In the map below if Palestine was a human body, Israel would
be a
Cancer and a kind of Tumor that spread itself through that body . This
would not have happened if it were not for the help of the west ( England
, Europe and the United States of America .)
Looking at that map any normal human
being can understand how inhuman Israel is, crawling and occupying the
Palestinian land, against all international laws and human rights and
orders.
Through the years, the body of course tried to repel the
cancer:
1948 Israel made war against a number of Arab countries
1956 Israel, hiding behind England and France, made war
against Egypt
1967 Israel attacked Egypt and occupied the Sinai
in what was known as "the six days war".
1982 Israel made war against Lebanon and occupied the south
of it for many years.
Finally in 2006 the
war on Lebanon was staged, planned and executed by Israel
and its biggest ally
America.
This war on Lebanon
represented by the Arab resistance "Hezbollah" is the subject of this site.
After Israel was beaten
in the 1973 war and expelled out of the Sinai , Israel
is beaten again for the second time
This is what the Israeli
army was trained for,
to intimidate old women and
helpless children
"How long you need
to get rid of Hezbollah?"
America
Asked the Israelis
"Only few
days and we will get rid of Hezbollah"
said the
Israelis
But Hezbollah had other
plans for the Israeli army
Israelis running for their lives.
What happened to the Israeli best trained,
best equipped army in the world!?
This is what happened ! Corps of the Israelis best trained army soldiers everywhere
Dead Israeli soldiers
And more dead Israelis
Defeated
Israelis
America
please help us!!
More
weeping, but it is too late
The
beasts of the Middle East
Those are the Zionists who
introduced terrorism and wars in the Middle East, those are the pioneers of terrorism, those are the children killers
In the Jewish religion it is
permitted and allowed to kill Children, so said their Rabbis .
But Hezbollah Has not the habit to kill children, Hezbollah knew better whom to kill !
Defeat
and Desperation
More casualties
More regrets
Hezbollah
made the Israeli army see the world upside down!
To prevent it from showing
the disastrous IDF defeat. Israel made many attempts to destroy Hezbollah TV
station but it did not succeed.
The
following are shots from El Manar TV channel of Hezbollah, that
criminal Olmert and his Gang did not want you to see:
Ambushed
IDF convoy
Israeli
Tank being destroyed
More
than a dozen dead Israeli soldiers
More
Israeli corps
The Israelis wanted to stop the war, but the
American administration ordered them to continue, hoping they could get rid of
Hezbollah. The matter was not the two Israeli soldiers made prisoners, the matter was America had plans for the Middle East.
But
as the Israelis were loosing the war, America through Condoleezza
Rice sent them smart destructive bombs to kill as many children
and civilians as possible, hoping that it would make the Lebanese
people stand against Hezbollah and Nasrallah . But the diabolic
scheme did not work! Allah is greater
than those satanic people.
The
Israeli army was more busy collecting the dead and the wounded than fighting.
In the
end, one can deduce that it was a
"Nasrallah", which in
English means: "Victory of God".
There's another significant anniversary this week, but not one that's attracted the sort of attention the 11 September commemorations have.
On the morning of Saturday, September 18th, 1982, reporters entering the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila near Beirut, Lebanon, were met with a ghastly sight. Piles of bodies littered the dusty streets of the camps, mass graves had been hastily constructed and buildings had been bulldozed over corpses. The slaughtered were old men, women, and children. A massacre had taken place here. The estimated death toll were in thousands.
What had happened here? What could have provoked this type of inhuman slaughter? Who did this?
These were the questions that punctuated the silence of the morning after the killing stopped. These questions are still asked today, more than two decades after the events had transpired.
To try to answer these question, lets read history again:
On 6 June 1982, the Israeli army invaded Lebanon in what it described as 'retaliation' for the attempted assassination of Israeli Ambassador Argov in London on 4 June. The invasion, soon dubbed "Operation Peace for Galilee," progressed rapidly. By 18 June 1982, Israel had surrounded the Palestine Liberation Organization's (PLO) armed forces in the western part of the Lebanese capital. A cease-fire, mediated by United States Envoy Philip Habib, resulted in the PLO evacuation of Beirut on 1 September 1982.
On 11 September 1982, Israeli Defence Minister Ariel Sharon, the architect of the invasion, announced that "2,000 terrorists" had remained inside the Palestinian refugee camps around Beirut. On Wednesday 15 September, the day after the assassination of Israeli-allied Phalangist militia leader and Lebanese President-elect Bashir Gemayel, the Israeli army occupied West Beirut, "encircling and sealing" the camps of Sabra and Shatila, which were inhabited by Lebanese and Palestinian civilians. Israel justified its move into West Beirut by a need to maintain order and stability after Gemayel's assassination. However, several days later, Ariel Sharon told the Knesset, Israel's parliament: "Our entry into West Beirut was in order to make war against the infrastructure left by the terrorists".
The Israeli army then disarmed, as far as they were able, anti-Israeli militias in West Beirut, while leaving the Christian Phalangist militias in East Beirut fully armed. By mid-day on 15 September 1982, the refugee camps were entirely surrounded by Israeli tanks and soldiers, who installed checkpoints at strategic locations and crossroads around the camps in order to monitor the entry or exit of any person. During the late afternoon and evening of that day, the camps were shelled.
Around mid-day on Thursday 16 September 1982, a unit of approximately 150 Israeli-allied-armed Phalangists (or that's what Israel claim) entered the first camp. For the next 40 hours members of the Phalangist militia raped, killed, and injured a large number of unarmed civilians, mostly children, women and elderly people inside the encircled and sealed camps. The estimate of victims varies between 700 (the official Israeli figure) to 3,500. The victims and survivors of the massacres have never been deemed entitled to a formal investigation of the tragedy, since Israel's Kahan Commission did not have a judicial mandate and was not backed up by legal force.
This is considered the bloodiest single massacre by Israeli Terrorist Army and it's claimed allies, but one can think that it will not be last, especially after what we saw in the last Israeli war on Lebanon.
If Americans approached the 11 September anniversary with trepidation, many residents of Shatila camp, and its more run-down neighbor Sabra, have been dreading the milestone on Saturday which marks 24 years of pain and the futile search for justice.
For Palestinians, it will certainly be a far cry from the ceremonies in New York and Washington, where American leaders told the world that its pre-eminent military power was going to ensure that justice for the victims would triumph over evil whatever the cost.
The Palestinian survivors of the 1982 massacres will probably gather for speeches at the place where their loved-ones were buried en masse - a dusty vacant lot marked by a pathetic temporary monument of breezeblocks.
But there will be no internationally-observed minute's silence for the innocent victims of Sabra and Shatila, or global news coverage about the survivors and their miserable existence at the scene of this evil crime.
In the week that George Bush took to
fantasising that his blood-soaked "war on terror" would
lead the 21st century into a "shining age of human liberty"
I went through my mail bag to find a frightening letter addressed
to me by an American veteran whose son is serving as a lieutenant
colonel and medical doctor with US forces in Baghdad. Put simply,
my American friend believes the change of military creed under
the Bush administration--from that of "soldier" to
that of "warrior"--is encouraging American troops to
commit atrocities.
From Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo
to Bagram, to the battlefields of Iraq and to the "black"
prisons of the CIA, humiliation and beatings, rape, anal rape
and murder have now become so commonplace that each new outrage
is creeping into the inside pages of our newspapers. My reporting
notebooks are full of Afghan and Iraqi complaints of torture
and beatings from August 2002, and then from 2003 to the present
point. How, I keep asking myself, did this happen? Obviously,
the trail leads to the top. But where did this cult of cruelty
begin?
So first, here's the official
US Army "Soldier's Creed", originally drawn up to prevent
anymore Vietnam atrocities:
"I am an American soldier.
I am a member of the United
States Army--a protector of the greatest nation on earth. Because
I am proud of the uniform I wear, I will always act in ways creditable
to the military service and the nation that it is sworn to guard
...
No matter what situation I
am in, I will never do anything for pleasure, profit or personal
safety, which will disgrace my uniform, my unit or my country.
I will use every means I have,
even beyond the line of duty, to restrain my Army comrades from
actions, disgraceful to themselves and the uniform.
I am proud of my country and
it's flag.
I will try to make the people
of this nation proud of the service I represent for I am an American
soldier."
Now here's the new version
of what is called the "Warrior Ethos":
I am an American soldier.
I am a warrior and a member
of a team. I serve the people of the Unites States and live the
Army values.
I will always place the mission
first.
I will never accept defeat.
I will never quit.
I will never leave a fallen
comrade.
I am disciplined, physically
and mentally tough, trained and proficient in my warrior tasks
and drills. I always maintain my arms, my equipment and myself.
I am an expert and I am a professional.
I stand ready to deploy, engage and destroy the enemies of the
United States of America in close combat. I am a guardian of
freedom and the American way of life.
I am an American soldier.
Like most Europeans--and an
awful lot of Americans--I was quite unaware of this ferocious
"code" for US armed forces, although it's not hard
to see how it fits in with Bush's rantings. I'm tempted to point
this out in detail, but my American veteran did so with such
eloquence in his letter to me that the response should come in
his words: "The Warrior Creed," he wrote, "allows
no end to any conflict accept total destruction of the 'enemy'.
It allows no defeat ... and does not allow one ever to stop fighting
(lending itself to the idea of the 'long war'). It says nothing
about following orders, it says nothing about obeying laws
or showing restraint. It says nothing about dishonourable actions
...".
Each day now, I come across
new examples of American military cruelty in Iraq and Afgha-nistan.
Here, for example, is Army Specialist Tony Lagouranis, part of
an American mobile interrogation team working with US marines,
interviewed by Amy Goodman on the American Democracy Now! programme
describing a 2004 operation in Babel, outside Baghdad: "Every
time Force Recon went on a raid, they would bring back prisoners
who were bruised, with broken bones, sometimes with burns. They
were pretty brutal to these guys. And I would ask the prisoners
what happened, how they received these wounds. And they would
tell me that it was after their capture, while they were subdued,
while they were handcuffed and they were being questioned by
the Force Recon Marines ... One guy was forced to sit on an exhaust
pipe of a Humvee ... he had a giant blister, third-degree burns
on the back of his leg."
Lagouranis, whose story is
powerfully recalled in Goodman's new book, Static, reported this
brutality to a Marine major and a colonel-lawyer from the US
Judge Advocate General's Office. "But they just wouldn't
listen, you know? They wanted numbers. They wanted numbers of
terrorists apprehended ... so they could brief that to the general."
The stories of barbarity grow by the week, sometimes by the day.
In Canada, an American military deserter appealed for refugee
status and a serving comrade gave evidence that when US forces
saw babies lying in the road in Fallujah--outrageously, it appears,
insurgents sometimes placed them there to force the Americans
to halt and face ambush--they were under orders to drive over
the children without stopping.
Which is what happens when
you always "place the mission first" whenyou are going
to "destroy"--rather than defeat--your enemies. As
my American vet put it: "the activities in American military
prisons and the hundreds of reported incidents against civilians
in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere are not aberrations--they
are part of what the US military, according to the ethos, is
intended to be. Many other armies behave in a worse fashion than
the US Army. But those armies don't claim to be the "good
guys" ... I think we need... a military composed of soldiers,
not warriors."
Winston Churchill understood
military honour. "In defeat, defiance," he advised
Britons in the Second World War. "In victory, magnanimity."
Not any more. According to George W Bush this week "the
safety of America depends on the outcome of the battle in the
streets of Baghdad" because we are only in the "early
hours of this struggle between tyranny and freedom".
I suppose, in the end, we are
supposed to lead the 21st century into a shining age of human
liberty in the dungeons of "black" prisons, under the
fists of US Marines, on the exhaust pipes of Humvees. We are
warriors, we are Samurai. We draw the sword. We will destroy.
Which is exactly what Osama bin Laden said.
In order to justify repressive "anti-terrorism" legislation, various scary miscreants are required, never mind if they lack persuasiveness.
For instance, in France, a recently enacted "law facilitates the surveillance of communications allowing the police to obtain communication data from telephone operators, Internet Services Providers, Internet cafes," according to European Digital Rights.
"The text of the law states that Internet Service Providers, Internet cafes, hosting providers and operators must communicate the traffic data, called numbers, IP addresses to specialized services in case of investigations related to suspect terrorist activities. Mobile phone operators and internet cafes will be required to keep records of client connections for one year under its provisions. The law also gives the possibility to use surveillance cameras in public spaces such as train stations, churches and mosques, shops, factories or nuclear plants.... This procedure ignores the magistrates and needs no judge involvement thus creating a sort of administrative police and ignoring all the guarantees related to public freedoms."
Of course, an "al-Qaeda" or likewise Freddy Kruger-like presence-lurking in the shadows, ready to slaughter French citizens, whipped into a fanatical Wahhabi froth by Osama stand-in Ayman al-Zawahri-is required to sidetrack any suggestion such draconian measures endanger civil liberties.
"Al Qaeda has for the first time announced a union with an Algerian insurgent group that has designated France as an enemy, saying they will act together against French and American interests," reports the Associated Press. "Current and former French officials specializing in terrorism said yesterday that an Al Qaeda alliance with the Salafist Group for Call and Combat, known by its French initials GSPC, was cause for concern."
Naturally, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, described as an "Atlanticist," in other words, a European neocon, is all over this one like white on rice.
"We take these threats very seriously," he told France-2 television. The threat is "permanent" and requires "absolute vigilance," according to Sarko, even though a close look at the Salafist Group for Call and Combat (GSPC, Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat) indicates it may be nothing more than an Algerian intel op cobbled together to profit from smuggling, protection rackets, and money laundering across the borders of Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Libya and Chad.
"A number of observers have voiced strong doubts regarding the GSPC's capacity to carry out large-scale attacks," notes Wikipedia. "They suspect the involvement of Algeria's Department of Intelligence and Security (DRS) in an effort to improve Algeria's international standing (as a credible partner in the 'war against terrorism') and to lure the United States into the region," and, as well, make excuses for building a "permanent" police state in France.
In order to prop up the flagging image of GSPC as a viable terrorist group-the Boston Globe cites evidence the group "has been severely weakened by internal divisions, security crackdowns, and defections in Algeria"-on the fifth anniversary of nine eleven Ayman al-Zawahri announced a "blessed union" between al-Qaeda and GSPC in a video release, a production more than likely straight from a video studio in the basement of the Pentagon.
In the video, al-Zawahiri tells us "Osama bin Laden has told me to announce to Muslims that the GSPC ... has joined Al-Qaeda" and all good jihadists "pray to God that they will be a thorn in the side of the American and French crusaders and their allies," that is if they can be dissuaded from their black market dealings. It is not revealed if al-Zawahiri consulted a Ouija board in order to receive his orders, as Osama took a dirt nap some time ago.
Finally, it should be noted that GSPC is a splinter faction of the GIA (Groupe Islamique Armé), or the Armed Islamic Group, the latter formed by "Afghan Arabs" in 1992. As we know, these Arabs were recruited, trained, and funded by the CIA and Pakistan's ISI in the 1980s (of the more than 10,000 Arabs recruited, 2,800 were Algerian), and members of "al-Qaeda" were distilled from this group and used in Bosnia, Chechnya, and are reported to be active in Mauritania, Mali, Chad, and Niger.
It is entirely legitimate, then, to surmise GSPC is yet another intelligence operation. GSPC may be incapable of threatening France, although they seem to be sufficient to rob ordinary French citizens of their civil liberties, but the shadowy and apparently ineffectual group, now supposedly linked up to "al-Qaeda," may prove to be quite a career boost for Nicolas Sarkozy and the Atlanticists-cum-neocons, if nothing else.
Gold closed at 586.00 dollars an ounce on Friday, down 5.4% from $617.90 at the close of the Friday before. The dollar closed at 0.7895 euros Friday, up less than 0.1% from 0.7890 for the week. The euro closed at 1.2666, compared to 1.2674 at the end of the previous week. Gold in euros, then, would be 462.66 euros an ounce, down 5.4% from 487.53 euros for the week. Oil closed at 63.33 dollars a barrel Friday, down 4.6% from $66.25 at the close of the previous Friday. Oil in euros would be 50.00 euros a barrel, down from 52.27 for the week. The gold/oil ratio closed at 9.25, down 0.8% from 9.33 at the end of the week before. In U.S. stocks, the Dow closed at 11,560.77 Friday, up 1.5% from 11,392.11 for the week. The NASDAQ closed at 2,235.59 Friday, up 3.2% from 2,165.79 at the close of the previous Friday. In U.S. interest rates, the yield on the ten-year U.S. Treasury note closed at 4.79%, up two basis points from 4.77 for the week.
Happy days are here again! Oil and gold closed down sharply, stocks up, everything must be great. There's an election coming up in the United States and it appears that good economic news will continue for about a month and a half.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Major stock indexes hit fresh four-month highs on Friday after reports showed inflation was mostly contained while a drop this week in energy prices suggested cost pressures were easing.
The dollar also climbed, largely because traders pared positions against the greenback ahead of a weekend meeting of Group of Seven central bankers and finance ministers. But U.S. Treasuries gave up early gains on a bout of technical selling.
The consumer price index rose 0.2 percent in August, for both the overall and core readings, matching market forecasts. Core CPI excludes food and energy costs.
When the Federal Reserve meets next week, it is expected to keep the key federal funds rate steady at 5.25 percent after halting its rate-increase campaign in August on the view that slowing growth will moderate upward price pressures.
"The inflation news this morning was positive, and that continues to fuel the belief that the Fed is done tightening," said Mark Bronzo, managing director at Gartmore Separate Accounts LLC in Irvington, New York.
"Oil continues to trade down, and with energy costs coming down, a lot of people feel that's going to help the consumer."
The University of Michigan said separately that consumer expectations in September for inflation one year out are the lowest since March 2006.
The Dow Jones industrial average added 33.38 points, or 0.29 percent, to 11,560.77. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index gained 3.59 points, or 0.27 percent, to 1,319.87. The Nasdaq Composite Index rose 6.86 points, or 0.31 percent, at 2,235.59.
European stocks were slightly higher, with the FTSEurofirst 300 Index up 0.3 percent at 1,373.33.
In Tokyo, the Nikkei closed down 0.5 percent at 15,866.93, coming under further pressure after the government downgraded its view on private consumption and exports...
Oil Plumbs 5-Month Lows, Gold At 3-Month Lows
Falling commodity prices helped to bolster the view that inflation pressures are under control.
Oil slid briefly below $63 a barrel, touching its lowest level since March as U.S. fuel stockpiles grew ahead of winter and investors probed for a price that would trigger an OPEC supply cut.
U.S. crude dropped as low as $62.03 per barrel, the cheapest since March 23, before settling up 11 cents at $63.33. London Brent crude was off 21 cents at $63.33.
U.S. crude oil for October delivery closed down 18 cents at $63.40 a barrel.
"The psychology of the market has really turned. It looks like the market will be oversupplied next year unless OPEC does something," said Frederic Lasserre, head of commodity research at Societe Generale.
Gold futures in New York ended the session at a three-month low, as traders ditched more holdings after crude oil tanked and the dollar rose.
COMEX gold for December delivery was down $3.00 at $583 an ounce, after falling to $571.20, its lowest price since June 15.
Elaine Kurtenbach, AP Business Writer
Sat Sep 16, 3:14 PM ET
SINGAPORE - The United States and other major economies are keeping global growth on track despite risks from high oil prices and other threats, finance chiefs from the Group of Seven industrialized nations said Saturday, while urging China to adopt more flexible currency policies.
The group also urged more action to combat terrorist financing and illicit activities by North Korea and Iran, U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said.
"We should intensify our efforts against terrorist financing, money laundering and illicit finance - including the financial networks supporting WMD (weapons of mass destruction) proliferation," Paulson said in a statement after the daylong talks ended.
Despite a sharp slowdown in U.S. growth in April-June, the U.S. economy is growing solidly, underpinned by rising wages, healthy corporate cash flow and investment, he said.
The U.S. is "vigorously doing its part" to raise savings and cut its budget deficits, repeating a prescription for resolving trade imbalances long advocated by Washington and other members of the G7 - Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan.
...The G-7 statement was upbeat in its assessment of world economic prospects.
"In our economies, performance remains strong amid moderating growth in the United States," the statement said.
"The positive outlook, however, is not without potential downside risks, e.g., tight and volatile energy markets, rising inflation expectations in some economies, and the spread of protectionist tendencies," it said.
And the economy isn't that bad, as long as you don't think about the future. It doesn't feel great, though, looking ahead, as alluded to at the very end of the previous article. We non-billionaires in the United States can only feel anxious reading about the drop in housing prices and headlines like these:
DETROIT (Reuters) - Ford Motor Co. said on Friday it will slash $5 billion in costs and one-third of its work force as it warned its auto business would not make a profit in North America for another three years.
The automaker also ruled out an immediate sale of its Jaguar brand, disappointing investors who wanted Ford to press ahead with asset sales to raise cash.
Ford shares dropped as much as 15 percent Friday, the biggest single-day percentage decline in almost four years.
Ford also suspended its dividend and pledged to revamp its vehicle line-up, an area of weakness widely cited by analysts.
In its third turnaround plan in five years, the No. 2 U.S. automaker said it would close 16 North American factories by 2012, two more than originally scheduled.
Ford said it will cut 10,000 white-collar jobs on top of the 4,000 jobs already cut this year. All of Ford's 75,000 factory workers are being offered buyouts under a deal with the United Auto Workers union. Ford hopes to cut 30,000 factory jobs by 2008.
The steps were the latest sign of the financial stress on the traditional Big Three.
General Motors Corp. is on track to shutter 12 plants and cut $9 billion in recurring costs as part of its turnaround plan.
DaimlerChrysler AG's Chrysler Group said Friday it could lose about $1.27 billion this year, a much deeper loss than it forecast in July because of mounting inventory and slower truck and SUV sales.
Ford warned its North American operations would not post a full-year profit before 2009, a year later than first projected. It also targeted $6 billion in materials cost savings by 2010 by streamlining purchasing.
That Wall Street responded so coolly to Ford's bloodletting should be taken by workers as a warning of the unprecedented scale of the attacks on jobs and living standards that are coming, as American capitalism seeks to place the burden of its crisis squarely on the backs of the working class. These attacks will hit very broad sections of the working population, as demonstrated by Ford's decision to slash an additional 10,000 white collar jobs, over and above the number it announced in January. These jobs are to be cut within a mere six months.
Jerome White, a socialist candidate for Congress in Michigan, has this to say:
Ford Motor Company's plan to wipe out 44,000 hourly and salaried jobs and shut down 16 manufacturing facilities in North America is a brutal attack on the working class. Once again, tens of thousands of workers and their families are being forced to pay for the mismanagement and avarice of the corporate bosses and the crisis of American capitalism.
The human impact of these cuts will be devastating. In communities throughout the Midwest and South, as well as in Canada, many thousands will lose their incomes and their homes. They will be forced to pull their children out of college or go without health care. Public schools will be robbed of the tax dollars they depend on, and small businesses will be forced to close.
Michigan, which is already reeling from the downsizing of General Motors and auto parts maker Delphi, will be particularly hard-hit, with the idling of the Wixom assembly plant and the uncertain future of Wayne Assembly, the Michigan Truck plant, and other facilities.
Michigan's 7.1 percent unemployment rate is the highest in the nation, and median household incomes have fallen 11.9 percent since 2000, the worst decline in the US. Auto industry centers like Detroit and Flint, which once ranked among the highest cities in the US in home ownership and per capita income, are now among the poorest.
Home foreclosures in the Metro Detroit area have soared 137 percent in the first eight months of the year. In Macomb County, the heart of my congressional district, foreclosures are up a staggering 234 percent! The rate of foreclosures will accelerate in the coming months as mortgage rates rise and home values decline.
Ford is targeting not only assembly line workers, but also white-collar employees, who were told that a college education and technical skills would guarantee them a secure job. At least 14,000 salaried jobs - one third of Ford's total white-collar workforce - are being axed.
The slashing of these jobs will do nothing more than push Ford - once an international industrial icon - further down the road to oblivion. But the big Wall Street investors who have demanded such massive cuts are not concerned with the long-term health of the company. Their only concern is making as much profit as possible, as quickly as possible.
Over the last five years, most of corporate America has been enjoying a "golden age of profitability," according to Wall Street analysts. The higher profit margins have been achieved at the expense of labor, which has seen its share of national income sharply decline.
Unsatisfied with the rate of return on its investments in the auto sector, the financial elite has demanded an end to the "social contract" in the auto industry, through which workers had enjoyed decent wages, a measure of job security, health care benefits, and pensions. Workers in the "new" auto industry are to be paid half as much, and will enjoy none of the benefits the previous generation had secured through decades of struggle.
When Ford announced last January its "Way Forward" plan - which included cutting 34,000 jobs in North America and the shutdown of 14 plants over the next seven years - Wall Street shrugged its shoulders and demanded more blood. To drive home their point, big investors drove down the company's share value by $1.4 billion in the first six months of the year.
Ford's directors responded by dumping William Clay Ford Jr. and handing the CEO position to Alan Mulally, the former Boeing executive who oversaw the destruction of thousands of jobs at the airline maker. Under the accelerated job-cutting program, dubbed "Way Forward II," Wall Street investors expect to see their earnings rise by 25 cents per share for every 5,000 workers Ford throws onto the street.
The claim that there is no money to sustain decent living standards for auto workers is a fraud. Even as Ford was losing hundreds of millions of dollars last year, its top five executives raked in $26 million, including $13 million for William Clay Ford Jr.
Mulally will get $2 million in salary and expenses in his first two years. In addition, Ford agreed to pay him a $7.5 million signing bonus and an additional $11 million to cover performance pay and stock options he left behind when he retired from Boeing.
No ruling class in the world is as parasitic and corrupt as the American corporate oligarchy. Rather than investing the necessary resources to build safer, less expensive and more fuel-efficient vehicles, as well as to provide workers with economic security and a high level of education and training, the auto bosses and Wall Street investors would sooner destroy one of the world's best known industrial companies as long as they can extract the maximum loot for themselves out of the ruins. This only underscores the socially destructive character of the profit system.
While the auto executives have acted with utter ruthlessness to defend their interests, the leaders of the United Auto Workers union (UAW) have responded with spinelessness and complicity. The UAW, which long ago abandoned the defense of the working class, has functioned as a junior partner with Ford, helping the company shutter plants and force out its older workforce. In exchange, UAW officials have been promised an opportunity to collect union dues from younger, lower-paid workers and continue at least some of the labor-management ventures that have provided a steady stream of income for the UAW bureaucracy.
My political opponent in the November election, twelve-term Democratic Congressman Sander Levin, has done nothing to oppose the unrelenting assault on auto workers' jobs. An ally of the UAW bureaucracy, Levin has long sought to divert workers from a struggle against the corporate owners by blaming the loss of jobs on Asian and European imports and alleged trade barriers to US carmakers.
Like the UAW, Levin and the Democrats have tried to sell this bill of goods in order to pit American workers against their brothers and sisters in other countries in a race to the bottom, to see who will work for the lowest wages and worst conditions. "Standing up for the American auto industry" really means sacrificing the jobs and living standards of American workers to defend the corporate executives and their multi-million-dollar salaries.
I reject the national chauvinism of the union bureaucracy and Democrats and call for the international unity of auto workers to defend their jobs and living standards. Workers in every country face a common struggle against the global auto giants. Over the last month, for example, Volkswagen workers have been engaged in bitter struggles against mass layoffs in Brazil and Mexico.
Autoworkers are not responsible for the crisis of the auto industry. Under the capitalist profit system, the corporate executives and Wall Street investors have a monopoly over the decision-making process, but they are not the ones who pay for their disastrous choices.
The first step in protecting the interests of working people is to institute democratic control over all business decisions affecting work, safety, salaries, hiring, and hours. These decisions cannot be made by the wealthy few - whose interests are antithetical to the needs of working people - but by committees of factory floor workers, technicians and other experts committed to the interests of the working class. The establishment of industrial democracy presupposes the opening of the books of all corporations for inspection by the workers, and the ratification of corporate leadership by a democratic vote of all employees.
The massive industries upon which millions of workers and their families depend can no longer be the personal assets of America's wealthy elite, who dispense with them as they see fit. If the auto industry is to be run for the good of society, not personal profit, it must be transformed into a publicly owned utility. This will not only guarantee a good standard of living for auto workers and their families, but the production of safe, high-quality and affordable vehicles for consumers.
The ongoing transfer of wealth into the pockets of the richest one percent in American society must be halted and the revolutionary advances in technology and globally integrated production put to use to meet the requirements and solve the problems of modern mass society.
That would require quite an awakening from the majority of people who have at least the potential of a conscience. A far deeper understanding of the enemy is needed than is offered by any left party, no matter how radical, before we can hope to accomplish a wrenching of economic and political power from the pathocracy (rule by those without consciences or psychopaths).
By Steven R. Weisman The New York Times
Published: September 17, 2006
The United States is pressing top finance officials of the world's leading industrial nations to crack down on what Henry Paulson Jr., secretary of the U.S. Treasury, said was the exploitation of their banking systems by at least 30 Iranian front companies involved in illicit activities.
Paulson said Saturday that he had told the finance and economic ministers that the front companies had been identified by U.S. intelligence agencies as funneling money to terrorist groups using banks in Europe and elsewhere, many of them "blue-chip banks."
Paulson said that many leading trading companies in Iran with legitimate business operations were also involved in the illicit activities, and that it behooved any legitimate bank to realize that it was risky to continue doing even legitimate business with the companies. He called on banks around the world to be "vigilant" in opposing such risks and to avoid "inadvertently facilitating the kinds of activities that they wouldn't want to facilitate."
He said banks around the world also needed to stop doing business with North Korea, but added that North Korea was almost entirely isolated from the financial system. By contrast, Iran is still a major player globally.
The Treasury chief's comments came after he met with his counterparts from Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan and the European Union, who had come for the annual gathering of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
The comments appeared to reflect the emerging Bush administration strategy on Iran as efforts to impose sanctions by the UN Security Council have faltered. The administration charges that Iran has a secret nuclear weapons program, a charge that Iran denies. Iran is also accused of transferring funds to Hezbollah and other Islamic militant organizations through regular commercial banks.
Last week, in what administration officials call a major escalation in the effort to squeeze Iran economically, the Treasury Department announced that Bank Saderat, a major bank in Iran, would no longer have even indirect access to the U.S. financial system.
After the announcement on Bank Saderat, two Treasury officials visited Europe to try to persuade regulators and banks to stop doing business with Bank Saderat and any other banks alleged to be involved in illicit activities. Some European banks have already curtailed their activities with Iran, but many leading banks have refused.
Also on the agenda at the meetings here was a discussion of the world economy, which Paulson said had grown in recent years at rates that he and others had not seen in a generation. Despite that, he acknowledged risks arising from the failure of recent global trade talks, high energy prices and the problem of what are called "economic imbalances."
That phrase is a euphemism for a broad set of problems, including the fact that the United States imports much more than it exports and has thus become the world's leading debtor, owing hundreds of billions of dollars to China, Japan and other trading partners.
The United States says this problem can be remedied by the trading partners importing more from the United States and by China allowing its currency to rise in value in relation to the dollar.
In a statement Saturday, the finance ministers of the Group of 7 leading industrial countries said: "Greater exchange-rate flexibility is desirable in emerging economies with large current-account surpluses, especially China."
[At the meetings here, China and Japan diverged with the United States over calls by Paulson for the IMF to police "misaligned" currencies, Bloomberg News reported.
[Paulson said the IMF should define "acceptable country-specific exchange rate policies." But China's central bank governor, Zhou Xiaochuan, said adoption of "command-style" surveillance may cause the fund to "deviate" from its mandate. The Bank of Japan governor, Toshihiko Fukui, said that beefing up the fund's currency role could "lead to focusing too narrowly on specific issues or specific countries."]
Europe may face higher rates
Officials from the European Central Bank stressed the economic strength of the euro-zone economy and inflation risks in a series of comments that suggested that interest rate rises are set to continue, Reuters reported Sunday.
"ECB rates are still extraordinarily low, both in monetary and real terms," the Bank of Italy governor, Mario Draghi, who is also on the ECB's Governing Council, said in Singapore.
WASHINGTON - Israel's Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said on Sunday that the world may have as little as "a few months" to avoid a nuclear Iran and called for sanctions.
"The crucial moment is not the day of the bomb. The crucial moment is the day in which Iran will master the enrichment, the knowledge of enrichment," she said on CNN's "Late Edition."
Livni, whose country is the only Middle East power possessing nuclear weapons, said she did not want to identify a point of "no return" in the controversy over Iran's nuclear program.
The Iranians, she said, "are trying to send a message that it's too late, you can stop your attempts because it's too late. It's not too late. They have a few more months," she said.
"The world cannot afford a nuclear Iran," Livni said. "I believe that this is time for sanctions."
Iran, whose president last year called for Israel to be "wiped off the map," denies it is seeking nuclear weapons.
Livni said Israel would like to help strengthen the more moderate elements within the Palestinian Authority -- such as President Mahmoud Abbas -- at the expense of the militant Hamas movement, which swept to power after winning January elections.
Livni called on the international community to unite to make Hamas take certain steps as a prelude to talks. She did not specify the steps, but did mention Israel's demand that Hamas release an Israeli soldier captured in June.
"If the international community show determination in the next few weeks, maybe this is the moment in which Abu Mazen can be strengthened and Hamas will have to do something," she said, referring Abbas.
Abbas and Hamas, which seeks Israel's destruction, accused each other on Sunday of trying to derail a planned unity government that Palestinian officials hope will lift Western sanctions imposed after Hamas' election victory.
Abbas and Livni will both be in New York to attend the U.N. General Assembly in the coming week.
President George W Bush is coming under enormous pressure from Israel - and from Israel's neoconservative friends inside and outside the US administration - to harden still further his stance toward Iran. They want the American president to commit himself to bombing Iran if it does not give up its program of uranium enrichment - and to issue a clear ultimatum to Tehran that he is prepared to do so. They argue that mere rhetoric - such as Bush's recent diatribe, in which he compared Iran to al-Qaeda - is not enough, and might even be counter-productive, as it might encourage the Iranians to think that America's bark is worse than its bite.
Hard-liners in Israel and the United States believe that only military action, or the credible threat of it, will now prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, with all that this would mean in terms of Israel's security and the balance of power in the strategically vital Middle East.
Fears that Bush might succumb to this Israeli and neoconservative pressure is beginning to cause serious alarm in Moscow, Beijing, Berlin, Paris, Rome and other world capitals where, as if to urge caution on Washington, political leaders are increasingly speaking out in favor of dialogue with Tehran and against the use of military force.
The quickening international debate over Iran's nuclear activities comes at a difficult time for Israel, where Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is fighting for his political life and for that of his ruling Kadima-Labor coalition.
The Iran problem is causing particular concern because it raises fundamental questions about the continued validity of the security doctrine Israel has forged over the past half century. A central plank of this doctrine is that, to be safe, Israel must dominate the region militarily and be stronger than any possible Arab or Muslim coalition.
The doctrine received a severe knock from Israel's inconclusive war in Lebanon, which demonstrated the country's vulnerability to Hizbullah's missiles and to the challenge of "asymmetric" guerrilla warfare. Israelis - especially those living in the more exposed north of the country where up to a million people took refuge in shelters - were shocked to discover that the war was being waged on Israel's home territory. All previous wars had been waged on Arab territory alone, and this had become something of an axiom for the Israeli military.
Another cause of anxiety for Israel's right wing - the settler movement, the nationalist-religious parties, the Likud and the right-dominated Kadima - is that Israel is coming under increasing international pressure to negotiate with the Palestinians, with a view to the creation of a Palestinian state. Influential voices are calling for an international conference - a sort of Madrid II - to re-launch the peace process.
Overcoming the crippling conflict between Hamas and Fatah, the Palestinians themselves are forming a national unity government, which will make it more difficult for Israel to claim that it has "no partner" with whom to negotiate.
Even British Prime Minister Tony Blair, whom the Israelis believed had been firmly co-opted into the US-Israeli camp, has recently called for the economic boycott of the Palestinians to be lifted once the unity government is in place.
This is all very bad news for right-wingers in Israel and their American supporters. They had hoped that the "land-for-peace" formula of UN Security Council Resolution 242 of 1967 had been finally buried. They want to break the Palestinian national movement - hence Olmert's unremitting assault on Gaza and the West Bank - rather than negotiate a political compromise with it. They want to seize more Palestinian land, not to withdraw to anything like the 1967 borders.
Such is the background to the outcry over Iran's nuclear activities. An Iranian bomb would end Israel's regional monopoly of nuclear weapons. It would force Israel to accept something like a balance of power, or at least a balance of deterrence.
Israelis claim vociferously that an Iranian bomb would pose an "existential threat" to their state. It is not clear whether they really believe that Iran might attack them and risk national suicide - an Armageddon scenario - or simply that they cannot contemplate a Middle East in which they would no longer be overwhelmingly strong, and in which their freedom to attack their neighbors and crush the Palestinians might be circumscribed.
When it destroyed Iraq's French-built nuclear reactor in 1981, Israel made clear that it would strike pre-emptively against the nuclear program of any hostile state in the region. The message which it and its friends are now addressing to President Bush is that if the US does not bomb Iran, Israel will have to do so.
This was put unambiguously in an article last week by Efraim Inbar, professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University and a well-known right-wing Israeli analyst. "Israel," he wrote, "can undertake a limited pre-emptive strike. Israel certainly commands the weaponry, the manpower, and the guts to effectively take out key Iranian nuclear facilities ... While less suited to do the job than the United States, the Israeli military is capable of reaching the appropriate targets in Iran. With more to lose than the US if Iran becomes nuclear, Israel has more incentive to strike."
These views are echoed by pro-Israeli writers in the United States, such as Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute. "Offers of dialogue with Iran are a waste of time," she wrote. "Iran has pursued ruthless oppression at home, terrorism abroad and weapons proliferation, largely with impunity ... We have talked about talking for long enough, there must be other options." Ominously she warned Iran: "It is not wise to force American into a choice between doing nothing and doing everything. But it may come to that."
Commentators like Inbar and Pletka, and many others in America and Israel who share their hard-line views, are deeply suspicious of what they see as Iran's duplicity, which they fear has seduced the Europeans. They are outraged by the negotiations which Javier Solana, the EU's foreign policy chief, is pursuing with Ali Larijani, Iran's principal nuclear negotiator.
The reported suggestion that Iran might suspend uranium enrichment for a month or two is seen as a trick to divide the Security Council and remove the threat of sanctions. They suspect that the international community is edging toward a position of allowing Iran to produce nuclear fuel under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards. For the hard-liners, this would be one step away from tolerating an Iranian bomb in the not too distant future.
The real fear of the hard-liners is that the United States might agree to direct talks with Iran which would legitimize the theocratic regime, vastly increase Iran's stature as the dominant power in the Gulf, and eventually downgrade Israel as America's exclusive regional ally.
For Washington's neoconservatives, the battle to shape US policy toward Iran is a crucial test of their dwindling influence. They played a decisive role in persuading the US to make war on Iraq. They clamored for the destruction of the Hamas government in the Palestinian territories. They gave fervent support to Israel's war on Hizbullah, relentlessly portrayed as a "terrorist movement" and as the armed outpost of Iran.
But the neoconservatives have lost ground in Washington. The war in Iraq has turned into a strategic catastrophe, with another disaster looming in Afghanistan. Anti-Americanism in the Arab and Muslim worlds is at record levels. Leading neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Lewis Libby have left the administration. For the remaining neoconservatives - and their standard-bearer, William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, losing the argument over Iran could be a terminal blow.
Their ultimate nightmare is that the United States may have to come to rely on Iran to help stabilize the dangerously chaotic situation in both Afghanistan and Iran. The visit to Tehran this week of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is, from their point of view, a ghastly pointer in that direction.
Iranian hardline newspapers said there were signs of an Israeli-US plot behind remarks by Pope Benedict XVI that linked Islam to violence and created a wave of anger across the Muslim world.
The daily Jomhuri Islami said Israel and the United States -- the Islamic republic's two arch-enemies -- could have dictated the comments to distract attention from the resistance of the Shiite militant group Hezbollah to Israel's offensive on Lebanon.
"The reality is that if we do not consider Pope Benedict XVI to be ignorant of Islam, then his remarks against Islam are a dictat that the Zionists and the Americans have written (for him) and have submitted to him."
"The American and the Zionist aim is to undermine the glorious triumph of Islam's children of Lebanese Hezbollah, which annulled the undefeatable legend of the Israeli army and foiled the Satanic and colonialist American plot," it said.
Fellow hardline daily Kayhan, whose editor-in-chief is appointed by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said there were signs of Israeli inteference aimed at creating conflict between Islam and Christianity.
"There are many signs that show that Pope Benedict XVI's remarks regarding the great prophet of Islam are a link in a connected chain of a Zionist-American project," it said.
"The project, which was created and executed by the Zionist minority, aims at creating confrontation between the followers of the two great divine religions."
In a speech in his native Germany on Tuesday, the pope spoke of a link between Islam and jihad, or "holy war", and quoted a 14th-century Byzantine emperor who said innovations introduced by the Prophet Mohammed were "evil and inhuman".
The pope on Saturday apologised for causing any offence to Muslims but did not retract his remarks, arguing they had been misinterpreted.
POPE Benedict XVI attempted to dampen Islamic fury over his controversial speech yesterday by stating that he was "deeply sorry" about the angry reaction. But he stopped short of making a full apology.
As the worst Vatican crisis in decades deepened with the news that an Italian nun had been shot dead in Somalia and that more churches had been torched in the West Bank, the Pope attempted to draw a line under the affair by expressing regret.
The pontiff's attempt to defuse the situation came as news broke that an Italian Catholic nun was shot dead in a children's hospital in Mogadishu. A senior Somalian Islamist said: "There is a very high possibility the people who killed her were angered by the Catholic Pope's recent comments against Islam."
The nun, in her mid-sixties, identified as Sister Leonella Sgorbati, was shot dead with her bodyguard by two gunmen at the hospital for mothers and children in northern Mogadishu.
The bodyguard died instantly, but the nun, from the Missionaries of the Consolation order based in Nepi near Rome, was rushed into an operating theatre after being hit by three or four bullets in the chest, stomach and back.
"She died in the hospital treatment room," a doctor, Ali Mohamed Hassan, said. "She was shot outside the hospital, going to her house just across the gate."
Islamic security chiefs said two people had been arrested over the shootings.
In a public statement, made during the Angelus, his traditional Sunday address, the Pope distanced himself from the medieval quote he had used last week in which the Prophet Muhammad was said to have brought only "evil and inhuman" things "such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached".
Speaking from the balcony of Castel Gandolfo, the Pope's summer retreat, Benedict XVI stressed that the words of Manuel Paleologos II, a 14th-century Byzantine Christian emperor, did not reflect his own personal opinion.
The head of the world's 1.1 billion Catholics said: "At this time I wish also to add that I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims...These [words] were in fact a quotation from a medieval text which do not in any way express my personal thought."
The Pope noted that the Vatican secretary of state on Saturday had issued a statement trying to explain his words, which he delivered last Tuesday in a speech during a pilgrimage to his native Germany.
He added: "I hope that this serves to appease hearts and to clarify the true meaning of my address, which in its totality was and is an invitation to frank and sincere dialogue, with great mutual respect."
Last night, however, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt demanded a "clear apology". Mohammed Habib, the movement's deputy leader, said: "It does not rise to the level of a clear apology and, based on this, we're calling on the Pope of the Vatican to issue a clear apology that will decisively end any confusion."
Mr Habib had earlier described the Pope's remarks as a "sufficient apology".
Yesterday, Mehmet Aydin, a Turkish state minister, said the Pope seemed to be saying he was sorry for the outrage but not necessarily the remarks themselves. He said: "You either have to say this 'I'm sorry' in a proper way or not say it at all. Are you sorry for saying such a thing or because of its consequences?"
The uproar had raised question marks about whether a papal visit to Turkey in November could go ahead, but the Turkish government, while calling his remarks "ugly", said there were no plans to call it off.
Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, also entered the debate yesterday when he urged world religious leaders to show "responsibility and restraint" - a reference to Pope Benedict XVI's remarks about Islam and the ensuing anger among Muslims.
Mr Putin went on to say that he hoped that "the leaders of the main world faiths will have sufficient strength and wisdom to avoid any extremes in relations between faiths".
In Palestine yesterday, more churches in the occupied West Bank were attacked in reaction to the speech. The attacks followed similar incidents on Friday and Saturday and caused minor damage but no injuries. In the town of Tubas outside Jenin, a group of Palestinians set fire to a Roman Catholic church, causing minor damage before the flames were put out.
A Roman Catholic church in the town of Tulkarm also sustained damage in a fire. Witnesses said they saw a man set the fire in the early morning. However, no-one claimed responsibility for either of the attacks.
In an attempt to calm concerns in the Muslim world, the Vatican announced that the papal nuncios - ambassadors - to Muslim nations had been issued with translation of the speech and would be addressing the matter with political leaders. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the secretary of state, said: "We have asked our nuncios in Muslim countries to take the Pope's message and explain his declarations to the political and religious authorities. They will give a clarification of the Pope's words and extinguish the flames of misunderstanding."
Senior officials inside the Catholic Church were debating that the current crisis could have been averted if Pope Benedict had not demoted Britain's most senior figure in the Vatican. Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, from Birmingham, had been head of "inter- religious dialogue" at the Vatican since 2002 and was the Pope's top expert on Islamic affairs.
However, in February Pope Benedict made him a papal nuncio in Cairo.
Yesterday a Vatican diplomat said: "Michael, or Fitz, as we know him, is an expert on Muslim affairs and this would not have happened if he had still been around.
"He would have known that saying something like this would have been a red rag to a bull but for some reason the Pope got rid of him and it was the worst mistake he made."
Father Thomas Reese, author of Inside the Vatican, said shortly after Archbishop Fitzgerald was demoted: "The Pope's worst decision so far has been the exiling of Archbishop Fitzgerald. He was the smartest guy in the Vatican on relations with Muslims. You don't exile someone like that, you listen to them."
Last night, when contacted in Lourdes, where he is attending a conference, Archbishop Fitzgerald said: "I have been away and not really followed all this so it would not be fair for me to comment.
"I hope that Pope Benedict's apology smoothes things over in the Muslim world - other than that I have nothing to say."
Professor Giuseppe Alberigo, of the Institute of Religious Science in Bologna, said it was the first time a Pope had said sorry, and compared Benedict XVI to John Paul II.
He said: "It is the first time that a Pope has apologised and tried to appease criticism for something he has said.
"Certain themes should be spoken about more prudently as the Crusades have never been forgotten. Pope John Paul II would never have said anything similar."
Comment: Ah yes - the pope - god's spokesman on earth. What a wonderful human being, obviously an example that every man woman and child on earth should follow.
The role of religion in political and geopolitical affairs has taken center stage in many periods in history, with disastrous results. Religion can be rewarding for individuals as a source of private morality and meditation. But when politicians and leaders start using religion for political purposes, disasters inevitably follow. Against all expectations, the mixture of religion and politics is presently making a powerful come back, first, in the Middle East, where Judaism and the various strains of Islam are fighting each other; secondly, in Islamist terrorism which is partly motivated by Islamic fundamentalism; and, thirdly, in the United States, where religious fundamentalism wields increasing power in the political arena. "I base a lot of my foreign policy decisions on some things that I think are true. One. I believe there's an Almighty. And, secondly, I believe one of the great gifts of the Almighty is the desire in everybody's soul, regardless of what you like or where you live, to be free." George W. Bush, April 24, 2006
"I am pro-Israeli, not because of political expediency, but because I believe Israel is the fulfilment of Biblical prophecy." Jimmy Carter, Democratic presidential candidate, 1976
"It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law, if it acquires the political power to do so..." Robert A. Heinlein
The role of religion in political and geopolitical affairs has taken center stage in many periods in history, with disastrous results. Religion can be rewarding for individuals as a source of private morality and meditation. But when politicians and leaders start using religion for political purposes, disasters inevitably follow. Against all expectations, the mixture of religion and politics is presently making a powerful come back, first, in the Middle East, where Judaism and the various strains of Islam are fighting each other; secondly, in Islamist terrorism which is partly motivated by Islamic fundamentalism; and, thirdly, in the United States, where religious fundamentalism wields increasing power in the political arena.
President Thomas Jefferson, probably the greatest American president, thought that there should be a "wall of separation" between the government and religious organizations in a democratic republic. It was his understanding that such a wall of separation between church and state had been erected with the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that forbids the establishment of a state-supported religion. In that spirit, there is a current law, the 1954 Revenue Act, 501 (c)(3), which states that a tax-exempt religious organization cannot get involved in partisan politics without losing its privileged tax-exempt status. The law says that organizations risk loosing their tax-exempt status if they "participate in, or intervene in ...any political campaign on behalf of any candidate for political office."
Why is the introduction of religion into politics a dangerous development? Essentially, because religion tends to paint the world in black and white, and is inimical to compromise, essential for peace in human affairs and a democratic form of government. When religious extremists acceed to positions of power, the risk of social strife and political conflicts increases markedly. Armed with metaphysical certitudes, the religious leader cannot help but divide humanity between Good and Evil, between "those who are with us, and those who are against us." This allows him to demonize his enemies and to proclaim that he is 100 percent in the right and others are 100 percent in the wrong. All errors are on one side and all the pious justifications on the other. Between friend and foe, between the pious and the infidel, there is no middle ground. There is only a wall of hatred and distrust that violence or warfare help to cement. Dictatorship, not democracy, is the ultimate result when religion takes over a government.
The same applies internationally. Indeed, to have peace among nations, even in the best of times, there must be some mechanism of mediation and a system of international law. For instance, in the 5th Century, after the demise of the Roman empire, the Catholic Church and its pope filled the institutional gap and were often called upon, not always successfully, to mediate international conflicts between states. A case in point was the mediation that Pope Alexander VI carried on between Spain and Portugal to divide the newly discovered territories of the Americas. The Pope issued a papal bull on May 4, 1493, dividing the New World between the former and latter countries. After minute negotiations, theTreaty of Tordesillasdrew an imaginary line on the globe. Going from north to south, and situated at 370 leagues or about 800 miles west of the Azores, it delineated the oceanic world between Spanish (western) and Portuguese (eastern) spheres of influence. That is why Brasilians speak Portuguese today, while most Latin Americans speak Spanish.
After the last war of religion, from 1618 to 1648, i.e. the Thirty Years' War between European Catholics and Protestants, the world became more secular, less fanatical and more civilized; henceforth, religion was kept out of major international conflicts. The Charter of the then new world order was the Treaty of Westphalia, which was signed at the end of the Thirty Years War.
The Treaty of Westphalia incorporated four basic principles: 1- The principle of the sovereignty of nation-states and the concomitant fundamental right of political self-determination for peoples; 2- the principle of (legal) equality between nation-states; 3- the principle of internationally binding treaties between states; and, 4- the principle of non-intervention of one state into the internal affairs of other states.
That is why the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) is so crucial in the history of international political relations. This important treaty formed the basis for the modern international system of independent nation-states. In fact, it marked the beginning of an international community of law between sovereign states of equal legal standing, guaranteeing each other their independence and the right of their peoples to political self-determination. The two most innovative principles being proclaimed were the principle of sovereignty and the principle of equality among nations. They were truly political and legal innovations for the time.
The Treaty defined these new principles of sovereignty and equality among states in order to establish a durable (eternal) peace and friendship among them, within a mutually acceptable system of international law, based on internationally binding treaties. This was a revolutionary approach to international relations because, for the first time, it established a system that respected peoples' rights and which relied on international law, rather than on brute force and the right of the strongest to regulate interactions between states.
A fifth principle was also present in the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, and it is the idea that in order to achieve an enduring peace, magnanimity, concessions and cooperation had to be shown by the victorious parties in an open conflict. It was the beginning of a genuine international constitution for humanity, the advent of a new international order and a big step forward forWestern civilization.
After the Thirty Years War, religion became less and less a politically motivating force behind conflicts between European states, being replaced by considerations of national interest. In a way, after 1648, international affairs became "secularized" and somewhat devoid of religious considerations.
It is to be deplored that some current day politicians would like to push international law aside and bring the world back to what it was before 1648. Nowadays, the only widely accepted international dispute resolution mechanism is the United Nations. Members of the currrent American administration have taken steps to undermine this institution, but they have nothing to replace it. Indeed, under George W. Bush, it can be feared that the United States is falling into the Old World pattern which prevailed before the American Revolution and the French Revolution, that is, the existence of an unhealthy symbiosis between political power and religion.
The separation of Church and State brought the greatest advance in Western civilization in the last three hundred years. Democracy and freedom from state intervention in religious matters are the two underpinnings of such a demarcation. What is most ironical is that many Europeans chose in the past to migrate to the United States in order to flee a Europe corrupted by the very mixture of state religion and politics. That the same debilitating corruption is coming back in contemporary U.S. should be a concern to all.
Giles Fraser
Saturday September 16, 2006
The Guardian
This was no casual slip. Beneath his scholarly rhetoric, the Pope's logic seemed to be that Islam is dangerous and godless
John Paul II's pontificate was largely defined by his relationship with a global conflict between west and east. Last Tuesday evening, in a badly judged speech before a home crowd of Bavarian academics, Benedict XVI may well have set the parameters of his own period as Pope, pitching himself into a debate over Islam that has prompted outrage throughout the Muslim world.
"Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." These were not the Pope's words, but those of an obscure Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologos, back in the 14th century. And yes, the Pope did make it clear he was offering a quotation. Even so, these words fell from the lips of the spiritual leader of a billion Christians without anything like enough qualification. There was no phrase distancing himself from the claim that Muhammad was responsible for evil. It's little surprise, therefore, that the remarks have roused anger and demands for a personal apology.
Christopher Tyerman's latest book on the Crusades, God's War, argues persuasively that analogies between the Crusades and the present global conflict are often overdrawn and historically dubious. That may be so. But it's an argument that doesn't cut much ice with millions of Muslims. After all, it was one of Benedict's predecessors, Urban II, who first summoned a Christian jihad against Islam. And it's born-again Christians who have been at the forefront of support for the invasion of Iraq, the occupation of Palestinian lands by Israel, and the whole "reorganisation" of the Middle East - a catastrophe in which many thousands of Muslims have lost their lives.
Any comments by a Christian leader that touch upon this wound are bound to be interpreted from every possible angle. The Pope must have known this. If millions of Muslims were offended by the scribblings of a few unknown Danish cartoonists, it's pretty obvious the enormous potential for harm that might flow from a few ill-judged comments by the vicar of Rome.
Furthermore, the Pope has form on all of this. Just a few months before he was elected, he spoke out against Muslim Turkey joining the EU. Christian Europe must be defended, he argued. It didn't go down well at the time with Muslim leaders. But what makes his comments from Bavaria doubly insensitive is that Munich and its surrounding towns are home to thousands of Gastarbeiter, many from Turkey, who are often badly treated by local Germans and frequently subjected to racism. It won't be lost on them that Manuel II ran his Christian empire from what is now the Turkish city of Istanbul. And reference to that time, in circumstances such as these, has the unmistakable whiff of Christian triumphalism.
For the most part, the Pope's address was a scholarly exercise that sought to challenge the idea that rationality is intrinsically and necessarily secular. We must "overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable", he insisted. Most Christians would agree. But even here there was a sharp criticism of Islam buried beneath the scholarly rhetoric. For the Pope argued that in Muslim teaching, because "God is absolutely transcendent", He is "not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality". In other words, there is no reasoning in or with Islam. Which, surely, is another way of the Pope saying how dangerous he thinks Islam is.
This is why the Pope's remarks look rather more than just a slip or a casual mistake. The speech concludes with a further reference to the views of the Byzantine emperor: " 'Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God,' said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures."
Blog sites have been buzzing with the thought that the Pope may have the president of Iran in mind when he speaks of Manuel's Persian interlocutor. But we don't need to speculate upon a contemporary casting for this speech to recognise its dangers. For in claiming that Islam may be beyond reason, and then to claim that to act without reason is to act contrary to the will of God, is pretty close to the assertion that this religion is godless. And that's not how different faiths ought to speak to each other - especially when we all have each other's blood on our hands.
As it is written: "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?"
Iran has told the European Union it will consider suspending its uranium enrichment activities to allow for formal negotiations over its nuclear programs, the French government confirmed Friday. EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana said talks were "really making progress," but his assessment is at odds with that of the United States, which earlier dismissed the "alleged Iranian offer."
"Iran... has accepted to talk about the question of suspension. That for us is a positive development," Government Spokesman Jean-Baptiste Mattei told a Paris news briefing.
"Like you, I see that there are a number of rumblings which are interesting, notably the fact that Iran has apparently accepted to discuss the question of suspension," he added.
The developments were announced following a Vienna meeting between Solana and Iran's chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani last weekend. Speaking to journalists after briefing EU foreign ministers in Brussels Friday, Solana said: "I think I can say honestly that we're making progress. It doesn't mean that everything has been solved. That would be an exaggeration, but we are really making progress."
His officials and Iranian officials were meeting every day to try and resolve outstanding issues, he added.
Earlier, German Foreign Minister Frank Walter Steinmeier told reporters at the meeting that the Solana-Larijani talks had apparently started Iran on "a process of intensive political thinking" which could result in new moves from Tehran.
Many countries try to excuse their failings by blaming outsiders. For several decades after independence, people in the Irish Republic blamed its economic under-performance on centuries of British rule. Similarly, Israel uses anti-Semitism to excuse its expulsion of Palestinians in 1948, its discrimination against the Palestinians who managed to remain inside the Green Line, and its territorial expansionism after 1967.
All good excuses contain a germ of truth. The 19th-century Irish famine, which was exacerbated by British policies, greatly damaged the morale of the survivors and their descendants. Similarly, the Nazi Judeocide has left a huge scar on the survivors of that catastrophe. However, to escape dysfunctionality, every society must admit its own failings. Irish economic woes stemmed from a culture of risk-avoidance which, while derived from colonial history, had to be admitted and overcome by citizens of the independent state. Similarly, Israelis will never be secure until they admit their responsibility to make restitution for the crimes of their state against the Palestinians. Israelis should beware of false friends who tempt them to avoid this responsibility by misrepresenting the critics of Israeli policies as anti-Semites.
A salient example of this phenomenon appeared in Haaretz last week, in an article ("One hundred years of hostility," Sept. 8), which alleged that Sinn Fein was and is anti-Semitic, and tried to smear the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC) by association. Belonging to no party, I will leave it to Sinn Fein to defend itself. However, those Zionist Irish Jews who were prominent supporters of Sinn Fein would be surprised at last week's characterization.
In his autobiography ("Living History"), Chaim Herzog wrote "My father [Yitzhak Herzog, later first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel] was an open partisan of the Irish cause. The outstanding Jewish leader in the revolution was Robert Briscoe."
Eamon de Valera, president of Sinn Fein from 1917 to 1926, was hidden in Rabbi Herzog's home on several occasions during the revolution. Briscoe, who made several trips to Germany to buy arms, was one of the hard-line Sinn Feiners, who followed de Valera in rejecting the 1921 treaty with Britain - an event which triggered civil war in the new state. Briscoe was also a Zionist who, while spending 38 years in the Irish parliament, found time to visit Poland in 1938 as an agent of Jabotinsky and to raise funds for the Irgun in New York in 1939, using his stature as a Jewish fighter for Irish independence. De Valera became a life-long friend of Herzog, meeting David Ben-Gurion in Herzog's Jerusalem home in 1950 and being honored by the Irish Jewish community in the mid-1960s by the planting of a forest in Israel.
In its early years, Israel received a great deal of sympathy in Ireland. While Briscoe's prominent place in Irish politics may have played a role, the two main reasons were a fellow-feeling for Jews as another people who had experienced religious persecution and ignorance about the dispossession of the Palestinians. As the truth about 1948 became known and the horrors of the post-1967 occupation became apparent, attitudes changed.
Coincidentally, the first English-language article to debunk the myth that the Palestinian refugees of 1948 had left on the orders of Arab radio broadcasts ("The Other Exodus," by Erskine Childers, The Spectator, May 1961) was written by the grandson and namesake of a prominent Sinn Feiner, who used his yacht to import arms from Germany in 1914 and who took the same side as Briscoe in the Irish Civil War.
The IPSC reflects the fact that Irish people, having experienced settler colonialism, understand the suffering of Palestinians who endure it today. However, IPSC membership also includes Israeli Jews and Palestinians living in Ireland. Moreover, far from being "a subset of the Republican movement," as was claimed, the Belfast branch has Unionist members and supporters.
Our shared goal is universal human rights. We want all who have the right to reside between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea, including refugees, to enjoy that right in peace. Unfortunately, many Israelis think that Palestinians should have less entitlement in their homeland than Jews who migrated to Palestine since 1882. The IPSC thinks both ethnic groups should enjoy all rights stipulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We have no view on the future organization of the territory. That is a decision for all those who are Palestinian or Israeli or both, including refugees.
Many members of the IPSC are veterans of other anti-racist campaigns, such as those concerned with South Africa, East Timor and rights for Native Americans. IPSC members also support campaigns for West Papuans, Kurds, Tibetans and others. The Belfast branch is affiliated to a network which opposes attacks on immigrant workers in that city. With this wide perspective, we see that hafrada (separation) is the Zionist form of apartheid, so we argue that Israel should be treated like the old South Africa.
Our campaign is gaining momentum. Recently, several Irish cultural events rejected Israeli embassy sponsorship and Irish trade unionists prevented use of Dublin trams for training staff of the projected tram system between West Bank settlements. But this is only the beginning. This campaign, part of a world-wide effort to help Israelis overcome their dysfunctional denial of responsibility, will cease only when Israel conforms to International Law.
James Bowen, a professor in the National University of Ireland at Cork, is national chairperson of the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
Many Palestinian children in Israeli Telmond Prison are being exploited by "forced labor in which they must work eight hours for a few shekels," as reported by the Prisoners Information Center.
One of the children made a statement after his release. "The prison administration has forced all prisoners in Telmond Prison to work eight hours for very low wages." He went on to say, "The Israeli soldiers come to the chambers at seven and force us to go with our legs tied with chains." The child added that his job was to stand under guard and pack plastic spoons in boxes.
Even injured political prisoners are forced to work, according to Friday's Nablus-based report. A former prisoner stated, "I had a broken bone but the soldiers forced me out of my cell to work anyway, without any consideration for the pain."
There are approximately 375 Palestinians in Telmond Prison, with most of them being children. The oldest Palestinian in Telmond is 22 years old. The child laborers are given two meals per 24 hours, one at 11:00 pm and another at 6:00 am.
Israeli prison officials also attempt to extract information from children regarding members of the armed resistance and engage in frequent psychological abuse
According to the Information Center there are 200 children less than 16 years old in Israeli prisons begin subjected to some of the worst forms of exploitation and humiliation. A total of 376 Palestinian children are currently imprisoned in Israeli prisons and detention camps.
Palestine News Network
Wednesday, 13 September 2006
(Bethlehem) The Palestinian Prisoner Society, legal and childhood rights institutions, and the international and local Red Cross, are pushing for the immediate release of Palestinian minors from Israeli prisons.
Children in Telmond Prison are in dire psychological and physical straights as reported by the Prisoner Society Wednesday. Israeli forces arrested 11 year old Mohammad Abdullah Mousa Othman and 13 year old Rafiq Mohammad Al Eisha nearly three weeks ago.
The western Ramallah's Beit Ur At Tahta Village boys have been subject to severe beatings at the hands of Israeli soldiers. Members of the intelligence in charge of interrogating the children have beaten and threatened both and forced them to sign statements.
Prisoner Society lawyer Adal Khalaila met with the boys on 11 September and described their situation as "tragic."
Khalaila said, "The minors have been thrown in with their elders and have no knowledge of the rules of law, and are clearly too young to adapt to prison life."
He described Othman as a "tall, skinny boy in prison contrary to all norms of international law. It is also contrary to Israeli law which does not allow arresting Palestinians under 12 years old."
The lawyer reported that Israeli soldiers arrested the 11 year old from the streets of his village on 25 August under the pretext that he had thrown stones at Israeli forces.
The boy was taken to a mountain high above the town and held there for seven to eight hours. He was handcuffed and blindfolded the entire time. One of the Israeli soldiers put his cigarette out in the boy's hand. Othman was then taken to a military installation for investigation in the Israeli settlement of Givat Ze'ev west of Ramallah in the West Bank. He was interrogated into the morning hours of the second day.
Khalaila stated that due to the boy's young age and lack of maturity or knowledge of how to handle the torturous investigations that most Palestinian males undergo at some point in their lives, he signed the investigators' report without knowing the content. "He was under threat and intimidation, beatings and insults."
None of the child's family members have been allowed to visit him and it remains unknown when or if he will be released. The Israeli military court has held three hearings for the boy since his arrest.
The second minor that the Palestinian Prisoner Society focused on in today's report is 13 year old Rafiq Mohammad Al Aisha. Israeli soldiers took him in the same manner as the 11 year old: from the streets of Beit Ur At Tahta Village, west of Ramallah, accusing him of throwing stones at Israeli forces.
Khalaila sat with Al Aisha as he reported what has happened to him. Israeli soldiers and interrogators have repeatedly punched the 13 year old in the face and kicked him in the legs and backside. The boy said that he was not throwing stones, denying the charge against him. He was forced under threat to sign a statement of unknown content.
The Prisoner Society attorney reported that both children are experiencing difficulty speaking and expressing themselves, and in understanding what is being said to them. Khalaila concluded reporting the sworn statements by saying that the boys are not pronouncing words clearly.
The Israeli authorities have arrested over 5,000 Palestinian minors since the beginning of the Al Aqsa Intifada in September 2000. Still in Israeli prisons are 350 Palestinians aged 11 through 17 years.
In a letter published in the Irish Times today (text below), 61 Irish academics from a wide variety of disciplines called for a moratorium on EU support of Israeli academic institutions until Israel abides by UN resolutions and ends the occupation of Palestinian territories.
The letter was organized in response to the Palestinian call for an academic and cultural boycott. The ongoing Israeli occupation has meant that educational establishments are closed off for many Palestinians. The checkpoints, closures and curfews Israel has imposed, as well as the ongoing harassment of academics and students, have played havoc with university life. In addition, military attacks on universities and schools and the occupation of many schools by Israeli soldiers have turned education into a life-threatening activity.
To date, 171 civil society organizations in Palestine including the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU), the General Union of Palestinian Teachers (GUPT), and the Federation of Unions of Palestinian Universities' Professors and Employees have called for a boycott of Israel, seeing such a boycott as a way for people around the world to express practical solidarity, and effect change in a nonviolent manner.
While this letter does not call for a comprehensive boycott, it does demand that European academic institutions cease funding collaborative projects with Israeli institutions. It also calls for academics to refrain, where possible, from institutional collaboration with Israel. Such actions are to continue until Israel abides by international law, part of which is ending the occupation.
Such a moratorium is not directed against individuals but against Israeli institutions which provide support - both moral and practical - for a racial system within Israel and an illegal occupation of Palestinian territories. The comparison is with South Africa. Just as blacks in South Africa called for sanctions against that country, so have Palestinians under Israeli control called for sanctions against the Israeli state and its institutions. It is no coincidence that modern day South Africans are among the strongest supporters of actions that will peacefully end the brutal racially-based regime in Israel, just as the apartheid regime was toppled.
Groups across the world have heeded the Palestinian call for an academic boycott. The British Academic union NAFTHE recently supported the academic boycott of Israel, followed by the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE). On July 10th, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), explicitly drawing on their own struggle against apartheid, called for a boycott of Israel. Moreover in Ireland, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions has already adopted a position of supporting political and economic sanctions on Israel - a position taken at its biennial conference in 2005. Irish parliamentarians too, at a specially convened meeting of the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs on August 4th, unanimously called for the imposition of sanctions on Israel.
TEXT OF LETTER WITH SIGNATORIES
Madam - There is widespread international condemnation of Israel's policy of violent repression against the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, and its aggression against the people of Lebanon. The Israeli government appears impervious to moral appeals from world leaders and to longstanding United Nations resolutions.
We feel it is time to heed the Palestinian call to take practical action to pressure Israel to comply with international law and basic human rights norms. Many national and European cultural and research institutions, including those funded by the EU regard Israel as a European state for the purposes of awarding grants and contracts.
We call for a moratorium on any further such support to Israeli academic institutions, at both national and European levels. We urge our fellow academics to support this moratorium by refraining, where possible, from further joint collaborations with Israeli academic institutions. Such a moratorium should continue until Israel abides by UN resolutions and ends the occupation of Palestinian territories.
# Hounaida Abi Haidar, Department of Geography, TCD
# Dr Kieran Allen, School of Sociology, UCD
# Professor James Anderson, School of Geography, Queen's University Belfast
# Professor Ivana Bacik, School of Law, TCD
# Ken Bond, Department of Zoology, Ecology & Plant Science, UCC
# Professor James Bowen, Department of Computer Science, UCC
# Dr Barbara Bradby, Department of Sociology, TCD
# Harry Browne, School of Media, DIT
# Noreen Byrne, Department of Food Business & Development, UCC
# Dr Joseph Cleary, Department of English, NUI Maynooth
# Professor John Coakley, School of Politics and International Relations, UCD
# Dr. Steve Coleman, Department of Anthropology, NUI Maynooth
# Denis Condon, Centre for Media Studies, NUI Maynooth
# Dr Laurence Cox, Department of Sociology, NUI Maynooth
# Dr Colin Coulter, Department of Sociology, NUI Maynooth
# Professor Seamus Deane, Institute for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame
# Mary Eldin, WERRC, School of Social Justice, UCD
# Dr Nazih Eldin, Head of Health Promotion, Dublin North East
# Dr Adel Farrag, Department of Electronic Engineering, Institute of Technology Tallaght
# Professor Tadhg Foley, Department of English & Chair of the Board, Centre for Irish Studies, NUI Galway
# Catherine Forde, Department of Applied Social Studies, UCC.
# Dr Kathy Glavanis, Department of Sociology, UCC
# Professor Luke Gibbons, Department of English, University of Notre Dame
# Dr Brian Hanley, Department of Modern History, TCD
# Dr Deanna Heath, Department of Modern History, TCD
# Conn Holohan, School of Media Studies, University of Ulster
# Marnie Holborow, School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies, DCU
# Dr Kevin Hourihan, Department of Geography, UCC
# Dr Carole Jones, Department of English, TCD
# Sinead Kennedy, Department of English, Mater Dei Institute of Education
# Dr Heather Laird Department of English UCC
# David Landy, Department of Sociology, TCD
# Dr Steve Loyal, School of Sociology, UCD
# An Dr. Seosamh Mac Muiri, Rannog na Gaeilge, Roinn na dTeangacha agus an Leinn Chultuir, Ollscoil Luimnigh.
# Dr. Breandan Mac Suibhne, Institute for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame
# Professor Brian Maguire, Faculty of Fine Art, NCAD
# Professor John Maguire, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, UCC
# Dr Sandra McAvoy, Women's Studies, UCC
# Piaras Mac Einri, Department of Geography, UCC
# Dr Conor McCarthy, Department of English, NUI Maynooth
# Dr Cathal McCall, School of Politics, International Studies & Philosophy, Queen's University Belfast
# Caroline McHugh, Department of Geography, NUI Galway
# Dr Des McGuinness, School of Communications, DCU
# Dr Bill McSweeney, Irish School of Ecumenics, TCD
# Montserrat Fargas Malet, School of Social Work, Queens University Belfast
# Dr John Nash, Department. of English, TCD
# Dr Emer Nolan, Department of English, NUI Maynooth
# Dr Feilim O hAdhmaill, Department of Applied Social Studies, UCC
# Garrett O'Boyle, Political Scientist
# Dr. Eamon O Ciardha, School of Languages and Literature, University of Ulster
# Gearoid O Cuin. Irish Centre for Human Rights, NUI Galway
# Dr Ruan O'Donnell, Historian
# Professor Patrick 0'Flanagan, Department of Geography, UCC
# Professor Denis O'Hearn, School of Sociology, Queens University Belfast
# Dr Lionel Pilkington, Department of English, NUI Galway
# Jim Roche, Department of Architecture, DIT
# Dr. Ailbhe Smyth, WERRC, School of Social Justice, UCD
# Dr Andy Storey, Centre for Development Studies, UCD
# Dr Gavan Titley, Centre for Media Studies, NUI Maynooth
# Dr Hilary Tovey, Department of Sociology, TCD
# Dr Theresa Urbainczyk, School of Classics, UCD
Israel's military expects Palestinian rocket and missile strikes from the West Bank by 2007.
Military sources said the Intelligence Corps has determined that Palestinian insurgency groups would acquire sufficient technology and components to assemble missiles modeled after the Hamas-origin Kassam. The sources said Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad have conducted tests of crude missiles and rockets.
"At this point, the main thing stopping rocket strikes against Israel from the West Bank is the inability by local Palestinians to design a weapon with sufficient range," a military source said. "A missile or rocket that can travel one or two kilometers has little value."
On Thursday, Palestinian gunners fired two Kassam-class, short-range missiles from the northern Gaza Strip into Israel. There were no reports of injuries.
Comment: Applying a little corrective interpretation of this story we get the following:
Israeli Mossad Plans to Attack Israeli citizens with larger missiles and place blame on "Palestinian terrorists".
Israeli authorities announced Sunday a new plan to isolate over 7000 dunums of Palestinian land in the Bethlehem and Hebron areas in preparation for the continuation of the Wall and the construction of a 'Jews-only' road which will carve through the south of West Bank.
The new 'Jews-only' road will run virtually parallel to the existing road, linking the Gush Etzion settlement block Karmel settlement in the South and land occupied by Israel since 1948. Israel has been seeking international funding since 2004 for 52 such 'Jews-only' roads totalling 500 kilometers.
Military orders confiscating 152 dunums of land were handed out in the towns of Um Salamuna, Beit Fajjar and Beit Ummar on 7th September to allow a 6.6km continuation of the wall around the Gush Etzion settlement block. A military terminal will be built in south west Bethlehem at Um Salamuna.
A further 7,200 dunums of land belonging to surrounding Palestinian towns are to be isolated behind the wall or destroyed by its footprint.
The affected towns are totally dependent on the land for their income, according to local sources. In Um Salamuna the wall will isolate 200 dunums of land behind the wall uproot more than 800 olive trees bearing fruit, 1500 grape vines and a large number of almond trees and other pine trees. Seven extended families from the town are entirely dependent on this land.
In Beit Fajar, the wall will isolate 1000 dunums, planted with grapes, olive trees and almonds. One resident said:
"This land will be annexed to Migdal Oz settlement and the owners are forbidden to access their land, and especially the soldiers and settlers have tried many times to buy the land, but the people refused to sell it, so they decided to take it using the wall."
In Beit Ummar the footprint of the wall will destroy 715 dunums south of the town. Alterations to the route of the wall mean that it will now isolate 6000 dunums of farmland, rather than the original 5000. Again the land is richly planted with grape vines, olive trees and almonds. A further 750 dunums from is to be confiscated from to the south of the town for the construction of the new apartheid road.
In the last two months occupation forces have begun uprooting land to the south of the town in order expand Karme Tzur settlement. The settlement is to be surrounded by an electrified fence annexing a further 450 dunums.
Comment: While lambasting as "anti-semitic" anyone who dares question the actions of the Israeli government, the Israeli government itself is implementing very clearly racist policies towards an innocent Palestinian people.
A central thesis of my book Beyond Chutzpah is that whenever Israel faces a public relations debacle its apologists sound the alarm that a "new anti-Semitism" is upon us. So, predictably, just after Israel faced another image problem due to its murderous destruction of Lebanon, a British all-party parliamentary group led by notorious Israel-firster Denis MacShane MP (Labor) released yet another report alleging a resurgence of anti-Semitism (Report of the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry Into Antisemitism, September 2006). To judge by the witnesses (David Cesarani, Lord Janner, Oona King, Emanuele Ottolenghi, Melanie Phillips) and sources (MEMRI, Holocaust Education Trust) cited in the body of the report, much time and money could have been saved had it just been contracted out to the Israel Foreign Ministry. (The report's statement that "we received no evidence of the accusation of anti-Semitism being misused by mainstream British Jewish community organizations and leaders" perhaps speaks more to the selection of the witnesses than the reality.)
The single novelty of the report, which mostly rehashes fatuous allegations already disposed of in Beyond Chutzpah, is the new thresholds in idiocy it breaks. Consider the methodology deployed for demonstrating a new anti-Semitism. The report defines an anti-Semitic incident as any occasion "perceived" to be anti-Semitic by the "Jewish community." This is the school of thought according to which it's raining even in the absence of any precipitation because I feel it's raining. It is the dream philosophy of paranoids, especially rational paranoids, for whom alleged victimhood is politically serviceable. The report includes under the rubric of anti-Semitic incidents not just violent acts and incendiary speech but "conversations, discussions, or pronouncements made in public or private, which cross the line of acceptability," as well as "the mood and tone when Jews are discussed." The wonder is that it didn't also tabulate repressed anti-Semitic libidinal fantasies. In the category of inherently anti-Semitic pronouncements the report includes "drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis" (only comparisons of contemporary Arab policy to that of the Nazis are permissible) and "theories about Jewish or Zionist influence on American foreign policy" (even if Jewish and Zionist organizations boast about this influence).
Much of the evidence of pervasive British anti-Semitism requires real strains in credulity. * The lone item listed under the ominous subheading "The Blood Libel" is a Syrian television series "that would be possible for viewers in the UK to seeif they had suitable satellite receiving equipment." It also notes the unreferenced "case of a Jewish university lecturer who was subjected to an anti-Semitic tirade from a student in the middle of a lecture and subsequently asked to explain to the university authorities why he ha upset the student." Is it anti-Semitic to wonder whether this is a crock? And then the report cites the warning of the London Assembly Conservative Group that "there is a risk that in some political quarters 'views on international events can, almost subconsciously, lead to subtly different attitudes to, and levels of engagement with, different minority groups.'" The new anti-Semitism business must be going seriously awry when British conservatives start sounding like Lacan. Finally, it is anti-Semitic for student unions to advocate a boycott of Israeli goods because this "would restrict the availability of kosher food on campus." Maybe Israel can organize a "Berlin airlift" of gefilte fish.
Although claiming that, in the struggle against anti-Semitism, "none of those who gave evidence wished to see the right free speech eroded," and "only in extreme circumstances would we advocate legal intervention," the report recommends that university authorities "take an active interest in combating acts, speeches, literature and events that cause anxiety or alarm among their Jewish students," and it registers disquiet that "classic and modern anti-Semitic works are freely available for ordering on the Amazon.com website," and that "the United States in particular has been slow to take action" in closing down "anti-Semitic internet sites." It is at moments like this that even the least patriotic of souls can take pride in being an American.
* The police data on an increase in anti-Semitic incidents in itself proves little because, as the report concedes, the spike might be due to more incidents being reported and a coarsening of British life generally, as well as the "spillover" from the Israel-Palestine conflict. In addition, there is little evidence of "organized," "politically motivated" anti-Semitic attacks; there is no evidence that perpetrators of anti-Semitic attacks were disproportionately Muslim; and most of the suspects in the incidents were adolescents. For 2005 the report cites a couple incidents that were "potentially" life-threatening. It cites no comparative data for other minorities in Britain, although tacitly acknowledging that "the level of prejudice and discrimination by Jews in Britain remains lower," a considerable understatement . On a related note, it deplores that "less than one in ten [anti-Semitic] incidents reported to the police resulted in a suspect becoming an accused" , but cites no comparative data indicating whether this ratio is aberrant.
Some 313,000 Jews have left Jerusalem over the last 25 years, 105,000 more than those who moved to the capital during the same period.
The 2005 figures, released by the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, show that the balance of population in the city would have favored Jews over Arabs had measures been taken to curb the exodus.
Today, 66 percent of Jerusalem's residents are Jews and 34 percent are Arabs. By 2020, the Jews are expected to comprise 60 percent of the city's population, while the Arabs are expected to reach 40 percent.
Labor and Kadima officials have in recent years advocated changing Jerusalem's jurisdiction in order to deal with the "demographic problem."
Some 16,200 residents left Jerusalem in 2005, half of them aged 20 to 34, compared to 10,300 who moved to the city.
Jerusalem's Statistical Abstract editor Dr. Maya Hoshen said people leave Jerusalem mainly due to lack of employment and affordable housing. The number of ultra-Orthodox residents leaving the city has also grown in recent years.
In an article she intends to release soon, Hoshen lists four main periods of Jewish emigration from Jerusalem since its unification.
*1968-1972 - The number of people leaving Jerusalem each year on average was 800 more than those moving in.
*1973-1978 - The number of people leaving Jerusalem each year was on average 1,000-2,000 more than those moving in, following the construction of new neighborhoods.
*1987-1988 - The number of people leaving Jerusalem each year was on average 600 more than those moving in.
*1988-2005 - The number of people leaving increased. In 2003, the number of people leaving was 5,100 more than those moving in, the smallest differential since 1990. From 1991 to 1996, the number of people leaving was 5,600-6,200 more than those moving in each year. The ratio of people leaving peaked in 2000, as 8,200 more people left Jerusalem than moved in.
Comment: Well, you can bet that if this keeps up there will be a new "anti-Semitism" scare. Any Jew who has a conscience and takes the trouble to learn the true history of the Zionist occupation of Palestine will find a way to leave and rejoin the human race.
On the brink of starvation, reports Erica Silverman, Gazans wonder if the world is blind as well as deaf.
Hundreds of desperate parents swarmed lists of coupon numbers tacked to the walls of the UNRWA relief centre in the Beach Refugee Camp of Gaza City Sunday, nervously trying to locate their assigned lot to collect emergency food packages only being offered to families with at least 11 members.
"There is not enough food in Gaza; even we at UNRWA are struggling to get the food in," warned John Ging, director of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in Gaza, as he toured the relief centre. UN workers urgently tossed bags of flour from supply trucks and stacked bottles of oil in efforts to alleviate what Ging described as a "desperate and unprecedented" crisis.
UNRWA began its emergency food distribution 10 September, one week later than planned due to the closure of Karni, Gaza's only commercial crossing. "There must be a solution at the crossing points. We need international help to open up Gaza to a civilised existence," asserted Ging. UNRWA feeds 830,000 of Gaza's 1.4 million residents, and one-third of the food required for the emergency distribution is still outside of Gaza.
"It is not just about bringing in containers of humanitarian assistance. It is about restoring the Gazan economy," said Ging, calling for the implementation of the Agreement on Movement and Access brokered by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last November and that stipulates that all border crossings to Gaza will remain open.
President Mahmoud Abbas announced from Gaza Monday that he had reached an agreement with Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh to form a unity government between Fatah and Hamas. The current Hamas-led government will be dissolved within 48 hours and a new prime minister will be appointed, said presidential spokesperson Nabil Abu Rudeinah Monday. However, it remained murky, till Al-Ahram Weekly went to print, as to how Hamas's political programme would change exactly.
Abbas was under great pressure to reach an agreement since he will go before the United Nations 22 September and the Quartet will meet 1 October.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair urged Hamas to form the unity government during his visit with Abbas Sunday in Ramallah in a bid to resuscitate the peace process, although he reiterated the government would only be accepted if Hamas met the Quartet's conditions of recognising Israel and renouncing violence. Blair did not meet with Hamas officials.
Speaking after Friday prayer at a mosque in Rafah, Haniyeh said, "when we form the unity government we shall see if the siege is lifted, although the goal of the Western world is to see Hamas out of office."
Gaza's commercial and passenger border crossings were sealed 25 June after an Israeli soldier was kidnapped by Hamas and have opened only sporadically since. The kidnapping prompted Israel to launch a 12- week-long incursion into Gaza, purportedly to rescue its captured soldier and to halt the launching of Qassam rockets into Israel. According to the Palestinian Authority (PA) Health Ministry, as of Monday, 272 Palestinians have died and 1,463 have been injured as a result of Israel's incursion.
Poverty and desperation have gripped Palestinians in Gaza as their economy has been buried by international sanctions against the Hamas-led government and Israel's decision to withhold, in violation of the Paris Protocol, $54 million in monthly tax revenue owed to the PA. The groundwork for Gaza's economic crisis was laid in the closure of the crossings, prohibiting imports and exports. However, since Israeli destroyed Gaza's only power station 28 June leaving residents, businesses, and hospitals without electricity and water, the situation has become unbearable.
Gaza residents are still living in darkness. According to Rafiq Maliha, project manager of Gaza Power Generating Company, an agreement has been signed between the PA and an Egyptian construction company to import transformers, although Gaza's residents still await Israeli permission for the equipment to enter. It will take weeks to begin the repairs and only 35 per cent of the plant's total capacity can be restored anyway.
Gaza's economy continues to die slowly from the effects of the 28 June power plant strike. Amir Company for Ice Cream has closed its doors, no longer making a profit, although owner Emad Al-Wadia still pays over 1,000 shekels per day to operate generators to refrigerate his stores of ice cream. "Seventy-five per cent of my products are exported to the West Bank, and until this week the last time exports left Gaza was in January," said Al-Wadia, unable to sell his products locally due to the lack of refrigeration in Gaza.
Only 40 out of 150 major companies in Gaza are operating due to border closures and the lack of electricity. Generators have doubled operating costs, reports Mohamed Mushtaha, head of the Palestinian Businessman's Association in Gaza. Like many companies in Gaza, if Al-Wadia does not export by 2007, he will close his business forever.
Recently, the Gaza business sector issued a plea to all Palestinian factions asking them not to "conduct operations" against border crossings. The private sector is "calling on the [Palestinian] factions not to target the crossings and the surrounding areas, and to remove them from the circle of conflict with the Israeli side," stated an announcement. "The closure of the crossings and the unavailability of raw materials led to a complete paralysis of the industrial, agricultural and construction sectors, resulting in the closure of factories," the statement continued. Gaza's crossings are "the lifeline of the Palestinian people and the backbone of the national economy".
The plea asked factions not give Israel "an excuse" to continue its closure policy, underscoring that building a Palestinian state depends on the movement of goods in and out of Gaza. Closure of the crossings has increased unemployment, already hovering at 80 per cent in Gaza, and has stifled international projects and investment.
Meanwhile, Palestinian civil servants declared an open- ended strike 2 September, demanding unpaid salaries from the past six months, although by Sunday the strike had lost momentum in Gaza, where Hamas support is strongest.
Almost all Gaza schools are operating and only about 10 per cent of other PA employees continued striking. About 300 employees from various ministries and the Gaza Workers' Union protested outside the Palestinian Legislative Council in Gaza City Sunday chanting, "The strike will continue until the government meets its responsibilities."
Meanwhile, hundreds of students protested outside the Islamic University demanding lower tuition fees. The general strike continued in the West Bank where union leadership is stronger and most schools remained closed. Abbas encouraged PA employees to return to work after announcing the agreement to form a national unity government.
UNRWA Commissioner-General Karen Abu Zayad called on the international community to provide Gaza with a peacekeeping force or mission of observers, arguing that the Gaza population deserves protection, during her visit to New York Thursday.
"It would be great to have an international presence, civilian, military, whatever," said Abu Zayad.
Comment: That's easy. The answer is "Yes". At least in the halls of power. Ordinary people around the world are shocked and horrified. The question is: What can we DO?
BAGHDAD - Dozens of corpses were found across Baghdad, as Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki launched a fresh peace bid and the US pledged more troops to help restore stability in the Iraqi capital.
At least 39 bodies were recovered from across the country, bringing to more than 150 the number of people killed execution-style in Iraq in the past four days amid raging sectarian conflict between the newly empowered Shiite majority and the ousted Sunni Arab elite.
In rebel attacks at least eight people were killed Saturday.
Maliki called on some 1,700 academics and civil rights activists gathered for a conference in the capital to back his efforts to stem the fighting through a national reconcilation plan.
"We should keep aside our differences to build bridges, and Iraq's civil society should work to implement a policy of concord," Maliki urged the audience in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone -- the seat of the Iraqi government and the US military headquarters.
He said the meeting was part of his national reconciliation plan aimed at restoring security and the only way to "defy terror."
"Reconciliation is the only thorough and sound way of thinking, and offers a high sense of responsibility. He who has no such characteristics must keep away from the process."
Civil society groups, he added, held the "responsibility to end sectarianism and racism. They are responsible for spreading freedom and democracy."
Maliki's comments were greeted by a call from the audience of: "Yes, yes to Iraq. No, no to terror."
Iraq's junior minister for civil society, Adel al-Asaadi, said the government's peace plan "was a valuable opportunity and should not be missed."
Many of the participants vowed to support peace.
"We raise our voice and urge rival parties to stop the fighting and create an atmosphere void of terror," said Ibtisam Abdel Razzak of the Iraqi Women's Federation.
The meeting marked Maliki's second major attempt to reach out to influential sectors of society for support for the plan he launched earlier this year.
Last month, he met hundreds of tribal leaders who later signed a pact of honour to end sectarian violence.
But since that meeting, communal bloodletting has surged in Baghdad with hundreds of people killed and their bullet-riddled bodies dumped on the streets.
In an effort to rein in the violence which has raged alongside persistent anti-US attacks by Sunni Arab insurgents, the United States military said it will divert some of the 30,000 troops in the restive Al-Anbar province to Baghdad.
"The main effort is Baghdad. And we must ensure that we weight the main effort," Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli told reporters late Friday.
Without giving actual numbers, Chiarelli -- the number two US commander in Iraq -- said the shift of troops will not affect operations in Anbar, where the military faces a stiff challenge from Sunni rebels and terror group Al-Qaeda.
Iraqi authorities, meanwhile, are planning to dig trenches around the capital to thwart the movement of rebels and death squads.
"We will surround the city with trenches," interior ministry spokesman Brigadier General Abdel Karim Khalaf told AFP on Friday.
"Entry to the capital will be permitted through 28 roads as against 21 at the moment, but at the same time we will seal off dozens of other minor roads with access to Baghdad."
In rebel violence Saturday, a trio of bombs killed three people and wounded dozens in Baghdad.
Two Iraqi soldiers were killed and two policemen wounded when a booby-trapped car was blown up as security forces arrived to remove a body placed inside the vehicle, a security official said.
In another attack, a suicide bomber blew up a vehicle, killing one civilian and wounding 22.
Three people, including two policemen, were killed in the restive city of Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, while a civilian was killed each in the northern city of Mosul and in the southern town of Karbala.
The US military also announced the death of a soldier, taking its losses in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion to 2,678, according to an AFP count based on Pentagon figures.
So far this month, the US military has already lost 27 servicemen in Iraq.
KIRKUK, Iraq - A suicide bomber firing a machine gun with one hand and driving an explosive laden truck with the other blew up his vehicle near a police centre, killing 18 people and wounding 65 in Iraq's northern oil city of Kirkuk.
Five other explosions elsewhere around the city claimed seven more lives.
The bomber detonated his truck in front of a police investigation centre in Kirkuk -- a city claimed by both the Arabs and the Kurds - at 10:24 am (0624 GMT) Sunday.
Many of the wounded were police officers, including the head of the investigation centre. The wounded also included six women and two children.
"He drove towards the centre, firing the gun with one hand randomly to push back civilians, and then detonated the truck in front of the centre," a Kirkuk police officer said.
Approximately half an hour later, a bomb exploded in front of the Mahaba wa Tasamah (Love and Forgiveness) foundation, killing one woman and wounding four others.
The organization had closed its doors a week earlier after receiving threats from the Al-Qaeda-linked Ansar al-Sunna organization. The building was owned by a local tribal sheikh who had recently called for Saddam Hussein's release and reinstatement.
A second car bomb exploded outside the offices of a private security company, killing two people and wounding another three.
As US forces arrived at the blast site and surrounded the company's offices, a suicide car bomber detonated his vehicle nearby, killing three civilians and wounding six, police captain Rafed Abdel Hussain told AFP.
Two roadside bombs targeting a police patrol in the city also exploded within five minutes of each other, killing a civilian and wounding 12.
Kirkuk, a fragile ethnic mix of Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen, has long been a flashpoint in Iraq, especially with the potential revenues from the massive -- and largely unexploited -- oil reserves beneath the city.
Until recently, violence between the communities was kept to a minimum, partly due to political institutions, including a strong provincial council. But in the past few months there has been a sharp increase in the number of explosions and car bombs.
US forces in the area attributed the bombing campaign to groups with links to Al-Qaeda seeking to spark civil conflict.
By ROBERT TANNER
AP National Writer
September 17, 2006
The U.S. military in Iraq has imprisoned an Associated Press photographer for five months, accusing him of being a security threat but never filing charges or permitting a public hearing.
Military officials said Bilal Hussein, an Iraqi citizen, was being held for "imperative reasons of security" under
United Nations resolutions. AP executives said the news cooperative's review of Hussein's work did not find anything to indicate inappropriate contact with insurgents, and any evidence against him should be brought to the Iraqi criminal justice system.
Hussein, 35, is a native of Fallujah who began work for the AP in September 2004. He photographed events in Fallujah and Ramadi until he was detained on April 12 of this year.
"We want the rule of law to prevail. He either needs to be charged or released. Indefinite detention is not acceptable," said Tom Curley, AP's president and chief executive officer. "We've come to the conclusion that this is unacceptable under Iraqi law, or Geneva Conventions, or any military procedure."
Hussein is one of an estimated 14,000 people detained by the U.S. military worldwide - 13,000 of them in Iraq. They are held in limbo where few are ever charged with a specific crime or given a chance before any court or tribunal to argue for their freedom.
In Hussein's case, the military has not provided any concrete evidence to back up the vague allegations they have raised about him, Curley and other AP executives said.
The military said Hussein was captured with two insurgents, including Hamid Hamad Motib, an alleged leader of al-Qaida in Iraq. "He has close relationships with persons known to be responsible for kidnappings, smuggling, improvised explosive device (IED) attacks and other attacks on coalition forces," according to a May 7 e-mail from U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Jack Gardner, who oversees all coalition detainees in Iraq.
"The information available establishes that he has relationships with insurgents and is afforded access to insurgent activities outside the normal scope afforded to journalists conducting legitimate activities," Gardner wrote to AP International Editor John Daniszewski.
Hussein proclaims his innocence, according to his Iraqi lawyer, Badie Arief Izzat, and believes he has been unfairly targeted because his photos from Ramadi and Fallujah were deemed unwelcome by the coalition forces.
That Hussein was captured at the same time as insurgents doesn't make him one of them, said Kathleen Carroll, AP's executive editor.
"Journalists have always had relationships with people that others might find unsavory," she said. "We're not in this to choose sides, we're to report what's going on from all sides."
AP executives in New York and Baghdad have sought to persuade U.S. officials to provide additional information about allegations against Hussein and to have his case transferred to the Iraqi criminal justice system. The AP contacted military leaders in Iraq and the Pentagon, and later the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad.
The AP has worked quietly until now, believing that would be the best approach. But with the U.S. military giving no indication it would change its stance, the news cooperative has decided to make public Hussein's imprisonment, hoping the spotlight will bring attention to his case and that of thousands of others now held in Iraq, Curley said.
One of Hussein's photos was part of a package of 20 photographs that won a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography last year. His contribution was an image of four insurgents in Fallujah firing a mortar and small arms during the U.S.-led offensive in the city in November 2004.
In what several AP editors described as a typical path for locally hired staff in the midst of a conflict, Hussein, a shopkeeper who sold cell phones and computers in Fallujah, was hired in the city as a general helper because of his local knowledge.
As the situation in Fallujah eroded in 2004, he expressed a desire to become a photographer. Hussein was given training and camera equipment and hired in September of that year as a freelancer, paid on a per-picture basis, according to Santiago Lyon, AP's director of photography. A month later, he was put on a monthly retainer.
During the U.S.-led offensive in Fallujah in November 2004, he stayed on after his family fled. "He had good access. He was able to photograph not only the results of the attacks on Fallujah, he was also able to photograph members of the insurgency on occasion," Lyon said. "That was very difficult to achieve at that time."
After fleeing later in the offensive, leaving his camera behind in the rush to escape, Hussein arrived in Baghdad, where the AP gave him a new camera. He then went to work in Ramadi which, like Fallujah, has been a center of insurgent violence.
In its own effort to determine whether Hussein had gotten too close the insurgency, the AP has reviewed his work record, interviewed senior photo editors who worked on his images and examined all 420 photographs in the news cooperative's archives that were taken by Hussein, Lyon said.
The military in Iraq has frequently detained journalists who arrive quickly at scenes of violence, accusing them of getting advance notice from insurgents, Lyon said. But "that's just good journalism. Getting to the event quickly is something that characterizes good journalism anywhere in the world. It does not indicate prior knowledge," he said.
Out of Hussein's body of work, only 37 photos show insurgents or people who could be insurgents, Lyon said. "The vast majority of the 420 images show the aftermath or the results of the conflict - blown up houses, wounded people, dead people, street scenes," he said.
Only four photos show the wreckage of still-burning U.S. military vehicles.
"Do we know absolutely everything about him, and what he did before he joined us? No. Are we satisfied that what he did since he joined us was appropriate for the level of work we expected from him? Yes," Lyon said. "When we reviewed the work he submitted to us, we found it appropriate to what we'd asked him to do."
The AP does not knowingly hire combatants or anyone who is part of a story, company executives said. But hiring competent local staff in combat areas is vital to the news service, because often only local people can pick their way around the streets with a reasonable degree of safety.
"We want people who are not part of a story. Sometimes it is a judgment call. If someone seems to be thuggish, or like a fighter, you certainly wouldn't hire them," Daniszewski said. After they are hired, their work is checked carefully for signs of bias.
Lyon said every image from local photographers is always "thoroughly checked and vetted" by experienced editors. "In every case where there have been images of insurgents, questions have been asked about circumstances under which the image was taken, and what the image shows," he said.
Executives said it's not uncommon for AP news people to be picked up by coalition forces and detained for hours, days or occasionally weeks, but never this long. Several hundred journalists in Iraq have been detained, some briefly and some for several weeks, according to Scott Horton, a New York-based lawyer hired by the AP to work on Hussein's case.
Horton also worked on behalf of an Iraqi cameraman employed by CBS, Abdul Ameer Younis Hussein, who was detained for one year before his case was sent to an Iraqi court on charges of insurgent activity. He was acquitted for lack of evidence.
AP officials emphasized the military has not provided the company concrete evidence of its claims against Bilal Hussein, or provided him a chance to offer a defense.
"He's a Sunni Arab from a tribe in that area. I'm sure he does know some nasty people. But is he a participant in the insurgency? I don't think that's been proven," Daniszewski said.
Information provided to the AP by the military to support the continued detention hasn't withstood scrutiny, when it could be checked, Daniszewski said.
For example, he said, the AP had been told that Hussein was involved with the kidnapping of two Arab journalists in Ramadi.
But those journalists, tracked down by the AP, said Hussein had helped them after they were released by their captors without money or a vehicle in a dangerous part of Ramadi. After a journalist acquaintance put them in touch with Hussein, the photographer picked them up, gave them shelter and helped get them out of town, they said.
The journalists said they had never been contacted by multinational forces for their account.
Horton said the military has provided contradictory accounts of whether Hussein himself was a U.S. target last April or if he was caught up in a broader sweep.
The military said bomb-making materials were found in the apartment where Hussein was captured but it never detailed what those materials were. The military said he tested positive for traces of explosives. Horton said that was virtually guaranteed for anyone on the streets of Ramadi at that time.
Hussein has been a frequent target of conservative critics on the Internet, who raised questions about his images months before the military detained him. One blogger and author, Michelle Malkin, wrote about Hussein's detention on the day of his arrest, saying she'd been tipped by a military source.
Carroll said the role of journalists can be misconstrued and make them a target of critics. But that criticism is misplaced, she said.
"How can you know what a conflict is like if you're only with one side of the combatants?" she said. "Journalism doesn't work if we don't report and photograph all sides."
THE commander of the British taskforce in southern Afghanistan said last week that UK troops could be in the country for as long as 10 years.
In his first interview since arriving in Afghanistan, Brigadier Ed Butler said: "I don't think there's any doubt we will be here for a considerable time. There will need to be training teams and embedded officers for 10 years or so."
Butler, commander of 16 Air Assault Brigade, took full responsibility for setting up the "platoon houses" at Sangin and Musa Qala, where 15 British soldiers have died. But he said the decision to send troops into the frontline bases, described by many of his men as "hellholes", was made "under not inconsiderable pressure" from Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan's president.
When British troops began arriving in April to take charge of Helmand province, they met immediate Taliban resistance, Butler said. Baghran district centre had been overrun by the Taliban.
"The governor [of Helmand] was concerned, and the Afghan government was concerned, that northern Helmand was about to fall to the Taliban," said Butler.
British troops had shown immense bravery in intense combat. "They have been in almost constant engagement with the enemy. Some of these guys are barely out of school. Killing someone is a very difficult thing to do," Butler said. "People think: 'Well, that's what soldiers are paid to do', but it still takes raw courage to go out and do it."
Comment:
Geeze, that whole "Democracy" thing is taking a little longer than expected, ain't it?...
Kirkuk, Iraq's oil-rich northern city, is probably the most critical area for the future of Iraq, but the least covered by international media.
Historically, the city accommodates people from Iraq's three biggest ethnic groups: Turkmen, Arabs and Kurds. The groups have been engaged in a prolonged dispute over the city's identity, with each side claiming ownership of the 5000-year-old metropolis.
Being the centre of Iraq's northern oil industry, the Kurds see the Kirkuk region as vital for their long awaited "independent state of Kurdistan". Attacks on the infrastructure of the Kirkuk oil industry have been ongoing since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The Kurds' grip on Kirkuk was strengthened after the invasion of Iraq, and the two main Kurdish political parties led by Masoud Barazani, the president of the Kurdistan region, and Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi president, became the main powerbrokers in the city. Now their ambition to annex the city to their intended state has become public and bold.
A referendum is to be held in late 2007 to decide the city's fate. But Arabs and Turkmen say the Kurds are using their political new power and the support of the US to manipulate it.
The situation has provoked Kirkuk's non-Kurdish communities and plunged the city into a fierce war.
Attacks on Kurdish targets reached their peak last month when a shrine owned by Talabani's family was attacked on August 27. On the same day, a car bomber blew himself up near the office of Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in Kirkuk.
Deteriorating situation
Najati Qalaji, secretary-general of the London-based civil rights group the Committee for Defending the Turkmen Rights, expressed serious concerns at the deteriorating situation in Kirkuk.
"Kurds are slowly but surely occupying Kirkuk, everything is for them now, jobs, privileges and power," he said.
Qalaji accused the Kurds of following Saddam's practices.
"Saddam wanted to Arabise Kirkuk and exchanged its Kurdish minority with ethnic Arabs, and the Kurds now are doing the same by scaring people away and bringing in their fellow Kurds in their tens of thousands.
"I do not think there is a need for the referendum because, according to what they are doing now, the result will definitely be 100% in favour of annexing Kirkuk to Kurdistan."
Influx
Kurdish parties say the Kurds who have flooded Kirkuk since 2003, many now sleeping rough in public buildings, are those who were thrown out of the city during the Saddam era.
However, the Turkmen say Saddam removed no more than 500 families and that they had ties with the then Kurdish insurgents. Saddam's plan was to prevent them from aiding the insurgency.
"One question I would like to raise here; We know that Kurds who were kicked out by Saddam returned after the invasion and took back their houses by force. So, if those tens of thousands of Kurds who have been sleeping in stadiums and former public buildings were really kicked out of Kirkuk by Saddam, then where are their houses? Why do they not own anything in Kirkuk not even their old identities?" Qalaji said.
Non-Kurdish powers in the city reject the Kurdish plan to launch a referendum in late 2007 and say it is just another bid to break Iraq apart and warned they would resist the Kurdish plan.
Counter act
Leaflets warning inhabitants not to join the army or security forces were distributed in the city last week. The leaflets also urged those serving in the army and security forces to abandon their jobs, or get killed.
Policemen and army officers have suffered countless attacks during the past months.
One Arab activist in Kirkuk, who wanted to be identified as Abu Adnan, said his community is working closely with the Turkmen to prevent the "hijacking of Kirkuk".
"Kurds were never a majority in Kirkuk and the city was never Kurdish, they always shared it with us [Arabs] and our brothers the Turkmen, who always constituted half or two-thirds of the city's population.
"We also should not forget the city's Chaldeans and Assyrians. Kirkuk is a small Iraq, where the country's diversity is demonstrated, no party should get hold of it, it is just an Iraqi city.
"I would like to say that the referendum will be fiercely resisted, we will do everything we can to prevent the hijacking of Kirkuk," he said.
Public wrath
Joost Hiltermann, director of Crisis Group's Middle East Project, said: "For the Kurds, this deadline could be a self-laid trap. Having raised expectations, Kurdish leaders must now deliver by the end of 2007 or meet public wrath [among Kurds]".
The group issued a report last month urging an international action to prevent Kirkuk from turning into a scene of savage civil war.
In 1959, Kurdish communists took advantage of the support of Abd al-Karim Qassim, then Iraq's ruler, and massacred Kirkuk's Turkmen elite.
Sami Abd al-Hamid, an Iraqi communist leader, said the massacre has been wrongly blamed on the communists.
"It is true that those who performed the killing were communist Kurds, but they acted as Kurds not as communists, they were absolutely ethnic Kurds killing their rival Turkmen," he said.
In 1991, Kurdish rebels seized Kirkuk after the Iraqi army's chaotic withdrawal from Kuwait, which caused a short power vacuum in Iraq.
Kurdish gunmen launched an organised killing campaign against Kirkuk's Arab and Turkmen inhabitants. Iraqi Republican Guards regained the city from Kurdish rebels shortly afterwards.
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 15, 2006
The CIA learned in late September 2002 from a high-level member of Saddam Hussein's inner circle that Iraq had no past or present contact with Osama bin Laden and that the Iraqi leader considered bin Laden an enemy of the Baghdad regime, according to a recent Senate Intelligence Committee report.
Although President Bush and other senior administration officials were at that time regularly linking Hussein to al-Qaeda, the CIA's highly sensitive intelligence supporting the contrary view was apparently not passed on to the White House or senior Bush policymakers.
Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) and two GOP colleagues on the committee disclosed this information for the first time in the panel's report on Iraq released last week. They wrote in the "additional views" section of the report that the Cabinet-level Iraqi official "said that Iraq has no past, current, or anticipated future contact with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda" and that the official "added that bin Laden was in fact a longtime enemy of Iraq."
On Sept. 25, 2002, just days after the CIA received the source's information, President Bush told reporters: "Al-Qaeda hides. Saddam doesn't, but the danger is, is that they work in concert. The danger is, is that al-Qaeda becomes an extension of Saddam's madness and his hatred and his capacity to extend weapons of mass destruction around the world. . . . [Y]ou can't distinguish between al-Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror."
According to the three Republicans, the CIA said it did not disseminate the intelligence about the lack of a Hussein-bin Laden connection because "it did not provide anything new."
But other information obtained at the same time from the same source that paralleled what administration officials were saying was immediately passed on to "alert" the president and other senior policymakers, the three Republicans said. A "highly restricted intelligence report" conveyed the source's claim that although Iraq had no nuclear weapon, Hussein was covertly developing one and had stockpiled chemical weapons, according to the committee members.
CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said he could not provide additional information about the situation beyond what is in the Senate report, but he added that "the agency's decisions to disseminate intelligence are not guided by political considerations."
Committee staff members would not expand on the report's language other than to say the Hussein-bin Laden material was maintained within the CIA at a high level with limited access.
Former senior CIA officials said it was unclear what happened to the Hussein-bin Laden information, although two former aides to then-CIA Director George J. Tenet said they could not remember if they received the original information. "Nothing was withheld from the White House," one former aide said, although there was "a lot of debate inside the agency about the Saddam-al-Qaeda relationship" because it was the focus of repeated questions from administration officials, including Vice President Cheney and his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
The high-level Iraqi official, who was not identified in the Senate report, was Naji Sabri, then foreign minister. A senior CIA officer, after months of trying, was able to question him through a trusted agency intermediary when Sabri was in New York City around Sept. 19, 2002.
According to former intelligence officials, the CIA case officer filed two separate reports describing his questioning of Sabri. One, involving the Iraq weapons program, would go to analysts interested in that subject, the officer believed; the second, about Hussein and bin Laden, would go to the CIA counterterrorism center. The officer, however, passed his material on to senior agency officials in New York and was not aware of how it was eventually distributed.
Sabri's role as an intelligence source for the CIA has already been publicly reported. New details, including a payment of $200,000 to the intermediary and a secret signal system to assure the CIA officer that Sabri was cooperating, are contained in the recently released book "Hubris," by Michael Isikoff of Newsweek and David Corn, Washington correspondent for the magazine the Nation.
Well, they stop short of actually calling it that, but they might as well with the absolute nonsense that is on the "Ten Facts About Guantanamo" list that was issued earlier in the week (word document at the top of the web site).
Is it me, or have things now just flown past obscene and vile and disgusting and shameful and disgraceful to bizarre and pathetic? Because when you see the items on this list, including (get this) high top sneakers, denim jean jackets, blue jeans and ping pong.
I swear, I kid you not.
Well, they stop short of actually calling it that, but they might as well with the absolute nonsense that is on the "Ten Facts About Guantanamo" list that was issued earlier in the week (word document at the top of the web site).
Is it me, or have things now just flown past obscene and vile and disgusting and shameful and disgraceful to bizarre and pathetic? Because when you see the items on this list, including (get this) high top sneakers, denim jean jackets, blue jeans and ping pong.
I swear, I kid you not.
Now, I must give a hat tip to the good folks at ThinkProgress for pointing out the lunacy. But in reality, I just don't know how to react to this, so I think that snark is the best answer here - not to minimize the fact that Gitmo is a symbol of the torture and complete disrespect for the Constitution, or that there are numerous detainees who have committed suicide while there, or have been released with no charges brought - but I just can't believe that this is something that anyone actually took the time to write, and then have approved for release by higher-ups at the Pentagon.
I'll provide the points on this list, just because I wouldn't have believed it unless I read them for myself, and you will see just how stupid, pathetic and just flat out wrong (no surprise there) these items are:
The detainees at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility include bin Laden's bodyguards, bomb makers, terrorist trainers and facilitators, and other suspected terrorists.
More money is spent on meals for detainees than on the U.S. troops stationed there. Detainees are offered up to 4,200 calories a day. The average weight gain per detainee is 20 pounds.
The Muslim call to prayer sounds five times a day. Arrows point detainees toward the holy city of Mecca.
Detainees receive medical, dental, psychiatric, and optometric care at U.S. taxpayers' expense. In 2005, there were 35 teeth cleanings, 91 cavities filled, and 174 pairs of glasses issued.
The International Committee of the Red Cross visits detainees at the facility every few months. More than 20,000 messages between detainees and their families have been exchanged.
Recreation activities include basketball, volleyball, soccer, pingpong, and board games. High-top sneakers are provided.
Departing detainees receive a Koran, a jean jacket, a white T-shirt, a pair of blue jeans, high-top sneakers, a gym bag of toiletries, and a pillow and blanket for the flight home.
Entertainment includes Arabic language TV shows, including World Cup soccer games. The library has 3,500 volumes available in 13 languages -- the most requested book is "Harry Potter."
Guantanamo is the most transparent detention facility in the history of warfare. The Joint Task Force has hosted more than 1,000 journalists from more than 40 countries.
In 2005, Amnesty International stated that "the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay has become the gulag of our times."
OK, take a moment to stop laughing, crying, shouting or screaming at the computer screen.
Now, correct me if I am wrong, but if these are "the worst of the worst Islamofascists" who only focus on bringing death and destruction to 'Murka - and they are this way because they "hate our freedoms", then please answer these questions:
Why would they be interested in high top sneakers, blue jeans, denim jackets and other "symbols of 'Murka"? Shouldn't we just give them an American flag lapel pin while we are at it?
There are approximately 460 detainees at Guantanamo. Are 35 teeth cleanings in nearly four years something to be bragging about? Are less than 100 fillings something anyone should be impressed with?
Was any of this dental work done after the prisoners were tortured and their teeth were knocked out? Were any of those pairs of glasses issued to people whose faces were kicked in?
Isn't the World Cup on once every four years? Isn't that like saying that the Olympics are broadcast? And wouldn't anyone that is only interested in killing 'Murkins not interested in this?
Journalists could not talk to detainees, they had to be accompanied by a military escort and their photos were censored.
What about that 4,200 calorie diet? Not to mention the fact that that is more than twice what is a normal diet, didn't we hear about hunger strikes? What about the following little nugget (and I don't mean chicken Mcnugget either):
There also has been a hunger strike since August. The number of inmates refusing food dropped to 18 by last weekend from a high of 131. The military has at times used force-feeding methods, including a restraint chair.
I guess when you force feed people, they gain weight.
What about those Red Cross visits? Well, it is nice to say that they visit often, but what does the Red Cross actually say about the "facilities"?
Christophe Girod - the senior Red Cross official in Washington - said it was unacceptable that the 600 detainees should be held indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay without legal safeguards.
---snip---
Mr Girod said the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was making the unusually blunt public statement because of a lack of action after previous private contacts with American officials.
"One cannot keep these detainees in this pattern, this situation, indefinitely," he said during a visit to the US naval base where the Taliban and al-Qaeda suspects are being held.
As for the last point, why would any "fun fact" sheet want to point out that Amnesty International called Guantanamo a gulag? Doesn't that seem like something that the Pentagon would want to gloss over?
Just like all of the other facts about Guantanamo, torture, rendition, secret CIA prison camps and well, pretty much everything else that these liars and war criminals have done over the past six years.
CARACAS - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad arrived in Caracas Sunday for talks with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a fellow critic of the United States who strongly defends Iran's controversial nuclear program.
Ahmadinejad, who was warmly greeted by Chavez after landing outside Caracas, will hold two days of talks with his Venezuelan counterpart and sign agreements on energy.
"We have a common thinking, common interests," Ahmadinejad said after his arrival. "We must be united to accomplish these ideas, to reach the objective of peace and justice in the world."
The Iranian leader, in his first visit to Latin America since taking office last year, hailed "all the free countries and liberators, all the revolutionaries who are against global hegemony."
The two leaders share a strong enmity towards the United States, which has had a war of words with Chavez and accuses Iran of seeking to build a nuclear weapon.
Chavez, who has visited Iran several times, praised Ahmadinejad as a "distinguished leader of a heroic people and leader of a revolution, sister of the Venezuelan revolution."
The leftist Venezuelan leader denied allegations that his country was secretly extracting uranium but did not rule out nuclear cooperation with Iran in the future.
"I have already begun to fight imperialists and internal enemies who continue to say that Iran is coming looking for uranium ... to make an atomic bomb," Chavez said.
"They don't tire of lying, but their attacks have run up against the power of morality and truth," he said.
Colombia's ambassador to the Organization of American States recently said Venezuela was extracting uranium in buildings disguised as bicycle factories. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe said the envoy had made a mistake.
In an interview with CNN television's Spanish-language station, Chavez said a nuclear technology transfer with Iran could be possible.
"There is no agreement for nuclear energy technology for now, but there could be one," he said.
Chavez and Ahmadinejad both attended the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Havana that concluded Sunday with a final declaration backing Iran's right to pursue nuclear energy.
The United States is pushing for sanctions to force Tehran to stop producing enriched uranium, which can be used both for both nuclear power and atomic weapons.
US officials "are now inventing stories that Iran is building atomic bombs," Chavez said. "This is a lie."
Chavez refused to say whether he would send troops to Iran in the event of a war with the United States.
"I can't reveal that. We are in solidarity and will be in solidarity with Iran," he told CNN.
Chavez also repeated his threat of cutting of oil exports to the United States if Washington attacked Venezuela or supported a coup.
Chavez and Ahmadinejad, whose countries are members of
OPEC, were to inaugurate via satellite Sunday a training center for a subsidiary of Venezuela's state-owned oil company PDVSA and a mosque west of Caracas.
On Monday, they will visit a tractor factory in southeastern Venezuela.
Chavez said Iran will help Venezuela build a gunpowder and detonator factory.
Other bilateral agreements include cooperation in the construction in Venezuela of car and computer factories, and petrochemical facilities.
Ahmadinejad travels to New York Monday to attend the UN General Assembly.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has proposed the creation of a bank of south-American nations to use international reserves for financing the development of these countries.
"If we are going to have a 'Bank of the South', we cannot lose one single day to use our international reserves to finance our development," he told the 14th Summit of 118-nation NAM here on Friday.
"Where are our reserves today?... in the countries of the North. This is about re-launching the potential of NAM and the basis of unity of this movement," Chavez said.
Coming down heavily against international financial institutions, the Venezuelan President, well-known for his anti-US views, said "we don't accept the kind of development the World Bank or International Monetary Fund wants to push on us to change our hopes, our souls and our pain."
Cuban First Vice-President, Raul Castro, who is presiding over the NAM conference, said the Summit leadership and the delegations is likely to discuss the concept of 'Bank of the South'.
However, Chavez said it was action and not debate that was needed to hasten the process of setting up such an institution.
"The reality is that we cannot expect solutions to our problems from the North, they are our own, and we must be capable of dealing with them practically."
Chavez also proposed creating a new 'Commission of the South' by using the recommendations in a book - which he read when he was imprisoned in 1992 - published by the previous Commission of the South chaired by the former President of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere.
HAVANA -- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has vowed to defend Iran from potential attack from the United States, the BBC reported Friday.
Chavez -- an ardent critic of the Bush administration -- made his pledge to Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during the Non-Aligned Movement Summit in Havana, a meeting that drew representatives from 118 countries and more than 50 world leaders.
The outspoken leftist leader told Ahmadinejad that Venezuela was "with you just like we are with Cuba."
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez asserted on Tuesday that the United States could have orchestrated the September 11 attacks five years ago to justify its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Chavez, who regularly accuses the Bush administration of planning to invade Venezuela and plotting to overthrow or assassinate him, offered no evidence to support his assertions.
He claimed, however, that momentum was growing for a conspiracy theory aired on television this week by a Venezuelan journalist.
"It is still not clear what the cause was, nor who directed the terrible act that claimed thousands of lives in seconds and gave the American empire an excuse to hit out with more even brutality and fury at the world," Chavez said in a speech in Caracas.
"It is difficult to believe that the towers of the World Trade Center could have collapsed as they did, in the blink of an eye, because of the planes."
Chavez suggested the towers could have been dynamited and noted that the wreckage of the plane that smashed into the Pentagon had not been recovered.
Cconspiracy theories persist about the 2001 attacks by hijacked airliners which killed nearly 3,000 people when they crashed into New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But no evidence has emerged to dispute the accepted version of events.
The US government says al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden masterminded the attacks and al Qaeda itself has claimed responsibility for them. The events of September 11 were also filmed and photographed and seen live on television screens by millions across the world.
The leftist Venezuelan president regularly rails against the United States for sending its forces into Afghanistan and Iraq as part of the war on terrorism it unleashed after the attacks.
In Washington, a US State Department spokesman said he had no comment on Chavez's remarks, which were based on a TV programme on Monday in which Venezuelan journalist Carlos Sicilia aired his theories on the attacks.
"The hypothesis that is gaining momentum, that Sicilia said last night could blow up soon, is that it was the imperial American power itself that planned and committed this terrible terrorist act ... to justify its acts of aggression," said Chavez.
With his confidence underpinned by an oil-fueled economic boom, Chavez has focused his foreign policy on creating what he calls a multipolar alliance of states to counterbalance the world's only superpower.
Although implacable toward the government in Washington, Chavez has cast himself as a supporter of the American people and run a highly-publicized programme to sell discounted heating fuel to poor US communities.
The struggle for justice and prosperity in the Arab world and everywhere depends upon popular resistance to US imperialism and its local clients.
"Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" reads the eponymous statue's inscription in Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem Ozymandias. But it is the boastful tyrant's monument, not the self-confidence of his enemies, that lies splintered in the sands.
Five years on from the atrocities of 11 September 2001, George W Bush and the neo-conservatives have managed to turn much of Afghanistan and Iraq into desolation, full of now lifeless things.
Amid this carnage lies another, unlamented casualty -- the colossal wreck of US and British foreign policy. The authors of that wreckage cannot conceivably claim they were not warned of the calamities they would unleash.
Millions of us told them what would happen if they seized on the events of five years ago to launch what the Pentagon now calls the "long war". Four days after the attacks in New York and Washington I spoke in a sitting of the recalled British parliament. I warned that if the US and its allies mishandled the response, they would create a thousand, ten thousand Bin Ladens. Five years on, is that not what's hapened?
Many tens of thousands of people -- mostly women and children -- have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Do the ultimate perpetrators of the killings, as they sit behind their mahogany desks in the White House and Downing Street, imagine that the rest of us have not noticed how they do not deem those Arab and Muslim dead worthy of the same grief as attends their own?
Do they think we have not noticed how they refuse even to count the number killed in Iraq? Did they believe that the pornographic images of Abu Ghraib would be discounted? Did George Bush and Tony Blair delude themselves into thinking they could whet the knife that Israel plunged into Lebanon without being seen as accomplices to war crimes?
Blair certainly gave every appearance of having lost all contact with reality when he flew to Tel Aviv last weekend. With his own MPs plotting to oust him for damaging their re-election prospects, he went to occupied Jerusalem and threw his arms around Ehud Olmert, whose war in Lebanon the vast majority of people in Britain opposed.
As for Bush, he has always struggled even to give the impression of having a connection with reality. Nevertheless, the reality of the last five years stubbornly remains. The world is not a safer place; it is more violent, more dangerous.
There are more, not fewer, jihadists of the Bin Laden stripe. The bitterness in the Arab and Muslim world is deeper, broader and more incendiary.
In Afghanistan, Blair, oblivious to his nation's history of military catastrophe in that proud country, has hurled his soldiers into the most unforgiving terrain, against a ferocious and growing military resistance, in a part of the world that even Alexander the Great could not occupy.
In Iraq, the occupiers have spilt enough blood to turn the two great rivers red. In order to cling on they foment sectarian and confessional strife which, and this may be their parting gift, threatens tragically to trisect the country. Can they with a straight face claim Iraq is better off now than it was before the invasion?
Remember what they said their war would achieve: freedom and democracy, respect for women, prosperity and dignity.
In truth, it was the freedom of US corporate culture, the democracy of the dollar and an Arab world ruled by corrupt kings and puppet presidents just as pliant but a little less gauche, able to rig an election as the Bush's do in Florida rather than tactlessly incarcerating the opposition.
Even these, their own selfish ambitions, have not been achieved. That increasingly stands out as the most salient feature of the reality they have created over the last half- decade. Nowhere symbolises it more than Lebanon.
In March of last year the US State Department and British Foreign Office were incongruously playing the role of revolutionary pamphleteer. The "Cedar Revolution" in Lebanon was, we were assured, about to usher an irresistible movement for a "New Middle East".
Fifteen months later and we know what that looks like: the Israeli army pledging to bomb Lebanon back two decades and embarking on an invasion whose success was predicated on reigniting the flames of civil war which the people of Lebanon have done so much to douse.
The war this summer was not merely another episode in the bloody history of Israel lashing out at bordering states. It was a battle in Washington's wider war on terror. It was a front that opened up, ironically, precisely because the US is mired and losing on the Iraq front. The assault on Lebanon was meant to pave the way to further aggression against Syria and Iran.
That makes the reaction of those Arab leaders who denounced the Lebanese resistance all the more emetic. Their spurious claims that this was merely a Shia issue or that threats to bomb Iran are a Persian problem should be met with nothing but contempt.
In backing Israel against Hizbullah and the Lebanese resistance, they sided with the enemy who is garrotting the Palestinians in Gaza. While these leaders humiliated themselves before Washington and Tel Aviv, the name Sheikh Sayed Hassan Nasrallah was on the lips of millions from Rabat to Riyadh.
Israel's defeat at the hands of Hizbullah and the resistance in Lebanon is a defeat also for Washington and London. It has opened up a new prospect for ending the nightmare of the last five years.
It is not only in the Arab and Muslim world that confidence is surging forward that there is an alternative to domination by the US, global corporations and their local junior partners. The same is happening in Latin America where President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela personifies a new radical generation, one that met its counterparts in the Middle East and the older generation of the great Fidel Castro at the Non-Aligned Summit this week.
This, I believe, is going to be the lasting legacy of the last five years: a renewed global movement in direct opposition to the Pentagon and the multinationals on whose behalf it acts as enforcer. The stakes are extraordinarily high. Just as the impasse in Iraq drove the US to support the Israeli adventure in Lebanon, so that defeat may in turn accelerate preparations for an assault on Iran.
That would be one of the most costly miscalculations in history. They stand warned. But they stood warned over their crazed reaction to 11 September, so no one should underestimate their capacity to wade deeper into the river of blood.
The US is not going to tip toe away, despite its losses. To do so would mean the American establishment accepting that its power and prestige had been thrown back to before 1989, when it faced a rival power.
It is going to take the power of the popular resistance from Caracas to Cairo to throw back that behemoth and settle accounts with all the quislings who it depends upon but who crucially also depend on it.
George Galloway, is respect member of British Parliament for the London constituency of Bethnal Green and Bow.
By Steven R. Weisman The New York Times
Published: September 17, 2006
Even before the conclusion of the annual gathering of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, a striking swing in the global order has been obvious.
China and other fast-growing developing countries are demanding a bigger say in the aging institutions that superintend the world economy.
The demands of China and other countries are stirring a fear in the West that agencies like the IMF, set up in the 1940s to stabilize the global economy, are in danger of fragmenting - a sobering thought for those worried that the breakdown of global trade talks this year imperiled the future of global economic cooperation.
The richest countries of the world are scrambling to make sure that this fragmentation does not happen. Accordingly, a U.S.-backed plan that would give a bit more of a say at the Fund to China, South Korea, Mexico and Turkey appears headed for passage Monday.
[Rodrigo Rato, the IMF's managing director, said Sunday that he saw "broad consensus" that the 184-member body would approve a plan to increase the voting shares of China and the three other emerging economies - despite opposition from several countries, The Associated Press reported.]
The plan is what the United States calls a "down payment," paving the way for more power to be given to other developing countries at the Fund, which is responsible for monitoring the global economy and rescuing countries from default. But that process is likely to produce much wrangling over the next year or two.
Judging from the comments of countries like India, Brazil, Argentina and Egypt, which have said they oppose the "down payment" idea, there is a clear residue of distrust from the poor or developing countries that feel left out of the process being discussed at these annual meetings. That criticism underscores the general anxiety about the future of the global economy and the systems set up to secure it.
Changing the way the IMF works has proved difficult, in part because countries with existing power at the fund, including some in Europe, are nervous about being marginalized after decades of power.
Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the Exchequer in Britain and chairman of a committee that helps set policy for the Fund, said Sunday that he expected that Europeans and others who might lose power to the Asians "will approach this in a statesmanlike way" and voluntarily give up some of their clout.
Another issue being discussed, people here say, is for the World Bank, which lends more than $20 billion a year to poor countries, to figure out a new relationship with countries like China, Thailand, Mexico and others with economies strong enough that they can borrow in commercial markets more cheaply than from the bank.
A decade ago, the fast-growing countries of Asia and Latin America that were termed "emerging markets" were on the defensive after the collapse of their economies and the embarrassment of elaborate rescues carried out by the United States and the IMF. But now some of these same countries are, along with the oil-producing countries, sitting on piles of reserves while the United States is the world's biggest debtor nation.
There is a new phrase at the World Bank that captures this situation. Many of these countries are "emerging donors," not just "emerging markets." China and India get loans from the World Bank because together they have more poor people than sub-Saharan Africa.
But China is also using its reserves to hand out billions of dollars in loans to Angola, Sudan, Nigeria, Zimbabwe and increasingly in Southeast Asia in a way that the West criticizes because many of these same countries have recently negotiated debt forgiveness packages and are in danger of sinking back into debt.
One reason for the push to give China more power at the Fund, U.S. and European officials say, is to get it to be more "responsible" in its lending practices and also to allow its currency to fluctuate more freely and not artificially intervene in currency markets.
But the countries with the reserves have mixed feelings about the IMF. They say they want more power there, but they also do not look back fondly on the period when they had to swallow harsh austerity plans in return for being saved in the 1990s.
"Many large countries in the world are building up their own reserves to make sure they do not have to come back to the fund," said Ariel Buira, a Mexican economist who serves as a spokesman for a group of 24 African, Asian and Latin American nations. "They are demanding more of a say in what the fund does in the future."
And they are threatening to go their own way, possibly following China's lead to set up an Asian monetary agency that would rival the monetary fund, long the unquestioned province of the United States and Europe. In addition, the poor countries of Africa have joined with the economically better-off poor countries to object to the Fund's overhaul because they fear that they will be left out of the process.
Margarito Teves, the Philippines' finance secretary, said the plan now on the table to overhaul the Fund was inadequate. But "that doesn't mean we would vote against the proposal," he said, adding that voting for it might be the best way of improving it.
In the past, those risking oversimplification tended to see these annual gatherings as battlegrounds between rich and poor countries, especially because of the anti-globalization protests like the one in Seattle in 1999. Protests have not been much in evidence here because of tight security; Singapore has banned demonstrations and refused visas to people it deemed to be troublemakers.
Representatives of 500 nongovernmental groups, many of them dissenting vehemently from policies at the World Bank and the Fund, have been holding quiet seminars on the fringes of the meetings calling attention to the problems of poverty, environmental degradation and diseases like AIDS. What these meetings show is that there are actually three groups of nations here: the rich, the poor and the "middle income" poor, led by China but including India and many of the countries that surround Singapore.
Lawrence Summers, the former U.S. Treasury secretary and former Harvard president, has also been on the fringes here, talking about how unprecedented it is that in the past few years, the "poor" countries of the world have ended up being the bankers of the United States. Summers estimates that "emerging markets" possess $2 trillion in "excess reserves," or what is in excess of what is normally considered necessary to protect against trade and economic downturns.
In effect, the poor countries are helping Americans consume more and save less. If the situation were reversed, many economists say, the United States would be enlisting the IMF to demand austerity of the errant poor countries.
Like the Fund, the World Bank is also wrestling with the phenomenon of "middle income" poor countries and plans to issue a report Monday on the subject.
By Valerie Richardson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
September 17, 2006
DENVER -- Ten Nobel Peace Prize winners gathered here this weekend to issue a worldwide call for peace and understanding toward all people, with the possible exception of those in the Bush administration.
The laureates, who met here to celebrate the 10th anniversary of PeaceJam, an international education organization, opened the three-day event by excoriating the White House for its invasion of Iraq and subsequent increases in military spending.
"I honestly wonder how any of them can think for a nanosecond how having civil war in Iraq has made us safer," said Jody Williams of Vermont, who won the peace prize in 1997 for her work toward clearing land mines.
Billed as the largest U.S. gathering of Nobel Peace Prize winners in history, the event served as a starting point for the laureates' "Global Call to Action," an initiative aimed at urging young people to record 1 billion "acts of peace" over the next 10 years.
About 3,000 young people from 31 countries attended the event, held at the University of Denver.
The event's biggest names, the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, steered clear of politics. The Dalai Lama was greeted like a rock star yesterday before a one-hour speech in which he urged young people to embrace globalization.
"There are no national boundaries. The whole globe is becoming one body," the Tibetan spiritual leader said. "In these circumstances, I think war is outdated -- destruction of your neighbor is actually destruction of yourself."
At a press conference Friday, however, other peace prize winners criticized U.S. foreign policy, saying the focus should be on social and economic justice.
Adolfo Perez Esquivel, the 1980 winner for his Latin American human-rights work, took it a step further with a personal shot at President Bush.
"Bush says he prays. But I think God covers up His ears when George Bush prays," Mr. Esquivel said through a Spanish translator.
The Nobel Peace Prize winners also issued a statement identifying 10 "barriers to global peace." They included disease, poverty, nuclear weapons, social injustice, racism, access to natural resources and the rights of women and children.
Conspicuously absent from the list was global terrorism. Several laureates said that terrorism was an outgrowth of ignorance, prejudice and inequality, and that it cannot be eradicated until those underlying social issues are addressed.
Mrs. Williams said the September 11 attacks were a response to U.S. aggression around the world, and that the White House should have tried to understand the reasons behind them before invading Iraq.
"They do not like the aggressive policies of the country and they don't like that we're ignorant of that," she said.
Mr. Esquivel compared the nearly 3,000 persons killed on September 11 with the tens of thousands of children who die every day of hunger. "I call that economic terrorism," he said.
Shirin Ebadi, who won the peace prize in 2003 for advocating democracy and human rights in the Middle East, said she was "very sorry for the sad events of September 11," but added that it would have been better for the United States to build a school in Afghanistan for each victim, rather than invading the country.
The founders of PeaceJam, Dawn Engle and Ivan Suvanjieff, said one of the event's goals was for the laureates to become as popular with young people as actors and musicians.
"I want the Nobel laureates to be icons, [instead of] some thumb-sucking [celebrities]," Mr. Suvanjieff said. "I want peace to be hip, sexy and cool."
By Karen Gleason
Del Rio News-Herald
September 13, 2006
Fluoride will no longer be added to Del Rio's drinking water.
The Del Rio City Council made that decision Tuesday night after a presentation by John Morony, a retired college biology professor, who characterized fluoride as a poison and showed the council numerous research references that link fluoride to higher rates of cancer and other health hazards.
Following Morony's presentation and a brief discussion by the council, Councilman Pat Cole said, "I make the motion that we cease immediately adding fluoride to our beautiful San Felipe Springs water."
In his letter to the city requesting time to address the council, Morony recommended "that Del Rio cease fluoridating its water supply."
Morony in his letter noted that in the U.S., more than 70 communities have stopped adding fluoride to their water.
He also pointed out that most European countries, Japan and China do not add fluoride to their water supplies.
"Why? Basically for two reasons: fluoridated water cannot be shown to significantly reduce dental caries (tooth decay) and it has proved to be far more toxic than previously thought," Morony wrote.
Morony during Tuesday night's meeting also presented the council with a paper titled "Scientific Facts on the Biological Effects of Fluorides."
The paper listed research references linking fluoride to a variety of medical problems, including the development of bone cancer and premature aging.
The paper stated, "Fluoride consumption by human beings increases the general cancer death rate."
Morony noted that although some fluoride occurs naturally in all water, the fluoride being added to the city's water supply "is a waste product of the phosphate fertilizer industry."
"I'm just trying to get the fluoride out of our water," Morony told the council.
At the end of Morony's presentation, Cole asked him, "So let me clarify: if we continue adding fluoride, we are putting in our water a byproduct of the fertilizer industry?"
"That's right," Morony said.
Councilman Mike Wrob asked, "At what point did we start putting fluoride in our water?"
City administrators asked Mitch Lomas, manager of the city's water treatment plant, to answer Wrob's question.
"We started fluoridating in 1990 as a result of a decision by the city council," Lomas replied.
"At the time we did not have all the information about fluoride that we do now," he added.
Wrob then asked Lomas to give the council his opinion of adding fluoride to the city's drinking water, a question Lomas did not answer directly.
Mayor Efrain Valdez noted that the city spends about $20,000 a year buying the fluoride to add to the city water.
Cole asked Lomas, "How do employees at the water plant feel about handling fluoride?"
"It's a very corrosive chemical. It eats through concrete and metal. When they handle it, they have to wear respirators and chemical-proof suits," Lomas said.
"But how do they feel about handling it?" Cole asked.
"They really would rather not handle it," Lomas replied.
Cole then made her motion to cease fluoridation of the city's water, with Wrob giving the second.
After the council had voted unanimously to approve Cole's motion, Morony told the News-Herald as he had left the council chambers, "The council's decision is very gratifying. Now we can go back to drinking Del Rio water."
By Rev. Bill McGinnis
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Sep 15, 2006
Researchers at Princeton University have released a new "Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine," which finds many possibilities for election fraud in these particular voting machines. Their report also recognizes that similar problems likely exist with other direct recording electronic (DRE) voting machines, saying, "Simply put, many computer scientists doubt that paperless DREs can be made reliable and secure, and they expect that any failures of such systems would likely go undetected."
Here is a direct quotation from this report, describing some of the ways by which the next election could be stolen (most footnotes removed)...
2.2 Injecting Attack Code
"To carry out these attacks, the attacker must somehow install his malicious software on one or more voting machines. If he can get physical access to a machine for as little as one minute, he can install the software manually. The attacker can also install a voting machine virus that spreads to other machines, allowing him to commit widespread fraud even if he only has physical access to one machine or memory card."
2.2.1 Direct Installation
"An attacker with physical access to a machine would have least three methods of installing malicious software. The first is to create an EPROM chip containing a program that will install the attack code into the machine's flash memory, and then to open the machine, install the chip on its motherboard, and reboot from the EPROM.
"The second method is to exploit a back door feature in Diebold's code to manually install the attack files from a memory card. When the machine boots, it checks whether a file named explorer.glb exists on the removable memory card. If such a file is present, the machine boots into Windows Explorer rather than Diebold's BallotStation election software. An attacker could insert a memory card containing this file, reboot the machine, and then use Explorer to copy the attack files onto the machine or run them directly from the card.
"The third method exploits a service feature of the machine's bootloader. On startup, the machine checks the removable memory card for a file named fboot.nb0. If this file exists, the machine replaces the bootloader code in its onboard flash memory with the file's contents. An attacker could program a malicious bootloader, store it on a memory card as fboot.nb0, and reboot the machine with this card inserted, causing the Diebold bootloader to install the malicious software. (A similar method would create a malicious operating system image.)
"The first method requires the attacker to remove several screws and lift off the top of the machine to get access to the motherboard and EPROM. The other methods only require access to the memory card slot and power button, which are both behind a locked door on the side of the machine. The lock is easily picked -- one member of our group, who has modest locksmithing skills, can pick the lock consistently in less than 10 seconds. Alternatively, this slot can be reached by removing screws and opening the machine. Some attackers will have access to keys that can open the lock -- all AccuVote-TS machines in certain states use identical keys, there are thousands of keys in existence, and these keys can be copied at a hardware or lock store.
"A poll worker, election official, technician, or other person who had private access to a machine for as little as one minute could use these methods without detection. Poll workers often do have such access; for instance, in a widespread practice called 'sleepovers,' machines are sent home with poll workers the night before the election."
2.2.2 Voting Machine Viruses
"Rather than injecting code into each machine directly, an attacker could create a computer virus that would spread from one voting machine to another. Once installed on a single 'seed' machine, the virus would spread to other machines by methods described below, allowing an attacker with physical access to one machine (or card) to infect a potentially large population of machines. The virus could be programmed to install malicious software, such as a vote-stealing program or denial-of-service attack, on every machine it infected.
"When the machine is rebooted, it normally emits a musical chime that might be noticed during a stealth attack; but this sound can be suppressed by plugging headphones (or just a headphone connector) into the machine's headphone jack.
"To prove that this is possible, we constructed a demonstration virus that spreads itself automatically from machine to machine, installing our demonstration vote-stealing software on each infected system. Our demonstration virus, described in Section 4.3, can infect machines and memory cards. An infected machine will infect any memory card that is inserted into it. An infected memory card will infect any machine that is powered up or rebooted with the memory card inserted. Because cards are transferred between machines during vote counting and administrative activities, the infected population will grow over time.
"Diebold delivers software upgrades to the machines via memory cards: a technician inserts a memory card containing the updated code and then reboots the machine, causing the bootloader to install the new code from the memory card. This upgrade method relies on the correct functioning of the machine's bootloader, which is supposed to copy the upgraded code from the memory card into the machine's flash memory. But if the bootloader were already infected by a virus, then the virus could make the bootloader behave differently. For example, the bootloader could pretend to install the updates as expected but instead secretly propagate the virus onto the memory card. If the technician later used the same memory card to 'upgrade' other machines, he would in fact be installing the virus on them. Our demonstration virus illustrates these spreading techniques.
"Memory cards are also transferred between machines in the process of transmitting election definition files to voting machines before an election. According to Diebold, 'Data is downloaded onto the [memory] cards using a few [AccuVote] units, and then the stacks of [memory] cards are inserted into the thousands of [AccuVote] terminals to be sent to the polling places.'
"If one of the few units that download the data is infected, it will transfer the infection via the 'stacks of [memory] cards' into many voting machines."
You can download a complete copy of this report in PDF format by clicking here.
The Active Denial System, the Pentagon's "less-lethal" microwave-based crowd-control weapon, produces potentially harmful hotspots when used in built-up areas, and its effects can be intensified by sweaty skin. The flaws call into question the weapon's usefulness in hot conditions, like those in Iraq.
The ADS fires a microwave beam intended to heat skin without causing damage, while inflicting enough pain to force the victim to move away. However, tests of the weapon showed that reflections off buildings, water or even the ground can produce peak energy densities twice as high as the main beam. Contact with sweat or moist fabric such as a sweaty waistband further intensifies the effect.
The safety concerns, revealed in the details of 14 tests carried out by the US air force between 2002 and 2006, were acquired under a Freedom of Information request by Edward Hammond of the Sunshine Project USA, which campaigns against the use of biological and non-lethal weapons. Test details released to the organisation last year revealed that volunteers taking part in the tests had been banned from wearing glasses or contact lenses because of safety fears (New Scientist, 23 July 2005, p 26).
Nevertheless, the weapon may be safer than some alternatives. More than 9000 experimental exposures to the ADS have produced just six cases of blistering and one second-degree burn caused by an accidental overexposure. The US army wants permission to deploy the system in Iraq, but the decision has been delayed while tests continue.
From issue 2569 of New Scientist magazine, 16 September 2006, page 27
Billionaire philanthropist George Soros compared the Bush administration to socialist and communist regimes Thursday while criticizing America's war on terror.
The liberal political activist said the U.S. strategy of fighting a "war" against terrorism is "false" and a "dismal and disheartening situation." Critics say Soros is only trying to hurt Republicans' chances in the November elections and warn that he is undermining efforts to protect Americans from terrorists.
Soros told an audience at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, "We are working with a very false frame when we talk about a 'war on terror,' and yet it is universally accepted.
"Everybody now recognizes that invasion of Iraq was a real blunder, but the war on terror is still the frame that is accepted by Democrats and Republicans alike," Soros claimed. "It is a false, misleading, counterproductive, destructive frame."
By using the word "war," he argued, the Bush administration is invoking military terminology in response to a situation that, Soros believes, should be dealt with diplomatically. He also said the "war on terror" is "counterproductive," because there are "innocent victims," which "breeds rage and resentments and feeds into the terrorist case."
"It is a war that cannot be won without lots of adverse consequences," he added.
Soros also accused the president of using the war on terror for political gain and compared the Bush White House to the most murderous regimes in human history.
"President Bush is exploiting it even further ahead of these elections," Soros said. "I would voice my concerns about the similarities between this administration and the Nazis and communist regimes."
In 2004, Soros gave more than $23 million to political advocacy groups known as "527s" to defeat Bush, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Matthew Vadum, an analyst with Capital Research Center, said Soros has apparently decided to try a different strategy to influence the upcoming midterm elections.
"Instead of vigorously contesting the election this November," Vadum told Cybercast News Service, "George Soros has apparently opted to attack President Bush and the Republican Party by undermining America's war on terror."
Vadum urged Americans to examine the claims Soros is making from another perspective.
"Soros argues that it is a phony war, an empty advertising slogan that Bush is using to pull the wool over gullible Americans' eyes," Vadum said. "But U.S. soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan who put their lives on the line every day beg to differ."
WASHINGTON --In a published report, the Lovenstein Institute of Scranton, Pennsylvania has detailed findings of a four month study of the intelligence quotient of President George W. Bush. Since 1973, the Lovenstein Institute has published its research to the education community on each new president, which includes the famous "IQ" report among others.
According to statements in the report, there have been twelve presidents over the past 60 years, from F. D. Roosevelt to G. W. Bush who were all rated based on scholarly achievements, writings that they alone produced without aid of staff, their ability to speak with clarity, and several other psychological factors which were then scored in the Swanson/Crain system of intelligence ranking. The study determined the following IQs of each president as accurate to within five percentage points:
147 Franklin D. Roosevelt (D)
132 Harry Truman (D)
122 Dwight D. Eisenhower (R)
174 John F. Kennedy (D)
126 Lyndon B. Johnson (D)
155 Richard M. Nixon (R)
121 Gerald R. Ford (R)
176 James E. Carter (D)
105 Ronald W. Reagan (R)
98 George H. W. Bush (R)
182 William J. Clinton (D)
91 George W. Bush (R)
The six Republican presidents of the past 60 years had an average IQ of 115.5, with President Nixon having the highest IQ, at 155. President G. W. Bush was rated the lowest of all the Republicans with an IQ of 91.
The six Democrat presidents had IQs with an average of 156, with President Clinton having the highest IQ, at 182. President Lyndon B. Johnson was rated the lowest of all the Democrats with an IQ of 126.
No president other than Carter (D) has released his actual IQ, 176. Among comments made concerning the specific testing of President GW Bush, his low ratings were due to his apparent difficulty to command the English language in public statements, his limited use of vocabulary (6,500 words for Bush versus an average of 11,000 words for other presidents), his lack of scholarly achievements other than a basic MBA, and an absence of any body of work which could be studied on an intellectual basis.
The complete report documents the methods and procedures used to arrive at these ratings, including depth of sentence structure and voice stress confidence analysis. "All the Presidents prior to George W. Bush had a least one book under their belt, and most had written several white papers during their education or early careers.
Not so with President Bush," Dr. Lovenstein said. "He has no published works or writings, so in many ways that made it more difficult to arrive at an assessment. We had to rely more heavily on transcripts of his unscripted public speaking."
The Lovenstein Institute of Scranton Pennsylvania think tank includes high caliber historians, psychiatrists, sociologists, scientists in human behavior, and psychologists. Among their ranks are Dr. Werner R. Lovenstein, world-renowned sociologist, and Professor Patricia F. Dilliams, a world-respected psychiatrist. This study was commissioned on February 13, 2001, and released on July 9, 2001, to subscribing member universities and organizations within the education community.
Comment: Although this story is a hoax, and it has a bias towards one gang of thieves at the expense of another, we offer it because there once in ahwile you just need to laugh.
The US-led aggression in the Middle East and the three failed attempts to oust Venezuela's Hugo Chavez since 2002 (with a fourth now planned and likely to be implemented soon) are just the latest examples of this country's imperial agenda and the "new world order" it has in mind. The way this country now engages throughout the world isn't much different than what it's done close to home and worldwide since inception. Only the venues chosen, the scope of our aims, and the extent of our power have changed. This article in two parts gives some historical perspective and then concentrates on the imperial grand strategy of the Bush administration under which regime change is a central element.
In Part II, the focus is on the war in Iraq as a case study of imperial madness and its consequences. It also covers a possible little discussed economic motive behind what's now being called "the long war."
Maybe it's something in the air or water around the Capitol that makes it happen - causing the men and women elected or appointed to high office to do bad things. It may in part be going along to get along for some of them. But mostly it's the dangerous and deadly sickness or syndrome of power corrupting and absolute power doing it absolutely. That's bad enough, but when it happens to rulers of a superpower and those in league with them, it can inflict immeasurable harm and human suffering. In cost/benefit analysis terms: what serves the interests of a superstate comes at the expense of the public welfare.
The US Has Always Been A Warrior, Imperial Nation
There's no longer a dispute that the US pursues an imperial agenda. What once was hidden behind a politically correct facade and would never be admitted publicly is now seen as something respectable and even an obligation to advance "western civilization." How low we've sunk in coming so far. But how different is today from the past? Not much for those who know the country's true history that's quite different from the proper and polite version of it taught in school at all levels. Expansionism and militarism have always been in our DNA since the early settlers first confronted the nation's original inhabitants and then over the next few hundred years slaughtered about 18 million of them to seize their land and resources. We may even have put language in our sacred Declaration of Independence to give us a birthright to do it. In it we called our native people "merciless indian savages," and with that kind of framing gave ourselves a moral justification to remove them. It's a code based on the notion of might makes right and what we say goes.
It didn't matter that our original inhabitants lived mostly in peace for 20-30,000 years on the lands we took from them. There also was no concern that the native peoples treated the early settlers graciously, helping them survive through the early years of struggle and hard adjustment. We showed our gratitude with hostility, open warfare and genocidal extermination. It never ended and continues in less conspicuous ways today as the current unstated national policy is to eliminate native cultures through assimilation into our own. It's hardly a testimony to the benefits of "western civilization" Gandhi thought would be a good idea when asked what he thought of it.
Our belligerence wasn't just directed against the indian nations as we always were apparently willing to pick a fight. It's hard to believe that this country since inception has been at war with one or more adversaries every year without exception to this day. That's in addition to all other attempts to destabilize or overthrow governments of nations whenever their leaders weren't willing to sacrifice their national interest in service to ours. Imperialists don't ever tolerate that, especially one that happens to be an unchallengeable superpower.
But long before we gained that status, we pursued a land-grab policy throughout the 19th century to expand the new nation from "sea to shining sea" including taking the half of Mexico we wanted along the way. It's surprising we didn't take all or most of Canada as well and nearly did twice in the past: during the War of 1812 with the British when our interest was more on expansion than the British impressment of our seamen and again in 1920 when we eyed Canada for the same reason we're waging two wars today - O-I-L. Only fate may have prevented it from happening. A few cooler heads also likely prevailed, and our attention both times got diverted to other "adventures" and priorities.
But despite our tradition of imperial expansion, we stated our aims carefully and diplomatically and still do. The closest we came early on to an open admission of our true intent was in code language like "manifest destiny" or being willing to heed Rudyard Kipling's racist call to ally with Britain, take up the "White Man's Burden," and engage in "savage wars" to bring civilization to dark-skinned people in countries like The Philippines we decided didn't have any. So in our imperial wisdom, we came, stole, and conquered "for their own good" and in the process left lots of bodies around to prove our good intentions.
Theodore Roosevelt welcomed Kipling's call, publicly supported an expansionist foreign policy before he became president and during most of his time in office. He wanted colonies to make over in our own image and was willing to go to war for it if that's what it took to do it. He won a Nobel Peace prize for his efforts and was the only US president to get one until Jimmy Carter (another dubious man of peace) received the award in 2002. While president, TR's foreign policy was to solidify the country's world position it gained from the Spanish-American war during which and after he had a hand in extending the US empire to The Philippines, Cuba, Haiti, Guam, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and the Canal Zone area part of Colombia that broke away to become the new nation of Panama. Building the canal there across its isthmus fulfilled TR's dream to link the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans even though it took devious tactics to arrange the deal, manage to begin construction during his time in office, and finally see it completed about four and a half years before he died. TR also ironically allowed the number of US possessions to shrink during his second term in office - maybe out of guilt over what he did in his first four years and earlier.
Woodrow Wilson was another of the "noted" presidents we now revere as one of our greatest who came to office with noble promises of wanting to reform national politics and have an enlightened presidency only to fall far short. While proclaiming all nations had the right of self-determination, he believed that America had a duty to see they all had the kind we practiced even if we had to bring it to them at the point of a gun. The result during his tenure was the military occupation of Nicaragua, Haiti (beginning 20 oppressive years) and the Dominican Republic. He also had his problems with Mexico and did what any good US president would do. He sent in the Marines to invade the country, seize and occupy Veracruz, the country's main seaport, manage to resolve that dispute and then do it again with Army regulars under General John Pershing (the Dwight Eisenhower of WW I in charge of the American Expeditionary Force sent to Europe) to hunt down Pancho Villa as payback for Villa's cross-border incursion into the US killing 19 Americans. Pershing didn't find him but nearly began a full-scale war with Mexico trying before Wilson decided the whole adventure was a bad idea and called it off.
But all this was prologue to what Wilson wanted most while claiming otherwise - getting the US into WW I to further our undeclared imperial ambitions. In 1916 Wilson was reelected on a platform promise of: "He Kept Us Out of War" - referring to the one raging in Europe since 1914. Of course, he had to promise that as the US public overwhelmingly wanted nothing to do with it. But he no sooner was reelected than he began making plans to get into it. He established the Committee on Public Information under George Creel which was able to turn a pacifist nation into raging German haters resulting in the Congress overwhelmingly declaring war on Germany in April, 1917. Once in the war, he managed to control most public anti-war sentiment with the help of the outrageous Espionage and Sedition Acts that outlawed criticism of the government, the armed forces or the war effort, imprisoned or fined violators and censored or banned publications daring to publish what the Wilson administration wanted suppressed. It all has a familiar ring to it.
After the war, Wilson failed to create the new world order he had in mind. The vengeful Treaty of Versailles set the stage for the greater conflict to follow in 20 years, and Wilson left office a defeated, broken and very ill man. Despite it all, we hail him as one of our greatest presidents, even though with an honest assessment it's clear he fell far short. It's also clear there's a thin line between the ones we call our best and those we rate our worst. It hardly matters as the only qualification for the job is to faithfully pursue the interests of the power brokers who get to choose the ones they think will serve them best. It was true for Theodore Roosevelt, his younger cousin Franklin (who had a little Great Depression to deal with and had to give some to save capitalism), Woodrow Wilson and the current undistinguished incumbent in Washington.
At the heart of those interests is the pursuit of wealth and power and a system of governance beholden to capital, now more than ever dominated by giant predatory corporations that control and decide everything - who governs and how, who serves on our courts, what laws are enacted and even whether wars are fought, against whom and for what purpose. It's for the profit, of course, because wars are good for business, which is why we wage so many of them. Corporations have to keep growing. They're mandated by law to do it to maximize shareholder value for their owners, and the only way they can is by increasing profits. They do it by growing sales, keeping costs low, expanding their market share when possible and always seeking new opportunities globally for their products and services. It doesn't matter how they get them as long as they do, and the surest way when others fail is through strong-arm imperialism. The easy kinds through favorable (one-way) trade agreements or other market-opening arrangements are always preferred. But if those methods fall short, the alternative is direct confrontation or all out aggressive war. When it happens, corporations are the winners as long as the adventure doesn't harm the economy. It usually harms the public interest asked to sacrifice butter for guns and their civil liberties in the name of greater security (never gotten), and then having to pick up the tab.
It's part of the same dirty business Senator Henry Cabot Lodge noted in his 1885 unguarded moment comment that "commerce follows the flag." Today it's more true that the flag goes where commerce directs it to secure new markets and a corporate friendly environment once they've been opened for business. That's how imperialism works and why war is an effective geopolitical way to pursue it. War, of course, is just geopolitics by other means, and powerful capital-controlled countries like the US use it freely because it works so well most often. The great political economist Harry Magdoff wrote of it this way in his Age of Imperialism in 1969: "Imperialism is not a matter of choice for a capitalist society; it is a way of life of such a society." He also knew the only way our system can work is through repression, institutionalized inequality and militarism all camouflaged in the deceit of serving the public interest. Magdoff knew those elements are in the DNA of our capital-controlled society that thrives and prospers best by pursuing a global predatory policy that assures continued economic growth at the macro level, geopolitical control, and greater wealth for the rich and powerful at the expense of all others.
Our tradition of imperialism began at the republic's birth, but until the end of the "cold war" wasn't discussed in polite society or acknowledged publicly. But that changed in the 1990s, and now it's seen as something respectable, a matter of national pride and contributing to the advance of civilization. It shows in our new language that portrays us as agents of a humanitarian mission (a benign Pax Americana or modern "white man's burden") still hiding the cold reality that what we're really up to is keeping the world safe and profitable for corporate America. Those on its receiving end need no explanation, but the public at home does as it harms them too. They must be convinced that what's good for business also serves them, but it's never stated in those terms. It's always sold at home as an effort to achieve national security, make the world safe for democracy, or bring our form of rule to other parts of the world we decided need our version of it. It doesn't matter if it's true or not, just that we say it is and can convince people to believe it. Based on our track record, that's not a problem as time and again the public is willing to swallow most any reasons government officials tell them (reinforced, of course, by the corporate media trumpeting them like gospel) to get them to go along with the schemes they have in mind, no matter how outrageous they are. They're never told the truth because it's so unpalatable it's has to be suppressed, especially in time of war when it's the first casualty.
The Second Great War to End All Wars Changed Everything
The US emerged from WW II as the only dominant nation "left standing." We became the world's leading and unchallengeable economic, political and military superpower almost like we planned it that way, which we did. We decided while the war was still ongoing to take full advantage of our new post-war status once it was clear what the outcome would be - to dominate all other nations, have them serve our interests, and do it either through cooperation or by force of one kind or other. With our allied global North partners we've done it through political and military alliances as well as trade and other economic agreements and incentives where we have to give enough to developed nations to get more back in return if we do it right. With the developing world though it's another story, especially those nations with vital strategic resources like large hydrocarbon reserves. Our dealings with them are crafted one-way on the basis of all take and little give in return. For us, it's a sweet deal to serve our dominant capital interests, but for them it's a pact with the devil - one always made at the expense of the public welfare everywhere.
The Beginnings Of Our Current Imperial Grand Strategy
One way or another, the US is moving ahead with its plan to rule the world with little regard for how likely it is to succeed. The Bush administration makes no pretense about this and has put its plans in writing for anyone to read and know what it has in mind. Current era thinking goes back at least to 1992 and a Pentagon document written by Paul Wolfowitz, former Bush administration Deputy Defense Secretary and current World Bank president, and the now-indicted Richard Cheney aide Lewis Libby. It was an outline of a plan for US world dominance with no allowable challenge from other nations. At the time, the George H. W. Bush administration dismissed it as off-the-wall and over-the-top after it was leaked to the public, but in September, 2000 the neo-conservative think tank Project for a New American Century (PNAC - established in 1997) revived the plan and put meat on its bones in a document they called - Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century. Leading PNAC members are well known and include Vice President Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and a rogues gallery of many other high ranking Bush administration neocon officials.
This document was and still is a grand imperial plan for US global dominance to extend well into the future to be enforced with unchallengeable military power. The PNAC plan was a blueprint for the current "war on terror" (now being rebranded as a war against "Islamic fascism") and "preventive wars" now raging in Iraq, becoming that in Afghanistan, and planned and "signed off" for against Iran, likely Syria, and possibly Venezuela and other targeted states not submissive to US authority. This plan was also a 21st century update of the Truman Doctrine, conceived by State Department advisor and analyst George Kennan who was the ideological godfather of "containment" and the "cold war." Kennan's plan became the first post WW II formulated strategy for US global military and economic dominance. He did it by creating the myth that the Soviet Union was a serious threat to our security, and we had to take preventive action.
The truth was the "Russians were never coming." In fact, they had their hands full until around 1960 just rebuilding their war-torn nation to its former state after being devastated by the Nazi Wehrmacht. The public, of course, never knew the truth, and the leadership was able to convince it to go along with the big lie through scare tactics. As already explained, it's an age-old tactic that always seems to work. This time it was to justify a planned military buildup in peacetime. The myth of a Soviet threat and world communist conspiracy was used to sell it, and it remained the method of choice until that nation came apart in 1991 to what are now 15 separate and independent republics.
We then had a brief respite while the first Bush administration desperately tried to find a new enemy to keep the public off guard and hypotized by the fear of a "new Hitler" threatening us. Saddam, of course, took the bait and obliged, and the Gulf war and its aftermath ensued, followed by a dozen years of brutal and crippling economic sanctions and continued bombing up to the second Iraq war. Now after nearly 16 years, the US-led reign of terror against a defenseless nation and its people continues unabated with no end in sight or plan for it except the apparent intent to foment a full-scale civil war hoping to divide the country to make it easier to rule. The combination of endless war, harsh economic sanctions and no serious effort to rebuild or aid the people has effectively destroyed the most advanced and prosperous nation in the Middle East. It's also caused extreme suffering, hardship and mass disease, death, and destruction to millions of Iraqi victims whose only mistake was having been born in the wrong country at the wrong time. It's a country with the terrible misfortune of having immense and easily accessible oil reserves that are coveted by the most powerful nation on earth wanting to control them.
Post 9/11, The Gloves Came Off As Well As Any Pretense of What Our Present Aims Are
The second war against Iraq became possible after 9/11 and was spelled out in what may be called the Bush Doctrine. It refers to this administration's aggressive foreign policies which were framed by George Bush in an address to the Congress shortly before the attack against and invasion of Afghanistan in which he stated the US would "make no distinction between 'the terrorists' who committed these (9/11) acts and those who harbor them." Bush arrogantly went on to say "Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." It didn't matter that Osama bin Laden was our invention and a former CIA asset against the Soviets in Afghanistan and again in Bosnia in the 1990s against Slobadan Milosevic and Serbia in the Balkan wars. The public didn't know it or once did and forgot so it was easy using him and an ill-defined al-Quaida to scare it to go along with the schemes we had in mind but needed the power of fear to do it. The ploy worked as it always does, and now the nation is embroiled in two endless wars and others in the queue to begin by whatever means the plans are to pursue them and whenever they're intended to be rolled out.
It's all part of the Bush Doctrine and Messianic mission which also include the notion of a permanent state of preventive war (now called "the long war") against those nations and "Islamic fascists" we claim threaten our national security, whether or not it's so. That notion became the pretext for the Iraq war, others we have in mind, and our claiming the right to ignore the inviolable rules and established codes of warfare in the Hague Regulations and Geneva Conventions going back to the 1850s. This recognized and accepted body of international law covers what weapons are banned, the treatment of prisoners including prohibiting torture and mistreatment, and the care of the sick and wounded. But, by Bush Doctrine standards, those laws are now judged "quaint" and "obsolete" and no longer apply. From now on, the law is only what we say it is or make up as we go along despite the fact that all treaties and conventions we're signatories to are the supreme law of the land. That's a level of arrogance only an imperial superpower without challengers can get away with, but it's much easier when a complicit corporate media goes along as cheerleaders "fixing the facts around the policy." The Bush administration pursues this policy wantonly and recklessly regardless of who approves or doesn't. It even writes it down so others can read it and know what we have in mind. It makes for frightening reading for those who do it.
It's there in the National Security Strategy (NSS) of September, 2002 that was just updated earlier this year. This plan lays out an "imperial grand strategy" with more belligerent language than the original version which was intended to be a declaration of "preventive war" against any nation or force this administration claims is a threat to our national security. It doesn't mean it is, just that we say it is. That threat includes any nation we label "unstable" or a "failed state," a term we use for nations seen as potential threats to our security which may require our intervention in self-defense. However, the very notion of what a "failed state" may be is imprecise at best. It may be its inability to protect its citizens from violence or destruction. But it may also be a nation that believes it's beyond the reach of international law and free to act as an aggressor. Under any of those conditions, the US now claims the right to wage preventive war in self-defense although in so doing that makes us the kind of "failed state" we claim the right to protect ourselves from.
Before the NSS was updated in 2006, we had four other important imperial documents. First was the May, 2000 Department of Defense (DOD) Joint Vision 2020 that outlined a plan for "full spectrum (or world) dominance." This was code language or "Militaryspeak" meaning total control over all land, sea, air, outer space and information with enough overwhelming power to defeat any potential challenger or adversary even by use of nuclear or any other new weapons we might develop. Second was the Nuclear Policy Review of December, 2001 that claims a unilateral right to declare and wage future wars using first strike nuclear weapons that have the potential to destroy all human life on the planet if enough of them are used. Third was the FY 2004 Air Force Space Command Strategic Master Plan. This was a plan to "own outer space", weaponize it with the most advanced, destructive and planet threatening weapons and technology we have or hope to develop including nuclear ones. It also called for developing and placing out there unmanned space vehicles to surveille the entire planet and be able to launch an overwhelming attack against a target country or enemy force that can't retaliate against us from that vantage point.
The fourth document is the Pentagon's 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review issued in February. As congressionally mandated, this report is a "comprehensive examination of the national defense strategy, force structure, force modernization plans, infrastructure, budget plan, and other elements of the defense program and policies....for the next 20 years." The review covers the military's main missions of homeland defense - which, if implemented, even by federally mandating National Guard troops to patrol our southern border as has been done, will violate the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 that prohibits the military from acting in a domestic law enforcement capacity unless expressly authorized by the Constitution or Congress and only in an extreme situation like putting down an insurrection. Other missions are the so-called "war on terrorism" which famed author Gore Vidal says is "idiotic...slogans...lies (and as nonsensical as) a war against dandruff," irregular or asymmetric warfare (against non-state enemies), and what Pentagonspeak calls "shaping the choices of countries at a crossroad" which translated means the potential threat of China as an emerging global power able to challenge our dominance.
The document also unveiled the notion of "the long war" Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signaled in his February National Press Club appearance when he said "The United States is a nation engaged in what will be a long war." George Bush then announced it in his September 5 speech to an association of US military officers in which he declared war against "Islamic fascists." The Pentagon report used the phrase "long war, long global war (or) long irregular war" 34 times in its Quadrennial Review including as the title for the first chapter called "Fighting the Long War." The clear message is that all resisting Muslims and their sympathizers are Islamo-fascists and must be defeated in a "long war" struggle to preserve and spread "western civilization." The much clearer message is that post-9/11 the Bush administration embarked on a messianic bankrupt global racist colonial "war OF terror" against all nations and peoples everywhere opposing its quest for world dominance.
The bottom line for the Pentagon, backed by administration rhetoric, is to assure the Congress will go along with the near half-trillion dollar defense budget for adventurism in the next fiscal year with steady increases in subsequent years plus the off-budget add-ons for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, others to come, and any other special funding DOD may ask for. So far, since 9/11, the Pentagon got a blank check for anything it wants called "national security" - meaning grand theft from the public to enhance profits for defense-related industries and the well-connected corporations chosen to rebuild and police the countries we first destroy so they can then get large, no-bid war-profiteering contracts. It also means the erosion and eventual loss of our civil liberties now fast disappearing, as a nation dedicated to perpetual unjustifiable war can only do it at the expense of a free society at home. It's what James Madison meant when he wrote: "Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it compromises and develops the germ of every other. In war, too, the discretionary power of the executive is extended...and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force of the people."
Imperialism Often Includes Regime Change
A previous article called War Making 101 - A User's Manual prompted the writing of this one as a follow-up. The earlier article about war making laid out the steps or rules this country follows in preparing to take the nation to war. The same idea is used here to explain how we pursue our imperial aims. For them to work, it's essential to have foreign leaders in place who know "who's boss" and will cooperatively go along and serve our interests ahead of those of their own people. When they don't, the plan calls for regime change to replace them with someone who will. Below are listed and explained the different ways we go about it in order of preference. Here they're called plans instead of rules.
Plan One: Always try the easy way first. It works most often.
No imperial state, now or in the past, prefers the messiness and bother of hot conflict. Even the tyrannical ones need to convince their people of a plausible reason to get their young men motivated enough to go to war and fight hard enough to win it. The US is no different, and ideally prefers "convincing" foreign leaders to do it our way through diplomacy with enough of a sweetener to their key political and business elites to gain their acquiescence. That way works best in states headed by "strongmen" who gained power politically, militarily or from their royal predecessor or family. It's a lot easier having relations with one person in power who can decide everything rather than having to deal with messy democrats chosen by elections who must answer to voters and may have to consider their needs along with or ahead of ours. It still works with them if they're subservient enough to our wishes. It's only when they aren't that we try another method.
Plan Two: If Plan One fails, up the ante to harsher tactics. This second choice also works most often.
If at first you don't succeed the easy way, try again more forcefully. So the second choice is always: remove the "uncooperative leader" and install a more dependable new one we can rely on - to do things our way but nearly always at the expense of the great majority of the people. We've also had lots of experience with Plan Two, and most often it works.
There are two ways to do it. Method A is the easy and preferred way. It involves co-opting and bribing officials to do the dirty work. There are usually ready-takers willing to go along and share in the spoils. We then train and fund them, choose the time, opportunity and place to implement the scheme, then stand back and hope all goes as planned. However it turns out, we can claim plausible deniability they did it, not us. This was the method used in Venezuela in three unsuccessful attempts from 2002 - 2004 to oust Hugo Chavez, put the country's oligarchs back in power, and destroy the Bolivarian Revolution that created a model system of participatory democracy based on the principles of political, economic and social justice. Method A failed in Venezuela because Hugo Chavez gave his people what they never had before and despite the coup plotters' best efforts they weren't able to defeat the will and spirit of the people who showed through their determined efforts they wouldn't tolerate returning to the ugly past they'll never again accept.
So when things don't work out, as happened in Venezuela, Method B is tried. It involves eliminating an uncooperative leader by assassination as discretely as possible. It may be by a "rogue element's" bullet, some well-placed and hard to detect poison, or an unfortunate plane crash the CIA conveniently arranges. We've used this one enough times too, so we're usually able to pull it off with the public none the wiser in the target country or at home.
The CIA used this method to murder Panamian president Omar Torrijos in a 1981 plane crash and Equadorian president Jaimi Roldos in a helicopter crash the same year. Perhaps the most infamous CIA arranged coup and presidential assassination happened on another September 11 in 1973 when General Augusto Pinochet with strong US backing overthrew and had murdered democratically elected President Salvador Allende. It ended the strongest and most vibrant democracy in the Americas and ushered in a brutal right wing military dictatorship for the next 16.5 years. Hugo Chavez now fears this is the fate the US has in mind for him and has said so publicly. What happened in Chile can happen anywhere, and it shows the fragility of a free and democratic society that can easily be toppled by forces determined and strong enough to do it. It's not that hard when the public is unprepared or unwilling to resist to save the liberties it takes for granted until it's too late. But it also shows how successful people-power can be when mobilized in force to resist a looming tyranny it refuses to accept. That's the lesson of Venezuela under Hugo Chavez, and it's visible on the streets of Mexico in the wake of (another) stolen election and a system of authoritarian rule the people have begun to resist.
Plan Three: This choice of last resort is only used when the two preferred methods fail - open conflict or war involving an invasion and possible occupation.
If the top two choices fail, as was the case in Iraq after years of trying Plans One and Two, and the target is too important to pass up (again like Iraq), the only choice left is open conflict or war. It can be simple, quick and easy like Ronald Reagan's walkover against Grenada in October, 1983 that was mostly over after several days or G.H.W. Bush's Operation Just Cause invasion of Panama in December, 1989 that was almost as easy. It might also be like the Gulf war which was not simple because of the long buildup and expense but was still quick and involved no occupation.
However it's done, this least preferred option is messy, costly and usually takes much more time from planning to completion. It's also only undertaken against targeted foes too weak to put up a good fight and have no weapons that will cause us heavy damage or loss of life. Guessing wrong on either count will make it hard to maintain public support for long, as it's never easy explaining the body bags when they arrive home in large numbers. It's even harder when the pretext for going to war in the first place was based on lies (as they always are), and they're beginning to unravel.
Once the war option is chosen though, the administration needs to prep the public to go along with the "big lie" they concocted. It takes time and effort but involves what so far is the proved the time-tested method of choice guaranteed to work as explained above - scaring the public to death by convincing it the targeted country threatens our national security and welfare. The message repeated ad nauseam is that we patiently tried reason, but all diplomatic efforts failed and we're only left with one viable option - force. We've done this so often we're expert at it, so it's likely the public will be traumatized enough to go along with even the most implausible, extreme or outrageous plan we have in mind like using nuclear weapons against a targeted enemy that likely can't even put up a decent fight against conventional ones.
Sometimes though we outsmart ourselves or refuse to listen to cooler heads and end up in a hopeless quagmire. It happened in Vietnam, and it's being repeated again in Iraq and heading toward more of the same in Afghanistan. But despite a bad situation that's getting worse, it's usually not good strategy for an imperial power to admit making a mistake, decide to cut its losses and leave. It's generally not popular with voters (except when most of them are fed up and want a quick exit) and doing it also emboldens others targeted to see us as willing to back down when things go sour. They'll likely get the idea they can make us quit if they make it tough enough long enough, and they're likely to be right. It's no different than a schoolyard bully able to get away with it as long as the ones picked on allow him to do it. Once one retaliates and strikes a telling blow, it shows the bully isn't as tough as he wants others to believe.
So to avoid that fate, as well as saving face, we can never admit a mistake or decide to give up a bad fight, even ones we can't win - just like we're now doing in Iraq and beginning to face in Afghanistan. Instead we foolishly have to keep up the charade with the public, say we're making good progress, and claim there's light at the end of the tunnel. At most we'll admit it's taking longer than expected, but we're still on plan and with some patience we'll succeed. But that strategy only works for so long, because if winning isn't likely or can't happen before patience runs out, the only light the public will see in the tunnel is a train wreck in the making. If it comes to that, the game is over, the administration suffers, and the opposition party (if that's a proper term any more) will likely be the beneficiary. The public never is. It's always the patsy during a conflict and when it ends. It must sacrifice butter for guns and then pay the tab when the bill comes due.
Will the Public Ever Realize It's Been Had
The scaremongering scam has been used so often before with the same or similar language that later proved false, you'd think the public by now would have caught on. But you'd be wrong. Up to now, it's worked like a charm every time proving again you can fool most people all the time so why not keep doing it - as long as it keeps working. The only differences from one conflict to the next are the names, dates and places. The playbook is always about the same. All that's needed is an old one, and then fill in the blanks.
But imagine a "what if" using the well-known Aesop fable about The Boy Who Cried Wolf but with a different moral. We remember the tale about the bored shepard boy who broke his monotony by falsely crying "wolf" and getting the nearby villagers to come to his rescue. When the villagers tired of his false alarms they stopped coming. That's where our analogy ends. In the fable the wolf finally came, the villagers ignored the boy's cry for help and the flock perished. Aesop's fables always had a moral so we'd learn from them. His was that even when liars tell the truth, they're never believed. Today, however, when liars keep lying, the public never catches on and they keep getting away with it - to our detriment. Hopefully, one day the lesson learned will be that liars can only get away with so many lies until finally no one believes anything they say. Maybe some day if the public knew about famed journalist IF Stone and what he once said - that "all governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed."
Watch for Part II of this article to follow soon on this site. It will include a case study of imperial madness.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
"Why do you hate America?" This is a remarkably easy question to provoke. One might, for instance, expose elements of this nation's brutal foreign policy. Ask a single probing question about, say, U.S. complicity in the overthrow of governments in Guatemala, Iran, or Chile and thin-skinned patriots (sic) will come out of the woodwork to defend their country's honor by accusing you of being "anti-American." Of course, this allegation might lead me to ponder how totalitarian a culture this must be to even entertain such a concept, but I'd rather employ the vaunted Arundhati defense. The incomparable Ms. Roy says: "What does the term 'anti-American' mean? Does it mean you are anti-jazz or that you're opposed to freedom of speech? That you don't delight in Toni Morrison or John Updike? That you have a quarrel with giant sequoias?" (I'm a tree hugger remember? I don't argue with sequoias.)
When pressed, I sometimes reply: "I don't hate America. In fact, think it's one of the best countries anyone ever stole." But, after the laughter dies down, I have a confession to make: If by "America" they mean the elected/appointed officials and the corporations that own them, well, I guess I do hate that America-with justification.
Among many reasons, I hate America for the near-extermination and subsequent oppression of its indigenous population. I hate it for its role in the African slave trade and for dropping atomic bombs of civilians. I hate its control of institutions like the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization. I hate it for propping up brutal dictators like Suharto, Pinochet, Duvalier, Hussein, Marcos, and the Shah of Iran. I hate America for its unconditional support for Israel. I hate its bogus two-party system, its one-size-fits-all culture, and its income gap. I could go on for pages but I'll sum up with this: I hate America for being a hypocritical white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
After a paragraph like that, you know what comes next: If you hate America so much, why don't you leave? Leave America? That would potentially put me on the other end of U.S. foreign policy. No thanks.
I like how Paul Robeson answered that question before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956: "My father was a slave and my people died to build this country, and I'm going to stay right here and have a part of it, just like you. And no fascist-minded people like you will drive me from it. Is that clear?"
Since none of my people died to build anything, I rely instead on William Blum, who declares, "I'm committed to fighting U.S. foreign policy, the greatest threat to peace and happiness in the world, and being in the United States I the best place for carrying out the battle. This is the belly of the beast, and I try to be an ulcer inside of it."
Needless to say, none of the above does a damn thing to placate the yellow ribbon crowd. It seems what offends flag-wavers most is when someone like me makes use of the freedom they claim to adore. According to their twisted logic, I am ungrateful for my liberty if I have the audacity to exercise it. If I make the choice to not salute the flag during the seventh inning stretch at Yankee Stadium, somehow I'm not worthy of having the freedom to make the choice to not salute the flag during the seventh inning stretch at Yankee Stadium. These so-called patriots not only claim to celebrate freedom while refusing my right to exploit it, they also ignore the social movements that fought for and won such freedoms.
There's plenty of tolerated public outcry against the Bush administration and the occupation of Iraq, but it's neither fashionable nor acceptable to go as far as saying, no, I do not support the troops and yes, I hate what America does. Fear of recrimination allows the status quo to control the terms of debate. Until we voice what is in our hearts and have the nerve to admit what we hate...we will never create something that can be loved.
Shades of Herman Wouk! George Bush strolled into the Rose Garden today and channeled the behavior of Captain Philip Francis Queeg as described in the Caine Mutiny. He avoided grasping for small steel balls in his coat pocket and rolling them menacingly in his hand (no clack, clack to compliment the clicks of cameras) but he did have the shrill, hysterical tirade down pat. For those not familiar with the Queeg character, consider the following traits described courtesy of Wikipedia:
Queeg is assigned as captain of the U.S.S. Caine
Sort of like being named President by the Supreme Court--a command decision.
He is initially welcomed by the crew as a tough, no-nonsense veteran, who will shape up the ship after his slovenly predecessor's departure.
Oval Office oral sex does not qualify as "slovenly", but it certainly was tawdry. Despite the uproar surrounding his appointment, most of the country welcomed Governor Bush--the tough minded, compassionate conservative--as a tonic to restore honor to the Presidency.
After a honeymoon period, it becomes apparent that Queeg is prone to eccentric behavior. Queeg displays a micro-managing command style and (sometimes unprovoked) angry outbursts.
How about eccentric behavior? Does sitting immobile for several minutes in a Florida classroom on 9-11 after being told the United States was bombed count? Chopping wood on ones ranch while the city of New Orleans drowns in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina seems queer. The New York Times editorial from 19 July 2006 noted that, "the really weird thing is his (Bush's) sense of victimization. He's strangely resentful about the actual core of his job. Even after the debacles of Iraq and Katrina, he continues to treat the presidency as a colossal interference with his desire to mountain bike and clear brush."
Micro-manager? Okay, not so much. Manager? Not so much. The most vacationed President in the history, spends little time managing anything. But "anger"? That's another story. The jutting jaw tirade unleashed during today's press conference was occasionally interrupted by the Bush smirk. Doubt Bush was angry? Give NBC's David Gregory a shout.
As time passes, he begins to make mistakes that endanger his crew. He neglects to order the ship to stop turning while reprimanding a crew member for having his shirttail out, and so the ship steams over its own towline, parting it.
If you are going to invade a country, history demonstrates the invader should be prepared for the aftermath. George Bush ordered U.S. troops into Iraq but took a nap when it came to post-war planning. George Bush ordered U.S. troops out of Afghanistan before the Taliban were fully destroyed and Bin Laden in hand. Today, Iraq is embroiled in an escalating civil ware and the Taliban are back with a vengeance in Afghanistan. Bush actions and inactions are endangering America and, as noted just yesterday by former Secretary of State Colin Powell, undermining our nation's moral authority.
When called on the carpet by a superior after this incident, he refuses to acknowledge it happened, or to admit blame in any way.
Senate Intelligence Committee reports anyone? Last week's bipartisan report documents multiple examples of Bush ignoring and misrepresenting intelligence on Iraq to the American people. For example, Bush consistently portrayed Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein as partners in the crime of terrorism. The intelligence community, however, said no--there was no operational relationship. This was the consensus of the analysts. Yet Bush continued to insist the opposite.
. . .the Caine is ordered into combat. Queeg is observed to always frequent the sheltered side of the ship's bridge from the beach. When he orders the ship to withdraw before reaching the line of departure while escorting a Marine landing craft under hostile fire, his subordinates consider him either crazy or a coward.
George Bush, who hid out in the Alabama National Guard rather than serve in Vietnam, was crazy like a fox. Bush is Commander-in-Chief but accepts no responsibility for insufficient troop strength in Iraq. Bush claims the security of the United States depends on success in Iraq, but takes no action to boost the manpower and materiel of the U.S. military. No member of the Bush family has served in Iraq or Afghanistan during this war.
Another episode which highlights Queeg's behaviors occurs when a quart of strawberries go missing from the wardroom icebox. Remembering how he helped solve a mystery involving a similar theft when he was an ensign earlier in his career, Queeg attempts to recreate his former accomplishment by insisting the strawberries were pilfered by a crewmember with a duplicate key. Queeg orders every key on the ship collected, and a thorough search made. During the search, the captain is confronted with evidence that the messboys ate the strawberries. Queeg loses all enthusiasm for the search, though he orders it to continue, and it is continued in a desultory way amid public mocking of the captain.
Two words--Valerie Plame. Bush flim flams the American people with a false story that Iraq is buying uranium in West Africa. The husband of secret CIA operative Valerie Plame--Ambassador Joseph Wilson--alerts the press that the claim is bogus. Eager to discredit Wilson, Administration officials--including Richard Armitage, Karl Rove, and Scooter Libby--fan out thru the Washington press corps with the story that Wilson's wife sent him on a boondoggle. Following the public disclosure that Valerie Plame was an undercover CIA operations officer, George Bush vowed to punish the leakers. When he "learns" that Karl Rove and Scooter Libby are culprits, his enthusiasm for justice peters out.
George Bush is the Captain Queeg of the U.S.S. America. The ship and her crew--the American people--are endangered by his sins of omission and commission. When warned in August of 2001 by the CIA that Al Qaeda was ready to strike inside the United States, he did nothing to confront the threat. Then came 9-11. Since unleashing the dogs of war in Iraq, terrorist attacks in which people are killed and wounded have quadrupled. Surrendering the high ground earned during the Cold War against the Soviet Union, George Bush approves secret prisons, torture, and trials with secret evidence. Actions once considered unique to Soviet tyrants are now staining the garments of the cloak of American justice.
Instead of mature, measured leadership, America is saddled with a man that would probably frighten the fictional Captain Queeg. Like the character portrayed by Humphrey Bogart, George Bush compensates for his insecurity and inadequacy with shows of bravado and choleric indignation. But this ain't the movies folks. This is real. Like the crew of the U.S.S. Caine, there is a growing realization that the Captain is a little crazy. Mutiny anyone?
George Bush is the worst President the United States has ever had. Notice that I did not use the word "arguably." He simply is. For one reason. He is the first President ever to have as his primary goal the destruction of the Constitutional, Democratic, system under which he took power (notice that I did not say "elected"). This is for him the absolutely primary goal. For the nation as a whole it would obviously be an unmitigated disaster. It stands above even those of: further entrenching the power of the extractive industries and further securing their dominance over U.S. economic and environmental policy; reducing the functions of the government other than those of repression at home and military expansion abroad, to the barest minimums; and filling the pockets of his rich supporters at the expense of the public treasury.
There have been, to be sure, other bad Presidents. Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan essentially stood by as the nation slid towards civil war. Andrew Johnson established the basis for what became the South's long-term victory in that Civil War in every element other than preserving the legal institution of slavery (see my column, "How the South Won the (1st US) Civil War," Sunday, November 06, 2005, at http://www.planetarymovement.org/ [archive] ).
Some of those bad Presidencies shared major characteristics with that of the Second Bush. Ulysses S. Grant (a predecessor who was drunk in office), Warren G. Harding, and Ronald Reagan presided over Administrations rife with corruption. James Polk and Lyndon Johnson essentially lied our country into foreign wars aimed at, in the first case, gaining large swatches of the territory of another county, and in the second preventing the establishment, through the Democratic process, of a system of government in another country that ours did not approve of. Herbert Hoover was incompetent when it came to dealing with major economic and natural disasters, and had a strong predilection for favoring the rich. Nixon was paranoid; Clinton was personally irresponsible, and so on and so forth. But none of them set out to destroy US Constitutional Democracy and replace it with a Dictatorship (otherwise known as the "Unitary Executive").
Let me make it clear that we are not talking about substantive, individual governmental policies here. Bush's differ in no essential ways from those of most of his Republican predecessors since Lincoln except in matters of degree. He is the first Republican President in modern times to have a Republican Congress, and a very pliable as well as unified one at that, at his disposal. Thus he has been able to implement polices that his two immediate Republican predecessors, Reagan and his father, could only dream of doing.
In terms of Bush's Republican predecessors since the New Deal, one should note that Eisenhower might have trouble getting DLC support for the Democratic Presidential nomination because he was a firm believer in the New Deal, with certain modifications, and Nixon was a bundle of contradictions. Yes, the old McCarthyite liked using government agencies to spy on his political enemies, kept the war on Vietnam going for a totally unnecessary additional four years, and introduced racism to the Republican Party. But he also fully supported the development of our modern system of environmental regulation and protection that the Georgites are determined to dismantle, in the Spring of 1973 introduced a national health plan to the Congress that had much in common with the Clinton Health Plan of 1993, created the "opening to China," and led the "Second Détente" with the Soviet Union.
In terms of particular foreign and domestic policies, Bush has simply been following the line laid down by Goldwater, Reagan and his father, as noted above. Except for one significant element, those policies are really nothing new in the Republican playbook. That one element is, of course, the prominence given by this Administration to the Christian Right and their policies in the social realm that it would like to implement. For the top Republican policy-makers, in the current era led by Cheney and Rove, as is well known it is not that they like the Christian Fundamentalist content so much, but that their rock-solid voting base of support for the ultra-corporatist Republican line is to be found in the Christian Right. Otherwise on policy and the differences now versus what Goldwater would have done if he had become President and what Reagan and Bush I did do to some extent, and would have done to a much greater extent except for the Congress, it is just that Bush is getting to implement them.
What is totally different, totally new, is the assault on Constitutional Democracy. I have illustrated this assault, I have been writing about it in this space, from the last three columns on "Let's Hear it For Strict Constructionism" all the way back to my second TPJ column ever, that appeared on March 4, 2004. That one was "A Firebell in the Night," my first effort in the discussion of the so-called "Gay Marriage Amendment" (a subject that I revisited this year on April 2 and 9, that is more accurately termed "The Homosexual Discrimination Amendment").
And so under Bush we have, in brief, his declaration that we "at war" when under the Constitution only the Congress can declare war; the so-called "Signing Statements" under which Bush arrogates to himself the supposed authority to ignore Congressional legislation at will; the claim that he can ignore international law to which the US has ascribed by treaty, when ratified treaties are, under the Constitution, part of it; that he can ignore provisions of the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and 14th amendments at his pleasure. And so on and so forth.
In understanding what is going on here, what I have termed a "coup d'etat in slow motion," it is vital to note that so many major Georgite policy moves are taken not so much on the substance but in an attempt to establish a precedent unchallenged for establishing a dictatorship. Do you think that Bush (well, maybe not Bush, even when he is sober which seems to be less and less frequently these days) and his policy-makers don't know that the FISA requires warrants, that under it warrants were virtually never denied, and that the national security apparatus would function just fine, thank you very much, should they be complying with the law on wiretapping? Of course they do. It ain't about warrantless wiretapping, folks. It is about unfettered Presidential power to do what he wants to do when he wants to do it, without any interference or even comment from either of the other two branches of the government. The "I will ignore the Fourth Amendment in relation to Guantanamo," "I will ignore the anti-torture law," the obvious policy of "if I decide [and after all, I am the Decider] to launch a war on Iran I will just go ahead and do it," are all first and foremost about establishing the Georgite Dictatorship (oh sorry, "Unitary Executive"), than about the specific policy.
The lessons for the Democrats here? First, to now focus on Constitutional Democracy, its preservation and promotion could very well be the "Big Idea" that they supposedly have been looking for, for the last thirty years. (In fairness, the DLC isn't looking for this one or any other Big Idea. Their latest tack is to run against Wal-Mart rather than against Bush and the Republicans even though there is nothing the Constitution that says that a corporation, no matter how big it is, can run either for Congress or the Presidency. But I am talking about and to Real Democrats, not Georgite Collaborationists.) Properly formulated ("framed" is the current jargon), a fairly easy job to do beginning with slogans like "The New Patriotism," organizing around the preservation of Constitutional Democracy as the primary political objective could quickly become a very powerful political weapon. But even more important than that: if we don't do it and don't do it soon, we will not see another chance to do it until the task becomes, somewhere way down the Road of History, the Restoration rather than the Preservation, of Constitutional Democracy. And so, the primary reason to take this up as the rallying cry and the battle of the Democratic Party is the salvation of the nation.
Are there other major issues? Of course there are, the War on Iraq being the prime one. Then there are the monstrous tax-giveaways in the form of the rapidly and monstrously increasing national debt, the foreign debt, the criminal energy policy, the unprecedented (and in the light of Grant, Harding, Reagan, et al that's a pretty strong word) corruption, the evermore sophisticated tools, plans, and campaigns for stealing elections, and so on and so forth. But they all have to be seen and presented, should be seen and presented, can easily be seen and presented in the context of the counter-assault that absolutely must be launched and launched soon against the Georgite assault on US Constitutional Democracy that has been underway since they took office on January 20, 2001. Mark my words, folks. There is not too much time left. The Democratic Party simply must get moving, before it is too late.
As I noted at the end of my last column in this space: "As my good friend Jack Dalton said some time back: ' Was it not George W. Bush who stated 5 years ago, "...this would be much easier if this were a dictatorship, as long as I was the dictator?" Was it not George W. Bush who was quoted recently [as] stating, "The Constitution is just a goddamn piece of paper?" ' (Jack's Straight-Speak 1-2-06, http://jack-dalton.blogspot.com/)."
Dr. Steven Jonas is a contributing author for The Political Junkies (www.thepoliticaljunkies.net). He is a Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY) and author/co-author of over twenty books. Dr. Jonas is one of America's most perceptive Democratic political analysts. In his book The New Americanism, Dr. Jonas presents his proposal for that "new vision and mission" for the Democratic Party that so many, for so many years, have been urging it to find. A new vision and mission are obviously needed with increasing urgency as with increasing speed and determination the Georgites drive our nation towards frank theocratic fascism. Dr. Jonas finds the needed vision and mission in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. "The New Americanism: How the Democratic Party Can Win the Presidency is available from Amazon.com (go to "Books;" enter the title) and BarnesandNoble.com (same).
He is also the author of The 15% Solution: A Political History of American Fascism, 2001-2022. Under the pseudonym "Jonathan Westminster" this book was originally published in 1996. It was republished with a New Introduction in 2004. Under Georgite rule, the "fictional non-fiction" scenario of this work of "future history" is, most unfortunately, becoming all too real, now almost day-by-day. The 2004 edition is available at www.barnesandnoble.com (search with the book title) and www.xlibris.com (click on "Bookstore," then "Search" with the title). Both versions are available at www.amazon.com (go to "Books;" search with the title).
Dr. Jonas is also a Contributing Editor for the Weblog http://planetarymovement.org/blog/, produced by The Planetary Movement Ltd. UK (http://planetarymovement.org/blog/), TPJ's own Michael Carmichael, President and Chief Executive Officer, a Contributing Columnist for the Project for the Old American Century, POAC (http://www.oldamericancentury.org/), on which his TPJ columns appear regularly, and a Columnist for the webmagazine BuzzFlash (http://www.buzzflash.com/) on which short(er) articles are published once a week or so. By invitation, Dr. J's TPJ columns are also posted periodically on the weblog Thomas Paine's Corner (http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/).
The current Congress -- the 109th -- is set to spend the least amount of time in Washington of any Congress since 1948.
The House of Representatives is projected to meet for only 99 days this session, nine days less than the Congress of 1947-48. The Senate is projected to meet for 129 days, tying the sixth fewest days a Senate session has met since 1948.
CapitolHillBlue
(Generally a disinfo rag but now and again publishes something worthwhile)
September 16, 2006
An obviously-angry President George W. Bush declared war on Senators from his own party Friday after a Republican revolt in the Senate threatened tough anti-terror legislation that would allow torture of prisoners.
A defiant Bush rejected warnings that the United States had lost the high moral ground to adversaries.
"It's flawed logic," he snapped.
Bush is trying to rush his legislation through Congress, hoping a hyped sense of urgency will work as it did with the Constitution-defying USA Patriot Act that lawmakers passed without reading in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks.
"Time's running out" for the legislation, he warned, with Congress set to adjourn in a few weeks.
The bitter president called a Rose Garden news conference to confront a Republican rebellion led by Sens. John Warner of Virginia, John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Susan Collins of Maine.
To the administration's dismay, Colin Powell, Bush's former secretary of state, has joined with the lawmakers. Powell said Bush's plan to redefine the Geneva Conventions would cause the world "to doubt the moral basis" of the fight against terror and "put our own troops at risk."
Seven weeks before the November elections, the dispute left Republicans fighting among themselves - rather than with Democrats - about national security issues that have been a winning theme for the GOP in past elections.
Responding to Bush, McCain rejected the president's assertion that an alternative bill approved by the Senate Armed Services Committee dealing with the trial and interrogation of terror suspects would require the closure of the CIA's detainee program.
McCain said the measure would protect agents from criminal and civil liability and, by not reinterpreting the meaning of the Geneva Conventions, uphold the nation's obligations.
"To do any less risks our reputation, our moral standing and the lives of those Americans who risk everything to defend our country," the senator said.
Democrats were eager to point out the GOP disarray.
"When conservative military men like John McCain, John Warner, Lindsey Graham and Colin Powell stand up to the president, it shows how wrong and isolated the White House is," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. "These military men are telling the president that in the war on terror you need to be both strong and smart, and it is about time he heeded their admonitions."
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said, "Instead of picking fights with Colin Powell, John McCain and other military experts, President Bush should change course, do what the American people expect, and finally give them the real security they deserve."
Warner, a former Navy secretary, is chairman of the Armed Services Committee. McCain is a former Navy pilot who spent more than five years in enemy captivity during the Vietnam War. Graham is a former Air Force Reserve judge. Powell, a retired general, is a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
On another major national security issue, Bush said he was disappointed that the number of U.S. troops in Iraq was climbing rather than falling. He said hopes for troop withdrawals were dashed by a spike in violence in Baghdad, where in just the past two days more than 130 people were killed in attacks or tortured and dumped in rivers and on city streets.
"Look, we all want the troops to come home as quickly as possible," the president said. Polls show the war is unpopular among Americans, and Republicans worry it could cost them votes. He said he would base troop levels on the recommendations of his top commanders, Gen. William Casey and John Abizaid, and said he had great confidence in both men.
Bush took vehement exception when asked about Powell's assertion that the world might doubt the moral basis of the fight against terror if lawmakers went along with the administration's proposal to come up with a U.S. interpretation of the Geneva Convention's ban on "outrages upon personal dignity."
"If there's any comparison between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it's flawed logic," Bush said. "It's just - I simply can't accept that."
Growing animated, he said, "It's unacceptable to think that there's any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective."
Bush said the Geneva Convention's ban was "very vague" and required clarification. "What does that mean, 'outrages upon human dignity?' That's a statement that is wide open to interpretation."
He said that unless Congress acts, the CIA will end its program of tough interrogation methods that the administration says has prevented attacks.
"So Congress has got a decision to make," Bush said. "You want the program to go forward or not? I strongly recommend that this program go forward in order for us to be able to protect America."
On another anti-terror matter, with Osama bin Laden still at large five years after the 9/11 attacks, Bush said he could not send thousands of troops into Pakistan to search without an invitation from the government. "Pakistan's a sovereign nation," Bush said.
At the same time, Bush expressed frustration that the United Nations had not sent peacekeepers to stop the misery in the Darfur region of Sudan. "What you'll hear is, well, the government of Sudan must invite the United Nations in for us to act. Well, there are other alternatives, like passing a resolution saying, we're coming in with a U.N. force, in order to save lives."
As Republicans continue to distance themselves from the political suicide of George W. Bush's policies and his failed war in Iraq, some are also privately expressing doubts about his mental stability, saying the President's erratic actions show a man increasingly out of control.
Even Bush's former Secretary of State, Colin Powell, tells confidants he feels the President has "buckled under the pressure" of the administration's increasingly unpopular and often contradictory actions.
That concern prompted Powell this week to publicly oppose Bush's proposed plan to ignore the guidelines of the Geneva Convention and give the military and Central Intelligence Agency the right to torture suspects in the so-called "war on terror."
"The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism," Powell said in a letter to Sen. John McCain, one of the Republican Senators opposing Bush's push for the right to torture. "To redefine Common Article 3 would add to those doubts. Furthermore, it would put our own troops at risk."
Powell, a career military soldier and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, knows a hell of a lot more about war than George W. Bush, who evaded service in Vietnam by using his then-Congressman father's connections to land a safe spot in the Texas Air Guard only to fail to even complete that nominal service.
So does McCain, a prisoner of war during the Vietnam conflict. McCain is another Republican who tells aides that he is "increasingly disturbed" by the President's actions.
McCain, Congressional sources say, was upset to learn the Bush White House pressured military lawyers who testified against the bill to sign a new letter expressing support. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who joined McCain in opposing the President's plan, confirmed the military lawyers were forced to sign the letter.
Graham is also a former military lawyer and a colonel in the Air Force Reserve.
"It's a bridge too far, and it's not necessary," Graham says of Bush's proposals. "It will result in putting us in legal jeopardy and erode our standing in the world community."
Other Republicans object to Bush's strong push to pass his plan quickly with little time for consideration or debate. It reminds them of the headlong rush to pass the USA Patriot Act, a bill that stripped away most of the protections of the Constitution and was rushed into a law by a post-9/11 shell-shocked Congress. Many who voted for the bill admitted later they hadn't even read the legislation.
Graham did take time to read the bill.
"I fell over when I read it," he said.
A growing number of Republicans admit shock at the President's actions.
"The White House has lost its way on a number of important issues," says Nebraska Republican Senator Chuck Hagel. Bush's Iraq war, Hagel adds, "is a replay of Vietnam."
Republican Tom Kean Jr., running for Senate in New Jersey, says Bush has been dishonest with the American people about the war in Iraq.
"There have been horrendous mistakes made in the war in Iraq," Kean told the Newark Star-Ledger. "The president should acknowledge that. He needs to level with the American people."
Asked if such a step might bring down the wrath of the President, Kean shrugged his shoulders and added:
"If it means that I'm angering the White House, so be it."
Comment: Thompson hasn't got a clue what is really going on behind the scenes. For the inside scoop, get and read Douglas Reed's Controversy of Zion, (a free download).
We live in a time when interest in science is at its highest, but trust in science is at its lowest. Polls and other investigations show that the public is aware of the important role that science has taken upon itself, but that they are concerned about its increasing commercialisation, the way it is presented in the media, and they would also like to have more influence on what the scientific endeavour chooses to research. The question arises: to what extent should we place our trust in science?
To explore this issue, I intend to take us on a brief diversion into the fringe sciences - those places where there is little agreement among scientists. One of the most vehemently disputed areas is that of psi research - psi being the new name for telepathy, ESP and so forth. Psi is a catch-all phrase intended to describe unexplainable phenomena related to mind. I have no desire to argue the case for or against psi - I merely wish to draw attention to a particularly interesting experiment, known as the Ganzfeld, and its implications for science as a whole.
The Ganzfeld is a rather silly experiment. I say this not to refute its scientific credentials, as I personally believe the Ganzfeld is a perfectly legitimate experiment, but rather to draw attention to the fact that this is an experiment in which the test subject sits in a chair with half a ping pong ball over each eye, while they are played white noise and sat in front of a red light source (see the opening image to appreciate how ridiculous this looks). The purpose of all this is to induce a state of sensory deprivation in the subject.
The experiment then consists of another subject (the sender) viewing a picture or video clip (randomly selected from a large pool), and then attempting to project this message mentally to the receiver in the Ganzfeld (i.e. under the ping pong balls). The receiver describes the visions they experience in their sensory deprived state, which are recorded. This recording is then played back to an independent panel that compare the transcript with the original picture or video clip, and three others chosen at random, ranking each in order of how accurately they deem the transcript describes them.
A hit is scored if the panel assigns the top rank to the correct source image. Otherwise, a miss is scored. Obviously by chance one would expect a 25% hit rate. However, the hit rate that is actually reported is around 35%. Of course, the number varies from study to study, and some studies report no significant finding. However, this is the gist of the Ganzfeld experiment, and any further details are left for the interested party to dig into in their own time.
The interesting thing about this experiment, at least in terms of what we are discussing here, is the response from the scientific community at large. Initially, responses began by pointing to possible experimental flaws that might be the source of the effect. One by one, these experimental errors were addressed by experimenters and the procedure repeated. The reported results have not changed. The number of experimental revisions the Ganzfeld has undergone appears to have exceeded any previous experiment in scientific history, making it the most rigorously refined experiment to date.
Now let us put aside the Ganzfeld experiment, it's results, and any criticisms. I do not claim to know how to interpret the experiment, nor is its interpretation material to the matter at hand. Let us focus solely on the behaviour of the two sides involved.
One side, the experimenters, keeps repeating its experiments eliminating any and all systematic flaws that are suggested. They keep reporting the same results. The other side, the critics, keeps proceeding from the assumption that the source of the effect is an experimental error. When all possible sources of experimental errors have been eliminated, the critics conclude that the experimenters have behaved fraudulently.
Consider this comment by psychologist Mark Hansel from the University of Wales:
If the result could have been through a trick, the experiment must be considered unsatisfactory proof of ESP, whether or not it is finally decided that such a trick was, in fact, used... [As a result,] it is wise to adopt initially the assumption that ESP is impossible, since there is a great weight of knowledge supporting this point of view.
This is an odd state of affairs! We appear to have a scientist suggesting that it is better to believe that these results are a consequence of experimenter fraud than to change beliefs in respect of the published results. Neither is Mark Hansel alone in expressing such views. G.R. Price (another psychologist) suggested that since psi was clearly impossible, fraud was the only remaining explanation for psi effects. Donald O. Hebb (another psychologist) was troubled by the fact that the experimenters had presented sufficient evidence to convince the scientific community on any other issue, and admitted that his own rejection of the research was "in a literal sense prejudice."
The claim that science is an objective process is apparently falsified by the Ganzfeld experiment. From examining the experiments and the scientists that conduct them, I can state confidently that there is no scientific evidence of fraud at this time, and consequently any decision to impugn the results must draw upon either prior metaphysical beliefs, or a subjective decision to distrust the experimenters. Either way, if the meaning of a scientific experiment depends upon subjective elements (such as metaphysics, or a value judgement) then the entire scientific endeavour has lost its claim to objectivity.
Robert Anton Wilson suggested that every study that had set off with the goal of proving that telepathy existed had succeeded, and that every study that had set off with the goal of proving that telepathy did not exist had also succeeded. This was very close to the actual state of affairs! It just overlooks that there are many more studies of the former kind than the latter, because those who believe that telepathy does not exist have little motivation to conduct an experiment about which they believe the result is already known.
Neither is the Ganzfeld the only example of a scientific experiment being left open to subjective interpretation, although I suggest it is as clear an indication of this phenomenon as we could hope to find. In fact, Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions cites many similar examples from more conventional positions, some of which we examined earlier. Scientists do not change their views in the light of new evidence as readily as Popper presumed, and this is only natural because science is not an objective process at all.
Science is a subjective process with an objective goal. Genuine objectivity is beyond the reach of any individual scientist, or any community of scientists, as we are all human and subject to biases of many different kinds. The scientific endeavour achieves something that approximates to objectivity only over time. Scientific theories receive popular validation when they result in technology, or when sufficient time has passed for the most effective explanations to prove their worth (as we saw previously in the case of continental drift).
Trust in science is a metaphysical belief. I place a certain amount of trust in science, in so much as I believe that over time the scientific process approximates to its goals. But excessive trust in science is probably misplaced, because science is simply the name we place on the activities and knowledge of scientists. And scientists are people - hence the interpretation of the results reported by any scientist depends on how much people trust the scientists concerned.
For science to win back the trust of the general populace may require the adoption of a more modern model for how science functions. Individual scientists must work harder to keep their metaphysics (and hence ideology) out of their scientific writings if they want to win back public trust - that is, scientists must strive to adopt an ideologically neutral stance, or at least to accurately report the sources of their potential bias so that this can be taken into account.
Furthermore they must work on positioning science in its proper social context. Science has no absolute right to pursue its goals - scientists are granted that right by societies that choose to invest in the work of scientists. And to earn that right, scientists must gain and maintain the trust of the general public, something which is better achieved by open discourse than by individual scientists pugnaciously insisting that they are right. This is the challenge that science faces at the start of the 21st century - to convince people that scientists can be trusted. It is a trial that I hope and believe that scientists are ready to take on.
Kathmandu: After a kid who sat in mediation in the same posture without food or drink for months and a child who measured only 20 inches grabbed headlines, Nepal has now found a new teen prodigy - a girl who "grows glass".
Sarita Bista, a fifth grader in Tikapur town in western Nepal, has been "generating" glass pieces from her head for the last eight months, says Nepal's official media.
Glass shards, nearly 1.5 inches long and 0.5 inch wide, have been coming out of her forehead since January, her mother Dhansara Bista told the Rising Nepal daily.
The phenomenon started when Sarita fainted one day after which she began to bleed from the forehead and a sliver of glass came out. However, the wound healed soon after that, leaving no scars.
When the puzzled youngster told her mother, Dhansara said she did not believe the story at first. But since then, nearly 100 slivers have come out.
Sarita said she felt no pain. According to her family, both her physical and mental conditions are normal.
The daily said Sarita's schoolteachers were aware of the extraordinary feat.
Chakra Prasad Adhikari, a teacher at the Trinity English Boarding School, told the daily they had noticed the phenomenon about four months ago but had kept it a secret on being requested by the girl's family.
There have been no attempts by rationalists or scientists to explore the phenomenon and prove its veracity, let alone find a reason if it was true.
Nepal also suffers from a high incidence of superstition.
A large number of the population still believes in witches, divine cures and supernatural manifestations.
Do streetlights suddenly go out when you pass beneath them? Do watches or credit cards stop working in your possession? Perhaps you are a SLIder
A reader writes:
Around five years ago, I have noticed that at times while I am driving down the road at night a street light will go out as I am passing below it. It happens frequently and seems to be happening more.
It has been giving me the creeps. If it happened only once or on very rare occasions, I don't think I would have given it a thought. However, it happens about once or twice a week. Could it be some electronic thing or could it be something less explainable?
The phenomenon is known as street lamp interference, or SLI, and it possibly is a psychic event that is just beginning to be recognized and studied. Like most phenomena of this type, the evidence is almost exclusively anecdotal. I have received several stories like the one above from readers.
Typically, a person who has this effect on streetlights - also known as a SLIder - finds that the light switches on or off when he or she walks or drives beneath it. Obviously, this could happen occasionally by chance with a faulty streetlight (you've probably noticed that it's happened to you once in a while), but SLIders claim that it happens to them on a regular basis. It doesn't happen every time with every streetlight, but it occurs often enough to make these people suspect that something unusual is going on.
Very often, SLIders also report that they tend to have an odd effect on other electronic devices. In letters I've received, these people claim such effects as:
* Appliances such as lamps and TVs go on and off without being touched.
* Lightbulbs constantly blow when the SLIder tries to turn them off or on.
* Volume levels change on TVs, radios, and CD players.
* Watches stop working.
* Children's electronic toys start by themselves when the SLIder is present.
* Credit cards and other magnetically encoded cards are damaged or erased when in their possession.
What's the Cause?
Any attempt to pinpoint a cause for SLI at this point would be mere speculation without a thorough scientific investigation. The problem with such investigations, as with many forms of psychic phenomena, is that they are very difficult to reproduce in a laboratory. They seem to happen spontaneously without the deliberate intention of the SLIder. In fact, the SLIder, according to some informal tests, are usually unable to create the effect on demand.
A reasonable speculation for the effect, if it is a real one, might have something to do with the electronic impulses of the brain. All of our thoughts and movements are the result of electrical impulses that the brain generates. At present it is known that these measurable impulses only have an effect within an individual's body, but is it possible that they could have an effect outside the body - a kind of remote control?
Ongoing research at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) lab is suggesting that the subconscious can indeed affect electronic devices. Subjects are able to influence the random generations of a computer far more than would occur merely by chance. This research - and research being conducted at other laboratories around the world - are beginning to reveal, in scientific terms, the reality of such psychic phenomena as ESP, telekinesis and soon, perhaps, SLI.
Although the SLI effect is not a conscious one, some SLIders report that when it does occur, they often are in an extreme emotional state. A state of anger or stress is often cited as the "cause." SLIder Debbie Wolf, a British barmaid, told CNN, "When it happens is when I'm stressed about something. Not really manically stressed, just when I'm really mulching something over, really chewing something over in my head, and then it happens."
Could it all be just coincidence, however? David Barlow, a graduate student of physics and astrophysics, suspects that the phenomenon might be attributed to people seeing patterns in "random noise." "It is unlikely that a light will turn itself on when you walk past it," he says, "so it is a shock when it happens. If this should happen a few times consecutively, then it appears some mechanism is at work."
SLI Research
A research project into SLI has been started by Dr. Richard Wiseman at the University of Berkfordshire in England. Wiseman recently made the newspapers with a project to test ESP with a kiosk-type machine - called The Mind Machine - that he set up in various locations around England to collect a large amount of data about the possible psychic abilities of the general public.
Hillary Evans, an author and paranormal investigator with The Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (ASSAP), is also studying the phenomenon. (You can download the original SLI Effect book in PDF format by Hilary Evans completely free from their website.) She has established the Street Lamp Interference Data Exchange as a place where SLIders can report their experiences and share those of other SLIders. "It's quite obvious from the letters I get," Evans told CNN, "that these people are perfectly healthy, normal people. It's just that they have some kind of ability... just a gift they've got. It may not be a gift they would like to have."
Bhopal: Superstitious villagers in Madhya Pradesh have started drinking water from a 'miracle tree' in order to get rid of their ailments.
An old peepul tree standing tall in the Sonagiri locality has become the centre of attraction for villagers.
"Water is coming out of this Peepul tree. People are coming and drinking it. It is magic. Those who suffer from stomach ache are being cured. People are also getting rid of their drinking habits. It is miraculous," said Preeti, a resident.
"Everyone drinking this water has experienced relief. Whether one is unwell or a drunkard or has some other problem, this water is providing relief. Even, the one who does not have work, he starts getting it after drinking this", claimed Puranlal Patel.
Most of parts of the country are steeped in superstition with thousands choosing the so-called miracle trees, wells or even graveyards.
Science magazine this week details the discovery of a stone block in Veracruz, Mexico, that contains a previously unknown system of writing; believed by archeologists to be the earliest in the Americas.
The slab - named the Cascajal block - dates to the early first millennium BCE and has features that indicate it comes from the Olmec civilization of Mesoamerica. One of the archaeologists behind the discovery, Brown University's Stephen D. Houston, said that the block and its ancient script "link the Olmec civilization to literacy, document an unsuspected writing system, and reveal a new complexity to this civilization."
"It's a tantalizing discovery. I think it could be the beginning of a new era of focus on Olmec civilization," explained Houston. "It's telling us that these records probably exist and that many remain to be found. If we can decode their content, these earliest voices of Mesoamerican civilization will speak to us today."
Construction workers discovered the Cascajal block in a pile of debris in the community of Lomas de Tacamichapa in the late 1990s. Surrounding the piece were ceramic shards, clay figurine fragments, and broken artifacts of ground stone, which have helped the team date the block and its text to the San Lorenzo phase, ending about 900 BCE; approximately 400 years before writing was thought to have first appeared in the Western hemisphere.
The block weighs about 26 pounds and measures 36 cm x 21 cm x 13 cm. The text itself consists of 62 signs, some of which are repeated up to four times. There is no doubt that the piece is a written work, say the archaeologists. "As products of a writing system, the sequences would, by definition, reflect patterns of language, with the probable presence of syntax and language-dependent word order," they explain.
Interestingly, the surface containing the text appears to be concave and the team believes the block has been carved repeatedly and erased - an unprecedented discovery according to Houston, who added that several paired sequences of signs could even indicate poetic couplets.
Deadwood, SD - Weird aircraft(s) reported to 911. I know because I was the one that reported them. About 9:45pm on September 14th I stepped outside my home to get some fresh air and could hear what sounded like 4 or 5 B1's flying overhead.
Not overly freaking out, because we live close to Ellsworth AFB home of the B-1 Bomber wing and hearing a B1s fly over every once in awhile... but several at the same time? No... We're not going to war are we? Then I looked off into the near distance (approx. 5 miles) and could see the strangest formation of lights flying straight north. Normally B1's don't fly information, as far as I know.
I just stared in amazement, not being a little green men fanatic, trying to figure out what I was looking at. This was more than a group of plains it appeared to be as large as a small town. Being a US Army Veteran, it certainly wasn't something I could recognize or didn't sound like a B1 either. Hmmm! I went and asked my son if he heard the strange plane and he said he did. I told him... I saw a U.F.O. Unidentified Flying Object. Then I went back to watching TV.. With in a matter of a few minutes like "10 -15" the noise returned.
I didn't think much about it at first except, I thought I better go see what is going on. I stepped back out my front porch and once again I see the same lights but in a different configuration. This time flying vertical. Flying extremely slow and closer in the exact opposite direction. I couldn't believe my eyes. The lights weren't flashing like plane lights, they where more of a bright strobe light. Now I was freaking out. This time I ran to get my video camera. No film loaded, I ran back outside to see it they where still there. 'Gone! This time I called 911 to report this strange night time flight. The Spearfish dispatch forwarded my call to the Deadwood dispatch. The officer in charge said he could tell I was concerned, he actually said he could hear the "Fear" in my voice. He said that one of the officers reported Black Hawk helicopters flying earlier in the afternoon. I told him that I helped develop the Black Hawk helicopters back in the late 70s when I was in the service and this wasn't Black Hawks... but could have been I guess. Anyway it was strange. So strange I went back to my computer to try and duplicate what I saw. This is what it looked like on the first flight.
GO TO ORIGINAL to see Graphics and read the rest of the story.
In 1966, Ralph Turner was a 27-year-old reporter at the Huntington Herald-Dispatch, writing stories about city politics and crime that would lay the groundwork for a distinguished journalism career.
On a chilly November night that year, Turner was sent out, on what seemed at the time like a wild goose chase, to do a story that lives on to this day.
He spent a few hours in a Mason County field under cover of dark waiting for a chance encounter with the Mothman.
This weekend at the Fifth Annual Mothman Festival, Turner will recount the time he spent investigating sightings of the creature in the Point Pleasant area and his part in one of the most best-known mysteries in Mountain State history.
It's a story Turner once pledged he wasn't going to tell anymore.
But the monster, or the myth at least, has a hold on him.
"No matter what I did in my career as a professor or all my years as a reporter, this is what follows me," Turner said. "I decided a year ago I wasn't going to talk about it again, but I shouldn't have done that. I almost gave it up, but you can't. Mothman won't go away."
Turner, an award-winning journalist and retired Marshall University professor, has for years told his tales to Boy Scout troops and Rotary Clubs. They tend to capture an audience's imagination, not because he has any real answers about the mystifying red-eyed creature, but because he has first-hand experience of what it was like when the monster captivated an entire town.
He went to Point Pleasant that night in 1966 not really knowing what to expect.
"I had one of those tough city editors," Turner recalls. "He called me up and told me to go up there and check out the nonsense. He didn't believe in it at all."
Turner didn't either. Well, not really.
"It seemed unrealistic that it was some sort of Mothman thing, so the challenge was to find out what was going on," he said. "I didn't think there could be such a thing, but I do remember I stopped at my house on the way and got a ball bat. Just in case."
Turner and a photographer from the newspaper made the hour-long drive from Huntington to Point Pleasant in an old Ford Bronco.
"It was foggy around the river," he says. "It looked like Dracula-type weather all along Route 2. It was misty and foggy and damp."
The duo set up shop near the abandoned powerhouse in Point Pleasant, known as the TNT area. It was the place where most of the Mothman sightings, which numbered 10 or so at that time, had occurred.
Even at 10 o'clock at night, the spot was crowded with people hoping to catch a glimpse of the monster.
"There were people still stirring, and we just set up some railroad ties there, and we kind of camped out with our reporters' pads and cameras," Turner said. "We stayed up all night and didn't see anything."
The story didn't end there, of course. Turner took it upon himself to try and find the source of the weird phenomenon.
He called a biology professor at West Virginia University, and wound up writing the first report that attempted to solve the mystery and explain the sightings as something other than the supernatural.
A story -- "That Mothman? Would You Believe a Sandhill Crane?" -- appeared that week in the Herald-Dispatch with Turner's byline. Nonbelievers still tout the story today as proof that the Mason County myth is based on a bird.
In an interview with Turner and with local police, biologist Robert Smith said descriptions of the Mothman perfectly matched those of a sandhill crane, a huge winged bird usually found in the Deep South and in Canada.
Smith said he thought one of the animals, with its seven-foot wingspan and ringed, fleshy red eyes, might have gotten caught in a corner of West Virginia while trying to migrate further north.
Turner's story temporarily stalled furious speculation in Point Pleasant, but the crane explanation didn't hold up for long.
"I figured, case closed, people saw a bird," Turner said. "I think there's a logical reason for everything, and it was the most logical conclusion I know of that anybody has offered. Obviously, a lot of people didn't agree with me."
Turner says he only wrote, at most, a handful of stories about the Mothman sightings, but he has become one of the central characters in the story that's now known nationwide and that became the basis for a blockbuster movie just a few years ago.
"I started getting calls from friends telling me that someone had done a book in Indiana or somewhere and I was known in it as the Mothman reporter," Turner said. "The movie was a real stretch. I like to kid that Richard Gere played my part."
Turner will be a keynote speaker in this weekend's Mothman Festival, an event that's growing each year and is expected to attract as many as 5,000 monster fans and paranormal experts from all over the country.
He isn't planning on publicizing the fact he still believes the legend of the Mothman probably was born by people witnessing the frenzied fight for freedom of a lost bird.
"I don't think they're going to change it to the Sandhill Crane Festival," Turner quipped. "For years in Point Pleasant, they didn't know much about it. The movie has had to do with a lot of it, but they have a lot of fun with it."
In one of his news stories about the Mothman, Turner turned speculative about whether the mystery might ever be solved. He seemed to have fairly accurate foresight of how the incident would forever change the county.
"Just what was seen in the dark that night may never be firmly established," he wrote in a Nov. 22, 1966 story. "The Mason County monster may become a legend. Maybe a new tourist attraction has been born."
Contact writer Kris Wise at kriswise@dailymail.com or 348-1244.
LONDON - It's a jungle out there: the number of sightings of non-indigenous, exotic animals in Britain has sky-rocketed in the last six years, according to a recent study.
More than 10,000 sightings of everything from wallabies to dangerous spiders, crocodiles and even a penguin have been recorded since 2000, with the rise attributed to climate change, zoo thefts and animal escapes.
Chris Mullins, founder and co-ordinator of Beastwatch UK, which compiled the data, said: "It is clear the United Kingdom contains far more exotic wild animals than the British public could ever imagine."
The figures show that in the last six years 51 wallabies, 13 spiders including a tarantula and a Black Widow, 13 racoons, 10 crocodiles, seven wolves, three pandas, two scorpions and one penguin have been spotted.
There were also reported sightings of 5,931 big cats, 332 wild boars and 3,389 sharks in British waters.
Southwest England was a big cat hotspot, wild boar are most common in the southeast while Buckinghamshire - north of London - and neighbouring Oxfordshire have the most numbers of wallabies.
Oban, on the west coast of Scotland is home to several monkeys, the study found.
On a stormy April day in 1995, the RMS Queen Elizabeth 2 was sailing in the North Atlantic when the ocean liner dipped into a "hole in the sea." Out of the darkness, a towering 95-foot wave threatened to crash down upon the vessel, which the 70,000-ton ship attempted to surf in order to avoid being pummeled to the bottom of the ocean.
Fortunately, the ship and passengers survived, but the instance occurred just months after the first scientific recording confirmed the validity of old sailors' tales once considered skeptical: the existence--and prevalence--of freakishly giant waves, also known as rogue waves.
Before the first laser measurement of a freak wave in January 1995, oceanographers and mathematicians predicted that such monster waves should only occur about once every 10,000 years. But as the occurrence inspired satellite measurements, scientists observed many more freak waves than theory predicted. In fact, observations imply that a handful of these waves is occurring at every moment somewhere on the ocean. Although it's controversial just how many ships and lives have been lost in modern times due to these fairly common giant waves, most ships today are only built to withstand waves up to 50 feet tall--while freak waves have been calculated to reach heights of up to 198 feet. Technically, a freak wave is defined as a wave that is twice the "significant wave height," which is the mean of the largest third of waves in an area.
Intrigued and terrified by freak waves and their potential for swallowing giant ships whole (from oil rigs to cruise ships), scientists are trying to formulate a theory or theories to describe the evolution of these mythical realities. Recently, scientists from Sweden and Germany, Padma Shukla et al., have presented the first analysis and simulation of its kind for the instability of nonlinear waves interacting in deep water. In the past, nonlinear theories have seemed capable of explaining the greater prevalence of rogue waves than previous theories which were linear.
"The basic reason for the occurrence of freak waves seems to be what is known as nonlinear wave interactions--by a certain mechanism there is an energy exchange between the waves resulting in a large growth in wave amplitude, much larger than what would be possible through ordinary linear superposition of waves," coauthor Mattias Marklund told PhysOrg.com.
Nearly all waves originate as ripples on the water's surface blown by the wind. (The exception is tsunamis, which are caused by seismic tremors on the ocean floor and only become dangerous when they reach the shore.) Most waves, however, die down due to viscosity in the water, unless heavy winds cause the swells to increase. Scientists believe that heavy winds--especially when blowing in the opposite direction of the water current--play a large role in forming freak waves. This idea may explain why locations with strong currents (e.g. the Agulhas off Africa and Gulf Stream off the U.S., including the Bermuda Triangle) have a history of reported freak waves.
"The freak wave a phenomenon is important to understand since it may be the cause of serious accidents involving oil platforms and ocean-going ships," said Marklund. "If a greater understanding of the mechanisms behind these waves is obtained, one may, for example, in the future combine this with observational and statistical tools in order to construct warning systems."
Shukla, Marklund and their colleagues built their theory on a two-wave system, where two waves interact nonlinearly, which is described by the Schrodinger equations. These quantum mechanics equations, originally developed to describe the wave-like behavior of electrons in atoms, have since been used for a variety of wave systems. The scientists found that two-wave cases behave much differently than single waves, which exhibit standard instabilities and dissolve into a wide spectrum of waves.
"We have presented a theoretical study of the modulational instabilities of a pair of nonlinearly interacting two-dimensional waves in deep water, and have shown that the full dynamics of these interacting waves gives rise to localized large-amplitude wave packets," wrote the scientists in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters. "[T]wo water waves can, when nonlinear interactions are taken into account, give rise to novel behavior such as the formation of large-amplitude coherent wave packets with amplitudes more than 3 times the ones of the initial waves."
Using the Schrodinger equations, the scientists studied the impact of different wave speeds and different angles at which two waves intersect. The team found that for a certain, relatively small angle, a new instability arises with a "maximum growth rate that is more than twice as large as the ones for the single wave cases," they report. Two waves meeting at such an angle would escape normal stabilizing effects and exhibit constructive interference that would result in a freak wave. Strong currents can help further by "focusing" waves, continually building them up to giant sizes.
"This particular piece of research describes a possible mechanism behind rogue wave formation," said Marklund. "In order to statistically predict their location, one will need further observations and analysis of such data using various methods, in particular statistical analysis and computer simulations."
Citation: Shukla, P.K., Kourakis, I., Eliasson, B., Marklund, M. and Stenflo, L. "Instability and Evolution of Nonlinearly Interacting Water Waves." Physical Review Letters. 97, 094501 (2006).
WASHINGTON (AP) -- When President Bush addresses world leaders at the United Nations this week, he will have fewer options and lower expectations on almost every major foreign policy front than a year ago.
The United States is relying more readily on international institutions and alliances for help in Iran, Lebanon, North Korea, Sudan and elsewhere. Yet, according to analysts, the Bush administration has less room to maneuver.
Bush and his foreign policy advisers have tried with some success to dispel the caricature of Bush abroad as a Texas cowboy riding alone and herding the U.S. into an unpopular war in Iraq.
But the war, now in its fourth year, devours resources and energy for other global objectives and feeds mistrust about U.S. intentions, experts say.
"I'm not sure they have changed their minds about to what extent to proceed unilaterally and how much to use military force so much as they have run out of options," said Richard Stoll, a political science professor at Rice University who studies foreign policy and national security.
With Bush nearly halfway through his final term, time is dwindling for him to accomplish his signature goals of confronting terrorism and spreading democracy, and he faces more distractions at home, said Andrew Bacevich, a professor of international relations at Boston University.
Friday, Bush told reporters what his Tuesday speech to the U.N. General Assembly would focus on. He said he would carry a strong message, "based upon hope, and (a) belief that the civilized world must stand with moderate, reformist-minded people and help them realize their dreams."
A year of change
A scan of the globe, however, points up the defensive posture for the U.S. these days and the changed circumstances from a year ago.
- In Afghanistan, five years after the U.S.-led invasion ousted the Taliban from political power, the militant Islamic group is proving a resilient enemy for NATO forces in the south while suicide attacks have spread to the capital, Kabul. President Hamid Karzai's credibility has been undermined by the bloodiest fighting since the Taliban's fall, failure to control the drug trade and wide disparities between the rich and poor. Karzai is a U.S. favorite whom Bush will see at the White House this month.
- In North Korea, the breakthrough weapons agreement announced during last year's U.N. opening session fell apart weeks later. Now the communist government is boycotting talks with the United States and other nations. The situation worsened when North Korea tested a long-range missile theoretically capable of reaching the U.S.
- In Iraq, political gains and the capture of a terrorist leader have not stopped the wholesale killing. U.S.-backed Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whom Bush will see in New York, has failed to make his security plan stick. Washington shelved plans to withdraw some American troops this year despite declining public support in the U.S. for the war and growing calls from Congress for a phased withdrawal. Bush has acknowledged that U.S. forces will remain there for years.
- In Iran, the government has accelerated its nuclear program and defied U.N. demands. The U.S. is still the main force for U.N. penalties that allies find unappealing or of questionable value. With Tehran trying to undermine a fragile U.S.-built consensus, the weeks ahead may show whether the U.S. can persuade the Security Council to impose meaningful penalties or whether the administration will concede the futility of a course pursued for more than two years. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is trying to deflect suspicion that the U.S. intends to topple Iran's ruling mullahs or bomb its nuclear sites.
- In the Mideast, the prospects for progress for peace between Israel and the Palestinians look more remote than at this time in 2005. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is unconscious from a stroke; his successor, Ehud Olmert, has political problems after an inconclusive war with Hezbollah militants in Lebanon. Humanitarian and political crises followed the victory of Hamas militants in Palestinian elections and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was vastly weakened.
- Hamas' victory was the biggest blow to Bush's goal of spreading democracy in the region. Yet the U.S. said little about political reform in Egypt and Saudi Arabia while appealing to those Arab allies for help during the recent Israeli-Hezbollah war.
Bush may need help around the globe, but he could not resist taking a swipe at the United Nations during his White House press conference Friday. He stopped just short of calling the United Nations feckless in its response to the death and destruction in Sudan's Darfur region.
"I think a lot of Americans are frustrated with the United Nations, to be frank with you," Bush said.
By PATRICK QUINN
Associated Press
September 17, 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq - In the few short years since the first shackled Afghan shuffled off to Guantanamo, the U.S. military has created a global network of overseas prisons, its islands of high security keeping 14,000 detainees beyond the reach of established law.
Disclosures of torture and long-term arbitrary detentions have won rebuke from leading voices including the U.N. secretary-general and the U.S. Supreme Court. But the bitterest words come from inside the system, the size of several major U.S. penitentiaries.
"It was hard to believe I'd get out," Baghdad shopkeeper Amjad Qassim al-Aliyawi told The Associated Press after his release - without charge - last month. "I lived with the Americans for one year and eight months as if I was living in hell."
Captured on battlefields, pulled from beds at midnight, grabbed off streets as suspected insurgents, tens of thousands now have passed through U.S. detention, the vast majority in Iraq.
Many say they were caught up in U.S. military sweeps, often interrogated around the clock, then released months or years later without apology, compensation or any word on why they were taken. Seventy to 90 percent of the Iraq detentions in 2003 were "mistakes," U.S. officers once told the international Red Cross.
Defenders of the system, which has only grown since soldiers' photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib shocked the world, say it's an unfortunate necessity in the battles to pacify Iraq and Afghanistan, and to keep suspected terrorists out of action.
Every U.S. detainee in Iraq "is detained because he poses a security threat to the government of Iraq, the people of Iraq or coalition forces," said U.S. Army Lt. Col. Keir-Kevin Curry, a spokesman for U.S.-led military detainee operations in Iraq.
But dozens of ex-detainees, government ministers, lawmakers, human rights activists, lawyers and scholars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the United States said the detention system often is unjust and hurts the war on terror by inflaming anti-Americanism in Iraq and elsewhere.
Building for the Long Term
Reports of extreme physical and mental abuse, symbolized by the notorious Abu Ghraib prison photos of 2004, have abated as the Pentagon has rejected torture-like treatment of the inmates. Most recently, on Sept. 6, the Pentagon issued a new interrogation manual banning forced nakedness, hooding, stress positions and other abusive techniques.
The same day, President Bush said the CIA's secret outposts in the prison network had been emptied, and 14 terror suspects from them sent to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to face trial in military tribunals. The U.S. Supreme Court has struck down the tribunal system, however, and the White House and Congress are now wrestling over the legal structure of such trials.
Living conditions for detainees may be improving as well. The U.S. military cites the toilets of Bagram, Afghanistan: In a cavernous old building at that air base, hundreds of detainees in their communal cages now have indoor plumbing and privacy screens, instead of exposed chamber pots.
Whatever the progress, small or significant, grim realities persist.
Human rights groups count dozens of detainee deaths for which no one has been punished or that were never explained. The secret prisons - unknown in number and location - remain available for future detainees. The new manual banning torture doesn't cover CIA interrogators. And thousands of people still languish in a limbo, deprived of one of common law's oldest rights, habeas corpus, the right to know why you are imprisoned.
"If you, God forbid, are an innocent Afghan who gets sold down the river by some warlord rival, you can end up at Bagram and you have absolutely no way of clearing your name," said John Sifton of Human Rights Watch in New York. "You can't have a lawyer present evidence, or do anything organized to get yourself out of there."
The U.S. government has contended it can hold detainees until the "war on terror" ends - as it determines.
"I don't think we've gotten to the question of how long," said retired admiral John D. Hutson, former top lawyer for the U.S. Navy. "When we get up to 'forever,' I think it will be tested" in court, he said.
The Navy is planning long-term at Guantanamo. This fall it expects to open a new, $30-million maximum-security wing at its prison complex there, a concrete-and-steel structure replacing more temporary camps.
In Iraq, Army jailers are a step ahead. Last month they opened a $60-million, state-of-the-art detention center at Camp Cropper, near Baghdad's airport. The Army oversees about 13,000 prisoners in Iraq at Cropper, Camp Bucca in the southern desert, and Fort Suse in the Kurdish north.
Neither prisoners of war nor criminal defendants, they are just "security detainees" held "for imperative reasons of security," spokesman Curry said, using language from an annex to a U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing the U.S. presence here.
Questions of Law, Sovereignty
President Bush laid out the U.S. position in a speech Sept. 6.
"These are enemy combatants who are waging war on our nation," he said. "We have a right under the laws of war, and we have an obligation to the American people, to detain these enemies and stop them from rejoining the battle."
But others say there's no need to hold these thousands outside of the rules for prisoners of war established by the Geneva Conventions.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan declared last March that the extent of arbitrary detention here is "not consistent with provisions of international law governing internment on imperative reasons of security."
Meanwhile, officials of Nouri al-Maliki's 4-month-old Iraqi government say the U.S. detention system violates Iraq's national rights.
"As long as sovereignty has transferred to Iraqi hands, the Americans have no right to detain any Iraqi person," said Fadhil al-Sharaa, an aide to the prime minister. "The detention should be conducted only with the permission of the Iraqi judiciary."
At the Justice Ministry, Deputy Minister Busho Ibrahim told AP it has been "a daily request" that the detainees be brought under Iraqi authority.
There's no guarantee the Americans' 13,000 detainees would fare better under control of the Iraqi government, which U.N. officials say holds 15,000 prisoners.
But little has changed because of these requests. When the Americans formally turned over Abu Ghraib prison to Iraqi control on Sept. 2, it was empty but its 3,000 prisoners remained in U.S. custody, shifted to Camp Cropper.
Life in Custody
The cases of U.S.-detained Iraqis are reviewed by a committee of U.S. military and Iraqi government officials. The panel recommends criminal charges against some, release for others. As of Sept. 9, the Central Criminal Court of Iraq had put 1,445 on trial, convicting 1,252. In the last week of August, for example, 38 were sentenced on charges ranging from illegal weapons possession to murder, for the shooting of a U.S. Marine.
Almost 18,700 have been released since June 2004, the U.S. command says, not including many more who were held and then freed by local military units and never shipped to major prisons.
Some who were released, no longer considered a threat, later joined or rejoined the insurgency.
The review process is too slow, say U.N. officials. Until they are released, often families don't know where their men are - the prisoners are usually men - or even whether they're in American hands.
Ex-detainee Mouayad Yasin Hassan, 31, seized in April 2004 as a suspected Sunni Muslim insurgent, said he wasn't allowed to obtain a lawyer or contact his family during 13 months at Abu Ghraib and Bucca, where he was interrogated incessantly. When he asked why he was in prison, he said, the answer was, "We keep you for security reasons."
Another released prisoner, Waleed Abdul Karim, 26, recounted how his guards would wield their absolute authority.
"Tell us about the ones who attack Americans in your neighborhood," he quoted an interrogator as saying, "or I will keep you in prison for another 50 years."
As with others, Karim's confinement may simply have strengthened support for the anti-U.S. resistance. "I will hate Americans for the rest of my life," he said.
As bleak and hidden as the Iraq lockups are, the Afghan situation is even less known. Accounts of abuse and deaths emerged in 2002-2004, but if Abu Ghraib-like photos from Bagram exist, none have leaked out. The U.S. military is believed holding about 500 detainees - most Afghans, but also apparently Arabs, Pakistanis and Central Asians.
The United States plans to cede control of its Afghan detainees by early next year, five years after invading Afghanistan to eliminate al-Qaida's base and bring down the Taliban government. Meanwhile, the prisoners of Bagram exist in a legal vacuum like that elsewhere in the U.S. detention network.
"There's been a silence about Bagram, and much less political discussion about it," said Richard Bennett, chief U.N. human rights officer in Afghanistan.
Freed detainees tell how in cages of 16 inmates they are forbidden to speak to each other. They wear the same orange jumpsuits and shaven heads as the terrorist suspects at Guantanamo, but lack even the scant legal rights granted inmates at that Cuba base. In some cases, they have been held without charge for three to four years, rights workers say.
Guantanamo received its first prisoners from Afghanistan - chained, wearing blacked-out goggles - in January 2002. A total of 770 detainees were sent there. Its population today of Afghans, Arabs and others, stands at 455.
Described as the most dangerous of America's "war on terror" prisoners, only 10 of the Guantanamo inmates have been charged with crimes. Charges are expected against 14 other al-Qaida suspects flown in to Guantanamo from secret prisons on Sept. 4.
Plans for their trials are on hold, however, because of a Supreme Court ruling in June against the Bush administration's plan for military tribunals.
The court held the tribunals were not authorized by the U.S. Congress and violated the Geneva Conventions by abrogating prisoners' rights. In a sometimes contentious debate, the White House and Congress are trying to agree on a new, acceptable trial plan.
Since the court decision, and after four years of confusing claims that terrorist suspects were so-called "unlawful combatants" unprotected by international law, the Bush administration has taken steps recognizing that the Geneva Conventions' legal and human rights do extend to imprisoned al-Qaida militants. At the same time, however, the new White House proposal on tribunals retains such controversial features as denying defendants access to some evidence against them.
In his Sept. 6 speech, Bush acknowledged for the first time the existence of the CIA's secret prisons, believed established at military bases or safehouses in such places as Egypt, Indonesia and eastern Europe. That network, uncovered by journalists, had been condemned by U.N. authorities and investigated by the Council of Europe.
The clandestine jails are now empty, Bush announced, but will remain a future option for CIA detentions and interrogation.
Louise Arbour, U.N. human rights chief, is urging Bush to abolish the CIA prisons altogether, as ripe for "abusive conduct." The CIA's techniques for extracting information from prisoners still remain secret, she noted.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government's willingness to resort to "extraordinary rendition," transferring suspects to other nations where they might be tortured, appears unchanged.
Prosecutions and Memories
The exposure of sadistic abuse, torture and death at Abu Ghraib two years ago touched off a flood of courts-martial of mostly lower-ranking U.S. soldiers. Overall, about 800 investigations of alleged detainee mistreatment in Iraq and Afghanistan have led to action against more than 250 service personnel, including 89 convicted at courts-martial, U.S. diplomats told the United Nations in May.
Critics protest that penalties have been too soft and too little has been done, particularly in tracing inhumane interrogation methods from the far-flung islands of the overseas prison system back to policies set by high-ranking officials.
In only 14 of 34 cases has anyone been punished for the confirmed or suspected killings of detainees, the New York-based Human Rights First reports. The stiffest sentence in a torture-related death has been five months in jail. The group reported last February that in almost half of 98 detainee deaths, the cause was either never announced or reported as undetermined.
Looking back, the United States overreacted in its treatment of detainees after Sept. 11, said Anne-Marie Slaughter, a noted American scholar of international law.
It was understandable, the Princeton University dean said, but now "we have to restore a balance between security and rights that is consistent with who we are and consistent with our security needs."
Otherwise, she said, "history will look back and say that we took a dangerous and deeply wrong turn."
Back here in Baghdad, at the Alawi bus station, a gritty, noisy hub far from the meeting rooms of Washington and Geneva, women gather with fading hopes whenever a new prisoner release is announced.
As she watched one recent day for a bus from distant Camp Bucca, one mother wept and told her story.
"The Americans arrested my son, my brother and his friend," said Zahraa Alyat, 42. "The Americans arrested them October 16, 2005. They left together and I don't know anything about them."
The bus pulled up. A few dozen men stepped off, some blindfolded, some bound, none with any luggage, none with familiar faces.
As the distraught women straggled away once more, one ex-prisoner, 18-year-old Bilal Kadhim Muhssin, spotted U.S. troops nearby.
"Americans," he muttered in fear. "Oh, my God, don't say that name," and he bolted for a city bus, and freedom.
Big Brother is not only watching you - now he's barking orders too. Britain's first 'talking' CCTV cameras have arrived, publicly berating bad behaviour and shaming offenders into acting more responsibly.
The system allows control room operators who spot any anti-social acts - from dropping litter to late-night brawls - to send out a verbal warning: 'We are watching you'.
Middlesbrough has fitted loudspeakers on seven of its 158 cameras in an experiment already being hailed as a success. Jack Bonner, who manages the system, said: 'It is one hell of a deterrent. It's one thing to know that there are CCTV cameras about, but it's quite another when they loudly point out what you have just done wrong.
'Most people are so ashamed and embarrassed at being caught they quickly slink off without further trouble.
'There was one incident when two men started fighting outside a nightclub. One of the control room operators warned them over the loudspeakers and they looked up, startled, stopped fighting and scarpered in opposite directions.
'This isn't about keeping tabs on people, it's about making the streets safer for the law-abiding majority and helping to change the attitudes of those who cause trouble. It challenges unacceptable behaviour and makes people think twice.'
The Mail on Sunday watched as a cyclist riding through a pedestrian area was ordered to stop.
'Would the young man on the bike please get off and walk as he is riding in a pedestrian area,' came the command.
The surprised youth stopped, and looked about. A look of horror spread across his face as he realised the voice was referring to him.
He dismounted and wheeled his bike through the crowded streets, as instructed.
Law-abiding shopper Karen Margery, 40, was shocked to hear the speakers spring into action as she walked past them.
Afterwards she said: 'It's quite scary to realise that your every move could be monitored - it really is like Big Brother.
'But Middlesbrough does have a big problem with anti-social behaviour, so it is very reassuring.'
The scheme has been introduced by Middlesbrough mayor Ray Mallon, a former police superintendent who was dubbed Robocop for pioneering the zero-tolerance approach to crime.
He believes the talking cameras will dramatically cut not just anti-social behaviour, but violent crime, too.
And if the city centre scheme proves a success, it will be extended into residential areas.
The control room operators have been given strict guidelines about what commands they can give. Yelling 'Oi you, stop that', is not permitted.
Instead, their instructions make the following suggestions: 'Warning - you are being monitored by CCTV - Warning - you are in an alcohol-free zone, please refrain from drinking'; and Warning - your behaviour is being monitored by CCTV. It is being recorded and the police are attending.'
Mr Bonner said: 'We always make the requests polite, and if the offender obeys, the operator adds 'thank you'. We think that's a nice finishing touch.
'It would appear that the offenders are the only ones who find the audio cameras intrusive. The vast majority of people welcome these cameras.
'Put it this way, we never have requests to remove them.'
But civil rights campaigners have argued that the talking cameras are no 'magic bullet', in the fight against crime.
Liberty spokesman Doug Jewell said: 'None of us likes litterbugs or yobs playing up on a Saturday night, but talking CCTV cameras are no substitute for police officers on the beat.'
A convenience store videotape long-sought by September 11 conspiracy theorists does not actually show the attack on the Pentagon, RAW STORY has learned.
Many believed the video would show American Airlines Flight 77 -- or something else -- striking the Pentagon. The videotape, which depicts views from the gas station’s six security cameras, shows that the CITGO cameras did not seem to capture the actual attack.
Conservative organization Judicial Watch obtained the footage through a Freedom of Information Act request filed December 15, 2004. The request sought all records pertaining to September 11, 2001 camera recordings of the Pentagon attack from the Nexcomm/CITGO gas station, Pentagon security cameras and the Virginia Department of Transportation.
In May 2006, The Department of Defense released a number of videos depicting the attack in response to a Judicial Watch lawsuit. The group filed another lawsuit against the FBI on June 22, 2006.
The FBI has also agreed to release to Judicial Watch a videotape obtained from the Doubletree Hotel near the Pentagon by November 9, 2006.
"With the release of this videotape, we are one step closer to completing the public record on the September 11 terrorist attacks," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton in a statement. "The CITGO tape evidently does not show the Pentagon attack, which the American people can now see for themselves. This videotape was the subject of intense public debate. Now that it has been released to the public, there is no reason for further speculation about what it does or does not show."
The video may be viewed below. Images from inside the store have been partially obscured by the FBI to protect the privacy of store customers and employees.
Comment:
Now we just need to see the footage from the dozens of security cameras at the Pentagon...
From New Scientist Print Edition
16 September 2006
ON the ground, the legacy of 9/11 is starting to emerge from the dust.
Volunteers and emergency workers at ground zero as well as New York residents have been complaining of health problems since the attacks five years ago. Now doctors at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York say the problems are more serious, persistent and widespread than previously thought.
"An estimated 40,000 rescue and recovery workers were exposed to caustic dust and airborne toxic pollutants," says Philip Landrigan, who led the study. It found that of the 9500 ground-zero workers studied, almost 70 per cent of them had a new or substantially worsened respiratory problem as a result of breathing in dust from the collapsed buildings. One-third had diminished lung capacity.
The Bush administration has been criticised for ignoring the problem. The results, published in Environmental Health Perspectives (DOI: 10.1289/ehp.9592), will increase calls for the federal government to provide free healthcare for the estimated 40 per cent of workers who did not have health insurance. So far it has pledged $75 million to health programmes related to the attack. At a congressional subcommittee last week, Republican New York senator Vito Fossella said this was nowhere near enough. He said the government had not even recorded how many workers and volunteers took part in the cleanup.
From issue 2569 of New Scientist magazine, 16 September 2006, page 4
Zurich - 2973 people died in the attacks of 9/11th. The Bush clan shouted "Bin Laden" and "Al-Qaeda". The world believed them. Meanwhile even scientists doubt the Bush version themselves. The Swiss university assistant professors Albert A. Stahel (63) and Daniele Ganser (34) are asking hot questions now, too.
Strategy expert Stahel says "something isn't correct" in the "Weltwoche"(Swiss weekly) and refers to the "fragmentary" official 9/11 report of the U.S. government of 2004.
The university professor confirms the criticism to "BLICK" (Swiss tabloid):
Osama bin Laden can "not be the big godfather" behind the attacks. He hasn't had enough means of communication.
Stahel doubts that a airliner crashed into the Pentagon: "For flight amatuers it is actually impossible to hit the building as exactly (as they did)."
Seven hours after the Twin Towers the World Trade Center 7 collapsed. The official version: It burned a long time. Stahel: "It's not that obvious."
Historian Daniele Ganser, goes even further than Stahel, his colleague at the university of Zurich. He also calls the official U.S. version "a conspiracy theory": "There are 3 theories which we should treat with equal rights":
"Surprise theory":
Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda executed the attacks.
"Let it happen deliberately":
Part of the U.S. government knew the Al-Qaeda plans. They didn't react to legitimize a series of wars.
"Execute it deliberately themselves":
The attacks were executed by the Pentagon and/or secret services. The Bin Laden videos are forged. 3000 people were sacrificed for strategic interests.
Ganser: "The more we research, the more we doubt Bush's version." For him it is conceivable that the Bush government was responsible. "Bush has already lied so much! And 1962 there was already a plan in the Pentagon to sacrifice innocent U.S. citizens for there own interests."
Ganser doesn't go as far as Stahel: "I only ask questions."
Dan Rivers and Narunart Prapanya
CNN
September 16, 2006
HAT YAI, Thailand -- Six bombs exploded, one every five minutes, in a southern Thailand city, killing at least four people and wounding 30 on Saturday, police said.
The evening attacks in Hat Yai came just hours after a government-sponsored peace rally in the nearby town of Yala and on the 21st anniversary of the founding of the GMIP -- Gerakan Mujahideen Islami Pattani -- separatist movement.
The six bombs were placed about every 500 yards along the main commercial street, police said.
The targets included an Odeon department store, a marketplace and the Lee Garden Hotel, police said.
The explosives were hidden in motorbikes and a tuk tuk -- a tricycle taxi -- and were apparently triggered remotely by cell phones, police said.
Chaos followed in the streets of Hat Yai, which is normally free of the separatist violence that has plagued some of Thailand's southern provinces.
LAS CRUCES, New Mexico -- Police warned Las Cruces residents that they've received two letters threatening random shootings if city leaders fail to hand over a "substantial" ransom.
Police had received some information from the public Saturday but there had been no break in the case, Lt. Randy Lara said.
"Someone knows something out there, and hopefully this will generate more information for the case," he said.
The city received the second of two threatening letters Friday, but police remained tightlipped about details of the demand, including how much money was involved. They did say the demand called for a "substantial amount."
At a news conference late Friday, Lara said he didn't want to alarm residents but he urged them to watch for any suspicious activity.
"The letter did reference that Las Cruces residents will be shot at random if the city didn't comply with the extortion," Lara said.
The letter -- the second sent to the city in recent weeks -- was hand written with an unusual style of printing.
Authorities were taking the threat seriously, Lara said, but cautioned that officials don't know the intentions of the writer.
"Frankly we still don't know if we are dealing with a hoax or not," Lara said Saturday. "But after the second correspondence we felt it was necessary to go ahead and put the information out there -- with the caveat that people should still go about their daily business."
SINGAPORE, Sept. 17 (Xinhua) -- The World Bank and the United Nations officials warned the possible occurrence of pandemic of avian influenza here on Sunday.
"There will be a world animal and human influenza pandemic one day, but we don't know when," said David Nabarro, Senior United Nations System Coordinator for Avian and Human Influenza, at a press conference held here.
According to World Bank estimate, a severe flu pandemic among humans could cost the global economy up to about 3.1 to 4.8 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), which is between 1.25 trillion and 2 trillion U.S. dollars of a world GDP.
"Over the last 12 months, the avian influenza has gone global, spreading rapidly beyond its East Asian stronghold to the countries in South Asia, Europe, Middle East and Africa. So far, more than 50 countries have reported H5N1 outbreaks, most of them since January 2006, causing an estimate of 220 million bird deaths and significant damage to rural livelihoods, especially in the poorest areas," according to a World Bank's press release.
Nabarro said that they are now concerned that the H5N1 avian influenza virus would mutate to a new kind of virus and the virus would be transmitted from human to human someday.
"The world community has stood up and worked together to fight against the virus," said Jim Adams, Head of the World Bank's Avian Flu Taskforce.
The World Bank is ready to support developing countries to fight avian influenza in animals, while simultaneously preparing for a possible human flu pandemic through a global funding program, he added.
By ALAN ROBINSON
AP Sports Writer
September 17, 2006
PITTSBURGH - Five Duquesne basketball players, all but one of them new players who enrolled only this month, were shot early Sunday during an apparent act of random violence on campus. Two players were in critical condition, and the condition of a third hospitalized player was not immediately available.
Police were searching for a man believed to have done the shootings, and were investigating whether anyone else was involved. The shootings occurred about 2:15 a.m. as several players were returning from a campus party at the student union and others were sitting on benches outside Vickroy Hall, the dormitory where the shootings took place.
The players most badly injured were 6-foot-7 forward Sam Ashaolu, a transfer from Lake Region State College and a cousin of former Houston Rockets star Hakeem Olajuwon, and Stuard Baldonado, a 6-7 transfer from Miami Dade College who was considered the Dukes' best recruit.
Ashaolu is from Toronto, and his parents were traveling to Pittsburgh on Sunday to be with their son.
Also hospitalized is Kojo Mensah, a guard from Brooklyn, N.Y., who averaged nearly 17 points last season at Siena before transferring, school officials said at a news conference Sunday.
Treated and released from Mercy Hospital were 6-10 Shawn James, the nation's leading shot blocker last season at Northeastern before transferring to Duquesne, and Aaron Jackson, a guard who is one of only two returning players from Duquesne's 3-24 team of last season.
New Duquesne coach Ron Everhart, formerly at Northeastern, had rebuilt the Duquesne program almost from scratch after being hired in March by bringing in 10 recruits - one of the most sweeping upheavals of any Division I program in recent years.
According to police, two players were returning from a campus social function when they encountered a man who apparently had been disruptive at the party. After the players tried to calm the man, the players began walking away, only to be shot. Several other players who were nearby rushed to their aid, also to be shot.
James, expected to be Duquesne's top player when he becomes eligible in the 2007-08 season and an NBA prospect, was shot in the foot but no bones were broken. Mensah was believed to have been shot in the shoulder. Jackson was shot in the hand.
The shooter was not a Duquesne student, police said. Duquesne is located in downtown Pittsburgh.
"First and foremost, we are concerned about our students and are praying that each of them has a full recovery," Duquesne spokeswoman Bridget Fare said in a statement. "We will offer support and services to the victims and their families, as well as to our other students who may have been affected by this tragic incident. This type of situation has never occurred before on Duquesne's campus. The university is cooperating fully with the ongoing investigation."
Several students who were distraught after witnessing the shootings were being counseled Sunday.
MEXICO CITY, - The complicity in Mexico between child sex rings and the political and business elites "goes beyond what we can even imagine," says activist Lydia Cacho, who faces death threats and was even thrown briefly into prison for revealing those ties in a book.
"What we have just seen is only the tip of the iceberg," Cacho told IPS, after the local media aired Tuesday recordings of telephone conversations between two prominent politicians and a hotel owner now in prison, and a wealthy local businessman.
The number of Mexican politicians and businessmen involved in child pornography and sex rings "would shock us if we knew the real extent of the phenomenon," said Cacho.
In one of the illegally taped conversations broadcast Tuesday, which apparently date back to 2004, the governor of the state of Veracruz, Fidel Herrera of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and Emilio Gamboa, head of the party's bloc in the lower house of Congress, can be heard talking on friendly terms with textile mogul Kamel Nacif.
Nacif, a Mexican of Lebanese origin, who in the obscenity-laced conversation can be heard asking Gamboa to block a gambling bill to be debated by Congress, is suing Cacho for libel.
In her 2004 book "Los demonios del Edén" (The Demons of Eden), Cacho -- who is a journalist and writer as well as the director of a women's shelter in Cancún -- links Nacif with Jean Succar, a Lebanese-born hotel owner who is in prison facing charges of arranging paedophile parties in that Mexican resort town.
In another of the anonymously recorded conservations leaked to the press and broadcast Tuesday, Nacif can be heard talking with Succar.
Succar, under arrest in Mexico since July, after he was extradited from the United States, can be heard asking Nacif for a seven million dollar loan to purchase a hotel in Cancún, to which Nacif responds in the affirmative.
Later, the two exchange information on "the girl from Miami," who they refer to as "putita" (little whore), and who they say they have paid 2,000 dollars. Succar asks Nacif when it would be best to bring the girl to Cancún, and the latter responds that "next week, you son of a b***h, but you bring her to fornicate."
In Cacho's book, Succar is identified as the head of a ring of adults who subjected underage girls to sexual abuse in Cancún, in which Nacif allegedly took part.
Succar was arrested in February 2004 in the United States on child abuse charges and was extradited to Mexico in July, where he also faces charges for money laundering and organised crime.
"Los demonios del Edén" contains the personal accounts of minors who talk about the sexual abuse they suffered at the hands of a ring in which prominent figures were allegedly involved. The youngsters describe how the hotel owner sexually abused them himself, set up a prostitution ring to allow others to abuse them, and photographed them in order to sell the pornographic images on the Internet.
A 2004 study by researcher Elena Azaola, which estimated that some 17,000 children under the age of 18 are victims of the sex trade in Mexico, is also based on interviews with minors who managed to escape, as well as visits to establishments where underage girls and boys are forced to work as prostitutes.
The two PRI politicians, Herrera and Gamboa, denied having any illegal ties with Nacif, and said they did not even know Succar. From their point of view, the airing of the tapped phone conversations was a low political blow aimed at their party.
The PRI, which ruled Mexico from 1929 to 2000, came in third in the Jul. 2 presidential and legislative elections.
Gamboa is one of the lawmakers who have approached Felipe Calderón of the conservative governing National Action Party (PAN) over the last few days, since he was confirmed as president-elect by the electoral court.
Javier González, a leader of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) legislators, said the leaked conversations between Nacif and the PRI politicians showed that the political system "is rotten."
The PRD argues that its candidate, Andrés López Obrador, lost the elections to Calderón because of fraud.
Cacho agrees that corruption is rife. "Many businessmen like Nacif have amassed huge fortunes in exchange for dark favours to politicians."
So far, no direct link between politicians or prominent businessmen and child porn or sex rings has been proven. But there are suspicions, which are fuelled by Nacif and his web of contacts.
Cacho, who has been under police protection since last year, when she began to receive death threats, was referred to in earlier leaked conversations, between Nacif and Mario Marín, governor of the state of Puebla, near the capital.
In the tapped conversations, Marín, a member of the PRI, can be heard telling Nacif that "I just gave a bump on the head to that old witch."
The two men also discussed how they had the activist arrested and thrown into a cell with "nutcases and dykes (lesbians)," so that she would be raped -- something that did not occur, because in the prison, "the prisoners themselves and the guards protected me," the writer said in an earlier conversation with IPS.
The tapes, which were sent to the press anonymously and broadcast in February, were apparently recorded in December 2005, after Cacho was thrown into jail for 30 hours, after a grueling 20-hour drive from her home in Cancún to Puebla.
The activist was arrested in connection with the libel suit brought against her by Nacif.
But when the news of her arrest broke, the rights watchdog Amnesty International, the World Organisation Against Torture, the Inter-American Press Association and other international groups raised an outcry, and Cacho was released on bail.
After the scandal triggered by the leaked phone conversations in February, in which the governor of Puebla and Nacif -- who owns factories in that state -- are heard discussing actions to teach Cacho a lesson, the Supreme Court initiated an investigation to determine whether or not Marín had engaged in criminal activity.
Comment: It's not just Mexico, it's everwhere including the United States, UK and Europe.
If you have a passport, now is the time to renew it -- even if it's not set to expire anytime soon. If you don't have a passport and think you might need one, now is the time to get it. In many countries, including the United States, passports will soon be equipped with RFID chips. And you don't want one of these chips in your passport.
RFID stands for "radio-frequency identification." Passports with RFID chips store an electronic copy of the passport information: your name, a digitized picture, etc. And in the future, the chip might store fingerprints or digital visas from various countries.
By itself, this is no problem. But RFID chips don't have to be plugged in to a reader to operate. Like the chips used for automatic toll collection on roads or automatic fare collection on subways, these chips operate via proximity. The risk to you is the possibility of surreptitious access: Your passport information might be read without your knowledge or consent by a government trying to track your movements, a criminal trying to steal your identity or someone just curious about your citizenship.
At first the State Department belittled those risks, but in response to criticism from experts it has implemented some security features. Passports will come with a shielded cover, making it much harder to read the chip when the passport is closed. And there are now access-control and encryption mechanisms, making it much harder for an unauthorized reader to collect, understand and alter the data.
Although those measures help, they don't go far enough. The shielding does no good when the passport is open. Travel abroad and you'll notice how often you have to show your passport: at hotels, banks, Internet cafes. Anyone intent on harvesting passport data could set up a reader at one of those places. And although the State Department insists that the chip can be read only by a reader that is inches away, the chips have been read from many feet away.
The other security mechanisms are also vulnerable, and several security researchers have already discovered flaws. One found that he could identify individual chips via unique characteristics of the radio transmissions. Another successfully cloned a chip. The State Department called this a "meaningless stunt," pointing out that the researcher could not read or change the data. But the researcher spent only two weeks trying; the security of your passport has to be strong enough to last 10 years.
This is perhaps the greatest risk. The security mechanisms on your passport chip have to last the lifetime of your passport. It is as ridiculous to think that passport security will remain secure for that long as it would be to think that you won't see another security update for Microsoft Windows in that time. Improvements in antenna technology will certainly increase the distance at which they can be read and might even allow unauthorized readers to penetrate the shielding.
Whatever happens, if you have a passport with an RFID chip, you're stuck. Although popping your passport in the microwave will disable the chip, the shielding will cause all kinds of sparking. And although the United States has said that a nonworking chip will not invalidate a passport, it is unclear if one with a deliberately damaged chip will be honored.
The Colorado passport office is already issuing RFID passports, and the State Department expects all U.S. passport offices to be doing so by the end of the year. Many other countries are in the process of changing over. So get a passport before it's too late. With your new passport you can wait another 10 years for an RFID passport, when the technology will be more mature, when we will have a better understanding of the security risks and when there will be other technologies we can use to cut the risks. You don't want to be a guinea pig on this one.
By Alister Doyle
Reuters Environment Correspondent
Fri Sep 15, 2006
OSLO - Polar bears are drowning and receding Arctic glaciers have uncovered previously unknown islands in a drastic 2006 summer thaw widely blamed on global warming.
Signs of wrenching changes are apparent around the Arctic region due to unusual warmth -- the summer minimum for ice is usually reached between mid-September and early October before the Arctic freeze extends its grip.
"We know about three new islands this year that have been uncovered because the glaciers have retreated," said Rune Bergstrom, environmental adviser to the governor of Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago about 1,000 km (600 miles) from the North Pole.
The largest is about 300 by 100 meters, he told Reuters.
On a trip this summer "We saw a couple of polar bears in the sea east of Svalbard -- one of them looked to be dead and the other one looked to be exhausted," said Julian Dowdeswell, head of the Scott Polar Research Institute in England.
He said that the bears had apparently been stranded at sea by melting ice. The bears generally live around the fringes of the ice where they find it easiest to hunt seals.
NASA projected this week that Arctic sea ice is likely to recede in 2006 close to a low recorded in 2005 as part of a melting trend in recent decades. A stormy August in 2006 had slightly slowed the 2006 melt.
"There are very unusual conditions this year from Svalbard to Alaska," said Samantha Smith, director of the WWF's environmental group's Arctic Programme.
One international study in 2004 projected that summer ice could disappear completely by 2100, undermining the livelihoods of indigenous peoples and driving creatures such as polar bears toward extinction.
WAKE-UP CALL
Smith said the shrinking ice should be a wake-up call for governments to cut emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly from power plants, factories and cars that most scientists say are causing global warming.
"The Arctic is likely to warm more than any other part of the world" because of global warming, said Dowdeswell. Darker water and soil, once exposed, soaks up far more of the sun's heat than mirror-like ice and snow.
The melt may also open up the Arctic to more exploration for oil, gas and minerals, increase fisheries and open a short-cut shipping route linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
Ian Stirling, a researcher with the Canadian Wildlife Service, said polar bears were finding it harder to find food, threatening their ability to reproduce.
"In 1980 the average weight of adult females in western Hudson Bay was 650 pounds (300 kg). Their average weight in 2004 was just 507 pounds," he said in a report this week. Numbers in the Hudson Bay region dropped to 950 in 2004 from 1,200 in 1989.
For some, the unseasonal warmth is good news. It was 5 C (41 F) on Friday in Longyearbyen, the main village on Svalbard. "Last year the first snow fell here on September 11 and stayed all winter," said Bergstrom.
"A lot of people here have boats to go out hunting in summer and go to cabins. So it's a good year for them -- the ice melted earlier and they can still use the boats," he said.
WRIGHTSVILLE BEACH, N.C. - A wayward Arctic ice seal was found Friday on a beach in southern North Carolina, far from its usual habitat.
The 4-foot-long seal didn't seem to be emaciated and growled at beachgoers at Wrightsville Beach, said Ann Pabst, a marine biologist at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. It was taken to the state aquarium.
"An ice seal, by definition, is out of habitat when it's found this far south," Pabst said.
The seal's appearance on a southern beach isn't unprecedented, said Wendy Walton, a veterinarian technician with the Virginia Aquariums stranding program.
A half dozen wayward ice seals have been brought to the facility in the past two months. The seals have been found as far south as Florida and the Caribbean. Walton said it was too early to tell whether the seal would be released.
TOKYO, Sept. 17 (Xinhua) -- Typhoon Shanshan caused landfall on Japan's southwestern island of Kyushu on Sunday evening, the Japan Meteorological Agency said, while downpours and strong winds have claimed seven people's lives in Japan since Saturday.
According to Kyodo News, three people were newly found dead in the southern Miyazaki Prefecture, adding the death toll to seven.
In the southern city of Hiroshima, a volunteer firefighter who was out on patrol Saturday night, was found dead in a river on Sunday morning. A local newspaper reporter who went to a disaster site Saturday night is still missing, according to the police.
In southwestern Saga prefecture, a father and a daughter were killed when their car was hit by a flash flood on Saturday. Besides, a man was found dead on a submerged road in the prefecture on Saturday noon.
Japan's Meteorological Agency said that the typhoon, packing winds of up to 144 kilometers per hour near its center, made landfall near Sasebo, Nagasaki prefecture, shortly after 6 p.m. (0900 GMT) Sunday, and was moving north-northeast at 35 kph.
The typhoon caused the derailment of a city train Sunday afternoon in Nobeoka, Miyazaki prefecture, with six people on board slightly injured.
Meanwhile, 450 flights to and from Kyushu airports were canceled due to the typhoon Sunday, affecting 40,000 passengers, while operations of several trains, including Shinkansen bullet trains, were also canceled.
For about a 24-hour period through 6 p.m. Monday, 350 millimeters of rainfall was expected on the Pacific Ocean side of the southern Shikoku region and 200 mm on the region's Setouchi area plus the Kinki, Tokai and Chugoku regions, the weather service said.
From New Scientist Print Edition
17 September 2006
African countries last week agreed a plan to tackle a new and ultra-lethal strain of tuberculosis called Extensive Drug Resistant TB (XDR-TB).
It is especially harmful to people infected with HIV, killing 52 out of 53 HIV-positive people who caught it after attending a clinic in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, earlier this year. All were infected with the same strain, suggesting that one infected person spread it to all the rest. Most died within 25 days - long before the three months it takes to get lab test results back.
At an emergency meeting in Johannesburg last week, the World Health Organization, the South African Medical Research Council and African health officials agreed a plan to screen for XDR-TB in 11 other African countries to see just how widespread it is. Until now, South Africa was the only African country capable of testing for it.
"We strongly fear that XDR-TB is likely to be in other places in Africa," says Paul Nunn, head of the WHO's TB drug resistance team.
New Scientist Print Edition
Stuart Clark
18 September 2006
It is known as the Little Ice Age. Bitter winters blighted much of the northern hemisphere for decades in the second half of the 17th century. The French army used frozen rivers as thoroughfares to invade the Netherlands. New Yorkers walked from Manhattan to Staten Island across the frozen harbour. Sea ice surrounded Iceland for miles and the island's population halved. It wasn't the first time temperatures had plunged: a couple of hundred years earlier, between 1420 and 1570, a climatic downturn claimed the Viking colonies on Greenland, turning them from fertile farmlands into arctic wastelands.
Could the sun have been to blame? We now know that, curiously, both these mini ice ages coincided with prolonged lulls in the sun's activity - the sunspots and dramatic flares that are driven by its powerful magnetic field.
Now some astronomers are predicting that the sun is about to enter another quiet period.
With climate scientists warning that global warming is approaching a tipping point, beyond which rapid and possibly irreversible damage to our environment will be unavoidable, a calm sun and a resultant cold snap might be exactly what we need to give us breathing space to agree and enact pollution controls. "It would certainly buy us some time," says Joanna Haigh, an atmospheric physicist at Imperial College London.
Global average temperatures have risen by about 0.6 °C in the past century, and until recently almost all of this has been put down to human activity. But that may not be the only factor at work. A growing number of scientists believe that there are clear links between the sun's activity and the temperature on Earth. While solar magnetic activity cannot explain away global warming completely, it does seem to have a significant impact. "A couple of years ago, I would not have said that there was any evidence for solar activity driving temperatures on Earth," says Paula Reimer, a palaeoclimate expert at Queen's University, Belfast, in the UK. "Now I think there is fairly convincing evidence."
What has won round Reimer and others is evidence linking climate to sunspots. These blemishes on the sun's surface appear and fade over days, weeks or months, depending on their size. More than a mere curiosity, they are windows on the sun's mood. They are created by contortions in the sun's magnetic field and their appearance foretells massive solar eruptions that fling billions of tonnes of gas into space. Fewer sunspots pop up when the sun is calm, and historically these periods have coincided with mini ice ages.
The number of sunspots and solar magnetic activity in general normally wax and wane in cycles lasting around 11 years, but every 200 years or so, the sunspots all but disappear as solar activity slumps (see "Field feedback"). For the past 50 years, on the other hand, the sun has been particularly restless. "If you look back into the sun's past, you find that we live in a period of abnormally high solar activity," says Nigel Weiss, a solar physicist at the University of Cambridge.
Fortunately, an indirect record of the sun's moods stretching back thousands of years has been preserved on Earth in the concentrations of rare isotopes locked into tree rings and ice cores. The story begins way out beyond the orbit of Pluto, at the boundary of the sun's magnetic field. While the sun is magnetically calm, its field extends around 12 billion kilometres into space, but the field puffs up to 15 billion kilometres when the sun is active. Cosmic rays - the high-energy particles from deep space that are constantly hurtling towards us - are deflected by the field, so at active times far fewer of them reach the Earth.
Cosmic correlation
The rays that do reach our planet leave traces in the form of carbon-14 and beryllium-10, isotopes that are only created when cosmic rays slam into the Earth's atmosphere. Plants and trees then absorb carbon-14, while beryllium-10 settles onto the polar ice sheets and becomes incorporated into that year's ice layer. So by measuring the levels of the isotopes in tree rings and polar ice cores, we can work out how many cosmic rays were reaching Earth when the rings or ice layers were formed, and so estimate how active the sun was at those times.
Sami Solanki and his team at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, have looked at the concentrations of carbon-14 in wood and beryllium-10 in ice as far back as back 11,000 years ago. The similarity of the fluctuations in both isotopes convinced them that they were seeing effects due to the sun. The peaks and slumps showed a recognisable pattern: "Periods of high solar activity do not last long, perhaps 50 to 100 years, then you get a crash," says Weiss. "It's a boom-bust system, and I would expect a crash soon."
Although another crash is likely, predicting the sun's activity with any certainty is difficult because of the chaotic way in which the solar magnetic field is generated. If anyone can do it, though, it's solar physicist turned computer programmer Leif Svalgaard, from Stanford University in California, who has been forecasting solar activity for nearly three decades. In the 1970s, he pioneered the best forecasting method yet devised, which uses the strength of the magnetic field at the sun's poles to predict future levels of solar activity.
He too expects a crash. The sun's polar field is now at its weakest since measurements began in the early 1950s, and to Svalgaard, the latest figures indicate that the sun's activity will be weaker during the next decade than it has been for more than 100 years. "Sunspot numbers are well on the way down in the next decade," he predicts. He expects fewer than six new sunspots per month, less than half the average number seen over the past decade.
This is hardly the sunspot crash that observations from 1645 to 1715 suggest. Back then, the appearance of even a single sunspot was major astronomical news, sparking hurriedly penned communications from one observatory to another. Nevertheless, it's a sign of things to come. "Sunspot numbers will be extremely small, and when the sun crashes, it crashes hard," says Svaalgard.
Hot link
So what does the sun's magnetic activity have to do with the climate on Earth? To pin down the connection, Solanki and his colleagues compared records of solar activity derived from tree rings with meteorological records from 1856 to the present day. They found that the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere changed in step with sunspot numbers until 1970. This is the evidence that has done more than anything else to convince climatologists to take the link seriously. What's more, the most recent calculations by Solanki's team suggest that the sunspot crash could lead to a cooling of the Earth's atmosphere by 0.2 °C. It might not sound much, but this temperature reversal would be as big as the most optimistic estimate of the results of restricting greenhouse-gas emissions until 2050 in line with the Kyoto protocol.
There is still a big puzzle, though. Astronomers and climate scientists have always struggled to understand exactly how solar activity could influence the temperature on Earth. Whatever the variations in the sun's magnetic activity, the total energy it emits changes by only 0.1 per cent - too small a change to have any direct effect. As a result, the sun's role in climate change is highly controversial. "People have been arguing over this for years," says Reimer.
What other factor is at work? Important clues have emerged recently from solar observatories, including the SOHO spacecraft operated by NASA and the European Space Agency for the past 10 years. Although the change in overall solar energy is small, measurements made by SOHO and other solar observatories have revealed much greater variation in the levels of ultraviolet radiation, which can peak at up to 100 times its minimum level. "This means that there is scope for ultraviolet to have a much larger effect on our atmosphere," says Haigh, who for the past decade has been studying the impact of the sun's variability on climate.
According to computer models she has developed, ultraviolet radiation heats the upper reaches of the Earth's atmosphere by energising atoms and molecules there. This drives chemical reactions involving ozone and other molecules, which can release still more heat. This heating changes the temperature structure of the atmosphere at all altitudes, although the details are unclear because of the sheer complexity of Haigh's model. "By varying the amount of ultraviolet radiation, solar activity changes the circulation of the whole atmosphere," she says. Change the circulation, and you change the weather.
Haigh's work may help to explain one of the most puzzling aspects of the Little Ice Age: "Europe was badly hit, but other parts of the world may not really have noticed it," says Solanki. This might have been due to the different distribution of land masses in the northern and southern hemispheres. While Antarctica is surrounded by a wide belt of ocean, the distribution of land and oceans in the northern hemisphere is much less regular. This means that the interaction between the circulating atmosphere and the ground is more complex in the northern hemisphere. It gives rise to the North Atlantic Oscillation, an interplay of low and high pressure that dictates the movement of storms across the continents bordering the north Atlantic.
Haigh has found that at times of low solar activity the air pressure over the North Pole is higher than normal and forces storms south, funnelling colder weather to lower latitudes. What happens in the southern hemisphere is less well known, but Haigh says she wouldn't be surprised if the reaction here to changes in solar activity is different.
Solar activity might also influence climate through its effect on cosmic rays. In another study, Solanki has found an intriguing correlation between the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere and the number of cosmic rays striking it, with lower temperatures in periods of high numbers of cosmic rays.
How could cosmic rays lead to cooler temperatures? Enter a theory proposed by Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen of the Danish Meteorology Institute in Copenhagen almost a decade ago. They suggested that cosmic rays create an electric charge in particles in our atmosphere that then act as seeds for the formation of clouds at low altitudes. A spell of low solar activity would mean more cosmic rays and therefore more clouds and lower temperatures.
Svensmark and Friis-Christensen's idea is controversial, however (New Scientist, 11 July 1998, p 45). Most climatologists accept that more low clouds would reflect more radiation back into space, thus lowering temperatures. But many dismiss Svensmark and Friis-Christensen's evidence of a link between cosmic rays and cloud cover as coincidence (see "Cloud cover"). Others want the theory investigated, if only to rule it out. To this end, an international group of more than 50 scientists have proposed an experiment at the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, to begin in 2008.
No room for complacency
The coming years could settle the sun's role on temperatures once and for all. If the expected sunspot crash does takes place, Solanki's work could receive dramatic confirmation. "Having a crash would certainly allow us to pin down the sun's true level of influence on the Earth's climate," says Weiss.
None of this means that we can stop worrying about global warming caused by emissions into the atmosphere. "The temperature of the Earth in the past few decades does not correlate with solar activity at all," Solanki says. He estimates that solar activity is responsible for only 30 per cent, at most, of the warming since 1970. The rest must be the result of man-made greenhouse gases, and a crash in solar activity won't do anything to get rid of them.
What might happen is that the sun gives the planet a welcome respite from the ravages of man-made climate change - though for how long, nobody knows. During the Little Ice Age, the fall in average global temperature is estimated to have been less than 1 °C and lasted 70 years. The one before that persisted for 150 years, but a minor crash at the beginning of the 19th century lasted barely 30. For now, we will have to keep watching for falling sunspot numbers. "The deeper the crash, the longer it will last," Weiss says.
There is a dangerous flip side to this coin. If global warming does slow down or partially reverse with a sunspot crash, industrial polluters and reluctant nations could use it as a justification for turning their backs on pollution controls altogether, makingmatters worse in the long run. There is no room for complacency, Svalgaard warns: "If the Earth does cool during the next sunspot crash and we do nothing, when the sun's magnetic activity returns, global warming will return with a vengeance."
SIDEBARS
Field feedback
Sunspots and solar activity are driven by the strength of the sun's complex magnetic field. Although solar scientists are still debating the detail, most believe that the magnetic field is generated in a shell of hot gas 35,000 kilometres thick and buried some 200,000 kilometres deep inside the sun. Known as the tachocline, this layer is made of plasma - a gas so hot that the atoms break up into charged electrons and ions.
Material at different latitudes and depths of the tachocline rotates at different rates. This variability moves electric charges and generates the sun's magnetic field. Once created, the magnetic field is strong enough to influence the movement of the electrically charged gas that creates it, a feedback mechanism that can either strongly amplify or diminish the overall strength of the field. For the past 50 years the field has been building, and the sun has been experiencing a period of unusually high magnetic activity.
Predicting future solar activity is tricky because of this complexity. The best method in use today was formulated in the 1970s by Leif Svalgaard, then at Stanford University. He showed that the magnetic field at the sun's poles is the best predictor. "The polar field is the magnetic seed for solar activity," Svalgaard says.
The polar fields are the accumulation of dead sunspots, transient dark patches on the sun's surface that have immense magnetic fields. When a spot fades from view, its residual magnetic field is gradually swept polewards by a surface current of solar gas known as the meridional flow. At the poles, this flow turns down into the sun, where astronomers believe it sinks to the tachocline and begins a return journey towards the sun's equator. En route, the magnetic field is rejuvenated by the tachocline to produce new sunspots.
Cloud cover
In 1997, meteorologists Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen of the Danish Meteorology Institute in Copenhagen analysed weather satellite records from 1979 to 1992. This was long enough for the sun's activity to complete one of its regular 11-year cycles.
The researchers found that the Earth was 3 per cent cloudier when the sun's activity was at a minimum than when it was at its peak. They also noted the influx of cosmic rays at five experiments across the globe and found that it was as much as 25 per cent higher at the solar minimum. They called their discovery a "missing link in solar-climate relationships" and argued that cosmic rays were responsible for increasing cloud formation by electrically charging the lower atmosphere.
Intriguing as this link is, it is far from proof that solar activity and cloud cover are connected. "You have to demonstrate such an effect with an experiment, otherwise it is not physics," says Robert Bingham, a physicist at the UK's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Didcot, Oxfordshire.
Bingham is part of an international collaboration building an experiment called CLOUD to test the idea that cosmic rays seed clouds. CLOUD will start up in 2008 using a particle accelerator at the CERN laboratory near Geneva as a source of simulated cosmic rays. The researchers will fire charged particles through a chamber holding a mixture of gases similar to the Earth's atmosphere to determine how often the particles trigger cloud formation. "CLOUD will go a long way towards understanding the microphysics of droplet formation," says Bingham.
From issue 2569 of New Scientist magazine, 18 September 2006, page 32-36
September 17, 2006 7:19 a.m. EST
Ryan R. Jones - All Headline News Middle East Correspondent
Jerusalem, Israel (AHN) - A moderate earthquake measuring 4.0 on the Richter scale was felt across much of central Israel Sunday morning. Police said there were no reports of injuries or damage as a result of the temblor.
Seismologists with the Israel Geophysical Institute put the epicenter of Sunday's quake at the Dead Sea.
Similarly-sized earthquakes have hit Israel with what appears to be increasing frequency over the past year.
Just eight days earlier, an earthquake measuring 4.4 on the Richter scale and centered on the northern Jordan Valley struck the region. Several months ago, a slightly smaller tremor hit at the same location.
A magnitude 4 earthquake struck just north of the Dead Sea exactly one year ago, and was felt throughout the country.
The Dead Sea, Jordan Valley and Sea of Galilee sit atop the Syrian-African Rift, one of the world's largest fault lines.
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina - A strong earthquake sent panicked residents fleeing from their homes Sunday in Argentina, but it caused no injuries or damages, authorities said.
The magnitude 6.1 quake was felt in the provinces of Mendoza, San Juan and La Rioja. Its epicenter was in Pampa de las Salinas, about 745 miles northeast of Buenos Aires and it was the second in less than a week to shake the region.
A magnitude 5.7 quake struck the San Juan province on Tuesday but also caused no injuries or damage.
From New Scientist Print Edition
16 September 2006
OLDER people who feel that they are "losing their mind" may be closer to the truth than anyone had realised.
Tests on a group of people over the age of 60 who complained of significant memory problems have shown that even those who performed well on cognitive tests had a 3 per cent reduction in the density of brain tissue in an area known to be important for memory (Neurology, vol 67, p 834). The findings could lead to earlier detection and treatment of Alzheimer's disease, says Andrew J. Saykin at Dartmouth Medical School in Lebanon, New Hampshire, who led the study.
He believes that such individuals may be suffering from an early form of mild cognitive impairment, a precursor to the more serious memory loss associated with Alzheimer's. Previous studies of people known to have the disease have found significantly more severe reductions in the density and volume of brain tissue.
Saykin says that elderly patients who complain of memory loss but perform well on cognitive tests ought not to be dismissed as the "worried well", but should be evaluated and closely monitored over time.
From issue 2569 of New Scientist magazine, 16 September 2006, page 17
Science aGOGO
Mount Sinai School of Medicine
18 Sept 06
Scheduled for publication in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, a study by Mount Sinai School of Medicine researchers extends and strengthens the hypothesis that dietary regimens involving caloric restriction might halt, or even reverse, Alzheimer's disease. The researchers, working with Squirrel Monkeys, speculate that restricting caloric intake may prevent Alzheimer's by triggering activity in the brain associated with longevity.
The monkeys in the study were put on either a calorie restrictive or normal diet for their entire lifespan until they died of natural causes. Upon examining animals from both groups, the researchers found that those on a 30 percent calorie restriction had reduced Alzheimer's type amyloid neuropathology in the temporal cortex relative to the normally fed monkeys. Interestingly, the decreased Alzheimer's pathology correlated with increased longevity of related protein SIRT1, located in the same brain region that influences a variety of functions including aging related diseases.
The researchers behind the study are bullish about future prospects for treating humans with Alzheimer's. "CR [caloric restriction] may exert beneficial effects on delaying the onset of Alzheimer's disease - amyloid brain neuropathology in humans, similar to that observed in squirrel monkey and rodent models of Alzheimer's disease," said Mount Sinai researcher Dr. Giulio Maria Pasinetti. "The findings offer a glimmer of hope that there may someday be a way to prevent and stop this devastating disease in its tracks."
"Many Christian psychology professionals are only average pew warmers, who then practice secular psychology." ~ Pastor Steven J. Cole
Psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung changed the way we think about the human psyche. For those who have never heard of him, he was the foremost pioneer of dream analysis, which is the process of assigning meaning to dreams. In many ancient traditions dreams were considered to be messages from the gods.
Jung's research asserts the concept of an impersonal or "collective unconscious" (a type of library containing everything ever known) present in each person's unconscious. The inspiration came to Jung from contacting the spirit realm. Jung claimed that his spirit guide, Philemon (more on "it" later), was a source of information that gave him crucial insights. According to Don Matzat, "Jung theorized that all humanity, past and present, were connected on an unconscious plane. Therefore, deep within each individual was the collective wisdom of the ages, including all religious, mythical content. ... Jung placed a "scientific" footing under occult phenomena and mystical experience. Jung was deeply involved in the occult and did his doctoral thesis on parapsychology. He also was interested in Catholic mysticism and conducted seminars on the teachings of Ignatius Loyola."
The lie detector test and the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) are also based on Jung's theories. MBTI is a personality and psychological test to see what makes people tick. Are you an extrovert or an introvert? Do you mentally live in the now or in the future? Do you plan in advance, or do you move into action without a plan? Take a personality quiz and find out! Several years ago a church I attended gave newcomers the MBTI to identify their spiritual gifts. Knowing an individual's desires and gifts helped the leadership figure out where they could best serve the church body. It's pretty much a given to say that in most congregations today, 20 percent of the people do 80 percent of the work. Which means desires and gifts have to be put on the back burner when there's a shortage of Sunday school teachers. So why take the test in the first place? But I digress.
Carl Jung was a "spiritual thinker" who offered Western culture a way back to religion that places no shame on being human. Spiritual teacher, codependency therapist and author, Robert Burney, agrees with Jung: "We are not sinful, shameful human creatures who have to somehow earn Spirituality. We are Spiritual Beings having a human experience."
If Burney's assertion is correct, and the human race isn't sinful, then the Bible is nothing more than myths and fables -- and Jesus was a nut job for declaring He was the Son of God who came into the world to die for the sins of all mankind. Jesus clearly taught that we are sinners, with a capital S, and "fall short of the glory of God." Sin was the reason Jesus went to the cross. His death was payment for mankind's sin debt. Thus He threw open the gates of heaven, and all who believe in Him will be reconciled to God. If it's true that we are merely "Spiritual Beings having a human experience" as Burney claims, the Son of God would have had no reason to leave His throne in heaven and come to Earth. Which is Burney's whole point! If we're not sinners, we have no need of a Savior!
But what if Burney and all the other Jungian psychologists have it wrong? If they do, those that never admit their sin and accept Christ as their Lord and Savior are in a real pickle. Basically they have a one-way ticket on the H Train. Once you're on that train, there's no getting off, no turning back.
Bear with me for a moment while I share the biblical account of the Fall of Man (and woman, if you must). "When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom (emphasis added), she took some and ate it." Because the fruit was pleasing to the eye Eve gave into temptation. She came, she saw, she ate. Bingo! Her eyes were opened. In one split second Eve went from God-centeredness to self-centeredness. From thereon out everything went downhill. "She also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked"(Genesis 3:6). When Adam and Eve deliberately disobeyed God, sin, which is deadlier than the AIDS virus, entered into the world and infected all humankind. And the only sin cure is Jesus Christ!
Burney's approach to psychology might seem right for unbelievers, but it's wrong for Bible believing Christians.
Which brings me back to Carl Jung. As I mentioned above, Jung was considered a "spiritual thinker," albeit his lofty ideas came from Eastern mysticism, not Christianity or Judaism. The man was no ordinary psychologist by any stretch. Actually, he thought of himself as a "spiritist." According to Elliot Miller, "The movement that Jung initiated is much closer in nature to a neopagan (Aryan) cult than the scientific psychiatric discipline that it has always claimed to be. It is not just religious but a religion." And a pagan religion at that!
Jung was deeply involved with his mother and two female cousins in hypnotically induced séances. He was also involved in alchemy, fortune telling, and channeling spirits. All are occult practices. To be involved in any of this is to go against God. Ponder this for a moment. When Carl Jung was three years old a "spirit guide" named Philemon contacted him. The spirit was one of his teachers and tutored him all of his life. Other spirits came to him as well and he made this observation about them: "Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force that was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. [...] Psychologically, Philemon represented superior insight." There was no reason for Jung to believe that his visitors were benevolent spirits; nevertheless he chose to believe they were. Could the "forces that were not myself" have been the forces of evil? Absolutely! Scripture tells us that Satan masquerades as an angel of light, which is why John gave this warning: "Do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world" (I John 4). John calls the devil the "father of lies" and addressed the Gnostics with these harsh words, "You belong to your father, the devil," he says, "and you want to carry out your father's desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies" (John 8:44).
Carl Jung has been called the "Father of Neo-Gnosticism and the New Age Movement" and rightly so. Dr. Satinover comments, "One of the most powerful modern forms of Gnosticism is without question Jungian psychology, both within or without the Church."
Jung's view of good and evil is worth noting. To quote the Rev. Ed Hird, "Jung believed that 'the Christ-symbol lacks wholeness in the modern psychological sense, since it does not include the dark side of things...' For Jung, it was regrettable that Christ in his goodness lacked a shadow side, and God the Father, who is the Light, lacked darkness."
Further, Jung believed not that good should overcome evil; good should be integrated with evil in order to achieve wholeness. "The homosexual who has the courage to 'come out', for example, is welcoming and integrating the darker and 'opposite-sex side of the personality. There can be no moral condemnation when wholeness is achieved."
The Apostle Paul has something to say about uniting good and evil, (my comments in brackets) "Do not be joined to unbelievers. What do right (good) and wrong (evil) have in common? Can light (good) and darkness (evil) be friends? How can Christ (our standard of goodness) and Satan (pure evil) agree? What does a believer (good) have in common with an unbeliever (evil)?" (1 Cor. 6:14, 15) The answer to Paul's last question is, in a word, nothing! The Prophet Habakkuk says of God, "Your eyes are too pure to look on evil; you cannot tolerate wrong" (Habakkuk 1:13).
Unfortunately, Jungianism has influenced not only our popular culture, but Christian teaching as well, in spite of the fact that God expressly forbids practicing sorcery in any way shape or form. (Leviticus 19:26-31; II Chronicles 33:6; Isaiah 47:8-11) J. Budziszewski, professor of Government and Philosophy at the University of Texas, says this about Jungianism: "[It] is based on damnable lies about the nature of good, evil, God, and the human soul. Yet these lies are being taught in ostensibly Christian seminaries and promoted by ostensibly Christian psychotherapists. I shuddered when I spoke to a Christian lady who said that her minister had been teaching her to 'gain strength from her dark side.'"
Amazingly, Jung believed that "It is possible for a man to attain totality, to become whole, only with the co-operation of the spirit of darkness..." Jung said that opposites always balance one another and "onesideness, though it lends momentum, is a sign of barbarism." Who knew?
"How can these dangerous teachings be confronted?" asks Budziszewski. His answer is to inform Christians who have never heard of Carl Jung about his New Age teaching. Many years ago when I first heard about Jungianism it was described to me as a kind of psychoanalysis that's open to "spirituality." (Not knowing what was really behind "spirituality" I started reading "Christian psychology books.")
The catchword "spirituality" has a whole host of meanings. For Carl Jung spirituality "blended psychological reductionism with gnostic spirituality to produce a modern variant of mystical, pagan polytheism in which the multiple 'images of the instincts' (his 'archetypes') are worshipped as gods."
The difficulty, says Budziszewski, is that there's a little truth mixed in with Jung's lies. "Through a little twist, he turns the truth that for the time being God tolerates certain evils into the lie that God is beyond good and evil. Through another twist, he turns the truth that we must reckon with what we repress into the lie that we must achieve a reconciliation with what is evil. To dispel this kind of confusion, we need to identify each truth, but show how he distorts it."
For "the wolves of the flock," who fully understand what Jung's ideas mean, and teach them anyway, Budziszewski gives this advice: "Like the Gnostics against whom St. Paul and the early church waged spiritual battle, these people don't need instruction, but rebuke. Christ gave disciplinary authority to the church for a reason (emphasis added). He meant it to be used."
Budziszewski says we face two obstacles to exposing Jung's earlier writings: (1) His writings were composed in a misleading style. (2) His teachings twisted the truth rather than ignoring it. He suggests that Christians respond to this dangerous philosophy in two ways: First, become informed about the deceptive teachings of Jung's psychology. Second, familiarize yourself with the metaphysical concepts and techniques of New Agers.
If someone claims to be a Christian and yet embraces an incompatible, non-Christian pluralistic worldview, he/she has not received the Spirit of God. In Scripture believers are admonished, "give no regard to mediums and familiar spirits; do not seek after them, to be defiled by them: I am the Lord your God" (Leviticus 19:31). How much plainer could God be?
Because of what we know about Carl Jung, it would be wrong for Christians to "seek after" his dangerous worldview. Christians play a part in his twisted religion when they incorporate the theories and therapies that come from dream analysis, 12-step programs, inner healing, and through personality types and tests. Apostle Paul warns, "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God" (Romans 12:2).
I suspect that I'm going to receive a lot of hate mail for daring to express my views on psychology in the Church. I don't pretend to be an expert on this subject. Far from it. I'm only expressing my personal opinion and the opinion of many other Christians who are opposed to meshing sorcery with Christianity for any reason. And that's exactly what so-called "Christian psychology" does. It might help some people, but at what cost?
"We must carefully discern the theories and practices of modern psychology before we visit them upon the people of God." --Don Matzat
Psychologists have launched a study to find out why some people who hear voices in their head consider it a positive experience while others find it distressing.
The University of Manchester investigation - announced on World Hearing Voices Day (Thursday, 14th September) - comes after Dutch researchers found that many healthy members of the population there regularly hear voices.
Although hearing voices has traditionally been viewed as 'abnormal' and a symptom of mental illness, the Dutch findings suggest it is more widespread than previously thought, estimating that about 4% of the population could be affected.
Researcher Aylish Campbell said: "We know that many members of the general population hear voices but have never felt the need to access mental health services; some experts even claim that more people hear voices and don't seek psychiatric help than those who do.
"In fact, many of those affected describe their voices as being a positive influence in their lives, comforting or inspiring them as they go about their daily business. We're now keen to investigate why some people respond in this way while others are distressed and seek outside help."
Although the voices heard by psychiatric patients and members of the general population seem to be of the same volume and frequency, the former group tend to interpret the voices as more distressing and negative.
The team believes that external factors such as a person's life experiences and beliefs may be the key to these differences: for example, the presence of childhood trauma or negative beliefs about themselves could have an affect.
"If a person is struggling to overcome a trauma or views themselves as worthless or vulnerable, or other people as aggressive, they may be more likely to interpret their voices as harmful, hostile or powerful," said Aylish.
"Conversely, a person who has had more positive life experiences and formed more healthy beliefs about themselves and other people might develop a more positive view of their voices.
"People being treated for hearing voices are usually given medication in an attempt to eliminate the problem. By investigating the factors influencing how voices are experienced we hope to contribute to the development of psychological therapies to help people better understand and cope with their voices."
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The team would like to hear from people in the northwest aged 16 years and over who have been hearing voices for at least six months. They can be both users of mental-health services or not.
Discussions will be carried out at a location to suit the volunteer in complete privacy. Participants will also be asked to complete questionnaires about their experiences. In all participation in the study will take about an hour and a half. Travel expenses will be reimbursed.
People interested in participating can call 0161 306 0405 or e-mail voicesresearch@hotmail.co.uk
The University of Manchester (www.manchester.ac.uk) is the largest higher education institution in the country, with 24 academic schools and over 36 000 students. Its Faculty of Medical & Human Sciences (www.mhs.manchester.ac.uk) is one of the largest faculties of clinical and health sciences in Europe, with a research income of around £51 million (almost a third of the University's total research income).
The School of Psychological Sciences (www.psych-sci.manchester.ac.uk) was founded in 2004, and comprises the oldest Psychology department in the UK together with Human Communication and Deafness and Clinical Psychology divisions. All were rated 5/5 in the last higher education Research Assessment Exercise.
STOCKHOLM - Swedish Prime Minister Goeran Persson and his Social Democratic Party lost legislative elections by a thin margin to a centre-right coalition headed by 41-year-old newcomer Fredrik Reinfeldt.
The four-party opposition Alliance for Sweden was credited with 48.1 percent of votes, while the Social Democrats and their allies, the Left and the Greens, garnered 46.2 percent with votes in 99 percent of electoral districts counted.
The opposition victory was seen as a major political shake-up in the Scandinavian country, where the Social Democrats, who created the welfare state, have governed for all but nine years since 1932.
The centre-right was last in power in 1991-1994 under prime minister Carl Bildt.
In his first national election campaign after taking over the conservative Moderate Party three years ago, Reinfeldt focused on getting Swedes back into the job market and capitalized on voters' frustrations over cracks in their cherished welfare state.
He vowed to combat abuses to the system and create more jobs instead of offering government handouts.
His Alliance has vowed to slash income taxes for low income earners and improve the business climate for small and medium-sized companies, all the while pouring more money into child and elderly care, health care and education.
Persson, who has served as prime minister since 1996, meanwhile struggled in the polls throughout the campaign despite his strong economic record, with Sweden boasting growth of 5.5 percent in the second quarter.
"A strong economy is crucial to win, but it is not enough. A lot of other things factor in," Persson told Swedish public television after announcing his defeat, adding that his party had "failed to mobilise voters in time."
The party registered one of its weakest scores ever, with 35.3 percent of votes compared to 39.8 percent in 2002 elections.
Reinfeldt's own conservative Moderate Party meanwhile registered one of its best election scores ever, garnering 26.1 percent of voter sympathies compared to 15.2 percent four years ago.
"That's the biggest rise registered not only by the Moderates but by any party in Swedish history," political scientist Soeren Holmberg commented.
Reinfeldt is seen as having breathed new life into the opposition by uniting the notoriously divided bloc, after having shifted his own conservative Moderate Party toward the middle to create the New Moderates.
"We ran in the election as the New Moderates, we have won the election as the New Moderates and we will also together with our Alliance friends govern Sweden as the New Moderates," Reinfeldt told supporters after declaring victory.
The primary theme in the election campaign was employment, with the opposition repeatedly pointing out that some 20 percent of Swedes of working age live off generous state subsidies for unemployment, sickness or early retirement.
In numerous debates Reinfeldt put Persson on the defensive, demanding to know why so many Swedes were unable to work and earn their own living under his government.
Persson responded by asking Reinfeldt how his plan to reduce unemployment benefits would help the jobless.
Observers suggested that voters had tired of Persson because he had become too power-hungry.
Alongside the parliamentary election, Stockholm residents also voted in a referendum on whether to introduce a road congestion tax aimed at reducing traffic in and out of the capital.
Those results were not immediately available, though voters were expected to approve the project.
Alone in his ordeal: Clive Collins, 65, and the loose cover over the manhole he fell down
Passers-by ignored an injured pensioner's calls for help after he fell down a manhole in a busy shoppers' car park and lay there trapped for 45 minutes.
Clive Collins, 65, was trying to get into the boot of his car in Hawkwood Road car park in Boscombe at noon on Monday when he stood on the manhole cover, which tipped up, catapulting him into the five-foot deep hole.
"I fell in and was in there for three-quarters of an hour," he said. "In the time I was in there, 30 people must have walked past me not wanting to get involved."
Mr Collins said one leg, one arm, his shoulders and his head were sticking out.
Initially, he passed out, but when he came to, he tried to get the shoppers' attention.
"I was shouting and people were walking by, looking straight ahead," he said.
"I think it was fear, they just didn't want to make eye contact. They didn't want to get involved.
"One woman parked next to me and put the hood up on her car. I said: Can you call an ambulance or something?' and she completely ignored me.
"I waved at a man and he just waved back and drove on. It's quite frightening to thing that people took that attitude."
Mr Collins managed to wiggle himself into an angle where he could reach the mobile phone in his pocket and call 999. He was taken to Royal Bournemouth Hospital, where he was given 47 stitches and treatment for two broken ribs, a chipped tooth and groin strain.
Mr Collins is worried that the manhole has still not been fixed. Police had placed traffic cones on top as a warning.
Bournemouth council spokeswoman Carly Earnshaw said: "We're sorry to hear of the incident that happened to Mr Collins. A full investigation is being carried out as to how this happened and if any vandalism of the manhole has taken place."
She confirmed the manhole had been coned off and that engineers would be along to fix it shortly.
In 2003 Dr David Kelly was found dead in the woods. Caught in a political vortex, Dr Kelly had been forced to appear before a televised government committee investigating whether he had accused British government figures of planting in a dossier the questionable claim that WMDs could be unleashed from Iraq in 45 minutes. The Hutton Inquiry concluded that Dr Kelly took his own life. But did he? The KELLY INVESTIGATION GROUP takes a closer look....
The Kelly Investigation Group (KIG) is a loose affiliation of professionals and lay people from all walks of life; it includes nine doctors, four of them surgeons, and a QC. Medical and legal expertise has ensured our objections to the the official line on Dr David Kelly's death are taken seriously by the media and public, even if the authorities affect to ignore them. Our aim is to ensure agents of the state do not bury the truth, along with Dr Kelly.
SUSPICIONS FROM THE START
During 2002/3 it was obvious to many that the search for WMD in Iraq was a disingenuous ploy to secure regime change. Blair and his aides had claimed that it would take only 45 minutes for Saddam to launch a CBW attack on British bases, and that mobile laboratories found in Iraq were for the purpose of making chemical/biological weapons. In asides to journalists Dr David Kelly had shot both assertions down in flames. So when he was found 'dead in the woods' three days after being hauled before a televised government committee, many of us were highly suspicious.
Why were Thames Valley police labelling Dr Kelly's death a 'suicide' before his body had been examined? At the age of 72, judge and law lord Brian Hutton had never before chaired a public inquiry - so why did the prime minister's old friend Charles Falconer appoint this safe establishment figure at such extraordinary speed*?
As the Hutton Inquiry got underway in August 2003, I pored over the transcripts in an attempt to understand exactly how Dr Kelly had died. I listed aspects of the case that did not add up, and joined an internet forum to correspond with others working in a similar vein. One was IT expert Garrett Cooke.
INITIAL PLEA TO THE CORONER
On 20th November 2003 Garrett and I wrote a letter to coroner Nicholas Gardiner explaining our concern that the inquest had been subsumed into the Hutton Inquiry. In particular, we listed the reasons why we felt a full inquest with powers to subpoena witnesses and hear evidence under oath should be held:
*Dr Kelly's body appeared to have been moved - twice
* the knife, bottle of water, glasses, and cap reported beside the body by later witnesses, were not seen by the two volunteer searchers who first discovered it
* DC Coe was with the body at the time its position changed from sitting to lying
* DC Coe claimed he was with one other officer yet five witnesses said he was with two
* the primary cause of death was given as haemorrhage from an incised wound to his left wrist, yet the amount of blood at the scene was, according to the paramedics, extremely sparse
* vomit stains from the corners of his mouth to his ears suggested Dr Kelly had died on his back, yet his position when found was slumped against a tree
* the puzzling nature of the wound: the severing of a single artery deeply embedded in the left wrist and total avoidance of the more superficial radial artery
We received no response.
'SECTION 17A' MISAPPLIED
Later we discovered that to avoid an inquest, Lord Chancellor Charles Falconer had invoked Section 17a of the Coroner's Act of 1988, citing as his reason avoidance of duplication (having both an inquest and an inquiry) and consequent distress to the Kelly family.
However, Section 17a was introduced in 199 at his instigation to avoid unnecessary repetition (and mounting costs) in cases of multiple deaths with a single known cause, e.g. a train crash or a ferry disaster; Dr Kelly's was a single, high profile death of unknown cause. In view of the political manoeuvres preceding this high-profile death, one suspects the avoidance of 'distress' to the family was a very British excuse masking the real reason: that the authorities did not want witnesses subpoenaed and giving evidence on oath.
Had the scientist's close female friends, Mai Pederson, Gabriele Kraatz Wadsack and Judith Miller been subpoenaed we might have been provided with a much more intimate portrait of events leading up to his death.
BUILDING A MEDICAL CASE
Faced with the Coroner's wall of silence, I decided to try to secure medical support. I started a blog listing a number of KIG concerns and wrote two articles for the internet entitled - 'Dark Actors at the Scene of Dr Kelly's Death' (October 2003) and 'The David Kelly Story: Turning Murder into Suicide' (28 November 2003.) The latter was a critique of the forensic pathologist's evidence to the Hutton Inquiry; for to me, his reasoning seemed in places, quite farcical.
On 29 November 2003 Dr Searle Sennett, a specialist in anaesthesiology from Johannesburg, responded to these articles by e-mail as follows:
Dear Rowena
I have just read your piece at rense.com and also the one at propaganda matrix.com and I complement you on both of these articles but, more importantly, on your guts and preparedness to take on the Establishment. I am a retired specialist anaesthetist and I too, without knowing the details of the Kelly incident that you do, considered the whole "suicide" story to be phoney in the extreme. I am quite satisfied that cutting the ulnar artery in the manner described could not have been fatal.
He was clearly murdered in some other manner and, in my opinion, there are a variety of ways in which it could have been done.
You did mention the use of a chloroform-like substance, of which there are many, and I can assure you that the modern volatile anaesthetic agents are extremely potent. They would not necessarily kill but could certainly cause unconsciousness in less than a minute especially if applied in high concentration. The subject could then be asphyxiated by means of a plastic bag over his head which, in fact, could also contain the agent. To show this technique is distinctly feasible, I mention the incident where a potent anaesthetic agent was introduced into the air-conditioning system of a Moscow theatre and which incapacitated and, indeed, killed the Chechen terrorists and some of their hostages.
Injectible muscle relaxants which paralyse all muscles within seconds and stop the breathing of the subject receiving them. Although normally intravenous, the injection could, in fact, be given into any muscle or even under the hair of the scalp, or elsewhere, so as to avoid subsequent detection. Muscle relaxants are part of the lethal cocktail injection used in many US prisons to carry out the death sentence.
It will be very interesting to see what approach Lord Hutton takes concerning the inquest and whether he, too, attempts to cover up the obvious murder. Meanwhile, I am not surprised that Tony Blair is suffering from a variety of stress-related disorders!
Keep up the good work.
Your sincerely
Searle Sennett
Johannesburg
Anomalies continued to accumulate, but things were set alight when a friend sent me a letter published on 15 December 2003 in the Morning Star from orthopaedic and trauma surgeon, David Halpin. Here was a surgeon, a man with intimate knowledge of arteries, and how they behave, saying he did not see how Dr Kelly could have died of haemorrhage from transection of a single ulnar artery:
I write to enquire as to the status of the coroner's inquest into the death of Dr David Kelly. I hope that it has not been subsumed within the Hutton Inquiry.
He had been put through the psychological mincing machine of the elite running this country and it is easy to imagine his sense of failure as well as betrayal in both directions. We have been told that he died from a cut wrist and that he had non-lethal levels of an analgesic in his blood.
As a past trauma and orthopaedic surgeon, I cannot easily accept that even the deepest cut into one wrist would cause such exsanguinations that death resulted.
This one point was key: the primary cause of death could not have been haemorrhage because it is virtually impossible to bleed to death from severing a single ulnar artery. Over the ensuing weeks we honed and refined our case to include arguments against the second and third causes of death cited - poisoning by co-proxamol and atherosclerosis. With Dr Sennett and David Halpin's continued input and support, the KIG was able to develop a strong medical case against suicide.
Around this time we were joined by Jim Rarey, an ex-newspaper editor from the US, who wrote seven articles for the internet on a number of aspects of Dr Kelly's death.
KELLY'S DEATH A PHENOMENON ACCORDING TO STATISTICS
In January 2004 we were contacted by Dr Andrew Rouse, Senior Lecturer in Public Health and Dr Yaser Adi, from the Dept of Public Health & Epidemiology at the University of Birmingham, who three months earlier had submitted a letter to national newspapers:
IS DR KELLY A STATISTIC OR A PHENOMENON?
The pathologist who performed Dr Kelly's autopsy reported that "The features... of Dr Kelly's wounds... were quite typical of self-inflicted illness". Unfortunately he did not report that it is almost unheard of for such wounds to result in death.
Suicide associated with wrist-slashing is extremely rare - so rare that the Office of National Statistics does not report wrist slashing as a specific cause of death; it groups such deaths with other uncommon suicide methods such as belly and abdomen stabbings and throat cuttings (see table)
This table shows that fewer than five 55-50 year old men use cutting and piercing instruments to commit suicide annually. This statistical evidence, combined with the fact that even after searching the medical literature and speaking to medical and surgical colleagues we have not been able to document that wrist slashing can lead to successful suicide, suggests that for all practical purposes wrist slashing suicide does not exist in Britain.
Suicide and self inflicted injury by cutting and piercing instruments amongst males in England and Wales
Data from: Twentieth Century Mortality, Office of National Statistics, London 2003
We must also remember that Dr Kelly was a first rate researcher. As such, before making a suicide attempt, he would surely have done an internet or library search into the success of various suicide methods. He would have learnt that - since it invariably fails - wrist slashing is not a recommended suicide method. There fore why would Dr Kelly slash his wrist in the first place and against, all odds, actually die?
MORE DOCTORS CHALLENGE OFFICIAL SUICIDE RULING
As the medical case challenging suicide became stronger, we were happy to welcome in a new doctor - Chris Burns-Cox, and two more surgeons - Martin Birnstingl and William McQuillan. Birnstingl, a retired specialist in vascular surgery from London responded enthusiastically to a Kelly article with "Count me in". He was a foundation member of the Vascular Surgical Association of GB and Ireland and President in 1986. In private e-mails he wrote:
Vascular surgeons deal with vessels of all sizes but I have never seen or heard of anybody dying from a cut wrist artery even when both ulnar and redial have been cut
Dr Kelly did not "slit his wrists" as suggested by Professor Milroy. The evidence is that one wrist was cut, dividing only one of the four main wrist arteries, which is very unlikely to have been fatal.
During 2004 I made contact with a Dr C Stephen Frost who had written a list of 35 questions about Dr Kelly's death on the Independent internet forum . Working together, and liaising with the rest of the medico-legal team, we managed to get five letters published in the Guardian:
1. OUR DOUBTS ABOUT DR KELLY'S SUICIDE 27 January 2004 signed by David Halpin, C Stephen Frost, Searle Sennett
2. MEDICAL EVIDENCE DOES NOT SUPPORT SUICIDE BY KELLY 12 February 2004 signed by Andrew Rouse, Searle Sennett, David Halpin, C Stephen Frost, Peter Fletcher, Martin Birnstingl
Our arguments met with a blustering emotional response from Professor Chris Milroy in a letter entitled:
FANTASISTS & DR KELLY14 February 2004
3. QUESTIONS STILL UNANSWERED OVER DR KELLY'S DEATH 19 February 2004 signed by Andrew Rouse, Searle Sennett, David Halpin, C Stephen Frost, Peter Fletcher, Martin Birnstingl
4. NEW DOUBTS OVER KELLY 28 September 2004 signed by C Stephen Frost, David Halpin, William McQuillan, Searle Sennett
5. QUESTIONS OVER KELLY 28 December 2004 signed by Dr Michael Powers QC, Martin Birnstingl, Chris Burns-Cox, C Stephen Frost, David Halpin, William McQuillan, Andrew Rouse, John Henry Scurr, Searle Sennett
The first letter, published on 27 January to coincide with the publication of the Hutton Report, caused a media storm, and we were inundated with requests for radio and TV appearances. David Halpin appeared on TV and radio in the UK, and Dr Sennett gave newspaper interviews from his home in Johannesburg. The Evening Standard ran a headline on the evening prior to the publication of the Hutton Report: "Was Kelly Murdered?" But since 'The Sun' chose to leak the Hutton Report a day ahead of publication - and we think this may have been a deliberate tactic - the angle of possible murder was not pursued in the media the following day.
On 21 January 2004 five of us - David Halpin, Dr Searle Sennett, Dr C Stephen Frost, Garrett Cooke and myself - wrote an eleven-page letter to the Coroner setting out our concerns in detail. He failed to respond. A month later I phoned him to ask if he had received the letter - he said he had noted the contents but did not think these were sufficient grounds for concern. He had seen a police report and was satisfied everything was in order.
On 31 January highly qualified pathologist Dr Peter Fletcher wrote a letter to the Daily Telegraph:
Sir,
As a retired pathologist, I have been dismayed by the lack of information on the precise circumstances of the discovery of Dr David Kelly's body. It is claimed that the major cause of death was blood loss from a severed wrist artery, possibly complicated by the ingestion of an unstated number of co-proximal tablets. An adult human body contains about 10 pints of blood, of which about half has to be lost to cause death. Anybody who has seen five pints of blood spurted forcefully out of a severed artery will know that there is one hell of a mess. The two searchers who found the body did not even notice that Kelly had incised his wrist with a knife. The two paramedics who arrived at the scene later apparently stated that there was remarkably little blood around the body.
Something, somewhere is seriously wrong. Either Dr Kelly did not die of blood loss or it occurred at some place distant from where the body was found. It is, of course, possible that blood was spattered everywhere, which four witnesses failed to notice.
A coroner has the power of subpoena, witnesses give testimony under oath and a jury is usually involved. Lord Hutton was denied these requirements for his inquiry.
Dr A Peter Fletcher, Pathologist, Halstead, Essex
I contacted him and he too agreed to lend his support to the KIG.
I was put in touch with lawyer Michael Shrimpton by an e-mail correspondent and he joined the cause on 29 January 2004. The following month he was invited onto the Alex Jones Show, one of the top conspiracy radio programmes in the US. Unfortunately the slant he put on Kelly's death - that it was a 'hit' performed by the French DGSE - was not one shared by the rest of the KIG; although allegedly received from intelligence sources, there was no way of corroborating it. We were frankly uneasy with his strong bias towards the US's 'neocon' administration.
On 8 February 2004 Andrew Rouse and Yaser Adi submitted an adapted version of their original letter entitled 'Hutton, Kelly and the missing Epidemiology"to the British Medical Journal. They called for readers to send in details of any 55-65 year old males who had committed suicide by slashing their wrist, during the previous 10 years.
Professor Milroy responded to their report by saying, 'The problem with use of statistics in any single case is that unlikely does not make it impossible.' In his view the combination of all three causes on the death certificate was sufficient to account for Dr Kelly's death. This had been the key tactic of KIG opponents: not to examine one cause of death at a time, but if one cause did not stand up, hop on to the next one, or even cite all three as 'somehow' working together -- hardly a scientific way to proceed.
Another surgeon - John Scurr - was quoted in a Washington Post report, 21 February 2004.
I looked up his details and found him to be a practising vascular surgeon, also London-based. David Halpin wrote to him and he too become a willing participant in the KIG. He has since appeared on Channel 4 News and in a US documentary to be screened in 2007 - in both cases explaining in his professional capacity why Dr Kelly is highly unlikely to have bled to death from a single transected ulnar artery. He put us on to his friend and lawyer, QC Michael Powers. Once he had reviewed all evidence accumulated by the KIG, it was his view that there should have been a full inquest into Dr Kelly's death.
On 29 February 2004 Renan Talieva, an e-mail correspondent from the US, wrote a long and detailed article derived from KIG discussions and her own assiduous research entitled "The Strange Suicide of David Kelly."
CORONER SHUTS THE DOOR
Before the Coroner returned to court after reviewing The Hutton Report, a letter from Michael Powers was published by 'The Times' declaring:
Suicide cannot be presumed. Even evidence pointing to the likelihood that Dr Kelly took his own life is not sufficient. Suicide has to be proved beyond reasonable doubt.
After reviewing the Hutton Report, coroner Nicholas Gardiner returned to court on 16th March 2004 to announce his decision on whether to re-open the inquest into Dr Kelly's death.
The same day David Halpin was interviewed by the Today programme, and when Gardiner declared his satisfaction with the Hutton Inquiry's ruling of suicide, was asked to comment.
Around this time, practising vascular surgeon John Scurr and QC Michael Powers made separate appearances on Channel 4 News. Mr Scurr explained why, in his view, one cannot bleed to death from full transection of a single ulnar artery while Michael Powers stated that by law, suicide must be proved beyond reasonable doubt, and an inquest was the only forum equipped to provide this degree of rigour. In his view the medical evidence provided since the Hutton Inquiry was sufficient to warrant a full inquest. When phoned by the Channel 4 News team, Dr Nicholas Hunt, the forensic pathologist to the Hutton Inquiry, said that he too would be 'more comfortable' with a full inquest.
On 13 May 2004 Renan Talieva answered the Coroner's refusal to reopen the inquest with an excellent and thoroughly researched critique of the coroner's actions in "The Coroner and David Kelly".
In response to the KIG's medical arguments, Professor Robert Forrest, forensic toxicologist at Sheffield University, set up the 'International Toxicology Advisory Group' and on 18 September 2004 had an article published in the BMJ entitled 'Forensic science in the dock'. The Hutton Inquiry had conveyed the impression that Dr Kelly may indeed have taken the 29 tablets missing from the blister packs in his pocket, even though the toxicologist stated that the amount he measured was only a third a what is normally a fatal amount. But in this article Forrest et al listed reasons why forensic science was unable to specify the amount of drug a person had taken prior to their death.
"Post-mortem measurements of drug concentration in blood have scant meaning except in the context of medical history, the sequence and circumstances surrounding death, and necropsy findings. The paucity of evidence based science, coupled with the pretence that such science exists in regard to post-mortem toxicology, leads to the abuse of process...'
In December 2004, in a 'Daily Mail' article entitled 'Specialists demand a new Kelly inquiry' it was reported that medical and legal experts in the KIG were arguing that it was vital to have an inquest. Michael Powers called for backers to help him fund a legal challenge against the coroner's decision not to reopen the inquest. It was discovered however, that without a 'properly interested person' to call for a judicial review of the coroner's decision, the KIG could not proceed.
A 'properly interested person' is a legal term for what in Coroner's Law has to be someone who stands to gain or lose by the death in question. In practise, that could only have been Mrs Kelly, and she made it clear in a private phone call that she did not want the inquest re-opened because she was convinced her husband had committed suicide. She claimed to have studied the KIG's doubts about the official reason for her husband's death, but gave few reasons for her thinking it was suicide other than her husband's anguish at the time. This was a blow which appeared to shut the door on further progress. However we persevered.
PARAMEDICS UNHAPPY WITH OFFICIAL CAUSE OF DEATH
I contacted the two paramedics who had attended the scene of Dr Kelly's death and put them in touch with Antony Barnett of the Observer. They arranged to meet Barnett in the presence of their solicitor and gave him the material for his 12 December 2004 article, 'Kelly Death Paramedics Query Verdict' where their shock at the general absence of blood at the scene and scepticism over the official cause of death was described in detail. When the press arrived on their doorsteps, they gave a televised press conference.
MP NORMAN BAKER BEGINS HIS PRIVATE KELLY INVESTIGATION
it was not until MP Norman Baker came forward this year (2006) to announce that he had resigned his seat on the front bench to pursue a private investigation into Dr Kelly's death that the case was injected with new life. According to a Guardian report:
Mr Baker said he wanted to return to the issue because the 2003 Hutton inquiry had "blatantly failed" to get to the bottom of matters. He vowed to question ministers and to unearth new facts in a bid to establish the "truth" of the case.
After a few months on the case he wrote a major article for the 'Mail on Sunday' vowing to prove Dr Kelly's death was not suicide. His new finding was that the Coroner had irregular and clandestine meetings with Department of Constitutional Affairs officials and representatives of the forensic staff just prior to the issuing of a full death certificate - before Lord Hutton had even started to examine the details of Dr Kelly's death. Normally a temporary death certificate is issued pending a full inquiry. In this case it seems, the rules were bent.
In 2006 the KIG launched a NEW DR DAVID KELLY BLOG and is now working in conjunction with Mr Baker. Significant progress is being made. Watch this space....
Dr Kelly was found dead on 18th July 2003; Lord Hutton was appointed only a few days later - on 22nd July.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
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Comment: The death of David Kelly can only be understood in the context of the subject he was working on: Ethnic Specific Weapons. For a complete analysis of this issue see our book: 911: The Ultimate Truth
MEXICO CITY -- Mexico said Sunday that it is reevaluating its diplomatic relations with Venezuela after Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez accused the Mexican government of stealing its country's recent presidential election.
Chavez said last week that his government had not recognized the victory of Mexican ruling party candidate Felipe Calderon because of concerns about alleged election irregularities.
Chavez apparently expanded on his allegations Saturday when interviewed by CNN at the Nonaligned Movement summit in Havana. According to a CNN anchor, Chavez again accused Mexico's conservative National Action Party of stealing the election, and said Calderon's campaign had "destroyed" the opportunity for good relations with Venezuela.
Attack ads by the National Action Party compared leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to Chavez, calling the candidate "a danger for Mexico."
"The Mexican government rejects completely the judgments expressed about the Mexican electoral process and its results," Mexico's foreign ministry said in an e-mail to reporters. "Even though false, they constitute an inadmissible intervention in the internal affairs of our country."
"The Mexican government is evaluating the level of relations it will maintain with the government of Venezuela for the rest of this administration," it continued.
Mexican President Vicente Fox hands power to Calderon on Dec. 1.
By Luciana Bohne
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Sep 15, 2006
During the Mercosur summit in Argentina, WJAN-TV South Florida reporter, Manuel Cao, asked Cuban President Fidel Castro why his government didn't allow a prominent doctor and dissident to leave the country. Quick as lightning, Castro shot back, "Who pays you?"
Now we find that Cao's paymaster was the US government: he received $10,400 in payments so far this year. Cao is one among 10 South Florida journalists to have been found accepting money in exchange for touting propaganda intended to undermine the Cuban government via Radio and TV Marti (both bankrolled by the US government to the tune of $37 million to broadcast anti-Cuban propaganda from the States onto Cuban soil).
The news mercenaries' covert employer was exposed by documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Three were fired from El Nuevo Herald, the Spanish-language sister paper of the Miami Herald: columnist Pablo Alfonso, staff reporter Wilfredo Cancio and freelancer Olga Connor.
Pablo Alfonso, who wrote an opinion column, received $175,000 since 2001.
Perusing Alfonso's columns in Spanish, I found them to be concerned with trivial and titillating gossip of possible interest only to resentful exiles. The columns whispered about an alleged dairy farm, maintained solely for private catering to Castro's taste for the freshest strawberry yogurt and camembert cheeses.
Other fluff items included speculations on the "secrecy" -- perhaps nepotism -- surrounding the professional activities of Castro's tribe of grandchildren (all apparently respectably employed in Cuba or abroad in various non-subversive scientific fields).
Another provocation to outrage included Castro's alleged failure to effect a promised "energy revolution" because a power outage of four hours had crippled three provinces in June. My hunch is that Castro's "energy revolution" might have been referring to the one promised by ongoing off-shore, deep-sea explorations for oil and gas effected through an agreement with an Indian oil exploration company.
The most ironic of Alfonso's silly charges was the one stating that the newspaper, Granma, acted as a stenographer for Raul Castro's recent "declarations" and "interviews," upon assuming leadership of the Cuban nation, absent the convalescing Fidel Castro.
Of the bribed journalists mentioned by the US national media this morning (11 September 2006) -- the names of all 10 were reported by the Miami Herald. El Nuevo Herald's Olga Connor, a freelance journalist, received $71,000 from the US Office of Cuba Broadcasting since 2001; Nuevo Herald staff reporter Wilfredo Cancio Isla received $15,000 for the same period. Additional US news mercenaries were opinion page editor for Diario Las Americas Helen Aguirre Ferre and reporter/columnist Ariel Remos.
What struck me about this news coverage, however, was the absence of detailed coverage for Carlos Alberto Montaner, surely one of the most world-prominent of the Miami 10. A militant anti-Castroist, sentenced to 20 years of imprisonment by the Cuban revolutionary government in 1960 for "conspiring against the power of the state," Montaner has lived two-thirds of his life in exile. Now residing in Spain, he's founder and president of the Unión Liberal Cubana (Cuban Liberal Union). In Spain, he writes for ABC (the former mouthpiece for Francisco Franco, the Falangist Spanish dictator). An admiring website claimed that "his syndicated column is read by six million readers. His opinions make politician[s] in Spain and Latin America tremble. . . . He maintains his position as one of the regions most respected journalists."
Perhaps, but now he'll have to maintain it in the face of this recent exposure of his being in the pay of the US government. When he claims that Fidel Castro's "cancer will deliver justice," as he does in his columns, the alleged cancer's war on Fidel might suggest that it is diagnosed by a close collaborator of the US government. If Caracas indeed "will shiver with Castro's death," as Montaner predicts, readers might wonder with whom this drivel of wishful thinking is intended to curry favor. "The [Cuban]army's loyalty ends with Fidel's life" makes you wonder if another Bay of Pigs US debacle fueled by anti-revolutionary, out-of-touch, diehards in exile is in the offing -- or if the myth of a military coup is the result of too many years of mojito drinking, coupled with frustrated hopes among US-supported Cuban exiles' intriguers and illusionists.
"Democracy can arrive on the island via a pact with reformists," Montaner opines. Which "reformists"? The former Cuban estate landlords and clients of US multi-national exploiters in Miami? Or the "reformists" generated and proliferated by the $10 million initiative to foment "dissidence" in Cuba by the US Special Interests Office in Havana?
Actually, Cuban government officials have been arguing for decades that Montaner is far from a liberal paladin of human rights and democracy. They say that he's very close to known international terrorists such as Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people. He's an agent of the CIA, the Cubans insist. He has ties to the NGO, Reporters without Borders, which, last year, admitted it is financed by the CIA.
Reporters without Borders mounted a campaign in 2002 characterizing the trial and imprisonment in Cuba of more than two dozen journalists, among 75 "dissidents," as a violation of human rights. The Cuban government insisted that the accused were mercenary agitators paid by the US to pose as "independent journalists." As Granma reported, "none of them even passed through a journalism faculty or school of journalism and never wrote a single line of journalism."
Now whom are we to believe, in this matter of human-rights violations by Cuba? The Cuban officials or the purveyors of democracy in the "free press" paid for by the US government -- not exactly distinguished by its regard for truth?
Further Reading
"Cuba after Fide1," Le Monde Diplomatique, 1 Sept. 2006
Luciana Bohne teaches film and literature at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. She can be reached at lbohne@edinboro.edu.
By William Kay in Los Angeles
The Sunday Times
September 17, 2006
Moves are afoot to market America and regain valuable revenue from overseas visitors.
CRYSTAL RESENDEZ was working in the Virgin Megastore in New York's Union Square on the morning of 9/11, and vividly remembers crowds of people fleeing the World Trade Center covered in ash.
Today Resendez, 30, is general manager of the store, next to Mann's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood Boulevard, one of the hottest tourist spots on America's West Coast. "There's no doubt we're still suffering much more than New York from the drop-off in foreign visitors," she said. "The Union Square store is beating its sales records, but we're definitely not."
Midwest accents seemed to dominate the throngs jostling around the freshly made hand and foot prints of actor Kevin Costner in the Chinese Theatre forecourt, but few of them were going into the Virgin store.
"I think the recent bomb threat at Heathrow has had a big effect on visitor numbers," said Resendez. "It seems to have affected the whole of Europe's tourist decisions whether to come here."
Last Monday relatives of the 2,700 people killed in the Twin Towers gathered to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks. At the same time, 1,000 leaders of America's travel industry were preparing to fly to Washington for a much more hard-nosed event.
On Tuesday evening they hosted 130 members of Congress at 30 dinners across the capital, a prelude to the launch of Discover America Partnership, a campaign aimed at reviving America's ailing tourist trade.
The US share of international travel has been falling since 1992, but the decline has accelerated since September 11, 2001. Since then America has lost an estimated $286 billion (£152 billion) in revenue from foreign tourists.
While global travel has grown by a fifth, the the US travel industry's share of the world tourism market has shrunk by a third, from 9% to 6%.
"Tourism is booming around the world, and we're not participating in it," said Jay Rasulo, chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts and a leading figure in the Discover America Partnership.
Last year 49m people visited America, 1.5m fewer than five years earlier. But these figures disguise a u-shaped trend in which visitor numbers slumped for two years after the attacks in 2001 but have been climbing again since 2003.
Ground Zero has proved a potent international magnet. New York expects an extra 500,000 international arrivals this year compared with 2005, when the 6.8m foreign visitors exactly matched the figure for 2000.
But the West Coast, which has suffered no terrorist attacks, has had a drop in tourism. Last year Los Angeles had 2.5m foreign tourists, 1m fewer than in 2000.
The question is why America is missing out. The immediate obstacle is the stricter security introduced since September 2001. Airline and hotel executives groaned last month at the new limits imposed on hand luggage after the bomb plot scare at Heathrow.
The American tourist industry is painfully aware that many travellers are put off by the tough visa requirements and the hostile reception that can greet them at the country's airports.
"We're not a welcoming country," said Geoff Freeman, executive director of the Discover America Partnership. "Most countries ask people to come visit them. We have more of a fortress appearance."
Tough security measures are only part of the problem, however. Surveys show that America is becoming unpopular with the rest of the world, partly because of the Bush administration's foreign policy.
Since 2000 the percentage of people holding favourable opinions of the country has fallen from 83% to 56% in Britain, from 78% to 37% in Germany and from 77% to 63% in Japan.
One plank of the Discover America Partnership is that when foreigners actually get to America, they take away a better opinion of it than those who have never been there.
In July, Roger Dow, chief executive of the US Travel Industry Association, said: "Research documents the 'perception boost' that occurs when someone visits the United States and experiences our nation first-hand. Yet we do little to encourage international travellers to pay us a visit, while challenging entry requirements give travellers a reason to go somewhere else."
But it will take a huge marketing campaign to get that message across and tourism chiefs bemoan what they see as a lack of government support.
"Other countries have publicly supported efforts to sell themselves," said Rasulo. "By and large, we have abandoned the task of marketing America."
- A third of white-collar staff face redundancy
- Company losing fight against Japanese rivals
The Ford Motor Company could lose as much as $9bn (£4.8bn) this year as it undergoes a huge restructuring in a desperate attempt to halt its ongoing loss of market share in the US.
Ford announced yesterday it would cut a third of all salaried employees - 14,000 jobs - and offer voluntary redundancy to all of its 75,000 hourly paid workers. It also announced it would close two more manufacturing plants by the end of 2008, on top of 14 closures already announced this year.
Ford, which hopes the cuts will save it $5bn in operating costs, also admitted it would no longer reach profitability in 2008 as it had expected.
"These actions have painful consequences for communities and many of our loyal employees," said chairman Bill Ford, who this month stepped down as chief executive of the company founded by his great-grandfather, Henry Ford. "But rapid shifts in consumer demand that affect our product mix, and continued high prices for commodities, mean we must continue working quickly and decisively to fix our business."
The situation at the Michigan-based carmaker could be even worse than it admitted yesterday. The Detroit News reported on Thursday that an internal company report dated September 6 and prepared by chief finance officer Don Leclair's office projected that its worldwide automotive operations' losses would be nearly $6bn this year. Once restructuring costs were included, the report said, Ford's 2006 pre-tax loss could be between $8bn and $9bn.
Ford has stopped giving guidance about projected losses and declined to comment on the report yesterday. However, the leaked internal forecasts are in line with projections by several analysts. According to Eric Selle, an analyst at JP Morgan Securities in New York, Ford stands to lose more than $8.4 bn this year. Brad Rubin, at BNP Paribas in New York, estimates the loss at a similar amount. "Their results are going to get crushed," he said.
The central cause of Ford's problems is that Americans are increasingly buying their cars from Japanese competitors such as Toyota. Ford has lost market share in the US for 10 successive years. It now has a share of only 16%, and said yesterday it expected that to drop to between 14% and 15%. Above all, it has been hit by falling sales of pick-up trucks such as the F-150 and sports utility vehicles (SUVs), once best-sellers that generated the bulk of profits, as petrol prices have hit $3 a gallon. "They get all their revenue from the F-150 and SUVs, and no one is buying them," Mr Rubin said.
Ford yesterday revealed details of new, smaller, more fuel-efficient models that it hopes will help it to regain market share. It announced the launch of a new "crossover" (a cross between an SUV and a car). But analysts remain sceptical. "I'm not sure their new products will be able to replace their revenue stream," Mr Rubin said.
The problems faced by carmakers were underlined yesterday when DaimlerChrysler announced losses of $1.2bn for the third quarter, double previous forecasts.
Under Ford's previous restructuring plan announced in January, titled the Way Forward, Ford planned to cut 25,000-30,000 manufacturing jobs and close 14 plants by 2012. It has now decided to bring forward the plans by four years and complete the cuts by the end of 2008.
Ford had offered voluntary redundancies to some hourly workers, but only 6,000 had accepted. Under a new agreement with the United Auto Workers Union, it will offer "buyouts" to all of its hourly workers, who will receive between $35,000 and $140,000, depending on how long they have been with the company.
The voluntary redundancies at Ford are similar to a plan by General Motors earlier this year that succeeded in cutting 34,000 workers - or about a third of the hourly workforce - from the payroll. GM now employs 95,000 hourly workers, 39% of the number it employed 10 years ago.
Ford announced last month that it plans to sell Aston Martin, and there has been speculation about sell-offs of other parts of its Premier Automotive Group, which includes Land Rover and Jaguar. But it insisted yesterday that it had no plans to dispose of Jaguar. "Jaguar is not for sale," Mark Schulz, executive vice-president, said. Ford's announcement of its restructuring plans came days after Mr Ford stood down as chief executive. Mr Ford admitted at the time of his move that he was overwhelmed by the job, and he had been "wearing too many hats".
In his place he appointed Boeing's head of commercial aircraft, Alan Mulally, who is known as a turnaround expert. Mr Mulally was not involved in the plan announced yesterday, and whether the company will have to put together yet another restructuring once he has got his feet under the table remains to be seen.
"We know our work is far from over," he said yesterday.
Backstory
Much of the success of American car manufacturers in the 1990s was based on sales of sports utility vehicles (SUVs) such as the Ford Explorer and pick-up trucks like the Ford F-150. But as petrol prices have soared, sales of trucks have dropped as Americans have turned to smaller, more fuel-efficient Japanese cars. While Ford and GM restructure, Toyota is expanding in the US. In July it sold more vehicles than Ford to rank as the second-largest automobile maker in the US behind General Motors. Asian companies now sell more than 40% of vehicles sold in the US.
The whir of hundreds of sewing machines reverberates in the thick, dusty air at the RIFU garment factory. Inside this large warehouse, behind a guarded metal fence, 300 employees-most of them Chinese women-cut, sew, iron and fold blouses with such efficiency and focus that they seem like machinery themselves. From piles of orange and pink fabric, the workers will produce over 15,000 garments today for J. Jill, Elie Tahari and Ann Taylor. These name brand companies don't own the factory; like Liz Claiborne, The Gap, Ralph Lauren and others, they subcontract production to factories like this, scattered around the tiny Micronesian island of Saipan.
Counters above the sewing machines indicate how many pieces the women have completed. According to workers, if they can't finish a set quota of garments in a day, they may have to stay later and work for free, or they won't be eligible for future overtime opportunities-which they desperately need.
Coming from rural villages and the big city slums of poor Asian countries, these garment workers began their sojourn in the Marianas with a huge financial deficit, having paid recruiters as much as $7,000 to obtain a one-year contract job (renewable at the employer's discretion). Many of them borrow the money-a small fortune in China, where most are recruited-from lenders who charge as much as 20 percent interest.
In a situation akin to indentured servitude, workers cannot earn back their recruitment fee and pay annual company supplied housing and food expenses of about $2,100 without working tremendous hours of overtime. Before being able to save her first dollar, a worker who owes, say, $5,000 to her recruiter has to work nearly 2,500 hours at Saipan's current minimum wage-which equals six more 40-hour workweeks than exist in a year.
And that's assuming she gets paid. Increasingly, workers are filing formal complaints that they have not received their wages, with some women going without paychecks for over five months. Still, workers at RIFU and other Saipan garment factories labor six days a week, sometimes up to 20 hours a day.
"One or two days a week we'd work through an entire night, and I was exhausted," says Chen Xiaoyan, 26, a nervous young woman with a thin ponytail who used to work for RIFU. "Sometimes we had no Sundays off either, but if you didn't want to work they'd allow you no overtime at all as a punishment."
The American consumers who wear the clothes these women produce probably have never heard of Saipan or the 13 other islands that comprise the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI). Located just north of the U.S. territory of Guam, the islands were seized from the Japanese by U.S. military forces during World War II and served as the base for sending atomic bombs to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the war, the islands became a United Nations territory, administered by the United States.
Then, in 1975, the islands' indigenous population of subsistence farmers and fishermen voted to become a commonwealth of the United States-a legal designation that made them U.S. citizens and subject to most U.S. laws. There were two critical exceptions, however: The U.S. agreed to exempt the islands from the minimum wage requirements of the Fair Labor Standards Act (allowing the islands to set their own lower minimum wage, currently $3.05, compared to $5.15 in the U.S.) and from most provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act. This has allowed garment manufacturers to import thousands of foreign contract guest workers who, ironically, stitch onto the garments they make the labels "Made in Saipan (USA)," Made in Northern Marianas (USA)" or simply "Made in USA."
The USA label tells customers "the quality is really good," insists Cleofe de Guzman, a Filipina manager, as she walks down long, neat aisles past women pushing thin fabric through sewing machines. But to many Americans, adding USA to the label implies that goods are produced by Americans, not by foreign guest workers toiling under sweatshop conditions thousands of miles away.
The guest worker designation means that these foreign laborers can remain on the islands for an indefinite period but are not eligible for U.S. citizenship. If workers complain about conditions, not only can they be terminated at the whim of their employer, but because they're exempt from U.S. immigration law, they can be summarily deported.
The local Department of Labor and Immigration, chronically underfunded, is of little help to them, taking six months to a year to complete reviews of complaints. There are no labor unions. While there is a Federal Labor Ombudsman's office in Saipan, under the Department of the Interior's Office of Insular Affairs, it can do little more than offer translation services and refer aggrieved workers to other agencies; it has no authority to investigate or prosecute.
"There are serious problems here and everybody knows it," says the ombudsman, Jim Benedetto, as he stares out his Saipan office window at a sheet of rain. "There isn't anyone who would say there aren't worker abuses."
Such abuses have helped a highly profitable garment industry to flourish in the islands. At its peak, the industry annually exported to the U.S. garments worth $1 billion wholesale (with a retail value conservatively estimated at $2 billion). Considering that the success of the industry was tied closely to its low wages and exploitative guest worker program-and the fact that it was exempt from tariffs or quotas on exports to the U.S. mainland-it's not surprising that both the Marianas' government and the garment manufacturers have fought long and hard to maintain the deal.
Enter Jack Abramoff, who hardly needs an introduction. Caught in the crosshairs of one of the biggest congressional scandals in a century, the Georgetown educated lawyer was once a high flying Republican lobbyist on Capitol Hill; he now awaits sentencing on multiple criminal charges to which he has pled guilty: bribing public officials, fraud and tax evasion.
While at the Washington, D.C., offices of the Preston, Gates, Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds law firm in 1995, Abramoff and his team were hired as lobbyists for the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. At the time, the islands' sweet deal was in trouble, as a decade's worth of rumblings about labor conditions and immigration abuses there had finally led members of Congress and the Clinton administration to press for legislation to eliminate the island's exemptions from U.S. minimum wage and immigration laws. But Abramoff, using his close ties to Republicans in the House, worked mightily to block such reforms.
Many of his efforts focused on the House Resources Committee, which has jurisdiction over U.S. territories, including the Marianas. Although members of both houses of Congress and both political parties repeatedly pushed to bring the Marianas under federal immigration and minimum wage laws, not a single legislative attempt has succeeded-most killed in the House Resources Committee.
Beginning in 1995 and continuing to the present day, at least 29 different bills-some to raise the minimum wage, some to close off the immigration exemption, and some to deny use of the "Made in USA" label on products of the CNMI-were introduced by Sens. Frank Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and by Reps. George Miller (D-Calif.) and David Bonier (D-Mich.). Twice-in 1995 and again in 2000-the U.S. Senate voted unanimously for Murkowski's wage and immigration reforms only to have the bills die in the House Resources Committee. "We were instrumental in first delaying Senate consideration of the Murkowski bill. We then stopped it cold in the House," Abramoff wrote in a 2001 letter to the governor of the Marianas, Pedro P. Tenorio.
Even a 1999 bill, sponsored by New Jersey Republican Rep. Bob Franks, died in the Resources Committee, despite having 243 co-sponsors-a substantial majority of House members, and enough to ensure passage on the floor.
Abramoff also cultivated powerful allies in the House leadership, notably Tom DeLay, who, as majority whip at the time, could keep a bill off the House floor even if the Resources Committee voted in its favor. According to the Associated Press, which, through an open records request, obtained the billing and correspondence records sent by Preston Gates to the Marianas government, Abramoff was in almost daily contact with DeLay's top aides concerning Marianas-related matters. DeLay himself, the billing records showed, met or talked with Abramoff about the Marianas at least two dozen times in 1996 and 1997 alone.
Abramoff would later summarize his early Marianas lobbying successes in the 2001 letter to Tenorio: "We worked with the House leadership to assure the [minimum wage] bill would not move to the House floor, even if the [Resources] committee did act. It also allowed us to acquire some very powerful allies, such as Majority Whip Tom DeLay." Three of DeLay's former aides would end up joining Abramoff's lobby ing team and working on the Marianas account.
As Rep. Miller, the ranking Democrat on the House Resources Committee and a leading sponsor of reform legislation, told Ms., "The combination of DeLay and Abramoff kept anything from being considered in Congress for years. [The Northern Marianas] was a multimillion dollar client of Abramoff, and DeLay was actively working to make sure his friend was able to protect his client."
With the election of George W. Bush in 2000, Abramoff gained additional connections. After three Abramoff associates who had lobbied on behalf of the Marianas secured powerful positions in the Departments of Labor and Interior and in the General Services Administration, the lobbyist could gleefully report in his letter to Tenorio, "We have worked with W[hite] H[ouse] Office of Presidential Personnel to ensure that CNMI-relevant positions at various agencies are not awarded to enemies of the CNMI."
First at Preston Gates and then with the law firm of Greenberg Traurig, Abramoff was well-compensated for his lobbying efforts, bringing in nearly $11 million in fees from the Marianas government and from the islands' garment manufacturers between 1995 and 2004. And his clients got exactly what they hoped for. "Our team has combated and defeated every single attack on the CNMI," Abramoff wrote to Tenorio in 2001.
One of Abramoff's favorite tactics for influencing members of Congress was to arrange Saipan junkets. As many as 100 people connected to the U.S. Congress-members themselves, or their staffers-traveled to the islands, sometimes with spouses or other family, including nearly half the Republican members of the House Resources Committee or their staffers. In addition to meetings with local officials, the trips-frequently all-expenses paid-typically entailed a stay at the Hyatt Regency resort, snorkeling in the crystalline waters and golf at one of the islands' four championship courses.
Among the visitors were DeLay, his wife and daughter, and six of his aides. During his 1998 New Year's holiday trip, he told Saipan officials, as was later reported in The Dallas Observer, "When one of my closest and dearest friends, Jack Abramoff, your most able representative in Washington, D.C., invited me to the islands, I wanted to see firsthand the free-market success and the progress and reform you have made." At a New Year's Eve dinner on Saipan, DeLay lavishly praised the governor-in a moment caught on camera and later shown by ABC's 20/20-"You are a shining light for what is happening in the Republican Party, and you represent everything that is good about what we're trying to do in America, in leading the world in the free-market system."
Two years later, DeLay still saw the islands through rose-colored lenses, as he told The Washington Post: "[The CNMI] is a perfect petri dish of capitalism. ...It's like my Galapagos Island."
Even today, DeLay remains a booster. When Ms. contacted him, he was in Texas and unavailable for comment, but his spokesman Michael Connolly said, "I can't think of anything that would have changed his position on the Mariana Islands. He stands by the things he has said in the past and he stands by the votes he's made that pertain to the islands."
To find the dark underbelly of Delay's "Shining light," simply cross a busy Saipan street and walk a few yards down a dirt road. At 10:30 p.m., knots of Chinese women are just getting off work at a nearby garment factory and making their way through the steady rain that slices the black night. These women eschew the more expensive, factory-owned barracks in favor of tiny homes constructed of corrugated tin, with thin wooden doors. In one tin dwelling, three women share a queen-sized bed that rests on a slab of concrete. The smell of frying vegetables wafts from the "kitchen"-a few hot plates and water-filled plastic buckets set outside on a concrete counter. Nine people share one toilet.
As they cluster outside, near a thin clothesline that doubles as a closet, one woman says that she's worked here for two years and is nowhere close to paying the money back to her recruiter; the others shake their heads in agreement. Their fear is palpable: They're afraid to use their names or to be photographed, even from the back.
"I heard that the lender might break my family's legs if I don't pay the money soon. I worry about it a lot," one 35-year-old Chinese woman told Ms. a few days earlier, speaking through a translator. "I can't imagine how long it will take to pay the money back. It's very hard to be here. The only foods I can afford to buy are rice and some very cheap precooked vegetables. My teeth are always bleeding," she says, her eyes like wet stone.
Most guest workers here are from poor Asian countries: China, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Thailand. Most have only a third- or fourth-grade education. Of the nearly 30 workers interviewed by Ms., almost all had left children back home with relatives, hoping they'll earn enough in Saipan to finance their offspring's education.
"The recruiter told us that in America it's a very free country, and because we had never been here we believed them," says a 22-year-old garment worker from China's rural Fujian Province. "They were lying."
Despite the squalid living conditions, the young guest workers want to stay at their jobs long enough to make their sacrifices worthwhile. But if they happen to get pregnant while working in Saipan, they're faced with a new nightmare. According to a 1998 investigation by the Department of Interior Office of Insular Affairs, a number of Chinese garment workers reported that if they became pregnant, they were "forced to return to China to have an abortion or forced to have an illegal abortion" in the Marianas.
These days, pregnancy is still highly problematic for guest workers. Many believe that if they get pregnant their employers will not renew their contracts for another year. That's essentially what happened to Chen Xiaoyan, the former RIFU worker. Two years ago, she became pregnant while visiting her boyfriend back in China. RIFU, although ostensibly responsible for workers' medical care, told her they would not renew her contract unless she provided them an affidavit saying she would pay for all pregnancy-related medical expenses. When she refused, Chen was fired.
Outside one of the barracks guest workers live in, located just yards from the factories where they work "It's not fair and it's not right," she says. "I read from a book that the U.S. has the best law and protections for workers and I thought here it would be better than in China, but it isn't."
With few economic options, pregnant workers often feel they have no choice but to visit one of Saipan's underground abortion providers. At least four acupuncture clinics offer pills to induce abortions, according to a local translator and former garment worker.
"I've driven four Chinese women to get abortions here," he says, pointing to an inconspicuous cement building with red Chinese lettering and an English sign that reads "Acupuncture, Herbs, Massage Oils." "I see girls whose bleeding did not stop, and on two incidents I had to take the girls to the hospital."
While Congress wouldn't help the garment workers, at least the courts have tried. In 1999, two federal class-action lawsuits were filed on behalf of Saipan's garment workers, alleging violations of U.S. and international laws, including forcing employees to work "off the clock" and under hazardous working conditions. A third case, filed in California state court by Global Exchange, Sweatshop Watch, UNITE! and Asian Law Caucus, accused U.S. retail firms of engaging in false advertising by indicating their garments were "Made in USA."
In 2003, all three suits were finally settled with the garment industry, for a total payout of $20 million. The money was earmarked for workers' back pay, a fund to help out workers who couldn't earn enough to repay their recruitment fees, and an independent oversight board to monitor working conditions at 27 factories on the islands. Although it wasn't part of the settlement agreement, the pressure generated by the lawsuits and legislative reform efforts led most of the companies that once labeled their garments "Made in USA" to change their labels to read "Made in Saipan (USA)" or "Made in Northern Mariana Islands (USA)."
The monitoring program, while an important effort, has had mixed results, according to a U.S. government source in the Marianas speaking on background. Inspections only take place twice a year and the results are kept confidential-even the retailers who pay for the program don't see them. The monitoring board has discretion to put factories on probation, but that has occurred only once. Moreover, the program will sunset in July 2007, and there are no other proposals on the table to replace it.
As for the $20 million settlement, only $5.8 million is earmarked for direct pay to workers, and very little of that has yet been paid out, according to Timothy Bellas, one of the monitors. Considering that the settlement was a class action on behalf of thousands of workers, no one can expect a large sum. The board has managed to disperse $328,000 to some 300 workers under the "Disappointed Expectations Fund," but those moneys are now almost gone.
Meanwhile-and even more ominously-Saipan's garment industry is declining. In January 2005, the GATT treaty, which had regulated all global trade in textiles and apparel since 1974, expired, eliminating quotas on textile exports to the U.S. The Northern Marianas had been attractive to garment makers because of its exemption from such quotas and from tariffs on goods shipped to the U.S. marketplace. Without those advantages, manufacturers are increasingly moving to such places as China, Vietnam and Cambodia, where they can pay even lower wages. Since the treaty's expiration, seven factories have closed in Saipan, reducing the value of garment exports to half its 1999 peak and putting thousands of guest workers out of jobs. Some observers expect almost all factories to close by 2008, when a temporary restriction on Chinese apparel exports to the U.S. ends.
Considering that thousands of garment workers won't be able to make enough money to pay back their recruitment fees in their home countries, what will they do if the factories close?
Desperate to make money, some will undoubtedly turn to Saipan's revitalizing tourist industry for jobs-but there are few to be had. In mid- December, nearly 1,000 workers lined up at the World Resort Hotel's job fair, hoping to be among the lucky ones to fill fewer than 100 vacancies.
The Marianas Variety, Saipan's local newspaper, reported that they were "mostly foreign workers who are experiencing problems getting their wages on time due to the worsening economic crisis on the islands."
If the legitimate tourist industry can't provide for these workers, many of them will end up feeding the island's other lucrative, burgeoning industry: sex tourism.
A naked Mongolian woman in a blond wig grinds her body around a silver pole. As music pounds through the small room, disco lights reveal an overweight, graying man in a Hawaiian shirt sitting in the corner, rubbing the thighs of another of the club's dancers. A Japanese man with a sunburned nose stuffs dollar bills between a third woman's legs while kissing and rubbing her breasts.
Outside the club, scantily clad Chinese girls, their hair dyed red or blond, sit on cheap white plastic chairs. "You want massage?" they call out.
"I can get you lots of Chinese girls," says a man with one long fingernail, who calls himself Free. "You can take a girl back to her room and do whatever you want to her. All night."
Teeming with strip clubs and massage parlors, the red-light district of Saipan has a magnetic draw for Asian businessmen, and for U.S. Navy sailors on three-day furloughs from duty stations in the Pacific and beyond. "Every time a ship arrives, they want women," says a local taxi driver. "They say, 'I want a nice fuck tonight. Give me a nice lady.'"
There are no reliable statistics, but an estimated 90 percent of the island's prostitutes are former Chinese garment workers, who sell sexual favors for about $50 a night. Women recruited to work in Saipan as waitresses, or in other legitimate jobs, often end up being forced to become strippers or prostitutes, according to Timothy Riera, director of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's Honolulu office.
"I thought I was coming to work as a dancer," says a young Filipina woman, her voice barely a whisper as she speaks behind a curtain of her hair. "I was so surprised on the first night in the club when they told me I had to strip. The only way to get tips was by picking up the money with your breasts and your vagina. And there was a VIP room in the back where people could have sex."
She points to a yellowed building with boarded-up windows and a security camera in the stairwell just off a busy street. There, she and the other strippers, all young Filipinas, were locked inside during the day and not allowed to leave except for work.
Eventually, she and a friend escaped their employer after one of them rappelled down from a second-story balcony, using a rope made out of pants. "We felt so ashamed but we couldn't back out," says the young woman. "My family was relying on me for money."
The guest worker system inherently denies rights to foreign employees, and this, paired with a lack of government intervention, creates a "breeding ground for slavery," says Jolene Smith, executive director of Free the Slaves and an expert on human trafficking.
The saddest tale we're told in the Marianas comes from a 24-year-old Filipina who is afraid to give her name. She and the 22-year-old woman sitting on a couch beside her came to Saipan last fall after recruiters offered them $400 a month to work as waitresses. Her 14-month-old son had died of dehydration the year before when she didn't have enough money for his medication. So, she couldn't turn down the recruiters, she whispers, because she believed it would enable her to provide a better life for her surviving 3-year-old son.
But, "they forced me to work like a prostitute," she says. They were expected to have sex with as many as four men per day and given but one daily meal of noodles. "The boss lady told me if I don't work, I won't return back to the Philippines or see my son, and they will file a complaint and I'll go to jail."
As she talks in the shelter where they've now hidden for five months, the other girl folds her body into a ball, tears streaking her face.
Tom Delay insists that he's never heard such stories.
"Sure, when you get this number of people, there are stories of sexual exploitation," he told the Galveston County Daily News in May 2005. "But in interviewing these employees one-on-one, there was no evidence of any of that going on. Most Saipan prostitutes are former garment workers. No evidence of sweatshops as portrayed by the national media. It's a beautiful island with beautiful people who are happy about what's happening."
Reformer Rep. George Miller, however, heard completely different stories on his visit to the islands. He and others hope that the indictment of Abramoff offers a chance for real change (see sidebar, to the right). Miller has also requested that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the current House Resources Committee chair, Richard Pombo (R-Calif.), launch a full investigation of Abramoff's dealings in the Marianas. So far, Pombo has yet to hold a hearing, but Miller says he will continue to push.
"It's so ironic that people who talk about themselves as having family values are allowing these guest workers to be exploited in the harshest possible ways," says Miller. "Their money and lobbying allowed the continuation of the worst of human behavior. Hopefully, now DeLay's influence is diminished and there's an opportunity to provide some protections."
For guest workers in Saipan, drowning for years in wretched conditions, Miller's legislation offers but a faint outline of a lifeboat on the horizon. "This is a dark, dark place in America," says one former garment worker while driving beneath the warm tropical sun past one of the covert abortion clinics. "It's a nightmare here."
Tell Congress about Saipan
Three bills currently wending their way through the U.S. House and Senate contain provisions that would make federal minimum wage requirements applicable to the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.
To express support for increasing the minimum wage in the Marianas, contact chair Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon (R-Calif.) of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat of the committee, as well as the chair of the Senate Committee on Finance, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), and ranking Democrat, Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.).
Also, Miller has asked the chair of the House Resources Committee, Rep. Richard Pombo (R-Calif.), to investigate Jack Abramoff's lobbying efforts on behalf of the Northern Mariana Islands. To encourage Pombo to hold hearings, contact him at rpombo@mail.house.gov.
Erica Hsu and duVergne R. Gaines contributed additional research for this article.
Rebecca Clarren is an investigative journalist based in Portland, Ore., with a particular interest in labor issues. Her work has appeared in Salon, The Nation and Los Angeles Times Magazine. She has won five grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
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nothing about obeying laws
or showing restraint. It says nothing about dishonourable actions
...".
In order to justify repressive "anti-terrorism" legislation, various scary miscreants are required, never mind if they lack persuasiveness.
