- Signs of the Times for Mon, 16 Oct 2006 -

• Signs Editorials
• Against All Odds
• Hiding Under a Bush
• The Crusade
• Occupied Territory
• Out of Hand in La-La-Land
• Our Trembling Earth
• Bush Plans his Escape
• Nuking the Future
• Democracy in the Middle East
• Drugs and Birds
• Science Fiction?
• Planet Chaos

Over the past few months, and in the aftermath of the academic paper by Professors Walt and Mearsheimer, you may have noted more than a touch of sarcasm in many alternative news commentaries and editorials dealing with the obvious and excessive influence of the 'Israel lobby' in America and beyond. "Israel lobby?! What Israel lobby?!" one title exclaimed, following it up with several official news releases that left the reader in no doubt that to be a Zionist representative on Capitol Hill is to hold the keys to the Kingdom of 'G-d'. However, as time progresses and this particular infection continues to worsen and spread across the globe, mere sarcasm becomes insufficent for dealing with this problem, and must make way for outright condemnation, in the strongest possible terms, of the flagrant policy of appeasement of the fascist Zionist ideology and its exponents by Western governments.

Counterintuitively, Western 'democratic' governments have a long and ignoble history of appeasement of tyranny and tyrants, most notably in the case of the rise of the Nazis and WWII.

Definitions of Appeasement on the Web:

Policy adopted by major Western political powers towards Adolf Hitler's ambitions in the Munich Agreement of 1938. Leaders, famously including Britain's Neville Chamberlain, agreed to allow Hitler portions of land in Eastern Europe in order to avoid war.

Making of concessions to an aggressor in order to avoid war.

Wikipedia tells us: Appeasement is a policy of accepting the imposed conditions of an aggressor in lieu of armed resistance, usually at the sacrifice of principles. Since World War II, the term has gained a negative connotation, in politics and in general, of weakness, cowardice and self-deception.

In short, Appeasement can be defined as ‘giving a bully what he wants’.  

Let's look at how appeasement worked with Adolf Hitler and the Nazification of Germany.

After coming to power in 1933, Hitler immediately began to re-arm Germany which was a breach of the Treaty of Versailles..  After 1936, he reintroduced conscription, and by 1939 Germany had 95 warships, 8,250 airplanes and an army of 1million.  Britain, France and the U.S. turned a blind eye; Britain even made a naval agreement with Germany, accepting Germany’s right to have a navy that equalled 35% of the British navy. This was appeasement.

In 1936, Hitler moved his troops into the Rhineland.  France did nothing to stop this open breach of the Treaty of Versailles.  Again, this was appeasement.

In March 1938 Hitler invaded Austria and declared Anschluss in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Again, France and Britain did nothing – even though the Austrian Chancellor Schuschnigg asked Britain and France to help. This (and the West’s ignoring of human rights violations such as Kristallnacht, 1938) were also acts of appeasement.

The fact is, many people in France and Britain were not just appeasing Hitler; many of the French and English actively sympathised with Hitler’s aims; so their inaction was purposive.  

It is the crisis of 1938 that is usually marked as the major act of appeasement. Local German officials asserted that the Sudeten people had been discriminated against by the Czech government. On 15 September, British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, met with Hitler at Berchtesgaden.  Hitler threatened war, but promised that this was the ‘last problem to be solved’. Chamberlain apparently believed that Hitler was ‘a man who can be relied upon’, and persuaded the Czechs to hand over the Sudetenland. But when he met Hitler again, at Bad Godesberg on 22 September, there were more demands which Chamberlain refused. War seemed near, and Chamberlain was not sure Czechoslovakia was a ‘great issue’ which needed war.  Instead, he decided that it was ‘a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing’ and, at Munich (29 September), Britain and France gave the Sudetenland to Germany. This was appeasement.

In March 1939, Hitler invaded the remains of Czechoslovakia without resistance from the French or the British. It was this event that finally convinced France and Great Britain that the Fuhrer would not stop his multi-lateral aggressions without forcible intervention. Soviet leaders saw the weakness of France and Britatin, and signed the non-aggression pact with Hitler that divided Poland into German and Soviet territories.

On September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, with the firm belief that Britain and France would not object. Ironically, in March, 1939, a British-French alliance pledged to aide Poland with all available power "...in the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence and which the Polish Government accordingly considered it vital to resist with their national forces," (Neville Chamberlain, Great Britain, House of Commons, Parliamentary Debates, Vol. 3e45, March 31, 1939). On September 3, 1939, Great Britain and France finally declared war against Hitler and Nazi Germany.

However, a major War and the deaths of millions upon millions of innocent human beings could have been avoided by effective, early action. In his 1956 book "The Controversy of Zion", former Times of London chief correspondent, Douglas Reed, states:

"From the start of Hitler's regime (on that night) all professional observers in Berlin, diplomats and journalists, knew that it meant a new war unless this were prevented. Prevention at that time was relatively simple; Mr. Winston Churchill in his memoirs rightly called the Second War "the unnecessary war". It could have been prevented by firm Western opposition to Hitler's preliminary warlike forays (into the Rhineland, Austria and Czechoslovakia) at any time up to 1938 when (as Mr. Churchill also confirms) the German generals, about to overthrow Hitler, were themselves undone by the Western capitulation to him at Munich.

The trained observers in Berlin were agreed that he would make war if allowed and so advised their governmental or editorial superiors in London. The Chief Correspondent of The Times in Berlin, Mr. Norman Ebbutt (I was the second correspondent) reported early in 1933 that war must be expected in about five years unless it were forethwarted, and this particular report was printed. He, I and many other reporters during the following years grew alarmed and perplexed by the suppression, "burking" and ignoring of dispatches, and by the depiction of Hitler, in Parliament and the newspapers, as an inherently good man who would remain peaceable if his just grievances were met (at others' expense).

This period has become known as that of "the policy of appeasement" but encouragement is the truer word, and the policy changed the probability of war into certainty. The strain brought Mr. Ebbutt to physical collapse. From 1935 on I was Chief Correspondent in Vienna, which was then but another vantage-point for surveying the German scene. From there, late in 1937, I informed The Times that both Hitler and Goering had said that the war would begin "by the autumn of 1939"; I had this information from the Austrian Chancellor. I was in Vienna during Hitler's invasion and then, after brief arrest by Storm Troops on the way out, transferred to Budapest, where I was when the supreme capitulation of Munich followed in September 1938. Realizing then that a faithful reporter could do nothing against "the policy of appeasement", and that his task was meaningless, I resigned by expostulant letter, and still have the editor's discursive acknowledgement.

Fourteen years later, The Times publicly confessed error, in respect of its "policy of appeasement", in that curiously candid Official History of 1952. This contains a grudging reference to me: "There were resignations from junior members of the staff" (I was forty-three in 1938, was Chief Correspondent for Central Europe and the Balkans, had worked for The Times for seventeen years, and I believe I was the only correspondent to resign). In this volume The Times also undertook never so to err again: "it is not rash to say that aggression will never again be met at Printing House Square in terms of mere 'Munich'." The editorial articles and reports of The Times about such later events as the bisection of Europe in 1945, the Communization of China, the Zionization of Palestine and the Korean war seem to me to show that its policies did not change at all." [Douglas Reed, Controversy of Zion]

Hitler, as he appeared in "Home and Gardens" in 1938.

Official history, written as always by the victors, records WWII as a classic battle of good verus evil, yet as Reed points out, Hitler's reign could have been cut-short not long after the 'false-flag' burning of the Reichstag in 1933, if there had been more moral rectitude and less appeasment on the part of British, French and American political leaders of the day. As Reed also points out, many laypeople at the time (including Reed) saw the handwriting on the wall and attempted to expose it, but to no avail. By 1938, when Chamberlain was still greeting Hitler in London as the 'German gentleman' par excellance, Hitler had already invaded Czechoslovakia and his policies of oppression and murder of minorities and political oponents were already well advanced.

As late as November 1938, less than a year before the Nazi invasion of Poland that was the final straw for the British and French, Hitler was appearing in issues of magazines such as the British 'Homes and Gardens' where he was portrayed relaxing at his mountain retreat and described as a "droll ranconteur and art lover". Within a few short years thereafter, the self-deluded policies pursued by Chamberlain, Churchill, Roosevelt and later the French Vichy government towards Nazi fascism had contributed directly to the final World War II death toll of 65 million, mostly innocent, people.

But what of today? Has the lesson been learned? If the modern world were faced with a belligerant and extremist force that appeared bent on the creation of yet another, and perhaps decisive, world-wide conflagration, would the same powers that appeased Hitler continue to "appease" such a force? Sadly, the answer appears to be an unequivocal "Yes."

On the 10th October 2006, the French embassy in New York cancelled a planned party for a book, entitled "Bad Faith", dealing with Vichy France's collaboration with Nazi Germany because the author included a postscript stating that Israel has oppressed Palestinians. In writing the book, its author, Carmen Callil', sought to explore the nature of the collaborationist French Vichy government, and in particular the role of Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, the Vichy government official who organized the deportation of French Jews to Auschwitz.

In the book's postscript Callil writes: "What caused me anguish as I tracked down Louis Darquier was to live so closely to the helpless terror of the Jews of France, and to see what the Jews of Israel were passing on to the Palestinian people." "Like the rest of humanity, the Jews of Israel 'forget' the Palestinians. Everyone forgets; every nation forgets."

And so, the book launch party was cancelled by the French embassy in New York because, after having these final lines brought to their attention, "the embassy objected to the author's opinion ... equating what was done to the Jews of France (under the Nazi regime) with what has been done to the Palestinian people." Callil herself refuted this explanation stating that the decision to cancel was not the embassy's alone but rather French doplomats had come under disproportionate influence as a result of a "series of letters from various Jewish fundamentalists complaining. They take a view that that no one can say anything about Jews that is not 100 percent complimentary." Callil said.

The simple fact is that Callil's comments in the postscript of her book could not be more TRUE and appropriate. The parallels between what the Nazis and their sympathizers and appeasers did to the Jews in Germany and Poland and France etc. and what the Zionists are currently doing to the Palestinian people are shockingly similar. Indeed, for many years now it has been clear to anyone interested enough in Truth to circumvent the virtual media blackout, that the Zionists in the Israeli government have been following a policy of steady and genocidal ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in their own land, just as it was very clear in 1938, (while the media was portraying Hitler as a 'country gentleman') that the Nazis were beginning to systematically exterminate Jews and other minorities in Germany, Czechosolvaki and later Poland.

The tragic, almost unbearable irony in all of this could not be more evident. The French Vichy government during WW II is today remembered with shame by the French people, precisely because of the appeasement and open collaboration in which it engaged with Nazi Germany during the War years, including the deportation to concentration camps of Jews and other 'enemies' of the Nazi ideology. Callil wrote her book in an attempt to highlight this historical appeasement and as a warning about where it leads, and. as a postscript, drew the very clear parallel to modern day Israel and the plight of the Palestinian people under Israeli occupation. The response from the French government to this salient reminder to the world of these hard-won lessons of history was appeasement. Cancelling of parties, muzzling of dissent and criticism of the extremism of the Israeli Zionist government towards the Palestinian people and the Arabs of the wider Middle East. France the appeaser, and then the occupied. Will history repeat itself?

Of course, this policy of appeasement of extremism is not limted to French politicians. Successive American governments, perhaps above all others, have pursued a policy of not only appeasement but outright encouragement of the Zionist threat to peace in the Middle East, and by implication, the world. For evidence of the truth of this statement, we need only look to the list of UN resolutions on recognising the basic rights of Palestinians and criticism of Israel over the years and the votes for and against:

Res. No: 33/110 Yes/No vote: 110-2 (US, Israel) Subject: Palestinian living conditions.

Res. No: 33/113C Yes/No vote: 97-3 (US, Israel, Guatemala) Subject: Condemnation of Israeli human rights record in occupied territories.

Res. No: 34/113 Yes/No vote: 120-2 (US, Israel) Subject: Request for report on the living conditions of Palestinians in occupied Arab countries.

Res. No: 34/133 Yes/No vote: 112-3 (US, Israel, Canada) Subject: Assistance to Palestinian people.

Res. No: 34/136 Yes/No vote: 118-2 (US, Israel) Subject: Sovereignty over national resources in occupied Arab territories.

Res. No: 34/160 Yes/No vote: 122-2 (US, Israel) Subject: Include Palestinian women in agenda on UN conference on women.

Res. No: 35/13E Yes/No vote: 96-3 (US, Israel, Canada) Subject: Requests Israel to return displaced persons.

Res. No: 35/75 Yes/No vote: 118-2 (US, Israel) Subject: Condemns Israeli policy regarding the living standards of Palestinians.

Res. No: 35/122C Yes/No vote: 118-2 (US, Israel) Subject: Israeli human rights practices in occupied territories

Res. No: 35/174 Yes/No vote: 120-1 (US) Subject: Emphasising human rights of nations and individuals.

Res. No: 36/15 Yes/No vote: 114-2 (US, Israel) Subject: Demand that Israel cease certain excavations in East Jerusalem.

Res. No: 36/27 Yes/No vote: 109-2 (US, Israel) Subject: Condemns Israel for its bombing of an Iraqi nuclear installation.

Res. No: 36/73 Yes/No vote: 109-2 (US, Israel) Subject: Condemns Israeli policy regarding the living conditions of Palestinian people.

Res. No: 36/87B Yes/No vote: 107-2 (US, Israel) Subject: Establishment of a nuclear-free weapons zone in the Middle East.

Res. No: 36/96B Yes/No vote: 109-1 (US) Subject: Urges negotiations on the prohibition of chemical and biological weapons.

Res. No: 36/120A Yes/No vote: 121-2 (US, Israel) Subject: Rights of the Palestinian people.

Res. No: 36/120B Yes/No vote: 119-3 (US, Israel, Canada) Subject: Palestinian rights.

It is interesting to note therefore that, while the British government during WWII recognised De Gaulle's 'Free French movement', which refused to accept French surrender and rebelled against the Vichy government of Pétain, then US President Roosevelt accepted the Vichy government as the official and legitimate voice of the French people. Some things never change it seems, and sadly, the lessons of history seem equally lost on the current British Labour government of Tony Blair, which has lost no opportunity to sit quietly by as the modern state of Israel effectively dictates British policy towards Israel and the Palestinians.

Appeasement, then, is the problem. But the tendency of American British and French political leaders to collapse in the face of manipulation and coercion from tyrants was not forged by their experience with Hitler. By 1938, British and American diplomats already had a disgraceful track record of fawning appeasement of powerful influences with a less-than-wholesome agenda. It was in fact at the turn of the century that British and American politicians first succumbed to a serious subversion of their supposedly sovereign power.

In the late 19th Century, Zionism as a distinct force with the aim of acquiring a "homeland for Jews in Palestine" appeared. The majority of ordinary Jews in Britain, America and elsewhere in Europe were strongly adversed to any plan that would see them being coerced morally or physically to move from the countries in which they felt very much at home, particularly given than Jewish emancipation had already been achieved for most European Jews and was soon to follow in Russia in the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik 'revolution'. Leading Zionists of the day, via their emmissary Dr Chaim Weizmann, effectively ignored oppostion from Jews to their plan for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and proceeded to lobby British and American government officials to "grant them Palestine", a piece of land that contained somewhere in the region of 700,000 Arabs who happened to have been living there for about 1,500 years.

In his book "Controversy of Zion", Reed tells us that, in 1915, while Dr. Weizmann, was knocking on doors in White Hall, the long-established body that represented ordinary Jews living in England, the Anglo-Jewish Association, through its Conjoint Committee, declared that:

"...the Zionists do not consider civil and political emancipation (in England) as a sufficiently important factor for victory over the persecution and oppression of Jews and think that such a victory can only be achieved by establishing a legally secured home for the Jewish people. The Conjoint Committee considers as dangerous and provoking anti-semitism the 'national' postulate of the Zionists, as well as special privileges for Jews in Palestine. The Committee could not discuss the question of a British Protectorate with an international organization which included different, even enemy elements".

That is to say that the masses of ordinary Jews were entirely against such a move and their representative body even went so far as to say that the Zionists were in fact the enemy of ordinary Jews. And who could blame them? They saw very clearly that planting them by force on the land of another people would place them in a very perilous position for a long time to come.
In 1917 the Conjoint Committee again declared that the Jews were a religious community and nothing more, that they could not, and would not, claim "a national home", and that Jews in Palestine needed nothing more than "the assurance of religious and civil liberty, reasonable facilities for immigration and the like".

Such resistance from ordinary Jews to the Zionist idea of a move to Palestine had already been voiced for several years. In 1914, the same Dr. Weizmann had written that such Jews who opposed his grand plan "have to be made to realize that we and not they are the masters of the situation". In America, two prominent Zionists, Mr. Brandeis and Rabbi Stephen Wise, were equally vigilant against the ordinary Jewish people there who did not support Zionism. The Rabbi (from Hungary) asked President Wilson, "What will you do when their protests reach you?" For one moment only he was silent. Then he pointed to a large wastepaper basket at his desk. "Is not that basket capacious enough for all their protests?"

In England, Dr. Weizmann was enraged by "outside interference, entirely from Jews".

At this point he felt himself to be a member of the Government, or perhaps the member of the Government, and in the power he wielded apparently was that. He did not stop at dismissing the objections of British Jews as "outside interference"; he dictated what the Cabinet should discuss and demanded to sit in Cabinet meetings so that he might attack a Jewish minister! He required that Mr. Lloyd George put the question "on the agenda of the War Cabinet for October 4, 1917" and on October 3 he wrote to the British Foreign Office protesting against objections which he expected to be raised at that meeting "by a prominent Englishman of the Jewish faith".

"The Cabinet and even yourself attach undue importance to the opinion held by so-called 'British Jewry'. "Two days later (October 9 1917) Dr. Weizmann cabled triumphantly to Mr. Justice Brandeis that the British Government had formally undertaken to establish a "national home for the Jewish race" in Palestine.

Reed states:

No rational explanation for the action of leading Western politicians in supporting this alien enterprise (the granting of Palestine to Zionists) has ever been given, and as the undertaking was up to that point secret and conspiratorial no genuine explanation can be given; if an undertaking is good conspiracy is not requisite to it, and secrecy itself indicates motives that cannot be divulged. If any of these men ever gave some public reason, it usually took the form of some vague invocation of the Old Testament. This has a sanctimonious ring, and may be held likely to daunt objectors. Mr. Lloyd George (the British Prime Minister) liked to tell Zionist visitors (as Rabbi Wise ironically records), "You shall have Palestine from Dan to Beersheba", and thus to present himself as the instrument of divine will.

He once asked Sir Charles and Lady Henry to call anxious Jewish Members of Parliament together at breakfast "so that I may convince them of the rightfulness of my Zionist position". A minyan (Jewish religious quorum of ten) was accordingly assembled in the British Prime Minister's breakfast room, where Mr. Lloyd George read a series of passages which, in his opinion, prescribed the transplantation of Jews in Palestine in 1917: Then he said, "Now, gentlemen, you know What your Bible says; that is the end of the matter".

The main point is that the Zionist agenda, as identified by Reed and others is WORLD REVOLUTION that will end with Zionists controlling ALL governments on the planet. They managed to gain control of over half the planet via WW II, now they intend to finish it off, along with a few billion innocent people. Judaism is a tyrannical system of social control administered by rabbis and that is the coming New World Order, believe it or not.

The Yiddish word, chutzpah, is sometimes defined as the boy who kills his parents and then pleads for mercy on the grounds that he is an orphan. Unfortunately, this precisely describes the entire Zionist Agenda.

And appeasement is just helping this project along.

The slavishness of all of the so-called independent nations to Jewish interests as appeasers can be identified as coming from elements of pressure within the governments themselves. What is interesting is how the propaganda campaigns of these same governments (undoubtedly directed by Jewish lobbies or "pressure elements" within) are utilizing the word "appeasement" as a weapon against those they wish to destroy. It is a classic case of the aggressor accusing the victim of that which he, himself, is guilty. This is not passing unnoticed. For example, a recent letter to the editor of the St. Petersburg Times (Florida) points out:

I find the references to Nazi appeasement by our Defense Secretary and the letters they have provoked simply frightening.

Apparently Donald Rumsfeld slept through the class about how Adolf Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 after a deliberate propaganda campaign featuring staged attacks on German soil allegedly committed by the Poles.Details of that campaign were revealed in testimony at the Nuremburg trials. The project, called “Operation Himmler” involved more than 20 incidents staged to give the appearance that Polish forces had attacked Germany.In retaliation, Hitler invaded Poland.64 years later we have the Bush administration telling the world:

* Iraq has weapons of mass destruction * Iraq played a role in the 9/11 attacks * Saddam has reconstituted his military * Iraq is trying to acquire or build nuclear weapons * Iraq is an imminent and immediate threat to the USAll of which turn out to be false and part of a propaganda campaign to build support for a war against Iraq.Bush invades.

So I ask you, Mr. Rumsfeld (and all of you flag waving, chest thumping Republicans): Who do you think looks more like Hitler and the Nazi’s to the rest of the world, Bush or the terrorists whose country he invaded?

But France? Is it not reasonable that we might demand more of the modern French government, founded as it was on liberty, fraternity and equality for all? Has France, having fallen quickly into the clutches of the Nazi rampage across Europe in 1940, and thereafter openly siding with the Nazis in exchange for having only half of its territory occupied by German troops during WWII, not learned the hardest lesson of all the allied powers about the 'rewards' of appeasement of extremism? It appears not.

How else are we to explain the recent actions of the French ambassador to America in refusing to be associated with the simple comment that Palestinians are being oppressed by the Zionists in the Israeli government? When the Zionist Israeli goverment appears to be borrowing from the Nazi rule book on solutions to demographic problems, and the powerful countries of the world are standing idly by, or worse, supporting Israel, are we not seeing a repeat of the appeasement that led to the deaths of 65 million people just 60 short years ago?

And what are we to make of the current 'Zionophile' French Interior Minister and Presidential hopeful, Nicolas Sarkozy? When we see pictures of French Vichy leader Petain in 1940 warmly shaking hands with the Nazi dictator, side by side with images of Sarkozy warmly greeting Sharon, or Sarkozy receiving awards from the Zionist Simon Weisenthal Center, are we expected to NOT draw very clear parallels, and immediately feel a foreboding that history is indeed repeating itself?

In order to get an idea of the extent and reality of the undue influence weilded by Zionist groups around the world, consider the following report from 2001 about a scientific paper published by a Spanish geneticist:

Genetics paper erased from journal over political content

Nature - 11/22/01

A paper about the genetic origins of Palestinians has found itself at the centre of a political storm. In a highly unusual move, the journal Human Immunology has deleted the paper from its September issue after receiving a wealth of complaints over what some saw as inappropriate political comments about the Israeli­Palestinian conflict.

The paper examines genetic variability in the HLA complex ‹ a highly diverse complex of immune-system genes ‹ in a sample of Palestinians (A. Arnaiz-Villena et al. Hum. Immunol. 62, 889­900; 2001). But controversially, it also includes a historical introduction calling Jews living in the Gaza strip "colonists" and describing some Palestinians as living in concentration camps. The paper's publication sparked a "cascade" of angry letters complaining that such comments had no place in a scientific journal, says the journal's editor-in-chief, Nicole Suciu-Foca of Columbia University in New York.

The paper "purports to be a scientific treatise" but "offers opinion on geopolitical issues that cannot be substantiated by the data presented", wrote Dolly Tyan, then president of the American Society for Histocompatibility and Immunogenetics (ASHI), which runs the journal, in a letter to members on 3 October. "ASHI is offended and embarrassed by its inclusion within the journal."

The publisher of Human Immunology, Elsevier Science, has removed all electronic versions of the article and has sent a letter to individual subscribers and librarians advising them to ignore the article "or, preferably, to physically remove the relevant pages".

The paper's lead author, Antonio Arnaiz-Villena of the Complutense University in Madrid, says he did not intend to offend anyone and calls the decision to withdraw the article "unwise". He says he has several letters of support, including one from Jean Dausset, president of the Human Polymorphisms Study Centre in Paris, one of the founding fathers of HLA genetics. A more appropriate action, Arnaiz-Villena says, would have been to publish the letters of complaint and allow him to respond.

But the depth of anger the article raised made such a course impossible, argues Suciu-Foca. One ASHI member was so offended by the article that he resigned, she says. "We would have had mass resignations and the journal would have been destroyed if this paper were allowed to remain."

The paper was in a special issue on anthropology edited by Arnaiz-Villena. Although Arnaiz-Villena says the paper was approved by two reviewers, the incident has prompted the journal's editorial board to revise its policy so that in future the editor-in-chief will supervise work by guest editors, Suciu-Foca says.

The data announced in the paper, which indicated that Jews and Palestinians have a close genetic relationship, were worth reporting, says Steven Marsh, a member of Human Immunology's editorial board who studies the nomenclature of HLA genes at the Anthony Nolan Research Institute in London. "Had the authors confined themselves to announcing their scientific results, it would have been an interesting paper," he says.

The retraction of a scientific paper because of political statements is "unprecedented", says Sheldon Krimsky, an expert on publication ethics at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. But the editorial board took legal advice before making its decision, Suciu-Foca says. "This has nothing to do with freedom of opinion," she says. "This journal is not the right forum for expressing political views."

No mention is made of who, exactly, was behind the hue and cry raised over the simple and truthful comments by the Spanish geneticist that Israelis living in the Gaza strip were colonists, and that Palestinians in the Gaza strip in particular are living in conditions not unlike those experienced by the Jews in Nazi Germany. The five years that have elapsed since this paper was published and then effectively "removed from the pages of history" has served only to reinforce the Truth of the Spanish geneticist's statement. We have to wonder, however, if it was the comments about colonists and concentration camps that provoked the ire of the Zionist lobby, or if was not in fact that findings of the paper itself. Note that the paper's findings indicated that "Jews and Palestinians have a close genetic relationship".

The brutality with which the Palestinians have been oppressed by Jewish soldiers over the past 60 years has to a large extent been facilitated by the belief among Jewish soldiers and civilians (a belief promoted by Zionist leaders) that Palestinians are as different in every way from Semitic Jews as dogs are different from human beings. If Israeli soldiers and civilians were to realise that when they shed Palestinian blood they are in fact shedding the same blood that courses through their own veins, and that of their own sons and daughters, would they continue to do so? And what of the term "anti-semitism"? In this case, in hating the Palestinians, every Semitic Israeli Jew becomes an anti-Semite in a very literal sense. To hate the Palestinians becomes the equivalent of self-hatred. Indeed, is this not the term already being used by Zionist leaders (themselves not of Semitic stock but Russian and Eastern European) for any Jew that utters a word in condemnation of Zionist policies? Policies that were roundly condemned and rejected when the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine was first floated by Zionist leaders at the beginning of the 20th century?

The modern-day equivalent of this story of appeasement of Hitler is being repeated today with Israel, and its puppets, the U.S. and Britain, attacking Iraq, than setting its sights on Iran, Syria, and who knows where and who else. In the rhetoric of the U.S. Neocons, the creatures of Israel, we hear echoes of Hitler and the Nazis. The bottom line is that the outbreak of war in Europe in September, 1939, was the dirext result of the aggressive foreign policy of Hitler's Third Reich opposed to the complete lack of preventative measures taken by the major european powers to prevent Hitler's increasing use of force. It could be said that the policy of appeasement is to blame for the onset of Worldwide conflict.

Don't be surprised if you see Homes and Gardens publishing a special feature on the statesmenlike virtues of Ehud Olmert or Benjamin Netanyahu, who will surely be pictured lounging around with animals and children at their respective Negev Desert retreats. Visiting, and pictured standing behind them with excited smiles on their faces will be Bush, Blair and Sarkozy. France: an Appeaser; controlled from within and without by Zionists it would seem.

Prepare yourself, French citizens, for the coming of the "New World Order."

Patriotism ... is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a network of lies and falsehoods; a superstition that robs man of his self-respect and dignity, and increases his arrogance and conceit.

-Emma Goldman

Populist Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez had the sheer audacity to stand before the United Nations and deliver an angry diatribe against the enemy of humanity. Dispensing with mealy-mouthed pleasantries, he verbally savaged Bush in his fiery oration. Chavez knows an abhorrent war criminal when he sees one and he isn't one to mince words or use polite euphemisms.

George Bush had addressed the assembly the previous day with an incredibly disingenuous monologue loaded with platitudes and Orwellian Doublespeak Admittedly, with his credibility around the world and uncanny capacity to articulate in an intelligent manner, Bush was a tough act to follow at the UN. But somehow, Chavez managed.

He made a few choice observations:

"The devil came here yesterday. And it smells of sulfur still today."

Bush may not actually be the devil, but he certainly qualifies as one of his Earthly agents. And Chavez may very well have smelled residual sulfur fumes which had emanated from Satan himself. It is a virtual certainty that Lucifer was present for Bush's virtuoso performance on 9/19. How could he have resisted watching his favorite sociopath's attempt to beguile listeners into believing he is pursuing noble causes?

Chavez went on to assert:

"As the spokesman of imperialism, he came to share his nostrums to try to preserve the current pattern of domination, exploitation and pillage of the peoples of the world. An Alfred Hitchcock movie could use it as a scenario. I would even propose a title: 'The Devil's Recipe.' "

Underscoring his blasphemy against the predatory capitalism inflicted on the world by the economic and military titan "affectionately" known as the American Empire, the champion of humane social democracy waved a copy of Hegemony or Survival by Noam Chomsky, a vehement domestic critic of the United States political and economic systems.

Chavez also noted that Bush "stole the elections" and "is, therefore, a dictator."

Tough point to argue given that Bush came to power via two bloodless coups, one engineered by Katherine Harris and the other by Diebold.

In the aftermath of Chavez's blistering verbal attacks on US imperialists and the miscreant conducting their symphony of the macabre, "patriots" emerged to defend "our president". Given the overt fascism and aggressive militarism emerging in the United States, it is almost inconceivable that such a regime would continue to enjoy popular support. Yet economic tyranny, consumerism, and relentless pressure to conform to the American Way are so powerful that many US Americans have sold their very souls by offering their voluntary complicity in the subjugation, exploitation, and (in some instances) extermination of billions of human beings around the globe.

And some of these "patriots" originate from some surprising segments of the United States' population.

New York Democrat Charles Rangel, a member of the treasonous US Congress which has enabled the Bush administration in its steady march toward becoming a tyrannical regime, took serious umbrage to Chavez's remarks:

"You don't come into my country; you don't come into my congressional district and you don't condemn my president..."

How telling that a member of the opposition party in a self-proclaimed "democratic nation" would publicly support a war criminal and characterize him as "my president".

He may be a ruthless potentate, but he is OUR ruthless potentate. And don't you dare criticize George W. Bush!

Sadly, the reality in the United States is that there is little difference between Republicans and Democrats. While both parties give ample lip service to meeting the needs of the working class and the poor, most of the Duopoly's "elected" officials zealously devote themselves to advancing the interests of their corporate and aristocratic patrons.

Some might defend Rangel's remarks as evidence of his "patriotism" or allegiance to his nation. Yet the virulent nationalism that has swept the United States since 9/11 is not a healthy loyalty to fellow countrymen. "Patriotism" in the United States today is a symptom of the rapidly spreading malignancy of fascism. Sadly, being a "patriot" in the United States requires one to support egregious crimes against humanity, domestically and abroad.

Consider James Bryce's thoughts on patriotism:

Our country is not the only thing to which we owe our allegiance. It is also owed to justice and to humanity. Patriotism consists not in waving the flag, but in striving that our country shall be righteous as well as strong.

Given its economic might and obsession with militarism, the United States is certainly strong. But righteous? While she may be 305 feet of towering nobility, Lady Liberty is up to her eyeballs in the fetid fecal matter ceaselessly flowing from the bowels of an empire built on economic oppression, genocide, bellicosity, racism, and the pernicious lie known as the American Dream.

Even some of the most oppressed people in history have succumbed to this infection of pathological "patriotism". A group of indigenous people in Alaska recently refused Chavez's offer of free heating oil.(1) Facing 25% unemployment rates, winter temperatures as low as minus 15 Fahrenheit, and heating bills of $300.00 per month, these psychologically enslaved individuals rejected Venezuela's assistance because Chavez insulted George Bush.

Bear in mind that these are people descended from victims of genocide waged by the predecessors of Bush and the members of his regime. Despite surviving the attempted extermination, these Native Americans face significant structural barriers to overcoming perpetual poverty, including years of under-education and marginalization.

Yet Justine Gunderson of the tribal council for the Aleuts in Nelson Lagoon is convinced that they "did the right thing" by choosing to suffer to defend a war criminal's "honor":

"As a citizen of this country, you can have your own opinion of our president and our country. But I don't want a foreigner coming in here and bashing us. Even though we're in economically dire straits, it was the right choice to make."

Dimitri Philemonof, another leader in the Aleutian community, further exhibited the efficacy of the US corporate propaganda mill when he opined:

"I think we have some duty to our country, and I think it's loyalty."

Many of those Justine and Dimitri represent have been doomed to the misery of chronic poverty by years of institutionalized racism. Yet they live in a state inundated with the oil for which they pay such an outrageous price. And they have chosen to forsake their own well-being out of loyalty to the guardians of a rapacious economic system principally dominated by wealthy White elites. The same elites who tenaciously strive to ensure that the poor and minorities continue to wallow in wretchedness. At least they can still wave the Stars and Stripes with pride.

Hugo Chavez embodies nearly everything the working class and poor in the United States have been indoctrinated to fear, hate and ridicule. Like Evo Morales in Bolivia, he champions indigenous poverty-stricken people and their long unfulfilled needs. Both men are on the cutting edge of a South American political revolution in which the people are wresting power and resources away from corporations and the minority wealthy elite. Morales' administration is in its infancy, but Chavez has had time to deliver free health care, free education, and food at subsidized prices to many of the staggering numbers of Venezuelans who had been living in abject poverty in a nation flush with huge reserves of precious petroleum (2).

Meanwhile, in the United States, Bush and his accomplices have persistently striven to replace a constitutional republic with a fascist regime. Invading and occupying a nation that posed no viable threat the United States and had no connection with 9/11, exterminating an estimated 655,000 innocent Iraqis (3), legalizing torture, staging fraudulent elections, jettisoning the Constitution and legal principles from the Magna Carta, and consistently advancing the interests of the super rich at the expense of the working class and vulnerable members of society (4,5,6,7) qualify the US government as a fascist regime.

In Bush's "ownership society", a relatively tiny slice of the population does most of the owning (8). Lulled into a dogmatic slumber, many US Americans are content to fulfill the roles of obedient workers and consumers. Bread and circuses, the idealization of "go it alone, rugged individualism" personified by cultural icons like the Marlboro Man, and the perpetuation of the delusion that their nation is a meritocracy serve to cripple the minds and consciences of many citizens of the United States.

Thus those leaders (like Chavez) who fight for the poor and oppressed are treated as threats and pariahs, champions of the privileged elite like Reagan are enshrined in the pantheon of American politics, and malefactors in the Bush Regime garner enough support to continue perpetrating their heinous crimes.

Thomas Paine penned these words in The American Crisis:

These are times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country...Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered..."

Today's American Crisis? These are the times that enslave men's souls. And the hell of the Bush Regime will not be easily conquered.

Tragically, many spiritually shackled US Americans remain blissfully ignorant of their bondage. And a myriad of myths and distractions shield them from awareness of (or concern for) their complicity in the United States' over-consumption that threatens the perpetuation of life on Earth (9), genocide (10,11), and campaigns of mass murder like the one in Vietnam.

Relentless psychological manipulation has armed the US ruling elite with a vast army of "patriots" eagerly submitting to the yoke of economic subjugation and enabling governments like the Bush Regime to inflict abject misery upon hundreds of millions of human beings.

The staggering 43% of US Americans who still embrace a tyrant who has unleashed hell upon the world with impunity (12) are a testament to the power of the siren call to be a "patriot" in the United States.

If the melodious strains of Orpheus' lyre don't captivate more listeners soon, the ship of humanity may be doomed to share a watery grave with mythological mariners.

Jason Miller is a wage slave of the American Empire who has freed himself intellectually and spiritually. He writes prolifically, his essays have appeared widely on the Internet, and he volunteers at a homeless shelter. He welcomes constructive correspondence at willpowerful@hotmail.com or via his blog, Thomas Paine's Corner, at http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/.

(1) Shivering Alaskans to Hugo Chavez: Keep your oil

(2) Hugo Chavez and His Bolivarian Revolution

(3) 655,000 Iraqis Die Because of War

(4) Income Inequality Has Intensified Under Bush

(5) How Bush Widened The Wealth Gap

(6) Wealth Gap Grows on Republican Policies

(7) White House budget proposal for 2007 includes cuts in social programs, taxes

(8) The rich, the poor and the growing gap between them

(9) US population hits 300 million, but is it sustainable?

(10) Genocide In Gaza

(11) Imperial Conquest, Torture, And A Little Matter Of Genocide

(12) President Bush Job Approval 10/14/06
Comment on this Editorial

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Editorial: Signs Economic Commentary for October 16, 2006

Donald Hunt
Signs of the Times
October 16, 2006

Gold closed at 593.70 dollars an ounce on Friday, up 2.7% from $578.00 for the week. The dollar closed at 0.7992 Friday, up 0.6% from 0.7941 euros at the close of the Friday before. That put the euro at 1.2513 dollars compared to 1.2594 at the previous week's close. Gold in euros would be 474.47 euros an ounce, up 3.4% from 458.95 for the week. Oil closed at 58.70 dollars a barrel, down 2.1% from $59.91 at the end of the previous week. Oil in euros would be 46.91 euros a barrel, down 1.4% from 47.57 euros at the end of the week before. The gold/oil ratio closed at 10.11, up 4.8% from 9.65 for the week. In the U.S. stock market the Dow closed at 11,960.51 Friday, up 0.9% from 11,850.21 at the close of the previous week. The NASDAQ closed at 2,357.29 Friday, up 1.0% from 2,299.99 at the end of the week before. In U.S. interest rates, the yield on the ten-year U.S. Treasury note closed at 4.80%, up 11 basis points from 4.69 for the week.

Last week saw a bit of excitement as the Dow set records and approached 12,000:

Stocks gain as Dow hits another record high

By Chris Sanders
Fri Oct 13, 7:02 PM ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks rose on Friday, driving the Dow to another all-time high as positive retail sales data helped the broader market, while a gain in oil prices pushed up energy shares such as Exxon Mobil Corp..

September retail sales unexpectedly fell on a record decline in gasoline sales. However, when the record 9.3 percent drop in gasoline sales was stripped out of the government data, retail sales actually rose 0.6 percent on strong clothing and department store sales. That sign of a healthy economy gave investors a solid reason to buy shares.

"It's no surprise the market is hanging in there," said Scott Wren, senior equity strategist at A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc. in St. Louis, adding that "people are out there spending money. If you look at the retail sales numbers and strip out the gasoline, they look pretty good and they should be in a good job market with falling energy prices."

Gains in recently out-of-favor large-cap tech stocks, including International Business Machines Corp. and Qualcomm Inc., helped boost the Dow and the Nasdaq, respectively. IBM rose 1.6 percent, or $1.38, to $86.08 on the New York Stock Exchange, while Qualcomm gained 2.3 percent, or 90 cents, to $39.84 on the Nasdaq.

The Dow Jones industrial average gained 12.81 points, or 0.11 percent, to end at a record 11,960.51, which also marked a fresh intraday all-time high. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index rose 2.79 points, or 0.20 percent, to finish at 1,365.62, just below a fresh 5 1/2-year high at 1,366.63. The Nasdaq Composite Index advanced 11.11 points, or 0.47 percent, to close at 2,357.29.

For the week, the blue-chip Dow average rose 0.9 percent, while the S&P 500 gained 1.2 percent and the Nasdaq climbed 2.5 percent.

WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM EXXON

U.S. crude oil futures ended stronger on Friday after jumping to a session high above $59 on news of oilfield shutdowns in Norway and indications that OPEC may meet next week to formalize a production-cut agreement, boosting energy shares such as Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips .

Exxon Mobil shares rose 1.1 percent, or 75 cents, to $68.40, while ConocoPhillips gained 2.1 percent, or $1.22, to close at $60.03 on the New York Stock Exchange. Exxon Mobil was the top-weighted gainer in the S&P 500 and also gave a major boost to the Dow average.

NYMEX November crude rose 71 cents to settle on Friday at $58.57 a barrel, off its session high at $59.45.

On Friday, the Dow's advance was curbed in part because conglomerate General Electric Co. posted third-quarter profit in line with Wall Street expectations.

Investors were concerned because GE, the U.S. economic bellwether with operations ranging from jet engine manufacturing to commercial lending, reported weak margins, particularly at its plastics and NBC Universal units.

GE's stock fell 0.7 percent, or 24 cents, to $35.98. In addition to being a major drag on the Dow, GE was the heaviest weight on the S&P 500 and helped limit its gains for the day.

OF MICROSOFT AND MOMENTUM

Investors' appetite for tech stocks, though, offset the worries about GE.

"The confirmation from Microsoft that (the operating system) Vista is coming and the delays are behind them has got them stirred up," said Joseph Battipaglia, chief investment officer of Ryan, Beck & Co. in Yardley, Pennsylvania.

"There is an expectation of some spending to come after that" Vista release, he added.

Microsoft's stock rose 0.5 percent, or 15 cents, to $28.37 on the Nasdaq. It's also a Dow component and in the S&P 500.

Aside from retail sales, the University of Michigan's preliminary reading of its October consumer sentiment index rose to 92.3, exceeding economists' forecast.

The evidence of strong consumer spending bolstered the perception that the Federal Reserve is not inclined to cut interest rates soon. That view prompted some investors to sell bonds.

The yield on the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury note , which moves in the opposite direction of its price, rose to 4.81 percent on Friday from 4.78 percent late on Thursday.

HOME FRONT BLUES

A drop in the shares of Centex Corp., the fourth-largest U.S. home builder, helped drive an index of home builder stocks down 4.1 percent. Centex shares declined 5.5 percent, or $3.03, to $52.06, a day after the company sharply cut its earnings outlook as a slumping housing market led to record home sale cancellations.

A negative brokerage recommendation prompted investors to sell the shares of Home Depot Inc., making it among the heaviest weights on the Dow.

Home Depot's stock dropped 2.6 percent, or $1.00, to $36.90 on the NYSE after Prudential Equity Group began coverage of the biggest retailers with an "unfavorable" rating and suggested investors reduce the proportion of Home Depot holdings.

Prudential cited high gasoline prices, higher interest rates and a deteriorating housing market.

Trading was active on the NYSE, with about 1.51 billion shares changing hands, below last year's daily average of 1.61 billion, while on Nasdaq, about 2.00 billion shares traded, above last year's daily average of 1.80 billion.

Advancing stocks outnumbered declining ones by a ratio of almost 7 to 5 on the NYSE and about 3 to 2 on Nasdaq.

The pre-election drop in oil prices has helped push optimistic sentiment beyond the circles of media pundits into the public at large.

Falling gasoline price bolsters U.S. consumers

By Burton Friers
Fri Oct 13, 10:16 PM ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Falling gasoline prices spurred U.S. shoppers last month and consumers' enthusiasm firmed in October as the drop in fuel costs left them free to spend elsewhere, reports showed on Friday.

Overall retail sales posted a fall of 0.4 percent in September, the Commerce Department said, but when a record 9.3 percent drop in gasoline sales was stripped out, they showed a healthy rise of 0.6 percent, helped by strong clothing and department store purchases.

Meanwhile, the University of Michigan said its index that gauges consumer sentiment jumped to 92.3 in October, higher than the reading of 86.5 economists had predicted in a Reuters poll and up from September's result.

"Happy days are here again," said Patrick Fearon, senior economist at A.G. Edwards and Sons in St. Louis, Missouri.

"Consumers' improved mood was largely tied to falling gasoline prices."

Analysts polled by Reuters were expecting a 0.2 percent rise in overall retail sales.

U.S. stocks ended higher as the retail sales data helped drive the Dow Jones industrial average to a record high.

U.S. Treasury debt prices slipped and yields rose, as the data reinforced the perception that the Federal Reserve is in no hurry to lower interest rates to stimulate economic growth.

SPENDING PULSE

The strength of Friday's figures was consistent with earlier reports from the retail sector showing growth in consumer spending after a difficult summer when gasoline prices were hovering near record highs.

Average gasoline prices slid from a peak of $2.92 a gallon in mid-August to $2.38 a gallon in late September, according to the Energy Department.

SpendingPulse, a retail data service of MasterCard Advisors, an arm of MasterCard Worldwide, said on Monday that Americans felt freer to splurge with the help of lower gasoline prices and a soaring stock market.

In dollar terms, it said September seasonally adjusted sales, excluding autos, reached $287.7 billion, up 5.3 percent from a year ago.

This followed reports last week from U.S. department stores and clothing retailers, who posted surprisingly strong September sales.

..."If September's sales are any indication, shoppers appear confident heading into the holiday season," the National Retail Federation said in a statement after the retail sales report.

"As gas prices dipped last month, consumers had more disposable income to spend on other items, especially back-to-school necessities like clothing and sporting goods."

The University of Michigan data also showed inflation expectations for the next year were lower, though they were slightly higher for the next five years.

A report from the Labor Department showed U.S. import prices dropped by a more-than-expected 2.1 percent in September, the largest decline in almost 3-1/2 years, due largely to the big fall in petroleum prices.

It was the first fall in overall import prices since March and was led by a 10.3 percent fall in petroleum prices while the cost of non-petroleum imports inched up 0.1 percent.

Some analysts have been trying to peddle the idea that the bursting of the housing bubble is now behind us. Wishful thinking, most likely. Here is "theroxylandr:" blogger:

Real estate bubble: why the worst is still ahead

Any bubble, including Nasdaq bubble of 2000, when the index lost 78% of its value after the bubble burst, follow the same psychological pattern of participants, i.e. bubble inflators. This pattern is:

• euphoria
• denial
• recognition
• panic
• hope (optional)
• capitulation

Btw, the lost wars usually follow the same pattern. Now let see the reported RBC Homeowner's Survey, where homeowners expressed their ridiculous expectations:

• 75.6%: see their Home's value climbing over the next few years
• 46%: expect a gain of 5% or more annually
• 30%: foresee a rise of 10% to 15% a year
• 70%: said their home's value has risen 10% or more in the past 3 years
• 6% think their home's value will sink in the next few years
• 7.8%: worry that their mortgage might exceed the value of their home

As you can see 46% of homeowners are in deep denial and 30% have plain brain damage. Only 6% are absolutely correct.

This stage is called denial, when obvious facts are still ignored by the majority of the market players. It is the same stage where Nasdaq was in early 2001. Please check the charts to see what happened next.

In fact, if the housing situation does stabilize, it can only happen by means of an even bigger replacement bubble in some other sector. Each time one bubble replaces another, the stakes get higher. Some are suggesting a derivatives bubble is being created to soften the impact of a housing bust world-wide. If so, that might be the last bubble; what could replace THAT?"

Bubble - Bubble Toil And Trouble

by Captain Hook
www.treasurechests.info
October 15, 2006

The study below originally appeared at Treasure Chests for the benefit of subscribers on Monday, October 2, 2006.

While I may be a bit premature about attaching a Halloween oriented motif to this piece, at the same time, it fits the situation better than any other in mind so we'll just have to go with it. And to what does it refer, a witches brew perhaps? Well, in a way yes, that's it in a nutshell all right. Of course alternatively one could just as easily characterize it as a 'big mess' in less dramatic terms. What mess is this to which we are referring? Why it's the next asset bubble, in progress as we speak. Actually, it's been there for quite some time now, but not too many see it for what it is in reality. It's the bubble to replace the housing bubble, which of course was the bubble that replaced the tech bubble, all of which being a product of an insane credit bubble, undoubtedly the primary source of our undoing in the end. Which bubble is this then, after such a grand buildup? Why it's the derivatives bubble of course. You know, the one that keeps growing like a mushroom still to this day.

According to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the combined turnover in the world's derivatives exchanges totaled USD 344 trillion during Q4 2005. No, that's not a typo, that's $344 trillion of notional value, where if one were to annualize a total, it doesn't take long to figure out the world is now trading in excess of a quadrillion worth of this paper every year. Is that a big enough bubble for you? And it goes without saying this has been a boon to the brokerages and banks that deal in these formerly exotic financial instruments, where whether you realize it or not, even if you don't participate in them directly, simply by owning a mutual fund, or a bank account for that matter, indirectly you too are captive to this trend.

Can derivatives be classified as 'real' assets however? Are they not just contracts, or promises to pay if you will? And if they cannot be considered 'real' assets then, how can they be characterized as a bubble? An interesting viewpoint, one a banker attempting to baffle you with bull-pucky would raise at an opportune time while reciting a rendition of 'double speak'. But if this were true, then why are they ascribed value, traded for hard currency, and held on balance sheets? And why does the BIS itself count up all those values, notional as they may be? Answer: While it's true the notional values of derivatives will never be realized, which of course is the larger part of the scam bankers perpetuate on savers who participate in them, and much like how the insurance industry prospers, 'premiums' are paid (but rarely collected on), which as mentioned above go directly to the bottom line of the writers, who for the most part just happen to be banks and brokerages. [i.e. and if not in principal (where they only take the sweet deals themselves), as agents.]

Source: Credit Bubble Bulletin

On the surface this may all appear fine and dandy to the unsuspecting, especially if you are one of the increasingly few who actually benefit from this trickery perpetuated under the guise of 'free enterprise', where to the victors go the spoils, right? And hey, myself I'm all for fair play. The only problem is the banks and brokers have become too powerful, where they routinely and not so inconspicuously put there own interests ahead of those (the ignorant public) they are suppose to be serving. Of course everybody wants to be a millionaire these days, where we have been conditioned to think this is possible, which is a very large part of the reason this 'mess' is allowed to continue growing. What's more, in spite of a long and illustrious history in the manufacture of US paper, one that includes aiding in the Super-cycle collapse of US stocks back in 1929, I am willing to go out on a bit of a limb at this juncture and speculate the confidence men from Goldman Sachs are at the top of their game right now, evidenced in what appears to be 'free reign' in managing fiscal policy at home, while spearheading foreign initiatives designed to continue expanding the paper empire abroad.

Source: Credit Bubble Bulletin

With this in mind, and returning to the main topic at hand, it should be no surprise then that the use of derivatives around the world is still on the rise, and that if Mr. Paulson has his way, China will fall into the fold very quickly. One must realize that in order to be a good 'western' banker today, which he still is essentially, Hank wants to see China keep its economy humming along no matter what the cost, because he knows growth velocities at home are suffering, and that without accelerated US paper growth in the east, even the Wall Street Dawgs will begin to suffer soon. Here's a scary thought. If the paper pushers are put out of work, much like those already rendered useless in the 'real economy' through the export of manufacturing jobs to Asia, the only ones left working will be government. And then, whom would they tax?

The lack of credible alternatives is a strong incentive to allow asset bubbles to continue growing, and largely explains why officialdom condones / promotes / supports such activities, but it's getting harder and harder to find new ones. One has to wonder how it's all going to end knowing growth rates in bubbles under construction will undoubtedly prove unsustainable as well.

Source: Credit Bubble Bulletin

This is why Hank is over in China attempting to keep the flow of paper heading overseas accelerating as long as possible, which is why one should not be surprised to hear about derivatives markets opening there too, where simply getting them indebted is not sufficient to support necessary growth in the larger credit bubble anymore. Nope, western bankers need them buying derivatives too, and right away in support of all the other bubbles. North American's are already enslaved up to their eyeballs in debt and derivatives rendering little to no growth prospects at home in this regard. So, what do Wall Street capitalists do? They export the manufacturing base to China boosting worker's wages so they can be enslaved in debt servitude, as well as creating markets for all the other paper Da Boyz want to send over. Genius no? The only thing is even the Chinese have growth limits, along with the fact they may be acting to slow, which poses risks to the western model. A slowdown here would not be good for the credit bubble, at large.

Source: Credit Bubble Bulletin

So, the big question is what if the Chinese do not embrace the use of derivatives in good measure? Will the derivatives bubble pop soon too if this is the case? For an answer to that question, along with being a window on the larger condition of the paper world in full measure these days, and like GM was considered a 'bell weather' when the US still had a manufacturing base, one might want to keep a watchful eye on Goldman's stock, symbol GS on New York. While it appears to be pushing higher in deference to the ever-expanding derivatives / credit bubble(s), and the increased business that goes along with this trend, when the party is over for real, meaning growth in foreign markets is leveling off - Houston - we may have a problem. For now however, the top brass in China continue to see globalization as the pigs in Animal Farm would, an easy ride on the backs of others to good times. Thusly, we will have derivatives in China, and higher prices for Goldman's stock price in all likelihood, as well.

In March I put out some thoughts on why the echo bubble in stocks likely had much further to go than some could contemplate at the time. Upon reviewing this piece, you will notice we centered our attention on the plight of GS shares back then knowing we would likely return one day, and here we are now expanding on these understandings. Back in March, GS was $150, and today its $170, apparently on it's way to a Fibonacci (Fib) resonance defined target of approximately $190. Just as an aside, I use this price targeting method because it's my belief movements within humans are still primarily a function of nature, no matter how much we attempt to separate ourselves from this reality.

That being said, and while this is all pure speculation, if the Fib based projection presented above is in fact correct, the implication in my mind is that both the derivatives bubble, and perhaps even the larger credit bubble itself, are approaching 'critical mass', and that 'reversals of fortune' are possibly at hand in the not too distant future. One thing is for sure, even if this were not the case, a good test will be seen once Fib resonance related resistance is achieved, so at a minimum, one might keep this in mind.

And what if this does turn out to be the real deal? You will be very happy in a few years if you take precautions now I will wager, because in a larger sense we are talking about the derivatives and credit bubbles here today, but it should not be forgotten all of our asset bubbles depend on co-existence, and that if growth rates begin to wane, the leveraged buyout bubble, the stock market echo bubble, ALL the other asset bubbles will undoubtedly feel the pinch.

Traveling a little further down the rabbit hole in expanding on the above, and narrowing our focus onto the US stock market in terms of how it fits into the grand scheme of things, as mentioned above, while growth prospects in domestic derivatives markets are likely to slow in coming days for a variety of reasons, and not ignoring the importance of credit based derivatives in the big picture, not only monitoring growth rates is important in measuring future health prospects, but also structure as well. To what structure do we refer and why is it important? In the case of equity based derivatives markets, we are referring to put / call ratios, where if you are unaware, open interest ratios happen to be the best reflection of investor sentiment in the market today based on our studies.

Further to this, and in attempting not take away from the main thrust of this piece, while at the same time covering a related aspect of the derivatives world that could hasten a popping of the larger bubble, it must be briefly mentioned that if US equity index options markets ever became disorderly (not liquid), such a condition would spread to credit and currency related contracts as well, potentially setting off a chain reaction of defaults that for all intents and purposes would shut down the global financial system. Moreover, considering the size and extent of the current derivatives bubble, if the above numbers are extrapolated into the future, very soon we will be dealing in multi-quadrillions of notional values within the totality of international markets. That's one thing about bankers; they are very predicable, where if one quadrillion is good, ten will undoubtedly be viewed as better in maintaining paper empires. The only thing is, when a bubble of this nature (size) pops, there's no coming back. Please note this whole train of thought is very consistent with conditions one would expect to see at a top of 'grand' proportions in human intercourse.

Now it's time to throw some corny (in today's world) and obvious truisms at you, which in retrospect a few years out, may be looked back on as 'hitting the nail right on the head'. Here's another. Whatever has a beginning also has an end. Sounds like Confucius, no? Relating to this, 'whenever a more natural end is avoided, no matter what you are talking about, the result is usually violent'. Awe, there's the rub. This is why we watch sentiment in US equity indices so closely, because one of these days open interest put / call ratios will drop across the board, and the floor that currently exists under prices will be gone. Why is this important? Answer: In spite of what you may think on the subject, US monetary authorities are not in a position to monetize the entire financial system, and if stocks were ever to start falling precipitously with options related support(s) removed, not only would they likely not be able to do much about it right away, it's also likely panic and dislocations will spread to other markets as well. This is because today primary dealers not only deal in stocks in a big way, but also in debt / credit markets, and currencies, with the term 'counter party risk' potentially becoming applicable in cross-markets. Puff on that one for a bit.

This is why you want to step out of the paper game with some of your assets, not the least of which is the US dollar (think of China's growing $1 trillion holdings) considering it's poised to lose reserve status one of these days. What's more, all should realize this is the biggest and most obvious contrarian play ever, where man has never been so far from his natural beginnings. One can only see this if looking through the right pair of glasses however, which was the purpose of this paper, to provide such a view, along with a warning. Much trouble of increasing complexity lies down the road for all, and only the prepared will fair well.

In the end then, it's important to realize derivatives and debt are all forms of phony money, designed to artificially pump up an ailing financial system. Moreover, once more people not only begin to realize this, but act on this knowledge, gold, silver, and any of the other real 'hard' currencies you care to mention will come into their own, even if only to support new paper regimes ultimately as reorganizations are engineered in the future. Of course this eventuality is still years off, and when you see it, the trend towards tangible assets will be a lot closer to its end than beginning, along with rather substantial bubbles in gold and silver correspondingly.

The economic optimism on display in the U.S. recently can only be adopted if one puts on blinders and ignores the deficits, the debt, and, perhaps most importantly, the war. Without the Global War on Whatever They're Calling it Now, the problems of debt and deficit in the zone of the world's reserve currency would be bad enough. Wars, however, and most particularly unsuccessful imperial wars, exacerbate debt and deficit.

More reasons a monetary crisis is inevitable

Doug Casey
October 12, 2006

Doug Casey is the chairman of Casey Research, LLC., publisher of the highly acclaimed International Speculator .

Even a casual observer can see that the Fed is now caught between a rock and a hard place. If it lowers interest rates to head off the economic devastation that would come with a collapsed housing bubble - housing is estimated to have, directly and indirectly, contributed 57% of U.S. economic activity over the past 5 years - the Fed risks triggering a wholesale rush by foreigners to dump their trillions of U.S. dollars. But if it raises interest rates to protect the dollar, the Fed risks turning an economic downturn into the most serious recession since the 1930's.

It is our view at Casey Research that, for a number of reasons, not the least being that we are soon to enter the presidential election cycle, the government will take the course of inflation.

A couple of other factors lead us to that view. One is demographic.

The first-born baby boomers are turning 60 this year, and they and their little brothers and sisters will soon have their hands out for the Social Security and Medicare entitlements they've been promised. But the boomers represent an extraordinary bulge in the age profile of the U.S. population. The bulge means that the share of the population receiving government retirement benefits will grow, while the share of the population paying for them will shrink. To paper over this gross imbalance and still keep the entitlement checks going out, deficits will have to increase at a stupendous rate - and the engine of monetary creation will have to ramp up to entirely new and increasingly dangerous levels.

The second factor promising more inflation is the "Forever War" against Islam - already being called World War Three in many quarters. As the chart by our own Bud Conrad shows, the dollar has been a casualty of every U.S. war. War costs are paid for with deficits, and the deficits translate into rising price inflation every time.

Contrary to Wall Street's opinion, these aren't problems the Fed can sweep under the rug. Fed Chairman Bernanke is an academic with a reasonable understanding of the technical details, but his career bias has been to dodge recessions by cranking up the presses that print all those $100 bills. "Helicopter Ben" is the nickname he earned for facetiously proposing to drop cash out of helicopters to stave off a deflation.

Given the options in front of him, and his bias toward monetary expansion, we are convinced that the Fed will return to loose monetary policies - masked by ongoing tampering with the CPI indicators and by obfuscating the truth about the money supply. That's the path of least resistance. In the short run, no one gets hurt, and it delivers the U.S. government its daily fix of billions needed to keep the ship of state afloat.

Monetary expansion will buy some time, but then the real trouble starts. A loose monetary policy eventually produces price inflation. As the inflation becomes noticed, foreign holders will lose confidence in the dollar. Then, as they head for the exit, the Fed will face a stark decision: either raise interest rates to economy-crushing levels to save the dollar, or let the dollar collapse and tolerate even worse inflation a little further down the line.

There's room in the Fed's lifeboat for the dollar, and there's room for the economy, but there isn't room for both. Bernanke has already all but announced that it will be the dollar that gets thrown overboard.

While no one can say how long it will take for a monetary crisis to emerge or what will ultimately trigger it, now is the time to acknowledge the risk - and in fact the likelihood - that it will occur in the next few years. That potential is confirmed with each newsflash telling us that the housing slump is accelerating and that signs of recession are appearing. Those are code words for the Fed to begin pumping more paper money into the system.

Of course wars, even disastrous ones, make some people rich. They just benefit at the expense of their home society and currency. George Ure blames those fictive psychopaths, the corporations, and those real psychopaths who benefit from those corporations, for the chronic warfare that so damages the average people of the world:

The West is hostage to a view that is profit-oriented; power derives from money, and money flows from corporations. Corporations exist to grow - and without growth profits shrink, and without profits the whole of the Western paradigm is in trouble. When growth doesn't exist to increase standards of living, the excess production must be spent somewhere else, and wars are a fine place to blow up, burn up, and shoot up excess production. I note that as soon as the gunfire stopped Lebanon last month, in came the bankers to make money. It has been almost too pat, too smooth, too orchestrated, at least for my taste.

To get a better understanding of how the psychopaths is charge think and act, ponder the following economic experiment. The economy itself is a weapon in their hands:

Gaza as Laboratory: The Great Experiment

Uri Avnery
October 14-15, 2006

Is it possible to force a whole people to submit to foreign occupation by starving it?

That is, certainly, an interesting question. So interesting, indeed, that the governments of Israel and the United States, in close cooperation with Europe, are now engaged in a rigorous scientific experiment in order to obtain a definitive answer.

The laboratory for the experiment is the Gaza Strip, and the guinea pigs are the million and a quarter Palestinians living there.

In order to meet the required scientific standards, it was necessary first of all to prepare the laboratory.

That was done in the following way: First, Ariel Sharon uprooted the Israeli settlements that were stuck there. After all, you can't conduct a proper experiment with pets roaming around the laboratory. It was done with "determination and sensitivity", tears flowed like water, the soldiers kissed and embraced the evicted settlers, and again it was shown that the Israeli army is the most-most in the world.

With the laboratory cleaned, the next phase could begin: all entrances and exits were hermetically sealed, in order to eliminate disturbing influences from the world outside. That was done without difficulty. Successive Israeli governments have prevented the building of a harbor in Gaza, and the Israeli navy sees to it that no ship approaches the shore. The splendid international airport, built during the Oslo days, was bombed and shut down. The entire Strip was closed off by a highly effective fence, and only a few crossings remained, all but one controlled by the Israeli army.

There remained a sole connection with the outside world: the Rafah border crossing to Egypt. It could not just be sealed off, because that would have exposed the Egyptian regime as a collaborator with Israel. A sophisticated solution was found: to all appearances the Israeli army left the crossing and turned it over to an international supervision team. Its members are nice guys, full of good intentions, but in practice they are totally dependent on the Israeli army, which oversees the crossing from a nearby control room. The international supervisors live in an Israeli kibbutz and can reach the crossing only with Israeli consent.

So everything was ready for the experiment.

THE SIGNAL for its beginning was given after the Palestinians had held spotlessly democratic elections, under the supervision of former President Jimmy Carter. George Bush was enthusiastic: his vision of bringing democracy to the Middle East was coming true.

But the Palestinians flunked the test. Instead of electing "good Arabs", devotees of the United States, they voted for very bad Arabs, devotees of Allah. Bush felt insulted. But the Israeli government was ecstatic: after the Hamas victory, the Americans and Europeans were ready to take part in the experiment. It could start:
The United States and the European Union announced the stoppage of all donations to the Palestinian Authority, since it was "controlled by terrorists". Simultaneously, the Israeli government cut off the flow of money.

To understand the significance of this: according to the "Paris Protocol" (the economic annex of the Oslo agreement) the Palestinian economy is part of the Israeli customs system. This means that Israel collects the duties for all the goods that pass through Israel to the Palestinian territories - actually, there is no other route. After deducting a fat commission, Israel is obligated to turn the money over to the Palestinian Authority.

When the Israeli government refuses to pass on this money, which belongs to the Palestinians, it is, simply put, robbery in broad daylight. But when one robs "terrorists", who is going to complain?

The Palestinian Authority - both in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip - needs this money like air for breathing. This fact also requires some explanation: in the 19 years when Jordan occupied the West Bank and Egypt the Gaza Strip, from 1948 to 1967, not a single important factory was built there. The Jordanians wanted all economic activity to take place in Jordan proper, east of the river, and the Egyptians neglected the strip altogether.

Then came the Israeli occupation, and the situation became even worse. The occupied territories became a captive market for Israeli industry, and the military government prevented the establishment of any enterprise that could conceivably compete with an Israeli one.

The Palestinian workers were compelled to work in Israel for hunger wages (by Israeli standards). From these, the Israeli government deducted all the social payments levied on Israeli workers, without the Palestinian workers enjoying any social benefits. This way the government robbed these exploited workers of tens of billions of dollars, which disappeared somehow in the bottomless barrel of the government.

When the intifada broke out, the Israeli captains of industry and agriculture discovered that it was possible to get along without the Palestinian workers. Indeed, it was even more profitable. Workers brought in from Thailand, Romania and other poor countries were ready to work for even lower wages and in conditions bordering on slavery. The Palestinian workers lost their jobs.

That was the situation at the beginning of the experiment: the Palestinian infrastructure destroyed, practically no means of production, no work for the workers. All in all, an ideal setting for the great "experiment in hunger".

THE IMPLEMENTATION started, as mentioned, with the stoppage of payments.

The passage between Gaza and Egypt was closed in practice. Once every few days or weeks it was opened for some hours, for appearances' sake, so that some of the sick and dead or dying could get home or reach Egyptian hospitals.

The crossings between the Strip and Israel were closed "for urgent security reasons". Always, at the right moment, "warnings of an imminent terrorist attack" appeared. Palestinian agricultural products destined for export rot at the crossing. Medicines and foodstuffs cannot get in, except for short periods from time to time, also for appearances, whenever somebody important abroad voices some protest. Then comes another "urgent security warning" and the situation is back to normal.

To round off the picture, the Israeli Air Force bombed the only power station in the Strip, so that for a part of the day there is no electricity, and the water supply (which depends on electric pumps) stops also. Even on the hottest days, with temperatures of over 30 degrees centigrade in the shade, there is no electricity for refrigerators, air conditioning, the water supply or other needs.

In the West Bank, a territory much larger than the Gaza Strip (which makes up only 6% of the occupied Palestinian territories but holds 40% of the inhabitants), the situation is not quite so desperate. But in the Strip, more than half of the population lives beneath the Palestinian "poverty line", which lies of course very, very far below the Israeli "poverty line". Many Gaza residents can only dream of being considered poor in the nearby Israeli town of Sderot.

What are the governments of Israel and the US trying to tell the Palestinians? The message is clear: You will reach the brink of hunger, and even beyond, if you do not surrender. You must remove the Hamas government and elect candidates approved by Israel and the US. And, most importantly: you must be satisfied with a Palestinian state consisting of several enclaves, each of which will be utterly dependent on the tender mercies of Israel.

AT THE moment, the directors of the scientific experiment are pondering a puzzling question: how on earth do the Palestinians still hold out, in spite of everything? According to all the rules, they should have been broken long ago!

Indeed, there are some encouraging signs. The general atmosphere of frustration and desperation creates tension between Hamas and Fatah. Here and there clashes have broken out, people were killed and wounded, but in each case the deterioration was halted before it became a civil war. The thousands of hidden Israeli collaborators are also helping to stir things up. But contrary to all expectations, the resistance did not evaporate. Even the captured Israeli soldier has not been released.

One of the explanations has to do with the structure of Palestinian society. The Hamulah (extended family) plays a central role there. As long as one person in the family is working, the relatives, too, do not die of hunger, even if there is widespread malnutrition. Everyone who has any income shares it with all his brothers and sisters, parents, grandparents, cousins and their children. That is a primitive system, but quite effective in such circumstances. It seems that the planners of the experiment did not take this into account.

In order to quicken the process, the whole might of the Israeli army is now being used again, as from this week. For three months the army was busy with the Second Lebanon War. It became apparent that the army, which for the last 39 years has been employed mainly as a colonial police force, does not function very well when suddenly confronted with a trained and armed opponent that can fight back. Hizbullah used deadly anti-tank weapons against the armored forces, and rockets rained down on Northern Israel. The army has long ago forgotten how to deal with such an enemy. And the campaign did not end well.

Now the army returns to the war it knows. The Palestinians in the Strip do not (yet) have effective anti-tank weapons, and the Qassam rockets cause only limited damage. The army can again use tanks against the population without hindrance. The Air Force, which in Lebanon was afraid to send in helicopters to remove the wounded, can now fire missiles at the houses of "wanted persons", their families and neighbors, at leisure. If in the last three months "only" 100 Palestinians were killed per month, we are now witnessing a dramatic rise in the number of Palestinians killed and wounded.

How can a population that is hit by hunger, lacking medicaments and equipment for its primitive hospitals and exposed to attacks on land, from sea and from the air, hold out? Will it break? Will it go down on its knees and beg for mercy? Or will it find inhuman strength and stand the test?

In short: What and how much is needed to get a population to surrender?

All the scientists taking part in the experiment - Ehud Olmert and Condoleezza Rice, Amir Peretz and Angela Merkel, Dan Halutz and George Bush, not to mention Nobel Peace Price laureate Shimon Peres - are bent over the microscopes and waiting for an answer, which undoubtedly will be an important contribution to political science.

I hope the Nobel Committee is watching.

Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is one of the writers featured in The Other Israel: Voices of Dissent and Refusal. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's hot new book The Politics of Anti-Semitism.

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Editorial: Headwinds for the US Economy

by Rodrigue Tremblay
New American Empire
October 16, 2006

"In the long run, we are all dead."
John M. Keynes (1883-1946)

Fourth sorrow: "There is bankruptcy, as the United States pours its economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and shortchanges the education, health, and safety of its citizens."
Chalmers Johnson, (Sorrows of Empire)

"The moral and constitutional obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars, while bringing bankruptcy and economic turmoil to our people."
Ron Paul, U.S. Representative (R - TX)

In 2004, it was revealed that Saudi Prince Bandar had promised President George W. Bush that Saudi Arabia would increase oil production and lower oil prices in the months before the 2004 presidential election-to ensure that the U.S. economy was strong on election day. This was exposed in Washington journalist Bob Woodward's 2004 book "Plan of Attack.". In the weeks leading up to the November 7 (2006) midterm elections, there is renewed optimism that falling oil and commodities prices, coupled with a soft housing market, will persuade the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates next year, and not raise them further. The bond market, while also sending messages that inflation is not an immediate threat, seems to forecast slower economic growth in the coming years, and possibly negative growth for one quarter, while the risk of a recession (two consecutive quarters with negative growth) is not negligible. The downturn in the housing market alone would account for a big chunk of this decline in economic growth, as capital spending slows down and as banks see their mortgage business contract.

Because of the aggressive low interest rate policy that the Fed pursued after 2001 and because of such financial innovations as interest-only mortgages, construction and its related industries are one of the three economic sectors which have created new employment since 2002, the other two being the health and military sectors. -However, as a consequence, many over-leveraged homeowners risk being caught in a 'negative equity' trap in the coming months, when the value of their mortgaged assets is not sufficient to cover the amounts borrowed. In the past, such squeezing has resulted in increased foreclosures and banking difficulties.

A downturn in construction would have the negative impact of removing one of the three pillars of employment growth in the U.S. -Therefore, we can understand why the Fed is weary of raising interest rates further. The Fed, in fact, is caught in a dilemma: it cannot raise interest rates much higher for fear of creating an unmanageable collapse in the housing market. However, the U.S. is running large current account external deficits ($-791,5 billion in 2005). And, because the American economy needs to draw a large amount of capital from abroad to finance its deficit spending, American interest rates must remain competitive.

Indeed, under the Bush administration, a combination of large tax cuts and large increases in military outlays to wage costly wars abroad have stimulated the economy, in a Keynesian way. However, this has also pushed the U.S. budget deficit to record current-dollar levels. In five years, from 2002 to 2006, the cumulative federal budget deficit has exceeded one and a half trillion (1.5 trillion) dollars. -Since the rest of the U.S. economy was also in deficit, the only exit was to borrow abroad the necessary cash. The United States is still borrowing abroad more than $2 billion a day just to keep this binge of expenses going. From whom? Mainly from China, Japan and some oil-rich Middle East countries which hold tons of U.S. dollars.

As a consequence, foreigners own an increasing share of the federal public debt, that share presently being estimated at $2.1 trillion or about 42 percent of all the public debt held outside the government (about $5.0 trillion in a total debt of $8.6 trillion). These foreign holdings represent an amount that is 17 percent of GDP ($12.3 trillion), a share that is increasing fast toward 20 percent of GDP. Keep in mind that this percentage was less than 1.5 percent in 1970 and less than 1 percent in 1946.

What does it all mean for the U.S. dollar? As a reserve currency, there is a built-in demand for the dollar from central banks and from worldwide operators, such as oil traders, who deal in dollars and who are big buyers of U.S. securities. These purchases have the double benefit of shoring up the dollar and of keeping U.S. interest rates low. That is why the foreign demand for U.S. dollars is not going to collapse overnight, even if relative American interest rates were to stay flat for a while. In this sense, it can be said that the U.S dollar has some resilience. This is one of the "seigniorage" benefits that accrue to the United States because its currency is held abroad as a reserve currency. -In the short run, measured in months, the U.S. dollar should continue its rebound against other major currencies, as long as oil and commodities prices are soft and as long as U.S. interest rates remain firm. However, in the longer run, measured in years, the dire external financial situation of the United States should begin to weigh more heavily on the dollar.

One currency against which the U.S. dollar is expected to decline is the Chinese yuan. Since July 2005, the yuan tracks a basket of currencies that includes the yen, the euro, the Hong Kong dollar and the South Korean won. Previously "pegged" to the dollar at the rate of about eight yuans for one dollar, the yuan has begun a slow appreciation toward the dollar and stands at a value of 7.9 yuans for one dollar, or at a price of about 12.6 US¢.

But, at this rate, the yuan is way undervalued and should be revalued substantially more to reflect China's huge external trade surpluses. Indeed, China has accumulated foreign exchange reserves in excess of $950 billion, which are invested roughly three-quarters in U.S. Treasury bills and other dollar-denominated assets, the rest being invested in other currencies. However, the Chinese government has expressed a wish to diversify somewhat its pool of foreign exchange reserves toward the euro or the yen and even increase its strategic stocks of oil.

In 2005, China attempted to spend some of its U.S. dollars to buy an American oil company, Unocal, for about $18.5 billion. However, the Chinese offer was unceremoniously rebuffed by the U.S. Congress.

A similar fate was met by Dubai-owned Dubai Ports World in early 2006, when it bought a British company (Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co or P&O for $6.8 billion) that happened to manage six U.S. ports. The company was forced to disinvest itself from its American interests by the U.S. Congress. -The message sent to foreign lenders was loud and clear: if you accumulate American dollars, deposit the money in our banks or buy U.S. government securities (Treasury bills), but do not attempt to invest them in income-generating real American industrial assets. How long will that scam last? Nobody knows. But, it most likely won't last forever.

The central question is how long will confidence in the U.S. dollar hold in the face of all these factors. If you add the widespread unpopularity that the Bush administration has bestowed upon the United States around the world, it is more likely than not that the value of the U.S. dollar, after the current show of strength, will continue eroding in the coming years. A lower currency translates into more imported inflation and makes it difficult to maintain low interest rates. The stage would then be set for a bout of stagflation, that is to say creeping higher inflation and slower economic growth.

Rodrigue Tremblay is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Montreal and can be reached at tremblay.rodrigue@yahoo.ca. He is the author of the book The New American Empire.

Visit his blog site at: www.thenewamericanempire.com/blog

Author's Website: www.thenewamericanempire.com/
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Against All Odds

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Seven Palestinians killed, 18 wounded in Israeli air raid

AFP
Sat Oct 14, 2006

GAZA CITY - Seven Palestinians have been killed and 18 wounded during an Israeli air raid on the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza overnight, Palestinian security officials said.

At least three of those who died were members of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of ruling Palestinian movement Hamas.

Officials said that Israeli ground forces also raided the Jabalya area.
Since Thursday 20 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip aimed at putting an end to rocket fire from the territory on southern Israel.

Since June 28 -- three days after an Israeli soldier was kidnapped by militants in an attack on an army post near the Gaza Strip -- the Israeli army has been pursuing its vast offensive to free him.

More than 220 Palestinians have been killed in the raids.

Two Israeli were slightly wounded late Friday when a rocket fired by Palestinian militants at the southern town of Sderot exploded.

The deaths bring to 5,434 the number of people killed since the September 2000 outbreak of the Palestinian uprising, most of them Palestinians, according to an AFP count.



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Israel threatens to step up deadly Gaza offensive

by Jean-Luc Renaudie
AFP
Sun Oct 15, 2006

JERUSALEM - Vowing not to let the Gaza Strip become a "second Lebanon", Israel has warned it will step up an offensive that has killed 22 people in three days in a bid to stop rocket fire and arms smuggling.

"Our policy is clear -- we will deploy all our efforts to prevent these firings and this contraband," senior defense ministry official Amos Gilad told army radio.

This will include "ground and air attacks on terrorists and their infrastructure," he added Sunday.
"Hamas, which is reinforcing itself, constitutes a threat to Israel's security," Gilad said, referring to the Islamic militant movement which dominates the Palestinian government.

"Our priority is now to make it more and more difficult for the continuation of terrorism."

Israel says that militants in Gaza are amassing stockpiles of arms smuggled into the impoverished territory through tunnels from neighbouring Egypt.

According to army radio, General Yossi Baidatz, head of Israel's intelligence research department, told the weekly cabinet meeting Sunday that surface-to-air missiles and Russian-made anti-tank rockets had been brought into Gaza.

Defense Minister Amir Peretz already approved a first intensification of Israel's three-month-plus offensive in Gaza on Thursday after rocket fire from the territory hit his southern hometown of Sderot, wounding three people.

At least 22 Palestinians have since been killed and scores more wounded, as Israel pushed tanks and troops, backed by helicopters and drones, into more populated areas of the Gaza Strip.

In the most recent clashes, several dozen Israeli armored vehicles and bulldozers rolled two kilometres (more than a mile) into the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanun Saturday evening, closing off its southern entrance.

But Peretz said Israel needed to take further action to prevent Hamas stockpiling weapons as Shiite militant group Hezbollah did in Lebanon ahead of this summer's 34-day conflict.

"We've learned the lessons of Lebanon well," Israel's top-selling daily Yediot Aharonot quoted him as telling a closed-door meeting.

"We will operate against the armament immediately and we will not allow the terrorist organizations to become stronger. Israel is acting to prevent Hamas from joining the Iranian axis of evil."

Israel has not ruled out resuming control of the Gaza-Egypt border, the Palestinian territory's sole link with the outside world that bypasses the Jewish state.

The anti-smuggling efforts of the lightly armed Egyptian guards who currently patrol the border "could be significantly improved," Gilad said, although he refused to be drawn on any Israeli plans to replace them.

"We've learned from experience not to tackle such questions in public in order to preserve the element of surprise," he said.

Although the Israeli army insists that most of the 22 people killed since Thursday have been Palestinian militants, a 29-year-old woman was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers on Friday and three young children died in an air strike.

The army has said its offensive -- launched after the capture of a soldier in a deadly cross-border raid from Gaza in June -- is being conducted "against tunnels and other terror threats."

But a UN special envoy for human rights, John Dugard, has accused Israel of unleashing "collective punishment" in the territory, declaring last month that some 260 Palestinians had been killed and 800 wounded in the operation.

All told, 5,436 people -- most of them Palestinians -- have died since the Palestinian intifada resumed in 2000, according to an AFP count.



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US 'plot to force out Hamas'

Sunday October 15, 2006
The Observer

Hamas accused the United States yesterday of fomenting internal strife among Palestinians as new details emerged of a campaign to funnel millions of dollars in funds to its opponents and provide weapons and military training for rival forces.

Officially the US has put up some $42m to bolster Hamas's political opponents ahead of possible early Palestinian elections, with officials saying the programme is aimed at promoting alternatives to Hamas, which caused a sensation when it won power in January. But reports in Israel suggest that cash is being diverted to military training and to purchase weapons for forces loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas, amid growing fears that Abbas's Fatah party and Hamas are headed for a showdown.

Ahmed Youssef, a political adviser to Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, said yesterday that the US was trying bring down the government by various means. 'They failed in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Lebanon, and they will fail in Palestine because they have no clear plans on how to deal with Islamists. We hoped after the elections in January that they would open door to talks, to put things on the table and to help Palestinians find a final peaceful solution but unfortunately every time they deal with wrong people and the wrong ideas.'

US cash is reportedly being used to set up training facilities for Abbas's special guard, Force 17, in the West Bank town of Jericho and in Gaza. Hamas, meanwhile has plans to strengthen its 3,000-strong Executive Force to 7,500 men, and has been importing weapons from Egypt.




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Palestinian assulted by Israeli Military after roadblock removal

Palestine Solidarity Project
12/10/2006

Shafiig Khlayel intervened when Israeli occupation forces began assaulting a Palestinian woman shortly after her husband had participated in the Beit Ommar roadblock removal. As people tried to stop the assault, they themselves came under attack. Shafiig was punched in the stomach and back, as well as being hit several times with a rifle butt. After he was thrown to the ground, he was then set upon again, being kicked in the back and on the legs. Internationals who had been involved in the road block removal happened to be passing by the site of the incident and were able to intervene, putting themselves in between soldiers and those being attacked. Several internationals were injured.




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Israeli troops attack Palestinians on way to prayer in Jerusalem

IHT
12/10/2006

Soldiers dispersed the crowds with stun grenades, tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannons. At one checkpoint, desperate protesters tried to scale Israel's massive concrete separation barrier with ladders. The protesters were on their way to the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. Friday is the weekly holy day for Muslims, and it is considered an honor to attend Friday prayers at Al-Aqsa during Ramadan. Tradition says Al-Aqsa is where the Prophet Muhammad, Islam's founder, ascended to heaven.




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3 Palestinians killed, five wounded by Israeli air strike in Gaza

IMEMC
13/10/2006

At least three Palestinians were killed and five where injured Friday morning, in an Israeli air strike in the northern Gaza Strip city of Beit Lahia, Palestinian sources reported.

Eyewitnesses said an Israeli apache fired at least one missile at the vehicle which completely destroyed it killing all its occupants.

The Israeli army said the strike targeted a car carrying Hamas operatives. Palestinian sources Identified one of the the dead as Rashad Al-Maqousi, 30, while the other two remain unknown as their bodies were completely burnt.

Five civilian bystanders were killed as the car was driving through a very crowded residential area.

Thursday night, another air strike targeted the house of a Hamas leader killing three residents and wounded several others.

The death toll in Gaza Strip exceeded 260 since the beginning of the Israeli military operation in the strip after the capture of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit by the Palestinian resistance on June 25.




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Israel: No Medical Care to Palestinians

Prensa Latina
15/10/2006

The investigation said that Tel Aviv applies discriminatory criteria and only admits cases with legal claims. Those considered threats are people between 16 and 35 years, and some up to 40. Tel Aviv is a signatory of international agreements to give medical attention to residents in autonomous territories, but is refusing to recognize its legal obligations.


Comment: Note that while Israel is refusing medical care to palestinians in Israel, it is also refusing to allow sufficient medical supplies to enter the occupied Palestinian territories.

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IDF sets up detention (humiliation) center near Gaza

Ynet
13/10/2006

The Israel Defense Force set up a temporary detention center near the border with the Gaza Strip where dozens of Palestinian men arrested by troops operating in the tiny coastal strip are interrogated each day.

The army said soldiers have been instructed to treat the detainees in a humane manner and stressed that most men are released after undergoing interrogation.

IDF soldier giving water to Palestinian detainees

Released Palestinians are given a package of food staples like sugar, oil and flour.

"We can be proud of the IDF's treatment of the Palestinians," reservist soldiers operating the center said. "It is a shame that the other side disrespects human life."

A tank and an armored personnel carrier brought in the latest arrestees around 11 am on Friday.

IDF sets up detention center near Gaza

The army said the latest wave of arrests in Gaza is part of intensified attempts to crack down on terror operatives implicated in firing Qassam rockets at Israel.

The army said arrest raid had been shelved since the pullout from Gaza in August 2005, but was dusted off with the kidnapping of Corporal Gilad Shalit on June 25 in a cross-border attack.

Detention center near Gaza

"Since yesterday, arrestees have been pouring in," a soldier told Ynet. "In the afternoon a number of Palestinians arrived, whose ages ranged from 15-year-old teenagers to adults aged 45. We made every effort to give the Palestinians a good feeling, we set up tables, benches, and we even set up shades so they don't have to stand in the sun."

Soldiers said the arrestees did not seem scared, and some were seen laughing. Most Palestinians who arrived at the center on Thursday were neither blindfolded nor handcuffed.

"Every one of them was taken to a tent for interrogation. Those with links to terror groups were taken by bus to another facility and the rest were released to Gaza within hours," soldiers said.

"We received orders to serve them hot meals, and the brigade set a table with bread and chocolate and served them drinks," reservists said. "We felt great pride for the treatment, for treating the Palestinians with respect, even those suspected of terror activities. It is sad that on the other side respect to human life in not as such, as they use children as human shields and an innocent population is under constant threat because of terror groups."

Comment: How 'noble' of the obviously 'superior' Israeli soldiers to give some water to those innocent palestinian men, women and children they arrest, bind and detain for hours. Equally admirable is the largesse of giving those Palestinians lucky enough to be released a bag of staple food like sugar. Really, it's remarkable, don't you think?

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Israeli Police officers who shot Arab motorists not indicted

15/10/2006
Electronic Intifada

On 6 October 2006, the Israeli Attorney General (AG) rejected an appeal filed by Adalah against the decision of the Ministry of Justice's Police Investigations Unit ("Mahash") to close the investigation file against Border Police officers who opened fire on and killed 28-year-old Mr. Moursi Jabali, and shot and injured his companion, Mr. Shihab Jaber. The AG informed Adalah that, in spite of the circumstances in which the incident occurred, he decided not to issue indictments against the police officers involved.




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Hiding Under a Bush

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Posada and Bush's 'war on terror' jam

W. T. Whitney Jr.
People's Weekly World
10/12/06

Cuban exile and accused terrorist Luis Posada Carriles is back in the news. Posada is the admitted mastermind behind the bombing of a Cubana Airlines jet, which killed 73 people in a midair explosion over Barbados on Oct. 6, 1976.

Nicknamed "the bin Laden of Latin America," Posada, currently being held at an El Paso, Texas, detention center for violating immigration law, presents a quandary for the Bush administration and its "war on terrorism."

U.S. plans to deport Posada have gone awry. At least seven countries - Canada, Mexico, Panama, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador - have refused to take him.

At the same time, the Bush administration has refused to honor Venezuela's request for Posada's extradition to stand trial there. Posada is a Venezuelan citizen. In 1985, he escaped from a Venezuelan jail (with CIA help) while standing trial for the airliner bombing.
On Sept. 11, an immigration judge ruled Posada be released unless the administration charges him with terrorism. In a Justice Department brief, the Bush administration admitted that Posada is "an unrepentant criminal and admitted mastermind of terrorist plots and attacks on tourist sites," but refuses to charge him for such crimes.

Recognizing the problem of setting a known terrorist free, and unable to deport him to a third country, the Justice Department argued that according to law an illegal immigrant cannot be freed if the release has "serious, adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States."

The Bush administration's handling of this case has resulted in a firestorm of criticism and charges of hypocrisy.

"The fight against terrorism cannot be fought à la carte," said José Pertierra, a Washington lawyer who is representing the government of Venezuela in its effort to extradite Posada. "A terrorist is a terrorist," he told The New York Times.

On the Oct. 6 bombing anniversary, four Nobel Prize winners and other scholars released a petition calling upon the U.S. government to judge Posada for the "73 murders committed on Oct. 6, 1976, or extradite him to Venezuela."

Wayne Smith, the former head of the U.S. interests section in Cuba, told reporters that the U.S. has "massive evidence" against Posada, and that if the administration doesn't bring him to trial or extradite him to Venezuela, they will be violating several treaties as well as their own admonitions. Smith pointedly recalled that Bush once remarked that "one who shelters a terrorist is a terrorist."

The hypocritical stand is only part of the problem the Bush administration faces. Posada worked for the CIA as a demolitions expert, saboteur and plotter of violent crimes. He helped organize well over 100 murderous attacks throughout Latin America and the United States. He was involved in Contra operations in Nicaragua, hotel bombings in Havana in 1997, and an assassination attempt against Cuban President Fidel Castro in 2000.

And according to newly released documents from National Security Archives, Posada told the CIA that he and other exile cohorts like Orlando Bosch (who freely walks the streets of Miami) were planning to bomb the plane.

Cuba's National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon said the Bush administration has a self-interest in covering up the case and declassified information. "The Bush administration wants to avoid a trial at all costs because someone will ask about the role of the CIA, and its director in 1976 was George Bush Sr.," said Alarcon.

Also included in the documents:

- Information tying the FBI to one of the airliner bombers.

- Then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was briefed on¡ previous failed attempts to bomb flights from Panama and Jamaica to Cuba.

- The bomb was placed in a Colgate toothpaste tube.

- The FBI had knowledge of a telephone call to Bosch reporting that "a bus with 73 dogs went off a cliff and all got killed."

Jesus Rojo, a Cuban father of three, was one of the 73 passengers, along with the entire Cuban Olympic Fencing team, other Cubans, Guyanese and North Koreans. His youngest son Camilo is the coordinator of a committee of victims' relatives seeking justice.

"I am not seeking vengeance; what I want is to see Posada in court," Camilo Rojo said.

"Terrorism affects us all. I have received solidarity even from the most right-wing people, those who do not agree with the revolutionary process in Cuba, but they tell me they are with me, because mine is everybody's cause. That is also what I share with the relatives of the 9/11 victims. We keep in contact with them, and we know very well what they feel."

Terrie Albano contributed to this story.



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New RFID tech would track airport passengers

By Gemma Simpson
Special to CNET News.com
October 13, 2006

The inventors of a new monitoring system that uses RFID tags claim it could improve airport security by tracking passengers as they mingle in the departure lounge.

The plan is to issue an RFID (radio frequency identification) tag to every passenger at check-in so human traffic can be monitored throughout the airport via transponders and video cameras.

Paul Brennan, an electrical engineer at University College London, heads the project, which features an RFID technology called Optag. Funded by the European Union, the technology is being developed by a consortium of European companies and the university. Brennan told Silicon.com that a prototype RFID tag will be tested in an airport in Hungary next month.
Brennan said that if the trials in Hungary are a success and the technology attracts customers, it could arrive in airports within two years.

Brennan said Optag has been designed to improve airport security by virtue of its ability to track the movement of suspicious passengers, which would enable security personnel to bar them from entering restricted areas.

The ability to locate individuals could also aid airports in an evacuation situation, he said, and in finding lost children and passengers who are late to the departure gate.

Optag's big range, big challenges

Optag is different from its RFID predecessors in that standard RFID devices have a range of only a few centimeters. Optag, by contrast, has a range of 10 to 20 meters, and its wearer can be located within a radius of 1 meter, Brennan said.

The Optag project is now nearing completion but there are still some sizeable hurdles to real-world implementation, such as figuring out how to get the tags to operate properly in an airport, developing a system that ensures people will wear them, and allaying concerns over civil liberty infringements, said Brennan.

He added the device is "not intended to know who's doing what, although it might be that security needs to pinpoint certain individuals."

The design of the device that would contain the Optag is still not finalized. Brennan said RFID-tagged wristbands could be used but noted that they can be taken off and swapped between individuals.

A possible option is to use cameras to scan the tag-wearer's face and verify that it matches the correct Optag ID, but such a system could be used only in certain areas of an airport, according to Brennan.

Brennan said installation of the systems required to run Optag would also be very disruptive to existing airports. Installation could occur easily, however, at airports under construction, such Heathrow's T5.

As currently configured, the tag does not store any data but might incorporate biometric data in the future, Brennan added.

Optag is primarily aimed at improving airport security, but Brennan said "anywhere where a large number of people are, this has applications."



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At Least One Innocent Man Still Locked Up From 9/11 Sweeps

AP
14/10/2006

In a jail cell at an immigration detention center in Arizona sits a man who is not charged with a crime, not suspected of a crime, not considered a danger to society.

But he has been in custody for five years.

His name is Ali Partovi. And according to the Department of Homeland Security, he is the last to be held of about 1,200 Arab and Muslim men swept up by authorities in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

There has been no full accounting of all of these individuals. Nor has a promised federal policy to protect against unrestricted sweeps been produced.


Human rights groups tried to track the detainees; members of Congress denounced the arrests. They all believed that all of those who had been arrested had been deported, released or processed through the criminal justice system.

Just this summer, it was reported that an Algerian man, Benemar "Ben" Benatta, was the last detainee, and that his transfer to Canada had closed the book on the post-9/11 sweeps.

But now The Associated Press has learned that at least one person - Partovi - is still being held. The Department of Homeland Security insists he really is the last one in custody.

"Certainly it's not our goal as an agency to keep anyone detained indefinitely," said DHS spokesman Dean Boyd. Boyd said the department would like to remove Partovi from the United States but that he refuses to return to his homeland of Iran.

And so he remains, a curious remnant of a desperate time.

Arrests now, questions later
Within hours of the Sept. 11 attacks - before it was even clear if they were over - the FBI was ordered to identify the terrorists who had managed to slip so smoothly into American society and to catch anyone who might have been working with them. The FBI operation was called PENTTBOM; it was swift and fierce, and the stakes couldn't have bee



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American Prison Camps Are on the Way

By Marjorie Cohn
10/13/06 "AlterNet"

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 governing the treatment of detainees is the culmination of relentless fear-mongering by the Bush administration since the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Because the bill was adopted with lightning speed, barely anyone noticed that it empowers Bush to declare not just aliens, but also U.S. citizens, "unlawful enemy combatants."

Bush & Co. has portrayed the bill as a tough way to deal with aliens to protect us against terrorism. Frightened they might lose their majority in Congress in the November elections, the Republicans rammed the bill through Congress with little substantive debate.
Anyone who donates money to a charity that turns up on Bush's list of "terrorist" organizations, or who speaks out against the government's policies could be declared an "unlawful enemy combatant" and imprisoned indefinitely. That includes American citizens.

The bill also strips habeas corpus rights from detained aliens who have been declared enemy combatants. Congress has the constitutional power to suspend habeas corpus only in times of rebellion or invasion. The habeas-stripping provision in the new bill is unconstitutional and the Supreme Court will likely say so when the issue comes before it.

Although more insidious, this law follows in the footsteps of other unnecessarily repressive legislation. In times of war and national crisis, the government has targeted immigrants and dissidents.

In 1798, the Federalist-led Congress, capitalizing on the fear of war, passed the four Alien and Sedition Acts to stifle dissent against the Federalist Party's political agenda. The Naturalization Act extended the time necessary for immigrants to reside in the U.S. because most immigrants sympathized with the Republicans.

The Alien Enemies Act provided for the arrest, detention and deportation of male citizens of any foreign nation at war with the United States. Many of the 25,000 French citizens living in the U.S. could have been expelled had France and America gone to war, but this law was never used. The Alien Friends Act authorized the deportation of any non-citizen suspected of endangering the security of the U.S. government; the law lasted only two years and no one was deported under it.

The Sedition Act provided criminal penalties for any person who wrote, printed, published, or spoke anything "false, scandalous and malicious" with the intent to hold the government in "contempt or disrepute." The Federalists argued it was necessary to suppress criticism of the government in time of war. The Republicans objected that the Sedition Act violated the First Amendment, which had become part of the Constitution seven years earlier. Employed exclusively against Republicans, the Sedition Act was used to target congressmen and newspaper editors who criticized President John Adams.

Subsequent examples of laws passed and actions taken as a result of fear-mongering during periods of xenophobia are the Espionage Act of 1917, the Sedition Act of 1918, the Red Scare following World War I, the forcible internment of people of Japanese descent during World War II, and the Alien Registration Act of 1940 (the Smith Act).

During the McCarthy period of the 1950s, in an effort to eradicate the perceived threat of communism, the government engaged in widespread illegal surveillance to threaten and silence anyone who had an unorthodox political viewpoint. Many people were jailed, blacklisted and lost their jobs. Thousands of lives were shattered as the FBI engaged in "red-baiting." One month after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, United States Attorney General John Ashcroft rushed the U.S.A. Patriot Act through a timid Congress. The Patriot Act created a crime of domestic terrorism aimed at political activists who protest government policies, and set forth an ideological test for entry into the United States.

In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the internment of Japanese and Japanese-American citizens in Korematsu v. United States. Justice Robert Jackson warned in his dissent that the ruling would "lie about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need."

That day has come with the Military Commissions Act of 2006. It provides the basis for the President to round-up both aliens and U.S. citizens he determines have given material support to terrorists. Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Cheney's Halliburton, is constructing a huge facility at an undisclosed location to hold tens of thousands of undesirables.

In his 1928 dissent in Olmstead v. United States, Justice Louis Brandeis cautioned, "The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding." Seventy-three years later, former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, speaking for a zealous President, warned Americans "they need to watch what they say, watch what they do."

We can expect Bush to continue to exploit 9/11 to strip us of more of our liberties. Our constitutional right to dissent is in serious jeopardy. Benjamin Franklin's prescient warning should give us pause: "They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security."

Marjorie Cohn, a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, is president-elect of the National Lawyers Guild, and the U.S. representative to the executive committee of the American Association of Jurists. Her new book, "Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law," will be published in 2007 by PoliPointPress



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Documents Reveal Scope of U.S. Database on Antiwar Protests

By ERIC LICHTBLAU
10/13/06 "New York Times"

WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 - Internal military documents released Thursday provided new details about the Defense Department's collection of information on demonstrations nationwide last year by students, Quakers and others opposed to the Iraq war.

The documents, obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, show, for instance, that military officials labeled as "potential terrorist activity" events like a "Stop the War Now" rally in Akron, Ohio, in March 2005.
The Defense Department acknowledged last year that its analysts had maintained records on war protests in an internal database past the 90 days its guidelines allowed, and even after it was determined there was no threat.

A department spokesman said Thursday that the "questionable data collection" had led to a tightening of military procedures to ensure that only information relevant to terrorism and other threats was collected. The spokesman, Maj. Patrick Ryder, said in response to the release of the documents that the department "views with great concern any potential violation" of the policy.

"There is nothing more important or integral to the effectiveness of the U.S. military than the trust and good will of the American people," Major Ryder said.

A document first disclosed last December by NBC News showed that the military had maintained a database, known as Talon, containing information about more than 1,500 "suspicious incidents" around the country in 2004 and 2005. Dozens of alerts on antiwar meetings and peaceful protests appear to have remained in the database even after analysts had decided that they posed no threat to military bases or personnel.

Some documents obtained by the A.C.L.U. referred to the potential for disruption to military recruiting and the threat posed to military personnel as a result.

An internal report produced in May 2005, for instance, discussed antiwar protests at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and was issued "to clarify why the Students for Peace and Justice represent a potential threat to D.O.D. personnel."

The memorandum noted that several hundred students had recently protested the presence of military recruiters at a career fair and demanded that they leave.

"The clear purpose of these civil disobedience actions was to disrupt the recruiting mission of the U.S. Army Recruiting Command by blocking the entrance to the recruiting station and causing the stations to shut down early," it said.

But the document also noted that "to date, no reported incidents have occurred at these protests."

The documents indicated that intelligence reports and tips about antiwar protests, including mundane details like the schedule for weekly planning meetings, were widely shared among analysts from the military, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security.

"There is simply no reason why the United States military should be monitoring the peaceful activities of American citizens who oppose U.S. war policies," said Ben Wizner, a lawyer for the A.C.L.U.

Joyce Miller, an official with the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group that learned that information on some of its antiwar protests was in the military database, said she found the operation to be a "chilling" and troubling trend.



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U.S. agents question teen: Girl ran anti-Bush page on MySpace

By Laurel Rosenhall and Ryan Lillis - Bee Staff Writers
Published 12:00 am PDT Friday, October 13, 2006

Julia Wilson, 14, got a surprise visit from two Secret Service agents Wednesday at McClatchy High after the words "Kill Bush" appeared on MySpace.com. Her mom, Kirstie Wilson, says she should have been present when her daughter was questioned.
The latest Sacramento resident to be questioned by federal agents in possible threats against President Bush is a 14-year-old girl with a heart on her backpack and braces on her teeth, a freckle-nosed adolescent who is passionate about liberal politics and cute movie stars.

Her name is Julia Wilson, and she learned a vivid civics lesson Wednesday when two Secret Service agents pulled her out of biology class at McClatchy High School to ask about comments and images she posted on MySpace.

Beneath the words "Kill Bush," Julia posted a cartoonish photo-collage of a knife stabbing the hand of the president. It was one of a few images Julia said she used to decorate an anti-Bush Web page she moderated on MySpace, the social networking Web site that is hugely popular among teenagers.

The Secret Service refused to answer questions about the case or even confirm an investigation. Eric Zahren, a Secret Service spokesman, said the agency does not discuss its work "due to the sensitivity of our mission."

But Julia's mother, Kirstie Wilson, and an assistant principal at McClatchy High said two agents showed them badges stating they were with the Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security.

Federal law prohibits making serious threats against the president, and Julia and her parents say what she did was wrong.

The couple are disturbed, however, that federal agents questioned a child at school -- without her parents present. And First Amendment lawyers question whether the Secret Service over-reacted to a 14-year-old's comments on a Web site made for casual socializing.

"I don't condone what she did, but it seems a little over the top to me," said Julia's father, Jim Moose. "You'd think they could look at the situation and determine that she's not a credible threat."

Earlier this month, federal officials arrested two Sacramento-area men for allegedly threatening the president. Elk Grove resident Michael Lee Braun has been charged with sending two threatening letters to the El Dorado Hills country club where Bush recently made an appearance. Rocklin resident Howard J. Kinsey is accused of threatening the president through a text message.

Here is how Julia Wilson's family tells their story:

Two Secret Service agents arrived at their Land Park home about 2:30 Wednesday afternoon, Kirstie Wilson said. They told her they wanted to speak with her daughter about threats to the president that she had posted on MySpace.

"She was in molecular biology, and I said I really didn't want to take her out of class for this," Kirstie Wilson said. "I said I'd make sure she came right home from school."

She asked the agents to come back in an hour, and they left.

Then Wilson sent her daughter a text message instructing her to come straight home from school.

"... there are two men from the secret service that want to talk with you. Apparently you made some death threats against president bush. Dont worry youre not going to jail or anything like that but they take these things very seriously these days," Kirstie Wilson wrote.

"Are you serious!?!? omg. Am I in a lot of trouble"? her daughter replied, using common teenage shorthand for "Oh, my God."

Kirstie Wilson called her husband. While they were on the phone, she received another text message from her daughter: "They took me out of class."

It was a 15- to 20-minute interview, Julia said. Agents asked her about her father's job, her e-mail address, and her Social Security number. They asked about the MySpace page she had created last year as an eighth-grader at Sutter Middle School.

"I told them I just really don't agree with Bush's politics," Julia said Thursday. "I don't have any plans of harming Bush in any way. I'm very peaceful; I just don't like Bush."

The MySpace page under question was a group page, similar to an online club.

Most of the groups Julia is a part of are fan clubs for movie stars like Jake Gyllenhaal and Ewan McGregor. The group that got her in trouble was called something like "People who want to stab Bush" -- Julia said she doesn't remember the exact name because she soon changed it.

After an eighth-grade history lesson in which she learned that threatening the president is against the law, Julia said she changed the group name to "So Bush is an idiot but hey what else is new?"

The group primarily consisted of her teenage friends who share her liberal political interests, Julia said. She deleted the group page over the summer when she decided that MySpace was juvenile and taking up too much time.

Moose and Wilson say they had no idea what their daughter had posted online.

"I was more than happy to have them talk to her about the severity of what she did. But I wanted to be here with her," Kirstie Wilson said.

McClatchy Assistant Principal Paul Belluomini said he usually does not notify parents when law enforcement officials come to school to interview students.

"Parents usually interfere with an investigation, so we usually don't notify them until it's done," he said.

Sacramento City Unified School District policy calls for parents to be notified but doesn't say whether it should happen before or after a student is interviewed. State law doesn't require parental notification.

In any case, said Ann Brick, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, Julia Wilson's post did not sound like a "true threat" to the president, making it political speech that is protected by the First Amendment.

"The courts have to distinguish between political rhetoric and hyperbole and a real threat," Brick said. "A reasonable person would have to interpret what was said as indication of a serious intent to commit harm."

Peter Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition, said in the current political climate, "the threshold that brings (agents) in has gotten lower."

"It's a cautionary tale for kids who are on MySpace that putting something on MySpace like 'Kill the President' is not the same as saying it on e-mail or over the phone," Scheer said. "The government is not systematically listening to all phone calls or going through e-mails, but it probably does search the Internet."



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The Crusade

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Bush keeps revising war justification

By TOM RAUM
Associated Press
Sat Oct 14, 2006

WASHINGTON - President Bush keeps revising his explanation for why the U.S. is in Iraq, moving from narrow military objectives at first to history-of-civilization stakes now.

Initially, the rationale was specific: to stop
Saddam Hussein from using what Bush claimed were the Iraqi leader's weapons of mass destruction or from selling them to al-Qaida or other terrorist groups.

But 3 1/2 years later, with no weapons found, still no end in sight and the war a liability for nearly all Republicans on the ballot Nov. 7, the justification has become far broader and now includes the expansive "struggle between good and evil."
Republicans seized on North Korea's reported nuclear test last week as further evidence that the need for strong U.S. leadership extends beyond Iraq.

Bush's changing rhetoric reflects increasing administration efforts to tie the war, increasingly unpopular at home, with the global fight against terrorism, still the president's strongest suit politically.

"We can't tolerate a new terrorist state in the heart of the Middle East, with large oil reserves that could be used to fund its radical ambitions, or used to inflict economic damage on the West," Bush said in a news conference last week in the Rose Garden.

When no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, Bush shifted his war justification to one of liberating Iraqis from a brutal ruler.

After Saddam's capture in December 2003, the rationale became helping to spread democracy through the Middle East. Then it was confronting terrorists in Iraq "so we do not have to face them here at home," and "making America safer," themes Bush pounds today.

"We're in the ideological struggle of the 21st century," he told a California audience this month. "It's a struggle between good and evil."

Vice President Dick Cheney takes it even further: "The hopes of the civilized world ride with us," Cheney tells audiences.

Except for the weapons of mass destruction argument, there is some validity in each of Bush's shifting rationales, said Michael O'Hanlon, a foreign policy scholar at the Brookings Institution who initially supported the war effort.

"And I don't have any big problems with any of them, analytically. The problem is they can't change the realities on the ground in Iraq, which is that we're in the process of beginning to lose," O'Hanlon said. "It is taking us a long time to realize that, but the war is not headed the way it should be."

Andrew Card, Bush's first chief of staff, said Bush's evolving rhetoric, including his insistence that Iraq is a crucial part of the fight against terrorism, is part of an attempt to put the war in better perspective for Americans.

The administration recently has been "doing a much better job" in explaining the stakes, Card said in an interview. "We never said it was going to be easy. The president always told us it would be long and tough."

"I'm trying to do everything I can to remind people that the war on terror has the war in Iraq as a subset. It's critical we succeed in Iraq as part of the war on terror," said Card, who left the White House in March.

Bush at first sought to explain increasing insurgent and sectarian violence as a lead-up to Iraqi elections. But elections came and went, and a democratically elected government took over, and the sectarian violence increased.

Bush has insisted U.S. soldiers will stand down as Iraqis stand up. He has likened the war to the 20th century struggles against fascism, Nazism and communism. He has called Iraq the "central front" in a global fight against radical jihadists.

Having jettisoned most of the earlier, upbeat claims of progress, Bush these days emphasizes consequences of setting even a limited withdrawal timetable: abandonment of the Iraqi people, destabilizing the Middle East and emboldening terrorists around the world.

The more ominous and determined his words, the more skeptical the American public appears, polls show, both on the war itself and over whether it is part of the larger fight against terrorism, as the administration insists.

Bush's approval rating, reflected by AP-Ipsos polls, has slid from the mid 60s at the outset of the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 to the high 30s now. There were light jumps upward after the December 2003 capture of Saddam, Bush's re-election in November 2004 and each of three series of aggressive speeches over the past year. Those gains tended to vanish quickly.

With the war intruding on the fall elections, both parties have stepped up their rhetoric.

Republicans, who are also reeling from the congressional page scandal, are casting Democrats as seeking to "cut and run" and appease terrorists.

Democrats accuse Bush of failed leadership with his "stay the course" strategy. They cite a government intelligence assessment suggesting the Iraq war has helped recruit more terrorists, and a book by journalist Bob Woodward that portrays Bush as intransigent in his defense of the Iraq war and his advisers as bitterly divided.

Democrats say Iraq has become a distraction from the war against terrorism - not a central front. But they are divided among themselves on what strategy to pursue.

Republicans, too, increasingly are growing divided as U.S. casualties rise.

"I struggle with the fact that President Bush said, 'As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.' But the fact is, this has not happened," said Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., a war supporter turned war skeptic.

The Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. John Warner of Virginia, said after a recent visit to Iraq that Iraq was "drifting sideways." He urged consideration of a "change of course" if the Iraq government fails to restore order over the next two or three months.

More than 2,750 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the war, most of them since Bush's May 2003 "mission accomplished" aircraft carrier speech. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have died.

Recent events have been dispiriting.

The United States now has about 141,000 troops in Iraq, up from about 127,000 in July. Some military experts have suggested at least one additional U.S. division, or around 20,000 troops, is needed in western Iraq alone.

Dan Benjamin, a former Middle East specialist with the National Security Council in the Clinton administration, said the administration is overemphasizing the nature of the threat in an effort to bolster support.

"I think the administration has oversold the case that Iraq could become a jihadist state," said Benjamin, now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "If the U.S. were to leave Iraq tomorrow, the result would be a bloodbath in which Sunnis and Shiites fight it out. But the jihadists would not be able to seek power."

Not all of Bush's rhetorical flourishes have had the intended consequences.

When the history of Iraq is finally written, the recent surge in sectarian violence is "going to be a comma," Bush said in several recent appearances.

Critics immediately complained that the remark appeared unsympathetic and dismissive of U.S. and Iraqi casualties, an assertion the White House disputed.

For a while last summer, Bush depicted the war as one against "Islamic fascism," borrowing a phrase from conservative commentators. The strategy backfired, further fanning anti-American sentiment across the Muslim world.

The "fascism" phrase abruptly disappeared from Bush's speeches, reportedly after he was talked out of it by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Karen Hughes, a longtime Bush confidant now with the State Department.

Hughes said she would not disclose private conversations with the president. But, she told the AP, she did not use the "fascism" phrase herself. "I use 'violent extremist,'" she said.



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CIA holds an al Qaeda leader in secret jail: report

Reuters
Sun Oct 15, 2006

MADRID - A suspected al Qaeda leader, accused of being involved in September 11 and planning the 2004 Madrid train bombings, has been imprisoned in a secret U.S. jail for the past year, Spain's El Pais newspaper reported on Sunday.

Mustafa Setmarian, 48, a Syrian with Spanish citizenship, was captured in Pakistan in October 2005 and is held in a prison operated by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Pakistani and European security service officials told El Pais.

A spokesman for the U.S. embassy in Spain declined to comment on the report.
Setmarian's 2005 capture was reported in May of this year after the United States put a $5 million bounty on the head of the alleged founder of al Qaeda's Spanish network.

A photograph of the red-haired Setmarian has been removed from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Intelligence's most-wanted Web page.

Pakistan has not answered requests from Madrid about the whereabouts of Setmarian, wanted in Spain for allegedly training September 11 hijackers in Afghanistan and ordering Madrid commuter train attacks that killed 191 people, according to El Pais.

Spain's high court is unable to request his extradition as he has not been officially imprisoned, the newspaper reported.

Spanish high court officials were not immediately available to comment.

Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon in June complained U.S. officials were concealing information on his whereabouts.

Amnesty International has reported Setmarian's disappearance. The human rights organization says dozens of Islamic radicals captured in Pakistan are held in clandestine jails operated by the United States and other countries.

Setmarian is married to Elena Moreno, a Spanish woman who says he is held in a secret CIA jail.



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Police want spy planes to fight anti-social behaviour

AFP
Oct 15, 2006

A police force is considering using unmanned aerial surveillance drones to fly over troubled local council housing estates to help tackle anti-social behaviour in respective areas.

The police force for Merseyside, in western England, has formed a new Anti-Social Behaviour Task Force which will have a budget of one million pounds (1.85 million dollars, 1.5 million euros), and a staff of 137, drawn from both the local police and fire services, The Sunday Telegraph reported.
"It's a cheap way of doing aerial surveillance, it's a cheap way of doing intelligence and evidence gathering. Put over an anti-social behaviour hotspot, it is quite a significant percentage cheaper than the force helicopter," said Superintendent John Myles, the joint-head of the task force.

"There may be some hurdles. The Civil Aviation Authority may say that it is a no-no, but I don't think it is at the moment," he said.

The newspaper reported that police forces in the United States have used similar drones, which cost about 16,000 pounds each, and circle areas at a height of 250 feet (76 metres), flying at about 30 miles (50 kilometres) per hour.



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US takes unilateral stance in new space policy

NewScientist.com news service
14 October 2006


THE US has issued a new national space policy that reflects a more aggressive and unilateral stance than the previous version set out a decade ago by former president Bill Clinton.
"The new US space policy reflects a more aggressive and unilateral stance"

The earlier statement said US operations should be "consistent with treaty obligations". In contrast, the most recent one, issued on 6 October, rejects international agreements that would limit US testing or use of military equipment in space.

The new version also uses stronger language to assert that the US can defend its spacecraft, echoing an air force push for "space superiority" made in 2004. It states the US has the right to "protect its space capabilities, respond to interference and deny, if necessary, adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile to US national interests".

The document also details how the US government plans to administer the use of nuclear-powered space craft, which will be used if they "safely enable or significantly enhance space exploration or operational capabilities".

From issue 2573 of New Scientist magazine, 14 October 2006, page 7



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British Gov caught using fake evidence in secret terror court trials

12/10/2006

Judge critical of MI5 testimony

A judge has criticised the Home Office over contradictory MI5 intelligence in secret hearings involving two terrorism suspects, it has emerged.

The error came to light only because one barrister acted in both Special Immigration Appeals Commission cases.

Mr Justice Newman said the "administration of justice" had been put at risk in the cases of Algerian Abu Doha and a suspect known as MK.

The Home Office said the "error was not due to any systemic failure".

But human rights campaigners called for an urgent review of the way MI5 intelligence is used in such hearings.

'Shadowy arrangements'

The cases were being heard separately by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, known as Siac.

But after MK's case had finished it became clear that the evidence against him was being contradicted by that in the Abu Doha hearings.
[The contradictions in the "intelligence" was only discovered by chance, because the same barrister happened to be representing for both men. The trials are held in secret under new "terror" laws, presumably to prevent fake evidence concocted by the regime from being exposed, because there is no legitimate reason for concealing any of the information from this trial. Details of other secret trials will remain secret. The lawyers acting for the government were familiar with both sets of evidence and must have been fully aware of the contradiction.]

In a ruling produced in May, but only now made public, the judge accepted the mistake was not deliberate.

But Mr Justice Newman went on to say the "administration of justice is put at risk" if such failures occur.

Shami Chakrabarti, director of human rights group Liberty, said: "Our worst fear has been realised when the government submits flawed secret intelligence to a commission, which will determine if people are to be returned to countries where they may face torture.

"The home secretary has a duty to explain why the commission was misled, and how this can possibly be prevented under these shadowy arrangements in the future."

'Steps taken'

The home office said the judge's comments had been noted and steps were being taken to ensure such an error could not occur again.

"The secretary of state and security service note the constructive comments made by Siac in its judgment concerning the methodology and approach which should be taken when preparing evidence," a spokesman said.

"We accept their recommendations and are taking this forward with independent counsel who acts for the secretary of state in these cases.

"Siac with the assistance of the special advocates, has identified an oversight in the secretary of state's disclosure process in this case.

"That this resulted from an error is accepted and steps are being taken to ensure that this does not occur again."

Siac is the venue of appeal for foreign nationals facing detention, deportation or exclusion from the UK on grounds of national security.

Its hearings and rulings are never fully made public because they include testimony from members of the secret security services, which the government says it cannot divulge.



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New Poll: 81% Of Americans Disbelieve Government 9/11 Story

angus-reid
15/10/2006

Many adults in the United States believe the current federal government has not been completely forthcoming on the issue of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, according to a poll by the New York Times and CBS News. 53 per cent of respondents think the Bush administration is hiding something, and 28 per cent believe it is lying.

Only 16 per cent of respondents say the government headed by U.S. president George W. Bush is telling the truth on what it knew prior to the terrorist attacks, down five points since May 2002.

Al-Qaeda operatives hijacked and crashed four airplanes in the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001, killing nearly 3,000 people. In October, after Afghanistan's Taliban regime refused to hand over al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the U.S. launched the war on terrorism.

On Aug. 6, 2001, a Presidential Daily Briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." mentioned "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."




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British Minister's Comments Provoke Attacks on British Muslims

October 15, 2006
zaman.com

Physical and verbal attacks against British Muslims have been on the rise since former Foreign Minister Jack Straw's call for Muslim women to remove their veils.

In some incidents Muslim women had their headscarves pulled off their heads and thrown to the ground. British Muslims are experiencing tense days due to the number and violence of the attacks.

Straw said that not being able to see a person's face made him feel "uncomfortable."

A day after Straw's remarks, in London a white man pulled the veil off a young Muslim woman and threw it to the ground. One young man threw a newspaper at the Muslim girl and shouted, "Jack has told you to take off your veil."

A Turkish student was also verbally abused by a British woman in a supermarket in Canterbury, who told her that she hated her presence in Britain and told her to leave.

In Hacney, East London, a black Muslim woman wearing a veil was getting off a bus when one of the passengers shouted at her, "Why do not you show your lovely hair?"

A group of British youths attacked a mosque in Preston, throwing bricks at cars while Muslims were performing prayers inside.

A survey in the Guardian newspaper suggested that 53 percent of people supported Straw on the veil comment. In addition, 36 percent opposed a ban on veils being worn outside the home.





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The Mettle of A UN Secretary-General

by Stephen Lendman
16 October 2006

UN Secretaries-General aren't usually made of the kind of mettle that extends beyond their willingness to serve the interests of the dominant country that effectively runs the UN establishment. It's no secret that the world body is largely a wholly owned subsidiary of the nation where it's been prominently headquartered on Manhattan's east side since 1952. It's also true no candidate gets the top job there without first passing a careful US vetting process to assure a willingness to accede to its agenda. A little wiggle-room is allowed but only as long as it doesn't exceed the limits of the boss' tolerance.
Outgoing Secretary-General Kofi Annan got the job because he agreed to play by those rules and did such an admirable job of it he (and the UN) won a Nobel Peace prize in 2001 as a reward for keeping his head down and doing what he was told but not as disingenuously announced at the award ceremony for "their work for a better organized and more peaceful world." Annan never achieved or worked for peace anywhere, nor would a true airing of his legacy show much more accomplished than he knew who the "management" was, and he showed up every day to serve that "higher authority" and its agenda of exploitative war and colonization.

The result is a 10 year record of failing to fulfill the mandate he was sworn to uphold: "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war; to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights; to establish conditions (promoting) justice....equal rights of men and women (in all nations)....(respect for) international law....promote social progress....to ensure....armed force shall not be used" and much more. Kofi Annan failed on all counts, and he'll leave his UN post shortly with little to boast about except a Nobel award so richly undeserved.

Annan's tenure is a shameless and dismal record of failure:

-- He never condemned or acted to end the devastating economic sanctions against the Iraqi people that killed up to 1.5 million defenseless men, women and children.

-- He never used his high-profile job to denounce the US criminal war waged there since March, 2003, based on lies and now known to have likely killed another 655,000 or more of them.

-- He failed to speak out forcefully against or do anything to prevent that war or the equally brutal and unjustifiable one waged against Afghanistan.

-- He's been appallingly silent in the run-up to a potential Middle East apocalypse if the US and/or Israel go ahead with their plans to attack Iran and use nuclear weapons to do it.

-- He never used his sworn power and influence to uphold the oath he took to work for peace and protest Israel's genocidal wars on Palestine and Lebanon against defenseless civilians there when the prestige of his office alone might have been enough to stop or at least mitigate them.

-- He acted irresponsibly during the three failed US-instigated and funded coup attempts against democratically elected President Hugo Chavez failing in his obligation to denounce them.

-- The Ghanaian-born Annan tenure showed a disturbing indifference to the pain and suffering of his own people throughout the continent of his birth. He chose instead to be a dutiful agent of the Global North and its corporate predators and conspiratorially allowed them to ravage Africa's vastness for its resource riches including in Dhafur where control of its oil and other valuable resources and the US's interest in them is central to understanding what this conflict is all about.

-- He allowed Blue Helmet stormtrooper thuggery in places like Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and what now is likely ahead for South Lebanon following Israel's summer aggression there. He dispatched UN so-called peacekeepers to these conflict zones as de facto paramilitary enforcers for the US and Israeli imperial agendas of plunder and exploitation, not with any intent or interest to keep the peace or promote the public welfare.

-- Kofi Annan will leave his post with a single notable achievement: a clear shameless record of having pledged fealty to the Bush crime syndicate making him a willing and willful co-conspirator in its reign of terror for world dominance.

This is a man who agreed to his marching orders before showing up for work, understood who's in charge and did his job to please the "management." He's now wrapping up his tenure, will leave shortly with a disgraceful record of mission unaccomplished and is preparing for the arrival of the new man just elected to replace him. People of conscience won't miss him. The Secretary-General-elect will have to work for the same "management" and understands he'll have to serve by its same set of rules. To get the top job, he, like Kofi Annan, had to have agreed in advance to go along with them to get along, but if he does it he, too, will violate the letter and spirit of the Charter all Secretaries-General are sword to uphold.

Since he hasn't yet arrived, it's premature to judge him, but it's fair to say Ban Ki-Moon never would have been South Korea's Minister of Foreign Affairs if he hadn't been respectful of the country that's occupied his for over half a century and still has enough clout to dictate who gets the most important jobs there affecting South Korean - US relations. Still, the new man on the job will be interesting to watch. In his former capacity, he's at times been a critic of US policy toward the peninsula and even went so far as to rebuke Condoleezza Rice's Senate confirmation hearing statement calling North Korea an "outpost of tryanny." He used diplomatic language, of course, only saying her comment "would never help create an atmosphere of dialogue."

In the aftermath of North Korea's presumed underground nuclear test this month and the economic and political sanctions (with no authorization for force) just imposed against the DPRK, it will bear watching how firm the new Secretary-General will be urging peaceful diplomacy instead of the usual US blunderbuss harshness demanding repressive sanctions with enough latitude to lead to war which often is the Bush administration's prime agenda in the first place. It will also be interesting to see how the new UN chief handles the continuing confrontation between the US and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. With the December presidential election fast approaching and a fourth US attempt to oust and assassinate Chavez likely moving toward implementation around the electoral period, will this UN leader act any differently than his predecessor.

Venezuelan Foreign Vice-Minister for North America, Jorge Valero, expressed a tone of optimism saying while still in his South Korean post, Ban Ki-Moon wanted (and presumably still does want) a strong relationship and spirit of cooperation with the Venezuelan Mission to the UN and his country. He also acknowledged Venezuela's progressive proposals and agenda in such multilateral bodies as the Non-Aligned Movement (of 116 nations against imperialism, colonialism, aggression and occupation) and the G-77 nations (that's since grown to 132 developing member states). The Venezuelan Minister said "Ban Ki-Moon assured that he will work with Venezuela on the region's integration. Likewise, he ratified his interest in the results of the elections for a seat on the UN Security Council, where Venezuela embodies a strong contender."

A few diplomatic words prior to heading up the UN Secretariat with an obligation to fulfill the body's Charter in service to all nations is no substitute for what the new man on the job will actually do once he's there. It won't be long to find out though, and the oppressed people of the world in all its troubled spots better hope Ban Ki-Moon takes his responsibilities more seriously than his predecessor and others before him. Based on the past record of UN Secretaries-General though and the oppressive power of the US overshadowing their best intentions, it's hard to hold out much hope. Still, it will be refreshing if Ban Ki-Moon actually takes his obligation and sworn oath seriously enough to respect the rights of all nations, uses his prominent public stage as an advocate for them, and works for peace and an end to all injustice and conflicts still raging around the world. That's his mandate, and it's about time someone in this post took it seriously. Let's wish the new UN Secretary-General well and hope one day he'll be deservedly rewarded for a job well done that he actually did. The world is waiting to find out.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be contacted at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.



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Iran says sanctions threat part of psychological war

Reuters
14 October 2006

TEHRAN - Iran's Foreign Ministry said on Saturday Western threats to impose sanctions were part of a "psychological war" and the Islamic Republic was more determined than ever to pursue peaceful nuclear technology.

Barring a change of heart by Iran, the European Union's 25 foreign ministers want to agree at a meeting on Tuesday to ask the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said on Saturday.

Iran's state television Web site said Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini described "the issue of imposing sanctions on Iran as a psychological war against Iran."

"The Iranian nation does not fear possible sanctions and -- more determined than in the past - it continues its way toward the peaceful use of nuclear energy," he was quoted as saying.

Iran's case has been sent back to the Security Council after it failed to halt uranium enrichment, a process the West fears Iran is using to develop atomic bombs despite Tehran's denials.
Iran has shrugged off the threat of sanctions in the past. Analysts say the world's fourth largest oil exporter, which is enjoying an oil revenue windfall, may feel it can cope with the modest penalties likely to be imposed initially.

Hosseini said Iran's proposal for other countries to invest in its nuclear program was "still on the table."

"We have received offers from the other side regarding our proposal about the consortium on uranium enrichment and we are studying the offers but we haven't made a decision about who we are going to work with," Hosseini said in comments broadcast on state TV after the initial Web site report.

He did not give further details or identify other parties.

Iran has said this would be a way for others to monitor its atomic work to prove it was peaceful.

In the Web site report, Hosseini was also quoted as saying that the United States was to blame for North Korea's decision to stage a nuclear test because of its "unilateral policies in global issues."

Iran has said it opposes atomic weapons and, in previous statements, has called for nuclear disarmament by all countries.



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Occupied Territory

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Ten-strong Iraqi family murdered in sectarian cleansing

by Ammar Karim
AFP
Sat Oct 14, 2006

BAGHDAD - Gunmen have slaughtered a Shiite family during a wave of sectarian cleansing in Iraq as up to a million Shiite pilgrims begin to descend on the holy city of Najaf to commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Ali.

Late on Friday night, gunmen attacked a farmhouse in Saifiyah and killed an entire family, including five women and three children, in an attack apparently motivated by sectarian hatred.
At the same time, Shiite pilgrims from the south and center of the country were streaming towards Najaf, many on foot, to mark the matyrdom of one of their sect's holiest figures, the Imam Ali.

"We expect that close to a million people will enter the city tonight and tomorrow morning," said Khaled Jawad, a member of the Imam Ali shrine's administrative committee.

Security measures are intense, however, with only specially licensed cars allowed into the city center where the golden-domed shrine of Imam Ali is located.

In the past Sunni militants have targeted these Shiite occasions as part of the sectarian dirty war roiling Iraq's mixed central regions.

Most people had already fled the Shiite village of Saifiyah in a mainly Sunni area just south of Baghdad that has been a frequent target recently of gunmen believed to have links to local Sunni tribes.

Bands of Shiite militiamen arrived from Baghdad a week ago and engaged the tribesmen in a gunbattle that prompted the intervention of US forces.

More than 100,000 people have been displaced from their homes in the past three years as gunmen target civilians from rival communities.

Iraqi police found the corpses of 14 murder victims around Baghdad between dawn on Friday and Saturday, many riddled with bullets and showing signs of torture.

Downstream from the capital, in Suweira village, another four bodies were recovered from the Tigris river, all without heads.

The violence was not restricted to the capital, and just to the north, in the town of Balad, police reported finding their own grim harvest of 26 bodies.

The men had all been kidnapped Saturday morning from a market south of the city. They were taken away, tied up, tortured and shot in the head.

The daily toll of corpses has increased during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, in what a US military spokesman called a "tremendous spike" in violence.

Most of the killings have been laid at the feet of Shiite death squads, many linked to radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia. On Friday the preacher denounced groups carrying out such killings in his name.

Meanwhile, the streets of the old city of Najaf were festooned with black flags and massive black banners marking Imam Ali's death. Tents serving food and drink were being laid out, sponsored by the city's wealthy.

Tents have also been erected to house poorer pilgrims unable to afford the hotels filling up with visitors, many from Iraq's overwhelmingly Shiite neighbor, Iran.

In other Baghdad violence, two car bombs exploded in the city center, setting several vehicles alight and wounding one man.

In the restive southern neighborhood of Abu Chir, five members of a family were wounded when a mortar round crashed into their house.

In Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, the Iraqi army reported that six gunmen and a female bystander were killed during a clash with US and Iraqi forces southwest of the provincial capital of Baquba.

Two civilians were also killed by gunmen in Baquba itself, and a shopkeeper was shot dead in the central city of Samarra.

Gunmen killed a teacher in the southern city of Diwaniyah in a drive-by shooting, said police, adding that they did not know why the victim was targeted.

Revenge was the apparent motive when a Baathist official with the former regime of Saddam Hussein was dragged by gunmen from his house in the southern city of Amara. His body was later found near the bus station, police said.

Police in the northern oil city of Kirkuk, meanwhile, reported clashes between the army and militants resulting in the deaths of two gunmen, as well as a joint US-Iraqi raid that netted 10 suspects and a quantity of weapons.



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Australian ex-army chief says Iraq war boosted militants

AFP
Sun Oct 15, 2006

SYDNEY - Australia's defence force chief at the time of the invasion of Iraq said in remarks published Sunday that he now believes the war has increased the threat of Islamic militancy.

The comments by retired general Peter Cosgrove come just days after Britain's army chief caused a furore by saying British troops in Iraq were exacerbating security problems around the world.

"If people say that there has been an energising of the jihadist movement through the protracted war in Iraq -- well that's pretty obvious," Cosgrove told the Sunday Telegraph, using the Islamic term for "holy warrior".
The highly respected Vietnam veteran, who retired last year, said he had apologised to national police chief Mick Keelty for criticising his comments that the Iraq war had inspired the 2004 terrorist attacks in Madrid.

"Things have moved on. I have got no reason to argue the weighty assessments that I am seeing," Cosgrove said.

The Australian government of Prime Minister John Howard, a close ally of Washington, contributed troops to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and maintains a force of some 1,300 involved in Iraqi operations.

Britain's army chief, General Richard Dannatt, said in an interview with the Daily Mail newspaper Friday that British troops in Iraq should pull out soon.

"I don't say the difficulties we are experiencing round the world are caused by our presence in Iraq but undoubtedly our presence in Iraq exacerbates them," he said.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair played down the comments, saying Dannatt was not calling for an immediate withdrawal.

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer echoed Blair's remarks in an interview on Australian television Sunday.

"In terms of pulling out of Iraq, I don't think the British general was saying that British troops should immediately withdraw," Downer told Network Ten.

"But if the proposition here is that foreign troops eventually should withdraw from Iraq, everybody agrees with that.

"Nobody wants to stay in Iraq for one minute longer than is necessary and the definition of necessary is whether the Iraqi regime can survive without the support of some foreign troops," he said.

Opposition Labor Party leader Kim Beazley said Cosgrove's comments supported Labor's opposition to the war and called for Australian troops to be withdrawn.

"General Cosgrove, Commissioner Keelty and many others, including the chief of the British defence forces, now make the point that the war in Iraq has made us less safe in the struggle with fundamentalist terror," he told reporters.

"It's something the Labor Party said was the likely outcome of that war for a very long period of time, and John Howard owes the Australian people an explanation for what he's done.

"Better still, he owes the Australian defence forces and the rest of us a withdrawal from the situation in Iraq and a concentration on our region."



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UK Gov Export Record Levels Of Weapons To Blacklisted Countries

October 15, 2006
The Observer

China tops list with £70m of exports in one year as military sales soar to blacklisted regimes

The British government is exporting record levels of military equipment to 19 of the 20 states its own ministers and officials have just identified as 'major countries of concern' for human rights abuses.

The 20 countries were listed in the Foreign Office's annual Human Rights Report, which was launched by the Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett, last week. They include China, Burma, North Korea, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe.

But the government's arms export records reveal that concerns over human rights appear not to have prevented ministers from approving tens of millions of pounds of military sales to those same regimes.

For instance, on China the report stated: 'The Chinese authorities continue to violate a range of basic human rights. The use of the death penalty remains extensive and non-transparent; torture is widespread.' Yet, despite the existence of a European Union arms embargo, ministers approved strategic export licences - which are needed to sell military items abroad - for China worth almost £70m between July 2005 and June 2006.
According to the UK government's own record of export licences, between January and March this year ministers approved the sale to China of military aero-engines, military communciations equipment and 'technology to build combat aircraft'. It also sold Beijing gun mountings and components for military vehicles, and 'components for nuclear reactors'.

The EU embargo prohibits countries from selling 'whole' weapons such as missile and aircraft, although it does allow the sale of parts.

Other countries whose human rights records concern the Foreign Office, but which still receive arms exports from the UK, include Colombia, Saudi Arabia and Russia, where more than £40m of military equipment was exported last year. On Russia, the Foreign Office report stated: 'Human rights defenders continue to be gravely concerned by actions taken by authorities... The North Caucasus... remains one of Europe's most serious human rights issues.' Yet last year ministers authorised export licences to Russia worth £10m. These included military cargo and utility vehicles, sniper rifles, gun silencers, shotguns, and components for military aircraft navigation equipment.

The analysis of military exports was carried out by Saferworld, the human rights campaign group. Claire Hickson, Saferworld's head of communications, said: 'This once again highlights the incoherence of UK policy which could result in British military equipment being used to commit human rights abuses abroad.'

At the launch of the Human Rights Report, Beckett said: 'This report would set down what we were doing to promote human rights and fundamental freedoms around the world. And it would be something by which the public, the NGO community and the media could hold us as a government to account.'

But Saferworld responded: 'The UK government does little to check what happens to arms exports once they leave the country. There is little way of knowing whether the arms find their way to other users, such as criminal gangs, pariah states, terrorists, paramilitaries or warlords or other rebel forces. A number of these states have reputations as conduits of arms to other irresponsible parties.'

A spokesman for the Foreign Office said that all military exports were rigorously scrutinised on a 'case by case basis' and the British government needs to be reassured that such sales would not be used for internal repression or external aggression.

The Human Rights Report was first published in 1998 by former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, who wanted to promote human rights overseas in line with the new Labour government's 'ethical foreign policy'.



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Why is the American press silent on the report of 655,000 Iraqi deaths?

By Joe Kay and Barry Grey
13 October 2006

The US media is virtually silent on a new scientific study that estimates the Iraqi death toll from the US war at 655,000. The study, conducted by Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health and funded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was posted Wednesday on the web site of the British medical journal, the Lancet.

The study is the only systematic estimate of the number of Iraqi civilians and military personnel to have died as a result of the US invasion and occupation to be brought to the attention of the American and international public.

Unlike previous estimates, which were based on reviews of media reports or tallies made by the US-backed Iraqi government, the Johns Hopkins study was carried out by Iraqi physicians who interviewed-often at great personal risk-nearly 2,000 families spread across the country, utilizing standard and widely used statistical methods to arrive at an objective estimate of the death toll from the war and occupation. The vast majority of the reported deaths were substantiated by death certificates.
The study concluded with a 95 percent degree of certainty that the number of "excess deaths" in Iraq since the invasion-the number of people who have died in excess of the number that would be expected on the basis of pre-invasion mortality rates-is between 393,000 and 943,000. The figure of 655,000 is given as the most likely number. This represents an astonishing 2.5 percent of the entire Iraqi population.

The researchers further estimated that about 600,000 of the deaths were due to violence in some form, including gunshots, air strikes and bombings. They concluded that US and allied military forces directly caused at least 31 percent-or 186,000-of the violent deaths.

Some 336,000 people, or 56 percent of those killed in violent actions since the invasion, died from gunshot wounds. The study also found that the number of violent deaths in Iraq has steadily increased every year since the invasion. In the period from June 2005 to June 2006, the researchers found a nearly four-fold increase in the mortality rate relative to pre-invasion levels.

There can be no legitimate doubts about the credibility of the study. Lancet is one of the oldest and most prestigious peer-reviewed medical publications in the world. The Johns Hopkins public health school is the largest in the world, and regularly ranks as the top public health school in the United States. The journal article was reviewed and approved for publication by four independent scientific experts in the area.

It is difficult to overestimate the significance of the report, even if one assumes its low-end estimate of 393,000 Iraqi deaths to be correct. It demonstrates that the American intervention in Iraq has produced a social and humanitarian catastrophe of historical dimensions, with vast political implications not only in the Middle East, but throughout the world and, above all, in the United States itself.

By any objective standard, the report merits front-page coverage in every major newspaper in the country and extensive discussion and reporting on television news broadcasts. Yet the response of the US press has been to virtually ignore the report and limit its coverage to news accounts on inside pages which report, uncritically, unsubstantiated statements by government and military officials dismissing the report as "not credible."

In burying the story, the New York Times and Washington Post have played a particularly significant role. The original articles published by these newspapers on Wednesday were relegated to the inside pages: in the Times on page 8, in the Post on page 12.

The Post decided to bury the story in its back pages despite the fact that the article it published vouched for the scientific validity the Johns Hopkins study, noting that it, and an earlier report on Iraqi deaths published by the same team, "are the only ones to estimate mortality in Iraq using scientific methods." The "cluster sampling" technique used by the scientists, the newspaper wrote, "is used to estimate mortality in famines and after natural disasters."

Minimal coverage in the press continued on Thursday, despite the fact that the issue was raised by a reporter at a White House press conference on Wednesday. President Bush contemptuously dismissed the report, stating that it was not credible. He was not challenged and the question was not followed up by any of the other reporters at the news conference.

Bush's remarks were followed by statements from various supporters and architects of the war similarly dismissing the Johns Hopkins study's casualty figures. General George Casey, the commander of US forces in Iraq, admitted that he had not bothered to read the report, but nevertheless concluded that it did not have "much credibility at all."

A spokesman for British Prime Minister Tony Blair said that the figure of 655,000 killed is "not one we believe to be anywhere near accurate." Iraqi government officials likewise declared that the figure was "exaggerated."

On Thursday, neither the Times nor the Post published an editorial on the Johns Hopkins report, or even a follow-up article on the report and the response of the Bush administration.

There was not one challenge in the establishment media to the official attempts to disparage the report. Instead, the minimal coverage on Thursday was largely devoted to reporting the statements by Bush, Casey, Blair and the Iraqi stooge regime. The Los Angeles Times, for example, published a story on its inside pages, "Iraq Disputes Claim of 600,000 War Dead," reporting the statements by the Iraqi government. The newspaper added its voice to the chorus by remarking that it had conducted its own survey and reached a figure of 50,000 killed.

The attempts to discredit the report are not backed up by any factual or methodological arguments. The administration and its supporters assume, correctly, that they can simply make unsubstantiated claims and the media will not challenge them.

Lee Roberts, a co-author of the study, noted in an interview with the radio program Democracy Now! on Thursday that the cluster survey approach the researchers used "is the standard way of measuring mortality in very poor countries where the government isn't very functional or in times of war." He pointed out that both the United Nations and the US government have used the method in determining mortality, including after the Kosovo and Afghan wars. "Most ironically," he said, "the US government has been spending millions of dollars per year... to train NGOs and UN workers to do cluster surveys to measure mortality in times of wars and disasters."

With its silence, the media is once again taking its cue from the government. It does not challenge Bush's ignorant and cold-blooded dismissal of the Johns Hopkins report, just as it did not challenge Bush's offhand remark at a December, 2005 press conference that 30,000 Iraqis, "more or less," had been killed since the March, 2003 US invasion-an absurdly low estimate.

The corporate-owned-and-controlled media have buried this story because they do not want the American people to know the truth of what is happening in Iraq.

They want to conceal this truth-as they have done consistently since the war began-because they are complicit in a massive war crime in Iraq, and continue to support the bloodletting by the US military.

The Johns Hopkins report, by revealing the colossal dimensions of the death and destruction wreaked by the United States in Iraq, shatters the edifice of lies that has been erected in an attempt to deceive the people and justify the war-from the phony claims of weapons of mass destruction and Iraq-Al Qaeda ties, to the current claims of a war for "freedom and democracy" and the overarching deception of the "war on terrorism."

The report inevitably highlights the culpability of the media itself, which has combined an acceptance of unprecedented censorship by the military with self-censorship and deliberate misinformation in order to whitewash an imperialist war for oil and geo-strategic domination of the Middle East.

The scale of mass killing revealed in the Johns Hopkins study published by the Lancet stands as an indictment of the entire American ruling elite, both of its political parties-Democratic no less than Republican-and all of its official institutions, among which the media has played a particularly sordid role.

What the corporate, political and media establishment fear are the explosive social and political implications of growing popular revulsion over the crimes of US imperialism in Iraq and around the world, combined with mounting anger over relentless attacks on working people's social conditions and democratic rights. The entire political system is being exposed and discredited before the eyes of the people. Such a process inevitably brings with it revolutionary consequences.



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Blair devastated as Army chief savages his approach to Iraq

By Colin Brown, Terri Judd and Andrew Buncombe in Washington
Published: 14 October 2006

The authority of Tony Blair was left battered last night as he attempted to play down a rift with the head of the British Army over his unprecedented warning that the presence of foreign troops was "exacerbating" the security situation in Iraq

The devastating assessment by General Sir Richard Dannatt, the chief of the general staff, infuriated ministers and caused alarm in Washington.
However there was widespread backing across the Army yesterday as soldiers of every rank praised General Dannatt for standing up to the Government.

Within hours of his comments being made public, the Army's unofficial website was packed with hundreds of blogs from troops voicing their support. The messages included: "Can Tony Blair recover from this and justify British presence in Iraq, without using the words 'I was wrong ...?'" Another said: "Dannatt gets my vote! Anyone care to disagree with him? We were lied to when it all started and we are still lied to today!"

Other serving soldiers were also quick to voice their relief at the general's intervention.

One senior officer said: "It has been decades since someone senior actually stood up for us, the soldiers and their families.

"People need to take him seriously. This is not a man who is thinking about his career. This is a man who passionately and clearly believes he should tell the truth and represent all of us."

Last night the Prime Minister tried to minimise the damage, saying he had agreed with General Dannatt's later remarks in a series of "clarifying" interviews. Mr Blair said: "I have to say, I've read his transcript of his interview on the radio this morning, and I agree with every word of it."

As the Government launched a damage-limitation exercise, General Dannatt attempted to clarify his comments. Interviewed on the BBC's Today programme, he said: "I've got an army to look after which is going to be successful in current operations. But I want an army in five years' time and 10 years' time. Don't let's break it on this one. Let's keep an eye on time."

As General Dannatt insisted that there was no rift with the Government, his soldiers were in no mood to back down. Senior officers said he should be "saluted" for his honesty, and frontline soldiers praised him for "telling it how it is".

A non-commissioned officer said: "He has spoken the truth. I think many people feel that but nobody would say it. I agree we should try and get out as soon as we can. That is not to say we let them fight among themselves, but we have always said we would go when the job was done, and I hope it is sooner rather than later.

In his interview with the Daily Mail, General Dannatt said we should "get ourselves out sometime soon because our presence exacerbates security problems".

He also suggested that the Government's aim of creating a liberal democracy in Iraq was "naive" and should be scaled down. Britain had "effectively kicked the door in" when troops entered in 2003, he added.

"Whatever consent we may have had in the first place, may have turned to tolerance and has largely turned to intolerance," he said. "I don't say that the difficulties we are experiencing round the world are caused by our presence in Iraq but undoubtedly our presence in Iraq exacerbates them."

He said the effects of the conflict could be felt in Britain, where there was a "moral compass spinning" and the Islamist threat had to be faced up to.

White House officials made a series of calls to clarify the comments. President George Bush's spokesman, Tony Snow, said: "We did call [Downing Street] and say, what did he say? We've received transcripts, especially of this morning's interviews.

"What he said is that the comment was taken out of context, and his general point was that when your work is done, you hand over authority to the Iraqis."

He added: "His general argument is, number one, there's no difference between him and the Blair government or between the Brits and the United States. Number two, this is not an injunction to leave, that somehow everything is getting worse."

General Dannatt earlier issued a clarifying statement, saying Britain would stand "shoulder to shoulder" with the Americans adding: "I'm a soldier. We don't do surrender. We don't pull down white flags."

Mr Blair will face a fresh challenge in the Commons next week over Iraq, following the general's intervention. The Commons Select Committee on Defence, which highlighted the threat to morale in Iraq last July, will publish the Government's response. They are expected to summon General Dannatt to expand on his concerns.

The Prime Minister's growing number of critics will be emboldened by the challenge to his authority by the general. Mr Blair's allies are worried where the next challenge will come from. "It's the end of an era," said one minister.

Reg Keys, whose son Thomas was killed in Iraq along with five fellow Royal Military Police officers in 2003, said he agreed "100 per cent" with the general.

Mr Keys said: "He is a strong character who is prepared to speak his mind and not be a spin doctor for the Prime Minister."

However the Tory former foreign secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind said Sir Richard had not been "playing politics" but should be sacked if he strayed into politics again. He said: "These are perfectly legitimate views for the rest of the nation but serving officers are not, I'm afraid, able to have that kind of freedom."

The SNP's leader, Alex Salmond, told delegates at the party's conference in Perth: "Today the head of the Army - the head of the Army - has said that in his professional opinion our continued presence in Iraq exacerbates the security position in Iraq and elsewhere. Finally the truth."



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Out of Hand in La-La-Land

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Yankee player jet overshoots runway in California

Reuters
October 14, 2006

LOS ANGELES - A private jet reportedly carrying New York Yankees star player Alex Rodriguez overshot the runway at a Los Angeles area airport on Friday, just days after teammate Cory Lidle died in a small plane crash in New York City.

"There were seven people on board and no injuries," said Victor Gill, director of public affairs at the Bob Hope Airport in Burbank, outside Los Angeles.
Gill did not have information on the identities of the passengers. But ABC News said that Rodriguez was aboard the jet and had told an ABC reporter by phone that he was doing fine.

Officials from the baseball team were not immediately available for comment.

The twin-engine jet landed at Burbank on Friday morning and stopped on an emergency pavement beyond the normal runway that is designed to collapse and bring the aircraft to a quick halt.

Lidle died Wednesday when the single-engine plane he owned slammed into a residential tower on New York's Upper East Side.

Comment: Two Yankees are involved in airplane accidents only days apart... Coincidence? We think not.

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500 students riot at California high school

AP
Oct. 14, 2006

FONTANA, Calif. - A fight between two high school students erupted into a riot of 500 people, prompting officers to fire bean bags and rubber pellets to scatter the crowd, police said. No major injuries were reported.

About 100 officers rushed to Fontana High School after students threw rocks and bottles at other officers and one another, according to Fontana police Sgt. Doug Wagner.
About 100 officers rushed to Fontana High School after students threw rocks and bottles at other officers and one another, according to Fontana police Sgt. Doug Wagner.
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Police were investigating the cause of the fight.

"We don't know if it was gang related or if it was racially motivated," Wagner said. "Some people were unhappy with one another, a fight broke out and it spilled over."

Two students were arrested for investigation of assault with a deadly weapon, and four others were arrested for refusing to disperse and resisting arrest, Wagner said. Their names were not released because they are minors, he said.

The brawl forced school officials to lock down the campus, and school was closed several hours early, he said.

Fontana is about 50 miles east of Los Angeles.



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5 in Iowa Family Slain; Son a Suspect

Sunday October 15, 2006
Associated Press

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) - Authorities were questioning a man arrested in Illinois after his parents and three teenage sisters were found shot to death at their home in southeastern Iowa.

Shawn Bentler, 22, was arrested Saturday in Quincy, Ill., on an unrelated charge of possession of drug paraphernalia, according to the Adams County, Ill., sheriff's office.

The Iowa Department of Public Safety said Bentler is considered a suspect in the slayings, but did not disclose a motive.

Quincy is about 60 miles southeast of the family's home.

The victims were found early Saturday near Bonaparte, according to the Van Buren County sheriff's office. They were identified as Michael Bentler, 53; his wife, Sandra, 47; and their daughters Sheena, 17; Shelby, 15; and Shayne, 14.

Autopsies were planned for Sunday.

The slayings shocked residents of this tiny town, located about 145 miles southeast of Des Moines.

"The whole town knew the family,'' resident Marilyn Thomas said. "This is only a town of 465 people.''

Thomas said she didn't see any indications of strife in the family.

The teens - a freshman, sophomore and senior - attended Harmony High School. School officials said they will have counselors available Monday to speak with grieving students.




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Family Of Four Murdered In Florida

Sunday October 15, 2006
Associated Press

FORT PIERCE, Fla.- Yessica Guerrero Escobedo and Jose Luis Escobedo were high school sweethearts, a relative said, who fell in love and married. Recently, they packed up their two children and left their Texas home, headed for Florida in search of a new life.

"Everybody loves them. They would do anything for anybody. There's not enough words - they were just funny, caring, very lovely people,'' said Lisa Salazar, a relative in Brownsville, Texas.

On Saturday, authorities were trying to figure out how they were fatally shot along Florida's Turnpike in Port St. Lucie, about 100 miles north of Miami. The body of Yessica Guerrero Escobedo, 25, was found Friday clutching her two sons in an apparent effort to protect them. Her husband, who was to turn 29 on Saturday, was found nearby.

Salazar said the couple, married for three years, didn't have any enemies. She showed photos of the family, including the 3- and 4-year-old sons, at a news conference. They had hoped to return to Brownsville for Christmas, she said.

Investigators were watching 480 hours of surveillance tapes from toll booths along the turnpike hoping to spot any clues to lead to the suspects. Bullets found at the scene also were being analyzed to see if the same kind had been used in any other crimes.
Investigators believe the Escobedos' vehicle, a 1998 four-door Jeep Cherokee, had pulled to the side of highway before someone else in the vehicle shot them and drove away sometime between 1:30 and 3 a.m. Authorities were searching for the vehicle Saturday, Sheriff Ken Mascara said.

A motive for the shootings was not yet known. Authorities said the victims and the shooter may have known each other, and investigators were not approaching the crime as a carjacking.

A search warrant was issued for the family's home in Greenacres in Palm Beach County, where the family had moved in June from the Brownsville, Texas, area.

Their white stucco single-story house looked Saturday as though the family was still settling in to their new home - the living room was devoid of furniture, except for a bean bag chair on the white tile floor. A handwritten note taped to the doorbell read, "Knock!! Door bell doesn't work.''

Neighbors said they didn't know the family well.

"He waved to me once, that's about all,'' said Ron Vendetti, 83, who lives across the street.

Patrick Center, 25, who lives next door, said the husband once came over to introduce himself.

"Really nice guy,'' Center said.

Mascara said Friday the mother and father suffered multiple gunshot wounds. Formal autopsy results were not expected until Monday, according to the medical examiner's office.

Seven other law enforcement agencies around the country were involved in the investigation, Mascara said. Investigators had received about 200 phone calls offering tips, the sheriff said.



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White House Upbeat About GOP Prospects

By Michael Abramowitz
Washington Post
Sunday, October 15, 2006

Amid widespread panic in the Republican establishment about the coming midterm elections, there are two people whose confidence about GOP prospects strikes even their closest allies as almost inexplicably upbeat: President Bush and his top political adviser, Karl Rove.

Some Republicans on Capitol Hill are bracing for losses of 25 House seats or more. But party operatives say Rove is predicting that, at worst, Republicans will lose only 8 to 10 seats -- shy of the 15-seat threshold that would cede control to Democrats for the first time since the 1994 elections and probably hobble the balance of Bush's second term.

In the Senate, Rove and associates believe, a Democratic victory would require the opposition to "run the table," as one official put it, to pick up the necessary six seats -- a prospect the White House seems to regard as nearly inconceivable.
The Mark Foley page scandal and its fallout have many Republicans panicked, but Rove professes to be taking it in stride. "The data we are seeing from individual races and the national polls would tend to indicate that people can divorce Foley's personal action from the party," he said in a brief interview Thursday.

The official White House line of supreme self-assurance comes from the top down. Bush has publicly and privately banished any talk of losing the GOP majorities, in part to squelch any loss of nerve among his legions. Come January, he said last week, "We'll have a Republican speaker and a Republican leader of the Senate."

The question is whether this is a case of justified confidence -- based on Bush's and Rove's electoral record and knowledge of the money, technology and other assets at their command -- or of self-delusion. Even many Republicans suspect the latter. Three GOP strategists with close ties to the White House flatly predicted the loss of the House, though they would not do so on the record for fear of offending senior Bush aides.

At this point in the 2002 and 2004 election cycles, Bush was on the offensive, racing around the country and providing public lifts to many candidates. This year, by contrast, is mostly about defense. Bush lately has been stumping for vulnerable House Republicans who, only a few weeks ago, seemed safe for reelection. Meanwhile, Bush' s own unpopularity has made House and Senate campaigns think twice about using him.

"You have to be careful where you take him," said an adviser to a GOP candidate in a close Senate race. In the past, this source said, the White House usually dictated where the president went. "They are probably more cooperative. They will go into the places and formats we suggest," he added.

To Rove and the small cadre of operatives who have been at his side throughout the administration -- including Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman and White House political director Sara Taylor -- confidence flows from a conviction that a political operation that has produced three consecutive national victories is capable of one more, despite voter disaffection with Iraq and GOP scandals in Washington.

Republican officials say the three closely coordinate strategy, with constant e-mails and a daily conference call. They see this familiarity -- in many respects it is the same team leading GOP strategy as in the past two elections -- as one advantage they have over Democrats, whose leaders on Capitol Hill and national party officials have been at odds on strategy.

So far, there have been few surprises in the Bush-Rove playbook, which seems little changed over the past four years. It includes tapping the powers of incumbency, mobilizing Christian conservatives and others in the GOP base, and seeking to polarize the electorate around national security and taxes. A huge effort to raise money by Bush, Vice President Cheney and first lady Laura Bush seems to be paying off: By Taylor's calculation, the various GOP campaigns and party committees will have a $55 million money advantage in the final three weeks of the campaign.

The RNC is also planning another big get-out-the-vote drive in the final three days before the elections. Rove believes that many of the polls in individual House and Senate races understate what he expects to be a GOP advantage in turnout, according to one party strategist who has heard him discuss the midterms.

Taylor, an Iowa native and protege of Mehlman's, said the administration recognized long ago that this would be a difficult campaign, coming in the sixth year of a presidency. "History suggests this will be a tough year for us," she said. "But at some point, the weight of our structural advantages makes up ground. And the message is really more important than all of that. When it comes to the war on terror, people have confidence in the policies that are keeping the country safe."

Polling suggests that may be changing -- the recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 53 percent of Americans disapprove of Bush's handling of terrorism, the lowest number he has ever received on what has been a signature strength. But in every campaign appearance, Bush continues to attack Democrats for being purportedly soft on national security.

The frustration for the White House is that, until two weeks ago, the Bush-Rove plan seemed to be having an impact. The White House used the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as an opportunity to redefine the Nov. 7 elections around the terrorism issue. A modest uptick in Bush's approval ratings followed, and GOP lawmakers began to feel better about their prospects.

But recent events combined to change the campaign conversation. These include the leak of a classified intelligence document suggesting that the Iraq war was complicating the fight against terrorism, a Bob Woodward book alleging administration deceptions about the war, and -- perhaps most critically -- the Foley scandal, which raised questions about whether the GOP tolerated the abuse of minors to protect one of its own.

Nonetheless, White House officials say the president plans to use the final weeks of the campaign to try to reshape the national agenda and to help as many candidates as he can, starting this week with fundraisers for Sen. George Allen (Va.) and Rep. Don Sherwood (Pa.), who is in trouble after admitting an extramarital affair.

"The president is going to be articulating the big issues and do so in a way that grabs people's attention," Rove said, although he quickly added that he believes many of the races will turn on local issues.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), who chairs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, predicted that it will not work: "The bottom line is that people are tired of the president and his policies, and he has been unable to escape it."

He voiced skepticism that Bush is helping Republicans much, despite what he concedes is the president's fundraising prowess. "Most candidates don't want to show up in public with him, and those that do are embarrassed," Schumer said. "If Bush were popular, these races would not be close."

A key focus is Tennessee, central to GOP hopes of holding the Senate, where Republican Bob Corker is locked in an expectedly tight race with Rep. Harold E. Ford Jr. (D). Bush has visited there twice, and Republicans anticipate another visit from Bush and the first lady. White House officials have also pushed Corker to go after Ford more aggressively.

Taylor, who with Rove helps determine Bush's political travel, said the president has helped raise money for some of the most endangered GOP House incumbents, such as Reps. Heather A. Wilson (N.M.) and E. Clay Shaw Jr. (Fla.). Some of Bush's focus more recently has been on helping GOP candidates who are in less intensely competitive districts, she said, citing recent presidential stops on behalf of California Reps. John T. Doolittle and Richard W. Pombo. "For Democrats to take back control of the House, they have to go to this outer ring," she said. "One of the things that's important now is to make sure this outer tier is solid and candidates have the resources they need."

Amy Walter, who tracks the House races for the Cook Political Report, views such stops differently. "It speaks to the fact that there are Republican districts that are now in serious jeopardy," she said.

Comment: What to do Bush and Rove know that you don't?

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Our Trembling Earth

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Hawaii governor declares statewide emergency after 6.6 Quake

CNN
October 15, 2006

HONOLULU, Hawaii -- Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle issued a disaster declaration for the entire state about four hours after a strong earthquake rumbled throughout its Big Island at 7:07 a.m. (1:07 p.m. ET) Sunday.

The quake knocked out power at many homes across the island chain and caused at least one landslide on a major roadway on the island of Hawaii, known as the Big Island, according to Hawaii's KITV. Officials said a state of emergency had been declared on the Big Island.

Authorities told KITV they have not received news of any fatalities from the strong quake, which was measured by the National Earthquake Information Center as 6.6 in magnitude.
Emergency room ceilings collapsed and electricity went out at Kona Community Hospital, which began transporting seriously ill patients and nursing home patients to Hilo Medical Center around 11 a.m. (5 p.m. ET), said spokeswoman Terry Lewis.

No Kona Hospital patients were injured during the quake, Lewis said.

Bill Wong, a Big Island resident, said damage to buildings was extensive. He said the 100-foot-tall stack to a century-old sugar mill collapsed into a pile of rubble. "Everything in our house is damaged," he said. "Our whole house was rocking, it was swaying from left to right," he said. He described his neighborhood after the quakes as looking "like a war zone."

Bruce Pressgrave of the U.S. Geological Survey said preliminary reports indicated the quake was centered along the west coast of the Big Island, 153 miles southeast of Honolulu, which is on the island of Oahu. There is no threat of a tsunami, the Geological Survey said.

CNN meteorologist Rob Marciano said an aftershock of 4.2 struck about 10 a.m. (4 p.m. ET). This is normal activity, according to the USGS, but it was the strongest aftershock after a series of at least 10 aftershocks ranging in the 3.0 and lower range.

KITV anchor Shawn Ching said there was "significant" structural damage throughout the Big Island. A spokesperson for a hospital in Waimea said its emergency room is "inundated" with patients who suffered lacerations during the quake.

KITV anchor Mahealani Richardson told CNN the west side of the Big Island is difficult to navigate and has one primary road.

Big Island Mayor Harry Kim said on KITV that he is looking into whether the area is eligible for federal assistance.

Honolulu International Airport canceled departing flights but was still accepting arriving flights. Officials said power outages had led to plumbing problems at the airport, which was creating an unpleasant situation for workers and travelers who continued to arrive at the airport in hopes of catching a flight.

Cell phone reception was sketchy on the islands, officials said.

Residents were urged to stay at home and not use their telephones to avoid tying up emergency lines.

Lingle said she had no report of fatalities but that boulders fell on highways, rock walls collapsed and televisions had been knocked off stands.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said there is no reason to fear a tsunami, but that did not stop some panicked vacationers from heading to the airport in hopes of catching a flight home, said Erik von Ancken, a reporter from Orlando, Florida. He is vacationing in Hawaii with his fiancee.

"We were walking on some of the paths by the ocean," he said. "The fish in the pond started jumping... the windows on the buildings started to shake. People started to run for higher ground... there was a lot of fear."

Home Depot in Honolulu was one of the few stores open. It reported that it was nearly out of batteries, but still had supplies of propane and charcoal. Stewart Weinstein, assistant director of the Pacific Tsunami Center, told CNN the quake's magnitude was below the center's threshold to issue a tsunami warning.

"We've been monitoring our sea-level instruments... so we're confident there's not going to be any tsunami effect from this earthquake," he said. Weinstein said the last time Hawaii had a quake of this magnitude was in 1983.

A U.S. Pacific Command spokesman, based in Hawaii, said that there had been no immediate reports of damage to U.S. military assets in Hawaii. There had been no requests for military assistance from civilian authorities, he said.



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Hawaii quake shuts down power, shakes up tourists

AP
10/15/06

When the strongest earthquake to hit Hawaii in 20 years jolted people awake Sunday morning, causing untold damage to roads and buildings, it turned a paradise dream vacation for many into a nightmare.

In Waikiki, worried visitors began lining up to buy food, water and other supplies.

The quake - estimated to be between magnitude 6.5 and 6.6 - hit at 12:07 p.m. St. Louis time, 10 miles north-northwest of Kailua Kona, a town on the west coast of Hawaii Island, also known as the Big Island, said Don Blakeman, a geophysicist at the National Earthquake Information Center.

It sent rocks tumbling onto highways, crashed the ceiling of a hospital and caused untold damage to buildings and bridges. Aftershocks - one as strong as magnitude 5.8 - continued all day. Hotels reported some minor injuries, but Gov. Linda Lingle said there were no fatalities.

Officials said there was no danger of a tsunami.
Residents had no easier of a time than tourists coping with the quake.

"I was pretty scared," said Anne LaVasseur, who was on the second floor of a two-story, wood-framed house when the temblor struck.

Big Island Mayor Harry Kim estimated that as many as 3,000 people were being evacuated from three hotels on the island. Brad Kurokawa, Hawaii County deputy planning director, confirmed the hotels were damaged but could not say how many people had left. They were being taken to a gymnasium until alternate accommodations could be found, he said.

Many with vacation plans found themselves bogged down in flight delays. Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Les Dorr said that planes were arriving at Honolulu International Airport but that there were few departures.

Earthquakes of magnitudes in the 6 to 7 range are rare in the region, which more commonly experiences temblors in the magnitude 3 and 4 range, caused by volcanic activity.

The last Hawaiian earthquake this strong struck more than 20 years ago. The magnitude 6.7 earthquake caused heavy property damage on Hawaii Island and collapsed trails into a volcano in Hawaiian Volcanoes National Park on Nov. 16, 1983.



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The undersea quake-zone tunnel builders

Julian Smith
New Scientist Print Edition
10 October 2006

Sitting at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, the ancient city of Istanbul has seen thousands of years of trade, battles and invasions. Now it is the scene of one of the most audacious engineering projects in the world.

The Marmaray Rail Tube Tunnel, due to open in 2010, will not only be the deepest underwater tunnel ever constructed. It willalso pass within 16 kilometres of one of the most active geological faults in the world. A major earthquake is not only expected, but imminent. No wonder the Turkish government is calling it the project of the century.
Istanbul is divided by the Bosporus strait that connects the Black Sea to the north of the city with the Sea of Marmara to the south (see Map). Part of the city lies in Europe, on the western side of the strait, while the rest is in Asia. Two road bridges cross the strait and there are plans for a third, but ever since the Ottoman sultan Abdul Mecit suggested it in 1860, city leaders have dreamed of building a tunnel to link the two halves of the city. Last year, a mix of technical expertise, foreign investment and national pride finally came together to make the sultan's dream a reality.

This time, the plan is not so much to unite an empire as to deliver modern Turks from traffic hell. Today, crossing the Bosporus means either a 3-hour trip by rail and ferry, or braving gridlock in narrow, 2000-year-old streets and the two overcrowded road bridges. The Marmaray project, which takes its name from the Sea of Marmara and "ray", the Turkish word for rail, aims to ease the strain by replacing car traffic with an upgraded rail service that will whisk commuters between Europe and Asia.

The plan is first to improve the existing railways on both sides of the strait and then extend them to the coast via tunnels bored through bedrock. The centre section, under the Bosporus, will be a 1.4-kilometre tube made up of several shorter sections that will be built on land, floated into position and sunk into place (see Diagram). End to end, the tunnel will be 12 kilometres long.

It might sound straightforward, but the project engineers face a major geological hurdle. Twenty kilometres south of Istanbul lies the North Anatolian fault (NAF), where the Anatolian plate that underlies Turkey, Greece and the north Aegean is being squeezed to the south and south-west by the surrounding Arabian, Eurasian and African plates. The result is what geologists refer to as a right-lateral strike-slip fault, similar in size and type to the San Andreas fault in California. The NAF runs for 1600 kilometres across northern Turkey, and the abutting plates move about 2 to 3 centimetres relative to each other every year.
Shaky ground

Earthquakes along the NAF are common. In the past seven decades Turkey has endured seven quakes of magnitude 7.0 or greater. While some earthquakes release the stress that has built up on a fault, seismologists have come to realise that others simply shift it along the fault, leaving it even more prone to slip. Almost every quake along the NAF in the past 100 years seems to have set up a larger one, to the west. The process appears cyclic: quakes march along the fault in sequence until stress falls below a certain threshold, and then start again after a period of quiet.

In 1997, geologists studying the most recent cycle predicted that the next shock would hit near the port city of Izmit, 80 kilometres east of Istanbul (New Scientist, 28 August 1999, p 5). Sure enough, a major quake of magnitude 7.4 struck close to Izmit in August 1999, followed by another in Düzce in December, together killing over 18,000 people and causing $10 to $25 billion of damage.

Seismologists agree that the most recent quakes on the NAF have shifted the stress steadily closer to Istanbul. Now the question isn't if a major earthquake will strike the city, but when. Recent estimates by the US Geological Survey, the University of Tokyo and Istanbul Technical University estimate that the probability of a strong quake hitting Istanbul is up to 44 per cent in the next decade and as much as 77 per cent in the next 30 years. A major earthquake and accompanying tsunami are considered inevitable within a generation.

Geoffrey King, director of the Tectonic Laboratory at the Paris Institute for the Physics of the Globe in France was among those who predicted Izmit was at risk. "Istanbul is in great danger," he says. The quake will likely be even bigger than at Izmit, and since Istanbul's population density is 10 times greater than that of Izmit, "a catastrophic event is likely to end the lives of a significant fraction of its current inhabitants", he adds.

Despite the prospect of a quake anywhere up to magnitude 7.5, the Marmaray team is undeterred. "To build a tunnel in a seismically active area is not something new," says Steen Lykke, project manager for Avrasya Consult, which is managing the construction. He points out that San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) rail tunnel and the Osaka South Port Tunnel in Japan were both built through quake-prone regions. The BART tunnel rode out the magnitude-7.1 Loma Prieta quake in 1989, and the Osaka tunnel was hit by a 7.2 quake in 1995 while it was still under construction, yet escaped with minimal damage.

The crucial factor that lets the tunnels withstand quakes of this magnitude is the fact that both are "immersed tubes". In this design, engineers dig a channel into the seabed and float the prefabricated sections into position above it before sinking them and covering them over. The Marmaray tunnel will use a similar approach.

"The trick is to build sufficient strength, flexibility and ductility into the structures in combination with flexible joints where the stiffness or the cross sections change," says Lykke. Special flexible joints made from thick rubber rings reinforced by steel plates will be installed where the tunnel is most vulnerable - at the linkages between the rock-bored sections and the immersed tube, and between the tunnel and the three underground stations it will connect.

These joints will act "like big gaskets" in the event of a tremor, says Lykke, allowing the sections on each side of the joint to move as the ground shakes. There will also be floodgates at both ends of the immersed section to protect the rest of the tunnel if the midsection is breached.

As well as being more resilient in earthquakes, immersed tubes are generally faster and less expensive to build than traditional bored tunnels. For starters, problems with one section of the tunnel won't necessarily hold up the entire project, and because they can have a rectangular cross-section, they are a more efficient shape than a circular tunnel for packing in railway lines side by side. And while a bored tunnel is usually considered stable only if its depth under the seabed is at least equal to its diameter, an immersed tube can sit immediately under the sea floor, allowing shallower approach gradients.

Equally important as reinforcing the tunnels is preparing for what could happen to the seabed during an earthquake. Saturated sandy soils have a tendency to liquefy when shaken strongly, as the grains move freely past one another due to a sudden increase in water pressure. Liquefaction on land can cause buildings to collapse and roadways to fracture. Anything buried under the sea might sink deeper into the sediment or, if it is buoyant enough, may even rise to the surface. To counteract this, the foundations of the immersed tunnel will extend about 16 metres below the seabed and the soil up to another 9 metres below that will be stabilised with injected mortar.

The construction effort got under way late last year, and the 11 tunnel sections are currently being built on land, each 135 metres long and weighing 18,000 tonnes. The first immersion is planned for February 2007. Meanwhile, engineers are dredging up some 1 million cubic metres of rock, sand and soil to form the trench in which the tunnel will sit.

This winter a pair of tunnel-boring machines, each wider than the fuselage of a 747 airliner, will start digging from the Asian side to connect the immersed tube with the overground rail lines. Another pair will leave from the European side in the spring.

This last part might not be so easy, however. While digging the foundations for the new Yenikapi railway station on the European side of Istanbul, engineers stumbled across the remains of the 4th-century port of Theodosius, the busiest in ancient Istanbul - which was in turn capital of the eastern Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman empires and known for many centuries as Constantinople. Archaeologists had predicted where the port would turn up, but it wasn't until buildings were removed to make way for the new station that their suspicions were confirmed.

Excavations revealed the remains of dams, jetties and no less than eight wooden boats, including the first known Byzantine naval vessel. Investigators also found anchors, lengths of rope and personal items such as candle holders, hairbrushes and sandals.

"From a historic point of view, the excavation is of utmost importance," says Robert Ousterhout, professor of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who has visited the site twice. "Although Constantinople was the most important city in the world for a thousand years, modern Istanbul has witnessed virtually nothing that might be called urban archaeology. What we know about the city comes from texts."

Archaeologists are therefore keen to explore the site properly before handing it over to the construction project, but the size, cost and national prestige of the tunnel project create pressures of their own. "The site is huge," says Ousterhout - almost a kilometre in length and as large as several football pitches. Exploring it properly could seriously delay the project, adding to its estimated $25 billion price tag.

Project managers are trying to figure out how to proceed with construction without jeopardising what has turned out to be a major archaeological find. Some artefacts will undoubtedly be reburied, while others may be displayed in museums incorporated into the tunnel project itself.

Meanwhile, construction continues within Istanbul at breakneck speed. In July the mayor of Istanbul province, Kadir Topbas, announced that the project team was digging a record 35 metres of tunnel per day throughout the city, and that they was planning to speed things up. Even so, says Lykke, the Marmaray engineers have their work cut out. "There is as far as we know no other tunnel where the sum of the challenges is of the same nature" as in Istanbul, he says.

Whether or not it meets the 2010 deadline, the Marmaray tunnel may ironically turn out to be one of the best places to be if and when the next big one hits. "The tunnel will certainly get shaken by the next earthquake," says King, "but tunnels are very strong. The faults that will move will not cut the tunnel, so it will probably be safer than the above-ground parts of the railway."

From issue 2572 of New Scientist magazine, 10 October 2006, page 42-45



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Another quake rattles remote Russia island

Oct. 14
UPI

MOSCOW -- An earthquake measured at 6.3 on the Richter Scale rolled through the remote Kuril Range in far eastern Russia Saturday, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

The powerful quake caused no major problems despite being classified as a "strong" event by international seismologists.

The U.S. Geological Survey fixed the epicenter at about 270 miles east northeast of the Kuril Islands, nearly in the same spot as an earthquake registering 5.2 that occurred on Friday.

Russia's Itar-Tass news service said that the Kurils have been shaking on a regular basis in recent weeks with a 6.9 earthquake recorded on Oct. 1.




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Earthquake jolts southeastern Bangladesh

China Daily
15/10/2006

An earthquake measuring 4.1 on the Richter scale jolted Bangladesh's southeastern port city Chittagong and its adjoining area early Sunday.

The quake occurred at 1:03 a.m. (19:03 GMT) and the distance of the epicenter of the quake was 191 km from Chittagong Seismic Observatory.

The magnitude of the earthquake was 4.1 on the Richter scale and it lasted for 21 seconds.

The intensity was light, said a Met Office bulletin.




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Bush Plans his Escape

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Bush Buys Land in Northern Paraguay

Prensa Latina
13 Oct 06

Buenos Aires - An Argentine official regarded the intention of the George W. Bush family to settle on the Acuifero Guarani (Paraguay) as surprising, besides being a bad signal for the governments of the region.

Luis D Elia, undersecretary for the Social Habitat in the Argentine Federal Planning Ministry, issued a memo partially reproduced by digital INFOBAE.com, in which he spoke of the purchase by Bush of a 98,842-acre farm in northern Paraguay, between Brazil and Bolivia.

The news circulated Thursday in non-official sources in Asuncion, Paraguay.
D Elia considered this Bush step counterproductive for the regional power expressed by Presidents Nestor Kirchner, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Evo Morales, Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro.

He said that "it is a bad signal that the Bush family is doing business with natural resources linked to the future of MERCOSUR."

The official pointed out that this situation could cause a hypothetical conflict of all the armies in the region, and called attention to the Bush family habit of associating business and politics.



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Jenna Bush joins UNICEF program in Paraguay

Associated Press
October 9, 2006

ASUNCION, Paraguay - Jenna Bush came to this poor, landlocked South American country to take part in a UNICEF program for young professionals who volunteer in its activities here, the U.N. organization announced Monday.

UNICEF released few details about the program involving the 24-year-old daughter of U.S. President George W. Bush, citing security concerns.

"The visit is strictly private in nature," UNICEF announced in a one-page statement released by spokeswoman Natalie Echague. "She will get to know the UNICEF activities in Paraguay and some of the programs it cooperates in."
Local news media reported said Jenna Bush arrived Saturday in the Paraguayan capital of Asuncion on a commercial flight, then dined Sunday evening with Paraguayan President Nicanor Duarte and his family at their official residence and met with U.S. Ambassador James Cason. Officials did not confirm those accounts.

Jenna Bush planned no news conferences and no interviews, according to UNICEF. She and sister Barbara are the twin daughters of the U.S. president and his wife, Laura.

Paraguay, one of the poorest countries in South America, is home to 17 indigenous groups. A large portion of Paraguay's population is dedicated to subsistence farming and Indians in the rural Chaco regionhave endured a devastating drought.

The United Nations Children's Fund and other aid groups have sought to extend basic services such as potable water, health care, education and better housing to the least developed parts of this nation of more than 6 million.

Paraguay's economy is struggling to emerge from years of recession and slow growth as it battles corruption.



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Flashback: BUSH SR'S CIA USED NAZI TORTURERS IN SOUTH AMERICAN DICTATORSHIPS

September 23, 2004

Vice President Rockefeller, Kissinger, and Bush Sr. ran a major Death squad operation in South America

Some reasons to Boycott Exxon, Chase, Citigroup etc...

With Congress' " Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act" of 1998, many records of CIA collaboration with Nazis are being opened to the public, though still heavily censored in many cases, by the Interagency Working Group (IWG)(see their website: http://www.archives.gov/iwg ).
PRESCOTT BUSH, Bush jr's grandfather, sold $50 million in bonds for German steel magnate Fritz Thyssen, the top financer of the Nazi party. In 1942 the Union Bank, in which Prescott Bush was a director, was closed by the US government under the "Trading with the Enemies Act". $30 million in Nazi bank accounts were confiscated.

J.D. ROCKEFELLER II and his sons controlled the following corporations known to have served and supplied the Nazi war effort: STANDARD OIL (todays EXXON), which supplied much of the Nazi's gasoline from South American refineries, and was in a tight business partnership with the German company IG FARBEN. FARBEN built Auschwitz concentration camp as a slave labor camp, where 4 million Jews were killed. Rockefellers' lawyer John McCloy, who was deputy-secretary of Defense, twice blocked a plan to bomb the railroad bridges and gas chambers of Auschwitz. (The Crime and Punishment of IG FARBEN, by Joseph Borkin, Barnes and Noble, details the "business marriage" of STANDARD OIL and FARBEN, including the transfer of 2000 patents to the German war machine).

Rockefellers' CHASE MANHATTAN bank served Nazi accounts in Paris, forclosed Jewish accounts, and after the war was involved in transferring the Reichsbank to Swiss and South American accounts. Rockefellers' ITT built important communications systems for the Nazis, and his IBM Corp. built ID machines for the holocaust (source: IBM and the Holocaust, Edwin Black, Crown Press). In 1952 John McCloy released the Nazi industrialists and gave them back their factories. IG FARBEN was divided into Bayer, Hoechst, and BASF, today among the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world.-

1947: CIA FOUNDED AS HANDLING AGENCY FOR NAZIS ABSORBED INTO U.S. MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX: In 1947, Rockefellers' lawyer/spy Allen Dulles brought 2000 Nazi scientists into the US (OPERATION PAPERCLIP), to run NASA's rocket program and chemical/ biological weapons programs.

In West Germany, Dulles hired Hitlers' master spy Reinhart Gehlen to revive the SS spy agency as the Gehlen Org., which became West Germanys' spy agency BND. Dulles gave Gehlen $200 million in US taxdollars over 10 years to rehire thousands of Nazi SS and GESTAPO veterans, allowing the Nazis to organise underground networks called ODESSA and DIE SPINNE (the spider). These networks created The RATLINE, an escape route to Argentina for thousands of Nazi war criminals sought by Israel, Russia, France etc.. These included notorious Nazis like Adolph Eichmann, Joseph Mengele, Otto Skorzeny, Walther Rauff and Klaus Barbie, who worked for the CIA-BND as advisers to the dictators of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Bolivia, running torture centers, death squads and cocaine rings.

IN 1947 HENRY KISSINGER SERVED AS GERMAN TRANSLATOR IN ARMY INTELLIGENCE, to help Dulles set up these secret networks. He personally "interrogated" many of the top Nazi prisoners held by the US Army, who were absorbed into the CIA-BND. (see: The CIAs worst kept secret, by M. Lee, under Archived article "Nazi echo" at http://www.consortiumnews.com )

In 1952 Dulles ordered SS comando Skorzeny to bring 200 Nazis to Egypt as military advisors to Abdul Nasser in his war with Israel (see: Postwar Arab links to the ODESSA network).

DULLES BEGAN THE CIA POLICY OF COUP D'ETATS, IN WHICH DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENTS WERE REPLACED BY MILITARY DICTATORSHIPS. as follows:

-----1953, IRAN: President Mossadegh overthrown by the pro-nazi Shah Pahlavi, who kills and tortures thousands and opens Irans' oilfields to Rockefellers' EXXON corp.

-----1954, GUATEMALA: President Arbenz overthrown by the military, which by 1989 killed 200,000 Mayan Indians. To protect assets of United Fruit co.(Chiquita Bananas). Dulles was a director.

-----1961, ECUADOR: Pres. Arosemana overthrown

-----1961-64, BRAZIL: Pres. Joao Gaulart overthrown

-----1961-65, CONGO: Pres. Lumumba overthrown by Mobutu, who rules corruptly for 32 years and gives 10,000 square miles to OTRAG, a German rocket company run by former Nazi scientists.

-----1963, USA: President JF Kenneddy assassinated; John McCloy and Allen Dulles,(who JFK had fired as CIA director), "serve" on the Warren Commission, which claims there was no conspiracy involved. Lyndon Johnson reverses Kennedy's order to withdraw troops from Vietnam.

-----1963-65, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC: Pres.Bosch ousted

-----1965, INDONESIA: President Sukarno overthrown by Gen. Suharto, who led a massacre (CIA assisted)of up to 1 million Indonesians and ran concentration camps with over 750,000 prisoners whose arms were tatooed with letters. He opened Indonesias' oilfields to Rockefellers EXXON, Mobil and Chevron co's. Rockefellers' Goodyear Tire co. made use of Suhartos' slave labor camps.

-----1965-67, GREECE: Pres. Papandreous overthrown

-----1971, BOLIVIA: President Torres overthrown by Gen. Banzer, who tortures and kills thousands with the help of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie. Barbie runs the major cocaine ring known as AMADEUS, a lucrative CIA operation. In 1983 he is extradited to France for his war crimes trial.

-----1973, September 11, CHILE: President Allende overthrown by Gen. Pinochet in a bloody coup in which 3000 Chileans are massacred. The Rockefellers' ITT corp., now run by John McCloy, donates $1 million to the coup effort, which is orchestrated by Henry Kissinger.(source: Rogue State, by William Blum)

.......1976-OPERATION CONDOR, SOUTH AMERICAN ASSASSINATION CARTEL, THE YEAR GEORGE BUSH SR. IS CIA DIRECTOR. In 1976, Nelson Rockefeller was Vice President (to Ford), and his advisor Henry Kissinger was Secretary of State. In this year Kissinger's puppet dictator Pinochet, of Chile, organised Operation CONDOR, to co-ordinate death squad assassinations by the secret police of the dictators of Chile, Brasil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay . 30,000 leftists were assassinated/ executed/ "disappeared". Former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier was car bombed in Washington DC by Chilean agents. Operation CONDOR was based out of a bizarre Nazi colony in Chile known as COLONIA DIGNIDAD, whose founder is wanted in Germany for kidnapping and molesting young boys. Colonia Dignidad was used by Pinochets team to train for the 1973 coup d'etat, and then served as a torture center where prisoners were "disappeared". Many of the top ranking Nazi war criminals in South America are believed to have lived in Colonia Dignidad. In 1993 a cache of documents called the "ARCHIVES OF TERROR" was found in Paraguay detailing Nazi war criminal involvement in Operation Condor, and listing victims, including Israeli agents who were trying to find Nazis to bring to trial. It is highly probable that George Bush sr and Henry Kissinger knew about, and directed, Operation CONDOR. General Pinochet was never ashamed of his pro-Nazi fetish, preferring Nazi uniforms and marching music. In 1985 an American professor, Boris Weisfeiler, was disappeared at Colonia Dignidad. Today Dignidad is a prospering commune valued at $5 billion, but closed to the public and protected by the Chilean military. Today David Rockefeller is the scion of his families' empire, running Chase-Manhattan Bank, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and Rockefeller Center, NYC. Kissinger was Bush jrs choice to head the September 11th investigation. Paul Bremer III, former Director of Kissinger Associates, was Bush's appointed ruler of Iraq.

(Sources: Operation Condor, Virtual Truth Commission: http://www.geocities.com/~virtualtruth/condor.htm

---Operation Condor and Pinochet, by Lucy Komisar, LA Times, Nov.1, 1998.

--- Chile, declassified US documents on Pinochet and the 1973 coup, P. Kornbluh, National Security Archive.

---CIA compiled Indonesian Death Lists in 1965, by K.Kadane-
http://www.namebase.org/kadane/html



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Jeb Bush: I Wasn't Hiding in the Closet - It Was Boiler Room

Mewsmax
14/10/2006

Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has disputed media accounts that said he hid in a closet to avoid anti-Republican protesters during a visit to Pittsburgh last week.

Bush encountered protesters Oct. 6 while on his way to a fund-raising event for Republican Sen. Rick Santorum at Pittsburgh's exclusive Duquesne Club.

Stories mentioned prominently that Bush sought "refuge in a subway station supply closet."

Bush said it was actually a boiler room.

Bush said he had to seek safety in the boiler room when he came across the protesters, but also said he was never concerned for his safety because he was taller and "more burly" than most of the protesters who chased him.




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Nuking the Future

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U.N. approves sanctions on North Korea

By EDITH M. LEDERER
Associated Press
October 14, 2006

UNITED NATIONS - The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously on Saturday to impose punishing sanctions on North Korea including ship searches for banned weapons, calling Pyongyang's claimed nuclear test "a clear threat to international peace and security."

North Korea immediately rejected the resolution, and its U.N. ambassador walked out of the council chamber after accusing its members of a "gangster-like" action which neglects the nuclear threat posed by the United States.
The U.S.-sponsored resolution demands that the reclusive communist nation abandon its nuclear weapons program, and orders all countries to prevent North Korea from importing or exporting any material for weapons of mass destruction or ballistic missiles. It orders nations to freeze assets of people or businesses connected to these programs, and ban the individuals from traveling.

The resolution also calls on all countries to inspect cargo leaving and arriving in North Korea to prevent any illegal trafficking in unconventional weapons or ballistic missiles. The final draft was softened from language authorizing searches, but was still unacceptable to China - the North's closest ally - which said it would not carry out any searches.

U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said North Korea's proclaimed test "poses one of the gravest threats to international peace and security that this council has ever had to confront."

"Today, we are sending a strong and clear message to North Korea and other would be proliferators that there will be serious repercussions in continuing to pursue weapons of mass destruction," he said, in what appeared to be a clear warning to Iran whose nuclear ambitions come before the Security Council again next week.

North Korea's U.N. Ambassador Pak Gil Yon countered by blaming the United States for forcing the country to conduct a test because of its "nuclear threat, sanctions and pressure."

"The Democratic People's Republic of Korea is ready for talks, dialogue and confrontation," Ambassador Pak Gil Yon said. "If the United States increases pressure upon the Democratic People's Republic of Korea persistently, the DPRK will continue to take physical countermeasures considering it as a declaration of war."

North Korea has made similar threats in the past, and has also said it might conduct a second nuclear test in response to U.N. sanctions.

The vote came after the United States, Britain and France overcame last-minute differences with Russia and China during what the Russian ambassador called "tense negotiations."

The resolution demands North Korea eliminate all its nuclear weapons but expressly rules out military action against the country, a demand by the Russians and Chinese. Bolton warned Pyongyang, however, that if it continues pursuing nuclear weapons, the U.S. would seek further measures.

The Security Council condemned the nuclear test that North Korea said it conducted on Oct 9. It demanded that North Korea immediately return to six-nation talks aimed at persuading Pyongyang to dismantle its weapons program without precondition.

It also imposed sanctions for the North's "flagrant disregard" of the council's appeal not to detonate a nuclear device and demanded that North Korea "not conduct any further nuclear test or launch of a ballistic missile."

"This action by the United Nations, which was swift and tough, says that we are united in our determination to see to it that the Korean Peninsula is nuclear-weapons free," President Bush said.

South Korea's Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon, who was chosen on Friday to become the next U.N. secretary-general, said in an interview with The Associated Press that the council's resolution "sends a very strong, clear and unified message to North Korea."

"I hope that North Korea will comply with this resolution," he said. "I hope that all member states of the United Nations will fully implement this resolution."

In a measure aimed at North Korea's tiny elite, the resolution bans the sale of luxury goods to the country. The North's reclusive leader, Kim Jong Il, is known for his love of cognac and lobster and collection of thousands of bottles of vintage French wine.

To meet Russian and Chinese concerns, the Americans eliminated a complete ban on the sale of conventional weapons. Instead, the resolution limits the embargo to major hardware such as tanks, warships, combat aircraft and missiles.

The council's go-ahead for the inspection of cargo gave broader global scope to the U.S.-led Proliferation Security Initiative launched in 2003 which urges countries to stop banned weapons from suspect countries including North Korea and Iran.

China's U.N. Ambassador Wang Guangya said Beijing allowed the cargo provision to be included in what he called a "watered-down" resolution even though the government is opposed to it.

"China strongly urges the countries concerned to adopt a prudent and responsible attitude in this regard and refrain from taking any provocative steps that may intensify the tensions," he said.

Wang said he did not consider the North Korean ambassador's response the official reply from Pyongyang, which he awaits. "The important thing is not what they say here," Wang said.

The overriding issue, he said, is "how we work together for peace and security in the region."

Russia's U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said Moscow got what it wanted - a strong resolution but one that is also aimed at "prevention of a further escalation of tension."

North Korea's Pak told the Security Council that the nuclear test was not inconsistent with the country's goal of a denuclearized Korean peninsula.

"The DPRK clarified more than once that it would feel no need to possess even a single nuke when it is no longer exposed to the United States' threat, after it has dropped its hostile policy to the DPRK and confidence has been built between the two countries," he said.

Following Pak's speech, Bolton took the floor again saying "I'm not going to waste any our time responding." But he noted that North Korea had done Saturday exactly what it did in July after the council adopted limited sanctions for its ballistic missile tests - immediately reject the resolution and walk out.

"It is the contemporary equivalent of Nikita Khrushchev pounding his shoe on the desk," Bolton said, referring to the Soviet leader's legendary act of protest at the U.N. General Assembly in 1960.

Bolton later told reporters that the next step is to start work on implementing the resolution.

"Hopefully on saner reflections perhaps they'll begin to accept that if they don't change course, the only future for them is continued isolation," he said.

On Friday, U.S. officials said an air sampling after North Korea's claimed nuclear test detected radioactive debris consistent with an atomic explosion. However, the Bush administration and congressional officials said no final determination had been made about the nature of Monday's mystery-shrouded blast.

The U.S. and other nations trying to persuade the North to give up its atomic program continued a flurry of high-level diplomatic visits, including a trip to Asia by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice meant to present a unified front to North Korea.

The resolution invokes Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter, which the U.S. views as a necessary because it makes economic and diplomatic sanctions mandatory.

China and Russia normally object to the Chapter 7 provision because it carries the possibility of military enforcement. The Bush administration used the same provision to justify its invasion of Iraq, and Moscow and Beijing worry the U.S. might do the same eventually with North Korea - even though Bush has said the U.S. has no plans to attack.

But in a compromise also used in July to unanimously vote on a resolution condemning North Korean missile launches, the text added mention of Article 41 of the chapter, which permits only "means not involving the use of military force."

A Russian nuclear envoy who visited North Korea said Saturday he pressed the North to return to six-nation nuclear disarmament talks. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Alexeyev said he had a "very useful" meeting Friday with Kim Gye Gwan, the North's nuclear negotiator, but did not say how Kim responded.

Pyongyang has boycotted the six-nation talks for the past 13 months to protest financial measures imposed by Washington for alleged counterfeiting and money-laundering.



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Signs of discord over NKorea sanctions

AFP
Sun Oct 15, 2006

WASHINGTON - The United States played down signs of disagreement among world powers over how UN sanctions should be enforced against North Korea over its declared nuclear test.

A day after the UN Security Council voted unanimously to slap weapons and financial sanctions against North Korea, questions loomed about whether the measures would be fully enforced amid reservations from China.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice insisted China would work to enforce the sanctions against North Korea despite Beijing's stated objections to cargo inspections.

"China is signed on to a resolution that pledges cooperation in stopping the proliferation trade with North Korea," Rice told a US television network.

"I'm quite certain that China has no interest in seeing the proliferation of dangerous materials from North Korea," Rice said on the Fox News Sunday program.

Rice, who is due to meet Asian leaders next week to discuss the enforcement of the sanctions, acknowledged that there were "many details to be worked out, particularly about how this embargo and intradiction might work."

The Security Council resolution adopted Saturday seeks to block North Korea from importing items related to its nuclear or other mass-destruction weapons programs, calling for inspections of cargo to and from the Stalinist state.

After the vote, China's UN ambassador, Wang Guangya, said his country did not approve of provisions for inspecting cargo going in and out of North Korea.

"China strongly urges the countries concerned to adopt a prudent and responsible attitude in this regard and refrain from taking any provocative steps that may intensify the tension," Guangya said.

Russia called the negotiations before the vote "tense" and had favored time limits on any sanctions. In a concession, the United States agreed to drop any reference in the resolution to a threat of military force.

While it remained unclear how the sanctions would be carried out, China and other world powers were in agreement in condemning North Korea for its nuclear test, calling it a "clear threat to international peace and security."

The resolution urged Pyongyang to give up its nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction in a verifiable manner and return to international negotiations that it has boycotted for nearly a year.

In Seoul, Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Alexeyev said the North Koreans had appeared willing to return to the bargaining table in talks last week.

"The North Korean side several times returned to the point that the six-sided process should continue," said Alexeyev, according to Russian news agencies.

The Russian met Sunday evening with Chun Yung-Woo,
South Korea's main nuclear negotiator, who said it was too early to be confident the talks could be revived.

"We have to see how North Korea will respond to the sanctions. After then, we can confidently talk about the diplomatic process," Chun said.

North Korea's UN ambassador Pak Gil Yon angrily rejected the Council action.

"It is gangster-like for the Security Council to have adopted today a coercive resolution," Pak said.

Communist North Korea, one of the world's most impoverished and isolated nations, has repeatedly insisted that it needs nuclear weapons to deter an attack by the United States, which it says wants to topple its regime.

The six-nation talks -- between China, Japan, Russia, North and South Korea, and the US -- appeared to have won agreement from Pyongyang last year to give up its nuclear ambitions.

But the talks fell apart when the North withdrew after Washington imposed sanctions on a Macau bank that it said was laundering money from North Korea, which is believed to be strapped for cash.

Some analysts said a previous round of UN sanctions, imposed after it test-fired seven missiles in July, failed to prevent North Korea from carrying out the declared test and that another test may still be on the way.

"They can probably survive the sanctions being considered at present but a second test would push the international community further to take aggressive action," said John Harrison of the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies in Singapore.

The test sparked initial fears of an arms race in Asia, where nations such as South Korea and Japan have overcome traditional differences to find common cause in trying to rein in the Pyongyang regime.



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China erects barbed-wire fence along NKorea border: report

Spacewar.com
16 October 2006

China erected a barbed-wire fence along part of its border with North Korea shortly after the communist country conducted its first nuclear test a week ago, a South Korean newspaper said Monday.

The aim was to prevent an exodus of refugees from the isolated state, the Hankyoreh quoted a resident as saying.
The fence was constructed on the outskirts of China's border city of Dandong, a gateway to North Korea, on Wednesday, two days after the North's announcement, the newspaper said.

It was the first time China has erected a barbed-wire fence along the border with its communist neighbor with whom it shares a long land border, the daily added.

The 2.5-meter-high (8.2 feet) fence stretches about 20 kilometers (12 miles) along the Yalu border river, Hankyoreh said.

The daily quoted an ethnic Korean resident in Dandong as saying that Chinese border guards were mobilized to build the fence, which he said was aimed at stopping North Korean defectors.

"I saw a platoon of Chinese soldiers building the fence on Wednesday," he was quoted as saying.

In a separate move a Chinese bank in Dandong stopped traders from remitting money to North Korea on Friday, the paper said, adding it was not clear whether the move was temporary or part of punitive action against the North.

China, North Korea's last major ally, supported the UN Security Council's vote Saturday to impose sanctions on the North.

Comment: An exodus in the event of a major attack on N. Korea by the US perhaps?

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Beijing's reserves set to exceed $1 trillion

Timesonline.co.uk
14 October 2006

CHINA's booming export trade is set to push its foreign exchange reserves, the world's largest, over the $1 trillion (£539 billion) mark before the end of the year, new official data indicated yesterday.

Quarterly figures from the People's Bank of China, the country's central bank, reported that its foreign exchange stockpile reached a huge $987 billion at the end of September. The news suggested that the reserves will exceed $1 trillion in as little as a month.

The currency reserves have piled up at breakneck pace because of China's buoyant trading performance and its persistent intervention on foreign exchanges to restrain the value of its yuan currency.

Beijing's vast purchases of dollars to curb any rise in the yuan have built up steadily. US Treasury bonds make up an estimated three quarters of the reserves.




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Democracy in the Middle East

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Israel police recommend president be charged with rape

by Ron Bousso
AFP
Sun Oct 15, 2006

JERUSALEM - Israeli police told the attorney general there was enough evidence to indict President Moshe Katsav on charges of rape, sexual harassment and wire-tapping, at the end of a weeks-long probe.

"There is sufficient evidence indicating that in several cases... the president carried out acts of rape, forced sexual acts, sexual acts without consent and sexual harassment," the police said in a statement.

"There is sufficient evidence indicating violation of the law banning wire-tapping by the president," police said following a meeting with investigators and Attorney General Menachem Mazuz in Jerusalem.
During recent weeks, police had investigated no fewer than 10 complaints of rape and sexual harassment by former Katsav employees during his presidency and before that as agriculture minister.

The 61-year-old Iranian-born president has been questioned by police five times over allegations that he forced women employees to have sex with him by abusing his position of authority.

Police sources now say that an indictment could be filed in three or four of these cases.

Mazuz is expected to decide in the coming days whether to file an indictment against Katsav, who has denied the allegations and rejected calls that he step down pending the investigation.

Despite the dramatic development in the scandal, which has rocked Israel, Katsav has repeatedly rejected calls for his immediate resignation.

"Police have no legal authority to make any recommendations of this type," said Katsav's attorney Zion Amir in a statement following the announcement.

"This is not the first time police have recommended the indictment of senior figures, including prime ministers, and those recommendations have all been rejected," he said, referring to former prime minister Ariel Sharon.

The decision came on the eve of the opening of parliament's winter session, during which the president traditionally makes a speech. Katsav said following the police announcement that he would attend Monday's ceremony but would not speak.

Katsav has been under criminal investigation since July, when a senior female aide complained she was sexually harassed while working under him. The president filed a simultaneous complaint to the attorney general against the aide for extortion.

But police said Sunday that there was no substantial evidence to back accusations by Katsav's legal team that one of the complainants attempted to blackmail him over the rape allegations.

The married father-of-five, who could yet be forced to resign, has claimed he was the victim of a "witchhunt" by the national press.

The Katsav case is the latest blow to Israel's leadership, with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's government steering its way through public anger over failings of its 34-day war against Hezbollah in Lebanon.



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Criticism of Israel an 'act of solidarity'

Australian Jewish News
12/10/2006

FIERCE criticism of Israel is not antisemitic, but an "act of solidarity", a visiting Israeli academic said this week.

"Being against Israel is the best act of solidarity and compassion with the Jews that one can have," Tanya Reinhart, a professor of linguistics at Tel Aviv University, told a full house at the University of Sydney's Seymour Centre on Monday.

Professor Reinhart, who earned her doctorate in the United States under the stewardship of staunch Israel critic Noam Chomsky, was scathing in her criticism of Israel, accusing the Jewish State of "ethnic cleansing" and describing Gaza as an "open-air prison".

Professor Reinhart was speaking on "Open-air prisons: the Israeli occupation of Palestine" at a lecture jointly hosted by the University of Sydney and the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism.

Professor Reinhart, who was born and raised in Israel and writes for Yediot Achronot, said she was speaking as one who loves the country and its people.

But the author of The Roadmap to Nowhere issued a warning that Israel's current strategy would be its downfall.
"The system of prisons that Israel is building is also a prison for Israelis. This small state is making itself the enemy of the entire Arab world and now the Muslim world. A state with this strategy does not have a future, so the solution for the Palestinians is also the solution for Israel."

While some Jewish leaders decided not to give Professor Reinhart's views more oxygen, others slammed her comments.

B'nai B'rith's Anti-Defamation Commission said it "utterly condemns [her] outrageous and extreme comments regarding Israel ... Her comments should be condemned by every reasonable person as being counterproductive to achieving a realistic resolution to the conflict."

Professor Reinhart was in Australian to deliver the second annual Edward Said Memorial Lecture at the University of Adelaide last weekend, which was sponsored by the Australian Friends of Palestine Association.




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Drugs and Birds

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Antibiotics in Poultry May Pose Risk to Humans

By Randy Dotinga
HealthDay Reporter
Fri Oct 13, 2006

FRIDAY -- Could a turkey sandwich or a bowl of chicken soup be hazardous to your health?

Poultry has that potential, according to research that suggests people who eat drug-treated poultry may be at increased risk of developing antibiotic resistance.

Still, the findings are preliminary and shouldn't make anyone stop eating chicken or turkey, the study's lead investigator said.
"We don't want to suggest to anyone that they should alter their diet based on this," said Dr. Edward Belongia, director of the Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation's Epidemiology Research Center in Wisconsin.

But federal regulators should consider the results as they make rules about the kinds of drugs given to poultry, the investigator added.

At issue is the use of virginiamycin, an antibiotic used in farm animals to boost their growth.

The drug is banned in Europe, but farmers are allowed to use it in the United States.

Some studies have suggested that virginiamycin can cause germs in poultry to become super-powered, much as overuse of antibiotics in humans has made some people immune to certain drugs.

This phenomenon, known as drug resistance, happens when an antibiotic is used so often that germs mutate around it.

It's possible for drug resistance to be spread through food. "When we consume food with organisms that have resistance genes, these genes can be transferred to our natural organisms, causing them to become drug-resistant," explained Molly Marten, a clinical epidemiologist at Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego who's familiar with the study findings.

Belongia and colleagues launched their study to see if people who ate chicken or turkey treated with antibiotics would themselves become resistant to an antibiotic known as quinupristin-dalfopristin, or Synercid.

Synercid treats disease caused by Enterococcus faecium, germs that are normally found in the gut and can cause disease in some cases.

The illnesses caused by these germs are especially common in hospitals among patients whose immune systems are weakened.

The study authors looked for signs of drug resistance by looking at enterococcus bacteria found in stool samples from 105 newly hospitalized patients and 65 healthy vegetarians, all living in the Midwest.

They also looked for signs of drug-resistance in enterococcus bacteria found in 77 samples of ordinary poultry from retail stores and 23 samples of poultry raised without antibiotics.

The findings of the study, which was funded by the federal government, are published in the Nov. 1 issue of the Journal of Infectious Diseases.

The researchers said they did not find any sign that the humans had developed resistance to Synercid from eating poultry. However, they said that "plenty" of drug-resistant enterococcus was found in poultry treated with antibiotics, Belongia said.

Furthermore, 38 percent of the hospitalized patients had a genetic trait that might make it easier for them to develop resistance to Synercid; none of the vegetarians had the trait.

Patients who ate the most chicken seemed most susceptible to developing immunity to the drug, as did those who touched poultry.

Right now, this isn't a major problem because Synercid isn't used a great deal, Belongia said. That means germs haven't had a chance to become immune to it.

"But that could change," he said.

Belongia believes that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration should take the findings into account. In a written statement, Belongia said that antibiotics should not be used to promote growth in animals.

"This research makes a strong case for limiting the use of antibiotics in food-producing animals," added Marten, the epidemiologist. "By using antibiotics for strictly therapeutic purposes (such as treating an infection), rather than as a growth promoter, we will slow the emergence of drug-resistant organisms in human populations."



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Big pharma calling journals' shots?

14 October 2006
NewScientist.com news service


MONEY talks, and the drug industry's dollar talks loud and clear through the pages of leading medical journals. That's the conclusion of Peter Gøtzsche and his team at the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Copenhagen, Denmark, who compared reviews of drug studies funded by pharmaceutical companies with similar reviews done without industry support.

The Danish team was looking for bias in meta-analyses, which combine results from multiple drug studies to establish the effectiveness of an experimental drug compared with an established treatment. To ensure a fair comparison, they matched studies that were published within two years of one another and that addressed the same drugs and diseases. "That has not been done before," Gøtzsche says.

Studies conducted without drug industry funding reached similar conclusions to the systematic reviews held in the Cochrane online database, recognised as the gold standard for such analyses. Studies backed by drug companies, however, tended to recommend the experimental drug without reservation, even though the estimated effect of the treatment was similar, on average, to that reported in the Cochrane reviews (BMJ, DOI: 10.1136/bmj.38973.444699.0B).

Gøtzsche says that some industry-funded reviews were also biased in their methods, as they considered only studies held in the company's own database. He says he would now ignore any meta-analyses funded by drug companies.

From issue 2573 of New Scientist magazine, 14 October 2006, page 6



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Mystery killer is wiping out the flamingo

Sunday October 15, 2006
The Observer

One of the natural world's most breathtaking sights - the pink and crimson clouds of flamingos that flock over East Africa - is under threat.

Scientists are baffled by the death of thousands of the birds along the Rift Valley lakes of Kenya and Tanzania. Possible causes include avian cholera, botulism, metal pollution, pesticides or poisonous bacteria.

Fears for the future of the lesser flamingo - Phoeniconaias minor - have also been raised by plans to pipe water from Lake Natron. 'This could have quite a disastrous effect on water levels, which are critical for successful breeding,' ornithologist Neil Baker, head of the Tanzania Bird Atlas project, said in the journal Science.

The lakes are crucial to the birds' breeding success because flamingos feed off the blooms of cyanobacteria that thrive there. In addition, the caustic waters provide protection for their chicks from predators.

Mass deaths used to occur sporadically, but are growing more frequent.




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Science Fiction?

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Spooky steps to a quantum network

Zeeya Merali
NewScientist.com news service
07 October 2006


EVEN if quantum computers can be made to work, there will still be two big obstacles preventing quantum networks becoming a reality. First, quantum bits, or qubits, stored in matter will have to be transferred to photons to be transmitted over long distances. Secondly, errors that creep in during transmission have to be corrected. Two unrelated studies have now shown how to clear these hurdles.

Both studies use quantum entanglement, a spooky property that links particles however far apart they are. Measuring a quantum property on one particle immediately affects the other, and this effect can be used to "teleport" information between pairs of entangled particles.
To make quantum networks possible, qubits need to be held in atoms or ions, processed, and then transformed into qubits of light for transmission between computers, says Todd Brun of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. One way to do this, he says, is to teleport the state between a photon and an atom.

Until now, quantum teleportation has only been done between similar objects - from light to light or matter to matter - but Eugene Polzik at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and his colleagues have taken the first steps towards doing what Brun suggests. They entangled photons with caesium atoms, transmitted the light and then teleported properties of the photons on to equivalent properties in the caesium atoms (Nature, vol 443, p 557). The information only travelled half a metre, but that distance can be increased, Polzik says. "Potentially, the only limit is how far light can travel without the signal becoming degraded," he says.

That raises the second problem: "Quantum states are fragile and easily get distorted during transmission," Polzik says. Quantum systems are prone to two types of errors: qubits can flip between values of 0 and 1, or they can change phase. Trying to figure out which kind of error has occurred is difficult, because of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. "When you try to measure one type of error you can end up creating the other type of error," says Brun. "You do more harm than good."

Now Brun's team has devised a way out. The solution is to first create several entangled pairs of particles and share them between the transmitter and receiver before any information is sent. The transmitter then sends its entangled particles along with the quantum information. The team has shown, in theory, that when the receiver combines these particles with its entangled twins, it can detect both types of quantum error (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1131563).

Polzik is impressed. "Quantum teleportation between light and matter can be dramatically enhanced with the use of such efficient quantum error correction codes," he says.

From issue 2572 of New Scientist magazine, 07 October 2006, page 12



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Scientists look to place a pro-science president

From New Scientist Print Edition
06 October 2006

Frustrated by their government's position on the environment, climate change and stem cell research, a group of US scientists have decided to take matters into their own hands and actively promote the election of a president in 2008 who is more receptive to science.
Scientists and Engineers for America plunged into politics last week with the aim of campaigning for particular candidates, starting with the 2006 mid-term elections. SEA says that "scientists and engineers have a right, indeed an obligation, to enter the political debate when the nation's leaders systematically ignore scientific evidence and analysis."

SEA's main targets will be the Bush administration and the Republican leadership, says executive director Mike Brown. "[They] are the source of a lot of the problems we've identified."

So far, the pitch has struck a responsive chord. Within days of the group being announced on27 September, nearly 2500 people had signed up as members. SEA's advisory board includes two of Bill Clinton's former science advisers - John Gibbons and Neal Lane - and eight Nobel laureates.

From issue 2572 of New Scientist magazine, 06 October 2006, page 6



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Mind fiction: Why your brain tells tall tales - The Unreliable Witness

Helen Phillips
NewScientist.com news service
07 October 2006


Our tendency to confabulate - to believe a fictitious story or memory - is a serious concern when it comes to trusting an eyewitness.

How easily do our made-up stories become false memories? Maria Zaragoza of Kent State University in Ohio showed people an event on video and then asked them leading questions. When they did not have an answer - because the information just wasn't on the tape - she encouraged them to make one up. People are very uncomfortable doing this, she says. They say they don't know, and are just making up an answer, but a week later, more than half of the subjects report their false statements as true events.

Another experiment reveals that children behave in the same way in a real eyewitness situation. When asked to report how a maintenance man they had seen in a waiting room had broken something that he had not in fact touched, they said he didn't break it, or that they didn't see. They were then asked to make something up. A week later, many of the children believed their lies and would now willingly confabulate about the false situation. As with the adults, the effect was strongest when the questioner gave positive feedback, telling the person that their made-up answer was correct.

Zaragoza says these findings have worrying implications for the way forensic interviews are conducted, and particularly for the credibility of forced confessions.

Another controversial forensic technique is hypnosis. Its reliability was tested experimentally in the 1980s by psychologist Jane Dywan of Brock University in Ontario, Canada, at a time when hypnosis was increasingly being used, with little opposition, to "refresh" eyewitness memory. She showed people pictures and then tested their recall over the following days. After a week, she hypnotised the same people and asked them again what they could remember. They all "recalled" more, but almost all the newly volunteered information was wrong.

Dywan says that hypnosis increases the focus of our attention and so increases the vividness and the ease with which information comes to mind. This may give us the sense of confident familiarity for false memories that we would normally only get with true ones. Hypnosis seems to interfere with our ability to judge what is real and what is not. Combine this confidence with increased recall, and you have set up a very dangerous situation, she says.
One of the last times I saw my grandmother in her nursing home she chatted cheerfully about her son, who was away studying at university. She spoke with complete conviction and considerable pride, despite seeming also to recognise that her only son - my father - sitting right beside me, was not far off retirement age. The impossibility of her tale caused her no apparent distress or confusion. Her story was lucid and complex. It was as though a perfectly plausible anecdote had been plucked from several decades earlier and woven into the void of her recent memory.

Many older people gradually develop amnesia about recent happenings while retaining a wealth of detail from their younger days. They may make up stories to cover their embarrassment about the blanks, and generally they know their memory is foggy. The kind of storytelling my grandmother did after a series of strokes is a little different. Neurologists call it confabulation. It isn't fibbing, as there is no intent to deceive and people seem to believe what they are saying. Until fairly recently it was seen simply as a neurological deficiency - a sign of something gone wrong. Now, however, it has become apparent that healthy people confabulate too.

Confabulation is clearly far more than a result of a deficit in our memory, says William Hirstein, a neurologist and philosopher at Elmhurst College in Chicago and author of a book on the subject entitled Brain Fiction (MIT Press, 2005). Children and many adults confabulate when pressed to talk about something they have no knowledge of, and people do it during and after hypnosis. This raises doubts about the accuracy of witness testimony (see "The unreliable witness"). In fact, we may all confabulate routinely as we try to rationalise decisions or justify opinions. Why do you love me? Why did you buy that outfit? Why did you choose that career? At the extreme, some experts argue that we can never be sure about what is actually real and so must confabulate all the time to try to make sense of the world around us.

Confabulation was first mentioned in the medical literature in the late 1880s, applied to patients of the Russian psychiatrist Sergei Korsakoff. He described a distinctive type of memory deficit in people who had abused alcohol for many years. These people had no recollection of recent events, yet filled in the blanks spontaneously with sometimes fantastical and impossible stories.

Neurologist Oliver Sacks of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York wrote about a man with Korsakoff's syndrome in his 1985 book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Mr Thompson had no memory from moment to moment about where he was or why, or to whom he was speaking, but would invent elaborate explanations for the situations he found himself in. If someone entered the room, he might greet them as a customer of the shop he used to own. A doctor wearing a white coat might become the local butcher. To Mr Thompson, these fictions seemed plausible and he never seemed to notice that they kept changing. He behaved as though his improvised world was a perfectly normal and stable place.

Also sharing this penchant for storytelling are some people who have suffered an aneurysm or rupture of the anterior communicating artery, a blood vessel in the brain that carries blood to frontal lobe regions. These people also have profound amnesia, yet seem unaware they have a problem and confabulate to cover the gaps. The same thing can happen in people with Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia, and after parts of the brain are damaged in a stroke.

Armin Schnider, a neurologist from the Cantonal University Hospital in Geneva, Switzerland, says that the vast majority of confabulations he has heard from his patients over the years relate directly to their earlier lives. One of his patients, a retired dentist, worried while in hospital that he was keeping his patients waiting. Another, an elderly woman, talked regularly about her baby in the present tense. Most of these patients had damage to the temporal lobes of the brain, particularly the memory regions of the hippocampus, so it seemed likely that they had somehow lost the ability to make new memories and were retrieving old ones instead. The intriguing thing was that they didn't realise these memories were old - they seemed convinced by their stories, and sometimes even acted on them. So Schnider decided to study their memory in more detail.

He found that his patients certainly had poor recall. If asked to learn a list of words, half an hour later they would be unable to name any of them. But was the problem to do with making new memories or accessing them later? To find out, he showed each person a series of pictures and asked them to point out any that appeared twice. Some confabulating patients and all amnesiac non-confabulators failed the task, unable to learn new information as the images flashed past. Often, though, even profound confabulators could do the task well.
Reality check

The most revealing thing about the experiment emerged when Schnider repeated it an hour later with the same images presented in a different order and with different ones repeated. The subjects were asked only to report repeats in this particular viewing, forgetting the earlier run - again, normally a very easy task. The scores of amnesiac non-confabulators were identical to the first session, but confabulators all performed terribly this second time around. Often they said they had seen a picture earlier in the run, when actually it was one they had seen an hour before. So the problem for people who confabulate is not necessarily that they can't make new memories, but that they confuse memory and present reality. "They seem unable to suppress memories irrelevant to ongoing reality," says Schnider.

He believes that we must all have a pre-conscious brain mechanism that distinguishes between current reality and fantasy, or a memory that is no longer relevant. "The brain decides long before the thought becomes conscious," he says. His recent recordings using scalp electrodes show that when people see the pictures in a second run, yet correctly suppress memories irrelevant to this test, they show a characteristic pattern of brain activity after 0.2 to 0.3 seconds, whereas it takes twice that time for people to become consciously aware of the judgement. The decision process happens subconsciously, too early for awareness. Our brain sorts fact from fiction well before we know our own thoughts, he concludes.

So confabulation can result from an inability to recognise whether or not memories are relevant, real and current. But that's not the only time people make up stories, says Hirstein. He has found that those with delusions or false beliefs about their illnesses are among the most common confabulators. He thinks these cases reveal how we build up and interpret knowledge about ourselves and other people.

It is surprisingly common for stroke patients with paralysed limbs or even blindness to deny they have anything wrong with them, even if only for a couple of days after the event. They often make up elaborate tales to explain away their problems. One of Hirstein's patients, for example, had a paralysed arm, but believed it was normal, telling him that the dead arm lying in the bed beside her was not in fact her own. When he pointed out her wedding ring, she said with horror that someone had taken it. When asked to prove her arm was fine, by moving it, she made up an excuse about her arthritis being painful. It seems amazing that she could believe such an impossible story. Yet when Vilayanur Ramachandran of the University of California, San Diego, offered cash to patients with this kind of delusion, promising higher rewards for tasks they couldn't possibly do - such as clapping or changing a light bulb - and lower rewards for tasks they could, they would always attempt the high pay-off task, as if they genuinely had no idea they would fail.

One rare condition can make people confabulate even more elaborate tales. Capgras's syndrome sometimes affects people after a stroke, and can leave them believing that their loved ones have been substituted by identical-looking impostors, so they make up stories of alien abduction and conspiracy in an attempt to explain this crazy situation. In similarly strange conditions people may lose the ability to recognise themselves in the mirror, or may even believe they or another person are dead, despite all evidence to the contrary. In each instance, the affected person confabulates to explain the weirdness, oblivious to the absurdity.

What all these conditions have in common is an apparent discrepancy between the patient's internal knowledge or feelings and the external information they are getting from what they see. In all these cases "confabulation is a knowledge problem", says Hirstein. Whether it is a lost memory, emotional response or body image, if the knowledge isn't there, something fills the gap.

Helping to plug that gap may well be a part of the brain called the orbitofrontal cortex, which lies in the frontal lobes behind the eye sockets. The OFC is best known as part of the brain's reward system, which guides us to do pleasurable things or seek what we need, but Hirstein and Schnider suggest that the system has an even more basic role. It and other frontal brain regions are busy monitoring all the information generated by our senses, memory and imagination, suppressing what is not needed and sorting out what is real and relevant. According to Morten Kringelbach, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford who studies pleasure, reward and the role of the OFC, this tracking of ongoing reality allows us to rate everything subjectively to help us work out our priorities and preferences.

People who confabulate may have damage to parts of the OFC itself that means it doesn't receive all the information, or perhaps doesn't rate that information properly. Or they may have damage to connected parts of the brain, such as memory regions, which means the OFC doesn't receive sufficient information on which to work. Either way, when the information the OFC receives is incomplete or contradictory, it may work overtime to try and make things fit. The result could well be fiction.

Kringelbach goes even further. He suspects that confabulation is not just something people do when the system goes wrong. We may all do it routinely. Children need little encouragement to make up stories when asked to talk about something they know little about. Adults, too, can be persuaded to confabulate, as Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and his colleague Richard Nisbett have shown. They laid out a display of four identical items of clothing and asked people to pick which they thought was the best quality. It is known that people tend to subconsciously prefer the rightmost object in a sequence if given no other choice criteria, and sure enough about four out of five participants did favour the garment on the right. Yet when asked why they made the choice they did, nobody gave position as a reason. It was always about the fineness of the weave, richer colour or superior texture. This suggests that while we may make our decisions subconsciously, we rationalise them in our consciousness, and the way we do so may be pure fiction, or confabulation.

More recent experiments by philosopher Lars Hall of Lund University in Sweden develop this idea further. People were shown pairs of cards with pictures of faces on them and asked to choose the most attractive. Unbeknown to the subject, the person showing the cards was a magician and routinely swapped the chosen card for the rejected one. The subject was then asked why they picked this face. Often the swap went completely unnoticed, and the subjects came up with elaborate explanations about hair colour, the look of the eyes or the assumed personality of the substituted face. Clearly people routinely confabulate under conditions where they cannot know why they made a particular choice. Might confabulation be as routine in justifying our everyday choices?
Just an illusion

There is certainly plenty of evidence that much of what we do is the result of unconscious brain processing, and that our consciousness seems to be interpreting what has happened, rather than driving it. For example, experiments in 1985 by Benjamin Libet of the University of California in San Francisco suggested that a signal to move a finger appears in the brain several hundred milliseconds before someone consciously decides to move that finger. The idea that we have conscious free will may be an illusion, at least some of the time.

Even when we think we are making rational choices and decisions, this may be illusory too. The intriguing possibility is that we simply do not have access to all of the unconscious information on which we base our decisions, so we create fictions upon which to rationalise them, says Kringelbach. That may well be a good thing, he adds. If we were aware of how we made every choice we would never get anything done - we cannot hold that much information in our consciousness. Wilson backs up this idea with some numbers: he says our senses may take in more than 11 million pieces of information each second, whereas even the most liberal estimates suggest that we are conscious of just 40 of these.

Nevertheless it is an unsettling thought that perhaps all our conscious mind ever does is dream up stories in an attempt to make sense of our world. "The possibility is left open that in the most extreme case all of the people may confabulate all of the time," says Hall.

From issue 2572 of New Scientist magazine, 07 October 2006, page 32-36



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Planet Chaos

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Cosmic rays before seven, clouds by eleven

Nigel Calder
New Scientist Print Edition
10 October 2006


For about a decade now, cosmic rays have been thought to affect the formation of clouds, but no one had come up with any evidence for an exact mechanism. Now, a Danish experiment has shown that subatomic debris created when these high-energy particles collide with the atmosphere could be behind some of our cloud cover.
Henrik Svensmark of the Danish National Space Center in Copenhangen first noticed a connection between cosmic-ray intensity and cloudiness in the mid-1990s. He found that when the sun's activity was at its lowest, during which time about 25 per cent more cosmic rays reach Earth, the planet was 3 per cent cloudier than during solar maxima. The link was greeted with scepticism, but evidence continued to mount (New Scientist, 28 January, p 17).

Svensmark's team decided to try and nail the mechanism behind this link. They built a transparent 7-cubic-metre Mylar box, which they then flushed continuously with purified air. The concentrations of sulphur dioxide, ozone and water vapour were controlled to mimic conditions in the atmosphere. The idea was to find out what happens when natural muons and antimuons interact with this mixture. These charged particles are formed when cosmic rays hit the upper atmosphere.

The researchers found that when the muons knocked electrons off the molecules in the box, in the presence of the ozone, sulphur dioxide and water, plus artificial ultraviolet light, vast numbers of fine droplets of sulphuric acid appeared. These fine aerosols are the building blocks of larger aerosols - the nuclei around which water vapour can condense and form clouds.

To check that the electrons freed by the muons were doing this, the team bombarded the box with gamma rays to produce more free electrons, and found that the production of fine aerosols increased. Conversely, when they applied a strong electric field across the box to sweep away the free electrons, the level of aerosols dropped. The researchers believe this shows the electrons were aiding the formation of fine aerosols. "The catalytic behaviour of the electrons was a big surprise," says Svensmark. The work will be published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A.

A similar but more elaborate experiment named CLOUD is being set up at the CERN particle physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland. Starting this month, it will use a beam of accelerated particles rather than muon and gamma-ray sources to replicate the Copenhagen box. Later, it will explore the action of cosmic rays at all altitudes in the atmosphere.

Robert Bingham of the UK's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, who has been involved with the CLOUD project, does not consider the Danish experiment conclusive. "This means that more experiments under controlled conditions are badly needed."

From issue 2572 of New Scientist magazine, 10 October 2006, page 13



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Cooling oceans buck global trend

Michael Reilly
NewScientist.com news service
07 October 2006

THE upper layers of Earth's oceans have cooled significantly over the past two years, even though the planet as a whole is warming up. While this may just be part of the natural variation of oceans, climatologists are still confounded by the massive, unaccountable loss of heat.
Earth's oceans can hold 1000 times as much heat as the atmosphere, and sea temperatures have climbed almost without pause over the past 50 years. This agrees with climate models that show that the oceans mitigate atmospheric warming by absorbing much of the heat.

Now measurements by John Lyman of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle, Washington, and colleagues have put a wrinkle in that trend. The researchers used data from a network of 3000 free-floating buoys, called ARGO, which monitors the oceans worldwide. They found that the upper 750 metres of ocean lost enough energy between 2003 and 2005 to cause an overall drop in water temperature of about 0.02 °C (Geophysical Research Letters, vol 33, p L18604).

That may not sound like much, but trying to account for the missing energy is proving to be an enormous task, says team member Josh Willis of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "It's enough to melt all of the sea ice in the world many times over," he says. "We know it's not [doing] that."

The researchers speculate that the missing heat is being radiated back into space, possibly because of aerosols injected into the atmosphere by volcanic eruptions or because of annual variations in cloud cover. No matter what the cause, though, over the long term we're still very much in hot water. "The 50-year trend is still much warmer than this small bit of cooling," says Willis.

Indeed, blips in temperature are to be expected and should be studied, says Tim Barnett at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. "When you're in the global warming business, the first thing you want to know is 'what's the natural variability?'," he says. That's because we need to be able to distinguish what's natural from what's caused by humans. "We're used to these bumps and wiggles in the ocean and atmosphere."

A similar cooling of oceans occurred between 1980 and 1983, and such aberrations are normally chalked up to natural changes in the ocean's behaviour. The researchers believe their discovery is just the first step in a whole new level of understanding of how the seas interact with global climate. "By measuring temperature, and soon salinity through ARGO, we'll really be able to nail down a lot of unanswered questions about climate," says Willis.

From issue 2572 of New Scientist magazine, 07 October 2006, page 14



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World slips further into the 'eco-red'

NewScientist.com news service
14 October 2006


WE ARE consuming the Earth's resources faster than they can be replenished, at least according to US think tank Global Footprint Network. It declared 9 October "overshoot day" - the point in each year when our ecological allowance for that year is spent.
GFN's eco-audits began in 1961, and overshoot day has fallen ever earlier since its first occurrence, on 19 December 1987. Now it will take 15 months for the world to regenerate what we use in 2006.

"Humanity is living off its ecological credit card and can only do this by liquidating the planet's natural resources," says Mathis Wackernagel, GFN's executive director. "While this can be done for a short while, overshoot ultimately leads to the depletion of resources such as the forests, oceans and agricultural land upon which our economy depends."

But not everyone is pessimistic. The European Centre for International Political Economy thinks that the GFN analyses dwell on the global picture but ignore the potential for solutions. For example, says CIPE director Julian Morris, forests in richer countries tend to be managed sustainably. "By being totally negative, [GFN] detracts from solutions that are out there."

From issue 2573 of New Scientist magazine, 14 October 2006, page 7



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