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Publication! 'The Wave' finally in book form!
The
Wave: 4 Volume Set
Volume 2
by
Laura Knight-Jadczyk
With a new
introduction by the author and never before published, UNEDITED sessions
and extensive previously unpublished details, at long last, Laura Knight-Jadczyk's
vastly popular series The Wave is available as a Deluxe four
book set. Each of the four volumes include all of the original illustrations
and many NEW illustrations with each copy comprising approximately 300
pages.
The Wave
is an exquisitely written first-person account of Laura's initiation at
the hands of the Cassiopaeans and demonstrates the unique nature of the
Cassiopaean Experiment.
Order
Volumes 1 and 2 now!
|
Lynda
Unger, left, supports the war; Cindy Sheehan doesn't. (Photo:
CBS) |
On the home front of a nation at war, one of the toughest jobs in
the military is delivering the worst of news.
"Three Army officers, and I knew the only reason they would
be there was to tell me that Casey was dead," says Cindy Sheehan.
"And when I walked in and saw the soldiers standing there
I just started saying, 'No, no, no, no,'" says Lynda Unger.
Losing a child in combat, Lynda Unger and
Cindy Sheehan are now Gold Star Mothers, but they are divided
by the same thing that brings them together: the war that took their
sons' lives.
"Iraq was never going to attack us," says Sheehan.
"If we just sit back and don't do anything,
they're going to overrun us," says Unger.
As CBS News Correspondent John Blackstone reports, Unger's son
Daniel, 19, was killed by shrapnel in Iraq. But it was his own small
hometown, Exeter, Calif., that his mother believes he was defending.
"If we'd waited any longer, I would be wearing
a burka," says Unger.
In Vacaville, Calif., Cindy Sheehan mourns her son Casey, who was
24 when he was killed in an ambush in Sadr City.
"He didn't agree with the war," says Sheehan. "He
didn't think that Iraq was an imminent threat to the United States,
but he wanted to go because he said that if he didn't, his buddies
needed him," says Sheehan.
Casey's death moved his mother to become politically active, speaking
out against the war in public forums.
"Not only the Sheehan family, but the whole
country and world has been betrayed by this war and the lies and
the rush to a war that should never have happened," says Sheehan.
"I still don't know who's connected to who
and all this stuff," says Unger. "I don't care. I really
don't care.
"We were attacked, we need to defend. If
going to Iraq is the way to do it, we got Saddam Hussein."
Unger's support for the war is bolstered by her
strong fundamentalist Christian faith and an unshakeable trust in
the Bible.
"I don't believe God
makes mistakes," says Unger.
She has told the story of Daniel's death in church
pamphlets as an example of Christian sacrifice and as a call to
others to be born again.
"The fact that he died doesn't mean he stops being great,"
says Unger.
Sheehan has been showing others the human cost of war through a
mother's grief.
"This is his teddy bear. He ate all the fuzz off of it when
he was a baby but he wouldn't go to bed without it," Sheehan
tells an audience at a town meeting.
The gold star designates those who have
given something more precious than their own lives - they have given
the lives of their children.
|
Get Faith - Switch Off Your
Mind
|
Excerpted from 'The Wave'
by Laura-Knight-Jadczyk |
"As the preacher, I'm working with the crowd, watching
the crowd, trying to bring them to that high point at a certain
time in the evening. I let everything build up to that moment
when they're all in ecstasy. The crowd builds up and you have
to watch that you don't stop it. You start off saying you've heard
that tonight's going to be a great night; then you begin the whole
pitch and keep it rolling."
For Marjoe, who had seen it a million times, the divine moment
of religious ecstasy had no mystical quality at all. It was a
simple matter of group frenzy that had its counterpart in every
crowd.
"It's the same as a rock-and-roll concert. You have an opening
number with a strong entrance; then you go through a lot of the
old standards, building up to your hit song at the end."
The hit song, however, was spiritual rebirth, the product of
a time-tested recipe for evangelical religion to which the preacher
and every member of the audience contribute some small but active
ingredient. Afterwards, according to Marjoe, the only fitting
encore to the overwhelming moment of being saved is a personal
demonstration of the power of that newfound faith. This is the
motivating factor that prompts speaking in tongues, also known
as the 'receiving of the holy ghost.' As Marjoe explained it,
this well- known evangelical tradition required even greater participation
on the part of the tongues recipient and the entire audience.
"After you've been saved," Marjoe continued, "the
next step is what they call 'the infilling of the Holy Spirit.'
They say to the new convert, 'Well, now you're saved, but you've
got to get the Holy Ghost.' So you come back to get the tongues
experience. Some people will get it the same night; others will
go for weeks or years before they can speak in tongues. You hear
it, you hear everyone at night talking in it in the church, and
they're all saying, 'We love you and we hope you're going to get
it by tonight.' Then one night you go down there and they all
try to get you to get it, and you go into very much of a trance
- not quite a frenzy, but it is an incredible experience.
"During that moment the person forgets all about his problems.
He is surrounded by people whom he trusts and they're all saying,
'We love you. It's okay. You're accepted in Christ. We're with
you, let it go, relax.' And sooner or later, he starts to speak
it out and go dut-dut-dut. Then everyone goes, 'That's it! You've
got it!' and the button is pushed and he will in fact start to
speak in tongues and just take off: dhandayelomosatayleesaso...
and on and on."
Marjoe paused. We were dumbfounded by his demonstration, although
he hadn't gone into the jerking, trance-like ecstasy that is commonly
associated with the tongues moment. ...Yet even in this restrained
demonstration, he seemed almost uncannily to be triggering some
innate releasing or babbling mechanism. We asked him how he brought
it about.
"You'll never get it with that attitude," he joked.
Then he went on to explain the true nature of the experience.
"Tongues is something you learn, " he emphasized. "It
is a releasing that you teach yourself. You are told by your peers,
the church and the Bible - if you accept it literally - that the
Holy Ghost spake in another tongue; and you become convinced that
it is the ultimate expression of the spirit flowing through you.
The first time maybe you'll just go dut-dut-dut-dut and that's
about all that will get out. Then you'll hear other people and
the next night you may go dut-dut-dut-UM-dut-DEET-dut-dut and
it gets a little better. The next thing you know, it's elahandosatelayeekcondelemosandreyaseya...
and it's a new language you've got down."
Except that, according to Marjoe, it's not a real language at
all. Contrary to most religious understanding, speaking in tongues
is by no means passive spiritual possession. It must be actively
acquired and practiced. Although the "gift" of tongues
is a product of human and not supernatural origin, Marjoe displayed
tremendous respect for the experience as an expression of spirituality
and fellowship.
"I really don't put it down," he said. "I never
have. It's just that I analyze it and look at it from a very rational
point of view. I don't see it as coming from God and say that
at a certain point the Holy Spirit zaps you with a super whammy
on the head and you've 'gone for tongues' and there it is. Tongues
is a process that people build up to. Then, as you start to do
something, just as when you practice the scales on the piano,
you get better at it."
During his years on the Bible belt circuit, Marjoe came to see
the evangelical experience as a form of popular entertainment,
a kind of participatory divine theater that provided its audiences
with profound emotional rewards.
"The people out there don't see it as entertainment,"
he confessed, "although that is in fact the way it is. Those
people don't go to movies, they don't go to bars and drink, they
don't go to rock-and-roll concerts - but everyone has to have
an emotional release. So they go to revivals and they dance around
and talk in tongues. It's socially approved and that is their
escape.
"It was my duty to give them the best show possible,"
he said. "Say you've got a timid little preacher in North
Carolina or somewhere. He'll bring in visiting evangelists to
keep his church going. We'd come in and hit the crowd up and we
were superstars. It's the charisma of the evangelist that the
audience believes in and comes to see.
"When I was traveling, I'd see someone who wanted to get
saved in one of my meetings, and he was so open and bubbly in
his desire to get the Holy Ghost. It was wonderful and very fresh.
But four years later I'd return and that person might be a hard-nosed
intolerant Christian because he was better than anyone who drinks
and better than the world because he had Christ. That's when the
danger comes in. People want an experience. They want to feel
good and their lives can be helped by it. But then as you start
moving into the operation of the thing, you get into controlling
people and power and money. "Moon's [Unification Church]
is doing the same thing I do, only he's taken it one step further.
He's suggesting to people that he IS the Messiah. In my religion,
the old-time religion, it's total blasphemy to suggest that. Moon
has gone too far, but that's a very heavy number on people, because
everyone wants to meet a Messiah."
Marjoe was quick to point out that Moon's preaching powers, like
his own, were by no means divine or even innate. Marjoe acknowledged
that his power over an audience derived primarily from the skills
he perfected as a child, techniques of rhetoric and public speaking
that have passed down from the Greeks.
"It's the same whether you're a preacher, a lawyer or a
salesman," he told us. "You start off with a person's
thought processes and then gradually sway him around to another
way of thinking in a very short time."
Many of the techniques he commanded were simple and age-old,
but so effective that they proved equally powerful even when an
audience had been explicitly forewarned of their use. Toward the
end of our conversation, Marjoe told us a story that revealed
the fineness of his skills. In contrast to the massive physical
experiences, intense group rituals and intimate personal crises
that [are popular in the New Age crowd], Marjoe demonstrated how
words alone, artfully manipulated, may be used to influence groups
and individuals, even to the point of evoking the overwhelming
emotional response of being "saved."
"I lecture in about twenty colleges a year," he began,
"and I do a faith- healing demonstration - but I always make
them ask for it. I tell them that I don't believe in it, that
I use a lot of tricks; and the title of the lecture is 'Rhetoric
and Charisma,' so I've already told them how large masses are
manipulated by a charismatic figure. I've given them the whole
rap explaining how it's done, but they still want to see it. So
I throw it all right back at them. I say, 'No, you don't really
want to see it.' And they say, 'Oh, yes. We do. We do!' And I
say, 'But you don't believe in it anyway, so I can't do it.' And
they say, 'We believe. We believe!' So after about twenty minutes
of this I ask for a volunteer, and I have a girl come up and I
say, 'So you want to feel better?' You're just up here for a good
time and you want to impress all these people and you want to
make an ass out of me and an ass out of this whole thing, so why
don't you go back and sit down?' I really get hard on her, and
she says, 'No, no, I believe!' And I keep going back and forth
until she's almost in tears. And then, even though this is in
a college crowd and I'm only doing it as a joke, I just say my
same old line, In the name of Jesus! And touch her on the head,
and WHAM! They fall down flat every time!”
[Conway, Flo, Siegelman, Jim. 1978. Snapping: America’s
Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change. Lippincott, Williams and
Wilkins.]
So the programming begins. During the early contacts, a potential
convert can be manipulated with absolute precision by the rhetorical
ploys described by Marjoe. Conversations using similar Neuro Linguistic
Programming techniques also build rapport, as does the use of confrontation
and direct emotional assault.
Once the individual has been drawn into the teaching, they are
bombarded with ideas and doctrines that they cannot fit together
while at the same time being led through ceremonies or rituals that
induce intense emotional highs and peak experiences.
They are then subjected to more personal encounters in which these
experiences are given the prescribed interpretation that is being
inculcated. During this period, they are usually involved in intensive
repetitive things, which can be as simple as the "order of
worship" in an ordinary church. There can be orders to "stand
up, sit down, kneel, pray, sing, stand up, sit down, sing, pray"
and so on. More intense formats include chanting and meditation
that can induce physical and psychic highs.
The end result is, of course, that all of this STOPS THE MIND! And
when that happens, the individual is completely open to suggestion
and command.
The convert is instructed at this time to "refrain from doubt,"
and "do not question the wisdom of the teaching." The
oldest version of this mind program is, of course, what we consider
to be the standard religious teachings. But we can certainly see
from all of the above that they are as much mind control as any
New Age teaching or so-called cult. As a matter of fact, the key
to being a Christian is "the surrender of the intellect, the
emotions, and the will." To whom? Well, it's said that it is
to the "One, True God." But would the "One True God"
really forbid doubt and questioning if there was no doubt or question
that he WAS the "One, True God?"
In the end, however, the result of all of these
programs is the same: under the cumulative pressures of whatever
specific mode of programming is employed, the individual's will
gives way and they slide into a state of mind in which they literally
are no longer capable of thinking for themselves.
This type of comprehensive assault strikes at the very heart of
consciousness by undermining the processes of thinking and reflection
that are crucial to individual awareness and Free Will.
Yet, the converts and adherents of religions and cults or many
"new age teachings," have a different name for what is
happening to them: HAPPINESS! They have found PEACE! In the labor
for the cult, they are in a daily state of spiritual high, an emotional
peak experience that never ends! And, if it does falter for just
a moment or two, the leaders and associates work quickly to bolster
the high - to get them back down to the church for another infusion!
And they go because then they can return to the state of bliss that
is their reward or unquestioning devotion.
Successful self-help therapy, religious or New Age philosophy graduates
often achieve a sustained state of euphoria. Their problems are
solved because - well, because they HAVE no problems! They have
stopped worrying about the things that were bothering them. They
no longer strive to change and grow and learn and do and accomplish.
They are content in their condition of a shutoff mind, their state
of not thinking.
Conway and Siegelman ask:
“What kind of cultural environment breeds this widespread
need to shut off the mind? It could be argued that the need is
universal, that everyone -from Athenians to Sufis to voodoo tribesmen
to modern Americans - must have some periodic release from the
ordeal of being human. In that sense, the rituals and techniques
which throughout history have been used to create peak experiences
and moments of enlightenment may be looked on as vital sources
of rest and relaxation for the mind, momentary breathing spells
that hold great powers of insight, healing and renewal.
But what value can there be in engineering these experiences
to shut down the workings of the mind altogether, to persistently
stunt the processes of thought and leave people numb to their
own feelings and the world around them? Throughout history, this
systematic stilling of human awareness has proved an efficient
method of controlling members of tribes, societies and whole nations
in which little value is placed upon individuality. The state
of mind it produces has a tradition that dates back to the dawn
of civilization.
In the remote bush country of Australia, aboriginal tribes still
engage in rituals perfected more than 16,000 years ago to induce
a state of mind in their adolescents that is surprisingly similar
to the plight of many of society's brightest youth today and people
of all ages.
In recent years, aboriginal Dream Time has been hailed as a state
of profound sophistication in human awareness. Anthropologists
point to the aborigine's physical endurance, spiritual satisfaction
and telepathic powers as marks of advanced evolution in a tribe
that may represent humankind's longest unbroken line of cultural
development. However, they make the error of implying that this
efficient and admittedly remarkable form of social control in
a primitive, unchanging environment holds some promise for the
future of our vastly more complex and fast-changing technological
society.” [Conway and Siegelman, 1978]
We need to make careful note that this mode of consciousness exists
for the very purpose of keeping the aborigine PRIMITIVE and UNCHANGING!
It's no surprise that they still live as they did many thousands
of years ago. That should give us pause!
“In all the world, there is nothing quite so impenetrable
as a human mind snapped shut with bliss. No call to reason, no emotional
appeal can get through its armor of self-proclaimed joy.”
[Ibid.]
It doesn't matter who it is, whether it is a graduate of some group
therapy, a born-again Christian, a meditator, or the follower of
this week's channel o'choice. If you ask a question, the individual
will spin around and around in circles of nonsensical beliefs and
dogma. If you interrupt and re-ask your question, they simply start
right where they left off, or go back to the beginning and start
over again.
Such people are not just simply incapable of carrying
on a conversation they are completely programmed. And they don't
have to be worked on by aliens or secret government mind control
programs to get that way. |
FRITZ STERN,
a refugee from Hitler's Germany and a leading scholar of European
history, startled several of his listeners when he warned in a speech
about the danger posed in this country by the rise of the Christian
right. In his address in November, just after he received a prize
presented by the German foreign minister, he told his audience that
Hitler saw himself as "the instrument of providence" and
fused his "racial dogma with a Germanic Christianity."
"Some people recognized the moral perils
of mixing religion and politics," he said of prewar Germany,
"but many more were seduced by it. It was the pseudo-religious
transfiguration of politics that largely ensured his success, notably
in Protestant areas."
Dr. Stern's speech, given during a ceremony at which he got the
prize from the Leo Baeck Institute, a center focused on German Jewish
history, was certainly provocative. The fascism of Nazi Germany
belongs to a world so horrendous it often seems to defy the possibility
of repetition or analogy. But Dr. Stern, 78, the author of books
like "The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise
of the Germanic Ideology" and university professor emeritus
at Columbia University, has devoted a lifetime to analyzing how
the Nazi barbarity became possible. He stops short of calling the
Christian right fascist but his decision to draw parallels, especially
in the uses of propaganda, was controversial.
"When I saw the speech my eyes lit up," said John R.
MacArthur, whose book "Second Front" examines wartime
propaganda. "The comparison between the
propagandistic manipulation and uses of Christianity, then and now,
is hidden in plain sight. No one will talk about it. No one wants
to look at it."
Dr. Stern was a schoolboy in 1933 when Hitler was appointed the
German chancellor. He ran home from school that January afternoon
clutching a special edition of the newspaper to deliver to his father,
a prominent physician.
"I was young," he said, "but I knew it was very
bad news."
The street fighting in his native Breslau (now Wroclaw in Poland)
between Communists and Nazis, the collapse of German democracy and
the ruthless suppression of all opposition marked his childhood,
and were images and experiences that would propel him forward as
a scholar.
"I saw one of the last public demonstrations against Hitler,"
he said. "Men, women and children walked through the street
and chanted 'Hunger! Hunger! Hunger!' "
His paternal grandparents had converted to Christianity. His parents
were baptized at birth, as were Mr. Stern and his older sister.
But this did not save the Sterns from persecution. Nazi racial laws
still classified them as Jews.
"It was only Nazi anti-Semitism that
made me conscious of my Jewish heritage," he said. "I
had been brought up in a secular Christian fashion, celebrating
Christmas and Easter. My father had to explain it to me."
His schoolmates were swiftly recruited into Hitler youth groups
and he and other Jews were taunted and excluded from some activities.
"Many of my classmates found the organized party experience,
which included a heavy dose of flag waving and talk of national
strength, very exhilarating," said Dr. Stern, who lost an aunt
and an uncle in the Holocaust. "It was something I never forgot."
His family fled to New York in 1938 when he was 12. He eventually
went to Columbia University intending to study medicine. But his
passion for the past, along with questions about what happened to
his homeland, caused him to switch his focus to history. He wanted
to grasp how democracies disintegrate. He wanted to uncover the
warning signs other democracies should heed. He wanted to write
about the seductiveness of authoritarian movements, which he once
described in an essay, "National Socialism as Temptation."
"There was a longing in Europe for fascism before the name
was ever invented," he said. "There was a longing for
a new authoritarianism with some kind of religious orientation and
above all a greater communal belongingness. There are some similarities
in the mood then and the mood now, although also significant differences."
HE warns of the danger in an open society
of "mass manipulation of public opinion, often mixed with mendacity
and forms of intimidation." He is a passionate defender
of liberalism as "manifested in the spirit of the Enlightenment
and the early years of the American republic."
"The radical right and the radical left see liberalism's appeal
to reason and tolerance as the denial of their uniform ideology,"
he said. "Every democracy needs a liberal fundament, a Bill
of Rights enshrined in law and spirit, for this alone gives democracy
the chance for self-correction and reform. Without it, the survival
of democracy is at risk. Every genuine conservative knows this."
Dr. Stern, who has two children from a previous marriage, is married
to Elizabeth Sifton, a book publisher. They live in New York. He
is writing a book called "Five Germanys I Have Known,"
a combination of memoirs and reflections that looks at Weimar, Nazi
Germany, the Federal Republic of Germany, East Germany and unified
Germany. He is widely read in Germany and has won its highest literary
prize.
"The Jews in Central Europe welcomed the
Russian Revolution," he said, "but it ended badly for
them. The tacit alliance between the neo-cons and the Christian
right is less easily understood. I can imagine a similarly disillusioning
outcome." |
The US secretary of state, Colin
Powell, admitted yesterday that the scale of destruction caused
by the tsunami had taken him by surprise, and that the devastation
was worse than anything he had experienced in his career.
Speaking in Banda Aceh after a helicopter had taken him over some
of the most affected areas, Mr Powell said: "I've
been in war and I've been through a number of hurricanes, tornadoes
and other relief operations, but I've never seen anything like this."
The former general's mission to Aceh was designed to give him a
better picture of what is needed to rebuild the province ahead of
today's summit in Jakarta.
"I cannot begin to imagine the horror that went through the
families and all of the people who heard this noise and then had
their lives snuffed out by this wave," Mr Powell told a press
conference in Banda Aceh.
The retiring secretary of state, who also met Indonesian officials
and inspected aid operations at the airport, said it was only by
seeing the devastation that he could appreciate what it must have
been like for those who experienced it.
"I have never seen anything like it in my experience ... and
I have a much better understanding now of what it would take to
complete the recovery effort and to help these people rebuild their
lives and their homes and their businesses," he said. [...]
But multinational aid agencies described Mr Powell's trip as "atrocity
tourism". Several aid agencies were angered because the trip
had clogged up deliveries for almost four hours, preventing the
arrival of all other flights and the departure of numerous aid missions
and evacuations of severely wounded survivors.
"It's unfortunate when a water buffalo causes the airport
to close for hours," said one non-governmental organisation
manager, referring to Tuesday's 16-hour closure when a plane damaged
its undercarriage and ground to a halt on the runway after crashing
into a water buffalo.
"But this caused unnecessary and avoidable delays. It could
have cost lives. I don't think he had to come."
|
LONDON, Jan 5 (Reuters) - The
BBC has postponed the broadcast of a docu-drama about a massive
volcano eruption in Yellowstone National Park to avoid offence following
the tsunami disaster that has ravaged Asia.
Britain's public broadcaster said on Wednesday it would air "Supervolcano"
at a later date, likely this year. It was originally supposed to
be shown in late January.
The two-part programme is one of the most expensive in the BBC's
history, replete with special effects showing the aftermath of the
volcano's eruption leading to climate change and tens of thousands
of deaths in the United States.
"We will show it at a later time," a BBC spokeswoman
said. "I'm sure it will be this year. We just don't feel it's
appropriate to show at this time."
The BBC's decision recalls similar gear-shifting
by Hollywood following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York City
when the release of such films as "Collateral Damage,"
"Sidewalks of New York" and "Heist" were delayed
because of their subject material.
Various television advertisements also have been pulled following
the tsunami.
"Supervolcano" had been touted in December as a linchpin
of the broadcaster's winter schedule -- "Supervolcano is a
true story, it just hasn't happened yet" -- and includes an
accompanying two-part documentary, "The Science Behind Supervolcano,"
on BBC2.
The BBC spokeswoman said the 2.8 million pound ($5.25 million)
production, which is already finished, had five co-producers, including
Discovery and ProSieben.
Yellowstone, site of one of the world's largest active volcanoes,
was shaped in part by a massive eruption some 640,000 years ago
that left a crater 30 miles wide by 45 miles long. The park is in
the western states of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. |
Since the tsunami hit, the mainstream press
and, to a lesser extent, the broadcast and cable network news programs,
have been chockfull of images of the freshly dead. We've seen images
of bodies of children and adults where the water left them; we've
seen them arranged in neat rows; we've seen them bagged and stacked.
Television broadcasts have, in the main, been more suggestive,
less specific, more distant in their images than the print press:
often you knew that lump was a dead body only because a chattering
reporter told you it was. TV executives say that is because their
images come into people's homes where children might come upon them
unawares, so they have to limit the reality on the airwaves. Hardly
anyone believes they have the children in mind when they plan their
programs.
What is perhaps more worthy of note than how many tsunami dead
we've seen, however, is how many other recent dead we have not seen.
The mainstream media showed, for example,
no blood and guts resulting from the 9/11 attacks. Most of
the people murdered that day were pulverized or vaporized, but not
all. Some of the most horrific images were the sidewalk remains
of those who leapt from the World Trade Center's upper stories before
the structures collapsed. The New York Times published a photo of
a man diving, his body almost tranquil in flight, the implications
of the image horrific. But nothing at ground level. None of the
print press and none of the mainstream electronic press published
anything at ground level. You could find those images on some hard-to-find
web sites: skin and heads with insides elsewhere, with bodies looking
like punctured balloons.
Those images showed what every cop and combat soldier knows: violent
death trivializes and shifts to someplace you do not want to go
every single thing you ever thought about life. But the press-individually
or in some collaborative council-decided those images were too much
for you to bear, so (unless you roamed the web) you never saw them.
Likewise the carnage in the Holy Land.
How many reports have you read of Palestinian bombers with explosives
strapped to their bodies, perhaps with added layers of nails to
provide extra shrapnel to maim and mutilate whoever wasn't close
enough to be killed outright? How many reports have you read of
Israeli tanks blowing up inhabited buildings or nervous Israeli
soldiers shooting down ordinary people on their way to work or children
on their way to school? And how many Holy Land images of shattered
bodies, of a hand, a jaw, an emptied skull, of guts draped over
the hood of a car have you seen?
Likewise the carnage suffered by US troops
in Iraq. You've read about the numbers of U.S. dead and mutilated,
and perhaps (if you watch PBS "Newshour") you've seen
head and shoulders studio photographs of the most recently killed
soldiers. But how many images how you seen of American soldiers
dead on the road, their eyes and mouths open, if they still had
eyes and mouths? How many images have you see of the limbs blown
off the thousands of amputees now filling VA hospitals? How many
images have you see of body parts blasted into the roofs and seats
and floors of Humvees they hadn't gotten around to armorplating?
And likewise the far greater carnage suffered
by Iraqi civilians. A study published in the British medical
journal The Lancet put the dead civilians resulting from the American
war of choice in Iraq somewhere around 100,000. Critics say that
is off by at least 100%: the US has killed only 50,000 Iraqi civilians,
they say. The scholars who did The Lancet study say they were conservative
in their numbers, that there are probably far more civilian dead
who remain uncounted because there is no one responsible for counting
them and no one interested in counting them. However you figure
it, there are a huge number of Iraqis who died because of American
violence, and a lot of Iraqis who died because of insurgent violence.
For every dead Iraqi, how many mutilated
Iraqis are there? Two? Five? Ten? Twenty?
Where are their pictures, those dead and mutilated Iraqis? How
many images have you seen of Iraqi children blown to dripping pieces
of flesh, puddles of blood, scattered white chunks of bone? How
many images have you seen of Iraqis who have lost hands, feet, eyes,
jaws when bombs when off, when machine guns fired, when mortars
fell, when vehicles blew up?
You've gotten words about those American and Iraqi deaths and mutilations,
but precious few images. The images are parked in the periphery
of the information spectrum, on web sites hardly anyone visits.
Time doesn't publish them, and neither does Newsweek, The New York
Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post or the Buffalo News.
You won't see them on CBS, ABC, NBC, PBS, or CNN.
Why? Because the daily press and evening news are
so attuned to our sensitivity or sensibility they just don't want
to offend us? Because their editors are old and literary enough
to be crippled by T.S. Eliot's fey line, "Humankind cannot
stand very much reality?" Or because they just don't want us
to know what the words they hurl at us are really about?
I'll tell you how powerful pictures are in a world
of words. Three photographs changed American opinion about the Vietnam
war: Eddie Adams's photograph of Lt. Col. Nguyen Ngoc Loan blowing
the brains out of a handcuffed prisoner on a Saigon street, Nick
Ut's photograph of Kim Phuc Phan Thi running naked down a Vietnamese
road after her skin had been burnt off by napalm, and Ronald Haeberle's
photographs of the slaughter at My Lai. People in the U.S. saw those
images and they said, "What the fuck are we doing there? Who
are we when we can be doing things like that?" Those images
trumped the politicians' words.
Think about what the Abu Ghraib jpgs did to American opinion about
the war in Iraq. They're clumsy, low-res, amateur tourist photographs
of ordinary folks having a little fun torturing some other folks
nobody (they'd been told) cares about. And those low-res jpgs blew
the cover off what the U.S. was really doing to Iraqis, what the
U.S. government really thought about Iraqis. After those photos
became commonplace, who-other than those idiots and ideologues who
have shut off the upper stories of their brains-can look you in
the eye and say, "We are in Iraq to make life better for Iraqis?"
But it is less and less likely that we'll have an Eddie Adams or
Nick Ut or Ron Haeberle showing us what we need to see to understand
what we're really doing in Iraq. During the US invasion of Iraq,
almost all press photographers were imbedded, dependent on U.S.
military support for their survival. (Unembedded press sometimes
saw more than embedded press, but they had a far higher death rate.)
Even with all the fancy technology that permitted a photographer
on the ground to upload images directly to a satellite, few images
that would piss off anyone in power ever made it off the ground,
and the nearly all of the few that did were killed by editors stateside.
Nowadays, photographers can't go anywhere without a platoon of soldiers
to protect them: they can't roam the countryside, they can't roam
the streets of Baghdad or any other major Iraqi city. They don't
see very much and they are very careful about what they photograph,
and their editors back home are even more careful about which of
their images you and I get to see.
Which is why the heartbreaking images of all those innocent Pacific
tsunami dead are doubly important.
First, those images help us understand the general and specific
magnitude of disaster caused by the tsunami. The huge outpouring
of aid would not have happened without those images.
Second, those images of tsunami death, destruction
and anguish remind us of how little we are permitted to see of the
death, destruction and anguish going on every day in the Holy Land
and in Iraq and all the other places where raw power and greed have
displaced decency and honor and human concern, all those places
where weapons and violence substitute for reason and responsibility.
Those images are surrogates for what we have become but have not
permitted ourselves to see.
Bruce Jackson is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P.
Capen Professor of American Culture at SUNY Buffalo. He edits the
web journal Buffalo Report. He can be reached at: bjackson@buffalo.edu |
President Bush’s public appearance Monday
to announce a fund-raising campaign for the victims of the Indian
Ocean tsunami is the latest attempt by the White House to recover
from a political debacle: its callous and dismissive response to
the colossal tragedy in southern Asia that killed 150,000 people.
Flanked by George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, George W. Bush declared
that the two former presidents would spearhead a nationwide appeal
to raise private contributions for disaster relief. The unusual
joint appearance of the president, his father and his Democratic
predecessor—they last stood together just after the terrorist
attacks of September 11, 2001—underscores
the growing alarm in US ruling circles over Bush’s public
display of indifference to the most extensive natural disaster of
the past half century.
Bush remained secluded on his Texas ranch for three days after
the December 26 catastrophe, while a White House spokesman announced
a derisory $15 million US contribution to emergency relief. After
a barrage of media criticism and hostile comments from government
officials in the affected region and UN aid coordinator Jan Egeland,
the administration reacted with a public relations campaign featuring
a new event or announcement every day. [...]
It would have been far more appropriate if Clinton and the senior
Bush had been appealing for greater contributions from the US government,
rather than from the American people. It is quite likely that, behind
the scenes, that is precisely what they were doing. Among the more
experienced representatives of the American corporate elite—among
whom these two must be counted—the
younger Bush’s performance over the last week is regarded
as a foreign policy blunder that only compounds the disaster in
Iraq, undermining the position of US imperialism in the world.
It may yet prove to be a political blow at home as well, especially
if the number of American victims of the tsunami should grow larger.
Secretary of State Powell, speaking with reporters aboard his plane
en route to Bangkok, Thailand, the first stop in his tour of the
disaster zone, revealed that between 4,000 and 5,000 American citizens
are unaccounted for in the countries hit by the earthquake and tidal
waves, although only 15 are confirmed dead.
There are two components to Bush’s evident indifference
to the enormous loss of life in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand
and eight other countries—individual and social. The
tragedy in South Asia is a moment of truth, revealing indelibly
both the personality of George W. Bush and the nature of the society
over which he presides.
Bush’s seeming annoyance at being
forced to interrupt his Christmas vacation to make perfunctory comments
on the death of 150,000 people reflects more than a racist outlook
towards poor brown people on the other side of the world.
His general contempt for human life has been
a characteristic feature, not only of his presidency, but of his
entire political career.
It is well known that Bush was responsible for the death by lethal
injection of more than 150 condemned prisoners during his six years
as governor of Texas. Less well publicized is the blitheness with
which he dismissed their appeals for clemency. According to his
Texas and White House counsel, and now nominee for attorney general,
Alberto Gonzales, Bush
spent less than 15 minutes on average reviewing each death row appeal.
He did not approve a single one.
The Texas governor evidently derived personal
satisfaction, with more than a touch of sadism, from exercising
this power of life and death over helpless human beings.
In at least one case, that of Karla Faye Tucker, a born-again Christian
whose appeal for clemency was championed by prominent evangelists,
Bush is known to have mocked the woman in the last hours before
her death, mimicking her desperate pleas for mercy.
Like presidents before him, Bush has shed no tears for the victims
of American military action overseas—in his case, the tens
of thousands of Afghan and Iraqi citizens killed by American bombs,
missiles and bullets. Unlike most presidents, however, he has also
displayed a cold and unfeeling attitude to the death of American
soldiers in his wars.
In the early stages of the occupation of Iraq, when the US death
toll was still in the hundreds, the media briefly made an issue
of Bush’s refusal to attend a single funeral or to allow the
coffins of war victims to be photographed as they returned to the
United States through Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Now that
the total killed is over 1,300, with 8,000 or more wounded, many
of them maimed or horribly disfigured, the media has largely dropped
the subject.
This attitude of depraved indifference towards human life is not
limited to Bush personally. It is characteristic of the clique around
him—as exemplified by the report that Secretary of Defense
Rumsfeld was using an autopen to place his signature on condolence
letters to the families of the dead, rather than signing personally.
Bush, Rumsfeld & Co. reflect the attitudes of the degenerate
financial aristocracy of which they are a part. The
American ruling elite disposes of the fate of tens of millions of
people, in the United States and around the world, with utter imperviousness
to the intensity of human suffering, death and destruction which
its policies cause.
Perhaps the most illuminating commentaries on the South Asian
catastrophe have appeared in articles in the financial press—BusinessWeek
magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, among others—and
on the business pages of the daily press. This coverage has focused
on a cold-blooded calculation of the economic impact of the earthquake
and tsunami. On balance, these articles have concluded, the events
of the past week were not all that important.
The Financial Times cited the estimate by Munich Re, the world’s
largest reinsurer, that tsunami-related damage will amount to $14
billion, barely a tenth of the losses from the 1995 earthquake in
Kobe, Japan, which killed 5,000 people. “The main reason for
the disparity is that the tsunami largely affected economically
poor areas with little industry or infrastructure,” the newspaper
said.
The poverty of the population also means that little of the damage
was insured, which will greatly reduce the losses to the world financial
system. As one Singapore brokerage economist, interviewed in a business
publication, commented, “It will be more of a story of human
tragedy rather than economic costs.”
There was even a “saving grace” in the calamity: “The
disaster spared output at the big Arun liquefied natural gas plant
on Sumatra,” a huge facility operated by ExxonMobil Corp.,
which restored production within hours of the quake. Tankers bound
for South Korea and Japan have resumed loading LNG and there will
be no disruption in fuel supplies for the industrialized countries.
This is the deeper social meaning of Bush’s slow and uncaring
response to a disaster which took the lives of 150,000 people. While
a few hundred million dollars are expended for disaster relief,
this is dwarfed by the vast sums flowing through the financial centers
of world capitalism. The year-end bonuses on Wall Street alone topped
$15.9 billion for 2004, more than the entire damage inflicted by
the greatest natural disaster in decades.
The television coverage of this enormous tragedy has profoundly
moved tens of millions of people around the world, provoking an
outpouring of sympathy and charitable contributions. But from the
ruling class of the United States, it evokes a collective yawn:
those who died are, for the most part, marginal to the world economy,
and there was not a great deal of money involved. |
The Islamic Army in Iraq, supposedly related
to Ansar al-Sunnah—and thus the mythical Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
and al-Qaeda—has released a statement on its web site declaring
the year 2005 “will bring woes on America. The mujahedeen
have prepared big surprises for your sons outside America and a
big surprise for you inside America,” in other words, as Agence
France-Presse reports, they will carry out attacks on American soil.
“We address you after you finished celebrating the new year,
hoping that you are no longer drunk…. We will give American
civilians a taste of what civilians in our country go through,”
said the statement, presented as a “message to the American
people.”
Any attack on America in the name of the
Iraqi resistance, of course, would go a long way in turning around
the American public’s growing skepticism of Bush’s Iraqi
quagmire. Either the Islamic Army in
Iraq is stupid or they are not who they claim to be. Qui
Bono? Certainly not the Iraqis. Bush desperately needs public opinion
where it was in the weeks and months following the 9/11 attacks.
He needs America’s sons and daughters to willingly donate
their lives to the Strausscon-neolib plan to “reshape”
the Middle East. How better to do this than stage Iraqi resistance
attacks in America? Imagine the mileage Bush
would receive if even a single suicide bomber hit a mall or corporate
office complex. It would be invaluable.
Earlier today I received an email from a journalist taking me
to task for suggesting that Margaret Hassan was kidnapped and apparently
killed in a CIA or Mossad operation designed to discredit and blacken
the name of the Iraqi resistance. Since there is no evidence Hassan
was killed—if indeed she was killed, since no body has turned
up—the journalist suggests that the “anti-war side of
things appear to have crossed the line from political criticism
to, perhaps, conspiracy-mongering.”
I responded by indicating that the largest
“conspiracy theory” currently afoot is the Strausscon
disinformation campaign, resulting in invasion and mass murder,
that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was in cahoots
with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. It
is a conspiracy theory believed—regardless of scads of evidence
to the contrary—by millions of Americans. Obviously,
such a monumental fabrication makes anything a lowly blogger, with
a mere thousand people reading his site daily, has to say pale by
way of comparison. Suggesting that Margaret Hassan was abducted
in a “counterinsurgency” operation is less than peanuts
when stacked up against the massive conspiracy theory perpetuated
by Bush and Crew. And yet the corporate media essentially ignores
this—or underplays it significantly—and routinely lambastes
bloggers as tinfoil hatters. Of course, since the corporate media
slavishly acts as the Bush Ministry of Disinformation, this is to
be expected. Its mission is to portray critics of the invasion and
occupation as mental cases or to ignore their arguments entirely.
I don’t know if the Islamic Army in Iraq—and thus
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and al-Qaeda—is blowing smoke out of
a certain orifice with their claim they will “give American
civilians a taste of what civilians in our country go through,”
but logic dictates this would work in Bush’s
favor, not in the favor of the Iraqi resistance. Of course,
the anger of Iraqis toward a somnolent and ignorant American public—who
support the murder of Iraqis through their sheepish acquiescence,
even support of “our” troops—is more than understandable.
However, unless they are stupid—and considering the military
sophistication increasingly demonstrated by the Iraqi resistance,
they are anything but stupid—they must
realize that attacking the American public will only catalyze war
fever among Americans and turn them in favor of “staying the
course” in Iraq, that is to say murdering more Iraqis.
It would be a gift to Bush and the Strausscons, who have ambitious
plans for Muslims and the “enemies” of Israel.
It would be extremely counterproductive for the Iraqi resistance.
But then this may simply be another conspiracy theory. |
A car bomb exploded outside a police academy
south of Baghdad yesterday during a graduation ceremony, killing
at least 20 people, a police official said.
The bomb exploded outside a gate of the academy in Hillah, about
95 kilometers south of Baghdad, said police Captain Hady Hatef.
Twenty people were killed and an unspecified number were injured,
he said. No other details were immediately available.
In a separate attack, six people were killed in the northern Iraqi
city of Baquba yesterday in a suicide car bomb attack on security
forces, police and hospital sources said.
Thirteen people, including two civilians, were wounded in the
attack on an Iraqi police and National Guard checkpoint in Baquba,
65 kilometres north of Baghdad.
These were the latest in a string of attacks against Iraqi police
and security forces ahead of January 30 elections which insurgents
are trying to disrupt.
The number of Iraqi policemen killed in the last four months of
2004 was 1300 before the latest blasts, according to the Iraqi Interior
Ministry figures released yesterday.
The Iraqi police and security troops represent a soft target for
the insurgents because of their poor training and equipment compared
to the US-led coalition forces. The militants consider Iraqi soldiers
as collaborators with the American occupiers.
Yesterday's violence brought the death toll in the past four days
to more than 90, mostly Iraqi security forces. Despite the bloody
insurgency, which US troops and Iraqi security forces have been
helpless to prevent, American and Iraqi leaders insist the January
30 vote will go ahead. |
Four Iraqis have been injured after US helicopters
bombed residential buildings in the northern Iraqi city of Arbil,
Aljazeera has learned.
Aljazeera's correspondent in Iraq's Kurdistan, Ahmad al-Zawiti,
said the bombing on Wednesday damaged the building where students
of Salah al-Din University live, in the Sidawa neighbourhood.
He said the building and other nearby houses were set ablaze,
adding that some nearby cars were also damaged.
Four students were injured in the two-hour-long
strike, officials said. The attack came after a US helicopter
had come under fire from the same area, witnesses said. [...] |
While most pollsters would agree
that there is almost no discernable support for reinstating the
military draft, why should the public support the military's policy
of forcing exhausted those who already have fulfilled their contractual
obligation to serve into an open-ended term of indentured —
potentially fatal — military servitude?
Yet that is exactly what is happening to people such as Oregon
Army National Guardsman Sgt. Emiliano Santiago, 27, of Pasco, Wash.
Last Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Owen M. Panner
denied Santiago's motion for a preliminary injunction against having
to report again for active duty, less than a week before Santiago
is scheduled to ship to Fort Sill, Okla. A soldier with D Company
of the Oregon Guard's 113th Aviation Battalion in Pendleton, he
is and his unit are expected to be deployed to Afghanistan in February.
Santiago argued that he already had completed
his contracted term in 2002, but Panner's ruling means that he will
have to go. And he is only one of thousands who are finding themselves
back in uniform despite having honorably completed the service they
signed on for.
This is possible because of an executive order
President Bush enacted after 9-11 that authorized the Pentagon to
involuntarily extend military personnel on active duty "for
not more than 24 consecutive months."
But the military has gone further in Santiago's case. He originally
signed for an eight-year tour with the Guard in 1996, but
as a result of the "stop-loss" back-door draft, his service
has been extended to December 2031, when he would be 54.
Judge Panner said he was ruling that Santiago
had to go back because the military would be more harmed than Santiago
if he allowed Santiago to leave. He correctly assumed that
the thousands of others also forced to stay would file similar court
challenges, complicating the United States' military actions in
Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
President Bush said repeatedly during his re-election campaign
that there would be no military draft in his second term. But
if a soldier who has completed his term of service and returned
to civilian life is forced back onto the battlefield, how is that
anything other than a draft, forcing involuntary servitude?
We haven't had a draft in this country since Richard Nixon abolished
it in 1973. And we haven't had involuntary servitude since Abraham
Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation made it illegal as of Jan. 1,
1863, freeing "all persons held as slaves within any state
or designated part of a state, the people whereof shall then be
in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward,
and forever free." The Emancipation Proclamation clearly stated
that "the executive government of the United States, including
the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain
the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress
such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their
actual freedom."
Who knew that President Bush would overturn the
acts of two past Republican presidents in deciding that, under his
term, the military means not being able to declare with confidence,
"I'm a civilian again." |
The case against the foreign
terror suspects imprisoned in Britain without trial for three years
is partly founded on flawed and inaccurate intelligence, court papers
seen by The Independent reveal.
Alarming weaknesses in the secret services' evidence cast serious
doubt on the Home Secretary's justification for detaining 12 men
held under emergency legislation rushed through Parliament in the
aftermath of 11 September.
Last month a historic judgment in the House of Lords triggered
a constitutional crisis when the judges ruled that the men's detention
was in breach of human rights law.
The documents reveal:
* A security service assessment was embarrassingly
withdrawn after it emerged that the purpose behind a visit to Dorset
by a group of Muslim men had not been to elect a terrorist leader
but to get away from their wives for the weekend.
* Confirmation that the Government is using evidence of association
with the Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg to hold at least two of
the foreign terror suspects under its emergency powers.
* False allegations made against one of the Algerian detainees
in relation to his association with Mr Begg arose from an MI5 surveillance
operation of Mr Begg's Islamic bookshop in Birmingham in 2000. MI5
wrongly claimed that weapons had been found there.
* The Home Secretary has been forced to
concede that some of the funds raised by the detainee Abu Rideh
for alleged terrorist activity were sent to orphanages in Afghanistan
run by a Canadian priest.
* Testimony against two of the detainees
came from an affidavit sworn by a man who was offered a lenient
sentence in return for evidence.
* Newspaper reports, including ones in The Guardian and La Stampa,
were used by the Home Secretary to support allegations of terrorism
against at least two of the detainees.
* Two of the detainees were awarded compensation for false arrest
shortly before they were detained under the anti-terrorist emergency
powers.
* MI5 reports, as part of the evidence against the detainees, describe
the men as being "excessively security
conscious" when travelling to and from London shopping
centres.
* The detention certificate of F, one of the Algerian detainees,
was revoked after it emerged he should have
been deported to France rather than imprisoned without trial.
* One of the detainee's children has been taken into care.
While the papers, released in the run-up to the implementation
of the Freedom of Information Act and now available on the Special
Immigration Appeal [SIAC] website, only give details of the "open"
evidence against the detainees, the inaccuracy
of some of these assertions raises questions about the reliability
of the secret evidence that the detainees have never been allowed
to see. |
An Australian held by the United States in
Guantanamo Bay has claims he was tortured during interrogation in
Egypt and abused while in US custody in Pakistan.
Egyptian-born Mamdouh Habib, a Sydney father of four, is one of
two Australians being held at the US military base in Guantanamo
Bay, Cuba.
He was detained in Egypt for six months shortly after his capture
in Pakistan in the weeks after the September 11, 2001 attacks as
Washington led an offensive to drive Afghanistan's fundamentalist
Taliban rulers from power for failing to hand over Al-Qaeda leader
Osama bin Laden.
The former Sydney taxi driver has been accused of aiding Al-Qaeda
but has so far not been charged and few details of the allegations
against him have been released.
Supporters want Habib and fellow Australian detainee David Hicks
brought back to Australia for trial, but the US-allied government
has given this little support.
There have been suggestions that Habib might instead be returned
to Egypt, where he would face worse conditions than in Guantanamo
Bay.
According to a US affidavit prepared by Habib's American lawyer
Joe Margulies in a bid to stop that happening, his Egyptian captors
gave Habib electric shocks and beat him.
"Mr Habib, always handcuffed and sometimes suspended from
hooks on the wall, was kicked, punched, beaten with a stick, and
rammed with what can only be described as an electric cattle prod,"
said the affidavit, which was reported on Australian radio.
"If he lapsed into unconsciousness, they would revive him
and continue the beatings."
Habib said he was forced into false confessions,
such as admitting to training Al-Qaeda fighters in martial arts.
At times his Egyptian captors would place him in a room and gradually
fill it with water, leaving only his head exposed and forcing him
to stand on tiptoe for hours.
In Islamabad, after his capture, a man who had
introduced himself to Habib as an Australian consular official watched
on while a US agent stood on his neck, the affadavit said.
The incident, which allegedly occurred while Habib was handcuffed,
took place at an airfield in Islamabad in late October 2001 and
photographs had been taken.
"The person with his foot on Mr Habib's neck
explained, in unaccented American English, that he planned to send
one picture to his girlfriend and another to his sister," the
affidavit said.
Habib's Australian lawyer Stephen Hopper said it was proof the
Australian government knew that he had been tortured.
Attorney General Philip Ruddock however denied any Australian official
witnessed any abuse against Habib in Pakistan. |
Deep inside a sprawling complex tucked in
the hills of this Appalachian town, a room full of supercomputers
attempts to sift America's guilty from its innocent.
This is where the FBI keeps its vast database of fingerprints,
allowing examiners to conduct criminal checks from computer screens
in less than 30 minutes--something that previously took them weeks
as they rummaged through 2,100 file cabinets stuffed with inked
print cards.
But the same digital technology that has
allowed the FBI to speed such checks so dramatically over the last
few years has created the risk of accusing people who are innocent,
the Tribune has found.
Across the country, police departments and crime labs are submitting
fingerprints for comparisons and for entry into databases, using
digital images that may be missing crucial details or may have been
manipulated without the FBI knowing it.
Not unlike a picture from a typical digital camera, a digital
fingerprint provides less complete detail than a traditional photographic
image. That matters little with pictures from the family vacation.
But when the digital image is of a fingerprint,
the lack of precision raises the specter of false identifications
in criminal cases.
"There's a risk that not only would they exclude someone
incorrectly--we have the potential to identify someone incorrectly,"
said David Grieve, a prominent fingerprint expert who is the latent
prints training coordinator for the Illinois State Police crime
lab system.
An FBI-sponsored group of fingerprint examiners was concerned
enough about the quality of digital images that in 2001 it recommended
doubling their resolution. Three years later, though, the vast majority
of police agencies still use equipment with the lower resolution.
Equally troublesome, the most commonly used image-enhancement
software, Adobe Photoshop, leaves no record of some of the changes
police technicians can perform as they clean up fingerprint images
to make them easier to compare.
This seemingly esoteric issue is crucial because it raises questions
about a bulwark of the criminal justice system: chain of custody.
If authorities cannot prove that a fingerprint is an accurate representation
of the original and show exactly how it was handled, its validity
can be questioned.
FBI officials recognize the resolution problem but say it leads
to overlooking guilty people, not falsely accusing the innocent.
"The risk that we're hearing is that we miss people--because
the resolution isn't enough--not that we're identifying people incorrectly,"
said Jerry Pender, deputy assistant director at the FBI's Clarksburg
facility. [...] |
There is a new warning for airports that may
have passengers checking their watches. Security
experts are now worried that terrorists could use a digital watch
to set off an explosion in the air.
There was a time when shopping for a watch was an innocent, and
perhaps one of the most fun things, you could do. But now the government
is concerned that watches could be used as an instrument for terror.
The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security
are warning transportation officials to look for Al Qaeda terrorists
wearing two types of watches.
The first type is called altimeters, which measure altitude, and
could be used to trigger an explosion when a jetliner reaches a
certain height.
They are also on the lookout for watches containing hidden cigarette
lighters, which could be used to ignite a bomb, like the one Shoe
Bomber Richard Reed hid in his sneakers on a flight from Paris to
Miami.
Both of these types of watchers are readily available on the internet.
Bob Parkllan, of House of Watch Bands in Southfield, has sold
altimeter watchers at his store for years, and never before thought
of them as a potential threat.
"It’s a little scary," Parkllan told 7 Action
News. "It’s scary thinking about it. It makes you think
of the type of person who wants to buy this type of watch."
For now, passengers are allowed to board planes with watches that
contain altimeters and butane lighters, but after this warning,
expect airline screeners to take a closer look at your timepiece
before you board the plane. |
“Are you a donor to Israeli universities?”
the anonymous writer asks. If yes, you should “learn what
is happening on Israeli campuses. Be informed about what is being
done with your gifts and generosity.”
These are the opening lines of a new Web site called Israel Academia
Monitor (israel-academia-monitor.com), a pathetic attempt to copy
Campus Watch, which was launched in 2002 to police and discipline
American university professors who criticize U.S. Middle East policy
and Israel’s occupation. Campus Watch
is closely connected to the academic journal Middle East Quarterly
and to the Middle East Forum, a right-wing think tank whose members
have access to the Bush administration. Numerous donors with
deep pockets support this neocon apparatus.
The Israel Academia Monitor, which may also be an offshoot of
the Middle East Forum, is both preposterous and dangerous. Its instigators
would have failed introductory courses like Logic and Twentieth-Century
History. The law of contradiction—i.e., that antithetical
propositions P and not-P cannot be true simultaneously—ceases
to exist in this cyberspace, thus allowing the site’s creators
to intimate that donors should boycott all Israeli universities
that employ professors who criticize state policies—while
at the same time denouncing Israeli professors who favor a boycott
of Israeli institutions.
Moreover, the Monitor presents itself as a human rights group
of sorts, which aims to bring to light abuses of academic freedom.
Its nameless perpetrators consider themselves not only the defenders
of free speech, but an anti-McCarthyist movement.
The McCarthyists they inveigh against are
academic rogues, professors who are critical of Israel’s rights-abusive
policies yet at the same time inspired by a deep concern for Israel’s
population and the occupied Palestinians. Apparently, their
offense against free speech is that they do not enable zealous nationalists
to voice their views—an absurd allegation considering that
for some years now the balance of power within Israel has been tilted
toward the far right.
At first sight, only twisted logic augmented by historical ignorance
could draw a parallel between relatively powerless academics and
those well-orchestrated, government-sanctioned redbaiters of ’50s
America. However, this is a feint. In reality
the Web inquisitors at Israel Monitor are accusing Israeli professors
of McCarthyism in order to deflect criticism from themselves, while
at the same time they set about exploiting fear in a McCarthy-like
manner.
The Web site dedicates a page to each major Israeli university,
listing “extremist professors” who, in the words of
the Monitor’s anonymous press release, promote “insurrection
and lawbreaking” as well as “seditious” behavior.
These professors also collaborate with “anti-Semites and enemies
of Israel” and support “lawlessness and terror.”
An innocent reader could be forgiven for thinking that Hamas terrorist
cells led by academics are currently operating within Israeli universities,
preparing students for the Jihad.
Israel Academia Monitor might have been a tasteless joke if the
times were not ripe for this kind of witch-hunt—if it were
not symptomatic of a more general and ominous mood informed by a
nationalistic and sectarian frenzy.
The site’s authors encourage students
and scholars to pass on information about suspect professors, promising
to publish incriminating material. The
goal, it seems, is to purge Israeli universities of those who dare
question the state—or, at least, silence them—and
to influence hiring and tenure decisions.
This assault, however, is not only aimed at academic freedom but
at democracy itself, for the danger confronting contemporary democracy
is not some new wave of overt authoritarianism, as it was in the
early and mid-twentieth century. It is not even terrorism. Rather,
the danger comes from those for whom the freedoms that accompany
democracy represent a threat, an obstacle to their uninhibited pursuit
of dominance and wealth.
Like its forerunner Campus Watch, Israel Academia Monitor is indicative
of the much broader attempt to silence all those who confront the
powers that be. |
LONDON (AP) - Britain closed its embassy in
Yemen on Wednesday because of "specific security concerns"
and warned that terrorists were in the end stage of planning assaults
against British targets in the country.
"The British embassy will be closed on Jan. 5 in response
to specific security concerns," said a statement posted on
the Foreign Office Web site.
As of Dec. 30, ìthere is specific information that terrorists
are in the final stages of planning attacks against British targets
and other Western interests in Yemen,î the statement added,
warning Britons to be vigilant in public places, such as hotels.
Foreign Office officials were not immediately available for comment.
[...] |
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Federal authorities searched
Wednesday for a man using a Middle Eastern name and possibly bogus
construction credentials to try to purchase large quantities of
an explosive ingredient used by Timothy McVeigh to blow up the Oklahoma
City federal building.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms
and Explosives said there was no indication that terrorism was involved,
but the agency was still checking information that came from a company
in Canada that reported the attempted purchase as suspicious.
ATF was asking the fertilizer and explosives industries to help
locate the man and to report any suspicious inquiries for the fertilizer
chemical ammonium nitrate, which is used to make so-called fertilizer
bombs.
"We're still running down leads. But we thought it would
be prudent putting out an advisory to the fertilizer industry,"
said Tom Mangan, an ATF agent in Phoenix, where the investigation
is centered.
The suspect also made several Internet e-mail inquiries to vendors
seeking to buy between 500 to 1,000 metric tons of the explosive
- a quantity larger than McVeigh used to bomb the Oklahoma City
federal building in April 1995 but smaller than amounts companies
typically might buy in bulk for construction, explosives or farm
work.
McVeigh used a combination of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil with
a detonation cord to make his bomb that killed more than 160 people.
The International Society of Explosives Engineers, based in Cleveland,
sent an e-mail Wednesday alerting its members and asking them to
call ATF in Phoenix to report any suspicious activity.
"ATF has recently been made aware of a suspicious attempt
by an individual to purchase mass quantities of ammonium nitrate,
specifically between 500 to 1,000 metric tons," the alert said.
"This individual, who uses a Middle
Eastern name, purports to be a representative of a construction
corporation. However, indications are that this is most likely false.
"The individual has previously made contact with other industry
members via e-mail seeking the large amounts of 'fertilizer grade'
ammonium nitrate," the alert said.
Ammonium nitrate has been linked to several recent terror plots.
Less than a year ago, Homeland Security officials put out a warning
about unsubstantiated intelligence suggesting that al-Qaida or like
terrorists might try to smuggle ammonium nitrate bombs aboard public
transportation venues such as trains, subways or buses.
Jordanian authorities alleged in an indictment last summer that
Iraqi insurgency leader Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi, backed by al-Qaida,
financed a plot for suicide bombers armed with chemicals for an
ammonium nitrate bomb to try to attack the country's intelligence
agency building.
And in Chicago, a disgruntled ex-con was charged with plotting
to blow up the federal courthouse in downtown after he was arrested
during a sting with a pickup truck containing 1,500 pounds of fertilizer
he thought was ammonium nitrate. Prosecutors allege he planned to
sell the chemical to terrorists. |
In the first minutes and hours
following the blasts that devastated the Alfred P. Murrah Federal
Building in downtown Oklahoma City, the morning of April 19, 1995,
a number of selfless individuals risked life and limb to rescue
many of the victims. Among them were Oklahoma City police officers,
Terrance Yeakey, Gordon Martin and Ken Griffin, a number of Oklahoma
City firefighters, Dr. H. Don Chumley, G.S.A. employee Mike Loudenslager
and others.
In the aftermath of the "bombing" the name Mike Loudenslager
holds particular significance in the hearts of many families in
and around Oklahoma City. And this is so, because of the forewarning
he gave to a number of those who had children in the Murrah Building's
day-care center. In the weeks preceding the bombing, G.S.A. employee,
Michael Loudenslager, 48, became increasingly aware that large amounts
of ordnance and explosives were in the building and strongly urged
(along with the operator of the day-care center) a number of parents
to take their children out of the Murrah Building.
This situation arose after other employees became concerned with
an increased amount of ordnance (missiles) being brought into the
building by the B.A.T.F. and D.E.A. As a result of this concern,
a grievance was filed with G.S.A. by the building's security director.
The result was, the man who'd complained lost his job there. Then,
after the operator of the day-care center (the security director's
wife) notified the fire marshals after some remodeling had been
done (as her license required her to do), the fire marshals were
denied access to do their inspection by federal agents and told
to leave! And the day-care operator lost her contract.
As a result of this (fearing the worst with all the talk around
town of a possible bombing), Mike Loudenslager and the day-care
center operator then told many of the parents to get their children
out. And, because of their warnings, far fewer children were in
the day-care center on that horrible Wednesday morning than there
otherwise would have been. A number of families, in and around Oklahoma
City, have these two people to thank for their children's lives
today.
Shortly after the bombing, Michael Loudenslager was actively helping
in the rescue and recovery effort. A large number of those at the
bomb-site either saw or talked with him. During the course of the
early rescue efforts, however, Mike Loudenslager was seen and heard
in a very "heated" confrontation with someone (there).
Much of his anger stemmed from the fact he felt the B.A.T.F. was
in large part responsible not only for the bombing, but for the
death and inury to those inside, including all the children.
To the absolute astonishment of a large number of police officers
and rescue workers, it was later reported that G.S.A. employee Mike
Loudenslager's body had been found inside the Murrah Building the
following Sunday, still at his desk, a victim of the 9:02 A.M. bombing!
This, mind you, after he'd already been seen alive and well by numerous
rescue workers at the bomb-site AFTER the bombing! He is also officially
listed as one of the 168 bombing fatalities.
The question now becomes: Was he murdered and placed at his desk
by federal agents? Or was he just simply murdered by them and SAID
to have been found at his desk? Access to the inside of the building,
from shortly after the bombing onward was extremely limited to nearly
all but federal employees by the F.B.I.
His death is UNQUESTIONABLY the most important sidelight of the
Oklahoma City bombing. Mike Loudenslager's murder, most assuredly
was one of the major factors leading to the demise of both Dr. H.
Don Chumley and later Terry Yeakey!
For whatever reason, the Oklahoma City Police Dept. has always
down-played Officer Terry Yeakey's presence at the Murrah Building
the morning of April 19, 1995, even though a large number of Oklahoma
City police officers, firefighters, emergency personnel and survivors
KNOW he played a much larger role in the early rescue-effort than
he's given credit for.
In an effort to cover up Mike Loudenslager's murder and to intimidate
others who were there early-on that morning, someone has taken out
a number of internal witnesses. Dr. Don Chumley AND Terry Yeakey,
both, besides being at the Murrah Building that morning, shared
one other commonality. Each at the time of his "death"
was attempting to deliver EVIDENCE concerning the fact Mike Loudenslager
was alive and well AFTER the bombing, and also to get certain other
facts out about the "bombing" as well.
In Terry Yeakey's case he thought he was delivering evidence andinformation
to a multi-county task force who would help get the truth out That's
how he was set-up. In Dr. Chumley's case, he was killed, some months
earlier, when his personal jet aircraft "crashed" while
attempting to do the same thing.
Were the deaths of Jack Colvert, Jackie Majors and Buddy Youngblood
also directly related to the cover-up of Mike Loudenslager's murder?
Each of them had been at the Murrah Building that morning and each
had also seen Mike Loudenslager ALIVE and well after the bombing.
Others who were there that morning have also felt threatened. Officer
Gordon Martin, for one, feels at least two attempts on his life
have been made. Other police officers and emergency services personnel
fear for their personal safety as well.
And while all this goes on, the moguls of themajor-media remain
silent! The so-called "fourth pillar of democracy" - the
press - once again falls flat on its face, foresaking its sacred
duty to REPORT THE NEWS. Remember, Hell is just as hot for those
who go there for sins of OMISSION as those who go for sins of COMMISSION!.
Another interesting case of "suicide" in Oklahoma, since
the bombing, is that of Kenneth Trentadue, who as the result of
violating conditions of his parole in California, was re-incarcerated
and sent to a federal (transfer) facility in Oklahoma. Mr. Trentadue,
the brother of a prominent Salt Lake City, Utah attorney, supposedly
committed suicide by hanging himself. But in actuality managed to
commit a "suicide" very similar to Terry Yeakey's (minus
the gunshot-wound-to-the-head). Only Kenneth Trentadue's was committed
with knotted or "braided" bedsheet, barely long enough
to fit around his neck in a "suicide-proof" prison cell.
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE later reported the trustees who cleaned Mr.
Trentadue's cell after his "suicide" found copious amounts
of blood inside. This included bloody fingerprints up a wall, to
within a few inches of a "panic button" on or near the
ceiling. This certainly is not consistent with hanging. When his
family was contacted by prison officials and informed of his "suicide",
they were asked if they wanted his remains cremated. They indicated
they did not, and after a very difficult time and much red-tape,
the body was finally shipped back to them.
Being very skeptical as to a suicide, family members removed the
mortuary make-up and were shocked to find part of his skull crushed,
his knuckles damaged, bruises, puncture-and-slash-wounds over a
good portion of his body (including the soles of his feet) and his
throat slashed. Boot heel marks were apparent around the right eye
and on his chest. All evidence points to the fact Kenneth Trentadue
was subdued after a fight - brutally beaten, tortured and murdered!
(Update: THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE, Sat. July 11, 1998 - states M.E.
says Trentadue death "suicide"!). This case is "supposedly"
being looked into by U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch. Former 7-term U.S. Rep.
George Hansen of Idaho and his organization, The United States Citizens
Human Rights Commission, IS, however, actively pursuing it. Former
Rep. Hansen was himself unjustly convicted and imprisoned and spent
a number of years literally as a political prisoner in the federal
penal system until his case was finally decided by the U.S. Supreme
Court.
Many Americans who are familiar with the Trentadue case see a chilling
similarity between Officer Terry Yeakey's "suicide" and
Kenneth Trentadue's. Especially when each occurred in such close
proximity to the other, in and around El Reno and Oklahoma City,
AFTER the bombing. Like Terry Yeakey, Kenneth Trentadue, (although
smaller) was also a powerfully-built man. He lifted weights regularly,
had a 19-inch neck and was a street-fighter with street savvy. In
short, he knew how to take care of himself.
Many now wonder if Kenneth Trentadue might have had information
regarding the Oklahoma City bombing, or its aftermath, that certain
agents wanted him taken-out for. And many also wonder why a man
re-incarcerated for violating his parole would REQUEST solitary
confinement. What was Kenneth Trentadue afraid of?
Could the murder of Murrah Building G.S.A. employee Michael Loudenslager
and the subsequent cover-up be the reason for (many of) the unresolved
deaths in Oklahoma since the bombing? A growing number of Americans
certainly think so. |
Seoul — North
Korea has ordered its people to prepare for a protracted war against
the United States, issuing guidelines on evacuating to underground
bunkers with weapons, food and portraits of leader Kim Jong-il.
The 33-page “Detailed Wartime Guidelines,” published
on South Korea's Kyunghyang newspaper on Wednesday and verified
by Seoul, was issued April 7, 2004, at a time when the communist
regime was claiming that it was Washington's next target of invasion
following the Iraq War.
The manual – the first such North Korea document made public
in the outside world – was signed by Mr. Kim in his capacity
of chairman of the Central Military Committee of the ruling Workers'
Party.
That ended speculation over whether he has assumed the top military
post following the 1994 death of his father, president im Il-sung.
Analysts said the guidelines reflected Pyongyang's fear over a
possible U.S. military strike amid stalling talks on its nuclear
weapons programs, as well as its campaign to whip up a sense of
crisis among its 22 million populace reportedly growing discontented
with economic hardships.
“The United States has cooked up
suspicion over our nuclear programs and is escalating an offensive
of international pressure to strangle and destroy our republic,”
the booklet said. “If this tactic doesn't work, it plots to
use this (nuclear) problem as an excuse for armed invasion.”
Kyunghyang did not clarify where it acquired the document classified
as “top secret.”
Seoul's National Intelligence Service said in a one-sentence statement:
“We believe the document reflects North Korea's wartime preparations.” |
Pyongyang, -- The U.S. came under fire by a
signed commentary of Minju Joson Tuesday for having massively shipped
into south Korea military hardware for mounting a preemptive attack
on the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. The commentary says:
The U.S. massively deployed in south Korea
up-to-date weapons and operational equipment it claimed tested in
the Iraqi and Afghan wars or newly developed. A month ago,
it rounded off the deployment of two battalions of PAC-3 in south
Korea and is now contemplating the deployment of new type missile
Bunker Burst there within this year. These
facts clearly prove that the U.S. is, in fact, hatching a dangerous
plot to stab the DPRK on the back, while paying lip-service to "peace"
and "dialogue," and this is being pushed forward at a
more desperate phase.
It is the DPRK's invariable mode of counteraction
to the hostile forces to return fire for fire and respond to the
use of force in kind.
The DPRK is left with no option but to move for increasing its
defence capacity for self-defense now that it has become clear that
the U.S. continues pursuing the policy to stifle the DPRK by mounting
a preemptive military attack on the DPRK prompted by its inveterate
negation of the DPRK.
The U.S. had better stop running amuck, clearly understanding
who its rival is. |
ALGIERS : Islamic extremists killed 18 people
in an ambush of an army convoy south of the capital Algiers.
The L'Expression newspaper said some 50 extremists used a bomb
to blow up the convoy and then raked it with machine-gun fire, killing
13 soldiers and five civilians who were travelling with them.
The attack took place in the early hours of Monday in a remote
area in the region of Biskra, some 420 kilometers (260 miles) south
of the capital, the paper said Wednesday.
Some of the soldiers were able to fire back, reportedly injuring
some of the assailants.
The paper said the rebels, said to be from Algeria's extremist
Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), were later surrounded
by security forces.
The attack was the deadliest in Algeria since 16 people were murdered
more than three months ago in the region of Medea, also south of
Algiers. [...] |
BEIJING: A truck returning from a pilgrimage to
Tibet overturned, killing at least 54 people and injuring 41 in China’s
dirt-poor northwestern province of Qinghai, Xinhua news agency said
on Tuesday. The truck carrying 104 people overturned near Kuola mountain
on Monday, Xinhua said without giving a reason for the accident. Trucks
transporting people are a common sight in China’s impoverished
hinterland. Fifty people died on the spot and four died on the way
to hospital, the agency said, adding that 29 passengers were seriously
injured. [...] |
Hanoi — A nine-year-old boy in Vietnam
has died of bird flu, bringing the number of people in the country
killed by the virus to 21, a doctor said Wednesday.
The boy from the southern Mekong Delta province of Tra Vinh was
admitted to the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Ho Chi Minh City
early Tuesday morning and died later that day, hospital deputy director
Tran Tinh Hien said.
“He was tested positive for H5N1 virus,” Mr. Hien
said, referring to the strain of the virus that is deadly to humans.
World health experts fear that bird flu might mutate and create
the next influenza pandemic.
So far, there has been no concrete evidence of human-to-human
transmission of bird flu. Only Vietnam and Thailand have recorded
human deaths from the virus. [...] |
(Criciuma): Two tornadoes that struck southern
Brazil have forced hundreds of people from their homes, civil defence
officials said on Tuesday.
The tornadoes destroyed three houses in Santa Catarina state on
Monday, severely damaged 27 and ripped the roof shingles off some
100 houses. At least one death was linked to the twisters.
The first tornado touched down on Monday afternoon about six kilometres
(four miles) outside the centre of Criciuma, civil defence officials
said.
A second twister, with winds topping 115 kilometres-per-hour (71
mph), struck an hour later even closer to the centre of Criciuma
- a city 900 kilometres (560 miles) southwest of Rio de Janeiro.
Amateur video showed the moment the second tornado touched down.
One elderly man died of a heart attack, which may have been related
to stress caused by the high winds. About five people suffered minor
injuries.
Each tornado lasted about seven minutes. Clovis Correia, a meteorologist
with the state's weather service, said that on a scale of one to
five, the two tornadoes registered at level one, the weakest.
Tornadoes are rare in the region and throughout Brazil, although
a weak tornado struck the same region last month.
Santa Catarina was also struck by rare subtropical cycle in March
that many meteorologists said was a hurricane - a controversial
classification because it has long been believed that hurricanes
didn't occur in the southern Atlantic. |
THREE children dodged death or serious injury
by minutes when a tornado slammed into a row of terraced cottages
at Lymm.
The climbing frame they had been playing on was hurled into the
air, over the house, the road and the nearby Bridgewater Canal before
landing, a twisted wreck, in a field about 50 yards away.
Four cottages were badly damaged - three of them made uninhabitable.
The roofs were ripped off two, with slates, bricks and masonry
scattered over a wide area. A third had six holes punched in the
roof and its dormer destroyed.
Three families had to be evacuated from the homes in Warrington
Lane, Agden, after the tornado struck on New Year's Day. [...] |
It had all the makings of a genuine Midwest
tornado, but the ominous funnel cloud that captivated wide-eyed
residents across the Valley on Tuesday didn't spawn much more than
a downpour of hail and a dousing of wind and rain.
"We're lucky it didn't touch down because it had the signature
of a tornado on the radar," said meteorologist Hector Vasquez
with the National Weather Service in Phoenix. "It would have
done some roof damage and blown out some windows."
The funnel cloud, which took over a portion of the afternoon sky
for more than an hour, blanketed portions of the West Valley with
pea-sized hail after it passed over Luke Air Force Base and headed
east. Vasquez said the cell, which forms through an updraft in a
thunderstorm and starts to rotate, gained strength over the White
Tanks Mountains before barreling into Phoenix. [...] |
REGINA - While still digging out from last
week's massive storm, Canada's Prairie provinces have been walloped
again by more snow and bitter cold.
Dramatically low temperatures swept in again and meteorologists
have again issued numerous severe wind chill warnings. Health officials
are urging people to stay indoors.
In Regina, with the wind chill, it felt like -51 C on Wednesday.
"I can't remember it being this cold," said one man,
"and I've been here a long time. It's pretty nippy."
While the temperature is frigid, it still isn't a record for Regina,
which has had it much colder: -50 in 1885, without the wind chill.
But the impact of this type of severe cold is felt.
At the Regina airport flights have been delayed as cargo doors
freeze up and equipment breaks down.
The cold has also claimed hundreds of car and trucks. Those that
do start, often don't get very far.
Even schools have been shut down, and that's rare on the Prairies.
School boards were worried students might be stranded on broken
down buses.
In Edmonton, fire forced dozens of homeless people from a shelter,
leaving the city scrambling to find alternative housing.
Doctors are warning of hypothermia-induced cardiac arrests, of
exhaustion from shovelling in the extreme cold, as well as exposure.
[...] |
There are only two places in the United States
where colliding tectonic plates could cause a major tsunami, and
new studies show a new earthquake in at least one of these locations
could be imminent.
The Cascadia subduction zone, a 680-mile (1,088-kilometer) fault
that runs up to 50 miles (80 kilometers) off the coast of the Pacific
Northwest — from Cape Mendocino in California to Vancouver
Island in southern British Columbia — has experienced a cluster
of four massive earthquakes during the past 1,600 years. Scientists
are trying to figure out if it is about to undergo a massive shift
one more time before entering a quiescent period.
"People need to know it could happen," said U.S. Geological
Survey geologist Brian Atwater.
The historical record for this zone, which has the longest recorded
data about its earthquakes of any major fault in the world, shows
that earthquakes occur in clusters of up to five events, with an
average time interval of 300 years between quakes, said Chris Goldfinger,
a marine geologist at Oregon State University. Goldfinger and other
scientists have been studying this subduction zone for many years.
The two most recent quakes on this fault occurred in the year
1700 (a magnitude 9 event) and approximately the year 1500. It has
now been 305 years since the last event. So is the Cascadia subduction
zone finished for now or on the brink of event No. 5?
"We know quite a bit about the periodicity of this fault
zone and what to expect," he said. "But the key point
we don’t know is whether the current cluster of earthquake
activity is over yet, or does it have another event left in it."
The Cascadia subduction zone occurs where the relatively thin
Juan de Fuca plate moves eastward and under the westward-moving
North American Plate. When that collision results in a rupture,
massive earthquakes occur. The other active subduction zone capable
of producing a major earthquake-tsunami sequence is in Alaska, the
site of a giant earthquake and subsequent tsunami in 1964.
Scientists say a rupture along the Cascadia fault would cause
the sea floor to bounce 20 feet (6 meters) or more, setting off
powerful ocean waves relatively close to shore. The first waves
could hit coastal communities in 30 minutes or less -- too rapidly
for the current warning systems to save lives.
A tsunami along the Atlantic Coast is considered extremely unlikely.
[...] |
DODGEVILLE, Wis. - A kangaroo that went on
a walkabout in frigid Wisconsin was captured Wednesday. But where
the marsupial came from remained a mystery.
Sheriff's deputies cornered the 150-pound kangaroo in a barn after
receiving calls for days from shocked residents who had seen it.
Officials from Henry Vilas Zoo in Madison, about 45 miles away,
planned to pick it up and take care of it.
Zoo director Jim Hubing said the kangaroo would not have survived
long in the Wisconsin winter. Temperatures in the animal's native
Australia generally do not drop below the 30s.
Sheriff Steve Michek said some people who spotted the kangaroo
were hesitant to report it "because they didn't want to be
made a fool of."
He said the animal might have escaped as someone was bringing
it through the county. |
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