The headline of this article is not a title of a science fiction film. It truthfully translates what is currently taking place in Iraq.

The gates of hell are now wide open – thanks to U.S. invasion – and their fires have enveloped almost everything in our country.

There is no electricity, no water, no fuel, no food rations, no security, no sewage …

There is terror everywhere and there is fear of everything – fear of the present and of what lies ahead in the future.

All indications tell that our future is bleak as there is nothing left in this country that makes you feel secure about your own future and that of your children.

What is happening is not a war, rebellion or insurgency. It is mass killing and annihilation coupled with torture and brutal and barbaric dismembering of innocent people.

Bombing and shelling of towns goes ahead and no one gives a damn for the lives lost and property damaged.

Politicians have not honored any of the promises they made during elections. There is a dangerous decline in the public services and government performance.

The shock we have received since U.S. troops landed in our midst and the new is beyond description.

Fear and terror have gripped the nation. Wherever you are at any time of the day you are liable to be killed by a stray bullet.

Stray bullets are no longer the prerogative of U.S. troops and their tormentors – the insurgents.

Almost everyone in Iraq now use their guns to shoot in order to scare, wound or kill.

If the bodyguards of a senior official want to reach a destination on time and are delayed by traffic jam, they fire in the air to scare other drivers to give way.

If someone is injured or killed as a result it is his or her problem.

Killing by mistake is now perhaps one of the main causes of death in Iraq.

Trust between the people and the government has collapsed. And now we are at the mercy of the stars because neither U.S. troops nor the government have the slightest idea of who is blowing up whom and why?

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon will hold a massive march and country music concert to mark the fourth anniversary of 9/11, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in an unusual announcement tucked into an Iraq war briefing yesterday.

"This year the Department of Defense will initiate an America Supports Your Freedom Walk," Rumsfeld said, adding that the march would remind people of "the sacrifices of this generation and of each previous generation."

The march will start at the Pentagon, where nearly 200 people died on 9/11, and end at the National Mall with a show by country star Clint Black.

Word of the event startled some observers. "I've never heard of such a thing," said John Pike, who has been a defense analyst in Washington for 25 years and runs GlobalSecurity.org.

The news also reignited debate and anger over linking Sept. 11 with the war in Iraq.

"That piece of it is disturbing since we all know now there was no connection," said Paul Rieckhoff, an Iraq veteran who heads Operation Truth, an anti-administration military booster.

Rieckhoff suggested the event was an ill-conceived publicity stunt. "I think it's clear that their public opinion polls are in the toilet," he said.

Rumsfeld's walk had some relatives of 9/11 victims fuming.

"How about telling Mr. Rumsfeld to leave the memories of Sept. 11 victims to the families?" said Monica Gabrielle, who lost her husband in the attacks.

Administration supporters insisted Rumsfeld was right to link Iraq and 9/11, and hold the rally.

"We are at war," said Rep. Pete King (R-L.I.). "It's essential that we support our troops."

He also said attacking Iraq was necessary after 9/11. "You do not defeat Al Qaeda until you stabilize the Middle East, and that's not possible as long as Saddam Hussein is in power."

DENVER - A U.S. Air Force colonel has been charged with painting obscenities on parked cars bearing pro-President Bush bumper stickers, police said on Wednesday.

Lt. Col. Alexis Fecteau, who supervises 41 full-time and part-time reservists at the National Security Space Institute in Colorado Springs, Colo., is suspected of vandalizing 12 cars at Denver International Airport over a six-month period, Denver police spokesman Sonny Jackson said.

"Lieutenant Colonel Fecteau has been charged with one count of felony mischief and six misdemeanor counts related to the vandalism," Jackson said.

Fecteau, who could not be reached for comment, is scheduled to be arraigned later this month.

Police said they received numerous complaints dating back to December 2004 from people with cars bearing Bush or Bush-Cheney campaign bumper stickers that their vehicles had been vandalized.

Police set up a bait car with a pro-Bush bumper sticker, parked it at the airport with a surveillance camera, and waited. On July 1, the camera recorded a man spray-painting over the bumper sticker with an expletive.

Investigators traced the license plate of the suspected vandal to Fecteau, 42, who turned himself into police last week and was released after posting a $5,000 bond.

Jackson would not comment on a possible motive for the vandalism, but said one victim had to spend $2,000 on repairs after it was spray-painted, which led to the felony charge.

Maj. Tina Barber-Matthew, spokeswoman for the U.S. Air Force Space Command, said the case was under investigation, but that it would be "premature" to discuss what discipline Fecteau would face if convicted.

"Until we can validate or invalidate the charges, he is still on full-duty status," she said.

Barber-Matthew said Fecteau has been in charge at the post since October 2004. The institute provides ongoing training to Air Force personnel to keep them current on space technology and its applications, she said.

"So we're driving down the road and it's midnight, so it's pitch-black, and when you're driving at night, you don't use any lights," says Terry Rodgers, "but we can see fine because we've got night vision goggles."

He's sitting in the living room of his mother's townhouse in Gaithersburg, telling the story of his last night in Iraq. He's still got his Army crew cut and he's wearing a T-shirt with an American flag on the chest.

"We're driving down this road and there's this tiny bridge over a little canal," he says. "They had rigged up this bomb and they had a tripwire running across the bridge and we hit it and it blew up."

Like the rest of the 13,877 Americans wounded in Iraq, Rodgers has a story to tell. He tells it in a matter-of-fact voice, like he's talking about making a midnight pizza run or something. He's sitting in an armchair with his right leg propped on an ottoman, the foot encased in a soft black cast that reaches almost to the knee. His crutches are lying on the rug beside the chair.

"The Humvee finally comes to a stop and the right side is just torn apart and I hear my squad leader screaming, 'I think I lost my arm!' And my best friend Maida was in the front passenger seat where the bomb went off and he was screaming, 'Where's help? Where's help?' And then he went quiet.

"And me, I'm trying to crawl out of the Humvee and I get most of my body out and just this leg is stuck and I thought it must be caught on something in the twisted metal. I look back and I see it's just laying there on the seat, so I'm like, 'Why is it stuck?' So I try to lift my leg up and it won't lift. I just had to pick up my leg and crawl the rest of the way out."

He mimes the action of picking up his leg with his hands, then he continues the story.

"I started patting myself down and that's when I noticed that my face took some shrapnel," he says. "It was all swollen on this side, so when I'm patting myself down, my middle finger went, like, this deep into my cheek where the shrapnel went in."

He points to a spot about halfway down his finger, showing how far it went into the shrapnel wound behind his right eye, which is still pretty much blind, unable to see anything but bright light.

"Then I started checking out my leg. I knew my femur was broken, but at that time I didn't know my calf was missing," he says. "And that's when I hear my best friend Maida and he started heaving."

Rodgers takes a few loud, quick breaths to show what Mark Maida sounded like.

"And he breathes like that for a few seconds and then he just stops. And that's when he died."

Rodgers pauses a moment.

"The two trucks behind us had to stop and make sure the area was secure before they could help us," he says. "And the first guys that showed up saw Maida in the front seat, leaning against the windshield and all I heard was, 'Sir, we lost Maida.'

"And then they helped my squad leader, who lost his right arm, and then they came over and helped me. They bandaged us up . . . and when the helicopter finally showed up, they loaded me and Maida into the chopper and flew us to Baghdad.

"And after that, I don't remember anything till like a week after I got to Walter Reed."

Heeding the Call

Terry Rodgers, who just turned 21, grew up in Rockville, son of a carpenter and a courthouse clerk. After graduating from Richard Montgomery High School in 2002, he worked as a mechanic in a Washington gas station, then joined the Army.

"It was something I always wanted to do," he says. "I thought it looked fun. I just wanted to get out on my own for a while. I got kind of bored being around here. I wanted to try something new."

He signed up in October 2002, but he didn't go into the Army until the following July. In between, the United States invaded Iraq, but Rodgers didn't pay much attention to that.

"I didn't have a political view," he says. "I'm not into politics."

He did his basic training at Fort Benning, Ga. Then his outfit -- the 2nd Squadron, 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment -- was assigned to Fort Irwin, Calif., in the Mojave Desert, where they played the bad guys in warfare training exercises.

"Basically we would just play laser tag in the desert," he says. "It was kind of fun."

They deployed to Iraq this January, assigned to a town about 30 miles south of Baghdad. Two nights after they arrived, an IED -- improvised explosive device -- blew up near their patrol base but nobody got hurt. Later, somebody set off a car bomb on the street in front of the base.

"It didn't do anything to us Americans," he says, "but it killed a few civilians."

Most days, Rodgers's platoon would patrol the town in Humvees, then set up a TCP -- traffic control point -- where they'd stop cars and search them for weapons. Or they'd do "house calls": "We'd pick random houses and just go in and search 'em." Sometimes they'd do a "dismounted patrol," which meant they wandered through the streets on foot.

"We'd have an interpreter with us and we'd try to talk to people," he says. "We didn't have any incidents when we were out walking. The biggest incident we'd have on foot patrol is we'd be mobbed by little kids asking us for candy. When people from back home would send me candy, I'd always give that to the kids."

Occasionally the Americans would hear about a house where somebody was rumored to be storing weapons or building bombs. They'd wait until dark and raid the place.

"It was very intense and very fast," he says. "We'd try to be as quiet as we could until we got to the front door, and then you just have the battering ram and you open the front door and you run in yelling and pulling your weapons and try to gain control of the house as fast as you can."

Other patrols found illegal weapons on these raids, but Rodgers's never did.

"We did hit the wrong house quite often," he says. "We had these overhead maps, satellite maps, and when you're on the street in the middle of the night, it's hard to find the right house. In those instances, we'd say, 'Sorry,' and give 'em a card with a phone number to call the Army and we'd pay for the damages."

In April, Rodgers's company was transferred to a tiny farming town about 20 miles away -- a place where no Americans had been stationed.

"We started looking for a building that would be suitable for a patrol base," he says. "And we took this building over. There was a family living there and we had to kick 'em out. . . . They weren't too happy about it, but there was nothing they could do."

A few days after they arrived in the little town, a Humvee on patrol was blown up by a bomb buried on a dirt road.

"It picked up the Humvee, and when it was in the air, it turned on its side," Rodgers says, "and my friend fell out and the Humvee ended up landing on him and it crushed him and he was killed."

His friend was Kevin W. Prince, 22, of Plain City, Ohio.

About a week later a car approached their patrol base, and the guys fired a few rounds to signal the driver that he should stop. He got out. Two American soldiers searched the car. When they opened the trunk, a bomb exploded, killing both of them.

It was scary. In three months, Rodgers's company had suffered no casualties -- nobody killed, nobody wounded. Now they'd lost three guys in a couple of weeks.

"We hadn't experienced anything like that before so it was nerve-racking," he says. "You try not to think about it because you have to get out there and keep doing the same things. Obviously if it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen, and worrying about it isn't going to do you any good."

Then, on a Thursday night, May 26, Rodgers's platoon was guarding the base when it got a call from a platoon that was patrolling the area: They'd found a bomb and needed reinforcements.

Rodgers and about 10 other guys piled into three Humvees and scrambled off to help. Speeding through the darkness, wearing their night vision goggles, they came to the canal with the bridge, where the bomb was.

The Wounds of War

Rodgers was flown to Baghdad, then to Germany, then to Washington, where he was taken to Walter Reed Army Medical Center on Memorial Day. But he doesn't remember any of that.

"The first memories I have turn out to be hallucinations," he says. "I thought my leg was burned off. I thought half my face was blown off. I thought little kids were jumping on me, stealing my eyes and my teeth."

He was doped up on pain medicine that made him see things that weren't there.

"He kept yelling at me to get the people behind him," his mother, Ann Rodgers, recalls. "He said, 'Get them away from me!' I said, 'There's nobody behind you.' He asked me if I could see the back of his eye because his face was gone. I said, 'Your face isn't gone.' He said, 'Liar!' "

His real injuries were almost as bad as the ones he hallucinated. He had a broken femur, broken jaw, broken cheekbone. His right calf was blown away. Also, his right ear couldn't hear and his right eye couldn't see.

He spent a month and a half at Walter Reed. The doctors wired his jaw shut, put a metal rod in his leg, did nine hours of surgery on his eye, reconstructed his calf, and did skin grafts.

"I've had way too many surgeries to count," he says.

He was never alone. Every night somebody stayed with him -- his mother or father or sister Marie, or his girlfriend, Jane Libert, 19, a student at McDaniel College in Maryland.

"I always had somebody to talk to," he says.

He got visits from celebrities, too. Generals came by to shake his hand and ask how he was doing. The Dave Matthews Band visited, as did players from the Washington Nationals and Colorado Rockies.

"I didn't catch their names," he says. "I was kind of high on morphine at the time. And you can't read their autographs."

One day a nurse came in to ask Rodgers if he wanted to meet President Bush, who was visiting the hospital.

Rodgers declined.

"I don't want anything to do with him," he explains. "My belief is that his ego is getting people killed and mutilated for no reason -- just his ego and his reputation. If we really wanted to, we could pull out of Iraq. Maybe not completely but enough that we wouldn't be losing people -- at least not at this rate. So I think he himself is responsible for quite a few American deaths."

Bill Swisher, a spokesman for Walter Reed, says it's "fairly common" for patients to decline to see visitors. "We've had visitors from Sheryl Crow to Hulk Hogan," he says, but he has no idea how many have refused to see Bush, who has visited the hospital eight times.

Rodgers says he also declined to meet Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice. This wounded soldier has lost faith in his leaders, and he no longer believes their repeated assurances of victory.

"It's gonna go on as long as we're there," he says. "There's always gonna be insurgents trying to blow us up. There's just too many of 'em that are willing to do it. You're never gonna catch all of 'em. And it seems like they have unlimited amounts of ammunition. So I don't think it's ever gonna end."

Moving On

"I can start putting weight on the leg and learn to walk again," Rodgers says.

He's lying in bed, head propped up on a pillow with an American flag design on it. He can't climb the stairs to his old bedroom so he's got a new one -- it used to be the family dining room. Next to his bed is a little table topped with three bottles of pills, a stick of Right Guard and a statue of Jesus.

He's been home for a few weeks now. He's feeling pretty good and is fairly optimistic about his future.

"I should be able to walk normally," he says. "My eye -- we really don't know about that yet. I might get some vision back. I lost most of the hearing in my right ear."

By the end of the year, he'll be out of the Army -- "medically retired" -- and he's happy about that: "I did my tour. I had my fun. Time to move on with my life."

He wants to go to school -- the Veterans Administration will pay for it, he says -- but he's not sure what he wants to study. "I've got a few ideas, but I don't know what I want to do yet."

For now, he'd like to get back on his feet and take a few weekend trips while he goes to rehab during the week. And he wants to get reacquainted with his old friends. Maybe he can tell them what Iraq is like, he says, but it won't be easy.

"They see it on TV, but they can only guess what it feels like over there," he says. "To actually be there and feel it and hear it -- I don't think many people have a clue what it's like."

COLDPLAY frontman CHRIS MARTIN has snubbed British Prime Minister TONY BLAIR's invitation to meet him at his London residence - because the YELLOW star feared it would damage his image.

A galaxy of stars, including rockers OASIS and SIR ELTON JOHN, have accepted invitations to Blair's Downing Street home.

And Martin respects the British premier, but does not want to be seen publicly socialising with the leader of the Labour party, for fear of offending his fans who may disagree with Blair's political goals and stance over the war in Iraq.

He says, "I'm not going to go. I really like Tony Blair. He's interested in the same things as I am - he plays the guitar and he always gives the impression of doing what he can to help.

"But I don't particularly want to be photographed with him at the moment."

The plot by America’s military bosses was devilish in both design and intent – to fabricate an outrage against innocent civilians, fool the world and provide a pretext for war. In the Pentagon, a top secret team drew up a plan to simultaneously send up two airliners painted and numbered exactly the same, one from a civil airport in America, the other from a secret military airbase nearby.

The one from the airport would have military personnel on board who had checked in as ordinary passengers under false names. The one from the airbase would be an empty drone, a remote-controlled unmanned aircraft.

Somewhere along their joint flight paths, the passenger-carrying plane would drop below radar height, and disappear, landing back at the airbase and unloading its occupants in secret.

Meanwhile, the drone would have taken up the other plane’s designated course. High over the island of Cuba, it would be exploded in mid-air after broadcasting an international distress call that it was under attack from enemy fighters.

The world would be told that a plane load of blameless American holidaymakers had been deliberately shot down by Fidel Castro’s Communists – and that the US had no choice but to declare war and topple his regime.

This ‘agent provocateur’ plan – code named OPERATION NORTHWOODS and revealed in official archives – dates from 1962 when the Cold War was at its height.

Four decades later, there are a growing number of people who look back at this proto-conspiracy and then to the events of 9/11 and see uncanny and frightening modern parallels.

For Cuba, read Iraq, say these skeptics. For the dummy airliner, read the Twin Towers in New York.

The Northwoods plan is crucial to the argument presented in a hugely provocative – many would say fantastical – yet, at times, genuinely disturbing new analysis of 9/11 by two radical British based journalists, Ian Henshall and Rowland Morgan.

Did the CIA actively help the hijackers?

In it, they examine various conspiracy theories that suggest the Bush administration connived in the devastating aerial attacks on New York and Washington four years ago.

The reason? To give Bush the excuse he wanted to push ahead with his secret, long-held plane to invade Iraq and capture its oilfields.

As we shall see. Many of the theories they raise are outlandish in the extreme. It would be easy to dismiss them as hokum, the invention of over-active imaginations among those whose instinct is always to find some way to blame America for the world’s ills.

Are we really supposed to believe that the CIA actively helped the hijackers succeed – or even that the US government staged the whole attack and itself murdered thousands of its own citizens?

Some would say that even in discussing such notions, we are lending comfort to terrorists and doing a disservice to the dead.

However, much of evidence the authors present is undeniably compelling – and their arguments sound rather less preposterous in the light of OPERATION NORTHWOODS all those years ago. That plan was proposed in all seriousness by America’s Joint Chiefs of Staff in a memo to the Secretary of Defence. It got as far as the Attorney General – Robert Kennedy, brother of the president, John Kennedy, before being vetoed.

It is proof, says Henshall and Morgan, that forces at the top of the US Government are capable of conceiving a deadly, devious and fraudulent plan to further their own secret ends – even under such a supposedly ‘nice guy’ president as JFK.

In which case, can the idea of a 9/11 plot by those who serve the deeply mistrusted Bush really be ruled out with total certainty, without at least considering the arguments?

Of course, the official explanation for 9/11 is that Al Qaeda just got lucky that sunny morning in September 2001.

The terrorists conducted their attacks without outside help, by this account, and intelligence and other blunders by the US authorities that contributed to their terrible success – for example, ignored warnings that an attack involving aeroplanes was likely, or issuing US entry visas to 19 Islamic fanatics set on murder – were just that: blunders.

This is the White House’s version and it was endorsed by a Washington commission of inquiry under Thomas Kean published last year.

But, according to Henshall and Morgan, the story is full of gaping holes and unanswered questions. And the most startling question, which remains unresolved, they say, is why the hijackers’ principal target, the two 110-storey towers at the World Trade Centre in New York crumbled so easily.

No-one who watched each building suddenly cascade into dust and debris in just 20 seconds will ever forget the slow-motion horror. But now the question is asked: was it all too pat, too neat?

Though 30 years old, the towers had expressly been built to survive the impact of a Boeing 707, a plane the same size and carrying as much fuel as the ones that struck. That they collapsed after being hit and fell at such speed was unprecedented in the history of architecture. It astonished many engineers.

The official explanation is known as the Pancake Effect – steel supports melting in the intense fireball, causing the floors to tumble down on each other.

The problem here is that the heat from the explosions was probably not nearly as great as people tend to assume.

There was indeed a lot of kerosene from the aircraft fuel tanks when flight 11 from Boston hit the North Tower between the 94th and the 98th floors but pictures show that most of this fireballed outwards. Experts have questioned whether the fire ever got hot enough to melt the buildings’ steel frames.

Oddly, too, original estimates by firefighters after the second plane, Flight 175, hit the South Tower, were that the blaze was containable.

Two firefighters actually reached the crash zone on the 78th floor and a tape exists of them radioing down that just two hoses would be enough to get the fire under control – in which case the situation should have been little different from a ‘normal’ office fire, and no steel tower ever collapsed as the result of such a blaze.

‘The fire wasn’t hot enough to cause a collapse’

Kevin R Ryan, laboratory director at a US underwriting firm specializing in product safety, was sacked from his job last year after questioning the official explanation.

“The buildings should have easily withstood the thermal stress caused by the burning jet fuel”, he said. “If steel did soften or melt, this was certainly not due to jet fuel fires of any kind, let alone the briefly burning fires in those towers. That fact should be of great concern to all Americans.”

Intriguingly, Ryan claimed that his firm had checked and approved the steel used in the towers when they were built. This was later vehemently denied by the bosses who sacked him.

To add to the mystery, the tape of the two firemen was kept secret and when relatives were finally allowed to listen to it, they had to sign strict confidentiality agreements.

If the Pancake Effect theory is wrong, there’s one obvious alternative: that the towers were brought down by the sheer impact of the planes hitting them. But this, according to the skeptics, ignores basic physics.

The initial hit on the North Tower, for example, destroyed 33 of the 59 columns in its north face. This meant the damage was asymmetrical, so any resulting collapse would surely have been lopsided.

In fact, the building fell evenly. The TV aerial on the summit sank vertically, in a straight line.

There were other strange anomalies. According to the Kean Commission, when the first plane struck: ‘A jet fuel fireball erupted and shot down a bank of elevators, bursting into numerous lower floors, including the lobby level, and the basement four storeys below ground.’

Unlikely, say Henshall and Morgan. A firm by a French documentary crew, who by chance were following a New York firefighting team that day, shows the first men arriving. The lobby was covered in fine debris and the windows were shattered but there was none of the soot or oily residue that burning jet fuel would have left behind.

Meanwhile down in the basement, a 50-ton hydraulic press was reduced to rubble and a steel and concrete fire door demolished. Witnesses there said the destruction was less like that from a fireball flash and more like that from a bomb.

Some firefighters told reporters that day that they thought there had been bombs in the building – before apparently being silenced by their chiefs. So had Al Qaeda cleverly placed explosives inside the towers as well as attacking them from the air?

Or, as conspiracy theorists would have it, had some homegrown agency mined the towers to make sure they fell – but neatly without collapsing over the rest of Manhattan, America’s financial and business heartland?

The authors quote an expert demolition contractor from Pennsylvania, Michael Taylor, who said the fall of the buildings ‘looked like a controlled demolition’.

Another expert, Van Romero, vice-president for research at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, reached the same opinion after studying videos of the disaster, and concluded that ‘explosive devices inside the buildings’ caused them to collapse.

Strangely and without explanation, he recanted that view just ten days after going public with it. Might he possibly have been leaned on?

Even stranger, say Henshall and Morgan, was the collapse of a third building on the World Trade Centre site, a smaller 47-storey block known as WTC7, which was largely ignored by the world’s media.

It had not been hit by a plane yet it, too, mysteriously fell many hours after the Towers had gone.

The official explanation for this was that fuel stores caught fire as a result of debris from the burning towers, the building began to bulge in one corner, and after that it was unsalvageable.

But remember that, according to Henshall and Morgan, a steel-framed building had never collapsed as a result of a fire before this day. And, again according to the authors, WTC7 appears almost untouched by fire in photographs taken at the time.

The landlord of the World Trade Centre site, Larry Silverstein, explicitly suggested at one point that WTC7 was deliberately demolished. He told a US TV documentary that a decision was taken to ‘pull’ the building rather than risk loss of life, though this was later denied.

Certainly, according to Henshall and Morgan, the building’s fall in seven seconds was just as textbook-tidy and suspicious as the collapse of the Twin Towers. Given that it also housed offices of the US Secret Service, the CIA and the Defence Department, this has led conspiracy theorists to give it a key role in the supposed 9/11 plot – as we will see shortly.

Part of the whole problem, according to Henshall and Morgan, is that vital evidence about what happened was destroyed or muddied in the wake of the atrocity.

One expert said there were bombs inside the towers

Ground Zero, the base of the towers, was fiercely protected by the authorities – understandably so because it not only contained human remains but a cache of seized drugs held in an FBI office and more than $1 billion of gold from bank vaults in the Buildings.

Yet what went on behind all the heavy security?

After most air disasters, the wreckage of the planes is meticulously gathered up and pieced together in search of clues.

Extraordinarily, in the course of removing the rubble from the Twin Towers to a nearby landfill site, the 9/11 salvage operation seems to have ‘lost’ four six-ton aircraft engines, besides failing to find the ‘black box’ flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders from either of the planes.

These data boxes – which could have revealed exactly what happened in the doomed jets – are deliberately designed to withstand heavy impacts and exceptionally high temperatures. It is, according to experts, very rare for them not to be recovered after an accident.

Unfortunately, according Henshall and Morgan, there was a singular lack of official zeal even to establish the very basic fact that the aircraft that hit the Twin Towers were the same as those that took off from Boston.

Perhaps, with almost the entire world watching the attacks on TV, it hardly seemed necessary to prove the glaringly obvious. But this failure to follow standard procedures for accident investigation once again gave encouragement to the conspiracy theorists.

And then there was the oddity of the single passport. The black boxes may have been destroyed and steel girders melted – yet somehow one of the hijackers’ passports avoided this inferno and was found intact in a nearby street by ‘a passer-by’.

To Henshall and Morgan, that seems absurd, as does the almost instant identification of this person as a hijacker rather than a passenger or a Twin Towers office worker. Conspiracy theorists suspect the passport was planted to help establish the official story in the first, critical hours after the disaster.

Why didn't fighter planes intercept the hijackers?

Still more unanswered questions surround what happened at the Pentagon in Washington, in the third successful terrorist attack that day.

After taking off from Dulles Airport, Washington, American Airlines Flight 77 dropped off the radar screens for 36 minutes when its transponders sending signals back to air traffic control were switched off.

When the blip reappeared, it was closing on the city but where precisely the aircraft had been for the past half an hour was a mystery. Nor could anyone in air traffic control figure out what it was.

Experienced officials apparently watched its speed and maneuverability and thought it must be a military plane. Conspiracy theorists maintain this is precisely what it was.

In a repeat of New York, no evidence has ever been produced from the wreckage to prove that it was Flight 77 that hurtled into the side of the Pentagon at 350mph.

Photographs show that the hole it made was large enough for the fuselage of a Boeing 757 but not for the wings and the tail, though these supposedly disappeared through the gap and then vapourised.

For the conspiracy theorists, this points to a conclusion that what hit was not Flight 77, and not even a jetliner.

Some witnesses claim the plane they say hit the Pentagon was a small one, an eight – or 12-seater, and that it did not have the roar of an airliner but the shrill whine of a fighter plane. One witness is convinced it was a missile.

The authors say the matter could be cleared up by CCTV footage of the crash from a nearby filling station, a hotel and traffic surveillance cameras. Unfortunately, the FBI seized all three videos within minutes of the crash and they have never been released.

The hole in the Pentagon was too small for a Boeing

If they were produced, they might lay to rest the theory that what hit the Pentagon was a military drone painted in airline livery and that just before impact it fired a missile to enable a clean entry which would explain the lack of debris. But until they are, the skeptics will continue to have a field day.

In essence, to the extreme conspiracy theorists, what took place on 9/11 was a repeat of the aborted OPERATION NORTHWOODS.

Far from being an attack by Islamic terrorists, they say, the events were a complete hoax, a conjuring trick by the US government in just the same way that Kennedy’s generals wanted to fool the world over Cuba.

Planes were swapped, ‘drones’ slammed into the World Trade Centre (which was mined with explosives as well) and the Pentagon, and the identities of alleged hijackers from the Middle East were stolen or invented to put the blame on Al Qaeda.

Along with the ‘passengers’ who apparently boarded the planes, the ‘suicide hijackers’ are now either dead or living under different identities, just as the pentagon planned fro the military personnel it was going to use back in 1962.

The theory seizes on the fact that, like the plane that apparently hit the Pentagon, both Flight 11 and Flight 175 switched off their transponders on their way to the Twin Towers and disappeared from Radar screens. According to the skeptics, this gave them time and opportunity to land at the handily located Griffiss Air Force Base, a Pentagon command center which also houses research laboratories into advanced computers and radar. There, they were supposedly replaced by remote-controlled substitutes.

In technical terms, this is not as far fetched as it sounds. The US military experimented with unmanned aircraft as far back as World War II and there have been successful jet models since. Well-connected conspirators, so the theory goes, would have little difficulty getting their hands on a system to fit in an airliner.

The switch would supposedly be foolproof because, as we have seen, the aircraft in the ruins would not be properly identified.

Then there was the smaller building known as WTC7. It was the obvious point from which to run the New York end of the scam, guiding the planes into their target. Afterwards, of course, the evidence had to be destroyed, hence its demolition.

Taken as a rush, and without looking at the detail this might seem vaguely plausible. But could we really have been so totally and utterly conned?

Common sense says no. An operation of such intricacy and complexity would require the co-operation – and the silence until death – of thousands of people. Everything we have read about the victims on the planes, and their heartbroken relatives, would be a carefully constructed sham.

It might just be possible in a totalitarian society but surely not in a flawed yet robust democracy like America. And with four missions (the hijackers of the fourth plane, Flight 93, were overthrown by its passengers), not just one as in OPERATION NORTHWOODS? No.

To be fair to Henshall and Morgan, they make it clear that they themselves are not advocating such an extreme theory of empty planes and hoax attacks.

They admit the Pentagon’s radar reconstructions suggest the planes were not switched, and that alleged Al Qaeda ringleaders are said by their interrogators to have confirmed the official account.

Comment: And to whom would these "alleged Al Qaeda ringleaders" have confessed? To their interrogators. And for whom do these interrogators work? Those who planned and carried out 9/11. So the source isn't very reliable, is it?

Instead of retreating into fantasy, they simply insist that something is being held back – that we have not been told the full story. And it’s hard to discount all their arguments.

Why, they ask, were air traffic controllers so slow to report suspected hijackings to the military that day in breach of standard procedures, with the result that fighter planes arrived too late to intercept?

Flight controllers in four separate incidents were unaccountably slow to realize that something was wrong and alert the military authorities. Even after one plane was definitely known to have been hijacked, they failed to respond promptly when others went missing.

The air force scrambled from the wrong base

For some reason, too, when fighter planes eventually were scrambled to New York, they were from an airbase 150 miles away, rather than the much closer one in New Jersey. The Twin Towers were ablaze before they got there.

All the while the local TV channels were smoothly getting eye-in-the-sky helicopters into the air over the World Trade Centre. In the words of the authors: “Their routine mobilizations stand in stark contrast to the apparent impotence and indecisiveness of the $350-billion-a-year US military."

Yet for all the shortcomings of the Federal Aviation Authority and the US Air Force that day, no-one was ever fired or reprimanded.

One explanation for this paralysis is that there was, as fate would have it, an air defence exercise going on in US airspace that same day, codenamed Vigilant Guardian. The air traffic controllers were confused by this, thinking the planes disappearing from their screens might be part of the exercise.

Coincidence? No say the 9/11 sceptics. This was exactly the sort of smokescreen operation that anyone wanting to make life easier for the hijackers would launch to paralyse any authorities that might get in the way.

When the first evidence came that hijackings were taking place, traffic control officials wasted valuable time wondering whether or not this was part of the Vigilant Guardian exercise.

Suck a smokescreen fits well with two types of government-inspired plot postulated by 9/11 sceptics – popularly known as ‘LIHOP’ and ‘MIHOP’.

‘LIHOP’ – ‘Let It Happen On Purpose’ – holds that since the turn of the new century, radical right-wingers in Washington (the so-called neo-cons) had been keen to get a US military presence in the Middle East oilfields and were also desperate to do something about Al Qaeda, which had been targeting US interests overseas.

When evidence came in of an impending terrorist attack, they decided to ignore it. They intended that it should succeed. It would act at the very least as a ‘wake-up’ call to their apathetic fellow countrymen and at best as an excuse for war.

In the much the same way, some historians believe, President Roosevelt knew in advance from broken codes about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941 – but let it happen, at the cost of 2,400 lives, because he wanted an excuse to join World War II.

‘MIHOP” takes a step on from this – ‘Make it Happen On Purpose’. This theory has the same motivation but the active involvement of US agents. Planted in Al Qaeda, they helped organize the plot, or at the very least cleared a path for the hijackers.

These agents may even have tried to keep down casualty figures, which some think were suspiciously small in the circumstances.

The plane that hit the Pentagon was seen to swerve at the last minute and hit an area of the building that was largely unoccupied – and which had just been fitted with reinforced external walls and blast-resistant windows. A crash into the other side would have killed and maimed many thousands instead of just 125.

In New York, too, more than 50,000 inhabitants of the Towers were targeted but just 2,600 killed – not least because of the orderly way in which the buildings collapsed, after most of the occupants had been evacuated. Was this an example of a ‘managed’ atrocity?

For most observers, the idea of US involvement in the attacks still strains credulity beyond breaking point. Yet that catalogue of unanswered questions remains troubling.

Some are very basic. How, for example, did the hijackers manage to slip past airport security with weapons?

The White House explanation is plastic knives, but there has never been any independent confirmation of how the men were armed. Some passengers who made phone calls from the doomed planes said they witnessed stabbings but others spoke of bombs and even guns being used.

To some, the official recourse to ‘plastic knives’ smacks of a cover-up to conceal security lapses – or worse, a deliberate turning of blind eyes.

So how did the passengers make those phone calls?

Another problem here is those very phone calls from the planes. Experts in Henshall and Morgan’s book say it is all but impossible to make a mobile phone call above 8,000 feet – let alone four times that altitude, as the jet passengers are alleged to have done.

So how were these calls on which so much of the 9/11 narrative has been built ever made? Could they possibly have been invented?

The authors write: ‘Few issues cause as much controversy amongst 9/11 sceptics as these, not least because they were cited – by Tony Blair among others – as eyewitness reports and proof positive the official narrative was true.’

Doubts are even raised over the gung-ho story of Flight 93, the fourth plane in the attacks, which passengers apparently seized back from the hijackers, causing it to crash into a field but miss Washington.

The legend of the heroic cockpit-storming, launched to cries of ‘Let’s Roll’, was a product of tapes that have never been authenticated or released to anyone other than the victims’ relatives, who were sworn to secrecy.

Henshall and Morgan say the matter could be cleared up if recordings or billing evidence from phone companies were produced but they never have been.

This call for transparency is the thrust of their whole argument. It is time, they say, for a full and truly independent inquiry into 9/11 that will reveal all the facts and silence the rumours.

One thing it could consider would be the anthrax attack on America three weeks after 9/11. Five recipients of contaminated letters died, postal facilities were closed, as were office buildings on Capitol Hill where hundreds of lawmakers and staff were tested and given an antibiotic.

At the time, this was seized on by the Washington power-brokers pressing for action against Iraq. ‘Who but Saddam Hussein could have supplied Arab terrorists with anthrax,’ they asked.

By contrast, skeptics about 9/11 see this as this finishing touch to the grand plot – an attempt to distract attention from any doubts about the atrocities and the lessons to be learned from them.

They may have a case. The letters mysteriously stopped and the anthrax spores were identified by scientists as a particular strain stemming only from the government’s own labs in Maryland.

But by then the scare had shut down congress at a crucial time, when questions about 9/11 were beginning to surface, and helped deepen the mood of fear and paranoia among ordinary Americans.

It was those fears, say the skeptics, that Bush exploited to get his way on Iraq. Had he plotted it that way all along? Henshall and Morgan raise enough awkward points to make it a thought that cannot simply be laughed out of court.

After all, Bush and Blair, took us to war assuring us that ‘the Iraq regime continues to possess some of the most lethal weapons ever devised’. Yet those weapons of mass destruction have not been found and many doubt they existed.

With public trust one of the major casualties of the war, can any of us be absolutely sure we have not been caught up in a lie and perhaps a bigger one even than we ever though possible?

In their inquiries Henshall and Morgan may have discover no smoking guns – but they have certainly left a whiff of something sinister in the air.

9/11 Revealed: Challenging The Facts Behind The War On Terror, by Ian Henshall and Rowland Morgan is published by Robinson on August 25 at £8.99. To order a copy (P&P free), Telephone 0870 161 0870

Let's talk dirty. The 9/11 suicide hijackers — all Arabs — attacked the U.S. instead of Brazil or Japan because the U.S. government has been neck-deep in the politics of the Arab world for a generation, whereas the Brazilian and Japanese governments haven't. There is a connection between Washington's Mideast policies — its support for oppressive Arab regimes, its military interventions in the region, and its uncritical backing for Israeli government policies — and the fact that Americans have become the preferred targets for Islamist terrorist attacks.

Indeed, no other non-Muslim nation except Israel was a target for Islamist terrorist attacks until after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. And the attacks since then have been aimed at the citizens of countries that were complicit in that invasion: Londoners, not Parisians; Spaniards, not Germans; Australians holidaying in Bali, not Japanese holidaying in Malaysia.

There you have it: two full paragraphs of obscenity. Prime Minister Tony Blair himself says so. He informed us last Tuesday that any attempt to link the terrorist attacks in London to his decision to follow the Bush administration in invading Iraq was "an obscenity."

That's nonsense. All the comments in the first two paragraphs of this article are about cause and effect. You may agree or disagree with the analysis, but discussions of cause and effect are still permissible and even necessary. So how does Blair — and President George W. Bush in Washington, and Prime Minister John Howard in Canberra — get away with forbidding us to talk about what is causing all this?

The key technique is to claim that any attempt to explain why these attacks are happening is also an attempt to condone and justify them.

Blair gave a virtuoso demonstration of the technique in his press conference Tuesday.

What he said was, "It is time we stopped saying: `Okay, we abhor (Al Qaeda's) methods but we kind of see something in their ideas or they have a sliver of an excuse or a justification for it.' They have no justification for it. Neither do they have any justification for killing people in Israel. Let's just get that out of the way as well. There is no justification for suicide bombing in Palestine, in Iraq, in London, in Egypt, in Turkey, anywhere."

Nobody had actually said suicide bombings are justified. What they are saying, in increasing numbers, is that actions have consequences, and that the reason a few young British Muslims became suicide bombers in 2005, whereas none at all became suicide bombers in 2000, is precisely the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

As the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency pointed out recently, the invasion of Iraq has turned the country into a breeding ground for a new generation of Arab jihadis in the Middle East.

What it failed to add was that it has also spread the virus of Islamist terrorism into Muslim communities in Western countries that previously contained only a few fanatics. Until Iraq, none of them contained people so filled with rage and so convinced that they were involved in a holy war that they were willing to blow themselves and dozens of strangers up.

The problem is that the invasion of Iraq made it look (to those already susceptible to such extreme arguments) as if the Islamist extremists, who had barely any credibility outside the Arab world even 10 years ago, were right. If there were no terrorists in Iraq, why did Western countries invade it? Because there is a Judeo-Christian conspiracy to destroy Islam, stupid. If there is another terrorist attack in the U.S., it is likely to come from within the resident Muslim community, as it has in Britain.

Most American Muslims, like most British Muslims, are appalled by the radical doctrines that are sweeping some of their young men and women away. But it is self-serving nonsense on the part of the governments of these countries to pretend that this is just some inexplicable outburst of violence by weird Muslim people. The laws of cause and effect still rule.

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based Canadian journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.

A senior lawyer for the U.S. government has told a judge hearing a lawsuit over Maher Arar's deportation to Syria that foreign citizens passing through American airports have almost no rights.

At most, Mary Mason told a hearing in Brooklyn, N.Y., passengers would have the right not to be subjected to "gross physical abuse."

The policy has implications for Canadians who head for international destinations via big American airports in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and other major centres.

Mason said the U.S. government is interpreting its powers in such a way that passengers never intending to enter the U.S. connecting to international flights at U.S. airports must prove they are no threat and could be allowed to enter the country.

If passengers are deemed to be inadmissible, they have no constitutional rights even if later taken to an American prison. Mason told Judge David Trager that's because they are deemed to be still outside the U.S., from a legal point of view.

"Someone who's inadmissible is in the same category as the people that the CIA snatches and grabs from other countries," said Barbara Olshansky, a lawyer for the U.S.-based Center for Constitutional Rights, which is suing a number of U.S. officials on Arar's behalf.

"You are fair game for however executive branch wants to treat you."

Mason said the interpretation means travellers can be detained without charge, denied the right to consult a lawyer, and even refused necessities such as food and sleep.

That's what happened to Arar, a Canadian-Syrian citizen who was stopped while trying to board a connecting flight in New York in 2002 and accused of having terrorist connections.

The Ottawa engineer was detained, not allowed to speak to a lawyer or the Canadian consul, and eventually deported through Jordan to Syria, where he claimed he was tortured while being held in prison for a year.

At most, Mason told the judge, a foreign passenger detained while travelling through a U.S. airport might have a limited right to protection from "gross physical abuse."

But in a motion filed this week, the U.S. Justice Department argues that even if torture does occur, U.S. officials can't be sued under the Torture Victims Protection Act because it only applies to foreign individuals committing or allowing torture.

The department wants the Arar lawsuit dismissed on that basis.

The U.S. Department of Justice declined to discuss the case or what the new interpretation could mean for Canadians travelling through the United States.

However, department spokeswoman Cynthia Magnuson issued this short statement: "The United States does not practise torture, export torture or condone torture."

In legal briefs written by U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, the Justice Department has defined torture to mean "pain consistent with major organ failure or death."

For the past four years since 9/11, I have been asked by many people in my own private life if I thought the Internet would be censored in some form. What has lead people to ask this question are the many truth-telling websites, which are popping up seemingly out of nowhere. Where they were once the brunt of derision, the websites of people like Alex Jones, Jeff Rense, and David Icke now receive millions of hits per month EACH. It seems that not as many people are mocking the truth these days. The category of patriotic truth-telling websites are now near the top of the offerings of the entire Internet, which I am very pleased to see and be a part.

I began THE KENTROVERSY PAPERS because as a writer and research-journalist, I was not about to sit here and NOT contribute to the enlightenment that is going on these days. If I remained silent, I would be complicit in the continuing cover-up that this group of globalist scum attempt to perpetrate. Not wanting to be a part of the problem, I sought to play a role in the solution.

Recently, I received an e-mail that said:

“. . . your work consistently turns up heaps of data that gives me pause to re-evaluate a number of my pre-conceptions about the American socio-political-economic landscape that have arisen from ignorance.”

When I receive comments such as this, I know that I am successful in helping people to understand the BIG LIE that surrounds us all. THIS is why I do what I do, and this is why I am proud to be included in the continuously growing group of people who are helping others understand the difference between lies and truth. I see great progress being made, especially in a June 2005 MSNBC poll, which asked: “Do you believe President Bush mislead the nation to go to war with Iraq?” -- where 94% of the respondents felt he LIED, and only 6% believed in his honesty.

But, the results of THAT POLL was never reported on the MSNBC cable news channel itself, and you should be asking yourself WHY.

Even the globalist-controlled establishment media cannot hide the fact that Bush is seen by many, including myself, as simply the worst President of all-time. An AP-Ipsos poll, which was reported on August 5, 2005 by CNN, stated that Bush’s approval rating is at 38%, which is the lowest of his entire term thus far. If this represents the true numbers, then I posit a correlation between this number of 38% and the percentage of people still asleep concerning the horrors unfolding in this country at the present time.

Realize that there are a sad minority of people out there STILL believing that Bush is a Christian, even though he has NEVER been seen at any church services, does NOT belong to any church congregation, and didn’t attend one single memorial service for any of the 9/11 victims. Even though it has been documented and proven that the Skull & Bones initiation ritual involves homosexual acts in a coffin, and Skull & Bones itself is a part of a larger occult group that calls itself ‘The Brotherhood of Death,’ there are people still out there trying so desperately to believe that Bush is a Christian -- such is the level of their denial.

This years Bilderberg Group meeting -- which was held on May 5-8, 2005 at the Dorint Softiel Seehotel in Rottach-Egern, Bavaria, Germany -- is notable for it involved a major discussion of the Internet. Brave and honorable patriots such as Alex Jones, Phil Jayhan, Greg Szymanski, and Jeff Rense are squarely in the crosshairs of these globalist scum, who fear what they described in this years meeting as “truth-telling patriots.” The Internet is seen as a threat to the globalists, and this is for good reason. For it is the Internet that has been instrumental in waking up tens of millions of people to the fact that these people have an agenda that in no way benefits the people of any nation, and their acting upon this agenda is treasonous, to say the least.

With the Internet viewed as their largest obstacle at this point in time, the Bilderberg Group globalists were seen and heard in this meeting making comments about how the Internet in America must be shut down, and how these “truth-telling patriots” must be stopped at whatever the cost. Forgetting for a moment, the issues related to “free speech and expression,” let us take a look at what it is that the globalists view as their largest impediment blocking the full implementation of their agenda of a one-world global government --- their precious new world order, as it were.

When the Internet reached the mass consciousness of our global population in the 1990’s, most of what was hyped and promoted was the use of the Internet to procure and obsess over pornography. Pornography has always played a part in the mass acceptance of various technologies -- the VCR in the 1970’s and 1980’s, the DVD player in the 1990’s, and of course, the Internet in the 1990’s and beyond. But, pornography and the various other Internet diversions -- such as sports, gambling, and online videogaming did not appeal to everyone.

Some of us who harbor intellectual interests began putting together and disseminating terabytes of research data, and subsequently publishing our own research findings online. Ninety-nine percent of the people who consider themselves Internet researchers -- such as myself -- do not make one single penny doing what they do. I cannot speak for anyone else, but for me, it is a matter of moral imperative. Having a talent for both writing and research, I would be complicit in the cover-up if I did not report on these matters. I leave it to my readers to be their own final arbiters of truth in these matters.

As a matter of fact, many mainstream news publications have been caught misstating the size of their daily readership, as with the recent cases involving the Dallas Morning News and Newsday newspapers. This has an effect on everything from what these papers charge for advertising, to the general reputation and veracity of the publication in its’ local community. The so-called alternative news websites of Jeff Rense, Alex Jones, World Net Daily, and NewsMax.com have now become the de facto mainstream press, with MILLIONS of people visiting these sites on a monthly basis. The tens of millions of people who have been awakened to the lies and crimes of the globalists is the reason why the Internet must be stopped.

The domestic terror psychological-operation known as 9/11 actually backfired on the globalist cabal. When a person Googles ‘9/11’ -- they end up with 29,200,000 hits. According to the website called Internet World Stats, the United States has 68.5% Internet penetration, which means that nearly 7 of every 10 people are connected in some way to the Internet. The Internet was instrumental in showing tens of millions of people worldwide the truth behind the 9/11 attacks -- that they were carried out to demolish a building complex that had out-lived its’ fiscal usefulness -- and it has to be the largest case of insurance fraud of which I have ever been aware in the history of this nation.

So, how exactly will the Internet become a ‘sanitized’ gated-community?

There are four primary ways in which this can be accomplished – and it is my own personal informed opinion that all four techniques will be used simultaneously:

Internet Will Be Used As Part of Terror Attack Against The USA:

This has been shown on the most recent season of the television show ‘24,’ where a rogue terrorist cell had kidnapped the Secretary of State and threatened to broadcast his execution on the Internet, live and in real-time. Just as the X-Files spin-off THE LONE GUNMEN showing a plan to fly a hijacked airliner into the World Trade Center in March 2001, I believe that this fourth season of ‘24,’ which had shown both the Internet being used to carry out a terror attack, AND the launch of a nuclear missile against a major U.S. city. It is my own firm belief that what ‘24’ was truly showing were near-term future events -- just as The Lone Gunmen episode did in March 2001 -- six months before 9/11. Incidentally, the March 4, 2001 date of The Lone Gunmen episode involving an airplane attack on the World Trade Center was exactly 191 days before 9/11 -- and here is yet another example of the 911 signature and numerological coincidence involved with this tragic event.

The Internet involvement in a large-scale terror attack against a major U.S. city will give the neo-con cabal all the pretext it needs to sanitize the Internet once and for all -- which will all be done for our own safety, of course. It will also be hyped as a way of getting rid of junk e-mail spam and viruses, as well as finally creating a ‘family friendly’ environment for all to enjoy the Internet in peace and complete safety. Any time children are used, or are seen as the motivation for, public action, the sleeping masses go along without questioning the action -- simply because it is being done for the children.

Passage of Hate-Crime Laws and Hate-Speech Laws (thought crimes):

It is important to note that the real reason why hate-crime laws are passed is NOT to protect anyone’s religious beliefs, ethnic heritage, or racial identity. This does not mean, however, that religious beliefs, ethnicity, and race are NOT used to enflame such issues. They are all used, which to the typical person who has been trained to accept everything perceived authority figures say, seem like reasonable actions. Why wouldn’t any reasonable person want to stop racism, for example?

Most people cannot see these laws for what they really are -- which is to stifle debate or silence a large group of people on a particular subject that has been deemed ‘off limits’ by the globalists. For instance, recent laws that have been suggested all have one thing in common -- if anyone’s writing incites or gives aid to groups who commit violent acts -- that person can be prosecuted under the Orwellian thought-crime laws that are sprouting up throughout the world. The Tony Blair government, at this moment, is planning to roll-out laws that criminalize all criticism of the government and its’ policies.

The globalist methodology is to lower the hammer upon an individual or group who is despised by the general population, which elicits the “we didn’t need their viewpoint, anyway” response. However, such people do not realize that what is being set up is legal precedence, so while thought-crime laws of today are brought against someone who might be seen as despicable by the mass population, tomorrow, these same laws can be used against anyone else -- all because legal precedence has been established. Today, while these thought-crime laws can be exercised against so-called ‘terrorists,’ tomorrow, they can and will be used against you or I.

What role the hate-crimes legislation plays in the censoring of the Internet, is to immediately halt all anti-government polemics, replacing them with an Internet that has been ‘wiped-clean’ and that same Internet will not include people such as Alex Jones, Jeff Rense, Phil Jayhan, Greg Palast, or Greg Szymanski. Furthermore, if the globalists see the Internet as such a threat, that means that we ARE having a positive effect. This is what true patriotism is all about -- and not fear-based enflamed nationalism by placing a red, white, and blue ribbon sticker on my car, as can now be seen on about every fifth car on the roads of this endangered nation.

Taxation of Bandwidth and E-Mail:

This idea has already been put forth in the form of a trial-balloon, and the response by the public was swift and exacting. The globalists will attempt to place so many taxes on Internet usage, that it will become financially difficult for anyone to reach a large audience. People are already paying approximately 60% total tax, once all the sales, income, property, gasoline, cigarette, and all the other various license fees that are paid are added together.

The taxation of either or both bandwidth and e-mail will affect the underlying operation of the Internet, which is access to tremendous libraries of truth at our fingertips. The Project For A New American Century (PNAC) report entitled ‘Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources For A New Century,’ lists as one of its’ key findings:

“Control the new ‘International Commons’ of space and ‘cyberspace,’ and pave the way for the creation of a new military service -- U.S. Space Forces.”

Why PNAC is important is because of WHO belongs to the organization. Examine the following partial list of members, which is found on the PNAC website at the bottom of the Statement of Principles, which was signed on June 3, 1997:

Elliott Abrams (National Security Council)

Gary Bauer (Well-known Christian fundamentalist)

William J. Bennett (Secretary of Education, Drug Czar)

Jeb Bush (Governor of Florida, brother of Bush Jr.)

Dick Cheney (Vice-President under Bush Jr.)

Steve Forbes (Presidential candidate, John Kerry’s mother is from Forbes family)

I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby (Dick Cheney Chief of Staff)

Norman Podhoretz (Council on Foreign Relations)

Dan Quayle (Vice-President under Bush Sr.)

Paul Wolfowitz (President of the World Bank)

Also notable about the Rebuilding America’s Defenses report of PNAC, is that it may be considered as the Neo-Con statement of intent. Listed in the report, are the following countries, with whom America now has problems -- each one of these countries have been subsequently mentioned in reference to the ongoing stability of American foreign policy:

Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Libya, Syria, and finally -- China

Careful study of think-tank reports can usually shine a light on the intentions of those in charge -- and this is especially true of this PNAC report in particular.

Many have asked me, “How could the Internet be controlled?”

This is quite easy, actually. It involves the control of something called Internet Domain Name Servers, which I will explain below.

United Nations or USA Control of Domain Name Servers:

Major companies like Cisco and Sun have already said they are not planning on upgrading the domain name servers. This involves something called Internet 2 -- which is the prototype template of the forthcoming ‘sanitized’ Internet. Both companies claim that demand is far exceeding technology -- and even though the Internet is built upon a network of freely-expanding nodes -- these companies claim they cannot keep up with the “one new blog per second” rapid-fire expansion of the Internet.

All of us are familiar with Internet website nomenclature, e.g. www.rense.com, as it is how one travels from one website to the next. It is also how the estimated 8 billion web pages are organized. The naming scheme is controlled by an independent organ called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). As it explains on the ICANN website, in the 1980’s, seven top-level domains were created for Internet addresses. These were: .com, .edu, .gov, .int, .mil, .net, and .org. Of these seven, only .com, .net, and .org could be used without limitation or restriction. The other four were related to government, and as such, had limited and restricted use.

On July 2, 2005, the London Guardian website ran a story that reported that the Bush administration was taking control of the thirteen root servers, which control the domain-name servers, thereby regulating Internet traffic. The reason stated was “growing security threats and the increased reliance on the Internet for global communications.” Of course, this is all bogus reasoning -- as it is provable that nearly all of the terror attacks are being done by the host government for fear-based control over their own citizens.

The London Guardian report goes on to say:

Despite many doomsday scenarios, the most recent US decision will have little if any immediate effect on Internet users, and given the Internet's anarchic nature it may simply represent a desire to assert state control even when it is not possible to do so. Claudia Bernett, 32, a digital design analyst in New York, said: “Scary as it seems, because of the nature of the internet, I think they'll be hard pressed to create a coherent system that is capable of the kind of monitoring they hope for ... Eventually, the people participating in the system will find the technological means to evade the watchful eye.”

While I would like to believe that the above quote represents truth, my intuition tells me that all mainstream papers have more to gain by lying than they do by telling the truth.

We Need A Napster-Type Application For Future Patriot Communications:

If there are any computer programmers reading this Kentroversy Paper, please understand that once this Internet censoring operation goes into effect, we are going to need some type of Napster-type software to communicate amongst ourselves. This software is going to need to be cross-platform, and it is going to need to encrypt the messages passed between nodes. It should also be able to handle both text and instant messages. I do not know how to do this programming myself, beyond knowing that this type of software application will be needed at such time as this sanitizing does take place.

So, if any programmers are out there reading these words, please consider programming a peer-to-peer cross-platform client for use in future patriot communications once the Internet is closed down to those of us who proudly wear the badge of ‘truth-telling patriot.’ I would much rather try to preempt some of their plans by bringing up this subject now while we still have some time to develop such a program. Also, this program should be ideally offered as freeware, and the programmers dedication to the future generations of this once-great nation should provide more than enough satisfaction in providing such a tool for use by all dedicated to defeating these globalist scum.

Conclusion:

Internet reporters such as Greg Szymanski and Greg Palast are embarrassing mainstream news reporters -- who should be more correctly known as news-readers -- as none of these people do any real reporting any more, investigative or otherwise. This is contributing to a mass exodus from mainstream to Internet news. The awakening of tens of millions of people to the lies and crimes of the globalist cabal is creating an environment where the Internet itself is being seen as a threat to the furtherance of their agenda -- which has been proven to be an agenda to bring about a one-world government built upon military fascism and iron-fisted control of WE THE PEOPLE.

For those of us who have children -- we are literally fighting for their future. The Internet has opened up people’s eyes to home-schooling, to the lies and crimes of the Bush Crime Family, and has provided a community-based connection whereupon many like-minded patriots have been able to realize that we are not as isolated as the mainstream media likes to portray us. In fact, we are now the mainstream of America -- we are winning this battle for the soul of America -- and WE THE PEOPLE will not allow these globalist scum to take away the open communication of the Internet.

SOURCES:

The following sources were used in the preparation of this Kentroversy Paper . . .

‘24’ Season 4 Episode Guide (FOX-TV)

Daily KOS – Bush Wants Control of the Internets!, July 1, 2005

Drudge Report – Senator Denounces Report Calling For U.N. Global Internet Control, August 1, 2005

Duration Date Calculator

Gonzales, Servando – Kiss Your Internet Goodbye!, April 6, 2003

Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) – Internet Top-Level Domains

Internet 2

Internet World Stats

‘Lone Gunmen’ Pilot Episode (March 4, 2001)

MSNBC Poll – “Do you believe that President Bush mislead the nation to go to war with Iraq?”

Prison Planet – Bilderberg Group Meeting 2005, May 2005

Prison Planet – Intelligence Sources Say Bilderberg Targeting Patriots, May 28, 2005

Project For A New American Century (PNAC) – Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century, September 2000

The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, February 2003

Theimer, Sharon – Bloggers Lobby To Fight Regulation By Government, Associated Press, June 30, 2005

Report of the Working Group on Internet Governance (Final Report), June 2005

Younge, Gary – Bush Administration To Keep Control of Internet’s Central Computer’s, July 2, 2005

Zogby International – Half of New Yorkers Believe US Leaders Had Foreknowledge of Impending 9/11 Attacks, August 30, 2004

It is better to be wrong and having to explain why you were for non-violence in the world when it turned out that violence was the proper mode, than be wrong and having to explain why you were for violence when it turned out that non-violence was the proper mode.

Has nothing much changed since March 2003? That mushroom cloud turned out to have zero degrees of probability, and as to the whereabouts of the weapons of mass destruction…maybe Judith Miller knows. Real inner circle guys like Paul O’Neil and Richard Clarke said some highly unflattering things about this administration, but you know how people talk after they leave the job. And you couldn’t miss the prison torture pictures, not from anywhere on this planet. Nor those nasty explosions from those ungrateful insurgents who wouldn’t recognize freedom if it was hanging from a flagpole. Still, considering what is going on in the world, and specifically in Iraq, there is a real quiet here.

Most of our politicians say they are against a draft, and let’s accept that for a moment. I’m going to speculate, though, that our country’s rulers are against it for a very specific reason – that they would never be able to get away with what they’ve been getting away with if there was a draft, because the campuses would have stopped this thing by now, maybe not even have allowed it to begin. No draft equals quiet campuses, and quiet campuses equal a quiet country.

Bush said he wants America to be the best place to do business with in the world. It’s the only thing he’s ever said that I believe. But as good as that is for some, it isn’t enough to kill for, and it isn’t enough to die for.

“Support our troops”, despite its benign-sounding inclusiveness, is not a neutral statement. As our new, federal slogan, it makes “our troops” inseparable from the government that commands them, leading to high cynicism; the near impossibility of our troops not being supported should they be doing rescue work, or genuine humanitarian protection, or genuinely defending the people of this country; and the deflection of valid criticisms, such as the war’s blatant manufacture, its illegality and immorality, a crime of the highest order – by keeping the focus on our troops who are doing the sacrificing – in effect, the government hiding behind the skirts of the troops while sacrificing them.

The “War on Terror” is not really a war, and it’s certainly not on terror. It’s a brand. If the government was selling it for $$ it would have a logo. Instead they’re pitching it for obedience. Do what we say, and we’ll keep on keeping you safe from those terrorists. Only we know where a lot of terrorists are, and we know where they cash their checks. This is unofficial. Officially, we cannot commit terrorism because our State Department restricts it, by definition, to the sub-national level. Anyway, as I write this the brand is getting a little worn so the “War on Terror” is in the shop for a nomenclature change.

Freedom. Liberty. Democracy. Service. Flag. Honor. Country. All terms such as these default back to the government, as if licensed. A recent United States Golf Association publication contains an article about a staff employee now deployed in Iraq as part of the Army Reserves. He writes a letter back home to his friends at work. “Our missions range from taking soldiers in and around the Forward Operating Bases (FOB), to transporting U.S. and Iraqi Generals, political dignitaries, celebrities, prisoners, assault insertions and what we call Hero missions (our fallen comrades).” He says there are some beautiful areas, some of which would make for great golf courses, like Arizona. He commends the Iraqi people for their simplicity, intelligence, resourcefulness, bravery and pride. “It’s good to see the smiling faces of kids as you go by. It helps to know that we are doing some good and hopefully winning the minds and hearts of the young.” The article is titled, Honoring His Country.

I hope he is winning some minds and hearts, and I certainly do not question his honor. But there are others that have seen too many lost ,young minds and stilled, young hearts to go on believing that. They’re the soldiers of conscience who oppose the war on moral grounds and, rather than go on participating in it, risk court martial or jail. Can anyone imagine a prominent employer referring to them as “honoring their country”?

The first example “honors his country”. The qualification for this is doing what you are told. Anybody who goes off to war and does what they are told qualifies for this distinction, even if the country is dishonoring itself, because there is no higher authority to pass judgment on this. The second example “dishonors his country” simply by insisting that his country stand for what it professes to stand for. One is honoring dishonor, which is dishonorable. One is dishonoring dishonor, which is honorable. It may be good logic, but try telling that to a judge. All wars are fought with the same rules. Pin medals on those who fight, and jail those who refuse. In some less free countries, it’s worse than jail.

A car spoke to me from its bumper sticker the other day: “If you don’t love this country, get the f--- out!” It also had a lot of flags on it. I don’t own an American flag, never felt the need. A lot of people have one at their house, usually just one. When the president speaks on TV he is surrounded by flags, more than I can count, and then that one on his lapel. Anyway, though the sticker creator could be expected to disagree, this bumper sticker delivers the unmistakable message – the country belongs to the people who do what they are told.

Some caution against allowing dissenters a sole presence, yet no amount of room could begin to rival the everpresence of the state. Systems of power, even democracies, are designed to maintain control over the public arena. Harold Lasswell wrote that with the rise of democracy, “propaganda attains eminence as the one means of mass mobilization which is cheaper than violence, bribery or other possible control techniques.” Is there a clearer and more effective example of this than the song/phrase, God Bless America?

The presidential administration uses (and as we know now, abuses) CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, and yes, even PBS. I won’t even mention FOX because they’ve been deputized. If Bush and Co. have a propaganda message, it takes the form of an official press release, goes out on the wires, and is promptly featured in our respected daily newspapers.

Suppose everything the administration has said about the war has been a lie. Just suppose for a minute. Suppose they had other motivations all along. How would you know about it? Who could have told you that you would have believed? Not some anti-war person. They’re always a little scuzzy, aren’t they? When one of our national heroes, such as Colin Powell, says Iraq is coming after us, who are you going to believe… him, or some scuzzy member of some antiwar group? Well everyone should know by now that Powell said he was not going to read that “bullshit” before the UN, but then, like the good, plantation “house nigger” that Harry Belafonte compared him to, he read it anyway.

Rather than wait 30 years or so for Powell, or Cheney, or Wolfowitz, or Rumsfeld, or Franks, or Myers, or Rice, or Feith, or Libby, or Perle, or Bolton, or the brothers Bush, (I’ll stop here but it’s so hard to leave people out), to make a McNamara-like confession of sorts, maybe we should pay more attention to those who bring alternative views right now.

Public opinion polls are a little confusing, but it’s fair to say they are at least mixed on Iraq. Opinions are sort of like the past two presidential elections…statistical ties. How mixed do you think opinions would be, though, if the public was not subjected to such an intensive propaganda campaign, brought to you by the people who can sell anything and boast openly about it. And what do you think the mix of your own community would be if spared that onslaught?

So look what we have here. On one side there is the federal government – Bush and all his “earned political capital” from the statistical tie, Senators Schumer and Clinton who didn’t oppose the war when it might have done some good, and still can’t seem to oppose it, Congressman Sweeney, touchingly sensitive to the plight of horses yet mute on the life and death of Iraqis (and to think, we’re this close to Congressman Hinchey) – this imbalance of power that justifies the unjustifiable, so that the war will seem worth it, the fight a good one, the lives lost not in vain.

On the other side, there are a few people standing on corners and in parks, doing what you would be doing if you believed that any life lost in service to an unprovoked act of aggression, a grab, an investment, is a life lost in vain. They’re protesting.

Albert Einstein called racism our national disease. In a similar but narrower vein, I’ll offer what I consider to be our national, political disease: hypocrisy. And for the national hypocrisy, the pledge of allegiance, notably the phrases, “for which it stands”, and “under God”.

If we live in a country with the widest disparity between rich and poor of any country in the world, with large numbers from both classes behind bars – the poor in their prisons and the rich in their gated communities – and national economic policy is to accelerate the pace of that widening gap; if we commit the “supreme international crime” of waging aggressive war, pretending we are freeing a people whose dead and mutilated we can’t be bothered to count; if we bomb Iraqi hospitals with children in them while prosecuting Americans who dare sneak vital medicines into Iraq; if our government plants fake “news” stories here at home while killing real journalists elsewhere; if our biggest problem with prison torture is the damn digital camera that revealed it, if this is what our republic is “standing for”, then what’s the difference if it’s under God or not?

Shortly after the invasion began, a grieving Iraqi father asked, “Why didn’t the British and American people stop their leaders from doing this?” He had a right to be asking this question that goes beyond the obvious one. Those that live under repression in military or police dictatorships, or under totalitarian regimes, have scant chance to stop their leaders from doing anything. He is well aware of the glorified traditions of law in Great Britain and the United States, and the legendary freedoms enjoyed in these countries. Certainly he would have been in no position to stop his own leader from doing anything. But the people of Great Britain and the United States? Surely they could have done something, he thinks. If only for this father, at this time, in this country, dissent is the only real badge of honor one can wear.

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Bomb experts were called to a Lynx public bus in Orlando, Fla., Wednesday after a suspicious package addressed from Osama bin Laden was discovered by a rider, according to police.

The package was found on Lynx bus 909 near the intersection of Hughey and Amelia at the Centroplex parking garage. The bus usually travels around downtown Orlando.

When the bus came to its last stop at the Centroplex parking garage, a passenger on the bus brought the package to the driver.

When the driver saw that Osama bin Laden was written on the package, he called 911, Local 6 News reported.

Firefighters and police aggressively moved into the area and checked the package, according to the report. Several streets in the downtown area were closed.

The package was packed with flyers but police did not say what the flyers said.

"We had approximately 20 firefighters out here on five different units and I don't know how many police officers blocking off the area," Orlando fire spokesman Rudy Johnson said. "It disrupts business and obviously the school district."

Orlando fire officials said they have had several incidents like this where suspicious packages have been left in places with the intention of causing alarm, Local 6 News reported.

"Because of handwriting on the packages and other details, they believe the same person is responsible," Local 6 News reporter Louis Bolden said.

Videotape from inside the Lynx bus has been turned over to Orlando police.

If you have any information concerning this crime, you are urged to call Crimeline at (800) 423-TIPS.

Oil prices zoomed higher Wednesday, touching a new high of $65 a barrel, with buyers focused on refinery snags and shrinking U.S. inventories of gasoline.

The latest rally - crude futures have risen 14 percent in three weeks - highlights just how nervous the market has become to just about any threat to output, even though analysts say the country has adequate levels of fuel in inventory to offset routine supply disruptions.

The heightened sensitivity comes amid strong demand in the United States and China, the world's top consuming nations, where high prices have only tempered rising fuel consumption slightly.

"People talked about $60 crude slowing economies around the world. But here in the U.S., (Federal Reserve Chairman) Alan Greenspan is telling us the economy is doing great and getting stronger," said James Cordier, president of Liberty Trading Group in Tampa, Fla. "It bodes well for crude testing the $70 range."

Even so, Cordier said he has been stunned by the recent runup in oil and gasoline prices and the lack of any response from motorists. Gasoline prices averaged $2.37 a gallon nationwide last week, while demand picked up by 1.4 percent from a year ago, according to the government data.

Cordier said prices at the pump may continue climbing "until consumers are crying uncle, which they're not."

Energy markets have been extremely jumpy about a spate of refinery outages in recent weeks, though analysts and industry officials said refinery snags are not out of the ordinary for this time of year, when plants run hard to meet peak gasoline demand. [...]

OPEC has pledged to pump more oil if needed, though the market has tended to brush off such talk. That's because worldwide demand is averaging some 84 million barrels a day, excess production capacity is limited to about 1.5 million barrels a day and the type of oil available - sour crude - is not the preferred variety for making transportation fuels.

"The market was used to having 4 to 5 million barrels in spare capacity some 10 years ago and people would still like to have this cushion available, but this is not the case anymore," said Manouchehr Takin, an analyst with the Center for Global Energy Studies in London. [...]

WASHINGTON -- Lost luggage, bad weather and now ... no fuel?

While fliers haven't yet had to add that problem to the list of headaches associated with air travel, it may not be far away. Airports in Arizona, California, Florida and Nevada recently came within a few days - and at times within hours - of running out of jet fuel.

Because of supply bottlenecks, airlines were forced to fly in extra fuel from other markets and scramble for deliveries by truck. But these are expensive, short-term fixes that do not address what airline executives consider to be the underlying problem: with passenger traffic rising above pre-9/11 levels, the nation's aviation business is slowly outgrowing the infrastructure that fuels it.

What started as routine supply tightness in these markets quickly snowballed following disruptive events that included a hurricane, a canceled fuel shipment and, ironically, the airlines' own efforts to prevent shortages, according to several airline executives.

Late July and early August were "unprecedented for Southwest for the number of cities where we've had to manage supply problems," said Glenn Hipp, director of fuel purchasing and inventory management at Dallas-based Southwest Airlines Co. AMR Corp.'s American Airlines, UAL Corp.'s United Airlines and America West Holdings Corp., also said there has been recent supply trouble.

These airlines have not canceled flights or made extra stops to tank up, nor have planes flown with less than the minimum fuel required by the Federal Aviation Administration, executives said.

But the near shortages underscore the added strain on refineries, pipelines and the airlines' own fuel procurement efforts as the industry recovers from its worst-ever downturn - June passenger traffic was up 4 percent from 2001 levels, according to industry data - and energy demand rises throughout the economy.

"It's really starting to surface as an issue," said James Holland, vice president of logistics at Kinder Morgan Energy Partners L.P., a Houston-based pipeline operator.

Part of the problem is that refining and pipeline capacity in some regions of the U.S. have grown slower than demand, meaning companies must run their equipment harder to satisfy growing fuel needs. This raises the chances of operational snags and leaves less of a cushion when something does go wrong. Recent refinery outages have helped push oil prices to record heights near $64 a barrel.

Also, the petroleum industry has reduced its fuel inventories in recent decades, redirecting funds once spent on storage to more lucrative oil drilling. Thus, some of the burden of storing surplus fuel has shifted to the airlines. But the industry's financial woes have hindered its ability, or willingness, to increase spending on storage, according to John Armbrust, publisher of Jet Fuel Report, an industry newsletter.

"If more effort isn't put into resolving some of these issues, it could have serious impact on the operational integrity of the whole aviation system," warned Bob Sturtz, general manager of fuel at Elk Grove Village, Ill.-based United Airlines.

While progress is being made, airline and energy executives predicted that the problem could get worse before it gets better. [...]

The fuel supply woes are dogging an industry already losing billions of dollars a year in large part because of soaring fuel costs. The price of jet fuel averages $1.91 per gallon in Los Angeles, up 46 percent from a year ago, according to government data. [...]

An asteroid known to astronomers for more than a century has now been found to harbor two small satellites.

It is the first asteroid trio ever discovered.

And there may be more than three.

The main asteroid, named 87 Sylvia, is one of the largest known to orbit the Sun in the main asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter. It is potato-shaped, about 175 miles (280 kilometers) in diameter and 235 miles (380 kilometers) long. It was discovered in 1866.

The first moon was found four years ago and the second one was announced today.

Asteroid moons common

There are about 60 asteroids known to each have one companion. The first pair was noted in 1993, when the Galileo spacecraft spotted the moonlet Dactyl orbiting asteroid Ida. Some pairs involve a smaller satellite, while in others the two objects are roughly equal in size.

Asteroid 87 Sylvia was named for Rhea Sylvia, the mythical mother of the founders of Rome. Now its moons will be called Romulus and Remus, for the ancient city's founders.

Romulus is some 11.3 miles (18 kilometers) across and orbits the main asteroid every 87.6 hours. Remus, the newfound object, is about 4.4 miles (7 kilometers) wide and orbits Sylvia every 33 hours.

Sylvia completes one rotation about its axis -- a day -- every 5 hours and 11 minutes.

The three-rock setup was likely created in a collision, astronomers said.

"People have been looking for multiple asteroid systems for a long time, because binary asteroid systems in the main belt seem to be common and formation scenarios, such as a collision between two asteroids followed by disruption and re-accretion, suggest that fragments should be orbiting bigger asteroids," said Franck Marchis, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley who led the discovery.

The details are reported in the Aug. 11 issue of the journal Nature.

More to find?

There may be smaller moons around Sylvia that still evade detection, Marchis told SPACE.com. Satellites up to 3 miles (5 kilometers) wide could lurk between the two known moons, he said, and an even larger object could exist inside the orbit of Remus and escape detection.

Observations of Sylvia itself support the idea of a collision. The asteroid's low density and known size allowed astronomers to calculate that it must be a rubble pile, rather than a solid rock.

"It could be up to 60 percent empty space," said French researcher Daniel Hestroffer, a co-author of the study from the Observatoire de Paris.

The small satellites are thought to be collision debris that went into orbit rather than getting re-stuck to Sylvia.

Based on what they've seen so far, astronomers estimate that about 6 percent of asteroids have companions, Marchis said, adding that it is too early to guess how many systems might contain multiple rocks.

The discovery was made with a European Southern Observatory telescope in Chile.

Robert Norton's brothers hope to lay the controversy to rest
He came into this world naked, spent much of his time in it nude, but will - against his specific wishes - depart it fully clothed.

Robert Norton, of Pekin, Illinois, was often prosecuted during his lifetime for gardening and wandering outside his house in the nude.

The 82-year-old said he wanted to be buried in his birthday suit - but his family are having none of it.

His brothers have decided to lay him to rest in grey trousers and a shirt.

One of them, Jack, is a minister. "He's not going to be buried in the nude," he said.

The other, Duane, explained that his late brother's behaviour was not meant to offend people.

"He was a naturist, and he just chose to be in the nude as people who are seeking nature. He was a peace-loving person," he said.

'Right to nakedness'

Nonetheless, certain people were offended including, crucially, Norton's neighbours.

Brenda Loete said she never spoke to Norton despite living next door to him for more than a decade.

"We didn't really know him. We just had him arrested," she said.

She had spent years taking her daughter to the park rather than letting her play in the garden because of the naked old man next door, she said.

"Normally, if we had him arrested in the spring he'd be gone for the summer and we wouldn't have to worry about him until the next spring."

The cycle of arrest and prosecution lasted over four decades, until the World War II veteran was admitted to a nursing home.

He fought 20 arrests for indecency since his first in 1962, arguing that he had a constitutional right to public nakedness, the Associated Press reported.

His family said they hoped his burial would lay years of controversy to rest.

RATON, N.M. -- An earthquake measuring magnitude 4.9 struck near the New Mexico-Colorado border Wednesday, but there were no immediate reports of damage or injuries.

The quake hit southwest of Trinidad and west of Raton, N.M., said Bruce Presgrave of the U.S. Geological Survey. He said the quake was light and not likely to cause serious damage.

Northeastern New Mexico usually gets about four earthquakes a year, usually less powerful than Wednesday's, according to the National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colo.

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