is not on the agenda of the Israeli government at all," Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in a speech. "The time is approaching for a comprehensive, sharp and severe Israeli operation. We will not wait forever," he said. "We will not become a target of Hamas-terrorist blackmail."
Comment: And, please, Mr Olmert, tell us when the much more aggressive and bloody Israel terror will stop...
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Israeli Occupation Forces Paralyze Lives of Civilians in the Gaza Strip
PCHR
27 June 2006
PCHR views with gravity the collective punishment currently being imposed by IOF on the civilian population of the Gaza Strip. This punishment is being inflicted through the complete land and sea closure of the Gaza Strip, including the closure of Rafah International Crossing Point on the border with Egypt, prevention of fishermen from going out to sea and constant aerial surveillance.
In addition, PCHR is apprehensive over the consequences of the current situation, following the military operation near Kerem Shalom checkpoint on Sunday 25 June 2006, and the possibility of a wide scale ground offensive in the Gaza Strip. The operation resulted in the death of two Palestinians from the group that conducted the operation and two IOF soldiers. Another IOF soldier was taken prisoner during the operation.
According to field information, Rafah International Crossing Point was closed on 21 June 2006, due to the absence of the European monitors. The spokesperson for the monitors indicated that they did not come to the crossing due to an Israeli security alert regarding an impending attack on Kerem Shalom checkpoint. The crossing has been completely closed since Sunday, 25 June 2006, following the military operation at Kerem Shalom. Hundreds of Palestinian travelers are stuck on the Egyptian side of the border. Among these travelers are women, children, elderly and ill persons returning after medical treatment in Egypt. They are enduring inadequate living and health conditions while waiting to enter Gaza.
Furthermore, IOF have closed the other crossings into the Gaza Strip: El-Muntar (Karni) Commercial Crossing; Beit Hanoun (Erez) Crossing - designated for workers, humanitarian cases and international workers; Sofa Crossing - designated for construction material; and Kerem Shalom Crossing - used for food and medical humanitarian assistance.
It is noted that the closure of Gaza Strip border crossings, since the Border Crossings Agreement between the Palestinian National Authority and Israel on 15 November 2005, has created a disastrous economic and humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip. Since the signing of the agreement, El-Muntar Crossing has been completely closed for 96 days and partially closed for 162 days. As a result, the import and export of medicine and other commodities was kept at a standstill for the majority of this time, causing further economic strangulation of the Gaza Strip and a lack of essential goods such as milk and fruits in the local market. In addition, agricultural and industrial exports from the Strip have been barred.
PCHR calls upon the international community to exert pressure on IOF to respect International Humanitarian Law, especially the Fourth Geneva Convention, and to immediately end the closure and isolation that is worsening an already dire situation in the Gaza Strip. The continuation of the closure will have catastrophic effects on the living conditions of civilians and accentuate the existing problems of poverty and unemployment. PCHR calls upon the international community to pressure IOF to reopen El-Muntar Crossing, Sofa Crossing, Beith Hanoun Crossing and Rafah International Crossing Point, in order to allow Palestinians enjoy their rights to freedom of movement and to import and export goods. The lifting of the closure will put an end to the daily suffering of nearly 1.5 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, whose civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights are currently being violated.
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Hamas denies deal recognizes Israel
Last Updated Tue, 27 Jun 2006 16:30:21 EDT
CBC News
Rival Palestinian factions Fatah and Hamas agreed on a plan Tuesday to end their power struggle, but Hamas denied earlier reports that the deal implicitly recognized Israel.
The agreement follows weeks of acrimonious negotiations surrounding the document, which was written earlier this year by Palestinian inmates in Israeli prisons.
The 18-point proposal calls for a Palestinian state alongside Israel. But Palestinian minister Abdel Rahman Zeidan told the BBC Tuesday that the deal does not recognize the state of Israel.
"There is no agreement between the Palestinians on specifically this phrase," the BBC quoted Zeidan as saying. "You will not find one word in the document clearly stating the recognition of Israel as a state. Nobody has agreed to this. This was not on the table. This was not in the dialogue."
In Washington, White House spokesperson Tony Snow said the United States will not change its position toward the Palestinian government until Hamas recognizes Israel.
"Let's wait until we see something for real," said Snow.
Tensions running high
The development comes against a backdrop of rising tensions along the Israeli-Gaza border.
Hundreds of tanks and armoured personnel carriers are gathering near northern Gaza as foreign negotiators work to win the release of an Israeli soldier. He was abducted by Palestinian militant groups, including the military wing of Hamas.
A militant organization that rejects Israel's right to exist, Hamas won a surprise victory in January's parliamentary elections.
The group, whose founding charter calls for the destruction of the Jewish state, has claimed responsibility for dozens of attacks inside Israel.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, of Hamas, have been locked in a power struggle for weeks, including a number of bloody battles between their security forces on the streets of Gaza.
Abbas has promoted the plan as a way to restart international funding for the Palestinian Authority, cut off by a number of Western countries after Hamas took over control of the government.
The economic embargo has led to a growing humanitarian crisis in the Palestinian Territories as tens of thousands of government workers haven't been paid for months.
Abbas, seen by many in the international community as key to restarting peace talks, had threatened to call a Palestinian referendum on the document.
Israel has called the prisoners' document an internal Palestinian affair and repeated a call for Hamas to reject violence and recognize the Jewish state.
Negotiated in secret by Palestinians serving time in Israeli prisons, the deal's signers include Sheikh Abdul Khaleq al-Natsheh of Hamas and Marwan Barghouti of Fatah, one of the most popular Palestinian political leaders.
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Bush's Current Mess
57 percent of Americans want Iraq withdrawal plan: poll
www.chinaview.cn 2006-06-27 23:22:40
WASHINGTON, June 27 (Xinhua) -- Fifty-seven percent of Americans want the U.S. Congress to pass a resolution to outline a plan for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq, according to the latest survey results released by The USA Today on Tuesday.
The USA Today/Gallup poll also found precisely half of the respondents support withdrawing all U.S. forces immediately or within 12 months.
The percentage of Americans who say U.S. President George W. Bush has "a clear plan for handling the situation in Iraq" has dropped to 31 percent, a new low.
The poll was taken Friday through Sunday among 1,000 U.S. adults.
The results show the public support for the ideas behind the Democrat Party's proposals, though they were defeated in the Senate last week.
One of the proposals called for starting withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq by year's end and withdrawing all U.S. combat troops from Iraq by July 1, 2007.
Another proposal was a nonbinding resolution that called on the government to start "a phased redeployment of U.S. forces" by this year's end but did not set a deadline for completion.
Meanwhile, an uptick in optimism toward the war after the killing of al-Qaida operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi earlier this month seems to have evaporated.
Richard Eichenberg, a scholar at Tufts University who studies presidential polling, said public views on Iraq are too set to be changed by momentary developments, even positive ones.
"The other piece of quote-unquote 'good news' is the unity government in Iraq, but it's not as if we're hearing that they have made great strides in eliminating the militia influence or violence anywhere in Iraq," he said, adding "there's still a steady drumbeat of bad news."
When asked about the survey, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Bush "is not going to conduct the war based on polls."
"His leadership is based on his strategy for victory. A democratic Iraq in the heart of the Middle East will strike a blow to the terrorists and ensure a more peaceful world. As the president has said, we are in it to win," she said.
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Reservists shoulder heavy burden in Iraq
By ANTONIO CASTANEDA
Associated Press
Tue Jun 27, 2006
FALLUJAH, Iraq - Unlike many Marines in this dangerous city, Staff Sgt. George Scott could have said "no." He could have stayed home in Ohio with his two young sons. Pentagon rules limit the number of times reservists like Scott can be called to duty involuntarily. But Scott keeps coming back. He's on his third tour now, and said he'd volunteer for a fourth.
"I like to be a Marine, leading Marines, and being around them," said Scott, who in civilian life is a car dealer service manager in Orwell, Ohio.
With the war in Iraq still raging after three years and the full-time military stretched thin, the Pentagon is counting on, and courting, committed volunteers like Scott to fill the ranks.
Scott served earlier in Iraq with another unit, but volunteered to help the 1st Battalion, 25th Regiment, 4th Marine Division, when it was looking for more troops. Many others also agreed to deploy again: about half of the 500 original members of the 1st Battalion are in Iraq by choice, said Gunnery Sgt. Pete Walz, a spokesman for the reserve battalion stationed in Fort Devens, Mass.
The 1st Battalion's numbers shows the increasing reliance on volunteers from the reserves and the National Guard, even as the total number of reserve units is going down.
The extended Iraq conflict, and the Afghanistan fight, have forced U.S. commanders to use reserve forces more heavily than at any other time in recent decades.
During the Vietnam War, active duty troops did the vast majority of the fighting. In Iraq, by comparison, the reserve troops made up half of the ground force for much of last year.
After signs that the reserve system was in trouble - including a major recruiting shortfall by the Army National Guard - the Pentagon moved to reduce the numbers of reservists called up. Of the roughly 127,000 U.S. troops in Iraq today, the number has dropped to about 21 percent, said Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke, a Pentagon spokeswoman.
U.S. commanders have said part-time troops will play a much smaller combat role for the remainder of the war.
But reservists haven't shared only the duty, they've shared the toll. In 2004, about 20 percent of the 845 U.S. military deaths in Iraq came from the reservists' ranks. In the first nine months of 2005 - when an Army National Guard division was sent into battle for the first time since the Korean War - reservists accounted for 36 percent of 595 U.S. deaths.
Though many reservists and national guardsmen in Iraq have been assigned to support roles, others have been sent to some of the most violent areas of the country. Scott's battalion is responsible for Fallujah, the former insurgent stronghold where militants are trying to make inroads.
It's no less dangerous for these reservists than for the active-duty Marines.
Last year one battalion of Marine reservists in western Iraq suffered 48 fatalities during a seven-month tour. In the summer of 2005, the Army's Georgia National Guard was stationed in Mahmoudiyah, one of Iraq's most dangerous areas, and quickly suffered several deaths before being moved to a calmer area.
But despite the long deployments, the risks, and fears of an extended Iraq conflict that have driven many away, others continue to volunteer.
In Fallujah, the Marine reservists who volunteered said they did so for many reasons, ranging from patriotism, to a sense of camaraderie with other troops from their hometowns, to the opportunity to save money.
"What I tell a lot of people is that we've got to finish what we started," said Staff Sgt. Christopher Hale, of Albany, N.Y., a correctional officer back home who now oversees one of six checkpoints leading into Fallujah. "I knew they needed a staff (noncommissioned officer), and the other guy wasn't going."
Some Marines, particularly those with wives and children, acknowledged the stress of being away for months. Sgt. Mark Sabourin, a carpenter back home in Bellingham, Mass., said he had a child back home who was "attached to his hip" but yet he still agreed to deploy to Iraq for the second time.
"My biggest reason was to take care of my Marines," said Sabourin, 37, noting that his battalion had several young Marines with only two years of experience. "I wouldn't feel right sitting at home watching these guys on TV, doing what they need to do. That's not why I joined the Marine Corps."
Sgt. Recordo Demetrius, a mechanic taking a break from repairing a Humvee damaged by a roadside bomb, said his wife was a "little reluctant" about his second tour in Iraq. He acknowledged that the stress of deployments often falls on relatives back home.
"I think it's harder for the families back home than the Marines who are doing it. Some of them understand. Others are like, 'Why are you doing it?'" said Demetrius, a New York City police officer.
While sometimes their families lack confidence in the mission, many of these Marines said they see important gains in Iraq.
"Every day I think about going home. But if I had the opportunity, I wouldn't. I'd stay here," said Sgt. Manuel Felicio, 31, a native of Rhode Island, on his first tour.
Scott too says he thinks about home, and looks forward to spending time at the end of this deployment with his sons, ages 6 and 10. "It's wearing a little bit, since my boys are at the age where I should be teaching them to throw a football, how to fish," he said.
Comment: Can you tell the 4th of July is coming up?
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Army wives get phone death threats from Iraq
By Sean Rayment, Defence Correspondent
The Telegraph
25/06/2006
Wives and family members of soldiers fighting in Iraq have received telephone calls, believed to include death threats, from insurgents, according to military documents seen by The Sunday Telegraph.
The "nuisance" calls have been made with increasing frequency over the past few weeks after insurgents managed to obtain home numbers from soldiers' mobile telephones.
The growing number of calls has led to an investigation by the Royal Military Police, which has issued a warning to all soldiers in Iraq to take great care when using mobile telephones to call home.
The extent of the problem emerged in a restricted Army document issued to soldiers of the London Regiment, a Territorial Army unit, which has soldiers from its ranks serving in Iraq.
The document warns soldiers preparing to take part in operations that insurgents in southern Iraq have managed to obtain the home telephone numbers of soldiers by using electronic intercept devices to hack into mobile phone systems.
It is understood that the threats range from claims that a husband or son is dead or will be killed fighting in Iraq, to verbal abuse. Many of those who have received calls say that they were made by people with a poor command of English or with a Middle Eastern accent.
The military document states that there have been "many instances in the last weeks of relatives and friends of personnel serving abroad on operations getting nuisance phone calls" from Iraq.
It adds: "Investigations indicate that the 'callers' of these nuisance calls have acquired the numbers from personnel using their own mobiles to phone. This is fairly easy using today's technology. It makes no difference whether the mobile is of UK origin or sourced abroad.
The MoD is keen to establish the extent of these nuisance calls, to determine whether there is a pattern to them. All ranks are to be aware of the possibility of receiving nuisance calls if using mobiles to phone home."
Since the start of the war in Iraq, a number of high profile soldiers are believed to have received death threats from opponents of the war.
Cpl Mark Byles, who won the Military Cross in 2004 after leading members of the 1st Bn of the Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment in a bayonet charge, received a death threat after his story appeared in the press. Abu Baker Mansha was later sentenced to eight years imprisonment for plotting to kill the soldier.
The Ministry of Defence confirmed that families of soldiers serving in Iraq had received "nuisance calls", including people calling the homes of soldiers from Iraq then hanging up.
The spokesman said: "We would not describe this as sinister. We have no evidence of anyone receiving any death threats."
Comment: "...insurgents in southern Iraq have managed to obtain the home telephone numbers of soldiers by using electronic intercept devices to hack into mobile phone systems."
Yeah, right. Their country is in shambles, but these "insurgents" just happen to have some spare, very high-tech pieces of equipment for eavesdropping on cell phone conversations?!
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No amnesty for killers of US troops: Iraqi PM
Reuters
28.06.2006
BAGHDAD - Insurgents who have killed U.S. troops in Iraq would not be pardoned under the Iraqi government's amnesty plan, American newspapers quoted Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki as saying on Wednesday.
On Sunday, Maliki, a Shiite who has pledged to ease violence gripping Iraq, unveiled a "national reconciliation" that included an amnesty for insurgents "who did not take part in criminal and terrorist acts and war crimes."
"The amnesty doesn't include those who have killed Iraqis or even coalition forces because those soldiers came to Iraq under international agreements to help Iraq," Maliki said in an interview with a group of newspapers that included The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.
The announcement of the vaguely worded plan prompted a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers to condemn any move that would pardon insurgents who had attacked U.S. soldiers. More than 2,500 American soldiers have died in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.
Maliki has said the plan is aimed at bringing Sunni Arab insurgents into the political process.
Some Sunni leaders call attacks against U.S. troops "legitimate resistance" against foreign occupiers.
The plan has been the subject of intense negotiation among the fractious sectarian and ethnic parties in the governing coalition.
Comment: Hmmm...I think I smell a double standard somewhere....
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U.S. soldier who killed Iraqi man released from prison
China Post
26/06/2006
A U.S. Army soldier convicted of fatally shooting an Iraqi cow herder in the back of the head was released from a U.S. military prison almost a year early, his attorney said.
Army Spec. Edward Richmond Jr., 22, was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced in August 2004 to three years in prison for the April 28, 2004, shooting death of Muhamad Husain Kadir in the village of Taal Al Jal, which is about 40 miles (65 kilometers) southwest of Kirkuk.
Richmond was released Friday on parole from an Oklahoma military prison, his attorney told The Dayton Daily News for a story published Sunday.
"He told me this morning it feels good to be free," said Richmond's father, Edward Richmond Sr.
Richmond Jr. said that he shot Kadir because he thought he lunged at the soldier who was holding him, Sgt. Jeffrey D. Waruch, and that he wasn't aware Kadir's hands were bound. (Ed: Sure!)
Waruch was accused in another shooting, in which a 13-year-old girl was killed and her mother and sister wounded. Waruch was discharged without being accused of a crime. Army officials determined it was unlikely they would find sufficient evidence against him.
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Moscow Blames U.S. for Russian Hostages Death in Iraq
Created: 27.06.2006 20:09 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 20:10 MSK
MosNews
Russia intends to keep in contact with the coalition forces to determine their level of responsibility in the death of the Russian diplomats earlier kidnapped in Iraq, Russian presidential envoy for international cooperation in fighting terrorism and transnational organized crime Anatoly Safonov quoted by Interfax has said.
"We are saying openly that it is either governmental institutions or coalition forces that are responsible for order," Safonov told journalists in Moscow on Tuesday.
"First of all - and I hope this will be also said at the UN - we need to emphasize the uniqueness of the situation concerning security in Iraq, express our condemnation of what has happened, and call for drawing conclusions from this," Safonov said
First Vice-Speaker of the Russian State Duma, Lyubov Sliska, joined Safonov in blaming the coalition.
"We can see how the coalition forces are 'restoring order'," she said.
"Every day dozens of innocent people are dying, and now diplomats are geting killed, too. The responsibility for what is going on in Iraq lies upon those who sought mass destruction weapons here, but found nothing," she said.
On Sunday, Arab in an Internet statement an al-Qaida terrorist group in Iraq said it had executed the four employees of the Russian Embassy in revenge for what they claimed was "the torture, killing and expulsion of our brothers and sisters by the infidel Russian government" in Chechnya.
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Russia takes aim at coalition over murders of diplomats in Iraq
27/06/2006
RIA Novosti
MOSCOW - A Russian presidential envoy said Tuesday that Russia would determine how far coalition forces in Iraq were responsible for the execution by Islamic extremists of four Russian diplomats there.
"We must determine the responsibility of the forces that should be keeping order," Anatoly Safonov said. "We openly say that if a state guarantees order, then state structures should bear responsibility, and if it's coalition forces, then they should keep order, and we will be in contact with them."
Russia's foreign minister said Tuesday that his country would make every effort to bring to justice the murderers of the four diplomats.
ergei Lavrov told journalists that efforts were being taken so that "the relatives of the four men can receive and bury the bodies of our comrades, and so that the criminals who committed this ghastly crime are found and brought to justice."
On Sunday, Arab television channel Al Jazeera reported referring to an Internet statement made by al-Qaeda in Iraq that terrorists had executed the four men in revenge for what they claimed was "the torture, killing and expulsion of our brothers and sisters by the infidel Russian government" in Chechnya.
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Baghdad crackdown stumbles
Wed, June 28, 2006
BAGHDAD -- The U.S. military conceded yesterday that violence had fallen only slightly in Baghdad in the two weeks since 75,000 Iraqi and American troops flooded the capital.
The evaluation came as 18 more Iraqis fell victim to sectarian and insurgent violence, including five people whose bodies were found dumped in Baghdad. The U.S. military also announced the deaths of a marine and three soldiers.
Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, spokesman for U.S. forces in Iraq, said the overwhelming security operation launched two weeks ago to rein in violence in Baghdad was moving more slowly than hoped.
"It's going to take some time. We do not see an upward trend. We ... see a slight decrease but not of the degree we would like to see at this point," he said at a news conference
However, Caldwell added, "we don't see this as turning into a civil war right now."
U.S. officials hope the willingness of leading Sunni Arabs to withdraw support for the insurgency will help heal the nation.
Yesterday, an influential Sunni Arab cleric endorsed Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's 24-point reconciliation plan.
Ahmed Abdul Ghafour al-Samaraie, the head of the Sunni Endowment, the state agency responsible for Sunni mosques and shrines, applauded the provision that calls for the release of all prisoners who have not been charged with crimes.
He called on the government to implement the plan quickly, but emphasized it should include the disbanding of armed Shiite militias. Minority Sunnis have accused Shiite-led militias -- who have infiltrated the police and armed forces -- of random detention and killing.
Al-Samaraie's endorsement came a day after key lawmakers said seven Sunni Arab insurgent groups offered the government a conditional truce.
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Bush's Next Mess
Three Days in Rome?
By Laura Rozen
06/27/06 "Mother Jones"
On December 21, 2001, military officials and intelligence operatives from three nations-the United States, Italy, and Iran-made their separate ways to a commercial building set anonymously amid the shops, cafés, and fountains of Rome's bustling Piazza di Spagna, and disappeared inside. Among the tourists enjoying the famous Spanish Steps, and the Romans going about their Christmas shopping in the boutiques nearby, few would have had reason to wonder what was going on in the building, which held an unmarked office provided by the Italian military intelligence organization Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare (SISMI). Nor would passers-by have likely recognized among the men two Pentagon officials and key figures in the post-9/11 push to redraw the political map of the Middle East. Rome's centro storico, locus of a few millennia of international intrigue, was the perfect setting for the business at hand.
Though little-known outside the Beltway, the Pentagon officials, Larry Franklin and Harold Rhode, were at the height of their powers among a small, tight-knit coterie of Washington Iran hawks determined, in the wake of 9/11, to push for regime change not just in Kabul and Baghdad, but in Tehran as well. Farsi speakers both, they had become increasingly influential as advisers to top Pentagon officials consumed with planning a response to the terror attacks. Franklin was the Iran desk officer in a Pentagon policy office that would eventually include the Office of Special Plans, an alternative intelligence shop that became closely allied with Ahmed Chalabi and his band of Iraqi exile informants. Joining the pair in Rome was Michael Ledeen, a neoconservative historian and activist who is among the most impassioned advocates for overthrowing the Iranian regime.
Given that Italian intelligence was hosting the gathering, protocol would have called for the CIA to be involved and the U.S. Embassy to be notified. Yet no one from Langley or Foggy Bottom had been invited-and for good reason. Among those who had come to meet with the Pentagon team was an Iranian exile who was not exactly an unknown quantity in Washington. Manucher Ghorbanifar, an arms dealer, intelligence peddler, and former military intelligence official in the Shah's regime, had been a key figure in the Reagan-era Iran-Contra scandal, in which Washington secretly sold missiles to Iran's Islamic rulers. Even before that, he had been so unreliable as a CIA informant that the agency had issued a "burn notice" directing agency personnel not to deal with him. When, in the midst of Iran-Contra, the CIA gave Ghorbanifar a polygraph test, he was deemed not to be showing deception on only 2 of the 15 questions-his name and his place of birth.
"One test of a source is his ability to tell you something accurate that cannot be known through any other means," Bill Murray, the former CIA station chief in France, told me. Ghorbanifar not only has never been able to do that, Murray said, "he has a proven track record of fabrication-making up the information he reports from his own imagination." Washington insiders of a certain vintage cringe at the mention of Ghorbanifar's name-and grow alarmed when they hear that, as another ex-CIA official puts it, "anyone in the U.S. government would still talk to Ledeen and Ghorbanifar after what happened."
But someone was. For three days, the international group met to discuss Middle East political machinations, alleged Iran-backed terrorism threats, and, most of all, rumors of discontent and divided loyalties in the Iranian security services. Even as Chalabi and company were spinning tales in Washington about how Saddam's regime would collapse with only a minor effort from the United States, the administration's Iran hawks were eager to hear the same about Tehran-and to that end, Ghorbanifar had delivered a special guest. The guest was "a very high-level ex-Revolutionary Guard," Ghorbanifar later told me. "His situation was so high that the Italian intelligence network, in order to prove he had a special mission to Italy, created a kind of fake cover itinerary to give him an excuse to the Iranian authorities."
CIA sources are unconvinced. "They drag these guys out and say they're from the Revolutionary Guard," Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA director for Europe, told me. "In fact, they're actually from some rug store. In any city, it's an industry."
Rhode and Franklin, in any event, were impressed. As the meeting was breaking up, Rhode sent a classified cable from the telex room of the U.S. Embassy in Rome back to the Pentagon, reporting that the group had "made contact with Iranian intelligence officers who anticipate possible regime change in Iran and want to establish contact with the United States government." The cable, portions of which were obtained by Knight Ridder's Washington bureau, continued, "A sizable financial interest is required."
Intelligence sources have their suspicions about what the money was to go for. "My thought is that he was trying to do a Chalabi, asking them to tell the president that there's Iranians waiting to rise up," one former U.S. intelligence official told me. "It would be comical except that they have a lot of money, and people pay a lot of attention. All they need is purchase someplace, and the virus spreads very quickly."
Just how far did it spread? In the four years since the Rome meeting, the Pentagon has refused to answer many questions about it, including those from congressional investigators examining whether the trip constituted an unauthorized "intelligence activity" by the Bush administration. It has also insisted that the meeting's purpose was merely to follow up on a tip about threats to U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and that the Ghorbanifar intelligence pipeline was quickly shut down.
The real story, as I learned in the course of a two-year investigation that took me from sterile Washington offices to smoky exile pubs in Paris, is more interesting. It's also not over. As the crisis with Iran deepens and moves to the fore, the Bush administration is putting in place key elements of the vision spun in part by the men at the Rome meeting. In a new campaign to ramp up pressure on the Iranian regime, millions of dollars are pouring into exile groups, anti-regime propaganda, pro-democracy projects, and intelligence gathering. State Department and intelligence personnel are being deployed to the region and new Iran operations offices are being "stood up" in the State Department and Pentagon-the latter even featuring some of the names familiar from the pre-Iraq-war Office of special Plans.
In his 1988 memoir of the Iran-Contra affair, Perilous Statecraft, Ledeen described the role of the "trusted envoy," a kind of freelance government agent who shuttles between world leaders with few of the constraints of a government job but all of the thrill. "There are certain kinds of secret information that move between friendly countries quite outside the routine channels of government," he wrote. "The bearers of these messages can be anything from businessmen and journalists to actors and trusted personal assistants; they are rarely top officials themselves. Frequently, their names do not even appear on official calendars or appointment schedules; they are slipped in between the formal appointments, or they are ushered into the leaders' private residences on weekends or after dinner."
It was the kind of role Ledeen, who counts among his contacts Karl Rove and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, has relished for 20 years. Having come of age in the 1960s at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he says he was friendly with the activists who helped launch Students for a Democratic Society, he later became an avid anticommunist. While living in Italy in the 1970s, he was a political historian, a correspondent for The New Republic, and a consultant to SISMI on terrorism issues. Adventurous, impatient, and seemingly unconstrained by the professional boundaries of any of his multiple avocations, Ledeen eventually worked in the Reagan administration at the National Security Council, where he helped set up the Iran-Contra missile sales to Tehran-and became a close ally of Ghorbanifar, Washington's liaison to the Islamic regime.
Ledeen-who has argued in many articles and media appearances that Tehran is the chief sponsor of Islamic terrorism-is part of a subclan of neoconservatives for whom Iran is not an afterthought to Iraq but has long been the primary target. For almost a quarter century, these hardliners have been waiting for Washington to go on the offensive against the Islamic Republic. But to engineer such a radical shift, to outmaneuver a CIA and State Department gone soft on the mullahs, as they saw it, they had to introduce the Pentagon and the White House to an alternate intelligence network-much as Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress had done with their clique of Iraq "insiders." In that pursuit, the Rome back channel was the opening gambit.
As several iran-contra histories and congressional investigations relate, Ghorbanifar has alternately bedeviled and infuriated most every U.S. official who ever dealt with him. Reagan's own national security adviser, Bud McFarlane, once said that while Ghorbanifar "seemed to have a rather agile and creative mind for intrigue," he was "corrupt, duplicitous...not to be trusted." Even Ledeen himself admits to never having figured out what Ghorbanifar was really up to: "Was he, as some have suggested, an infiltrator within the ranks of the émigrés...? Was he simply looking for useful contacts in the hopes of reviving his business career...? Or was he a man with a fairly consistent political agenda, constantly searching for some way to change the policies of the Iranian government...? The very fact that even those who worked quite closely with him wonder about his real identity testifies to the complexity of his personality and the cunning of which he is capable."
With a persona somewhere between a salesman and a Syriana-style operative, Ghorbanifar operates in a twilight world of exiles, international arms dealers, front companies, passports in multiple names and nationalities, and Swiss bank accounts, all suffused with a kind of desperate con artistry based on the larger dysfunction of the U.S.-Iranian relationship of the past quarter century. For 25 years now, Ghorbanifar has been selling American conservatives on the promise of regime change in Tehran; at the same time, and with the tacit knowledge of his U.S. partners, he has operated as a freelance agent of that regime.
Looking with his enormous mustache, balding pate, and cigar like a wheeler-dealer out of central casting, the 60-year-old Ghorbanifar lives with his family in Nice and maintains a Paris presence through an aging aide who happens to be Iran's former minister of commerce. In conversation he is cajoling, flattering, with a glint of a sharper edge beneath. "When you come to Paris, we will chat for hours," he told me. The intelligence he has given his American contacts has been "1 million percent" accurate. For $20 million, he would open doors all over Tehran for his American paymasters. And so on.
During Iran-Contra, Ghorbanifar conveyed Iran's weapons wish list to the Americans, via Ledeen. In return for sophisticated missiles to be used in Iran's war against Iraq, he promised, Tehran would intervene to gain the release of U.S. hostages held by Hezbollah in Lebanon; what's more, he told his American and Israeli contacts, the weapons sales would bolster regime moderates, in the midst then, he claimed, of a power struggle.
Disgraced in Washington along with his coconspirators, Ghorbanifar faded from view in the late 1980s. His associates in France say that he has continued to set up import-export projects, including a recent deal in Spain to sell peas to Sudan, and that his business of late has involved trips to Iraq. He is also known to have maintained a relationship with a company in Milan called Atlas Trading, according to U.S. intelligence sources. The company, Corriere della Sera journalist and terrorism expert Guido Olimpio told me, is one of several that acquire technology from Europe on behalf of the Iranian regime-marking another instance of Ghorbanifar serving the rulers whom he simultaneously seeks to help overthrow.
To Ghorbanifar, as to his American friends, 9/11 offered a chance for vindication. Ledeen has said that not long after the attacks he got a call from Ghorbanifar offering information-from his brother Ali, who once ran a rug store in Paris-about a threat to U.S. forces in Afghanistan; it was that tip that would provide the ostensible reason for the Rome meeting. Also among Ghorbanifar's intelligence wares was a tip about an alleged Iranian threat to assassinate former president George H.W. Bush, which the Secret Service checked out and deemed useless, as well as a bizarre tale about smugglers getting sick from radiation poisoning after transporting highly enriched uranium from Iraq to Iran back in the 1990s.
But it was one thing for Ghorbanifar to rekindle his rapport with Ledeen; it was another to get the Bush administration to start paying attention. That would require more strategizing-and as Douglas Feith, the Pentagon's undersecretary for policy, noted in a 2004 letter to the Washington Monthly, the initiative did not come from the Pentagon. "DoD learned from the White House that there were some Iranians who had information about terrorist threats to U.S. forces in Afghanistan and who wanted to defect," Feith wrote. "It turned out that the Iranians did not want to defect, but they did want to share information directly with the U.S. Government. The Iranians did not, however, want to deal with the CIA." It was classic Ghorbanifar-Ledeen fare-the hint to the White House, the handoff to the Pentagon, the quickly deflated promises, the end run around the CIA.
Not that the CIA had any desire to be involved. CIA headquarters "was extremely goosey about this," a former senior agency official knowledgeable about the Rome meeting told me. "You don't want to be sucked into Iran-Contra. Many of us were around when that happened, and went over a cliff with them. [Then-CIA Director George] Tenet was on the Senate intelligence committee staff when that happened. The answer from Langley was: We don't want anything to do with this." When the CIA learned that the Rome meeting was going ahead, its local station chief even fired off a memo to Langley reporting that an unauthorized covert action might be taking place-a memo that would eventually find its way into the files of Senate staffers investigating the matter. The State Department likewise complained to the White House, and then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley reportedly promised that the channel would be shut down. (Hadley's office has referred questions about the meeting to the Defense Department, where spokeswoman Lt. Colonel Tracy O'Grady Walsh first told me to email questions, then did not respond.)
Despite the complaints, it appears that the dalliance between U.S. government officials and Ghorbanifar continued beyond the Rome meeting. Rhode would travel to Paris in June 2003 to meet with Ghorbanifar again-a meeting the Pentagon later claimed was "unplanned." Also in June 2003, three months after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a CIA case officer was sent to meet in Baghdad with a Ghorbanifar associate known to U.S. intelligence officials as a London-based fraudster. As Newsday's Knut Royce-who first broke the story of the Rome meeting in 2003-discovered, Ghorbanifar and his associate claimed to have information about a secret cache of weapons-grade uranium in Iraq that Iranian intelligence had allegedly discovered and stolen part of.
At their tense meeting in Iraq, the CIA officer gave the associate a series of test questions, all of which he flunked. Then the officer asked him to provide a small sample of the uranium. He refused and walked out. "He's a fabricator," a former U.S. intelligence official told Royce. "These fabricators were produced by Ghorbanifar. They read headlines, try to cater to your fears, and they draw from real facts."
Ghorbanifar had better luck with Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), who has met with him in Paris and has now published most of his claims in a book, Countdown to Terror, that promises to reveal Iran as "the iron glove behind all our enemies." Weldon's main source, a mysterious Iranian whom the congressman code-names "Ali," is, in fact, Ghorbanifar's longtime business partner and personal secretary, Fereidoun Mahdavi. ("Dear Curt," begins one memo from "Ali" that Weldon quotes in the book. "I confirm again a terrorist attack within the United States is planned before the American elections.") Mahdavi, in turn, told me that the information he gave Weldon came from Ghorbanifar, who appears to have used him as a kind of cutout-a vehicle for laundering intelligence. U.S. intelligence sources confirmed to me that Weldon has identified Mahdavi as his source. Weldon, they say, has also demanded that Mahdavi be put on the U.S. payroll.
"Anything involving Ghorbanifar is always going to cost a lot of money," former Paris CIA station chief Murray told me after Weldon's book appeared. "His usual first ploy is to try to set up an expensive front company allegedly to do business with Iran. That means you pay for the company and whatever is sold and Ghorbanifar does the business, keeps the books, and uses the 'profits' to fund his nonexistent group in Iran: in short, himself. Some people always fall for it, but nothing ever comes out of it."
On july 9, 2004, the Democratic vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Senator Jay Rockefeller, stepped to the podium in the Senate Radio and TV Gallery to announce the release of his committee's first report on the intelligence community's pre-Iraq-war mistakes. The report tore into the CIA, finding that the intelligence community had consistently "overstated" the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But it stopped short of looking at the most troubling issues raised by those failures, chief among them whether the administration had cherry-picked intelligence that served its agenda; those issues would be addressed in a Phase II report that would not be released until after the presidential election. Among the specific targets of that probe, according to a February 2004 document agreed to by the committee, were the still-mysterious intelligence activities of the Feith operation at the Pentagon. Committee investigators were intrigued by documents they had obtained about the Rome meeting, including the cable mentioning a "sizable financial interest." Under U.S. law, notes one committee staffer, the committee is to be notified of any government intelligence activities. "So if they are conducting intelligence activities and didn't inform us, that's unlawful."(In a separate effort, Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee in 2003 persuaded that committee's chairman, Rep. Bill Young [R-Fla.], to investigate the activities of Feith's office and the Ghorbanifar pipeline, but committee Republicans eventually killed the probe.)
Two years later, the Phase II investigation is still barely limping along. Last August, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), a close White House ally, delayed the process once more by turning the Feith probe over to the Pentagon's inspector general for an inquiry with no specific deadline. By last November, Senate Democrats were so frustrated they literally shut down the Senate until Roberts promised to get things moving. Feith departed the Pentagon in the summer of 2005; even before then, his office had stopped responding to any questions from the Senate committee about its activities, including the Rome meeting. "They freaked out at Defense," the Senate staffer told me. "They said, 'If you're starting a criminal probe, we are not going to cooperate.'"
To many who saw the Iran-Contra scandal unfold, it all adds up to a familiar picture. Jonathan Winer worked for a Senate committee led by John Kerry that, in the mid-1980s, probed rumors of the secret arms deals and of the funneling of the profits to Nicaragua's right-wing Contra rebels. For years as the investigation continued, critics-led by then-congressman Dick Cheney-"called us conspiracy nuts," says Winer. The committee kept hearing tips about private individuals secretly carrying out the government's business, he recalls. "officials tell you none of it is true, because there's no record that any of these things took place. It creates a situation where oversight is practically impossible because official reality is completely misleading, and unofficial reality-which is the truth-does not exist." In the end, the scandal was uncovered after control of Congress shifted to the Democrats and, simultaneously, more and more evidence was revealed in Iran-Contra-related lawsuits and media investigations.
"What has to happen is, you have to have the press and Congress and the courts all playing their constitutional role for the truth to come out," Winer says. "If any of those components don't function, you can wind up with serious problems."
Comparisons between Ghorbanifar and Chalabi-and there have been a few, from sources including Ledeen himself-are imperfect; for one thing, Ghorbanifar has never shown political ambition. Yet there's a striking parallel in the way that Pentagon hawks relentlessly promoted both players long after they had been deemed unreliable and possibly treacherous by other agencies, in particular the CIA. The difference is that Chalabi's fictions have been exposed in a bloody and costly war, while Iran action is only now moving toward the front burner. And as it does, the notion that Ledeen and other Iran hawks have advocated for so long-that Iran's regime will fall if only the United States will give it a push-is emerging as the main policy trajectory for the Bush administration. In February, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice requested an additional $75 million for promoting democracy in Iran; that same month, a team of U.S. government Iran experts traveled to Los Angeles to talk to exiles there. State Department Iran watchers are being "forward deployed" to the Persian Gulf and surrounding region; in Washington, think tanks and exile groups are launching Iran initiatives, all of them jostling for the money and launching whisper campaigns against their competitors in a game whose stakes have suddenly risen. More covert measures are also reportedly under way, including the cultivating of proxies among the Kurds and some of Iran's ethnic tribes to gather intelligence in the border regions of Iran; and there have been reports that some in the administration believe missile strikes against Iran's nuclear program would embarrass the regime and lead to a revolution.
For the irrepressible Ledeen, none of this is quite enough. "I was recently asked if I saw signs of action," Ledeen told me in April. "I see nothing." Not much later, when the exile community buzzed with stories to the effect that Ledeen was involved in a new back channel to Iran's rulers, and that Vice President Cheney had authorized the Pentagon to use Ghorbanifar as a source, he shrugged off both rumors. "I can't imagine it. The Pentagon cannot, so far as I know, do intelligence operations without getting the approval of the CIA. It's impossible and illegal." Then he excused himself-he was headed out of town, to Italy, on vacation.
Laura Rozen is a senior correspondent for The American Prospect.
© 2006 The Foundation for National Progress
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US Must Denounce Israeli Nuclear Weapons For Movement From Iran
AFP
Tue Jun 27
The United States cannot denounce Iran's nuclear program while accepting Israel's possession of nuclear bombs, the head of the Arab League has said. "This will ultimately bring the Middle East to further instability and there will be an inevitable arms race," Arab League secretary general Amr Moussa told the US Arab Economic Forum in Houston, Texas.
"This will ultimately bring the Middle East to further instability and there will be an inevitable arms race," Arab League secretary general Amr Moussa told the US Arab Economic Forum in Houston, Texas.
The United States is locked in a standoff with Iran over its uranium enrichment program. Washington and its allies suspect the program masks a nuclear bomb-making effort.
The US administration turns a diplomatic blind eye to widely held suspicions -- including by the International Atomic Energy Agency -- that Israel already has a nuclear weapon.
"We do not believe there is a good and bad nuclear program," said Moussa.
"There is no moral and legal ground to distinguish them. Both are bad and all military nuclear programs or programs of weapons of mass destruction should not be allowed."
Moussa reiterated Iran's right to operate peaceful nuclear programs under the terms of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty and said the Arab-Israeli conflict is the greatest threat to instability in the Middle East.
"This conflict is the one that will make or break stability in the region," he said.
"There is no doubt that this conflict cannot be resolved without the active involvement of the United States as an honest broker."
Moussa said the United States needed to acknowledge that the conflict was not a result of "terrorists" but of a military occupation by Israel. The policy of aiming for "security now and peace later" will not work, he said.
"Only the role of honest broker played by the US will save the situation, will clear and change the reputation of US policy and lessen to a large extent the frustration."
The Arab League chief said the conflict in
Iraq was also a source of instability that could only be resolved through a reconciliation program to unite the varying factions.
"Iraq should not be the theatre for settling accounts. Reconciliaition is necessary for rebuilding the new Iraq."
Moussa also hailed recent progress in events in Somalia and Sudan and hoped that a recent peace agreement would bring peace to Darfur.
He characterized the current global political situation as a "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the west. "The clash is being fed and abetted by extremists on both sides," he said in his speech.
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Iran Undermines Russia
by Pyotr Goncharov
UPI
June 28, 2006
Summary: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tehran would give the answer to the offer made by Russia, the United States, China, Britain, France and Germany -- the Five-Plus-One states -- not by June 29, as the European Union, China and Russia hoped and the United States demanded, but in late August. It may also be that Moscow had unwittingly prompted Tehran's negative decision. Russia's First Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Denisov, who led the Russian delegation to the session of the foreign ministers of the Organization of the Islamic Conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, said Russia would not support UN Security Council decisions sanctioning the use of military force against Iran.
The Iranian leader has again turned the tables, or rather the table of the G8 July summit in St. Petersburg. On June 29, the G8 foreign ministers will meet in Moscow to discuss primarily the Iranian issue.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tehran would give the answer to the offer made by Russia, the United States, China, Britain, France and Germany -- the Five-Plus-One states -- not by June 29, as the European Union, China and Russia hoped and the United States demanded, but in late August.
The Iranian leader made this statement in an address to his voters in Hamadan, a city in western Iran, which has strengthened his standing in his home country.
At the June 29 meeting Moscow in ministers will determine if there are enough reasons to resume talks, or the Iranian nuclear dossier should be left to the United Nations Security Council.
The foreign ministers must know Tehran's stand on the Five-Plus-One offer to make a decision on keeping the dossier in the UN or returning it to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Their decision is to be signed by the G8 leaders.
During their meeting in Vienna on June 1, the foreign ministers of the six states approved a package of offers designed to convince Iran to stop uranium enrichment. The six countries thought their offer was quite attractive to Iran, and hoped its acceptance would help resume talks.
What stands behind Ahmadinejad's statement? Surely not only the "heaps of ambiguities" in the offer, as Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said in Italy. Tehran is most likely dissatisfied with the provision on freezing enrichment as an obligatory condition for resuming talks.
The Iranian authorities said that the provision distorted the essence of the forthcoming talks. In fact, it needs the talks primarily to discuss freezing uranium enrichment in response to western concessions.
It appears that Tehran's announcement was a response to the statement by President George W. Bush, who promised Iran "progressively stronger political and economic sanctions" if Tehran refused to verifiably suspend its uranium enrichment program.
It may also be that Moscow had unwittingly prompted Tehran's negative decision. Russia's First Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Denisov, who led the Russian delegation to the session of the foreign ministers of the Organization of the Islamic Conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, said Russia would not support UN Security Council decisions sanctioning the use of military force against Iran.
The same day, Russian president's aide Igor Shuvalov told journalists Russia would also insist on the inadmissibility of economic sanctions against Iran even if its stand clashed with the position of the other participants in the G8 summit in St. Petersburg.
If this supposition is correct, it means that Tehran has again let Russia down.
Tehran most likely used the complicated Washington-EU relations over Iran -- the White House wants Europe's undivided support over the Iranian nuclear fuel issue -- to force its rules of the game on the partners.
And yet, why did the Tehran authorities come to this decision, especially if their initial reaction to the Five-Plus-One offer was positive?
Some newspapers claim that Iran's spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was initially against the six countries' offer, which he described as "weak and disappointing." Tehran may again use the tactic which Khamenei calls "subtle diplomacy," the art of acting in international relations in such a way as to protect and strengthen national interests to the utmost level, as Iranian journalist Parviz Esmaeili put it.
On the other hand, many analysts say Iran's political establishment was divided over the nuclear fuel program and the six countries' offer. The majority would like to accept the right to limited enrichment, but this group does not include Ayatollah Khamenei or President Ahmadinejad, who reject all and any restrictions. If this is true, this imbalance in the Iranian leadership is the main reason for postponing the answer until the end of August.
The world can wait for another "moment of truth" regarding Iran, but will Iran benefit or suffer from the delay? Events can now take any turn, including some that will run counter to the Russian and Chinese opinion.
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Iran's Khamenei dismisses future negotiation with US
www.chinaview.cn 2006-06-27 21:22:31
TEHRAN, June 27 (Xinhua) -- Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Tuesday dismissed future talks with the United States, terming the negotiation between the two sides as "useless".
"I don't think it's useful for us to negotiate with the United States, we don't need such negotiations," Khamenei, quoted by local media.
The supreme leader also reiterated that Iran would not bend to international pressure demanding a suspension of the uranium enrichment activities.
"We are not going to negotiate with anyone on our undeniable right to develop nuclear technology and to use it," stressed Khamenei.
"If they could respect our legal right, we are prepared to negotiate over supervision controls," he added.
European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana on June 6 presented to Iran a new package over Iran's nuclear issue, which had been agreed by the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany in a meeting in Vienna.
The proposal includes both incentives aimed at persuading Iran to suspend uranium enrichment and possible sanctions if Iran chooses not to comply.
Western countries have asked Iran to stop enrichment works first in their proposals to create chance for future negotiations and have requested Iran to give a formal response to the package in a few weeks.
But Iran's top officials have repeatedly said their country wanted talks with the West without any preconditions, vowing Iran would never give up the legal right to use nuclear technology peacefully.
In a meeting with Khamenei on June 19, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also said Iran didn't want any preconditions over the nuclear talks with Westerns.
"The proposal is a step forward, but the Islamic Republic wants to pursue a fair and equal talk with them, and there should not be any preconditions," Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying by the state television.
The United States has accused Iran of secretly developing nuclear weapons under a civilian front, a charge categorically denied by Tehran.
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Iran's Ahmadinejad to visit Iraq - report
27 Jun 2006
Iran Focus
Tehran, Iran, Jun. 27 - Iran's hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will soon travel to Baghdad to meet and hold talks with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, the government-run news agency Fars reported on Monday.
The report quoted an "informed source" as saying that Ahmadinejad would hold talks with several top Iraqi officials.
He would lead a large delegation to Baghdad, the report said, adding that several political and economic agreements would be signed between the two states during his trip.
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U.S. House committee passes U.S.-India nuclear deal
www.chinaview.cn 2006-06-28 03:51:19
WASHINGTON, June 27 (Xinhua) -- The United States House International Relations Committee passed on Tuesday the nuclear deal between the United States and India by a vote of 37-5.
Such a result is expected as both the Bush administration and the Congress have been confident that the deal would win majority bipartisan support in the vote. "There is tremendous support although not necessarily unanimous," said Lynne Weil, spokeswoman for Tom Lantos, a ranking Democrat in the House International Relations Committee.
The nuclear deal, signed by U.S. President George W. Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in July last year, would aid the development of civil nuclear power programs in India in return for India's placing its civil nuclear facilities under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is expected to pass the deal on Thursday.
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Bush urges North Korea to disclose its plans
Last Updated Tue, 27 Jun 2006 18:49:41 EDT
CBC News
U.S. President George W. Bush urged North Korea on Tuesday to disclose what is inside a long-range missile that has been spotted on a launch site and to say whether it plans to fire the rocket.
Bush says Washington hasn't heard from the North Koreans, so it can't tell what their intentions are.
White House spokesman Tony Snow rejected calls on Monday from some senior U.S. politicians to hold direct talks with Pyongyang outside the stalled six-country negotiations on the country's nuclear weapons programs.
U.S. and Asian officials have said North Korea is preparing to launch a Taepodong-Two missile, which could potentially hit Alaska or possibly Hawaii, amid a standoff over North Korea's nuclear program.
North Korea says it will only return to talks on ending its nuclear weapons program if the U.S. removes financial sanctions on companies accused of handling counterfeit currency on behalf of Pyongyang.
The U.S. says the financial sanctions are unrelated to the nuclear talks, and it is up to North Korea to return to the negotiations.
After four rounds of six-party talks, agreement was reached in September 2005, in which North Korea pledged to dismantle its nuclear arms program in return for economic aid and security measures, but negotiations have not progressed any further because of the dispute over financial sanctions.
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Wild Planet
No Rest for the Wet and Weary: Evacuation Ordered as Relentless Rain Fills DC Waterways
By Steven Ginsberg and Robert Samuels
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, June 28, 2006; A01
Government officials prepared for evacuations of low-lying sections of the water-logged Washington region last night as record-setting rainfall continued and commuters, homeowners and federal agencies struggled to cope.
Several large federal offices remained closed. Local governments opened emergency command centers and sheltered more residents reeling from rains of historic magnitude. The silt-laden Potomac River neared flood stage, and other waterways verged menacingly on overflowing.
Fearing that Lake Needwood, north of Rockville, was breaching its leaking dam, Montgomery County officials early this morning began evacuating people living along Rock Creek below the dam, county spokeswoman Donna Bigler said.
As another day of downpours came to an end, the driving rain continued in spots, with one inch falling in 15 minutes in Annapolis shortly after 10 p.m., according to National Weather Service forecaster Andy Woodcock.
By yesterday afternoon, the sluggish system that had brought the record rainfall showed signs of heading out of the area last night.
But forecasters at the time pointed to a tropical system to the southeast that they said could help bring an additional three to five more inches of rain before all the storms dissipated. However, at 11 last night, the latest forecast indicated that no more than one to three additional inches remained in store, principally for northern and central Maryland.
Flash flooding was reported late last night in Rockville and in Harford County, Md. But radars showed areas of clearing on the western edges of the region.
From Friday morning through yesterday morning, 12.11 inches of rain fell at Reagan National Airport, according to unofficial tabulations.
"This amount of rain in four days should occur once every 200 years, and we just lived through it," said Jim Lee, meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service. Forecasters warned that an additional couple of inches of rain would lead to even more severe flooding, debris and damage.
The impact of the storm was seen everywhere: Struck from behind on a rain-slick street, a taxicab swerved and crashed into McFadden's Restaurant and Saloon, at 24th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW. The 11 p.m. incident sent four people to a hospital.
In Frederick and Carroll counties, Maryland State Police searched until late into the night for two missing boys, 14 and 15, whose families feared they had been washed away by rising waters after venturing to a stream about a mile from their homes in Keymar, Md.
In Montgomery County, firefighters used ropes and flotation gear to rescue a man and woman from a car that stalled in standing water on Brighton Dam Road in Brookeville.
With an eye on Maryland's rain-swollen Patuxent River, Anne Arundel County Executive Janet S. Owens (D) asked last night that residents of low-lying communities in the Laurel area head for shelter.
Also last night, the District, prompted in part by the predictions of more rain, declared a state of emergency to aid in the mobilization of resources.
As heavy rain fell in the evening, washed-out streets and downed signal lights on several major commuter routes left drivers stuck across the city. Traffic lights turned green on other major thoroughfares, such as K Street NW, but drivers went nowhere. Cars jammed intersections, and the honk of horns filled the humid evening air.
D.C. Transportation Department spokesman Erik Linden said the backups were primarily caused by downed signals on Constitution and Independence avenues. "If you can avoid driving, it really very much helps us out," he said.
Bus passengers were stuck in the same backups. Metro's Orange Line trains were so crowded that some riders at downtown stations had to wait for several trains to pass before they could get on. They said their trips home were delayed by as much as an hour.
Metro workers added sump pumps and positioned 12 tons of sandbags near vent shafts and grates at Federal Triangle, Archives-Navy Memorial-Penn Quarter and other vulnerable stations to prevent a repeat of the flooding that hobbled the transit system Monday.
In a preemptive move, the District placed a team of arborists on patrol last night to make quick assessments of weakening tree trunks and damaged limbs in hopes of keeping problems from worsening. Significant damage has affected about 250 trees since the storms started, one of the arborists said.
The Old Post Office building and the Ariel Rios Federal Building in downtown Washington remained closed yesterday, and federal officials announced that the headquarters of the Justice Department, Internal Revenue Service and National Archives would stay shut for the rest of the week. The National Zoo opened for most of the day, but only for visitors who arrived on foot.
Power was still a problem for some. As of last night, about 6,000 customers were without power in Maryland and the District, most in Montgomery County, Pepco said. That was down from about 8,000 a few hours earlier. In Virginia, about 3,700 customers were without power as of late yesterday, according to Dominion Virginia Power. By 9:30 p.m., the figure was less than 1,000.
The Fairfax County government was considering an evacuation of the Belle View and New Alexandria communities, which flooded during Hurricane Isabel in 2003.
Fire officials in Fairfax announced that 160 homes were damaged in the Arlington Terrace area Sunday night when Cameron Run overflowed, crashing through basement windows and destroying cars, which in some cases were immersed by the waves. Three of those homes were "red-tagged," meaning the damage was beyond repair and the houses had to be condemned.
In Bethesda, residents along the 4300 block of Sleaford Road were irate yesterday because they had been without power since Sunday morning. Those grumbling about traffic tie-ups and soppy shoes were getting little sympathy from Barry Blandford, who said he got a two-day runaround from Pepco.
"They keep telling you that it's scheduled to be restored at a certain time," he said "When you call at night, they say, it'll be fixed in the morning. When you call in the morning, they say it'll be fixed in the afternoon."
About 2 p.m. yesterday, a crew showed up. Within 21 minutes, power was restored.
"You don't realize what you miss -- all these little things like the coffeemaker," said a relieved Blandford, enjoying the cold blast coming from the air conditioner.
Two barns were destroyed in St. Mary's County yesterday evening by what people in the Choptico area said was a tornado. Authorities said they were investigating.
A resident of the area, Pat Riffle, said he saw a "white wall of water coming toward us." After the barns were destroyed, he said, debris was scattered to "every point of the compass," suggesting the rotating winds of a tornado.
"We definitely had a tornado," said Joyce Cusic of Cusic Mechanic Service on Manor Road in Choptico. She said trees went down, and "we're saying big trees."
In addition, she said, "I have tin from the neighbors' barns all over the back yard and the front yard."
She said she had been about to go out for a walk shortly before 6 p.m., but her dog refused to go. "That's what saved me," she said.
In Alleghany County in the western part of Virginia, rescuers searched for an 8-year-old girl swept away by floodwaters, the Associated Press reported. The child went missing shortly before 2 p.m., according to Ryan Muterspaugh, the county's public safety director.
Farmers on the waterlogged Eastern Shore dealt with the remains of as many as 80,000 chickens that drowned.
The Potomac will continue to rise today and probably will crest tomorrow, but forecasters were not projecting significant flooding.
Officials in Alexandria were bracing for a possible surge of water created by heavy rainfall north and west of the Washington area that could travel down the Potomac and reach the District by tonight, spokesman Brian Hannigan said. That could endanger riverfront homes and businesses in Old Town.
Hannigan said the city is concerned about a trio of forces that could combine tonight during high tide at 11:20. They feared the storm surge would hit when the tide peaks and more rain might fall.
Officials in Alexandria also warned of additional flash flooding all over the city after sweeping floodwaters in the city's West End trapped motorists, swept away cars, flooded homes and caused thousands of dollars in property damage Sunday evening.
Yesterday morning's commute went much better than Monday's crusher, but the continued rainfall washed out critical routes and choked traffic for many.
Water on Interstate 395 slowed drivers heading into the city, extending the morning rush. Drivers in downtown Washington suffered a second day of gridlock as parts of Constitution Avenue remained closed, signals were out on Independence and curb lanes of 12th Street NW were blocked as water was pumped from the Internal Revenue Service building.
On 17th Street NW, Rowena Reid described traffic as "a nightmarish mess." She and a friend spent 20 minutes going two blocks as they diverted around a closed portion of Constitution Avenue -- just like everyone else.
By mid-morning, Orange Line riders were reporting trips of 40 minutes or more and expressed frustration with Metro's lack of alerts.
Riders have complained all week that they have not received timely information, and Metro managers said yesterday that they were revamping their information systems.
But Gladys McCowin was just happy it wasn't as bad as Monday morning.
"Yesterday, I saw the commute and turned back around," said McCowin, a loan analyst at the Veterans Affairs credit union. "Today, it wasn't nearly as bad."
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Ecuador's Tungurahua volcano registers 50 explosions in 24 hours
Xinhua via COMTEX
Jun 27, 2006
QUITO - Ecuador's National Geophysical Agency said on Tuesday the Tungurahua volcano had registered 50 explosions in the past 24 hours.
The Tungurahua volcano, one of the most active volcanoes in Ecuador, started its second activity peak this May since the eruption process began in August 1999.
It is now experiencing "shivers": constant tremors inside the crater's bed. The agency's volcanologists have observed constant emissions of gas, ash and water vapor that is forming a cloud around 1 km above the volcano's crater.
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Weather Can Make Earth Wobble
June 26, 2006
By Bjorn Carey
LiveScience Staff Writer
Scientists say Northern Hemisphere weather patterns affect small wobbles
Weather can have huge affects, from sinking a city to causing hillsides to slip away, but scientists say the weather might have an even larger impact - causing the whole planet to wobble.
As the Earth rotates, it wobbles on its axis like a spinning top. And like a top as it slows down, the planet develops a host of different wobbles, ranging in period from a few minutes to billions of years.
Some of the major wobbles are well studied, such as the 433-day Chandler wobble and the annual wobble, which together can tilt the Earth's axis up to 30 feet from its nominal center. One long-term change alters which point of light deserves to be called the North Star every few millennia.
Earth's axis of rotation is tilted about 23.5 degrees compared to the plane in which the planet orbits the Sun each year. The daily rotation of the planet creates a bulge at the equator, and the gravity of the Sun and Moon tends to pull this bulge back toward the orbital plane.
But Earth resists this pull. The result is that the axis moves in a cone-shaped pattern, called a precession, with the celestial North Pole describing a full circle every 26,000 years or so. Right now, the north celestial pole points towards Polaris, the North Star, but it used to point to Vega, and in 14,000 years it aim at Vega again.
Smaller variations, lasting a week or so, have proved difficult to study, partly because they're masked by the more prominent wobbles.
But from November 2005 to February 2006, the Chandler and annual wobbles essentially cancelled each other out. This allowed Sebastien Lambert of the Royal Observatory of Belgium and colleagues to study the minor variations and determine why they occur when they do.
Using newly-available GPS data that establishes the exact location of the poles, the team determined that weather patterns in the Northern Hemisphere play a significant role small wobbles.
The location of high- or low-pressure centers and the relation of these systems to each other played a measurable role in generating small, short-term wobbles, the scientists report. Moving weather systems caused the pole positions to swing in small loops ranging from the size of a cell phone to a sheet of paper.
The motion of the ocean also affects short-term wobbles; the study showed that oceanic pressure variations also coincided with the polar loops. This is the first study to demonstrate that day-to-day changes in atmospheric pressure produce a measurable effect on Earth's rotation.
The study is detailed in the July 1 issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
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Magnets Help Explain Rain Patterns
by Staff Writers
Los Angeles CA (SPX) Jun 27, 2006TerraDaily
If someone said you can understand rain patterns and the dynamics of the atmosphere by studying magnets and magnetism - and therefore make better predictions of the effects of global warming - would you think he's crazy? Brilliant? The atmosphere spans the entire globe, while a magnet fits easily in your hand; can they really be so similar?
Ole Peters, a 27-year-old physicist with expertise in "critical phenomena" and "self organized criticality" - which he acknowledges is "a bit of a rogue field" - doesn't sound the least bit crazy.
In the June issue of the respected journal Nature Physics, he and J. David Neelin, UCLA professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, report that the onset of intense tropical rain and magnetism share the same underlying physics.
Peters and Neelin analyzed statistical properties of the relationship between water vapor in the atmosphere in the tropics and rainfall, using remote sensing from a satellite over the tropical oceans.
"We studied properties of that relationship that are also observed in equivalent quantities for systems with 'continuous-phase transitions' like magnets," said Peters, a research scientist with UCLA's Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics and a visiting scientist at the Santa Fe Institute.
"The atmosphere has a tendency to move to a critical point in water vapor where the likelihood of rain dramatically increases. The system reaches a point where it's just about to rain; it's highly susceptible. Any additional water vapor can produce a large response."
Finding the simple predictions of this statement confirmed in a complex meteorological system is unexpected, and may lead to more accurate climate models, Peters and Neelin said.
Neelin is working to incorporate these findings into models for atmospheric dynamics. Predicting the effects of global warming on precipitation is currently difficult to assess, he said.
"Global climate computer simulations make assumptions about how rainfall depends on moisture and temperature that are imperfect approximations," said Neelin, a member of UCLA's Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics.
"This research may lead to improved ways of treating rainfall in these models, which could help scientists improve rain prediction in daily weather or how it might change under global warming."
"Our study showed that absolutely everything we dreamed of finding was actually there," Peters said. "The predictions from critical phenomena showed up in the data. This is a huge step forward in self-organized criticality and critical phenomena. There really is a critical point. We observed the system in a whole range of different water vapors. This is the strongest evidence for any physical self-organized critical system to really have a critical point."
How does a critical threshold point work?
Consider a pile of rice, Peters said. You can add a single grain of rice and measure its effect on the pile. After slowly adding rice grains, at some point you eventually trigger an avalanche; the release is very fast.
A similar principle is behind the coin machines you can find in casinos, where it looks as if dropping in one or two quarters will create an avalanche of coins that will come crashing down for you. In fact, it is much more likely that it only looks like the system is at a critical point; you are more likely to lose your quarter.
Imagine that you add one raindrop into a cloud. Like the pile of rice, where adding a single grain can produce an avalanche or nothing at all, or like the coin machine, the one additional raindrop could trigger a huge downpour, but most of the time produces nothing. You can heat a magnet to a point where it loses its magnetization; it no longer has a north and south direction.
"When a magnet is near the critical temperature, a slight perturbation can cause it to switch north and south," Peters said. "When the system reaches the critical point and is so susceptible, a slight change - one more grain of rice, one more coin - can produce a massive response of the system. This phenomenon can be studied using statistical mechanics and critical phenomena."
The sun slowly evaporates water from the oceans, pumping water into the atmosphere. Much of that water vapor is stored and transported in the atmosphere before there is any rain, Neelin noted.
What finally triggers the rain?
Peters and Neelin were able to tie their findings back to seminal work in the 1970s at UCLA by Akio Arakawa, who sought to connect what is known about individual clouds to larger-scale atmospheric motions. As these motions increase water vapor in some regions, clouds begin to rise, heated by the condensing rainwater.
Arakawa postulated a balance between the clouds and the large scale. But if the clouds were reacting smoothly to the large-scale flow, rain would be much more predictable than it is.
"Arakawa's work was amazingly far-sighted," Neelin said, "but there's a new twist."
Complex interactions among the cloud motions organize the rainfall into clusters in space and a cascade of smaller and larger rain events. And these share the same mathematical structure as systems that physicists have studied.
"It's very hard to predict rainfall because of this type of interaction," Peters said. "In the last 20 years, scientists have become much better at predicting temperature and wind, but predicting precipitation has not improved much.
"Whenever you find different systems that are governed by the same mathematical laws, you are hitting on something fundamental. You have found a thread in the mathematical fabric of reality. This study raises the concept of 'self-organized criticality' to a higher status. It's not just a far-fetched possibility."
The research is federally funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Peters began studying "avalanche distributions" in 2002, measuring how much rain falls in one storm. This led him to make predictions about the functional relationship between water vapor and rainfall.
"It's a self-organized critical system, from which we can make predictions," said Peters, who described physics as "beautiful."
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Around the World
Italian govt faces confidence vote in Senate
www.chinaview.cn 2006-06-28 16:50:50
ROME, June 28 (Xinhua) -- The Italian government on Wednesday faced a confidence vote in the Senate over a decree to postpone the effective date of a package of laws endorsed by the previous government.
The bill has to be passed by the lower house for final approval if it gets a "Yes" vote in the Senate, the upper house of parliament where Prime Minister Romano Prodi's center-left coalition has a two-seat majority over the center-right.
Under the decree, the incumbent government would have more time to fulfill measures approved by its predecessor, thus delaying the entry into force of some laws passed by the previous government.
Prodi's government, which took power after winning an April election by a thin margin, tied its fate to the confidence vote at a Senate session on Tuesday.
The government hoped that the vote could speed up passages of legislation. If failed, however, the government has to resign.
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Blair ready to quit in the spring
By Toby Helm, George Jones and Rachel Sylvester
The Telegraph
28/06/2006
Tony Blair is ready to announce that he will step down next year, probably around his 10th anniversary in Downing Street in May.
Senior Blairite MPs said that high-level discussions were going on to prepare for a transition to an expected Gordon Brown premiership.
If Mr Blair announced a timetable at or shortly before Labour's annual conference at the end of September it would defuse the growing restlessness in the party over the succession.
Mr Blair could use the conference to acclaim his record while paving the way for a new leader to take on the challenge of the rejuvenated Conservative Party led by David Cameron.
Yesterday the Prime Minister brushed aside Charles Clarke's accusation that the Government was lacking leadership and direction.
He described the former home secretary as "a disappointed man" and rejected claims that the attack could hasten his exit from No 10.
He dismissed suggestions that the attack was Mr Clarke's "Geoffrey Howe moment", a reference to events that brought about Margaret Thatcher's downfall in 1990. He described it as "surface noise" that governments always faced.
"What we should do is just calm down, hold and get on with governing," he said.
Labour MPs feel certain that Mr Blair has made up his mind to go next spring. Everybody at No 10 believes that he will be gone within a year and acknowledges that power and authority is haemorrhaging away.
In the past week the Chancellor has openly assumed the mantle of prime minister-in-waiting, announcing the updating of the independent nuclear deterrent and reopening a European Union budget deal struck by Mr Blair last December that he regards as "bad" for Britain.
Mr Blair's inner circle hopes that when the Prime Minister makes clear his intention to go Mr Brown will back Blairite reforms and urge his supporters to stop trying to accelerate a takeover at No 10.
Mr Blair has admitted that it was a mistake to announce two years ago that he would not serve a fourth term and has been resisting naming a specific date for going because of fears that it would weaken his position further.
His supporters now think that it could be even more destabilising if he continues to keep his party guessing.
Some acknowledge that there is a risk he will become a lame duck, with pressure for him to go immediately once he has confirmed that he will step down next year.
But they think that Mr Brown and most MPs will go along with a leadership handover next year once Mr Blair has publicly confirmed his intentions.
At Westminster there was little sign of any heavyweight support for Mr Clarke, who used a series of interviews to make plain his anger over his dismissal as home secretary and suggested that Mr Blair might not be able to recover from recent blows to his authority.
Mr Clarke is the most senior Blairite to become publicly disloyal - and, even more significant, to begin the process of defecting to the Brown camp.
He effectively endorsed the Chancellor, a former sworn enemy, saying that he would be "happy" to see him installed as prime minister. Mr Brown has made clear that he would welcome Mr Clarke into a top domestic policy job in his first Cabinet.
David Davis, the shadow home secretary, said Mr Clarke's comments were "a Blairite equivalent of what Geoffrey Howe did to Margaret Thatcher all those years ago".
Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat leader, said it was clear that the Prime Minister's authority was "simply draining away".
The Prime Minister's official spokesman said that Mr Blair had been right to sack Mr Clarke last month over the freed foreign prisoners scandal.
He suggested that Mr Clarke's attack on the Prime Minister and John Reid, his successor as Home Secretary, was the result of "disappointment" over losing his job.
No 10 pointedly referred to the "difficulties" that had emerged while Mr Clarke was at the Home Office - and "continued to emerge after he left it".
It is unusual for Downing Street to brief so heavily against a former minister. Officials said that Mr Blair had offered Mr Clarke several other Cabinet posts, which he had rejected.
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Rice reaffirms U.S. Aghanistan commitment
By ANNE GEARAN
AP Diplomatic Writer
June 28, 2006
KABUL, Afghanistan - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice promised victory over a resurgent Taliban during an upbeat visit to Afghanistan on Wednesday and called the country's embattled president one of the most respected leaders in the world.
Rice acknowledged that the rise in violence in Afghanistan in recent months is a concern for the United States and the U.S.-backed government of President Hamid Karzai.
But she said democratic gains in the country in the nearly five years since the fall of the Taliban will not erased.
"That Afghanistan has enemies is not a surprise to anyone," Rice said following meetings with Karzai and with military commanders. All her meetings were held behind heavy fortifications.
Rice said the United States is committed to Afghanistan for the long haul. "We are not going to tire, we are not going to leave," she declared.
Karzai said optimism about his country's gains does not mean he is blind to its challenges, among them corruption and the drug trade.
Terrorists "are trying to attack us where they can," Karzai said. "When we speak of success, it doesn't mean that we forget the problems."
A clearly frustrated Karzai criticized the coalition's anti-terror campaign last Thursday, deploring the deaths of hundreds of Afghans and appealing for more help for his government.
Karzai did not repeat that criticism with Rice by his side, and Rice gave little sign that she is worried about the direction of the fight against terror even while acknowledging the scope of the challenge.
"This is an international force that is determined to try to undermine the aspirations of free people and they are not going to win," Rice said.
"We have to realize we that we have a common enemy. We can all do more. We can all work harder we all need to constantly assess our strategy, look at our tactics, make certain that we are responding to their change in tactics, because this is a thinking enemy."
After a few hours in Afghanistan, Rice was headed to Moscow for a meeting with counterparts from the Group of Eight industrialized nations in which the topic was expected to be
Iran's disputed nuclear program.
She had been in Pakistan on Tuesday for meetings with President Gen. Pervez Musharraf and other Pakistani officials.
While there, she heard Pakistan's military government challenge neighboring Afghanistan to identify the terror hideouts that Afghanistan claims exist in Pakistan.
"Our view is that we have two good friends and two fierce fighters in the war on terror," Rice said following meetings with Musharraf and Foreign Minister Khursheed Kasuri.
Musharraf became an unlikely ally of the Bush administration following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks when he pledged cooperation against terrorists who traveled easily between Pakistan and the lawless Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan.
Karzai has criticized Pakistan for not doing enough to go after terrorists along the mountainous border between the two nations.
The deadliest fighting in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in 2001 has killed more than 500 people, mostly militants, since mid-May and raised fears of a Taliban resurgence.
Afghan officials have said the Taliban is making an all-out push to scare Britain, Canada, the Netherlands and Romania from deploying some 6,000 troops to the region.
Outside Kabul, there is little visible evidence of improvements in infrastructure or services since the Taliban regime was ousted.
That has allowed forces loyal to the hard-line Islamic regime to regain strength and sympathy in their former strongholds in the poorer southern provinces of Uruzgan, Helmand, Zabul and Kandahar.
The Taliban also is being fueled by the return of a flourishing drug trade. Afghanistan produces 90 percent of the world's heroin supply with its poppy crop, and the profits of drug trafficking are helping fund the militants.
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Hostage Betancourt in good health: FARC chief
PARIS, June 27, 2006 (AFP)
Ingrid Betancourt, the Colombian presidential candidate who was kidnapped four years ago, is alive and in good health, a senior figure in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) told a French newspaper Tuesday.
"Ingrid Betancourt is well - taking into account the environment she finds herself in. It is not easy to be deprived of one's freedom. But she is an intelligent and affable woman," Raul Reyes - number two in the Marxist guerrilla movement - told L'Humanite.
"She was not captured because she was French and not for economic motives either. She was taken in order to secure the release of some 500 guerrilla fighters," he said.
Betancourt, 44, has a French passport by virtue of a 1981 marriage, and the French government has taken a special interest in her kidnapping. She was captured in February 2002 after going to meet FARC leaders in the country's demilitarized zone.
Reyes repeated the FARC's offer to exchange Betancourt as well as "three CIA agents", military commanders and police officers held prisoner for more than six years and some political leaders in return for the 500 guerrillas.
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Military Matters
Arctic sovereignty on radar: MacKay
Last Updated: Tuesday, June 27, 2006 | 9:06 AM CT
CBC News
Ottawa is committed to enhancing its presence in the Arctic, particularly with respect to the Northwest Passage, Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay says.
He made the remarks during a visit to the Yukon on Monday where he attended a gathering of diplomats in Whitehorse.
The government recognizes more personnel will be required to protect the Northwest Passage, MacKay told reporters.
"We've committed during the election to enhance our presence here - to enhance the necessary equipment, to keep that presence real," said MacKay.
"With the Northwest Passage on many people's minds, this is going to include more personnel. Clearly how and when this occurs is part of the decision-making we are going through right now."
More aboriginal people are also going to be needed to help Canada protect its sovereignty in the Arctic, he said.
MacKay's visit to the Yukon capital coincided with news from the Defence Department that it's going to spend $2.9 billion on three new naval ships.
"We are demonstrating in actions, not just words, that we take enhanced military procurement seriously," said MacKay. "We cannot expect our men and women of the Armed Forces to be doing their important work in substandard equipment or in many cases equipment that is rusting out, that is ancient."
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Boeing-Led Team Fires Surrogate Lasers From Airborne Laser Aircraft
Spacewar.com
Jun 27, 2006
A Boeing-led industry team and the U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) took a major step toward demonstrating the capability of the Airborne Laser (ABL) by successfully firing surrogate lasers from inside the aircraft.
During recent ground tests at Boeing facilities in Wichita, Kan., the team placed the lasers in the ABL aircraft, a modified Boeing 747-400F, and fired them repeatedly into a measuring device called a range simulator.
The tests verified that the ABL team properly aligned the optical beam train, a series of optical components, steering and deformable mirrors, and sensors that will guide lasers to an actual target. The equipment exercised in the tests is part of the beam control/fire control system designed and integrated by Lockheed Martin.
The lasers used in the tests were low-power surrogates for ABL's high-energy laser and two illuminator lasers. The program plans to install actual illuminators in the jet for ground and flight tests later this year. The track illuminator laser is designed to track all classes of hostile ballistic missiles.
The beacon illuminator laser will measure atmospheric conditions, allowing the beam control/fire control system to compensate for atmospheric turbulence in the high-energy laser's path to a target. During this year's flight tests, the illuminators will be fired in flight at a missile-shaped image painted on a test aircraft.
The high-energy laser, which achieved lethal power and run-times in a ground laboratory in December 2005, is currently being refurbished and will be installed in the ABL aircraft in 2007 to prepare for the program's first missile shoot-down test, slated for 2008.
"The surrogate-laser tests provide further proof that the ABL design is sound," said Pat Shanahan, vice president and general manager of Boeing Missile Defense Systems. "They also bring ABL closer to important flight testing later this year and to the 2008 lethal shoot-down milestone. This is an exciting time for the program, and our team has worked hard to make it that way."
Boeing is the prime contractor for ABL, which will provide a speed-of-light capability to destroy all classes of ballistic missiles in their boost phase of flight. Boeing provides the modified aircraft and the battle management system and is the overall systems integrator.
ABL partners include Northrop Grumman, which supplies the high-energy laser and the beacon illuminator laser, and Lockheed Martin, which provides the nose-mounted turret in addition to the beam control/fire control system.
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French Airforce Adds Home-Grown Fighter Plane To Its Arsenal
by Michel Sailhan
AFP
Jun 27, 2006
The French airforce took delivery of its first batch of the France-made Rafale fighter plane on Tuesday, with the manufacturer of the long-delayed jet, Dassault Aviation, still looking for the first foreign order for the aircraft. French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin attended a ceremony at an army base in Saint Dizier, northeast France, where 20 models of the Rafale were delivered.
The Rafale, which is the successor to the Mirage jet, entered service in the French navy in 2004 and 10 models are based on the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, The Charles de Gaulle.
French Defence Minister Michele Alliot-Marie, who attended the ceremony, called the planes "quite exceptional" and the "most comprehensive and most high-performance" fighter jets in the world.
Referring to the delays suffered by the project since the first Rafale prototype appeared in 1986, she added: "I regret only one thing. It's that it did not enter the French army at the moment it was conceived."
The French airforce had waited 10 years longer than expected for its first Rafales, a record delay in the industry, mainly because of "budgetary problems", according to Dassault.
The French government has so far ordered 120 Rafales, of which 82 are earmarked for the airforce and 38 for the navy. Under the latest defence spending program, which runs from 2003-2008, the government is expected to order up to 294.
Dassault Aviation has fallen from the heights of its success in the 1980s when it sold its Mirage jets to about 10 countries, particularly in the Middle East.
The market for fighter planes has changed since the beginning of the Rafale project, with the Europe-made Eurofighter aircraft, the US-made F-15 Eagle and the new F-35, as well as Russian models, now competing for national defence budgets.
Dassault has been unable to sell the Rafale to foreign governments and has suffered a series of setbacks since it began marketing the plane abroad in 1994, notably with the Dutch, South Korean and Singaporean governments.
In a high-profile sales pitch, French President Jacques attempted to convince his Saudi Arabian allies to place an order for the plane during an official visit to the country in March.
The Arab nation has still not made a decision, with the trade press suggesting that the defence ministry is ready to buy 48 planes from a foreign manufacturer.
"This plane is a good plane in the opinion of all its pilots, if not the best in its class," said the chief executive of Dassault Aviation, Charles Edelstenne, in April. "We will export it one day."
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Odds n Ends
Tropical Stonehenge may have been found
By STAN LEHMAN
Associated Press
Tue Jun 27, 2006
SAO PAULO, Brazil - A grouping of granite blocks along a grassy Amazon hilltop may be the vestiges of a centuries-old astronomical observatory - a find archaeologists say indicates early rainforest inhabitants were more sophisticated than previously believed.
The 127 blocks, some as high as 9 feet tall, are spaced at regular intervals around the hill, like a crown 100 feet in diameter.
On the shortest day of the year - Dec. 21 - the shadow of one of the blocks disappears when the sun is directly above it.
"It is this block's alignment with the winter solstice that leads us to believe the site was once an astronomical observatory," said Mariana Petry Cabral, an archaeologist at the Amapa State Scientific and Technical Research Institute. "We may be also looking at the remnants of a sophisticated culture."
Anthropologists have long known that local indigenous populations were acute observers of the stars and sun. But the discovery of a physical structure that appears to incorporate this knowledge suggests pre-Columbian Indians in the Amazon rainforest may have been more sophisticated than previously suspected.
"Transforming this kind of knowledge into a monument; the transformation of something ephemeral into something concrete, could indicate the existence of a larger population and of a more complex social organization," Cabral said.
Cabral has been studying the site, near the village of Calcoene, just north of the equator in Amapa state in far northern Brazil, since last year. She believes it was once inhabited by the ancestors of the Palikur Indians, and while the blocks have not yet been submitted to carbon dating, she says pottery shards near the site indicate they are pre-Columbian and maybe older - as much as 2,000 years old.
Last month, archaeologists working on a hillside north of Lima, Peru, announced the discovery of the oldest astronomical observatory in the Western Hemisphere - giant stone carvings, apparently 4,200 years old, that align with sunrise and sunset on Dec. 21.
While the Incas, Mayans and Aztecs built large cities and huge rock structures, pre-Columbian Amazon societies built smaller settlements of wood and clay that quickly deteriorated in the hot, humid Amazon climate, disappearing centuries ago, archaeologists say.
Farmers and fishermen in the region around the Amazon site have long known about it, and the local press has dubbed it the "tropical Stonehenge." Archeologists got involved last year after geographers and geologists did a socio-economic survey of the area, by foot and helicopter, and noticed "the unique circular structure on top of the hill," Cabral said.
Scientists not involved in the discovery said it could prove valuable to understanding pre-Columbian societies in the Amazon.
"No one has ever described something like this before. This is an extremely novel find - a one of a kind type of thing," said Michael Heckenberger of the University of Florida's Department of Anthropology.
He said that while carbon dating and further excavation must be carried out, the find adds to a growing body of thought among archaeologists that prehistory in the Amazon region was more varied than had been believed.
"Given that astronomical objects, stars, constellations etc., have a major importance in much of Amazonian mythology and cosmology, it does not in any way surprise me that such an observatory exists," said Richard Callaghan, a professor of geography, anthropology and archaeology at the University of Calgary.
Brazilian archaeologists will return in August, when the rainy season ends, to carry out carbon dating and further excavations.
"The traditional image is that some time thousands of years ago small groups of tropical forest horticulturists arrived in the area and they never changed - (that) what we see today is just like it was 3,000 years ago," Heckenberger said. "This is one more thing that suggests that through the past thousands of years, societies have changed quite a lot."
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Native language affects math ability: study
www.chinaview.cn 2006-06-27 11:35:13
LOS ANGELES, June 26 (Xinhua) -- People who speak Chinese as a first language process math tasks differently from those who are native speakers of English, scientists reported on Monday.
Although Arabic numbers have been widely accepted as mathematical codes, these digits are pronounced and written differently in various languages. Scientists have been curious about whether these digits are processed in the same way in the brains of people speaking different languages such as Chinese and English, which reflect differences in Eastern and Western cultures.
Now a Chinese research team has found some clues. Its findings appeared in the June 26 edition of the U.S. journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to scan people's brains, the researchers found that native Chinese and English speakers treat numbers with different cortical parts of the brain.
In contrast to native English speakers who largely employ a language process that relies on the left perisylvian cortices for mental calculation such as a simple addition task, the researcherssaid, native Chinese speakers engage a visuo-premotor association network for the same task.
In both groups, the inferior parietal cortex of the brain was activated by a task for numerical quantity comparison, but furtheranalysis revealed a functional distinction between Chinese and English groups among the brain networks involved in the task.
The results indicate that different language systems, such as Chinese and English, can shape the way non-language-related content is processed. In other words, number processing differs in those with Chinese and English backgrounds, according to the team led by Yiyuan Tang, a professor at the Dalian University of Technology in China.
The team also noted that the brevity of the Chinese language for numbers allows for a larger short-term memory, and suggest that such faster processing in the language system might mean more efficient cortical activities in the brain.
Although language-specific processing may contribute to those differences, the learning environment and cultural variables may also have an influence on how numbers are acquired and represented in the brain. These factors may result in differential brain processes, the researchers added.
For example, reading and writing squared Chinese characters, which possess a high, nonlinear visual complexity, as well as using an abacus since elementary school, may help build a "mental image" of numbers in the brain.
"Those well formulated learning processes, which are beyond reading systems and are both educationally and socially different, may lead to brain differences during number processing and other cognitive tasks," the researchers concluded.
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Venus Express Spies Double Vortex
SPX
June 28, 2006
Paris, France - ESA scientists said Tuesday that analysis of Venus Express data from the spacecraft's first orbit around the planet confirm the presence of a huge double-eye atmospheric vortex at the planet's south pole. Last April 11, Venus Express was captured into a first elongated orbit around Venus lasting nine days and ranging from 350,000 kilometers to 400 kilometers (217,000 miles to 248 miles) from the surface.
The initial orbit made possible the ability to obtain the first clues about the Venusian atmospheric dynamics on a global scale, before the spacecraft got closer and started observing the planet in greater detail.
During the spacecraft's orbital adjustment process, mission controllers used some of its instruments to perform the first observations at different distances from Venus - a few hours at a time from six different positions between April 12 and April 19.
Those observations produced images of a huge, double-eye atmospheric vortex over the south pole, not dissimilar from the equivalent structure present at the north pole - the only one previously studied in some detail.
Only glimpses of the stormy atmospheric behavior at the south pole were obtained by the Pioneer Venus and Mariner 10 missions, but such a double-eye structure never has been seen clearly before now.
High-velocity winds are known to spin westwards around the planet, and to take only four days to complete a rotation. This super-rotation, combined with the natural recycling of hot air in the atmosphere, would induce the formation of a vortex structure over each pole.
The question is why Venus is exhibiting two vortices.
"We still know very little about the mechanisms by which the super-rotation and the polar vortexes are linked," said Hakan Svedhem, ESA's Venus Express project scientist.
"Also, we are still not able to explain why the global atmospheric circulation of the planet results in a double and not single vortex formation at the poles," Svedhem added. "However the mission is just at the beginning and it's doing fine; we expect this and many other long-standing mysteries to be addressed and possibly solved by Venus Express."
Atmospheric vortexes are very complex structures that are very difficult to model, even on Earth. Thanks to these first pictures, it has also been possible to observe the presence of a collar of cold air around the vortex structure, possibly due to the recycling of cold air downwards.
Views of the Venusian southern hemisphere, taken in visible and ultraviolet light, show interesting atmospheric stripe-like structures. Spotted for the first time by Mariner 10 in the 1970s, they may be due to the presence of dust and aerosols in the atmosphere, but their true nature remains unexplained.
"Venus Express has the tools to investigate these structures in detail," Svedhem said. "Studies have already begun to dig into the properties of the complex wind fields on Venus, to understand the atmospheric dynamics on local and global scales."
Venus Express also made use for the first time ever from orbit of the so-called infrared windows present in the atmosphere of Venus - if observed at certain wavelengths, it is possible to detect thermal radiation leaking from the deepest atmospheric layers, revealing what lies beneath the dense cloud curtain situated at about 60 kilometers altitude.
The first infrared images making use of these windows show complex cloud structures, all revealed by the thermal radiation coming up from different atmospheric depths.
Venus Express also has compiled preliminary data about the chemical composition of the atmosphere. The planet's atmosphere is composed mainly of carbon dioxide. The incoming solar radiation dissociates this molecule into carbon monoxide (and oxygen in the upper atmospheric layers.
Venus Express already has spotted the presence of an oxygen airglow high in the atmosphere. However, the spacecraft's instruments have revealed the presence of carbon monoxide as low as the cloud-layer top.
Scientists will continue the data analysis and retrieval to understand the phenomenon, which is very important to clarify the complex chemical processes and cycles at work in the atmosphere of Venus under the influence of solar radiation.
Since May 7, Venus Express has been circling the planet in its final 24-hour orbit, ranging between 66,000 kilometers and 250 kilometers (40,920 miles and 155 miles), so it is now closer to the planet that during its capture orbits.
Venus Express scientists are now analyzing the new data, which already show what seem to be exciting new features. "We have never seen Venus in such great detail so far, Svedhem said. "We are eagerly waiting for these new data to be available."
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