|
"You get America out of Iraq and
Israel out of Palestine and you'll stop the terrorism."
- Cindy Sheehan
|
P I C T U R E
O F T H E D A Y
Brouillard
©2005 Pierre-Paul
Feyte
WASHINGTON - U.S. counterterrorism
authorities have been engaged for months in a shadow
war with a computer hacker extraordinaire who is using
cutting-edge technology to help al Qaeda and other jihad
groups with their vast Internet operations, The Post
has learned.
Experts inside and outside the government confirmed
in recent interviews that an intensive effort has been
under way for more than a year to track and shut down
the mysterious cyber-ghost, who identifies himself as
Irhabi 007 - or "Terrorist 007."
While officials said Irhabi
007 might not be a hardened al Qaeda terrorist,
they believe he is a vital cog
in the jihadi network, which relies on the Internet
for communications, recruitment, fund-raising and propaganda.
"We don't know whether Irhabi 007 is a man or
woman - an al Qaeda terrorist or a 16-year-old kid in
a basement somewhere. But he is a fairly important figure
who is getting increasingly popular and has a growing
following," said terror expert Rita Katz, whose
SITE Institute monitors al Qaeda communications on the
Internet.
The FBI has been investigating Irhabi 007 since July
2004, when the Web site of the Arkansas Highway and
Transportation Department was hacked.
The site was transformed into an al Qaeda message board,
and links were posted that allowed visitors to view
videotapes of Osama bin Laden and tributes to the 9/11
hijackers.
The person who hacked into the Arkansas government
site and posted the links identified himself as Irhabi
007.
Terrorist expert Evan Kohlmann, who
also monitors al Qaeda activities on the Web, told The
Post that Irhabi 007 played a key role in the distribution
and broadcast of the horrifying videotapes of the beheading
of American and other foreign hostages in Iraq by terror
master Abu Musab Zarqawi.
Irhabi 007 also is at the helm of the
cat-and-mouse game with U.S. other and Western intelligence
agencies to keep al Qaeda's Web operations up and running
at a time when there is a massive effort to shut down
terrorist infrastructure on the Internet, Kohlmann said.
There is growing evidence 007 is in
direct contact with the media wings of several terror
groups including Zarqawi's al Qaeda in Iraq, Kohlmann
said.
What's most intriguing about the case
is that Irhabi 007 claims he is U.S.-based, and may
be an American. |
CANBERRA - Australian Prime Minister
John Howard has announced plans for tough new counter-terrorism
laws including the detention and control of suspects
and tighter citizenship requirements.
Suspects could be fitted with
tracking devices and have their movements restricted
through 12-month "control orders" under
the new legislation to be discussed at a summit meeting
of state government leaders on September 27, he said.
The government would also create new
offences including inciting violence against the community
or Australian troops abroad, Howard said.
Australian states would also be urged
to introduce longer periods of preventative detention
without charge of up to 14 days.
Describing the changes as "significant",
Howard said police would be given
greater powers to stop, question and search people.
The government was trying to balance the rights of
individuals against the needs of the community, he said.
"We are very conscious that in all of these things
a balance has to be struck between the liberty of the
subject and the right of the community to be protected.
"We are, unfortunately, living in an era and time
when unusual but necessary measures are needed to cope
with an unusual and threatening situation."
The tougher security measures follow the London bombings
in July which killed more than 50 people and fueled
concern that Australia could face a similar attack.
Howard last month called a meeting of top leaders of
Australia's 300,000-strong Islamic community to enlist
their help in fighting extremism.
The period of waiting for citizenship approval for
permanent residents will be increased from two to three
years. |
NEWCASTLE, England - EU interior
ministers are to meet to try to hone Europe's response
to terrorism, including nailing down a controversial
deal to improve police access to telephone and Internet
data.
British Home Secretary Charles Clarke is hosting their
talks in Newcastle, northern England, and has given
a sense of urgency to them by pushing his EU counterparts
to move more quickly after the London bombings.
The attacks on the capital's transport system on July
7, in which 52 commuters were killed and four suspected
suicide bombers, were followed by a failed similar plot
two weeks later and frequent other warnings of more
to come.
Britain has since led the charge for the more rapid
implementation of anti-terror laws and for new ones
to be drawn up, and the pace of efforts will again be
discussed during Thursday's sessions.
But its leaders have also called,
quite disturbingly to civil libertarians, for a "new
balance" between individual rights and the security
needs of the wider community.
"I have concluded that the balance now is not
right and that it needs to be closely examined in the
heightened threat that we now face," Clarke reiterated
to members of the European Parliament on Wednesday.
The plan to better retain telecommunications data is
one element of Europe's new security thrust that has
angered many for its potential to invade privacy.
The EU ministers, who will hold talks and workshops
for two days at Newcastle racecourse, want to improve
judicial cooperation, particularly in dealing with terrorism,
by harmonising legislation in the 25 EU member states.
Under the project, set to be completed by next month,
telecoms operators and Internet providers would keep
for between six months and a year information on the
sender, receiver, time, place and length of any communication.
No record of the conversation or message
itself would be kept.
The rules would apply to a large range of equipment
including land lines and mobile telephones, text messages,
e-mails and Internet protocols.
The ministers also want records of calls or messages
that went unanswered to be included; details of which
helped Spanish police get their investigation rolling
into the Madrid bombings in March 2004.
The project has to be adopted unanimously.
Currently telecoms firms in Germany are not obliged
to keep the records of telephone calls or e-mails while
those in France are. The length of time for retaining
such records varies from two months in the Czech Republic
to four years in Italy.
The ministers, meeting amid extremely tight security,
will focus on Friday on two case studies of how cooperation
is working with countries outside the bloc, with others
sessions on migration and Africa, and Afghanistan and
drugs. |
NEW ORLEANS - The U.S. government
agency leading the rescue efforts after Hurricane Katrina
said on Tuesday it does not want the news media to take
photographs of the dead as they are recovered from the
flooded New Orleans area.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, heavily criticized
for its slow response to the devastation caused by the
hurricane, rejected requests from journalists to accompany
rescue boats as they went out to search for storm victims.
An agency spokeswoman said space was needed on the
rescue boats and that "the
recovery of the victims is being treated with dignity
and the utmost respect."
"We have requested that no photographs of the
deceased be made by the media," the spokeswoman
said in an e-mailed response to a Reuters inquiry.
The Bush administration also has prevented
the news media from photographing flag-draped caskets
of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq, which has sparked criticism
that the government is trying to block images that put
the war in a bad light.
The White House is under fire for its handling of the
relief effort, which many officials have charged was
slow and bureacratic, contributing to the death and
mayhem in New Orleans after the storm struck on Aug.
29. |
Blame
Amid the Tragedy
Gov. Blanco and Mayor Nagin failed their constituents. |
BY BOB WILLIAMS
The Wall Street Journal
Wednesday, September 7, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT |
As the devastation of Hurricane
Katrina continues to shock and sadden the nation, the
question on many lips is, Who is to blame for the inadequate
response?
As a former state legislator who represented the legislative
district most impacted by the eruption of Mount St.
Helens in 1980, I can fully understand and empathize
with the people and public officials over the loss of
life and property.
Many in the media are turning their eyes toward the
federal government, rather than considering the culpability
of city and state officials. I am fully aware of the
challenges of having a quick and responsive emergency
response to a major disaster. And there is definitely
a time for accountability; but
what isn't fair is to dump on the federal officials
and avoid those most responsible--local and state officials
who failed to do their job as the first responders.
The plain fact is, lives were
needlessly lost in New Orleans due to the failure of
Louisiana's governor, Kathleen Blanco, and the city's
mayor, Ray Nagin.
The primary responsibility for dealing with emergencies
does not belong to the federal government. It belongs
to local and state officials who are charged by law
with the management of the crucial first response to
disasters. First response should be carried out by local
and state emergency personnel under the supervision
of the state governor and his emergency operations center.
The actions and inactions of
Gov. Blanco and Mayor Nagin are a national disgrace
due to their failure to implement the previously established
evacuation plans of the state and city. Gov.
Blanco and Mayor Nagin cannot claim that they were surprised
by the extent of the damage and the need to evacuate
so many people.
Detailed written plans were already in place to evacuate
more than a million people. The plans projected that
300,000 people would need transportation in the event
of a hurricane like Katrina. If the plans had been implemented,
thousands of lives would likely have been saved.
In addition to the plans, local, state and federal
officials held a simulated hurricane drill 13 months
ago, in which widespread flooding supposedly trapped
300,000 people inside New Orleans. The exercise simulated
the evacuation of more than a million residents. The
problems identified in the simulation apparently were
not solved.
A year ago, as Hurricane Ivan approached, New Orleans
ordered an evacuation but did not use city or school
buses to help people evacuate. As a result many of the
poorest citizens were unable to evacuate. Fortunately,
the hurricane changed course and did not hit New Orleans,
but both Gov. Blanco and Mayor Nagin acknowledged the
need for a better evacuation plan. Again, they did not
take corrective actions. In 1998, during a threat by
Hurricane George, 14,000 people were sent to the Superdome
and theft and vandalism were rampant due to inadequate
security. Again, these problems were not corrected.
The New Orleans contingency plan is still, as of this
writing, on the city's Web site, and states: "The
safe evacuation of threatened populations is one of
the principle [sic] reasons for developing a Comprehensive
Emergency Management Plan." But the plan was apparently
ignored.
Mayor Nagin was responsible for giving the order for
mandatory evacuation and supervising the actual evacuation:
His Office of Emergency Preparedness (not the federal
government) must coordinate with the state on elements
of evacuation and assist in directing the transportation
of evacuees to staging areas. Mayor Nagin had to be
encouraged by the governor to contact the National Hurricane
Center before he finally, belatedly, issued the order
for mandatory evacuation. And sadly, it apparently
took a personal call from the president to urge the
governor to order the mandatory evacuation.
The city's evacuation plan states: "The city of
New Orleans will utilize all available resources to
quickly and safely evacuate threatened areas."
But even though the city has enough school and transit
buses to evacuate 12,000 citizens per fleet run, the
mayor did not use them. To compound the problem, the
buses were not moved to high ground and were flooded.
The plan also states that "special arrangements
will be made to evacuate persons unable to transport
themselves or who require specific lifesaving assistance.
Additional personnel will be
recruited to assist in evacuation procedures as needed."
This was not done.
The evacuation plan warned that "if an evacuation
order is issued without the mechanisms needed to disseminate
the information to the affected persons, then we face
the possibility of having large numbers of people either
stranded and left to the mercy of a storm, or left in
an area impacted by toxic materials." That is precisely
what happened because of the mayor's failure.
Instead of evacuating the people, the mayor ordered
the refugees to the Superdome and Convention Center
without adequate security and no provisions for food,
water and sanitary conditions. As a result people died,
and there was even rape committed, in these facilities.
Mayor Nagin failed in his responsibility to provide
public safety and to manage the orderly evacuation of
the citizens of New Orleans. Now he wants to blame Gov.
Blanco and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
In an emergency the first requirement is for the city's
emergency center to be linked to the state emergency
operations center. This was not done.
The federal government does not have
the authority to intervene in a state emergency without
the request of a governor. President Bush declared an
emergency prior to Katrina hitting New Orleans, so the
only action needed for federal assistance was for Gov.
Blanco to request the specific type of assistance she
needed. She failed to send a timely request for specific
aid.
In addition, unlike the governors of New York, Oklahoma
and California in past disasters, Gov. Blanco failed
to take charge of the situation and ensure that the
state emergency operation facility was in constant contact
with Mayor Nagin and FEMA. It is likely that thousands
of people died because of the failure of Gov. Blanco
to implement the state plan, which mentions the possible
need to evacuate up to one million people. The plan
clearly gives the governor the authority for declaring
an emergency, sending in state resources to the disaster
area and requesting necessary federal assistance.
State legislators and governors nationwide need to
update their contingency plans and the operation procedures
for state emergency centers. Hurricane Katrina had been
forecast for days, but that will not always be the case
with a disaster (think of terrorist attacks). It must
be made clear that the governor and locally elected
officials are in charge of the "first response."
I am not attempting to excuse some
of the delays in FEMA's response. Congress and the president
need to take corrective action there, also. However,
if citizens expect FEMA to be a first responder to terrorist
attacks or other local emergencies (earthquakes, forest
fires, volcanoes), they will be disappointed. The federal
government's role is to offer aid upon request.
The Louisiana Legislature should conduct an immediate
investigation into the failures of state and local officials
to implement the written emergency plans. The tragedy
is not over, and real leadership
in the state and local government are essential in the
months to come. More importantly, the hurricane season
is still upon us, and local and state officials must
stay focused on the jobs for which they were elected--and
not on the deadly game of passing the emergency buck.
Mr. Williams is president of the Evergreen Freedom
Foundation, a free market public policy research organization
in Olympia, Wash. |
BEIJING - China's most important
state-run newspaper has accused US President George
W. Bush and his administration of "negligence of
duty" in its response to the disaster wrought by
Hurricane Katrina.
People's Daily, the ruling Communist
Party's mouthpiece, said there was no excuse for Bush's
slow reaction to the unfolding tragedy.
"For the Bush administration, 'unexpected' perhaps
can be a lame excuse, but it can never explain away
the government negligence of duty," it said in
an opinion piece carried on its English language website
Thursday.
"As a matter of fact, ever since
'September 11', the Congress had cut anti-flood allocation
to Louisiana, which later became a main reason for the
slow rescue work this time," said the officially
controlled paper.
"In the face of the hurricane, Americans accepted
the challenge but failed to beat it off. This is really
a shame on the United States."
It said the anarchy and chaos seen in New Orleans after
the hurricane looked to the world like America was "fighting
a city war at home".
"New Orleans has become Baghdad,"
it said.
"People have reason to feel disgusted:
when Indonesia was hit by the tsunami last year, everybody
lent a helping hand and nobody looted. But now this
happened in the United States, showing people another
side of this 'civilized country'.
"In fact, it revealed the fragility of American
society, as well as despair and disorder in a state
of anarchy."
Katrina left hundreds of thousands of people homeless
and possibly thousands dead after it swept through the
Gulf of Mexico coastal region on August 29, causing
devastation to New Orleans.
Bush has been lambasted at home for a lag in dispatching
troops and relief supplies to the afflicted region despite
graphic television images of chaos and neglect.
He has acknowledged shortcomings and promised to lead
an inquiry into "what went wrong." |
Note: Bradshaw and Slonsky
are paramedics frorm California that were attending
the EMS conference in New Orleans. Larry Bradsahw is
the chief shop steward, Paramedic Chapter, SEIU Local
790; and Lorrie Beth Slonsky is steward, Paramedic Chapter,
SEIU Local 790. [California]
Two days after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans,
the Walgreen's store at the corner of Royal and Iberville
streets remained locked. The dairy display case was
clearly visible through the widows. It was now 48 hours
without electricity, running water, plumbing. The milk,
yogurt, and cheeses were beginning to spoil in the 90-degree
heat. The owners and managers had locked up the food,
water, pampers, and prescriptions and fled the City.
Outside Walgreen's windows, residents and tourists grew
increasingly thirsty and hungry.
The much-promised federal, state
and local aid never materialized and the windows at
Walgreen's gave way to the looters. There was
an alternative. The cops could have broken one small
window and distributed the nuts, fruit juices, and bottle
water in an organized and systematic manner. But they
did not. Instead they spent hours playing cat and mouse,
temporarily chasing away the looters.
We were finally airlifted out of New Orleans two days
ago and arrived home yesterday (Saturday). We have yet
to see any of the TV coverage or look at a newspaper.
We are willing to guess that there were no video images
or front-page pictures of European or affluent white
tourists looting the Walgreen's in the French Quarter.
We also suspect the media will have been inundated
with "hero" images of the National Guard,
the troops and the police struggling to help the "victims"
of the Hurricane. What you will
not see, but what we witnessed,were the real heroes
and sheroes of the hurricane relief effort: the working
class of New Orleans. The
maintenance workers who used a fork lift to carry the
sick and disabled. The engineers, who rigged, nurtured
and kept the generators running. The electricians who
improvised thick extension cords stretching over blocks
to share the little electricity we had in order to free
cars stuck on rooftop parking lots. Nurses who took
over for mechanical ventilators and spent many hours
on end manually forcing air into the lungs of unconscious
patients to keep them alive. Doormen who rescued folks
stuck in elevators. Refinery workers who broke into
boat yards, "stealing" boats to rescue their
neighbors clinging to their roofs in flood waters. Mechanics
who helped hot-wire any car that could be found to ferry
people out of the City. And the food service workers
who scoured the commercial kitchens improvising communal
meals for hundreds of those stranded.
Most of these workers had lost their homes, and had
not heard from members of their families, yet they stayed
and provided the only infrastructure for the 20% of
New Orleans that was not under water.
On Day 2, there were approximately 500 of us left in
the hotels in the French Quarter. We were a mix of foreign
tourists, conference attendees like ourselves, and locals
who had checked into hotels for safety and shelter from
Katrina. Some of us had cell phone contact with family
and friends outside of New Orleans. We were repeatedly
told that all sorts of resources including the National
Guard and scores of buses were pouring in to the City.
The buses and the other resources must have been invisible
because none of us had seen them.
We decided we had to save ourselves. So we pooled our
money and came up with $25,000 to have ten buses come
and take us out of the City. Those who did not have
the requisite $45.00 for a ticket were subsidized by
those who did have extra money. We waited for 48 hours
for the buses, spending the last 12 hours standing outside,
sharing the limited water, food, and clothes we had.
We created a priority boarding area for the sick, elderly
and new born babies. We waited late into the night for
the "imminent" arrival of the buses. The buses
never arrived. We later learned
that the minute they arrived to the City limits, they
were commandeered by the military.
By day 4 our hotels had run out of fuel and water.
Sanitation was dangerously abysmal. As the desperation
and despair increased, street crime as well as water
levels began to rise. The hotels turned us out and locked
their doors, telling us that the "officials"
told us to report to the convention center to wait for
more buses. As we entered the center of the City, we
finally encountered the National Guard. The Guards told
us we would not be allowed into the Superdome as the
City's primary shelter had descended into a humanitarian
and health hellhole. The guards further told us that
the City's only other shelter, the Convention Center,
was also descending into chaos and squalor and that
the police were not allowing anyone else in. Quite naturally,
we asked, "If we can't go to the only 2 shelters
in the City, what was our alternative?" The guards
told us that that was our problem, and no they did not
have extra water to give to us. This
would be the start of our numerous encounters with callous
and hostile "law enforcement".
We walked to the police command center at Harrah's
on Canal Street and were told the same thing, that we
were on our own, and no they did not have water to give
us. We now numbered several hundred. We held a mass
meeting to decide a course of action. We agreed to camp
outside the police command post. We would be plainly
visible to the media and would constitute a highly visible
embarrassment to the City officials. The police told
us that we could not stay. Regardless, we began to settle
in and set up camp. In short order, the police commander
came across the street to address our group. He
told us he had a solution: we should walk to the Pontchartrain
Expressway and cross the greater New Orleans Bridge
where the police had buses lined up to take us out of
the City. The crowed cheered and began to move.
We called everyone back and explained to the commander
that there had been lots of misinformation and wrong
information and was he sure that there were buses waiting
for us. The commander turned
to the crowd and stated emphatically, "I swear
to you that the buses are there."
We organized ourselves and the 200 of us set off for
the bridge with great excitement and hope. As we marched
pasted the convention center, many locals saw our determined
and optimistic group and asked where we were headed.
We told them about the great news. Families immediately
grabbed their few belongings and quickly our numbers
doubled and then doubled again. Babies in strollers
now joined us, people using crutches, elderly clasping
walkers and others people in wheelchairs. We marched
the 2-3 miles to the freeway and up the steep incline
to the Bridge. It now began to pour down rain, but it
did not dampen our enthusiasm.
As we approached the bridge,
armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot
of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak,
they began firing their weapons over our heads.
This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions. As
the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched
forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in
conversation. We told them of our conversation with
the police commander and of the commander's assurances.
The sheriffs informed us there
were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us
to get us to move.
We questioned why we couldn't
cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little
traffic on the 6-lane highway. They responded that the
West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there
would be no Superdomes in their City. These
were code words for if you are poor and black, you are
not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not
getting out of New Orleans.
Our small group retreated back down Highway 90 to seek
shelter from the rain under an overpass. We debated
our options and in the end decided to build an encampment
in the middle of the Ponchartrain Expressway on the
center divide, between the O'Keefe and Tchoupitoulas
exits. We reasoned we would be visible to everyone,
we would have some security being on an elevated freeway
and we could wait and watch for the arrival of the yet
to be seen buses.
All day long, we saw other families, individuals and
groups make the same trip up the incline in an attempt
to cross the bridge, only to be turned away. Some chased
away with gunfire, others simply told no, others to
be verbally berated and humiliated. Thousands of New
Orleaners were prevented and prohibited from self-evacuating
the City on foot. Meanwhile, the only two City shelters
sank further into squalor and disrepair. The only way
across the bridge was by vehicle. We saw workers stealing
trucks, buses, moving vans, semi-trucks and any car
that could be hotwired. All were packed with people
trying to escape the misery New Orleans had become.
Our little encampment began to blossom. Someone stole
a water delivery truck and brought it up to us. Let's
hear it for looting! A mile or so down the freeway,
an army truck lost a couple of pallets of C-rations
on a tight turn. We ferried the food back to our camp
in shopping carts. Now secure with the two necessities,
food and water; cooperation, community, and creativity
flowered. We organized a clean up and hung garbage bags
from the rebar poles. We made beds from wood pallets
and cardboard. We designated a storm drain as the bathroom
and the kids built an elaborate enclosure for privacy
out of plastic, broken umbrellas, and other scraps.
We even organized a food recycling system where individuals
could swap out parts of C-rations (applesauce for babies
and candies for kids!).
This was a process we saw repeatedly
in the aftermath of Katrina. When individuals had to
fight to find food or water, it meant looking out for
yourself only. You had to do whatever it took to find
water for your kids or food for your parents. When these
basic needs were met, people began to look out for each
other, working together and constructing a community.
If the relief organizations had saturated the City
with food and water in the first 2 or 3 days, the desperation,
the frustration and the ugliness would not have set
in.
Flush with the necessities, we offered food and water
to passing families and individuals. Many decided to
stay and join us. Our encampment grew to 80 or 90 people.
From a woman with a battery powered radio we learned
that the media was talking about us. Up in full view
on the freeway, every relief and news organizations
saw us on their way into the City. Officials were being
asked what they were going to do about all those families
living up on the freeway? The officials responded they
were going to take care of us. Some of us got a sinking
feeling. "Taking care of us" had an ominous
tone to it.
Unfortunately, our sinking feeling
(along with the sinking City) was correct. Just as dusk
set in, a Gretna Sheriff showed up, jumped out of his
patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces, screaming,
"Get off the fucking freeway". A helicopter
arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away
our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff
loaded up his truck with our food and water.
Once again, at gunpoint, we were forced off the freeway.
All the law enforcement agencies appeared threatened
when we congregated or congealed into groups of 20 or
more. In every congregation of "victims" they
saw "mob" or "riot". We felt safety
in numbers. Our "we must stay together" was
impossible because the agencies would force us into
small atomized groups.
In the pandemonium of having our camp raided and destroyed,
we scattered once again. Reduced to a small group of
8 people, in the dark, we sought refuge in an abandoned
school bus, under the freeway on Cilo Street. We
were hiding from possible criminal elements but equally
and definitely, we were hiding from the police and sheriffs
with their martial law, curfew and shoot-to-kill policies.
The next days, our group of 8 walked most of the day,
made contact with New Orleans Fire Department and were
eventually airlifted out by an urban search and rescue
team. We were dropped off near the airport and managed
to catch a ride with the National Guard. The
two young guardsmen apologized for the limited response
of the Louisiana guards. They
explained that a large section of their unit was in
Iraq and that meant they were shorthanded and were unable
to complete all the tasks they were assigned.
We arrived at the airport on the day a massive airlift
had begun. The airport had become another Superdome.
We 8 were caught in a press of humanity as flights were
delayed for several hours while George Bush landed briefly
at the airport for a photo op. After being evacuated
on a coast guard cargo plane, we arrived in San Antonio,
Texas.
There the humiliation and dehumanization of the official
relief effort continued. We were placed on buses and
driven to a large field where we were forced to sit
for hours and hours. Some of the buses did not have
air-conditioners. In the dark, hundreds if us were forced
to share two filthy overflowing porta-potties. Those
who managed to make it out with any possessions (often
a few belongings in tattered plastic bags) we were subjected
to two different dog-sniffing searches.
Most of us had not eaten all day because our C-rations
had been confiscated at the airport because the rations
set off the metal detectors. Yet,
no food had been provided to the men, women, children,
elderly, disabled as they sat for hours waiting to be
"medically screened" to make sure we were
not carrying any communicable diseases.
This official treatment was in
sharp contrast to the warm, heart-felt reception given
to us by the ordinary Texans. We
saw one airline worker give her shoes to someone who
was barefoot. Strangers on the street offered us money
and toiletries with words of welcome. Throughout, the
official relief effort was callous, inept, and racist.
There was more suffering than need be.
Lives were lost that did not need to
be lost. |
WASHINGTON - He's been called an
idiot, an incompetent and worse. The
vilification of federal disaster chief Michael Brown,
emerging as chief scapegoat for whatever went wrong
in the government's response to Hurricane Katrina, has
ratcheted into the stratosphere. Democratic members
of Congress are taking numbers to call for his head.
"I would never have appointed such a person,"
said New York Sen.
Hillary Rodham Clinton.
"Let's bring in someone who is a professional,"
urged Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md.
A more visceral indictment came from closer to the
calamity. Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish
near New Orleans, said the bureaucracy "has murdered
people in the greater New Orleans area."
"Take whatever idiot they have
at the top of whatever agency and give me a better idiot,"
he told CBS. "Give me a caring idiot. Give me a
sensitive idiot. Just don't give me the same idiot."
Republican Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi, just back
from a week surveying damage in his home state, allowed
that "mistakes were made" but tried to counsel
restraint Tuesday as calls for Brown's removal escalated.
But even Lott displayed some of the potent emotions
spawned by the horrific conditions on the Gulf Coast.
"If somebody said, 'You pick somebody to hammer,'
I don't know who I'd pick," he told reporters.
"I did threaten to physically beat a couple of
people in the last couple of days, figuratively speaking."
It's not uncommon for the Federal Emergency Management
Agency - and whoever is in charge at the time - to catch
blame in the messy aftermath of disaster.
It happened after Hugo hit South Carolina in 1989 and
Andrew struck Florida in 1992.
After Andrew, Mikulski slammed the
agency for a "pathetically sluggish" response,
and on the ground, Dade County emergency director Kathleen
Hale famously summed up the frustration felt throughout
the stricken areas when she cried, "Where the hell
is the cavalry?"
"There is nothing more powerful than the urge
to blame," said Eric Dezenhall, a crisis-management
consultant who helps corporate leaders and other prominent
figures try to repair tattered images. "It happens
every time. It is a deeply embedded archetype in the
human mind."
He said the Brown episode is playing
out in classic fashion.
"You can follow the steps,"
he said. "First, outrage. Second, the headline:
'What went wrong?' Third, the telltale memo that supposedly
suggests somebody knew and did nothing. I
just don't find this to be unique at all."
Brown, a 50-year-old lawyer, in some ways is an easy
target.
The former head of the International Arabian Horse
Association, Brown had no background in disaster relief
when old college friend and then-FEMA Director Joe Allbaugh
hired him to serve as the agency's general counsel in
2001.
"There is a Jay Leno-esque comic undertone to
his background," said Dezenhall. "It sort
of conjures up a who's-on-first kind of thing."
But the dim view of Brown's qualifications
by senators seems to have emerged only in hindsight.
Members of both parties seemed little troubled by his
background at 2002 Senate hearings that led to his confirmation
as deputy FEMA chief.
Indeed, Democratic Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut,
who led those hearings, called Brown's long-ago stint
as assistant city manager in Edmond, Okla., a "particularly
useful experience" because he had responsibility
for local emergency services.
As FEMA chief, Brown has pressed for greater attention
to natural disaster planning, including strategies for
a major hurricane in New Orleans, and he has had to
contend with cuts to FEMA's operating budget while more
attention was paid to fighting terrorism.
But as the enormity of the Gulf Coast damage gradually
came into clearer focus, Brown did not help his case
with a number of comments seen as insensitive or ill-advised.
For example, he acknowledged last week that he didn't
know there were some 20,000 evacuees enduring heinous
conditions at the New Orleans convention center until
a day after their difficulties had been widely reported
in the news.
ABC's Ted Koppel was incredulous as
he asked Brown, "Don't you guys watch television?
Don't you guys listen to the radio?"
"Forgive me for beating up on you there,"
Koppel later told Brown, "but you are the only
guy from the federal government who is coming out to
take your medicine."
The doses keep getting stronger. But, for now at least,
President Bush is standing by his embattled FEMA chief.
"Brownie, you're doing a heck
of a job," the president told him last week.
And Brown, for his part, is trying to shrug off the
criticism.
"People want to lash out at me, lash out at FEMA,"
he told reporters. "I think that's fine. Just lash
out, because my job is to continue to save lives."
|
The Federal Emergency Management
Agency has done it again.
Already under fire for its woeful response to Hurricane
Katrina, the federal disaster agency appears to have
turned hurricane relief donations into a political payoff
- until it was challenged.
All last week, FEMA bureaucrats gave prominent placement
on the agency's Web site to Operation Blessing, the
Virginia-based charity run by controversial right-wing
evangelist and Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson.
For anyone wishing to donate only
cash, the agency's site listed the names and phone numbers
of three groups: the Red Cross, Operation Blessing and
America's Second Harvest, a national coalition of food
banks.
That first list was followed by a second, longer list
of several dozen religious and nonsectarian charities.
This second list was for anyone who wanted to give either
cash or noncash gifts.
Just as in an ordinary election, however, top ballot
position makes it far more likely you'll get noticed
and chosen.
The same FEMA list was then disseminated by state
and local governments throughout the country. Both Gov.
Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg, for example, placed the
same top three FEMA charities on their Hurricane Katrina
press releases and Web sites last week.
Those familiar with Robertson and his charity were
flabbergasted.
Operation Blessing, with a budget
of $190 million, is an integral part of the Robertson
empire. Not only is he the chairman of the board, his
wife is listed on its latest financial report as its
vice president, and one of his sons is on the board
of directors.
Back in 1994, during the infamous
Rwandan genocide, Robertson used his 700 Club's daily
cable operation to appeal to the American public for
donations to fly humanitarian supplies into Zaire to
save the Rwandan refugees.
The planes purchased by Operation Blessing did a lot
more than ferry relief supplies.
An investigation conducted by
the Virginia attorney general's office concluded in
1999 that the planes were mostly used to transport mining
equipment for a diamond operation run by a for-profit
company called African Development Corp.
And who do you think was the principal
executive and sole shareholder of the mining company?
You guessed it, Pat Robertson himself.
Robertson had landed the mining concession from his
longtime friend Mobutu Sese Seko, then the dictator
of Zaire.
Investigators concluded that Operation Blessing "willfully
induced contributions from the public through the use
of misleading statements ..."
After the investigation began, Robertson placated
state regulators by personally reimbursing his own charity
$400,000 and by agreeing to tighten its bookkeeping
methods.
Separating Operation Blessing from Robertson's many
politically oriented endeavors is not that easy, however.
The biggest single US recipient of the charity's largess,
according to its latest financial report, was Robertson's
Christian Broadcasting Network. It received $885,000
in the fiscal year ended March 2004.
Robertson uses that Christian network for some markedly
unchristian purposes.
A few years back, he repeatedly defended
Charles Taylor, the former brutal dictator of Liberia
who is under indictment by a UN tribunal for war crimes.
As with Mobutu in the Congo, Robertson
had a personal stake in the matter: He had millions
invested in a Liberian gold mine, thanks to Taylor,
according to press reports.
Recently, Robertson called for the assassination of
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Those who know Robertson's
record raised such an uproar that on Sunday FEMA suddenly
rearranged its entire Web site for hurricane donations.
Gone was Operation Blessing's name and choice location.
Replacing it was an alphabetical list of nearly 50 national
relief organizations.
At FEMA, they take a while to get things right. |
NEW ORLEANS, United States - The
prospect of Hurricane Katrina survivors being dragged
from their homes loomed larger while lawmakers in Washington
locked horns over probing the federal response to the
disaster.
With officials saying anywhere between 10,000 to 15,000
people remained in New Orleans, police and soldiers
faced some difficult choices in enforcing a mandatory
order to empty the city.
Mayor Ray Nagin authorised the use of force on Tuesday
but, with a number of residents still awaiting voluntary
evacuation, rescue teams have so far postponed physical
confrontations with those determined to stay.
Eventually, however, only the diehards will be left.
"Once all the volunteer evacuations have taken
place, then we'll concentrate our efforts and our forces
to mandatorily evacuate individuals," New Orleans
police chief Eddie Compass said, promising that his
officers would use "the minimal amount of force
necessary."
Federal troops have joined in the
house-to-house search for survivors, but senior military
officers made it clear they would stand back if it came
to manhandling people out of their homes.
"When this turns into a law enforcement
issue, which we perceive forced evacuation is, regular
troops would not be used," said Major General Joseph
Inge, deputy commander of the US Northern Command.
As of Wednesday, there were 18,000 active-duty soldiers
and 45,000 National Guard troops in the area of the
US Gulf coast devastated by Hurricane Katrina on August
29.
The decision to authorise forced evictions was clearly
taken reluctantly, with officials anxious to avoid traumatic
scenes involving people who have already suffered extreme
deprivations since Katrina hit.
In giving the order, Nagin cited the growing threat
of disease posed by the putrid waters surrounding the
wooden homes of many of the holdouts.
Health authorities said five people
evacuated from the Katrina disaster zone had died as
a result of contact with contaminated water.
The five had been killed by vibrio vulnificus, "a
bacteria that can enter somebody through a cut, a scratch
or a wound," said Tom Skinner, a spokesman for
the government Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC).
Other medical officials said the deaths
should not be seen as presaging an epidemic, as the
bacteria preys mostly on the very old or those already
suffering from a chronic illness.
The floodwaters in low-lying New Orleans have receded
as US Army engineers have brought more of the city's
damaged pumps back in operation.
The drainage process is expected to take close to three
months and Nagin warned the country to brace for some
"awful" revelations as the dropping water
levels reveal more of Katrina's human cost.
The mayor said as many as 10,000
people may have died in the city and a Louisiana
health official revealed Wednesday that some 25,000
body bags had been brought into the area.
The city's official death toll currently stands at
83, but that number is certain to rise over the coming
week.
In Washington, President George W. Bush asked lawmakers
for a further 51.8 billion dollars in emergency funding
to cover costs tied to the hurricane relief and recovery
effort.
Bush, who has come under fire for the federal response
to one of the worst natural disasters in US history,
had signed an initial emergency package totalling some
10.5 billion dollars last week.
"We are sparing no effort to help those who have
been affected by Katrina and are in need of help,"
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.
Congressional leaders, meanwhile, battled over the
question of who should handle the inquiry into how the
Katrina crisis was managed.
Democrats are demanding an independent
probe like the one, at first resisted by Bush, that
looked into the September 11, 2001 attacks. They
have also started a petition to sack the much-criticised
head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael
Brown.
Bush's majority Republicans only agreed Wednesday to
a joint Senate-House of Representatives investigation
to look into the actions of "all levels of government."
After promising to lead his own inquiry, Bush would
not say whether any aides would be fired over the slow
response that he has admitted was "unacceptable."
A USA Today survey released Wednesday
said 42 percent of Americans felt Bush had done his
job handling Katrina "badly" or "very
badly". Thirty-five percent backed the president's
effort.
Twenty-five percent criticised local authorities and
18 percent the Louisiana state for the chaos.
Meanwhile Germany dispatched a team of disaster relief
workers Thursday to help hurricane victims, the Technisches
Hilfswerk (THW) agency said.
The 54-member THW team left the Ramstein US military
airport in western Germany bound for New Orleans early
Thursday in a C-17 Globemaster transport plane loaded
with water pumps and trucks.
A second contingent of 40 aid workers was to leave
from Ramstein later Thursday.
The move came as The Washington
Times reported that nearly 900 foreign nationals, many
of them French and British, are still missing in the
areas devastated last week by Hurricane Katrina.
While consular officials consulted by the daily reported
some 160 French citizens and 96 Britons missing, Mexicans,
especially illegal immigrants, were expected to outnumber
all other nationalities, the daily said.
The US State Department Wednesday afternoon told the
newspaper that, based on numbers provided by various
embassies, 883 foreign nationals were still unaccounted
for in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. |
WASHINGTON - The federal government
plans to hand out debit cards worth $2,000 each to families
displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
Homeland Security Department Secretary Michael Chertoff,
under fire for his agency's response
to the disaster, held a conference call with
governors of states with evacuees and described the
plan. While many details remained to be worked out,
the plan was to quickly begin distributing the cards,
starting with people in major
evacuation centers such as the Houston Astrodome.
Michael Brown, the head of the Federal Emergency Management
Agency which is administering the novel card program,
said it is aimed at those with the most pressing needs.
"The concept is to get them some cash in hand
which allows them, empowers them, to make their own
decisions about what do they need to have to start rebuilding,"
Brown said.
Republican Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who participated
in the conference call, said the cards will be offered
"to people in shelters as well as people who are
not in shelters but who have evacuated the area and
need help." He said the hope
is the cards will encourage people to leave shelters
voluntarily.
Other FEMA officials warned not all families that fled
their homes will be eligible.
"For instance you may have some people who have
insurance and insurance is meeting their living expenses
while they have been displaced," said Ed Conley,
a FEMA spokesman in Houston. "You have some people
who may be looking at an option such as a cruise ship
where all of their needs are going to be met. It is
going to vary by family."
The cards are to be used to help victims purchase food,
transportation and other essentials.
It's unclear how much the debit card program will cost
the government, but it could run into the hundreds of
millions of dollars since hundreds of thousands of people
have been displaced. [...] |
HOUSTON - Three truckloads of fashion
clothing seized by government agents for violating import
quotas arrived at Houston's Astrodome on Wednesday so
Hurricane Katrina refugees there can put it to use.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection
delivered about 100,000 items of summer clothing, with
an estimated value of $2.3 million, and said much more
is on the way to evacuees elsewhere.
"We normally would either sell this merchandise
or destroy it," said Robert Trotter, the agency's
director of field operations. "Or we would donate
it on a smaller scale."
Some of the items are fakes, but Trotter said most
are legitimate.
The hurricane relief operation, aimed at the more than
1 million Gulf Coast residents displaced by Katrina
last week, will involve a total of $168 million worth
of clothing.
The items delivered on Tuesday, much of it with designer
labels like Fubu and Code Blue, were handed to the Red
Cross and local church officials who were to distribute
it.
"They will be able to tell us
specifically what they want and a personal shopper will
go back and get it for them," said Mike Firenza
of St. Luke's Methodist Church. "It
will be one of the finest-dressed shelters that there's
ever been."
The Astrodome, a 40-year-old sports stadium that had
fallen into disuse recently, housed about 16,000 refugees
on Tuesday. Three other major shelters in Houston housed
a total of 10,000. |
FIRST ASSESSMENT: Hurricane Katrina
will cause national employment to drop by 400,000 jobs,
the Congressional Budget Office predicted. Such
a loss would wipe out recent jobs gains achieved under
the Bush administration.
ADDED WOES: The storm's havoc may also slow economic
growth by as much as a full percentage point this year
and cause gasoline prices to jump 40
percent this month.
UNCLEAR FUTURE: With economists
and politicians forecasting varying outcomes, the hurricane's
long-term impact remains uncertain. |
WASHINGTON - Barbara Bush was making
"a personal observation" when she said poor
people at a relocation center in Houston were faring
better than before Hurricane Katrina struck, President
Bush's spokesman said Wednesday.
Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, did
not answer directly when asked if the president agreed
with his mother's remarks.
Mrs. Bush, after touring the Astrodome complex in Houston
on Monday, said: "What I'm
hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to
stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality.
And so many of the people in the arena here, you know,
were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very
well for them." She commented during a radio
interview with the American Public Media program "Marketplace."
McClellan, at the White House briefing, said: "I
think she was making a personal observation on some
of the comments that people were making that she was
running into. ... But what we're focused on is
helping these people who are in need."
Asked if Bush agreed with his mother, McClellan said:
"I think that the observation is based on someone
or some people that were talking to her that were in
need of a lot of assistance, people that have gone through
a lot of trauma and been through a very difficult and
trying time. And all of a sudden, they are now getting
great help in the state of Texas from some of the shelters." |
If you believe the oil industry's
response to Katrina, you'd think demanding environmentalists
are to blame for $3 per gallon gasoline because the
tree huggers shut down refineries with tough new rules.
President Bush even mimicked the industry excuse by
waiving environmental standards in the wake of Katrina.
Well, the industry's own internal
memos show the intentional shrinking of American refinery
capacity in the 1990s was the oil companies' own idea
to pump up profits.
Take this internal
Texaco strategy memo:
"[T]he most critical factor facing the refining
industry on the West Coast is the surplus of refining
capacity, and the surplus gasoline production capacity.
(The same situation exists for the entire U.S. refining
industry.) Supply significantly exceeds demand year-round.
This results in very poor refinery margins and very
poor refinery financial results. Significant
events need to occur to assist in reducing supplies
and/or increasing the demand for gasoline."
The memo went on to discuss a sucessful
campaign in Washington State to shrink refined supply
by removing other additives in the gasoline that filled
gas volume.
Another Mobil
memo shows the company promoted tough regulations
in California to shut down an independent refiner. A
Chevron
memo acknowledged the industry wide need to shutter
refineries and discussed how refiners were responding
in kind.
Large oil companies have for a decade artificially
shorted the gasoline market to drive up prices. Oil
companies know they can make more money by making less
gasoline. Katrina should be a wakeup call to America
that the refiners profit widely when they keep the system
running on empty. It's time for government to regulate
the industry's supply. The fact
that President Bush received $2.6 million from the oil
industry for his reelection in 2004 should make regulation
of the nation's gas supply one of the Democrats' most
important talking points. |
"How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home."
Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone"
Let's be clear about one thing. Nothing that has happened
in the past week -- the mass destruction in the Mississippi
Delta, the obliteration of the city of New Orleans,
the murderous abandonment of thousands of people to
death, chaos and disease will change the Bush
Administration or American politics at all. Not one
whit. The Bush Administration will not reverse its brutal
policies; its Congressional rubber-stamps will not revolt
against the White House; the national Democrats will
not suddenly grow a spine. There will be no real change,
and the bitter corrosion of injustice, indifference
and inhumanity that is consuming American society will
go on as before.
One proof of this can be found in the first polls coming
out after the disaster, which show that a full 46 percent
of the American people approve of Bush's handling of
the relief effort. It seems inconceivable that any sentient
being could witness the agonizing results of the Bush
team's dithering, dilatory response an agony played
out in the full glare of non-stop media coverage
and not come away with a sense of towering anger at
this criminal incompetence. But it's obvious that nearly
half the American people have now left the "reality-based
community" altogether; they see only what they
want to see, a world bathed in the hazy, golden nimbus
of the Leader. The fact the undeniable truth
that behind this carefully-concocted mirage lies nothing
more than a steaming pile of rancid, rotting offal means
nothing to these true believers. The
Lie is better, the Lie is more comforting, the Lie lets
them keep feeding on the suffering of others without
guilt or shame.
This painful split between obvious reality and popular
perception is nothing new, of course. Today we look
at old footage of Adolf Hitler and wonder how on earth
such a pathetic and ludicrous creature could ever have
commanded the adoration and obedience of tens of millions
of people. Yet he did. As Eliot said, "Human kind
cannot bear very much reality."
The fact that a few conservative commentators and politicians
are making mild criticisms of Bush means nothing. There
has been much trumpeting of the remarks by David Brooks
of the New York Times that Bush's manifest failures
in the Delta coming after the debacle of the Iraq
occupation, the torture revelations, etc. could
be a "watershed" moment when the nation loses
faith in its institutions, a situation Brooks likened
to the 1970s. But even in making
these comments on one hand, Brooks was taking them back
with the other, saying clearly that he might "get
over" his disappointment with Bush soon enough.
Think of it: Brooks has watched
people literally dying before his very eyes after being
abandoned to their fate for days by Bush's criminal
negligence and he thinks he can "get over"
that at some point, and give his full-throated approval
to the Leader once again.
This is the general mind-set (if you want to dignify
the inch-deep shallowness of Brooks' intellect with
the word "mind") of all the conservative critics:
gosh, Bush really dropped the ball on this one! He'd
better turn the PR thing around, or he might lose some
of the "political capital" he needs to "advance
his second-term agenda." That's
it. That's as far as it goes.
After all, they fully support the "agenda"
more war, more tax cuts for the rich, more impunity
for big corporations, more welfare for the oil barons,
the coal barons, the nuke barons, more coddling of elite
investors, more state power for Christian extremists,
more media consolidation, more graft, more kickbacks,
more easy money for greasy palms. And now that Karl
Rove has finally figured out his response employing
brazen lies to smear state and local officials
you will very quickly see the conservative critics,
especially in Congress, fall into lockstep with the
porcine counsellor's program.
By the time Congress holds hearings into the disaster,
they'll be singing love songs to the Leader; the hearings
themselves will doubtless turn into a pageant of heroic
tableaux -- glittering stories of the heroic federal
effort to rescue the perishing, all of it driven by
the calm and steady hand of the Commander-in-chief.
Oh, there might be a scapegoat
or two for the Congressmen to pummel with puff-cheeked
righteous rage for the cameras. But anyone hoping for
a fearless, presidency-shaking probe will be disappointed.
Just as the media have always
overhyped Bush's popularity, they are now overhyping
the "political crisis" he is supposedly facing.
There is no political crisis whatsoever, if by "political
crisis" you mean something that will cause Bush
to alter his policies. The war in Iraq will go on. The
war against the poor will go on. The slow destruction
of middle-class security and stability will go on. The
long and ferocious rightwing campaign against the very
idea of a "common good" will go on, unabated
perhaps even strengthened as it faces a backlash
from the half of the American public that actually accepts
the reality of what they saw in New Orleans and all
along the ravaged Gulf Coast.
This is what you must understand: Bush
and his faction do not care if they have "the consent
of the governed" or not. They are not interested
in governing at all, in responding to the needs and
desires and will of the people. They are only interested
in ruling, in using the power of the state to force
their radical agenda of elitist aggrandizement and ideological
crankery on the nation, and on the world.
They have a large, hard core of true believers who
will countenance even applaud any crime,
any corruption, any incompetence of the Leader and his
minions. With this base, and with all of the branches
of government already in their hands, the Faction need
only procure the reluctant support of just a small percentage
of the rest of the population through fearmongering,
through smears and lies, and, as we saw in 2000 and
2004, through the manipulation of election results via
politically connected voting-machine corporations and
politically partisan election officials.
None of this will change because of what happened in
New Orleans. If these people
could be touched by suffering and injustice, by death
and destruction, by corruption and incompetence, then
they would not be where they are today. If there
was a viable opposition in the American Establishment
to Bush's policies, it would have stood up long ago.
Like the people left behind in New Orleans, we're all
on our own "with no direction home."
How does it feel?
Chris Floyd is a columnist for The Moscow Times
and regular contributor to CounterPunch. A new, upgraded
version of his blog, "Empire Burlesque," can
be found at www.chris-floyd.com. |
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration
asked the Supreme Court on Wednesday to turn away a
challenge to the military commissions the Bush administration
created to put some detainees at Guantanamo Bay on trial
for war crimes.
Lawyers for Salim Ahmed Hamdan are
seeking Supreme Court review of an appeals court decision
in which Judge John Roberts sided with the other two
judges in favor of the Bush administration.
While the Hamdan case was pending last April, Roberts
began interviewing with administration officials for
a possible Supreme Court spot. Democratic
senators Charles Schumer of New York and Russ Feingold
of Wisconsin have said they want to ask Roberts about
a possible conflict of interest.
The senators said it raises ethical issues to continue
to work on a case in which one of the parties is considering
you for another position.
In its brief to the Supreme Court, the Justice Department
said the trial of Hamdan, a Yemeni who once was al-Qaida
leader Osama bin Laden's driver, should be allowed to
proceed and said he will have ample opportunity later
to raise any legal objections. Even
if acquitted at trial, he will still be detained as
an enemy combatant, the department said.
Hamdan's lawyers object to the possibility
that classified documents will be introduced against
him at trial and that he would not be given access to
the information.
It is entirely possible that no classified material
would be presented by the prosecution, the government
said in asking the Supreme Court not to hear Hamdan's
case.
The Justice Department pointed out that the Pentagon
relaxed the rules for tribunals a week ago, enabling
classified information to be shared with defendants
"to the extent consistent with national security,
law enforcement interests and applicable law."
The rewritten rule also bars the admission of classified
information if it "would result in the denial of
a full and fair trial."
The rule changes also mean that the makeup of the tribunal
hearing Hamdan's case is likely to change, overcoming
another of Hamdan's objections, said the Justice Department.
Hamdan was not allowed to be present when his lawyers
challenged the impartiality of the U.S. military officers
sitting on the commission that was to hear Hamdan's
case.
Under the new rules, the presiding officer is more
like a judge in a court martial or civilian court and
is required to rule on all questions of law; the other
members of the commission will function more like a
jury and are no longer permitted to participate in deciding
most legal questions.
The shift in responsibilities is likely to result in
replacing the other members of the commission. They
were the ones challenged by Hamdan's lawyers, so the
fact that Hamdan was not allowed to be present when
their impartiality was called into question is no longer
an issue, the department said. |
WASHINGTON - The anonymous donor
turned up at a U.S. diplomatic office and presented
an envelope with 1,000 euros, about $1,200, for Hurricane
Katrina relief efforts.
It was a way of repaying a debt to the United States
for being liberated by American soldiers from a concentration
camp and treated more than 60 years ago, Sean McCormack,
the State Department spokesman, said Wednesday in relating
the incident.
The donor was 90 years old, but that is all McCormack
would say by way of identification, although it was
learned later the donor was a woman. "This is a
person who is not seeking any publicity for this act
- which in the time we live makes it even more extraordinary,"
he said.
"This is a selfless act by somebody
who is repaying what they felt was a deeply felt debt
of gratitude to the United States," the spokesman
said.
This is one of many stories from around
the world of individuals being very generous with the
American people at a time of need, McCormack said.
"It's extraordinary," he said. |
TOKYO - Powerful typhoon Nabi left
Japan after crisscrossing north to south in a path of
destruction that left 32 dead or missing in Japan and
South Korea and flooded thousands of homes.
The typhoon headed onto the Sea of Okhotsk east of
Siberia nearly a week after it first built up in the
subtropical Pacific waters south of Japan.
The worst hit area remained Miyazaki province on the
southern island of Kyushu, where rice fields were deluged
by a powerful downpour.
"We found another body, believed to be a 28-year-old
man who had gone missing, in a rice field" flooded
by the typhoon, an official at Miyazaki prefectural
police said.
It has raised the death toll in Japan to 19, with at
least eight others still missing. The search was also
on for five people who are unaccounted for in South
Korea.
With the typhoon bringing violent rains to most of
the country, police said 139 people had been injured
in 30 of Japan's 47 prefectures.
After hitting Kyushu, the typhoon made a sharp turn
to the east, slamming into the northern island of Hokkaido
but bypassing Japan's central population hubs.
Television footage showed residents in Hokkaido, which
is rarely hit by typhoons, using buckets to bail water
from their flooded houses as high waves lashed the coast.
"We have not received reports of injuries or deaths
over the typhoon ... but we need to be on alert,"
a Hokkaido police official said, noting waves were still
high and rivers were swollen.
Nabi, which means "butterly" in Korean, was
300 kilometers north of Abashiri City on Hokkaido's
Okhotsk coast at 10:00 am (0100 GMT) and is forecast
to weaken into a temperate depression later Thursday.
At its height, the typhoon packed winds of more than
90 kilometers (56 miles) an hour across a radius of
nearly 300 kilometers, a greater area than Hurricane
Katrina which ravaged New Orleans.
The typhoon flooded more than 8,000
houses, triggered 155 landslides and damaged 80 roads
since the weekend, Japanese police said.
The disaster also indirectly hit Japan's election on
Sunday, with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi calling
off campaign stops in the Osaka area Wednesday and staying
near Tokyo due to the heavy rain.
Rescue workers in southern and western Japan continued
to search for the missing using long, metal rods to
feel under piles of mud for any buried victims.
In the southern rural town of Tarumi, rescuers found
the bodies of two elderly women in their 70s at a house
that was engulfed by a landslide.
In western Yamaguchi prefecture, a landslide collapsed
a section of a highway, burying three people who were
inside two houses.
Mainland Japan was struck by a record 10 typhoons last
year. One of them, Tokage, was the deadliest in a quarter-century,
killing 90 people.
In South Korea, an 18-year-old student was missing
after heavy rains sent her car into a river, police
said Wednesday.
Floods also swept away a 70-year-old man and three
other people went missing overnight in South Korea,
Yonhap news agency reported. |
ROME - An earthquake rattled the
Alpine region near the Italian ski resort town of Courmayeur
on Thursday, officials said, but no damage or injuries
were reported.
The tremor had a preliminary magnitude
of 4.4 and its epicenter was at a depth of some 21,000
feet under the Pennine Alps in the Swiss-French border
area, according to the National Institute of Geophysics
in Rome.
A quake of magnitude 4 to 5 can cause moderate damage
in populated areas. The national civil defense office
said initial checks indicated no injuries or damage
occurred.
The ANSA news agency, reporting from Aosta in northwest
Italy, said some people on lower floors of buildings
heard a creaking sound that lasted a few seconds.
"I heard a rumble and then two jolts that lasted
a few seconds," said Giorgio Gialdrone, owner of
a Courmayeur restaurant.
"I was on the second floor so I felt it more,"
said Gialdrone, speaking by telephone. "It was
quite a vibration, but nothing was damaged." |
A moderate earthquake occurred
at 11:27:17 (UTC) on Thursday, September 8, 2005. The
magnitude 5.1 event has been located in SWITZERLAND.
(This event has been reviewed by a seismologist.) |
A moderate earthquake occurred
at 04:10:10 (UTC) on Thursday, September 8, 2005. The
magnitude 5.7 event has been located in the MOLUCCA
SEA. The hypocentral depth was estimated to be 42 km
(26 miles). (This event has been reviewed by a seismologist.)
|
To medieval observers, they were
mysterious harbingers of doom, but thanks to an unprecedented
act of celestial vandalism, scientists have unveiled
some of the innermost secrets of comets.
Out is the long-held view of hardened,
dirty snowballs hurtling through space. In is the comet
as a fluffy ball of powder, blowing puffs of dust whenever
sunlight falls on it.
The insight came yesterday when researchers announced
the first detailed results of Deep Impact, an elaborate
experiment played out in space on July 4. Under the
gaze of cameras on nearby spacecraft and more than 70
ground-based telescopes, the Deep Impact probe fired
a metre-long copper bullet on a collision course with
a 4-mile-wide block of dust and ice known as Comet 9P/Tempel
1.
The 23,000mph collision produced a huge crater and
gave scientists their first ever look inside a speeding
comet.
"Prior to our Deep Impact experiment, scientists
had a lot of questions and untested ideas about the
structure and composition of the nucleus of a comet,
but we had almost no real knowledge," said Michael
A'Hearn, professor of astronomy at the University of
Maryland and lead scientist on the Deep Impact project.
Prof A'Hearn's team is still trying to locate the crater
the projectile gouged out of the comet, because the
cloud of dust produced on impact obscured cameras aboard
the Deep Impact probe as it flew past. But measurements
of the particles knocked out of the comet during the
collision revealed some intriguing details of its make-up.
Most striking is that the comet is
not made up of very much at all. "It's mostly empty,"
said Prof A'Hearn. The fine particles of dust and ice
are held together extremely loosely, with pores thought
to run throughout. "We have deduced that around
75% to 80% of the nucleus is empty and that tells me
there is probably no solid nucleus. That is a significant
advance in our understanding," said Prof A'Hearn.
The finding overturns the view held by some scientists
that comets were hard balls of solid dust and ice. "The
outer several tens of metres of the cometary material
is extremely fragile," said Prof A'Hearn whose
study is published online by Science Express today.
Images of the comet before impact showed it released
bursts of gas and dust into space when sunlight heated
up its surface.
When Deep Impact's copper bullet slammed into the comet,
it produced a crater estimated to be the size of a football
pitch and some tens of metres deep. The impact knocked
thousands of tonnes of material into space.
Among the material were a host of organic molecules.
Some scientists believe that comets carried these compounds
to other planets, releasing them on impact, and seeding
them with the building blocks of life. "I'd argue
that's more likely now, because we saw this big enhancement
of organic material coming out on impact," said
Prof A'Hearn.
The researchers were also keen to
see if their speeding projectile would divert the comet
from its orbit, a strategy that might be used in defence
should a comet or asteroid be detected on a collision
course with Earth.
"What we have learned is important
to designing a diversion technique. Knowing it's highly
porous and highly fragile is important and knowing how
much material came out, and how fast, tells you how
efficiently you can transfer energy to it," said
Prof A'Hearn. |
The largest known asteroid could
contain more fresh water than Earth and looks like our
planet in other ways, according to a new study that
further blurs the line between planets and large space
rocks.
Astronomers took 267 images of asteroid Ceres using
the Hubble Space Telescope. From these images and subsequent
computer simulations, they suggest Ceres may have a
rocky inner core and a thin, dusty outer crust.
A team led by Peter Thomas of Cornell University said
today that Ceres is nearly spherical, which suggests
that gravity controls its shape. Also, the asteroid's
non-uniform shape indicates that material is not evenly
distributed throughout the inside.
These and other new clues, including Ceres' low density,
point to an interior loaded with frozen water, the astronomers
said.
The results are detailed in the Sept. 8 issue of the
journal Nature.
Big and round
Ceres has long been considered one of the tens of thousands
of asteroids that make up the asteroid belt between
Mars and Jupiter. At 580 miles (930 km) in diameter
– about the size of Texas – it's the largest
asteroid in the belt, accounting for about 25 percent
of the belt's total mass.
Astronomers had thought Ceres might never have been
heated enough to create layers of material.
But computer models now suggest Ceres has a differentiated
interior – dense material in the core and lighter
stuff near the surface. Possible configurations include
a mantle rich in water ice around a rocky core.
If this mantle is composed of
at least 25 percent water, Ceres would have more fresh
water than Earth, according to a statement released
by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates
Hubble for NASA and the European Space Agency.
"The most likely scenario from the knowledge we
have on how other objects form, it probably has a rocky
core and a mantle. That mantle is probably some watery,
icy mix, with other dirt and constituents. That mantle
could be as much as ¼ of the whole object,"
study coauthor Joel Parker of the Southwest Research
Institute told SPACE.com. "Even though it's a small
object compared to Earth, there could be a lot of water."
On Earth, fresh water makes up only
a thin layer just a few miles deep in some places, less
in others. The water layer proposed for Ceres, while
smaller in circumference, is many miles thicker.
The total volume of water on Earth is about 1.4 billion
cubic kilometers, around 41 million of which is fresh
water. If Ceres' mantle accounts for 25 percent of the
asteroid's mass, that would translate to an upper limit
of 200 million cubic kilometers of water, Parker said.
Since all the nine "regular" planets have
differentiated interiors, this new view of Ceres has
some astronomers calling Ceres a "mini-planet,"
adding fuel to an ongoing debate over exactly what qualifies
as a planet.
Embryonic world
Other researchers recently announced the discovery
of 2003 UB313, a round object in our solar system 1-1/2
times larger than Pluto and about three times further
away from the Sun. But even an object of this size –
at 2,100 miles in diameter roughly four times the size
of Ceres – doesn't receive universal endorsement
as being a planet.
One astronomer, Brian Marsden, who runs the Minor Planet
Center where data on small bodies is collected, says
that if Pluto is considered a planet, then any other
round worlds should also be considered planets. Under
this definition, which some other astronomers subscribe
to, Ceres 2003 UB313 and a handful of other large objects
would be named planets. The alternative, Marsden and
others say, is to stop calling Pluto a planet.
Another explanation is that Ceres is a sort of 'baby'
planet – an underdeveloped version of Earth and
other rocky planets. Looked at this way, Ceres appears
as other fledgling planets might have looked more than
4 billion years ago.
The leading theory for planet formation holds that
small rocks collided, stuck and gradually grew. Depending
on location and orbit, a developing world may or may
not have encountered enough raw material to become as
large as the four traditional rocky planets.
"Ceres is an embryonic planet," said observation
team member Lucy McFadden of the Department of Astronomy
at the University of Maryland. "Gravitational perturbations
from Jupiter billions of years ago prevented Ceres from
accreting more material to become a full-fledged planet."
In 2015 scientists will get a close up look at Ceres
when the NASA Dawn mission orbits the asteroid. A closer
look should provide more clues about the asteroid's
composition. |
Will the Sandia Lights - a string
of stationary lights seen along Sandia Crest Tuesday
night - join the Taos Hum and the UFO Crash near Roswell
as part of New Mexico's permanent museum of weirdness?
Apparently not. Just as the state's newest mystery
was deepening, eyewitnesses told U.S. Forest Service
officials Wednesday they had seen people on the crest
Monday carrying large boxes with photographic equipment
and again on Tuesday people setting up large "can-shaped
lights" along the crest for some kind of photo
shoot or photo experiment.
Phones were ringing off the hook at news media outlets
and official agencies Tuesday night and Wednesday morning
as a string of lights - some said five or six placed
at regular intervals along or just below the Sandia
Peak ridge - appeared between just after sundown until
around 10 p.m. Tuesday.
Officials were just as baffled as the general public
until people came forward Wednesday and told the Forest
Service what they had seen.
"Someone saw a group of three people Monday afternoon
carrying large boxes with photo equipment," District
Ranger Jackie Andrew of the Sandia Ranger District said
Wednesday. "They were told it was kind of a photography
experiment."
Then, a person living at Sandia Peak's Crest House
with Forest Service authorization told officials he
had seen some seven or eight battery-operated lights,
similar to those found at construction sites, lined
up along the crest, Andrew said.
Whoever lined up the lights "took the photos and
left," said Forest Service spokeswoman Karen Takai.
The explanation "wasn't terribly exciting,"
said Andrew, who earlier Wednesday had joked, "There
were no reports of aliens on the crest this morning."
More likely, Andrew said before the
Forest Service had the witnesses come forward, the lights
had been caused by nighttime hikers placing lights at
regular intervals along the trail, "a see-the-woods-at-night
kind of thing."
Mark Chavez, spokesman for the Cibola National Forest,
said the same thing. "We suspected it was a group
of hikers hiking at night."
But, he added, "we're just as curious to find out
what it was as everybody else."
A Bernalillo County sheriff's deputy was dispatched
to the crest Tuesday night and found nothing, said BCSO
spokeswoman Erin Kinnard. "The deputy cleared the
call around 10:15 (p.m.) and said it was nothing."
In fact, the whole public uproar about the lights was
much ado about nothing, Kinnard said.
"We got lots of calls,"
she said. "But we didn't spend a lot of time on
it."
Sandia Peak Tramway manager George Boyden said the
tram got "all kinds of phone calls" from newspapers,
radio and television stations and the general public.
"We still don't have any idea what it was,"
Boyden said.
The first light appeared shortly after sunset, around
7:30 p.m., Boyden said. Then five or six lights appeared
at regular intervals, "all right along the ridge"
between the Crest House and the tramway terminal, he
said.
Boyden said the lights were visible from below the
crest as he was driving home around 9 p.m. and were
still visible around 10 p.m.
Boyden said he thought when the first light was reported
was that somebody had gotten lost, but when more lights
appeared he said he joked to coworkers that "maybe
the UFOs had landed."
More likely, Boyden said, the lights could have been
part of a promotional stunt - one that could well backfire
if it was an organized activity that had failed to get
a permit from the U.S. Forest Service.
District Ranger Andrew said that a check of the trail
where the lights were set up didn't even find a footprint.
But whoever engaged in the photo experiment or photo
shoot should have checked in with the Forest Service
to see whether a permit was needed. |
For
the first time, the Signs Team's most popular and discerning
essays have been compiled into book form and thematically
organized.
These books contain hard hitting exposés into
human nature, propaganda, psyop activities and insights
into the world events that shape our future and our
understanding of the world.
The six new books, available now at our bookstore,
are entitled:
- 911 Conspiracy
- The Human Condition
- The Media
- Religion
- The Work
- U.S. Freedom
Read
them today - before the book burning starts! |
Readers
who wish to know more about who we are and what we do may visit
our portal site Quantum
Future
Remember,
we need your help to collect information on what is going on in
your part of the world!
We also need help to keep
the Signs of the Times online.
Send
your comments and article suggestions to us
Fair Use Policy Contact Webmaster at signs-of-the-times.org Cassiopaean materials Copyright ©1994-2014 Arkadiusz Jadczyk and Laura Knight-Jadczyk. All rights reserved. "Cassiopaea, Cassiopaean, Cassiopaeans," is a registered trademark of Arkadiusz Jadczyk and Laura Knight-Jadczyk. Letters addressed to Cassiopaea, Quantum Future School, Ark or Laura, become the property of Arkadiusz Jadczyk and Laura Knight-Jadczyk Republication and re-dissemination of our copyrighted material in any manner is expressly prohibited without prior written consent.
|