There is obviously a massive gulf in knowledge between the high-level members of the US government and military and the millions of American men and women who sign up to man the battle stations of manufactured wars. From the point of view of people like Rumsfeld, Cheney and the various US military generals, they see nothing unjust or wrong about they way they wilfully deceive and sacrifice the lives of American citizens. Quite the opposite in fact.

If there is one concept to which American political and military leaders cling dearly and to which they turn as the final arbiter of their actions, it is the maxim that 'the end justifies the means'. From the point of view of Rumsfeld, Cheney et al, the very fact that they find themselves in a position where they can command 150,000 young American men and women to die fighting a fabricated "war on terror", is evidence enough of the legitimacy of their positions as leaders. Indeed, they afford the U.S. population access to the same system of "justice" and offer them the chance to prove that they have a right to freedom of any kind. After all, if young American soldiers, or American citizens, are too stupid to see through the lies of their leaders, then who is to blame when they pay the ultimate price?

It's the age-old game of "survival of the fittest", and while they would be forced to admit that all players in the game do not start out on a level playing field, reality creators like the Washington NeoCons would also bring our attention to the fact that the playing field is not not level by accident. Such is the logic adhered to by the big men and women in the halls of power, and the end result of such a grossly immoral stance among the ruling elite is never pretty for the rest of us.

Of course, all of this is a long way from the founding fathers' declaration of inalienable rights for all, and the requirement that those elected to govern should uphold those rights. Somewhere along the line (quite close to the start actually), the idea of upholding the rights of the population was deleted from the great Democratic experiment and, in its place, systematic policies of corporate and political elitism leading to economic deprivation and class structuring, followed by intellectual 'dumbing-down' of the "lower" classes (lower classes being all but the elite), and finally the promotion of jingoistic fervour as a distraction and to ensure a continuous supply of cannon fodder, were developed.

The harsh reality then is that, far from honouring war heroes and supporting the troops, the American political and corporate elite have always viewed the American population, and particularly those they see as stupid enough to fight their wars for them, with nothing but the deepest contempt. To them they are "useless eaters", good only for paying taxes and being deceived into marching off to war, to kill and maim their fellow humans for the profit of the ruling elite. Of course, there is always the option to prove them wrong, regardless of our past record. Whether we as a race do so, depends entirely on our ability to recognise the truth of everything that has been said above.

If there is one thing above all others that has lead to the precipice upon which we currently sit as a species, it is knowledge, or the lack of it, and the fact that certain small groups of so-called ‘elite’ have always sought to maintain a monopoly on it at the expense of the masses of humanity. Clearly therefore, it is knowledge that is and always has been the most prized ‘commodity’ on this planet. Unfortunately, the catch 22 to beat them all is the fact that almost no one knows this.

Why?

Because the knowledge that knowledge is key has been deliberately and rigorously denied them by the propaganda of religion where "faith" and "blind belief" in the leader is the key to salvation. The salient point is that it is, and always has been, only in the darkness of ignorance of the true state of their reality that ordinary people can be merrily led down the path that leads, over and over again, to their own destruction. It is only in the darkness of ignorance of the true state of their reality that ordinary people can be merrily led down the path that leads, over and over again, to their own destruction.

IN RECENT YEARS, I have become increasingly concerned by a host of radical government policies that now threaten many basic principles espoused by all previous administrations, Democratic and Republican.

These include the rudimentary American commitment to peace, economic and social justice, civil liberties, our environment and human rights.

Also endangered are our historic commitments to providing citizens with truthful information, treating dissenting voices and beliefs with respect, state and local autonomy and fiscal responsibility.

At the same time, our political leaders have declared independence from the restraints of international organizations and have disavowed long-standing global agreements — including agreements on nuclear arms, control of biological weapons and the international system of justice.

Instead of our tradition of espousing peace as a national priority unless our security is directly threatened, we have proclaimed a policy of "preemptive war," an unabridged right to attack other nations unilaterally to change an unsavory regime or for other purposes. When there are serious differences with other nations, we brand them as international pariahs and refuse to permit direct discussions to resolve disputes.

Regardless of the costs, there are determined efforts by top U.S. leaders to exert American imperial dominance throughout the world.

These revolutionary policies have been orchestrated by those who believe that our nation's tremendous power and influence should not be internationally constrained. Even with our troops involved in combat and America facing the threat of additional terrorist attacks, our declaration of "You are either with us or against us!" has replaced the forming of alliances based on a clear comprehension of mutual interests, including the threat of terrorism.

Another disturbing realization is that, unlike during other times of national crisis, the burden of conflict is now concentrated exclusively on the few heroic men and women sent back repeatedly to fight in the quagmire of Iraq. The rest of our nation has not been asked to make any sacrifice, and every effort has been made to conceal or minimize public awareness of casualties.

Instead of cherishing our role as the great champion of human rights, we now find civil liberties and personal privacy grossly violated under some extreme provisions of the Patriot Act.

Of even greater concern is that the U.S. has repudiated the Geneva accords and espoused the use of torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, and secretly through proxy regimes elsewhere with the so-called extraordinary rendition program. It is embarrassing to see the president and vice president insisting that the CIA should be free to perpetrate "cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment" on people in U.S. custody.

Instead of reducing America's reliance on nuclear weapons and their further proliferation, we have insisted on our right (and that of others) to retain our arsenals, expand them, and therefore abrogate or derogate almost all nuclear arms control agreements negotiated during the last 50 years. We have now become a prime culprit in global nuclear proliferation. America also has abandoned the prohibition of "first use" of nuclear weapons against nonnuclear nations, and is contemplating the previously condemned deployment of weapons in space.

Protection of the environment has fallen by the wayside because of government subservience to political pressure from the oil industry and other powerful lobbying groups. The last five years have brought continued lowering of pollution standards at home and almost universal condemnation of our nation's global environmental policies.

Our government has abandoned fiscal responsibility by unprecedented favors to the rich, while neglecting America's working families. Members of Congress have increased their own pay by $30,000 per year since freezing the minimum wage at $5.15 per hour (the lowest among industrialized nations).

I am extremely concerned by a fundamentalist shift in many houses of worship and in government, as church and state have become increasingly intertwined in ways previously thought unimaginable.

As the world's only superpower, America should be seen as the unswerving champion of peace, freedom and human rights. Our country should be the focal point around which other nations can gather to combat threats to international security and to enhance the quality of our common environment. We should be in the forefront of providing human assistance to people in need.

It is time for the deep and disturbing political divisions within our country to be substantially healed, with Americans united in a common commitment to revive and nourish the historic political and moral values that we have espoused during the last 230 years.

"The atmosphere in the Oval Office has become unbearable," a source said. "Even the family is split."

INSIGHT: Sources close to the White House say that Mr. Bush has become isolated and feels betrayed by key officials in the wake of plunging domestic support, the continued insurgency in Iraq and the CIA-leak investigation that has resulted in the indictment and resignation of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff.

The sources said Mr. Bush maintains daily contact with only four people: first lady Laura Bush, his mother, Barbara Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes. The sources also say that Mr. Bush has stopped talking with his father, except on family occasions.

It probably won't happen. On available evidence, the President himself has not grasped the essential criticism of moving against Iraq when he did: that a war in Iraq undercut the broader and longer term war against Islamic terrorism. Not in one speech, not in one interview or off-hand remark, not in one insider account of White House deliberation has there been the slightest indication that President Bush recognizes this concept sufficiently to offer a rebuttal to it.

Someone who does recognize that distinction is Donald Rumsfeld, who raised exactly this concern in the famous leaked memo of two years ago warning that the United States might be creating terrorists even faster than it was killing them. But Rumsfeld has locked himself into permanent wise-guy mode, and it is hard to imagine him sitting still for a question long enough to answer it seriously.

Paul Wolfowitz's answer would also be fascinating to hear -- but he is off to other projects now. It offends the rules of karma that Wolfowitz should have received Robert McNamara-style job of absolution, tending to poor nations at the World Bank, without undergoing obvious McNamara-style torments about the effects of his grand vision to liberate a particular poor nation with U.S. troops.

Colin Powell has also made a sweet karmic deal: he can be known as the most principled internal dissenter, without the muss and fuss of public dissent. And in a different way, Condi Rice has an attractive situation: she resolutely (and without nuance) defends the policy, without usually being blamed for it.

As for an answer from Dick Cheney, dream on.

So when the President decided on Friday to "respond to the critics" of his Iraq policy, naturally he did nothing of the kind. For the record, here are the three biggest, most obvious points not even addressed in his speech:

1) Everybody was not, in fact, working from the same misleading information. The administration's line about WMD these days is: OK, we might have been wrong -- but everybody was wrong, and everybody came to the same conclusion we did. The foreigners came to that conclusion through their intelligence services, and the Democrats (especially that weaselly Kerry and ambitious Hillary) did it when they voted for the war resolution.

But at the time, Administration officials were most emphasically NOT saying "hey, we're all operating in the dark here." The implied message of every briefing for reporters, every speech to the public, and every background session with legislators, was: If you knew what we knew, then you'd be as alarmed as we are. That was the message of Dick Cheney's statement that "there can be no doubt" that Iraq "now" had weapons of mass destruction, of Condi Rice's warning about the mushroom cloud, and of Colin Powell's presentation to the UN. The argument over Iraq's capabilities was by definition one sided, because the Administration's presumed insider knowledge trumped what anyone else could say. To pretend this was just a big widely-shared confusion is dishonest and wrong.

2) To say that Saddam Hussein might have been a threat is not to say that we had to invade when we did.

The Administration had two responses when asked in 2003 "what's the rush?" about beginning the invasion. One was logistical: the troops were in place, they couldn't wait forever, soon it would be hot (as if they would not be in Iraq through many summers!). This obviously is a "Guns of August" style of reasoning: the trains are moving toward the front, so we might as well start World War I.

The other response was: we've waited 12 years, why wait any more? The answer to that was, first, that Iraq was now crawling with weapons inspectors, who at a minimum would make it hard for Saddam to cook up any surprise plans -- and, second, that beginning a war could touch off a lot of messy complications left out of the optimistic war scenarios.

This is the crucial point: Every aspect about managing occupied Iraq could have turned out better with more time. There would be more chance to line up Arabic-speaking or Islamic allies; more time to get adequate U.S. troops on the scene; more chance to think about protecting the power system, the hospitals, and other aspects of the public infrastructure; more time in general to ask "what if..."

Comment: Some argument. It boils down to "if we had waited longer, we could have won"!

3) As for managing Iraq after the fall of Baghdad, there is no shared blame at all. The Bush Administration owns every aspect of this disastrously bungled situation.

The failure to stop the looting; the deliberately low-ball on the number of occupying troops; the rash decision to disband the Iraqi army; the inattention to how quickly American "liberators" would become "occupiers"; the lassitude about recruiting or training enough Arabic speakers or getting serious about developing an Iraqi force -- on these and a dozen other familiar points, the Administration cannot possibly say, "Hey, everybody was wrong." These were the decisions of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, in many cases bulldozing or ignoring contrary views from within the military and other parts of the government. Or, I guess the reality is: the Administration could "possibly" say this. They just couldn't say it honestly.

Stephen Hadley, Bush's National Security adviser, underlined the same point on Sunday, denying that there had been any manipulation.

Ironically, Hadley himself was at the center of the scandal about the hyping of intelligence on Iraq's alleged nuclear weapons program. The CIA keep sending him memos that implausible things were being alleged by Bush in his speeches about Saddam's nukes. Hadley's response was to ignore the CIA and try to find some way to keep saying the implausible things, e.g., by sourcing them to British intelligence instead.

By the way, the allegation that some, including Sen. John McCain, keep making that "the whole world" thought that Iraq had WMD is wrong for two reasons. First, most of the world depended on the US for its intelligence on Iraq and did not have a way of making an independent judgment. Second, the French ministry of defense demurred, as did several of the most important and experience arms inspectors, including Scott Ritter and Hans Blix.

This BBC item of 11 February, 2003, doesn't read like the Republicans' supposed international unanimity on the issue before the war:

' France, Germany and Russia have released an unprecedented joint declaration on the Iraq crisis, demanding more weapons inspectors and more technical assistance for them . . . "Nothing today justifies a war," Mr Chirac told a joint news conference with Mr Putin. "This region really does not need another war." He said France did not have "undisputed proof" that Iraq still held weapons of mass destruction. '

The Russians were if anything more skeptical.

It is not true that most of the Democrats in Congress saw the same intelligence that Bush saw. Democrats in Congress have told me that most of what they knew about Iraq before the war came via briefings from Bush administration and Pentagon officials. They say privately that they now feel that they were consistently lied to.

But let us look at just one area where there was clear manipulation by Bush and his high officials, and where he was not saying the same things that Clinton or the Democrats had been saying.

There are different sorts of lies. One way to lie is to have two pieces of information, and to suppress one and play up the other. Here is an example of this sort of falsehood.

The lie of omission:

The top al-Qaeda leaders so far captured are

Khalid Shaykh Muhammad

and

Abu Zubayda.

According to the 9/11 Commission report, they revealed to interrogators that Usamah Bin Laden had prohibited al-Qaeda operatives from cooperating with the secular Arab nationalist, Saddam Hussein.

This crucial information was withheld from Congress and from the American people by the Bush/Cheney administration in the run-up to the Iraq War.

(Although KSM was captured only shortly before the war, surely the connection to Saddam was the first thing they asked him about. His answer was not shared with us, to say the least.)

The Democrats and Bill Clinton could never have cited this information because it was never made available to them by Bush.

In contrast, the Bush/Cheney administration played up the lies of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi that Saddam's Iraq was training al-Qaeda operatives, even though the Defense Intelligence Agency and other high-level intelligence operatives dismissed this information as unreliable. It should be noted that no money traces showed al-Qaeda funds coming from Iraq. No captured al-Qaeda fighters had been trained in Iraq. There was no intelligence that in any way corroborated al-Libi's story. And, it was directly contradicted by two of his superiors.

The information from KSM and Abu Zubaydah circulated widely among intelligence officials.

' The report on Zubaydah's debriefing was circulated among US intelligence officers last year, but his statements were not included in public discussions by Administration officials about the evidence of al-Qaeda ties. "I remember reading the Abu Zubaydah debriefing last year, while the Administration was talking about all of these other reports and thinking that they were only putting out what they wanted," one official said. '

This was a community of intelligence. Those with the clearances saw those confessions. The lower-level analysts were amazed when they saw Bush and Cheney and Rice on television hyping al-Libi's torture-induced "revelations." . . . They were only putting out what they wanted . . ..

It is impossible that Bush, Cheney and Rice saw the intel from al-Libi but not from Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Shaikh Muhammad. The only way to explain these comments is that they suppressed the latter in order to emphasize the former. This tactic was deeply dishonest.

So in September of 2002, as "the new product" was being "rolled out" in the words of Bush adviser Andy Card, this is what we heard:

Thursday, September 26, 2002 Posted: 1:28 PM EDT (1728 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush's national security adviser Wednesday said Saddam Hussein has sheltered al Qaeda terrorists in Baghdad and helped train some in chemical weapons development -- information she said has been gleaned from captives in the ongoing war on terrorism.

The comments by Condoleezza Rice were the strongest and most specific to date on the White House's accusations linking al Qaeda and Iraq.

The accusations followed those made by President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who earlier in the day said the United States has evidence linking Iraq and al Qaeda, but they did not elaborate."

This lie by omission was repeated over and over again by Bush and his cronies:

"Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda."
- Bush in January 2003 State of the Union address.

"Iraq has also provided Al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training."
- Bush in February 2003.

If he had said, "Khalid Shaikh Muhammad and Abu Zubaydah, the top al-Qaeda operatives in custody, deny that there was any operational cooperation between Iraq and al-Qaeda. But Ibn al-Shaikh al-Libi asserts that Saddam Hussein is training al-Qaeda in the use of chemical weapons. I asked our Defense Intelligence Agency about this, and they do not find al-Libi's allegations credible. I as president have tough choices to make. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, I am inclined to believe al-Libi on this."

Then he would not have been lying to the public. But the way he did it was a lie. Some are saying that the evaluation of al-Libi by the DIA did not reach Bush and Cheney. That is not the DIA's fault. That is incompetence on Bush's and Cheney's parts. Why spend $44 billion a year on intelligence and not seek it?

The United States military captured much of the archive of the Baath ministry of the interior, which it turned over to Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress. That is where any document would be that mentioned al-Qaeda. It does not exist, or we would have seen it by now.

It was all a tissue of lies.

"Some Democrats who voted to authorize the use of force are now rewriting the past," Bush said. "They're playing politics with this issue and they are sending mixed signals to our troops and the enemy. That is irresponsible."

The president spoke to cheering troops at this military base at a refueling stop for Air Force One on the first leg of an eight-day journey to Japan, South Korea, China and Mongolia.

During the stopover, he also met privately with families of four slain service members.

After a Latin American trip with meager results earlier this month, the administration kept expectations low for Asia. [...]

Nearing the end of his fifth year in office, Bush has the lowest approval rating of his presidency and a majority of Americans say Bush is not honest and they disapprove of his handling of foreign policy and the war on terrorism. Heading for Asia, Bush hoped to improve his standing on the world stage.

"Reasonable people can disagree about the conduct of the war but it is irresponsible for Democrats to now claim that we misled them and the American people," Bush said.

He quoted pre-war remarks by three senior Democrats as evidence of that Democrats had shared the administration's fears that were the rationale for invading Iraq in 2003. Bush did not name them, but White House counselor Dan Bartlett filled in the blanks.

- "There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons." — Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va.

- "The war against terrorism will not be finished as long as (Saddam Hussein) is in power." — Sen. Carl Levin (news, bio, voting record), D-Mich.

- "Saddam Hussein, in effect, has thumbed his nose at the world community. And I think that the president's approaching this in the right fashion." — Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., then the Democratic whip.

Comment: Well, hold everything! This is a momentous event! For once, we actually agree with Bush since (quite possibly for the first time EVER) he spoke the truth - about Democratic support for his war!!

"The truth is that investigations of the intelligence on Iraq have concluded that only one person manipulated evidence and misled the world — and that person was Saddam Hussein," Bush charged.

Comment: Sigh! And he was doing so well...

In the Senate, 29 Democrats voted with 48 Republicans for the war authorization measure in late 2002, including 2004 Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, and his running mate, John Edwards of North Carolina. Both have recently been harshly critical of Bush's conduct of the war and its aftermath.

On Capitol Hill, top Democrats stood their ground in claiming Bush misled Congress and the country. "The war in Iraq was and remains one of the great acts of misleading and deception in American history," Kerry told a news conference. [...]

The controversy has raged for 12 months. Ever since last November, when US forces battled to clear Fallujah of insurgents, there have been repeated claims that troops used "unusual" weapons in the assault that all but flattened the Iraqi city. Specifically, controversy has focussed on white phosphorus shells (WP) - an incendiary weapon usually used to obscure troop movements but which can equally be deployed as an offensive weapon against an enemy. The use of such incendiary weapons against civilian targets is banned by international treaty.

The debate was reignited last week when an Italian documentary claimed Iraqi civilians - including women and children - had been killed by terrible burns caused by WP. The documentary, Fallujah: the Hidden Massacre, by the state broadcaster RAI, cited one Fallujah human-rights campaigner who reported how residents told how "a rain of fire fell on the city". Yesterday, demonstrators organised by the Italian communist newspaper, Liberazione, protested outside the US Embassy in Rome. Today, another protest is planned for the US Consulate in Milan. "The 'war on terrorism' is terrorism," one of the newspaper's commentators declared.

The claims contained in the RAI documentary have met with a strident official response from the US, as well as from right-wing commentators and bloggers who have questioned the film's evidence and sought to undermine its central allegations.

While military experts have supported some of these criticisms, an examination by The Independent of the available evidence suggests the following: that WP shells were fired at insurgents, that reports from the battleground suggest troops firing these WP shells did not always know who they were hitting and that there remain widespread reports of civilians suffering extensive burn injuries. While US commanders insist they always strive to avoid civilian casualties, the story of the battle of Fallujah highlights the intrinsic difficulty of such an endeavour.

It is also clear that elements within the US government have been putting out incorrect information about the battle of Fallujah, making it harder to assesses the truth. Some within the US government have previously issued disingenuous statements about the use in Iraq of another controversial incendiary weapon - napalm.

The assault upon Fallujah, 40 miles from Baghdad, took place over a two-week period last November. US commanders said the city was an insurgent stronghold. Civilians were ordered to evacuate in advance. Around 50 US troops and an estimated 1,200 insurgents were killed. How many civilians were killed is unclear. Up to 300,000 people were driven from the city.

Following the RAI broadcast, the US Embassy in Rome issued a statement which denied that US troops had used WP as a weapon. It said: "To maintain that US forces have been using WP against human targets ... is simply mistaken." In a similar denial, the US Ambassador in London, Robert Tuttle, wrote to the The Independent claiming WP was only used as an obscurant or else for marking targets. In his letter, he says: "US forces participating in Operation Iraqi Freedom continue to use appropriate, lawful and conventional weapons against legitimate targets. US forces do not use napalm or phosphorus as weapons."

However, both these two statements are undermined by first-hand evidence from troops who took part in the fighting. They are also undermined by an admission by the Pentagon that WP was used as a weapon against insurgents.

In a comprehensive written account of the military operation at Fallujah, three US soldiers who participated said WP shells were used against insurgents taking cover in trenches. Writing in the March-April edition of Field Artillery, the magazine of the US Field Artillery based in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, which is readily available on the internet, the three artillery men said: "WP proved to be an effective and versatile munition. We used it for screening missions ... and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against insurgents in trench lines and spider holes ... We fired 'shake and bake' missions at the insurgents using WP to flush them out and high explosive shells (HE) to take them out."

Another first-hand account from the battlefield was provided by an embedded reporter for the North County News, a San Diego newspaper. Reporter Darrin Mortenson wrote of watching Cpl Nicholas Bogert fire WP rounds into Fallujah. He wrote: "Bogert is a mortar team leader who directed his men to fire round after round of high explosives and white phosphorus charges into the city Friday and Saturday, never knowing what the targets were or what damage the resulting explosions caused."

Mr Mortenson also watched the mortar team fire into a group of buildings where insurgents were known to be hiding. In an email, he confirmed: "During the fight I was describing in my article, WP mortar rounds were used to create a fire in a palm grove and a cluster of concrete buildings that were used as cover by Iraqi snipers and teams that fired heavy machine guns at US choppers." Another report, published in the Washington Post, gave an idea of the sorts of injuries that WP causes. It said insurgents "reported being attacked with a substance that melted their skin, a reaction consistent with white phosphorous burns". A physician at a local hospital said the corpses of insurgents "were burned, and some corpses were melted".

The use of incendiary weapons such as WP and napalm against civilian targets - though not military targets - is banned by international treaty. Article two, protocol III of the 1980 UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons states: "It is prohibited in all circumstances to make the civilian population as such, individual civilians or civilian objects, the object of attack by incendiary weapons." Some have claimed the use of WP contravenes the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention which bans the use of any "toxic chemical" weapons which causes "death, harm or temporary incapacitation to humans or animals through their chemical action on life processes".

However, Peter Kaiser, a spokesman for the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which enforces the convention, said the convention permitted the use of such weapons for "military purposes not connected with the use of chemical weapons and not dependent on the use of the toxic properties of chemicals as a method of warfare". He said the burns caused by WP were thermic rather than chemical and as such not prohibited by the treaty.

The RAI film said civilians were also victims of the use of WP and reported claims by a campaigner from Fallujah, Mohamad Tareq, that many victims had large burns. The report claimed that the clothes on some victims appeared to be intact even though their bodies were badly burned.

Critics of the RAI film - including the Pentagon - say such a claim undermines the likelihood that WP was responsible for the injuries since WP would have also burned their clothes. This opinion is supported by a leading military expert. John Pike, director of the military studies group GlobalSecurity.org, said of WP: "If it hits your clothes it will burn your clothes and if it hits your skin it will just keep on burning." Though Mr Pike had not seen the RAI film, he said the burned appearance of some bodies may have been caused by exposure to the elements.

Yet there are other, independent reports of civilians from Fallujah suffering burn injuries. For instance, Dahr Jamail, an unembedded reporter who collected the testimony of refugees from the city spoke to a doctor who had remained in the city to help people, encountered numerous reports of civilians suffering unusual burns.

One resident told him the US used "weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud" and that he watched "pieces of these bombs explode into large fires that continued to burn on the skin even after people dumped water on the burns." The doctor said he "treated people who had their skin melted"

Jeff Englehart, a former marine who spent two days in Fallujah during the battle, said he heard the order go out over military communication that WP was to be dropped. In the RAI film, Mr Englehart, now an outspoken critic of the war, says: "I heard the order to pay attention because they were going to use white phosphorus on Fallujah. In military jargon it's known as Willy Pete ... Phosphorus burns bodies, in fact it melts the flesh all the way down to the bone ... I saw the burned bodies of women and children."

In the aftermath of the battle, the State Department's Counter Misinformation Office issued a statement saying that WP was only "used [WP shells] very sparingly in Fallujah, for illumination purposes. They were fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters." When The Independent confronted the State Department with the first-hand accounts of soldiers who participated, an official accepted the mistake and undertook to correct its website. This has since been done.

Indeed, the Pentagon readily admits WP was used. Spokesman Lt Colonel Barry Venables said yesterday WP was used to obscure troop deployments and also to "fire at the enemy". He added: "It burns ... It's an incendiary weapon. That is what it does."

Why the two embassies have issued statements denying that WP was used is unclear. However, there have been previous examples of US officials issuing incorrect statements about the use of incendiary weapons. Earlier this year, British Defence Minister Adam Ingram was forced to apologise to MPs after informing them that the US had not used an updated form of napalm in Iraq. He said he had been misled by US officials.

Napalm was used in several instances during the initial invasion. Colonel Randolph Alles, commander of Marine Air Group 11, remarked during the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003: "The generals love napalm - it has a big psychological effect."

In his letter, Ambassador Tuttle claims there is a distinction between napalm and the 500lb Mk-77 firebombs he says were dropped - even though experts say they are virtually identical. The only difference is that the petrol used in traditional napalm has been replaced in the newer bombs by jet fuel.

Since the RAI broadcast, there have been calls for an inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the battle of Fallujah. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has also repeated its call to "all fighters to take every feasible precaution to spare civilians and to respect the principles of distinction and proportionality in all operations".

There have also been claims that in the minutiae of the argument about the use of WP, a broader truth is being missed. Kathy Kelly, a campaigner with the anti-war group Voices of the Wilderness, said: "If the US wants to promote security for this generation and the next, it should build relationships with these countries. If the US uses conventional or non-conventional weapons, in civilian neighourhoods, that melt people's bodies down to the bone, it will leave these people seething. We should think on this rather than arguing about whether we can squeak such weapons past the Geneva Conventions and international accords."

Did US troops use chemical weapons in Falluja? The answer is yes. The proof is not to be found in the documentary broadcast on Italian TV last week, which has generated gigabytes of hype on the internet. It's a turkey, whose evidence that white phosphorus was fired at Iraqi troops is flimsy and circumstantial. But the bloggers debating it found the smoking gun.

The first account they unearthed in a magazine published by the US army. In the March 2005 edition of Field Artillery, officers from the 2nd Infantry's fire support element boast about their role in the attack on Falluja in November last year: "White Phosphorous. WP proved to be an effective and versatile munition. We used it for screening missions at two breeches and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes when we could not get effects on them with HE [high explosive]. We fired 'shake and bake' missions at the insurgents, using WP to flush them out and HE to take them out."

The second, in California's North County Times, was by a reporter embedded with the marines in the April 2004 siege of Falluja. "'Gun up!' Millikin yelled ... grabbing a white phosphorus round from a nearby ammo can and holding it over the tube. 'Fire!' Bogert yelled, as Millikin dropped it. The boom kicked dust around the pit as they ran through the drill again and again, sending a mixture of burning white phosphorus and high explosives they call 'shake'n'bake' into... buildings where insurgents have been spotted all week."

White phosphorus is not listed in the schedules of the Chemical Weapons Convention. It can be legally used as a flare to illuminate the battlefield, or to produce smoke to hide troop movements from the enemy. Like other unlisted substances, it may be deployed for "Military purposes... not dependent on the use of the toxic properties of chemicals as a method of warfare". But it becomes a chemical weapon as soon as it is used directly against people. A chemical weapon can be "any chemical which through its chemical action on life processes can cause death, temporary incapacitation or permanent harm".

White phosphorus is fat-soluble and burns spontaneously on contact with the air. According to globalsecurity.org: "The burns usually are multiple, deep, and variable in size. The solid in the eye produces severe injury. The particles continue to burn unless deprived of atmospheric oxygen... If service members are hit by pieces of white phosphorus, it could burn right down to the bone." As it oxidises, it produces smoke composed of phosphorus pentoxide. According to the standard US industrial safety sheet, the smoke "releases heat on contact with moisture and will burn mucous surfaces... Contact... can cause severe eye burns and permanent damage."

Until last week, the US state department maintained that US forces used white phosphorus shells "very sparingly in Fallujah, for illumination purposes". They were fired "to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters". Confronted with the new evidence, on Thursday it changed its position. "We have learned that some of the information we were provided ... is incorrect. White phosphorous shells, which produce smoke, were used in Fallujah not for illumination but for screening purposes, ie obscuring troop movements and, according to... Field Artillery magazine, 'as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes...' The article states that US forces used white phosphorus rounds to flush out enemy fighters so that they could then be killed with high explosive rounds." The US government, in other words, appears to admit that white phosphorus was used in Falluja as a chemical weapon.

The invaders have been forced into a similar climbdown over the use of napalm in Iraq. In December 2004, the Labour MP Alice Mahon asked the British armed forces minister Adam Ingram "whether napalm or a similar substance has been used by the coalition in Iraq (a) during and (b) since the war". "No napalm," the minister replied, "has been used by coalition forces in Iraq either during the war-fighting phase or since."

This seemed odd to those who had been paying attention. There were widespread reports that in March 2003 US marines had dropped incendiary bombs around the bridges over the Tigris and the Saddam Canal on the way to Baghdad. The commander of Marine Air Group 11 admitted that "We napalmed both those approaches". Embedded journalists reported that napalm was dropped at Safwan Hill on the border with Kuwait. In August 2003 the Pentagon confirmed that the marines had dropped "mark 77 firebombs". Though the substance these contained was not napalm, its function, the Pentagon's information sheet said, was "remarkably similar". While napalm is made from petrol and polystyrene, the gel in the mark 77 is made from kerosene and polystyrene. I doubt it makes much difference to the people it lands on.

So in January this year, the MP Harry Cohen refined Mahon's question. He asked "whether mark 77 firebombs have been used by coalition forces". The US, the minister replied, has "confirmed to us that they have not used mark 77 firebombs, which are essentially napalm canisters, in Iraq at any time". The US government had lied to him. Mr Ingram had to retract his statements in a private letter to the MPs in June.

We were told that the war with Iraq was necessary for two reasons. Saddam Hussein possessed biological and chemical weapons and might one day use them against another nation. And the Iraqi people needed to be liberated from his oppressive regime, which had, among its other crimes, used chemical weapons to kill them. Tony Blair, Colin Powell, William Shawcross, David Aaronovitch, Nick Cohen, Ann Clwyd and many others referred, in making their case, to Saddam's gassing of the Kurds in Halabja in 1988. They accused those who opposed the war of caring nothing for the welfare of the Iraqis.

Given that they care so much, why has none of these hawks spoken out against the use of unconventional weapons by coalition forces? Ann Clwyd, the Labour MP who turned from peace campaigner to chief apologist for an illegal war, is, as far as I can discover, the only one of these armchair warriors to engage with the issue. In May this year, she wrote to the Guardian to assure us that reports that a "modern form of napalm" has been used by US forces "are completely without foundation. Coalition forces have not used napalm - either during operations in Falluja, or at any other time". How did she know? The foreign office minister told her. Before the invasion, Clwyd travelled through Iraq to investigate Saddam's crimes against his people. She told the Commons that what she found moved her to tears. After the invasion, she took the minister's word at face value, when a 30-second search on the internet could have told her it was bunkum. It makes you wonder whether she really gave a damn about the people for whom she claimed to be campaigning.

Saddam, facing a possible death sentence, is accused of mass murder, torture, false imprisonment and the use of chemical weapons. He is certainly guilty on all counts. So, it now seems, are those who overthrew him.

Abu Sabah knew he had witnessed something unusual. Sitting in November last year in a refugee camp in the grounds of Baghdad University, set up for the families who fled or were driven from Fallujah, this resident of the city's Jolan district told me how he had witnessed some of the battle's heaviest fighting.

"They used these weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud," he said. He had seen "pieces of these bombs explode into large fires that continued to burn on the skin even after people dumped water on the burns".

As an unembedded journalist, I spent hours talking to residents forced out of the city. A doctor from Fallujah working in Saqlawiyah, on the outskirts of Fallujah, described treating victims during the siege "who had their skin melted".

He asked to be referred to simply as Dr Ahmed because of fears of reprisals for speaking out. "The people and bodies I have seen were definitely hit by fire weapons and had no other shrapnel wounds," he said.

Burhan Fasa'a, a freelance cameraman working for the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation (LBC), witnessed the first eight days of the fighting. "I saw cluster bombs everywhere and so many bodies that were burnt, dead with no bullets in them," he said. "So they definitely used fire weapons, especially in Jolan district."

Mr Fasa'a said that while he sold a few of his clips to Reuters, LBC would not show tapes he submitted to them. He had smuggled some tapes out of the city before his gear was taken from him by US soldiers.

Some saw what they thought were attempts by the military to conceal the use of incendiary shells. "The Americans were dropping some of the bodies into the Euphrates near Fallujah," said one ousted resident, Abdul Razaq Ismail.

Dr Ahmed, who worked in Fallujah until December 2004, said: "In the centre of the Jolan quarter they were removing entire homes which have been bombed, meanwhile most of the homes that were bombed are left as they were."

He said he saw bulldozers push soil into piles and load it on to trucks to carry away. In certain areas where the military used "special munitions" he said 200 sq m of soil was being removed from each blast site.

The author is an unembedded (Read: uncensored)journalist reporting from Fallujah

Italian communists held a sit-in to protest the reported use by American troops of white phosphorous in Iraq.

Italy's state-run RAI24 news television aired a documentary last week alleging the United States used white phosphorous shells 'in a massive and indiscriminate way' against civilians during the November 2004 offensive in Fallujah.

The United States has said it used phosphorous shells 'very sparingly' in Fallujah to illuminate the night sky.

(AP Photo/Domenico Stinellis)

In a statement obtained Sunday, the lawyers did not say whether Saddam's chief Iraqi attorney, Khalil al-Dulaimi, was among those who withdrew. But the statement said other members of the team in Baghdad were continuing their duties "under complex and dangerous circumstances."

Support lawyers for Saddam's team in Jordan were not immediately available for comment.

However, the head of the investigative judges in Saddam's dozen cases, Raid Juhi, said Sunday the withdrawal of the defense team "will not affect the work of the court and it will continue its legal measures."

Comment: "Hey, we know the guy is guilty! Why does he need lawyers!"

"Suspending the members is not acceptable in Iraqi law," Juhi said. "The court will continue to give legal consultation through naming defense lawyers in case the defense team does not show up" Nov. 28, when the trial resumes, Juhi said.

Saddam and seven co-defendants are on trial in a special Iraqi tribunal, charged in the 1982 deaths of 148 Shiite Muslims in Dujail after an assassination attempt against Saddam in that town north of Baghdad.

The 1,100 lawyers repeated their call for canceling the trial in Iraq, which opened Oct. 19. The lawyers do not recognize the Nov. 28 date for its scheduled resumption.

The lawyers said they pulled out because "there was no response from the Iraqi Government, U.S. forces and international organizations to our demands for providing protection to the lawyers and their families," according to the statement released Saturday in Baghdad.

The lawyers have been unable to carry out their defense tasks, including contacting witnesses and preparing defense argument, because of "organized, intentional and systematic threats," the statement said.

Two Iraqis defending Saddam's colleagues have been killed since the trial started.

A defence lawyer in the Saddam Hussein case who was wounded in a fatal ambush today said he had fled the country and was appealing to the ruler of the Gulf state of Qatar to grant him asylum.

The move is another blow to the troubled case.

Thamir al-Khuzaie was injured in the 8 November ambush in western Baghdad in which another defence lawyer, Adel al-Zubeidi, was killed.

Al-Zubeidi was the second defence lawyer involved in the case to be assassinated since the trial opened on October 19.

"I was only a lawyer who practiced his profession in Iraq. Yet I was subjected to an assassination attempt and to danger that might have even touched my family," al-Khuzaie said. "So I decided to leave the country."

He said that he had written to the ruler of Qatar asking for "humanitarian asylum" for him and his family.

Al-Khuzaie represented two of Saddam's seven co-defendants in the trial, which resumes on 28 November.

British troops have come under attack in Kabul and Nato forces were targeted in two co-ordinated suicide car bombings in which at least four people died.

The attacks took place as ministers revealed that units are preparing to extend Britain's role in Afghanistan when it takes command of the international peacekeeping operation next year.

John Reid, the Secretary of State for Defence, told Parliament that Britain faced a "prolonged" involvement in the country. But MPs warned last night that British troops faced being mired in a long-term military commitment to a country in the grip of a growing insurgency.

They insisted yesterday's extension of Britain's role in Afghanistan, four years after troops first arrived, also reflected the size of the task facing coalition forces in Iraq.

Fears for Afghanistan's future emerged in the wake of suggestions, by the British and Iraqi governments, that British troops could begin pulling out of Iraq by the end of next year. For British troops, however, yesterday's violence in Kabul was a taste of what they will face next year when they deploy to the turbulent province of Helmand as part of a move by Nato to take over security in the Taliban heartlands.

At least four people were killed in the attacks, including one German soldier and an Afghan child, but the implications of the attacks were far wider. The insurgency that has been worsening while the world's attention has been focused on Iraq has now reached Kabul.

Mr Reid said British troops had to open fire to defend their camp in Kabul against "unauthorised entry". Few further details emerged, but Mr Reid said British troops were not targeted in the car bombings.

A German soldier died when the Nato vehicle he was travelling in was rammed by a Toyota Corolla stuffed with explosives just after 3pm local time. Two German soldiers and three Afghan civilians were wounded.

An hour later, another Nato vehicle was rammed in a near-identical attack on the same road. Three Afghan civilians were killed, including a young boy, and two Greek soldiers were wounded. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attacks.

"We have plans for more of the same," Mullah Dadullah, a top-ranking Taliban commander, said by satellite phone from an undisclosed location.

The insurgency in Afghanistan has been largely confined to the Pashtun area in the south and east. Until now, British troops have operated in Kabul and the north, where international forces have been largely welcomed by Afghans who suffered persecution under Taliban rule.

But in the south there is widespread support for the insurgency and opposition to any Western presence in Afghanistan. Helmand in particular is notorious even among Afghans for the ferocity of its tribesmen. British troops are moving into the province under a plan for the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) to take over security in the area. And it was no coincidence that yesterday's attacks specifically targeted Isaf troops in Kabul.

The message from the Taliban was clear: this is what is waiting for Isaf in the south. But the message was also that the Taliban can now strike in Kabul, which until now has been an oasis of stability largely unaffected by the insurgency.

Kabul is home to 3,000 foreigners, most working for NGOs, who live in an city that often seems utterly disconnected from the rest of the country. Replete with bars and expensive restaurants that sell alcohol to foreigners, but not Afghans, Kabul even boasts two designer boutiques for women's clothes. Yesterday another Afghanistan came crashing up against that world. Both car bombings came on the Jalalabad Road, which has long been the scene of the most serious attacks in Kabul.

There was a suicide bombing on that road in September, and there have been countless improvised bombs hidden along it - partly it is because there are several Western and Afghan military bases, and the UN's headquarters, on it. The road runs through a Pashtun suburb of Kabul where the Pashtun Taliban can operate freely. The fact that so senior a commander has claimed responsibility for the attacks is a sure sign the Taliban are stepping up their actions. Known as Dadullah-I-Leng, or Dadullah the Lame, he is known for his part in massacres of Hazara Shias, which have been described as attempted genocide.

One of the main failures of the Taliban's insurgency has been its inability to attract support among other ethnic communities.

KNOXVILLE, Tenn.

Vice President Dick Cheney was heckled by protesters Tuesday as he spoke at the groundbreaking for a public policy center honoring former Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker.

During Cheney's brief remarks, about a half-dozen people protesting the war in Iraq yelled, "War, what is it good for?" and held up a large banner saying, "Peace Now."

Cheney continued speaking and didn't acknowledge the protesters, who were escorted from the ceremony inside the University of Tennessee's basketball arena.

About 50 protesters, most of them appearing to be college age, demonstrated outside the arena. Several carried signs, including one that read "Honor Baker, Impeach Cheney."

Cheney said that Baker, a Republican who was President Reagan's chief of staff and ambassador to Japan, has brought tremendous credit to the university, to Tennessee and to the nation.

"It's good to know that far into the future people will come to this place and learn of Howard's career and his deep belief in the nobility of public service," Cheney said.

About 400 people attended ceremony, which coincided with Baker's 80th birthday.

The $25 million privately financed Baker Center is being created to foster greater appreciation of public service and understanding of government.

Baker is still remembered for posing a key question during the 1973 Watergate hearings that rocked the Nixon White House: "What did the president know and when did he know it?"

CNN Senior Analyst Jeff Greenfield talked with anchor Wolf Blitzer after the speech, analyzing the Bush administration's fresh strategy to target opponents of his Iraq policies.

JEFF GREENFIELD: I think the point here is for the president to try to make the case that there's an undermining going on.

Those are very strong words the president used, that it sends mixed signals to the enemy and mixed signals to the troops. [That] is a way of saying, if you now go back and say that I, the president of the United States, misled or lied us into a war, you're encouraging our enemies and you are discouraging the troops.

Comment: And if you encourage the enemy, then you're a terrorist yourself!

That is always the strongest card that any president has to play when public support for combat diminishes -- as every poll shows it has been [for the Iraq war].

I think the idea is to say, look: [Critics] were saying the same things I was about Saddam Hussein. And for them now to go and say they were misled is just wrong.

Now, there's going to be a real debate going on, on two levels. One, did the congressional leaders have the same access to intelligence that the administration had? There's a real debate about that one.

And, second, the White House is arguing that commissions have said that there was no twisting of intelligence. That's not exactly what those Intelligence Committees were finding. They found that the administration did not pressure intelligence operatives to change the intelligence. What they did with that intelligence, those committees have said, was not in their purview.

But, clearly, in Pennsylvania and again [in Alaska], the president is really trying to turn the tables and say, it's you Democrats who are partly responsible for the uncertainty out in the land.

I think, by the way, it's also a way to say, that that's why my poll numbers are going down. It's because Democrats are misleading people about the history.

WOLF BLITZER: It sounds like some of the campaign rhetoric that we heard last year, going into the election. It's still a year away from the midterm elections. But it certainly has that ringing give-and-take, that back-and-forth.

GREENFIELD: You may remember [this] was a line much quoted at the [2004] Republican Convention. And, obviously, it's overstated, as journalists are wont to do.

But one journalist, Roger Simon, said that the message of the Republican Convention was, vote for Bush or die. His satirical point [was that Republicans] were trying to make the case that, if John Kerry were put in the White House, his uncertainty would weaken the United States.

What you're getting now, almost a year to the day after the reelection of the president, is an argument from the White House saying: We know things ... are tough. We just heard the president acknowledge that. But if you Democrats try to re-fight the basis for going into this war, you're misleading the people.

And that, I believe, is what the White House wants people to focus on. They read these poll numbers. I don't care what any politician says. They know what the poll numbers say. And they are trying to change those numbers.

NEW YORK · Much of the nation has had a lovely real estate boom for the past five years, but the house party is almost over and the cleanup won't be pretty.

That's the word from economists and investors who have watched housing prices march ever higher.

"The collapse of the housing bubble will throw the economy into a recession, and quite likely a severe recession," warned a July report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

In recent weeks, many major investment firms have concurred. Said a Lehman Brothers report, "[A] turn in the housing market is central to our economic forecast. "

"The demographic story behind the housing market boom, as we always thought, was a giant hoax," wrote Merrill Lynch & Co.'s North American economist, David Rosenberg, in a recent report.

If housing prices decline sharply, the effects could be broad. Lehman estimates one-third of the past year's U.S. economic growth was a consequence of the housing boom. Housing construction is equal to 5 percent of the national economy.

A downturn in housing could mean more than 1.3 million lost jobs, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. predicts, bumping up the national unemployment rate by 1 percent and the unemployment rate in house-mad California by 2 percent. Those numbers don't include likely job cuts in housing-dependent businesses, such as banking, furniture and building materials.

The Center for Economic and Policy Research predicts worse, saying a bubble burst would mean the loss of 5 million to 6.3 million jobs.

The housing run-up has financed consumer spending, creating more than $5 trillion in bubble wealth, the center estimates. Consumers have used "cash-out" mortgages to pay for everything from new kitchens to college tuition.

A final nightmare scenario: A federal bailout of the mortgage market is likely if housing crashes, the center predicts. So, if corporate pension funds continue to falter and this dire prediction does come true, the Feds could conceivably be holding your mortgage and your pension.

While there's disagreement on what a downturn will mean, it's widely held that a number of factors could bring prices down. A decline in prices will track interest rates: If rates go up sharply, prices will plummet, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com, an independent provider of financial research. If rates rise slowly, housing prices may ease gradually.

Others point to simple supply and demand. Bubbles have their own psychology -- a neighbor tells you at a party that her house has tripled in value and you feel like an idiot for renting -- but supply and demand operates on logic, which has to kick in at some point.

The supply and demand picture for housing looks out of whack. For six straight months, ending in September, builders started work on more than 2 million new homes. This has only happened three other times in the postwar period, according to Merrill Lynch: 1971 to 1973, 1977 to 1978 and early 1984.

Those periods were fundamentally different from today in at least one respect: More people were forming households. Household formation is the growth rate in the number of households and it's boosted by new immigration and twenty-somethings leaving their parents' homes. It is currently half what it was for most of those peak periods.

"At no time in the past three decades has the gap between household formation and housing starts been as wide as it has been over the past 12 to 24 months," Rosenberg wrote. "We've become accustomed to hearing about how housing is in a new paradigm, that the fundamentals are sound, so on and so forth. But please, just don't tell me that the sector has managed to divorce itself from supply and demand realities."

Another indicator, unsold homes on the market, also points down. The ratio of inventories to sales has been rising rapidly in recent months and stands at its highest level since 1996, according to Wachovia Corp.

Rents provide more evidence of an imbalance between supply and demand. Since World War II ended, sale prices for homes have generally kept pace with the overall rate of inflation, and rents moved at the same pace. That hasn't been the case for the last eight years, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) – Fifty-nine percent of companies say they won't be giving out holiday bonuses in any form this year. And of those that will, only 13 percent said they will be giving out bonuses in cash.

The rest will opt to give food gifts, gift certificates or retailer gift cards, according to a survey released Monday by Hewitt Associates.

Among the companies that said they would be giving cash, the average holiday bonus planned is $683, but the cash bonuses slated range between $25 and $2,500.

Employers said they would spend between $10 and $150 on gift certificates; $10 to $50 for food gifts; and $10 to $100 on retailer gift cards, according to Hewitt's survey.

Nine percent of companies surveyed, meanwhile, said they would donate some or all of the money they would have spent on holiday bonuses to charitable organizations in light of the many natural disasters that have occurred, from the tsunami in Southeast Asia to the Gulf Coast hurricanes to the devastating earthquake in South Asia.

Whether or not a company gives out a holiday bonus in any form is no indication of whether the company gives out other bonuses as well. In an earlier survey, Hewitt found 78 percent of companies offer performance-based bonuses.

Of those companies that said they eliminated their holiday bonus, 25 percent said they did so because they created pay-for-performance programs.

In addition, 50 percent said they eliminated the holiday bonus because employees had started to feel entitled to the bonus rather than see it as a way to create loyalty or excitement for the new year.

"Employers recognize that the value in tying awards to performance, as opposed to the holidays, better connects employees to the company's goals and objectives, eliminates 'entitlement' issues, and leads to increased productivity and improved business results," said Ken Abosch, a business leader for Hewitt Associates, in a statement.

Ah. Well, then ...

May your holidays be highly productive.

Most net users probably do not spend a lot of time worrying about who runs the resource they are using, but there is a global battle brewing over that very question.

The internet grew out of US military and academic research, and the US government still has certain measures of control over it.

Other nations, however, are clamouring for a bigger say and are pushing for significant changes at the UN's World Summit on the Information Society.

The issue is expected to overshadow the summit, which is intended to focus on how to take the internet to less developed parts of the world.

Government role

Most internet users around the world would agree that the internet has been functioning, technically, quite well.

It is not a monolithic entity. In fact, it is comprised of some quarter of a million private networks that choose to interconnect with each other.

A California-based non-profit created by the Clinton Administration in 1998, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) is charged with making sure that these networks talk to each other.

The organisation says its job is technical, making sure that web addresses take surfers to the right site.

What Icann does not do is "run" or "control" the internet, according to Theresa Swinehart, General Manager for Global Partnerships at Icann.

"Actually, nobody runs or controls the internet single-handedly. It is multiple parties, multiple businesses, users, and networks connecting to this. All these different groups, organizations and companies have a responsibility."

But Icann operates under a memorandum of understanding with the US Department of Commerce. To some, that looks like American control of the internet.

"The rest of the world doesn't want to see US hegemony here, in large part just for symbolic reasons," says Jonathan Zittrain, Chair in Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University.

"So there's one set of countries, anchored by Iran, Cuba and China, that would like to see some process by which governments of the world have a much larger hand in controlling the shape of the internet."

Many African politicians are also asking for "regime change" on the internet, and the European Union called in September for a new, international body to govern the net.

US stands firm

But the Bush administration and many in the US Congress reject the idea.

Both the US Departments of Commerce and State have reiterated that the US will maintain what they call "stewardship" of the internet. They contend that the US, working with Icann, is best placed to ensure an open, secure and stable online environment.

And in a recent letter to the Wall Street Journal, Republican Senator Norm Coleman wrote: "There is no rational justification for politicising internet governance within a United Nations framework."

That view has plenty of support outside the US.

"We don't see any advantage in moving toward UN control," says Bill Graham, who works on internet governance issues for the Canadian government.

"In fact, we're on record as opposing that. We just feel it would be bureaucratically heavy and frankly, unnecessary."

Mr Graham supports a compromise measure, some kind of international forum that would have no oversight duties, but would help other nations feel like they have more input into how the internet functions.

Comment: This is choice. Graham proposes a body that would have no power; it would serve as a smokescreen to allow others to feel that they have a say, or to at least convince their publics that they have a say.

At risk

Some in the anti-US camp are threatening more drastic action. They say, if the US won't cede some control, they will create their own internet.

Michael Geist, who teaches internet law at the University of Ottawa, says that a world of multiple "internets" might not be a good thing.

"What's at risk is the possibility that the communications system of the internet that we've come to rely upon, the ability for me to send an electronic message anywhere around the world, and similarly access websites around the world, and have little doubt that my requests will be recognised, is put in some measure of peril by the fact that we might have several different internets," he said.

Few think this will actually happen, but the threat will be there as politicians and technocrats from across the globe meet in Tunisia from this week.

Special preparatory meetings to address the internet governance issue are under way ahead of the summit's official start on Wednesday.

"It's a political battle where, I think it was Henry Kissinger who once said, 'the fighting is so fierce, precisely because the stakes are so small'," says Oxford's Jonathan Zittrain.

"Almost all of these things are in part the result of what happens when you get a bunch of diplomats in a room.

"They'll find a way to have a grave disagreement, then have a way to work it through, and eventually come out with a communiqué, and it may not have anything to do with the technically realities of the way the internet works."

It would be better, Professor Zittrain says, for governments to focus on the serious internet issues that do need an international solution, especially things like spam, phishing, and cyber security.

Others have called upon leaders to focus their efforts on the original intent of the summit to find ways to bring the benefits of information and communication technologies to the developing world.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- As United Nations (UN) officials meet tomorrow in Tunisia to plot strategies for a new worldwide Internet governance structure, an "Issue Brief" from the 350,000-member National Taxpayers Union (NTU) warns that such schemes could choke political freedoms and soak taxpayers.

"After so many conspiracy hoaxes over the years, there is now a serious, ominous effort to replace the efficient and adaptable non-profit entity guiding the Internet with a new UN-sponsored agency," said NTU Government Affairs Manager and Issue Brief author Kristina Rasmussen.

Rasmussen's study traces the push for a government-dominated online environment to the Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG), created by the UN in response to detractors of the current, US-based International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (
ICANN). As the author notes, the advertised reasons for this proposal - increasing access and receiving global input -seem to be masking some less noble motives and outcomes:

-- Censorship. Despite having made a declaration of support for freedom of speech, many WGIG members come from nations that severely curtail this right; China, for example, has one of the most restrictive and sophisticated Internet control mechanisms in the world. Just as other UN bodies have been "co-opted" by non- democratic governments, "an 'International Internet Commission' chaired by China might not be far off," Rasmussen observed.

-- Taxes. Since the Internet's infancy the UN has crafted detailed proposals to tax online traffic. Rasmussen calculates that one 1999 plan for a "bit tax," adjusted for today's number of Internet users, would raise 12 trillion dollars this year - roughly equal to America's Gross Domestic Product. Even less ambitious money-raising models such as the independent, Switzerland-based "Digital Solidarity Fund" could feasibly be transformed into future collectors of compulsory Internet taxes and fees.

-- Bureaucratic Corruption. Given recent oil-for-food scandals, UN-style Internet agencies would present the inherent risk of "giving ruling members of regimes in the developing world shiny new computers rather than furnishing the poor with Internet access," Rasmussen said.

Although the US State Department (and more recently federal lawmakers) are moving to oppose a UN Internet takeover, and ICANN officials are advocating privatization, the author contends that vigorous opposition to WGIG's plans from taxpayers around the world is vital.

"Manipulating Internet content through an internationalized, tax-funded structure may be an attractive outcome for politicians seeking to suppress dissent and prop up financially ailing bureaucracies, but not for friends of economic and information freedom," Rasmussen concluded. "The concept of international Internet governance should be rejected, and the proposals of the WGIG report moved to where they belong - the 'trash' bin of every policymaker's computer."

NTU is a non-partisan citizen organization working for lower taxes and smaller government; the group is a founding member of the World Taxpayers Associations (http://www.worldtaxpayers.org). Note: NTU Issue Brief 157, WGIG - A Byte on Internet Freedom, is available online at http://www.ntu.org.

While 85 percent of students used the Internet during the first quarter of 2004, only 40 percent of the unemployed and 13 percent of the retired did so, Eurostat said in a report.

With regard to education, 77 percent of respondents with a tertiary education had used the Internet within this period, compared to 52 percent of those who had completed secondary education and 25 percent with a lower secondary education, it said.

In the 25 EU member countries, an average of 47 percent of individuals between the ages of 16 and 74 used the Internet during the first quarter of 2004.

During the past decade, information and communications technologies (ICTs) have become widely available to the general public in both accessibility and cost, the report said.

However, gaps remain in the use of ICTs among the EU population depending on factors such as age, employment status, educational level and the degree of urbanization of the area where one lives, the study found.

Missing infrastructure, a lack of incentives to use ICTs and a lack of computer literacy together contribute to the big digital divide, the report suggested.

The largest gaps between higher and lower educated groups were found in Portugal, Slovenia and Spain, with a gap of 70, 68 and 61 percentage points respectively.

Gaps were smallest in Lithuania, Sweden and Germany, which recorded a difference of 11, 24 and 25 percentage points respectively.

In all member states students were the biggest users of the Internet, followed by employees, the report said.

Jacques Chirac acknowledged last night that France's 18 nights of urban violence had revealed a "profound malaise" in society and launched an appeal to combat the "poison" of racial discrimination.

In his first formal address to the nation since the unrest started on October 27, the French president said the problem had to be tackled firmly but justly. "Those who attack ... must know that in a republic, one cannot break the law without being caught, judged and punished," he said.

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Mr Chirac said the rioting reflected a "crisis of ... identity", but added that "we can accomplish nothing if we do not respect the rules". Parental authority was critical, and parents who did not "accept their responsibilities" would be punished. The president confirmed that the government would today put a bill before parliament recommending that the state of emergency be extended for three months until mid-February if necessary.

Everyone should have the chance to share in the benefits of French society, Mr Chirac said, but "discrimination saps the foundations of the republic". The French media and political class must "better reflect the reality of French society today", he insisted. At present, the ethnic minority faces on French television can be counted on the fingers of one hand and mainland France has not a single MP of north African or black African origin.

Companies and trades unions must actively encourage diversity and support employment for immigrant youths from depressed suburbs, he said. He also announced the formation of a national volunteer corps that would offer training for 50,000 youths by 2007 and help them to get jobs. "Everyone must commit themselves, companies too - how many applications end up in the bin because of the applicant's name or address?" he asked. But he ruled out positive discrimination or quotas, saying the country must remain true to its republican values.

Police spoke yesterday of a "confirmed lull" in the violence that has raged through the rundown suburbs of Paris and dozens of other places since October 27. Some 280 cars were set on fire on Sunday, down from 374 on Saturday and more than 1,400 at the height of the rioting.

Upset at the coverage by some US, Russian and Chinese television stations, the government launched a charm offensive yesterday targeting Paris-based foreign correspondents and aimed at restoring the country's image abroad. The foreign affairs minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, and finance minister, Thierry Breton, met foreign journalists to ask them to "stand back more" from the unrest. A government spokesman, Jean-François Copé, told correspondents: "Reports should tell the truth without taboos, but not exaggerate either. Some have used words and phrases that are manifestly a caricature. To say France was burning, for example, was very far from reality."

Sparked by the deaths of two youths of African origin who were accidentally electrocuted while hiding from police, the nationwide wave of unrest has seen more than 8,500 cars torched and 2,652 people arrested, half of them minors and almost all second- or third-generation immigrants.

The French Federation of Insurance Companies yesterday gave a preliminary estimate of the bill for the damage at €200m (£134m).

With parliamentary backing, the government's "strictly temporary" proposal means the state of emergency, which lets local authorities impose curfews, conduct house searches and take other steps to prevent unrest, could be extended to mid-February. The powers, which would otherwise have ended next week, have been used by some 40 towns or suburbs, mainly to impose curfews on minors.

Other local officials have taken more unorthodox steps: the mayor of the Paris suburb of Draveil, Georges Tron, said yesterday he was halting council aid, for canteens or creches, for the families of youths convicted of rioting or arson.

"Yesterday Melbourne’s Sunday Herald Sun said information from an Islamic ’supergrass’ who had met bin Laden had been crucial in the arrests of the alleged terrorists," the Herald reports. "The newspaper said the informant, now in hiding and in fear of his life, was a former follower of radical Melbourne cleric Abdul Nacer Benbrika, also known as Abu Bakir, the alleged leader of the terror group, and an associate of another alleged member of the Melbourne cell, Gregory Kent…. Benbrika, according to a Weekend Australian investigation, had turned to extremism after hearing a sermon in 1994 by Abu Qatada, the spiritual leader of al-Qaeda in Europe, who had been invited to Australia by another Melbourne radical cleric and former Benbrika mentor, Sheik Mohammed Omran."

As we know, Abu Qatada, described as the leader and mastermind of al-Qaeda’s European network, is an MI5 asset. "Senior European intelligence officials tell TIME that Abu Qatada is tucked away in a safe house in the north of England, where he and his family are being lodged, fed and clothed by British intelligence services," Paul Joseph Watson writes in Order Out of Chaos. "Despite official denial French anti-terrorist officers stated on the record that they were certain MI5 were protecting Qatada, and in addition believed they had actually colluded in his disappearance." Qatada was convicted in absentia in Jordan for his role in the foiled millennium attacks and the French want to get their hands on him for his alleged role in a plot to blow up the U.S. embassy in France in 2001.

The official British excuse for sheltering Qatada is to deprive him of "contact with extremists in London and Europe," according to Bruce Crumley, writing for TIME. "The British win because the last thing they want is a hot potato they can’t extradite for fear of al-Qaeda reprisals but whose presence contradicts London’s support of the war on terror," a European intelligence official told Crumley in 2002. In other words, Abu Qatada is too valuable as an intelligence asset and knows too much about British involvement in terrorism to be extradited. In fact, in late 2001, MI5 offered Qatada a chance to escape to Afghanistan. "I do not trust this government," Qatada told the Guardian. "If I get on a plane, I am afraid I will be shot or handed over to the Jordanians, the Egyptians or the Saudis."

In other words, Qatada feared he would suffer the fate of many intelligence operatives and patsies who are of more use dead than alive, or at least wasting away in a dungeon. For instance, Bisher al-Rawi, a British resident and "unpaid [al-Qaeda] intermediary," was "seized by the CIA in Gambia, West Africa, in November 2002 and secretly flown to Afghanistan and then Cuba [to the Guantanamo Bay rape and torture gulag] as a suspected al-Qa’ida supporter," according to the Independent, and the British left him there to rot, or more accurately to be "interrogated" (possibly with panties over his head and electrical wires attached to a certain appendage) and probably wishing he was dead, as the high attempted suicide rate at Gitmo attests.

Another person protected by British intelligence is one Haroon Rashid Aswat, the so-called "brains" behind the London bombings last summer. Aswat "was a British intelligence plant," according to former Justice Department prosecutor John Loftus. "So all of a sudden he disappears. He’s in South Africa. We think he’s dead; we don’t know he’s down there. Last month [July, 2005] the South African Secret Service come across the guy. He’s alive… the Brits know that the CIA wants to get a hold of Haroon. So what happens? He takes off again, goes right to London. He isn’t arrested when he lands, he isn’t arrested when he leaves… He’s on the watch list. The only reason he could get away with that was if he was working for British intelligence."

"[Qatada’s] impact [on Benbrika] was enormous, and that is where it all began," a senior Muslim source told the Sunday Herald Sun. In short, the roots of this "captured" coven of terrorists in Australia stem from British intelligence, a familiar pattern, from Northern Ireland—killing civilians and bombing pubs—to Kosovo—creating organizations such as al-Muhajiroun (actually a collaborative effort between British intelligence and al-Qaeda, according to Loftus) engineered to brainwash and train "Mujahideen" to fight in the Balkans and assist the KLA (the Kosovo Liberation Army, a creation of British SAS Special Forces and NATO) in running drugs and weapons.

British, American, and Pakistani efforts to create terrorist organizations and cells is a well-documented fact, going back at least to the late 1970s. Thus we can only conclude that the "alleged Islamic terrorist cell in Sydney" that supposedly "stockpiled bomb-making materials, trained at outback hunting camps and sized up Australia’s only nuclear reactor as a possible target," according to the Associated Press, is yet another intelligence contrivance, as it was penetrated by ASIO and key people are in fact British intelligence assets. In 2003, the Howard government pushed the ASIO Terrorism Act through the Australian parliament, thus providing "the Australian Security Intelligence Organization … the power to detain and question people without charge or trial. ASIO and Federal Police officers can raid anyone’s home or office, at any hour of the day or night, and forcibly take them away, interrogate and strip-search them and hold them incommunicado, effectively indefinitely," write Mike Head and Richard Hoffman. As such, we can expect the Australian government to stage more raids on "terror cells" with links to intelligence services.

Fake terrorism leading to the dismantlement of civil liberties is the raison d’être of all authoritarian governments, from Hitler’s "Law for Removing the Distress of the People and the Reich" (the Enabling Act, dismantling civil liberties in Germany after the torching of the Reichstag, an act of arson claimed by Hermann Goering, Hitler’s deputy and legal heir) to Bush’s contrived war on terrorism in the wake of the nine eleven inside job.

Rice, who stayed in Jerusalem a day longer than planned to continue the talks, called it a "big step forward" in Israeli-Palestinian relations.

The deal means the Gaza-Egypt border will open on Nov. 25, and shortly after construction of a Gaza seaport will begin. Palestinian leaders say opening the crossings is crucial to rebuilding their economy and providing a door to the world, via Egypt.

Israel has allowed for the urgent export of Palestinian produce so the year's harvest doesn't go to waste, said Rice.

The deal will also allow Palestinians to travel between the West Bank and Gaza in army-escorted bus convoys through Israel.

The European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, on Tuesday confirmed the presence of EU observers at the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt.

"This is the first time a border is opened and not controlled by the Israelis," Solana said. "As you can imagine this is a very important step."

Comment: Excuuuuse me!!! Palestinians must be escorted by the Israeil military and they claim this is an important step!!!

Rice met with Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in Jerusalem and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah as negotiators hunkered down Monday at a Jerusalem hotel.

A key stumbling block had been an Israeli demand for a video link with the checkpoints, something the Palestinians refused. It's not clear how this was resolved.

Israel had been worried that free movement through the crossings could be used to bring in militants and weapons.

U.S. officials and James Wolfensohn – a special envoy named by the European Union, the United States, the UN and Russia to push for a negotiated settlement – have been involved in the talks.

Wolfensohn said Monday he had been frustrated by the lack of progress in the border talks.

The prospects for peace got much better when Israel unilateraly withdrew from the Gaza Strip in September.

One year after Yasser Arafat's death, and he has passed into silent myth and legend. As with all great historical figures, the myth is both powerful and pervasive. Yet in Arafat's case, it possesses a peculiar driving force that frames the manner in which we see the present. Indeed, everything about the conflict between the Palestinians and Israel is shaped by this myth. In the west it is entirely a negative myth, cultivated by the press and parroted by political elites, diplomats and intellectuals. It is obvious why Israel would portray its enemy in such a bad light, but why did this negative myth take hold outside Israel with such strength and persuasion?

Myths have a function - they are both practical and convenient. They help to justify reasons to do things and they justify reasons not to do things. The myth of Arafat as the obstacle to peace gave Clinton his reasons after Camp David; to maintain the myth of himself as international peacemaker, he needed a scapegoat to blame for the collapse of the talks. Clinton underwrote the then Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak's portrayal of Arafat as a terrorist and an obstacle to peace, in order that Barak could be re-elected.

The myth instead gave rise to Ariel Sharon, as the Israeli public felt only a Sharon could deal with that mythical monster Arafat. It gave the neoconservative hawks in the US administration the opportunity to redesign the Middle East in harmony with the views of their ally Israel, and for the British government to absolve themselves from doing anything whatsoever. Instead they watched, some cheering, while a democratically elected leader was imprisoned for years and slowly killed, without apparently feeling any moral queasiness or shame. This myth made all that possible. Arafat the obstacle.

A year after his death, the claim that his removal would positively alter the political landscape and give the chance to Israel, the Palestinians and the international community to negotiate a settlement has proved false. And being false, it allowed an even more destructive reality to take hold. Sharon, without serious protest and much encouragement, has in the past year turned Gaza into the largest prison on earth, moved tens of thousands of settlers into the West Bank, and built an illegal wall across Palestinian land which encircles and starves Palestinian cities and farms. In fragmenting the land, he has further fragmented the Palestinian people who belong to it, both those under occupation and those in enforced exile as refugees. This was his aim all along. He saw Arafat as an obstacle to this ambition. With Arafat gone, he has indeed managed to achieve it. But he couldn't have done this without the negative myth's magnetic hold in the west.

What of the alternative myth of Arafat - the one that will eventually triumph in the history books? The one that will include just a fraction of the epic stories about him that most Palestinians grew up with? Arafat, for all his flaws and mistakes, stood for a just peace, based on a historic compromise. He believed in international law, in a two-state solution based on implementing UN resolution 242, and for a just settlement for refugees, the main victims of this conflict. His legitimacy came from more than the fact that he was democratically elected: he performed a historic purpose in the life of Palestinians, a purpose as yet unfulfilled. By representing his people's general will and collective spirit, he symbolised the absent state's sovereign institutions.

What he represented was the reason he was removed: that Palestinians are one people, whether living under military occupation or in refugee camps. They have a right to self-determination, and they have fought hard for their liberty for generations, which is also a right. For a people to negotiate their way out of an occupation by diplomatic means alone, when the occupier is determined to hold on to their land, has no successful precedent. On the other hand, examples of successful negotiations once the occupier has accepted he must relinquish another's country are legion. Arafat's own much-used example was De Gaulle's 1958 call for "la paix des braves" with the Algerian armed liberation movement, the FLN. Arafat represented an important reality - peace will come when freedom is achieved for the Palestinians, and not one minute before.

The negative myth of Arafat prevents any understanding of the conflict or how to resolve it. This is not a conflict healed by providing economic recovery to Palestinians, since their impoverishment is entirely due to an entrenched and permanent military occupation. It is not a holy war against Palestinian terrorists who seek the destruction of the Israeli state, nor excited speculation on the role a new Israeli Labour party leader might play. This is a battle over the right to call this conflict a conflict between two peoples: one that is oppressed, and the other that is denying them their right to be free. Recovering the true myth of the old man is the key to understanding who the Palestinians are, and how they will achieve their freedom.

· Karma Nabulsi is a politics fellow at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and a former PLO representative

For 53 years, relatives of four Second World War army cadets whose plane crashed in the California mountains on a training flight have suffered the anguish of not knowing what happened to the bodily remains of their loved ones. Now, thanks to two climbers' fluke discovery of a body preserved in a mountain glacier, one of them may at last be given the dignity of full funerary rites.

The outdoors enthusiasts stumbled across the body a month ago while climbing Mount Mendel, part of the Sierra Nevada range in Kings Canyon National Park, central California.

It was a stroke of luck that they were walking in the right place in a year that had had a particularly long thaw. Most years, the body would have remained under ice, and, according to one forensic science expert, could have remained undiscovered for hundreds of thousands of years. The body is now undergoing tests at Hickam Air Force base in Hawaii to confirm its identity, but that is almost certainly already known. Investigators have saidhe was a Caucasian man in his early 20s, between 5ft 9in and 6ft 2in, with either light brown or sandy blond hair.

There is a partially visible name on a heavily corroded metal badge attached to his brown US Army Air Forces uniform (there was no separate Air Force in the US military until 1947). In his pockets was a collection of coins, a faded address book and a hand-written note with the words "all the girls know" still readable.

Still, the investigative team is making no firm announcements before checking DNA samples and dental information against family records of all four airmen. Their relatives are spread out across the US.

Such belated identifications are not uncommon in the US military. The Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, based at Hickam, analyses samples from hundreds of missing servicemen each year and makes positive identifications about twice a week.

What makes this case unusual is that it is 53 years old and that the body's discovery was so fortuitous.

The four had taken off from an air base in Sacramento, the California capital. It was known at the time that they had crashed in the mountains and perished, but forbidding conditions made their recovery impossible. Some debris was found in 1947. A military retrieval team later dug up clothing, a blank navigation log, a dog tag and what their report described as "insufficient remains ... for identification". Until last month, that was the last that was heard of the case.

European medicines regulators have ordered a safety check on Tamiflu after reports that two teenage boys died in Japan in apparent suicides after taking the anti-flu drug.

The deaths have raised safety fears about the only treatment against a threatened pandemic of avian flu. The deaths are not linked and occurred a year apart.

The Japanese health ministry issued a warning in June 2004 about psychological and neurological disorders linked with Tamiflu, with an instruction that doctors should be alerted - but no similar warning was issued in Europe and the UK.

Tamiflu is made by the Swiss-based pharmaceutical company Roche.

Yesterday, a spokesman for the European Medicines Evaluation Agency, which licenses drugs in the European Union, including the UK, said the agency had been aware of the first death but not the second.

"The company [Roche] has been asked to closely follow reports of psychological disorders, delusional states and abnormal behaviour linked with the drug. At the moment there is no warning [about this] in Europe and we need to establish if there is any link."

He added that the effects of the drug had to be distinguished from the effects of the flu. "Influenza can itself cause confusion and it can be difficult to tell whether [the mental state] is the effect of the Tamiflu or of the illness."

The Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency in Japan has received reports of 64 cases of psychological disorders linked to the drug between 2000 and 2004, according to the Tokyo news agency Kyodo.

The two Japanese boys were reported to have exhibited abnormal behaviour after taking the drug. In the first case, a 17-year-old high school student who was at home alone, ran out of the house and jumped over a railing into the path of a truck in February 2004 shortly after taking the medicine. In the second case, a junior high school student apparently fell from the ninth floor of his apartment building in February 2005.

Chugai Pharmaceuticals, the Japanese operating company for Roche, the Swiss-based manufacturers of Tamiflu, said: "We reported these cases to the health ministry as a link between the deaths and the drug could not be ruled out."

Shinichi Watanabe, deputy director of the Japanese health ministry's safety division, said the ministry had ordered Chugai in May last year - before receiving reports on the incidents - to include in the list of side effects impaired consciousness, abnormal behaviour and hallucinations. He said the ministry had no plans to put restrictions on the use of the drug, or to issue additional warnings.

"The link between the abnormal behaviour and the drug could not be ruled out, but at the same time the drug could not be singled out as the sole cause of the behaviour," he said.

In the UK, Tamiflu has been little used since its launch in 2003 and there have been only 41 "yellow card" reports of adverse reactions involving 161 separate side effects. One case was of agitation and two were of "confusional state". Under the yellow card system, doctors record any symptoms that could be linked with a drug.

A spokeswoman for Roche said: "We shared the information [about the Japanese deaths] with drug regulatory authorities around the world and they did not think it warranted any change in the product information."

MEXICO CITY

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez accused Mexican leader Vicente Fox of being a "puppy" of President Bush and said: "Don't mess with me, sir." Fox shot back on Monday that "we have dignity in this country" and demanded an apology. Now the two nations are withdrawing their ambassadors.

The severing of diplomatic relations came after a week of verbal sparring that highlighted Latin America's differences over free trade and relations with the United States. The conservative Fox tends to side with Washington on many issues, while Chavez, a socialist and populist, has been one of the hemisphere's strongest critics of Bush.

Venezuela's president has repeatedly accused Fox of being a "puppy" of American interests and of disrespecting him after the pair took opposing positions during this month's Summit of the Americas.

On Sunday, Chavez used his weekly radio and TV show to warn Fox: "Don't mess with me, sir, because you'll get stung."

Fox retorted in an interview with CNN: "Other countries might accept (Chavez's) wording and the way he attacks everybody and he attacks institutions. We are not willing to do that in Mexico."

Venezuela called its ambassador home Monday rather than apologize for the remark, and Mexico responded by recalling its own envoy to Venezuela.

Fox said his government was mulling its next move.

"We can't allow people to offend our country," he told CNN en Espanol.

Venezuelan Ambassador to Mexico Vladimir Villegas said he would fly to his homeland aboard a commercial flight Monday night.

"The whole world knows that this didn't begin on the Venezuelan side," Villegas said.

When asked what the driving issue was behind the flap, he said "look a little bit north" _ a reference to the United States.

Tensions between Fox and Chavez spilled over after the summit in Argentina, where Fox defended a U.S.-backed proposal for a Free Trade Area of the Americas. Chavez proclaimed the idea dead.

They reached a breaking point late Sunday, when Mexico issued a statement saying Chavez's latest barb "strikes at the dignity of the Mexican people and government."

Early Monday, Fox's spokesman, Ruben Aguilar, said Mexico would expel the ambassador if Venezuela didn't apologize by midnight.

Hours later in Venezuela, Foreign Secretary Ali Rodriguez said his country would not accept Mexico's demands.

Venezuela "rejects as an unjustified attack the ultimatum issued by the government of Mexico," Rodriguez said. "This situation is entirely the responsibility of President Fox."

Fox responded by saying he was going to continue to fight for free trade.

"In this issue we have to avoid personalities and characterizations," he told CNN en Espanol. "This is not about Mr. Chavez. This is not about Mr. Fox. It's about two nations."

Aguilar said withdrawing ambassadors wouldn't mean severing ties completely with Venezuela because business and cultural relations would remain intact. The Economy Department released a statement Monday afternoon detailing trade ties between the two oil-rich nations.

Mexican Foreign Secretary Luis Ernesto Derbez characterized Chavez's latest comments as "truly infuriating."

But he said despite the current conflict, "the historical friendship between our country and the nation of Venezuela continues unaltered."

Also Monday, Mexican prosecutors announced a large upswing in heroin shipments entering Mexico from Venezuela, and suggested that corrupt Venezuelan airport workers may be letting the drugs through. The prosecutors denied the announcement was related to the diplomatic dispute.

Aguilar backed away from insisting on an apology for Chavez's remarks in order to re-establish diplomatic relations, saying Venezuela could win over Mexico with conciliatory gestures and statements.

But Fox said in a subsequent interview with CNN that an apology was necessary.

"Of course, my minister of foreign relations and most of the people in Mexico are demanding that apology because (Chavez) used very strong words," Fox said. When asked why Mexico recalled its ambassador to Venezuela, he replied "because we have dignity."

The Qingshen gas field is located at the county of Zhaozhou, about 140 kilometers west to the city of Daqing, wherein lies China's largest oilfield.

The gas field is hidden in lava beneath the the Daqing Oilfield and was detected after nearly one year of efforts by more than 2,000 explorers, said Wang Yupu, president of Daqing Oilfield Co.,Ltd.

A preliminary probe shows that the gas field has reserves of at least 100 billion cubic meters.

Insiders say that the Qingshen gas field, which covers a vast area and boasts high quality natural gas, is China's fifth largest after those in the Tarim Basin, Qaidam Basin, Shanganning Basin and Chuanyu Basin.

The Qingshen gas field is a great discovery in natural gas exploration in eastern China, and will exert great influences on China's natural gas distribution, said Jia Chengzao, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Jia said some international oil and gas explorers have for a long time held an idea that a large oilfield will be definitely accompanied with a large natural gas field and the detection of the Qingshen gas field for another time testifies to this opinion.

Idaho sheep ranchers couldn't figure out why, in the decade after World War II, a random batch of their lambs were being born with strange birth defects. The creatures had underdeveloped brains and a single eye planted, cyclopslike, in the middle of their foreheads. In 1957 they called in scientists from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to investigate.

The scientists worked for 11 years to solve the mystery. One of them, Lynn James, lived with the sheep for three summers before discovering the culprit: corn lilies. When the animals moved to higher ground during droughts, they snacked on the flowers. The lilies, it turned out, contained a poison, later dubbed cyclopamine, that stunted developing lamb embryos. The mothers remained unharmed. The case of the cyclopamine and the one-eyed Idaho lambs remained a freakish chemistry footnote for the next 25 years; researchers never could uncover why cyclopamine caused birth defects.

But now cancer researchers have improbably seized on the obscure plant chemical as the blueprint for a half-dozen promising tumor-fighters. Cyclopamine, it turns out, blocks the function of a gene called Sonic hedgehog that is essential for embryonic development but also plays a lead role in causing deadly cancers of the pancreas, skin, prostate and esophagus. "It's a beautiful accident of evolution," says Philip A. Beachy, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Johns Hopkins University and one of the key players in this genetic detective story. In early tests researchers have stopped the growth of the most virulent human tumors, varieties accounting for 25% of cancer deaths.

Genentech and partner Curis, a fledgling biotech in Cambridge, Mass., are first out of the gate with an experimental hedgehog-blocking skin cream for basal cell skin cancer. More drugs in the pipeline are aimed at other cancers. Julian Adams, the superstar chemist who invented the AIDS drug Viramune and cancer drug Velcade, has made a hedgehog inhibitor one of his lead medicines at Infinity Pharmaceuticals. Little is known about his drug, which has not yet entered human trials, but on its Web site Infinity points to the role of hedgehog in pancreatic cancer. Novartis, Abbott Laboratories and Boehringer Ingelheim are all thought to be pursuing hedgehog programs. "It would be a major triumph for basic science if a drug were to come from this,"says Matthew Scott, an HHMI cancer genetics expert at Stanford University.

The discovery of the hedgehog genetic pathway originated in the quest to understand how an embryo knows what body parts to grow and where. A developing embryo starts out as a ball of identical cells with no top or bottom, no front or back. No one knew how this ball of cells figures out where to put an arm, a wing, a head or a foot.

In the late 1970s researchers Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and Eric Wieschaus completed their massive study of thousands of fruit-fly mutations, a landmark in large-scale biological analysis. They found 50 genes that turned out to be very important to the development of fly embryos. One that they mutated caused the flies to grow a coat of spines all over their undersides, so they dubbed it the hedgehog gene. (The two won the Nobel Prize in 1995 for this work.)

That set off a search by Philip Beachy and a dozen others to explore the hedgehog pathway in higher-order animals such as fish and mammals. They found several in each species, whereas flies have only one. In mammals, the most important may be the Sonic hedgehog gene, named after the Sega videogame character by scientists in the Harvard laboratory of Clifford Tabin in 1993. Mutations of Sonic hedgehog in people may result in babies with a single eye or a hole in the center of their head. The infants' brains can be so underdeveloped that they often don't survive. Usually patients have less serious mutations: a single front tooth or a slightly deformed face.

If Sonic hedgehog is mutated when a mouse is growing its paws, the animal won't grow digits. Interfere with it when the developing brain is casting out the two bulges of nerve tissue that become the eyes, and you get cyclopean sheep. "It's spectacular," says Frederic de Sauvage, a hedgehog researcher at Genentech.

A giant Galapagos land tortoise, Harriet lives in a spacious enclosure, complete with mud-bath and heated cave, on Queensland's Sunshine Coast. Darwin picked her up during his epic voyage aboard HMS Beagle, so the story goes, and transported her home to England. She was then taken to Australia, where she has ended up in a zoo run by Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, who infamously dangled his baby in front of a crocodile a couple of years ago.

Harriet was one of three tortoises collected by Darwin in the Galapagos; he called them Tom, Dick and Harry, believing them all to be male. They were only the size of dinner-plates back then, and thus escaped the indignity inflicted on adult tortoises by Darwin, who rode on their backs, rapping on their shells to persuade them to lumber along. Not the behaviour that one expects from one of the greatest scientific minds ever, but those were different times.

Harriet now weighs 150kg and is treated with the respect appropriate for a lady of her extremely advanced years. She receives a wash and rub-down from keepers at the Australian Zoo every morning, and is fed a nutritious vegetarian diet that includes courgettes, celery and green beans. For a special treat she is given red hibiscus flowers, which she adores – equivalent, perhaps, to a chocolate bar for humans.

The Guinness Book of Records cites her as the world's oldest living animal, not far off smashing the all-time record of 188 years, set by another Galapagos tortoise, now deceased. Harriet, whose correct gender was established only a few decades ago, was born in 1830, when Charles Dickens was still an 18-year-old lad.

Much of her lengthy life story is shrouded in mystery, for the only records documenting it were washed away in floods that swept Brisbane in 1893. Harriet was living at the time in the city's Botanical Gardens, where she spent nearly a century in the zoo after emigrating to the Antipodes in 1842.

But it appears that she was about five years old when HMS Beagle arrived in the Galapagos, bound for home after three years spent charting the coasts of South America. [...]

When the zoo at the Gardens closed in 1952, Harry was taken to a wildlife park owned by David Fleay, a Queensland zoologist who succeeded in breeding the platypus for the first time in captivity. Fleay was also, famously, bitten on the thigh by the last surviving thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, a species now extinct.

It was during "his" sojourn at Fleay's sanctuary that Harry was examined by a visiting director of Hawaii's Honolulu Zoo and declared to be a she. Harriet, as she was known from then on, moved again in 1988, to the Queensland Reptile Park, which had been founded by Steve Irwin's father, Bob.

While Steve is not nearly as old as Harriet, he has become far more famous. An extrovert latter-day Crocodile Dundee type, he has exported himself around the world as the Crocodile Hunter, star of a television series and one feature film. He achieved notoriety of a different sort when he was photographed feeding a crocodile while holding his one-month-old baby son, Bob.

But while stunts like those may draw the crowds, Harriet is a big attraction at the zoo, where she leads a pampered existence around the clock. Never a fast mover, she spends most of her time being patted by zoo staff and slumbering on her outdoor bed of grass in the sun.

As with all the best stories, many of the key "facts" in this one are disputed. There is, sadly, no proof that the Harry who sauntered on to the deck of the Beagle in 1835 is the Harriet who wows visitors in Queensland today. DNA tests have verified her age, but her birth date, said to be November 15th, is a guess, based on the fact that turtles hatched in the Galapagos in November.

That will not deter the zoo from staging a birthday party for her on Tuesday. They plan to bake a massive cake for her to share with guests, and her enclosure will be filled with the red hibiscus to which she is so partial. Her fame is spreading; a children's book about her, Darwin's Tortoise, written by Robin Stewart, just been published. [...]

Whether or not she personally inspired Darwin, Harriet is one of the last members of a dwindling species. Of the 15 sub-species of Galapagos giant tortoise that once existed, only 11 remain, all of them endangered and one on the brink of becoming extinct. As well as being hunted by sailors, they suffered from the release of feral animals which destroyed their food and ate their eggs.

Among the islands' present-day inhabitants is Lonesome George, the last representative of a sub-species found on Pinta Island. George has resisted three decades of encouragement to mate with females from a relatively close sub-species.

Despite all the publicity surrounding Harriet's birthday, zoo staff say the day will be relatively low-key. "With her being 175, we don't want to excite her too much," said Ms Campbell. "There won't be any table-top dancing."

The evacuation order was given last night and emergency officials early today began knocking on the doors of the poor subsistence farmers who live on the Galeras volcano, located near the Ecuador border 340 miles south-west of Bogotá, said Roberto Torres, a geologist at Colombia’s Geology and Mines Institute.

However, the storm, which formed Sunday, is not expected to threaten the United States.

At 10 a.m. EST, the storm was centered about 175 miles west of St. Lucia, the hurricane center said. Its maximum sustained wind speed was about 35 mph and it was moving west-northwest at about 7 mph.

Dangerous rip currents and up to 12 inches of rain were possible across the Windward Islands, the Leeward Islands, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, Stewart said.

If the system becomes a tropical storm — which would happen if its maximum sustained wind reaches 39 mph — it would become the 24th named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, extending this year's record. The previous record of 21 named storms had stood since 1933.

Letters from the Greek alphabet are being used to name storms because the list of 21 storm names was exhausted.

The man was killed while working on house struck by a landslide near the western city of Bergen. Six other workers caught in the avalanche escaped with no serious injuries.

Residents were evacuated as landslides destroyed several other homes near the city and hundreds of students were forced to abandon schools threatened by flooding.

All train services were halted between Bergen and the capital, Oslo, due to the risk of boulders falling onto the tracks.

On the west coast, authorities advised residents to leave their cars at home due to dangerously strong winds and to use public transport.

Mudslides halted traffic on several roads and trapped about 50 cars inside a tunnel, while about 2,000 households in the country's southeast lost power.

In southwestern Sweden, electricity supply was cut to 25,000 households and the telephone services of thousands more were disrupted.

The Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute warned sea levels in the country's southwest overnight Monday could rise by as much as 120 centimeters (47 inches), with winds gusting up to 90 kilometers per hourmiles per hour).

The Finnish Meteorology Institute issued a storm warning for the Baltic Sea, with winds in the country's southwest expected to reach 83 kilometers per hour.

Heavy snow, rain and ice in central Finland was expected to cause major traffic disruptions.

It was in the same area that in 1949 produced a 1,000-pound meteorite now on display at the Celestial Museum in Greensburg, part of the World's Largest Hand Dug Well that is the community's biggest claim to fame.

"It is aesthetically the type of meteorite that makes collectors drool," Arnold, a former Wichita resident who has hunted for meteorites around the world, said of his find. "It's what a meteorite ought to look like. It's going to make first-graders go 'Wow!'"

Arnold estimates the value of the big rock "in the seven figures" and says he wants to sell it, preferably to a museum or someone who will keep it intact.

"It won't be cut to reveal its inner beauty," he said. "It's awesome enough from the outside."

Geoffrey Notkin, a science writer and meteorite collector who was with Arnold when the meteorite was found, said its size alone makes it extraordinary.

"By sheer mass, it has to be one of the largest finds in decades," he said.

According to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the Brenham meteorite exploded centuries ago over what is now Kansas, scattering more than three tons of fragments.

"We get regular reports of meteorites," said Rex Buchanan, associate director of the Kansas Geological Survey. "People see them and they bring them in. A normal size is anywhere from the size of your fist to a grapefruit."

The meteorite Arnold discovered is classified as an oriented pallasite, so it has a conical shape and has olivine crystals embedded in iron-nickel alloy. Only two larger ones of that type are known to have been found: a 3,100-pounder in Australia and a 1,500-pounder in Argentina.

Meteorites change shape as they enter the Earth's atmosphere. An oriented meteorite, which is rare, maintains a stable flight rather than tumbling.

Richard Stephenson, manager of the Big Well, said the majority of meteorites found in Kiowa County are from a two-square mile area in Brenham Township. The Kiowa County meteorites are known throughout the world for gemlike olivine crystals, and they look almost like stained glass when cut.

The calls came in from the north and south Denver Metro area. One person from Fort Lupton wrote, "I saw a green glowing light in the southern sky. It looked like it was falling through layers of clouds. I did not see it hit the ground. The whole event took maybe one or two seconds to happen."

The reports started coming in around 8:30 p.m. The Douglas County Sheriff's Office said it planned on investigating the reports received from residents there.

Last month I had the opportunity and privilege to speak at the Toronto Exopolitics Conference, organized by Michael Bird and Victor Viggiani, and which also featured speakers Stanton Friedman and Stephen Bassett (Paola Harris, slated to speak also, unfortunately was ill). The conference headliner was former Canadian Minister of Defence, Paul Hellyer, whose comments on the reality of UFOs have justly received the lion’s share of media attention.

Prior to the conference, I had spent 3 days at the Canadian National Archives in Ottawa, doing UFO research. Most of my time was spent going through records of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who received reports from civilians and typically forwarded these to the Herzberg Institute of Physics at the National Research Council in Ottawa.

As was the case when UFO files in the U.S. were handled by Project Blue Book, UFO reports in Canada had long been treated as an unwelcome bastard child. No one wanted the reports, but the astronomers at the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics were stuck with the job of receiving them.

On the final day of my research trip, I was racing against time to go through the last folders I had requested. These were files from Records Group 77, Accession 1990-1991/073, but which had been placed in an Interim Box along with some other files I requested. This is because, as I was informed, not all the records in these folders had been fully cleared, but the ones in the Interim Box were cleared and could be reviewed by me.

The Klass Letter was in the very last folder I reviewed. I had been expecting to see yet more RCMP reports, or the occasional letter mailed by a Canadian UFO witness to the NRC, in the hope that someone would cogitate over their sighting. Instead, nearly by itself in the folder was this letter, along with two brief internal NRC memos generated as a result. Unlike every other record I reviewed that week at the National Archives, this letter was not designated by a formal file number. Frankly, I wondered if the letter was placed in there by mistake, since it was unlike everything I had looked at.

[Click letter to enlarge]



Philip Klass, who died in August 2005, was for decades the single most prominent UFO debunker in the world. He was also the most effective, at least in relation to his ability at working the media and influencing the academic community. He wrote several books on the topic, and was a senior avionics editor for many years at Aviation Week and Space Technology.

The letter was dated August 15, 1980, and addressed to Dr. A. G. McNamara of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics. It was unsolicited, and is a straightforward character smear of Stanton Friedman, who was at the time in the process of moving to Canada. According to Klass, Friedman was a "full-time UFO lecturer (of the ‘snake-oil salesman’ variety)." He was moving to Canada "to become its chief UFO Guru." Friedman was "quite a showman" whose lectures were "so filled with half-truths and falsehoods that it would take me several hours to offer a rebuttal. And like wrestling with an octopus, when you manage to pin down one leg, the other seven are still thrashing about."

The letter disparages Friedman’s professional credentials as a nuclear physicist, twice refers to Friedman’s "mountainous ego," and calls him "something of an outcast" within the UFO "movement." All in all, a nasty and underhanded little letter. Better yet, Klass enclosed a "White Paper" he prepared on Friedman "that illustrates the man’s modus-operandi and his distortion of facts." (This White Paper was not included in the material I saw at the archives.)

But why send the letter at all? Klass said he wanted to warn the good people at NRC that Friedman would now in all likelihood be directing his focus on them. "I can assure you," Klass wrote, "that you and your associates will be publicly accused of a UFO Coverup (or ‘Cosmic Coverup,’ as he is prone to say) that ‘dwarfs the Watergate scandal.’" Also, "to alert you to deal cautiously with him knowing he is inclined to distort the facts and exploit any ambiguity in your statements."

The final statement is nice: "Please treat this letter in confidence, sharing it with appropriate associates as you see fit." In other words, tell as many people as you can, but behind Friedman’s back, please.

I found it ironic that Klass twice mentioned Friedman’s "mountainous ego." Klass evidently felt he had no such ego problems, despite the chutzpah of such unsolicited character assassination. While he and Friedman had frequently debated publicly, their relations for years had been at least professional and cordial.

[As an aside, I will mention that I never knew Klass personally, nor had I ever seen his signature before. But I have spent about 30 years doing amateur graphology (e.g. handwriting analysis). It’s been a longtime hobby of mine, and I have a small graphological library to which I occasionally refer. Klass’s signature is very partially cut off at the bottom, but you can still make it out fairly well. One thing I noticed about it is the extremely wide "P" in his first name, as well as the very wide loops of his letter "l". Any graphologist will tell you this is a typical sign of writers who are personally vain and conceited. Mountainous ego, indeed.]

Ultimately, I interpret this letter less as a well-meaning warning than as a direct attempt at fear mongering, aimed at scientists who were already uncomfortable with receiving UFO reports. And this was exactly the effect he achieved, judging by the internal memo it generated.

Ten days after Klass’s letter, a memo from J. L. Locke to W. A. Cumming and P. J. Choquette at the NRC mentioned the letter and worried that "we can ill afford the publicity [Friedman] will generate for us." The next statement speaks volumes about how these men thought of UFOs:

"Since there is no science in the subject of UFO’s perhaps we should think again about the possibility of turning the so-called ‘UFO file’ over to some body with no responsibility for the conduct of scientific research."

[Click memo to enlarge]



One can’t help but think about the thousands of Canadian citizens who reported UFOs to the RCMP in the hopes that someone might be able to make sense of it all, or at least hoping somehow to advance the general cause of human knowledge. Oh, well. Instead, it looks as though no one was doing anything more than filing them away. This is a pity, since many reports that were sent to the NRC were truly quite interesting, seemingly very clearly observed, and intelligently described.

The National Research Council wasn’t able to unload entirely its UFO responsibilities. However, it was able to divest itself of most of the UFO files it had been holding. Apparently directly as a result of Klass’s letter, the decision was made that, as of January 1, 1981, any UFO file more than a year old (with names appropriately removed) was to be turned over to the Archives Branch of Public Archives of Canada. Incidentally, I was a bit startled to see the name "R. W. Dolan" at the top of the relevant document. I don’t know who this person was.

[Click memo to enlarge]



What Klass did here was impressive. He created a bogeyman for a group of easily frightened scientists and enabled them to unload at least some of their connection with the topic of UFOs. Seen in the broader context of his career, this was his typical modus operandi.

For example, Klass had done a similar thing years before against scientist James McDonald, which I recounted in my book, UFOs and the National Security State. In 1968, McDonald had received funding from the Office of Naval Research to conduct atmospheric and cloud research in Australia. McDonald was one of the leading atmospheric physicists in the world, but was also prominent in the field of UFO research. By December of 1968, Klass learned of McDonald’s research money, courtesy of Robert Low (number two man of the infamous Condon Committee at the University of Colorado). Klass launched a letter writing campaign to bureaucrats at ONR, asking who had been responsible for funding this; moreover, he inquired, who would be funding McDonald’s upcoming trip to Europe? Klass clearly was trying to intimidate ONR – as senior editor of Aviation Week, he was in a position to do so. ONR, for its part, replied that it was satisfied with McDonald’s work, and indeed had no objection to his UFO research. Still, ONR did discontinue future funding for McDonald.

Another Klassic incident, to be mentioned in my next book, had to do with a UFO symposium which took place at the University of Nebraska on November 11 and 12, 1983 – organized by the MUFON State Director for Nebraska, Ray Boeche. Klass had learned about the event three months in advance, and immediately placed telephone calls to the Conference Coordinator, Russ Free and the Director of Conferences at the University, Robert Mortensen. Essentially, Klass wanted to know why a prestigious university would sponsor such a conference. Apparently, he was so obnoxious that the two administrators contacted MUFON International Director Walt Andrus. Moreover, the University’s Assistant to the Chancellor, Dr. John K. Yost, actually started an investigation. The reason, in part, was that Klass had said there was a political agenda to the conference. In the words of Mortensen, "Mr. Klass has a personal feeling that the nature of this conference seriously questions the integrity of the United States government. He feels that there is no scientific evidence to support the claims of the presenters and indicated that these organizations, by publicly questioning the government, lend support to the Communist movement."

That’s right. The communist movement. At any event, the conference took place as scheduled.

Thus, this most recently discovered letter is simply one more bit of evidence relating to the "legacy" of Philip J. Klass. Anyone who has surveyed the man’s life and career should understand by now that any such so-called legacy of his has nothing to do with his analysis of the UFO phenomenon, which was always shallow and politically motivated. Rather, it will be for his underhanded, sleazy, behind-the-scenes efforts to intimidate academically and scientifically qualified institutions – as well as mainstream U.S. media – away from the study of UFOs. This is work, moreover, that strongly appears to have been done on behalf of elements of the United States intelligence community. That fact may not yet be proven to the satisfaction of everyone, but the ducks are certainly lining up.

In the years since the 9/11 attacks, dozens of books have sought to explore the truth behind the official version of events that day - yet to date, none of these publications has provided a satisfactory answer as to WHY the attacks occurred and who was ultimately responsible for carrying them out.

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Drawing on historical and genealogical sources, Knight-Jadczyk eloquently links the 9/11 event to the modern-day Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She also cites the clear evidence that our planet undergoes periodic natural cataclysms, a cycle that has arguably brought humanity to the brink of destruction in the present day.

For its no nonsense style in cutting to the core of the issue and its sheer audacity in refusing to be swayed or distracted by the morass of disinformation that has been employed by the Powers that Be to cover their tracks, 9/11: The Ultimate Truth can rightly claim to be THE definitive book on 9/11 - and what that fateful day's true implications are for the future of mankind.