Certainly it's hard to escape Bush's voice. Every time I turn on the radio, there he is giving a press conference, or yet another bulletin on the great triumphs in Iraq (where the recent election produced utter defeat for the United States and total victory for Iran). There's talk of a Bush bounce in the polls, though I tend to believe the usually reliable Zogby poll, which found on December 13 that after edging back up above 40 percent in November, Bush's job approval rating was once again at 38 percent. I'm sure millions of Americans yearn to approve of Bush. He's officially scheduled to be in the White House for another three years, and who wants a lemon in the garage that long?

And indeed, the President does still have his die-hard fans, clustered in their places of worship in the remoter regions of the country. A mid-November poll by SurveyUSA found that in only seven states did Bush's current approval rating even hover around 50 percent. These consisted of thinly populated states where sexual relations with livestock are still commonplace: Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Alabama and Mississippi.

For the first followers of Jesus, the importance of Jesus as the founder of their movement was directly related to the significance they attached to his teachings. What mattered most was the body of instructions that circulated in his name, what these teachings called for in terms of ideas, attitudes, and behavior, and the difference these instructions made in the lives of those who took them seriously. But as the Jesus movement spread, groups in different locations and changing circumstances began to think about the kind of life Jesus must have lived. Some began to think of him in the role of a sage, for instance, while others thought of him as a prophet, or even as an exorcist who had appeared to rid the world of its evils. This shift from interest in Jesus' teachings to questions about Jesus' person, authority, and social role eventually produced a host of different mythologies.

The mythology that is most familiar to Christians of today developed in groups that formed in northern Syria and Asia Minor. There Jesus' death was first interpreted as a martyrdom and then embellished as a miraculous event of crucifixion and resurrection. This myth drew on Hellenistic mythologies that told about the destiny of a divine being (or son of God). Thus these congregations quickly turned into a cult of the resurrected or transformed Jesus whom they now referred to as the Christ... The congregation of the Christ ... experienced a striking shift in orientation, away from the teachings of Jesus [...]

Narrative gospels began to appear. [...] These gospels combined features of the martyr myth from the Christ cult with traditions about Jesus as he had been remembered in the Jesus movements, thereby locating the significance of Jesus in the story of his deeds and destiny. Naturally, these gospels came to a climax in an account of his trial, crucifixion, and resurrection from the dead. They followed a plot that was first worked out by Mark during the 70s in the wake of the Roman-Jewish war. The plot collapsed the time between the events of Jesus' life and the destruction of the Jerusalem temple which took place during the war. Mark achieved this plot by making connections between two sets of events (Jesus' death and the temple's destruction) that could only have been imagined after the war. His gospel appears to have been the earliest full-blown written composition along these lines, but once it was conceived, all the narrative gospels used this same basic plot. [...]

The first followers of Jesus could not have imagined, nor did they need, such a mythology to sustain them in their efforts to live according to his teachings. Their sayings gospel was quite sufficient for the Jesus movement as they understood it. [...] Even after the narrative gospels became the rage, the saying gospel was still intact. It was still being copied and read with interest by ever-widening circles. And it was available in slightly different versions in the several groups that continued to develop within the Jesus movement. Eventually, the narrative gospels prevailed as the preferred portrayal for Christians, and the sayings gospel finally was lost to the historical memory of the Christian church.

Were it not for the fact that two authors of narrative gospels incorporated sizable portions of the sayings gospel into their stories of Jesus' life, the sayings gospel of the first followers of Jesus would have disappeared without a trace in the transitions taking place. [...] But Matthew and Luke each had a copy of the sayings gospel... It was this fortuitous coincidence that made it possible in recent times to recover the book [...]

By reading Q carefully, it is possible to catch sight of those earlier followers of Jesus. We can see them on the road, at the market, and at one another's homes. We can hear them talking about appropriate behavior; we can sense the spirit of the movement and their attitudes about the world. A sense of purpose can be traced through subtle changes in their attitudes toward other groups over a period of two or three generations of vigorous social experimentation. It is a lively picture. And it is complete enough to reconstruct the history that happened between the time of Jesus and the emergence of the narrative gospels that later gave the Christian church its official account of Christian beginnings.

The remarkable thing about the people of Q is that they were not Christians. They did not think of Jesus as a messiah or the Christ. They did not take his teachings as an indictment of Judaism. They did not regard his death as a divine, tragic, or saving event. And they did not imagine that he had been raised from the dead to rule over a transformed world. Instead, they thought of him as a teacher whose teachings made it possible to live with verve in troubled times. Thus they did not gather to worship in his name, honor him as a god, or cultivate his memory through hymns, prayers, and rituals. They did not form a cult of the Christ... The people of Q were Jesus people, not Christians. [...]

In Q there is no hint of a select group of disciples, no program to reform the religion or politics of Judaism, no dramatic encounter with the authorities in Jerusalem, no martyrdom for the cause, much less a martyrdom with saving significance for the ills of the world, and no mention of a first church in Jerusalem. The people of Q simply did not understand their purpose to be a mission to the Jews, or to gentiles for that matter. They were not out to transform the world or start a new religion.

Q's challenge to the popular conception of Christian origins is therefore clear. If the conventional view of Christian beginnings is right, how are we to account for these first followers of Jesus? Did they fail to get his message? Were they absent when the unexpected happened? Did they carry on in ignorance or in repudiation of the Christian gospel of salvation? If, however, the first followers of Jesus understood the purpose of their movement just as Q describes it, how are we to account for the emergence of the Christ cult, the fantastic mythologies of the narrative gospels, and the eventual establishment of the Christian church and religion? Q forces the issue of rethinking Christian origins as no other document from the earliest times has done. [...]

With Q in view the entire landscape of early Christian history and literature has to be revised. [...]

The narrative gospels can no longer be viewed as the trustworthy accounts of unique and stupendous historical events at the foundation of the Christian faith. The gospels must now be seen as the result of early Christian mythmaking. Q forces the issue, for it documents an earlier history that does not agree with the narrative gospel accounts. [...]

The issues raised are profound and far reaching. [...] They strike to the heart of an entrenched reluctance in our society to discuss the mythic foundations for attitudes and values, both shared and conflictual, that influence the way we think, behave, and construct our institutions. Q can hardly be discussed without engaging in some honest talk about Christian myth and the American dream.

The famous mythical text of Adam and Eve, left as such is of no possible use to the sincere Christian searcher. The same applies to the story of Abraham, that of Jacob, his sons and Joseph in Egypt, and even to the unedifying and highly immoral stories like that of the scandalous and incestuous affair of Lot with his two daughters.

If the bible is not integrally Truthful and if it does not contain an authentic “Teaching”, then it should be dispensed with. These texts are inspired by the Holy Spirit in all certainty. Every parable has a deep meaning that directly pertains to Truth. The risk, which Mouravieff took in writing the three volumes of Gnosis, comes precisely from divulging the real meaning of all these stories into the language of modern man. The latter is partially justified when he stands dumbfounded and asks if it is possible that all these meanings are really derived from this apparent incoherence? In fact he is unprepared for such a vast display in such a short time.

We will run the same risk when we re-expose the Creed in a philosophical and esoteric way expounding its rich and deep content to our contemporaries.

Let us add that the wilful assimilation of this Truthful Knowledge necessitates a lot of super efforts. The Christian should be broad-minded enough to accept such radical transmutation of texts he used to repeat mechanically every day. Prayers are very important, no doubt, but as many thinkers confirmed, no prayer is louder than the voice of true knowledge.

The Personality or psyche: The extensive modern psychological studies gave us nothing about the structure of the human psychic organism.

Our specific task here is to describe the complex structure of man’s psyche. In fact there exists at present no such science. Is the psychic body made up of organs, more or less analogical to those of the physical body? The fact that it is invisible and only indirectly detectable will not prevent us from affirming that it is a ‘body’. The reader will never find such a statement in any lay text: It is only the Early Fathers of the Church who affirmed that man is endowed with a complex psychic body. Until today, nothing of the sort exists in positive psychology. On the whole psychology deals with complex subjects like memory, imagination and the process of creating ideas, etc., which it has never been able to bind in a coherent unity, to say nothing about the functional study of the brain centres which have added to the confusion of an already confused subject. Psychology is thus now fragmented into numerous compartmented, heterogeneous studies, narrow in scope and quite modest in so far as results are concerned: Experimental psychology, Reflex psychology, Psychology of ethnic races, whether Russian, German or Hindu, etc., Instincts psychology, Brain and special senses psychology, Depths psychology, etc. Another large department of psychology has been created by several industrial states to test efficiency and competence in their engineers, pilots, doctors, labourers, astronauts and plenty of others... A sum of ideal qualities required in each discipline forms the basis on which the tests are elaborated. As if Man was not one and the same throughout Times and Space, as if Man was a multiplicity of different beings foreign to one another.

It was left up to psychoanalysis to utilise at the measure of its forces this heavy, contradictory and inconclusive heritage and to find for itself a new way. Here the criterion was upturned: If the patient was cured, then the psychological knowledge was sound. The encouraging results and the admiration which it justly deserved will not blind us: Psychoanalysis has not provided us with a solid theory on the structure of the human psyche, only problematic and incomplete statements. It has contented itself with the results it obtained, and out of which it never succeeded to draw for us an integral comprehension of man’s psychology.

Jung’s famous essay concerning human typology testifies to this failure. Can we define and enumerate the existing human types, and on what basis? This trial was not successful and did not yield the expected results. In it, Jung has had recourse to diverse and unorthodox sources, scientifically speaking, like Origen and other Fathers of the Church.

On the other hand the science of Characterology which was supposed to answer the questions: what is a character? How many kinds of characters are there? And, can we classify men according to their character? This branch of psychology succeeded in the end to fix and determine a certain number of character traits or features. But it did not answer the main questions it was meant to.

Therefore, neither psychology, nor psychoanalysis, nor Characterology, nor any other discipline did provide us with a description of the psyche as accurate as that description which anatomy provides us with concerning the human physical organs.

We will not mention all the psychological monographs and unilateral studies that can be found in the works of many contemporary occidental philosophers; such as those of the great phenomenological and existential schools, who describe Man psychologically speaking as a consciousness of being. Yet we must recognise their original and deep understanding of Man in terms of ontology, and we must pay homage to their splendid efforts to found their new phenomenological, existential psychoanalysis on the triple following basis: Being, Having and Doing. These three fundamental characteristics in man’s psychology are according to them irreducible and indivisible; they are the Atoms of the human psyche. In fact these philosophers have inspired a new generation of highly cultured psychoanalysts to rebuild psychoanalysis on these new bases. The school of Henry Ey in France and that of Binswanger in Germany testify to the grandeur of that enterprise.

To conclude, we must say that the thousands upon thousands of empirical and experimental psychological studies did not avail much: We have not been provided with a solid system of knowledge on which to understand others and ourselves.

In addition, one of the gravest mistakes modern psychological sciences committed was to never accept introspection as a valid method. It admired the deep descriptions of famous writers like Balzac, Proust, Dostoyevsky, Zola, etc. But, to it introspection was condemned before even being tried.

The succession of the realistic school, the behaviourist school, Gestalt psychology, the personalist school of Mounier and many others fully justify us in saying what we said in the title of this short historical note. There exists no valid attempt at describing the human psyche as a live entity. Up to our days, this statement remains fully valid.

We think we are fully entitled to say that psychology agonises. The chaotic state in which this pseudo science drifts away seems to have no possible way out.

Psychology as one of the four main classical branches of philosophy is therefore and undoubtedly in a mortal crisis.

Together with many other writers who are aware of the general human crisis of this end of the twentieth century, we believe that we must have recourse to the Ancients, for a possible solution. We have resolved on our part to rely on the powerful, clear and sharp knowledge that these same Ancients have transmitted to us about the structure of the psyche or mortal soul of Man. Our contemporaries can hardly conceive that there existed since times immemorial a systematic corpus of knowledge to study the human psyche. The latter is according to them composed of three spheres or centres, each quite complex in itself: The sphere of instincts and motricity, the sphere of emotivity or affectivity and finally the sphere of intellection or discursive thought. We shall adopt this structure of the human psyche as the instrument with which we will study Man, far from the chaos of the hybrid and heterogeneous results of the actual psychological sciences.

These three spheres are interconnected. Elaborately studied they give an integral, adequate and polyvalent comprehension of Man.

We will profit at the measure of our forces from the abundant, detailed and profound works that men like Plato, the Great Fathers of the Church and the Islamic theosophists have left us on this subject. It is a wealth that modern positive sciences have left aside not knowing exactly what they have missed. Some contemporary authors should be praised, like Jung, Evola, Kerenye, Mircea Eliade, etc., for having pointed to the extreme importance of such works; they thus promoted a vast international interest in the prominent works of the Ancients. Now all cultured milieus, for example, know for sure that beyond the Alchemical processes of metal transmutations, these alchemists meant above all to transmute their own souls, and even aimed at some sort of androgynous internal union, as we see this abundantly expressed in the famous theme of the fusion between king and queen.

We must state that all Ancient Traditions, whether originating in China, India, Assyria, Hebraic Palestine, Phoenicia, Ancient Egypt, Greece or Medieval Europe are all in full agreement about the detailed structure of the human psyche.

Such is the triple structure of the mortal human psyche, also called the Personality, which we will adopt in our studies to understand Man and his possible evolution…

Small matter now that a small number of people immediately smelled a rat, reasoning that rifle-carrying religious zealots in faraway Asian caves could not have mastered the complex necessities of paralyzing military defenses and skirting well-established airport strictures to pull off such a bold caper all by themselves. Even as the anomalies of that day multiplied into full-blown suspicions, the American public relations goliath silenced all skepticism, and preserved the scripted accounts as patriotic gospel to justify the new plan to start killing innocents in the name of revenge. It was the American modus operandi of cowboys killing Indians at its bloody best.

Intelligent people immediately marvelled at the clumsiness of the official lies, and wondered how it came to be that the American people, whom the media apparatus continually reminded us were the most intelligent in the world, could be duped by such a flawed fable.

Some of those people immediately protested that the government's account of 9/11 was surely a fake. Four hijacked planes flying free for an hour? Why did we spend all that money on the defense budget? How could this have happened? But these questions were immediately shouted down by flag-waving mourners. Show some respect for the dead, they snarled, muttering murmurs of treason and applauding those who suspended their Constitutional rights in a frenzied hunt for more so-called terrorists.

These bereaved and outraged flag-wavers didn't really give it a second thought when the rubble of the World Trade Center — the best evidence we had to ferret out the real truth about the attacks, and perhaps identify the method and maybe even the perpetrators of the attacks — was summarily carted off and made to disappear. Most people didn't notice when our indignant leaders claimed they had no idea such a preposterously bold attack could ever happen — even when those same leaders provided the names of the alleged culprits less than two days after the atrocity happened.

Few pondered the inconsistency. Top government officials said they didn't know it could happen. But they knew the names of those who did it.

Those who did notice this flaw began digging deeper. But the vast majority applauded when we started bombing other countries in a quest to annihilate the purported perps. Those digging deeper also noticed that the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq had been planned long before 9/11 happened, and tried to tell people, but were mostly shouted down amid cries of "treason!" That didn't stop those digging deeper from digging even deeper, because they were on the trail of real treason. And they certainly noticed when Pakistan offered to turn over Osama bin Laden for trial in a neutral country that America declined the offer.

Yet even as it became clear that the reasons for American mass murder from high in the sky were shameless lies, the American people clung to their grief, their outrage, and their bloodthirsty craving for retribution, so they really didn’t give it a second thought that they were sending their sons and daughters to die in a senseless effort to get satisfaction by killing thousands of people who had absolutely nothing to do with the crime that had enraged them in the first place.

And damned few made the logical connection that if our leaders lied about the reasons for invading Afghanistan and Iraq, it was highly unlikely that they were telling the truth about 9/11.

But the war machine marched on to the media’s hydrophobic applause, people kept waving their flags, and innocents are still dying, every day, because of it.

The early resistance to the 9/11 coverup was led in America by Mike Ruppert, who quickly pointed out that timely bets that certain airlines stock would plummet revealed a foreknowledge of the tragedy that could reveal who the true perpetators of this colossal crime actually were. And the work of Jared Israel revealed the bungling of America’s defenses in such meticulous detail that many people began to realize the attacks could have prevented by even a modicum of military competence on that fateful day.

Still, most flag-waving Americans refused to notice that the people in charge during the nation’s greatest failure of its military defenses were promoted instead of being censured or fired, never mind being put on trial.

As time passed and sorrow began to heal into sadness, other researchers came forth with penetrating questions casting doubt on the government’s version of events. German researcher Eric Hufschmid focused on why the government prevented a forensic examination of WTC rubble — an unbelievable and inexcusable dereliction of public responsibility, especially considering that in the case of aircraft disasters the government puts even the tiniest detail under the microscope to find out what actually happened.

Then former German defense minister Andreas von Buelow and British politician Michael Meacher made startling public declarations that they believed the American government had to be involved in order for such a complex operation to have been carried out.

The French researcher Thierry Meyssan first pointed out that the hole in the Pentagon could have in no way been caused by a giant jet airliner, and this argument was taken to much deeper levels by dogged researchers such as Dick Eastman to prove to anyone with a brain than no giant passenger jet had caused that explosion in Washington.

Consider this: the government says that an extremely intense fire that burned only eight minutes completely vaporized an entire passenger airliner, yet did not burn hot enough to prevent Pentagon officials from proclaiming that they had identified the DNA of every single passenger on the plane. Pardon me, but do you want to buy a bridge?

Furthermore, the FBI confiscated security camera video from a nearby gas station that could easily clear up the mystery, but they have refused to release it — along with voice recordings from the doomed airliners — in the name of national security. What does your sniffer tell you? Do you remember the TV detective story maxim: those who work to cover up the crime are the ones who most likely committed it?

Upon hearing the endless stories of distraught cellphone calls from passengers to relatives, retired Canadian professor A.K. Dewdney rented a plane and did some experimenting about making cellphone calls from the air. He concluded that many of the calls purported by the government to have been made could not be replicated under similar conditions.

Websites created by Jim Hoffman, Jeff King, and Rosalee Grable focused on the photographs of the 9/11 tragedy in New York and concluded that from the distance the rubble was propelled directly outwards that explosions had to have taken place. Evidence that the planes weakened the skyscrapers and caused their collapse was quickly debunked by Bill Manning and Jerry Russell.

Archives of all manner of critical analyses of the official story were quickly set up by Ken Vardon of the American Patriot Friends Network and Peter Meyer of the Serendipity website, with many brilliant commentaries about how the government had to have lied, and these were followed by hundreds of other sites which emulated their efforts.

Numerous timelines, the earliest being those by Paul Thompson and Mark Elsis, revealed every tiny detail of what had happened, and those with the tenacity to examine them discovered more flaws in the government’s stories.

Carol Valentine, known for her intense research into the debacle at Waco, unleashed an anonymous interview that asserted the killer planes were remote controlled. But another major researcher, experienced pilot Ralph Omholt, weighed in with the opinion that some of the maneuvers before the crashes could not have been accomplished without an expert pilot. And researcher Jon Carlson has always insisted the planes were controlled by a helicopter that hovered nearby.

A little later on, researchers Gerard Holmgren and Woody Box noticed the records of flight numbers on the ill-fated aircraft revealed more inconsistencies in the official story, to the point where Holmgren could later declare that two of the supposedly doomed flights never even got off the ground that day.

Two and a half years later, researchers scheduled a two-part conference that was supposed to delve into the delicate details of 9/11, but it was hijacked into other issues and suffered from low attendance and a lack of publicity. Perhaps the high point that came out of the Toronto end of it was Michel Chossudovsky’s essay that the dreaded al-Qaeda were no more than an evil fantasy creation of U.S. intelligence services, and for my money, that remains the central issue in the debate about the future of America.

Everyone knows by now that President Bush reluctantly appointed an investigative commission that was not charged with identifying the perpetrators — those were named at the outset without a shred of public evidence — and the panel accomplished nothing except a few hollow headlines. Despite incisive reports by Nico Haupt and Michael Kane and the constant complaining of the 9/11 victims’ families, the big questions were never answered and disinformation specialists like Condoleezza Rice and Richard Clark spun their tales of self-justification. At the end, a kind of ignorant incompetence had replaced intent as the reason for the tragedy, and the bad guys got away.

Of the many relevant issues that the Kean Commission simply ignored, perhaps the most glaring was what our military defenses were actually doing on 9/11. Barbara Honegger’s timely story about the counterterrorist wargame exercises planned for that very day raises all sorts of question about how they impeded the response of our nation’s air defenses, yet the commission never once admitted that the subject even existed.

Neither did it address numerous reports — particularly one from a worker in the building, Scott Forbes — that WTC security was profoundly compromised the weekend before the tragedy.

So, as time passed and the alternative theorists delved into their material more deeply, distortions developed, followed by charges of disinformation, increasing suspicions, and eventually the scrambling of the entire 9/11 truth movement.

From intense analyses of slow-motion video of the event, Grable, a.k.a. The Webfairy, developed a theory that the use of holograms was involved in the 9/11 deception. This assertion ignited a firestorm of complaints from other researchers who protested that Grable’s assertions were fantasies of an overactive imagination, at best. Yet researchers such as Holmgren, Scott Loughrey and Michael Elliott refuse to totally discount her findings because her analyses, interpretations aside, had been accomplished in a credible way.

Radio rapper Alex Jones produced one of the earliest videos questioning the official story about 9/11, but made two signal contributions later with his startling interview of the German politician von Buelow, who insists the American government was surely involved in the crime, and his chat with the maverick retired arms dealer, Col Donn de Grand Pre, who said that there were no hijackers on the planes (an opinion shared by many 9/11 researchers), that the bodies of the passengers are somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, and that he personally knows the names of the Air National Guard pilots who shot down Flight 93.

Matching de Grand Pre for astonishing assertions in recent days has been the website of Phil Jayhan, which has come out with three stunning observations based on photographic analyses of the original footage: that the plane that hit the South Tower had a pod on its bottom (if that were true, and it appears to be true from the photographs, then the government’s story is gone for good) and that the plane fired a missile just before it hit the building; that that particular plane had no windows (ditto last parenthetical comment); and then he proceeded to name the pilot de Grand Pre had referred to, the one who shot down Flight 93 (ditto again).

Now. Let us divert ever so briefly into the meaning of that oft-used but frequently misunderstood word — “disinformation.” It differs ever so slightly from the word “lie” in that it is a lie generally grouped with a series of facts that may be true, thereby ruining the credibility of the truths within the grouped series of facts.

It is used frequently on the web when one person disagrees with another person’s assertions. I’ve often had the intuition that the people who most frequently use the term — are you listening, Dick Eastman? — are very likely the ones who are spinning it to begin with. On the other hand, Eastman has been right a good deal of the time, particularly in regard to John Judge and Kyle Hence, two questionable figures who have shadowed the bogus Kean Commission hearings and pretended to be influencing the proceedings.

The classic example of disinformation specialist these days is probably Michael Moore, whose celebrated film has created a stir in plastic society. He has convinced the world that the Saudis’ relationship with the Bush family is the great secret behind 9/11, even though more developed minds clearly see that since the Saudis didn’t really benefit from 9/11 (though they may have had some supporting role in it), it had to have been Israel that was the silent partner in the greatest crime in American history, through Silverstein (and Marvin Bush) rigging the towers with explosives, providing the faux hijackers (Atta’s most fluent language was Hebrew, according to his girlfriend, as reported by Daniel Hopsicker), and even providing the two single suicide pilots (according to Dewdney’s Operation Pearl theory).

Regarding Israel there is the little matter that only three Israelis died that day in the biggest Jewish city in the world — and two were on the planes. Not to mention Jewish ownership of virtually every major news outlet in the United States. And not to mention the Jewish men who have crafted American foreign policy under the last four (at least) American presidents.

But there is disinformation out there, theories and reports that touch on legitimate evidence but include deliberately preposterous assertions so that the whole group of evidence is disregarded and ridiculed. Some say the new 9/11 video by Riley and von Kleist, which features the work of Jayhan, falls into this category, though I’ll reserve final judgment until I see it.

I am always reluctant to make the charge of disinformation, first, because, I don’t want to hurt anyone who is really trying to tell the truth, and second, because most of the time, I am simply not intelligent enough to make a certain judgment on the issue at hand, so it’s more prudent to keep my doubts to myself.

This frame of thought has come up repeatedly with the Webfairy’s hologram assertions, but having talked with her, and knowing researchers I respect also respect her, I can’t call her efforts disinformation just because I don’t agree with what she’s saying, because I know I don’t have the technical expertise to understand all the details.

Perhaps the oddest of all the internecine 9/11 arguments involves two websites both called “9/11 review.” Michael Elliott’s 911review.org arrived on the scene a little late and began to bill itself as a coordinating site to other links as well as possessing a certain degree of engineering expertise. Elliott remains quick to criticize other sites such as Dewdney’s physics911.org and Russell’s 9-11strike.com for “bad science.”

But computer whiz Jim Hoffman, who had already distinguished himself with his extraordinarily clear Power Point-type presentations on wtc7.net and in other places, quickly created 911review.com to blast Elliott for his superficiality, dead links, promotion of suspect theories, and unwillingness to ask the hard questions. Elliott’s response has been to label Hoffman a government agent. The two remain archenemies to this day, though both have substantial followings, as well as intriguing websites.

In the minds of some, Jayhan’s recent revelations fall into the same suspicious category. I’d love for his observations to be accurate and his assertions true, but I simply sense that I don’t have the expertise to make the call, so I don’t. I can’t.
I leave it up to you in the links below. Sorry if you think that’s copping out. That’s just the way it is.

What I do know for certain is that the hologram issue and other recent spectacular aspects of 9/11 information have actually hurt the effort to convince the public that 9/11 was an inside job, which in my mind it most certainly was.

But the evidence for this charge is not simple, like for instance the government’s disinformation campaign to defame Muslims.

“Arab hijackers did it, we have the evidence but we can’t give it to you because of national security, so let’s bomb the hell out of them.”

Simple. The dumbed-down public could get it, and fixate their hatred on the intended target, which of course is Islam.

None of these splitting hairs like you can’t make cellphone calls from above a certain altitude, or the Twin Towers were demolished because the pattern of ejecta indicates explosions, or the hole in the Pentagon isn’t big enough, or they deliberately took away the evidence so we couldn’t see what really happened.

No. Arabs did it. Let’s kill ’em.

That sounds very much like what the Israelis say about the Palestinians, doesn’t it?

So the truth has lost again. And the lies have prevailed. There are thousands of people in this country, most in very powerful positions, who know exactly what happened on 9/11. Because they profited from it. But we can’t find out who they are, because protecting the rich, no matter what they do, has always had a much higher priority in the country — and for that matter the world — than mere justice for the common folk. The FBI says there was nothing suspicious about the “put” options. And for want of a whistleblower, that’s the end of it.

The real murderers of 3,000 people in New York have gotten away with it.

Game over.

The most damning evidence is the behavior of the Bush administration and its motley cast of sociopathic characters (including John Kerry) that produced that totally staged, utterly facile, pseudoinvestigation which never attempted to identify the perpetrators. The hijacker fantasy held up. The people of the Muslim world were made legitimate targets, which was exactly the purpose of the 9/11 caper to begin with.

Now, at the exact moment in time that the American public and the people of the world are most willing to entertain the notion that something is wrong with the government’s story, the 9/11 truth movement has faltered, badly. Unable to come with the goods.

Totally stonewalled by the robotic phalanx of plastic presidential candidates too terrified to utter a single peep about the 9/11 coverup, Zionist control of America, the lies that created our so-called preemptive wars, or the continuing shakedown of the world by the Federal Reserve.

Totally blacked out by puppet media who claim our dead children are fighting for freedom but won’t photograph their coffins or their illnesses.

So forget about it. Go home, watch TV, pick your nose. Hey, vote in the next election, if you delude yourself into believing that will make a difference. Wait docilely for the next hammer to fall.

I am reminded of that Russian proverb, “When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

You are now the nail.

The truth of 9/11 lies buried beneath an avalanche of lies, just like the souls of those unsuspecting passengers on routine domestic airline flights and those ordinary folks who trudged off to work that day to the Twin Towers lie buried forever in that smoldering heap of uninvestigated rubble. And just like the futures of you and me lie buried an endless heap of fake terror alerts, anthrax scares, police state laws, and self-righteous fabrications of dark-skinned terrorists lurking demonically on every streetcorner in America.


Relevant links (in order of appearance):

• Mike Ruppert: http://www.fromthewilderness.com/
• Jared Israel: http://www.tenc.net/
• Eric Hufschmid: http://www.erichufschmid.net/
• Andreas von Buelow: http://www.prisonplanet.com/jones_report.html
• Michael Meacher: http://truthout.org/docs_03/090703A.shtml
• Thierry Meyssan: http://english.pravda.ru/main/2002/05/23/29196.html
• Dick Eastman: http://www.apfn.org/apfn/77_deastman1.htm
• A.K. Dewdney: http://physics911.org/
• Jim Hoffman: http://911research.wtc7.net/
• Jeff King: http://911review.org/Wiki/King,Jeff.shtml
• Rosalee Grable: http://thewebfairy.com/911/
• Bill Manning: http://www.rense.com/general18/firefighter.htm
• Jerry Russell: http://www.911-strike.com/
• Ken Vardon: http://www.apfn.org/
• Peter Meyer: http://www.serendipity.li/
• Paul Thompson: http://www.unansweredquestions.org/timeline/
• Mark Elsis: http://www.911timeline.net/
• Carol Valentine: http://www.public-action.com/
• Ralph Omholt: http://home.comcast.net/~skydrifter/exp.htm
• Jon Carlson: http://www.rense.com/general54/flight93crashwitnesses.htm
• Gerard Holmgren’s “The Truth About Sept. 11”: http://www.serendipity.li/wot/holmgren/holmgren2.htm
• Woody Box: http://inn.globalfreepress.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=323
• Michel Chossudovsky: http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO109C.html
• Nico Haupt: http://ny911truth.org/articles/stop_coverup.htm
• Michael Kane: http://inn.globalfreepress.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=387
• Barbara Honegger: http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=101&contentid=641
• Scott Forbes: http://69.28.73.17/thornarticles/powerdown.html
• Scott Loughrey: http://www.rense.com/general50/amy.htm
• Alex Jones: http://www.prisonplanet.com/
• Col. Donn de Grand Pre: http://www.warfolly.vzz.net/nohijackers.htm
• Phil Jayhan: http://www.letsroll911.org/
• John Judge: http://www.septembereleventh.org/forum/showthreaded.php?Cat=&Number=742&page=&view=&sb=5&o=&vc=1
• Kyle Hence: http://www.serendipity.li/wot/fake_opposition.htm
• Michael Moore: http://www.counterpunch.org/lodge09172003.html
• Daniel Hopsicker: http://www.madcowprod.com/
• A.K. Dewdney: http://www.serendipity.li/wot/operation_pearl.htm
• Riley/von Kleist: http://www.thepowermall.com/
• Michael Elliott: http://911review.org/
• Jim Hoffman: http://911review.com/

John Kaminski is the author of America's Autopsy Report a collection of his Internet essays seen on hundreds of websites around the world, and also “The Day America Died: Why You Shouldn’t Believe the Official Story of What Happened on September 11, 2001,” a 48-page booklet written for those who insist on believing the government’s version of events. For more information about both, go to http://www.johnkaminski.com/

The story did not name the companies.

Since the Times disclosed the domestic spying program last week, President Bush has stressed that his executive order allowing the eavesdropping was limited to people with known links to al Qaeda.

But the Times said that NSA technicians have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might lead to terrorists.

The volume of information harvested from telecommunications data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the paper said, quoting an unnamed official.

The story quoted a former technology manager at a major telecommunications firm as saying that companies have been storing information on calling patterns since the September 11 attacks, and giving it to the federal government. Neither the manager nor the company he worked for was identified.

The federal government is responsible for issuing Social Security numbers, but it may not be doing enough to protect these critically personal pieces of information on its own Web sites. Acting on a tip, InformationWeek was able to access Web pages that include the names and Social Security numbers of people involved in Justice Department-related legal actions. It's a discomforting discovery at a time when identity theft and fraud are on the rise.

One document on the Justice Department Executive Office for Immigration Review's site listed the name and Social Security number of a woman involved in a 2003 immigration-review case. Another document from 2002 listed the name and Social Security number of a man who was being prosecuted for committing insurance fraud. Other searches of the Justice Department's site yielded more Social Security numbers and identifying information.

When contacted on Dec. 20 about the presence of a 2003 document revealing personally identifying information, a spokesman for the Justice Department's Executive Office for Immigration Review noted that his division is governed by the department's overall privacy rules, the Privacy Act, and the Freedom of Information Act. He acknowledged that the woman's Social Security number displayed in the immigration-review case shouldn't be available to the general public, would be removed from the site, and that the woman in question would be notified that her number had been published.

A search Friday on the Justice Department's Web site for the woman's name indicated that the document had been blocked from public view. However, Google and Yahoo searches returned a hyperlink to her PDF court document. The PDF is now blocked when clicking on this link, but the information can still be obtained by clicking on the "text version" of the link.

But according to an InformationWeek source, the Justice Department had been notified of the error more than a month ago. The source, a systems security manager at a California bank, said he saw the information on the site and sent an E-mail on Nov. 12 alerting the Justice Department. The security manager followed up with the Justice Department via E-mail on Dec. 4 and was notified on Dec. 6 by the site's Web master that his E-mail had been forwarded to the "responsible component within the Department." The systems security manager contacted InformationWeek on Dec. 19 when he noticed that the person's name and Social Security number still could be found on the Justice Department's Web site.

In the nearly 70 years that the U.S. government has been issuing Social Security numbers, their use has grown from being strictly for government record-keeping to becoming attached to nearly every important document in a person's life, including bank accounts, medical records, and employment files. The growing use of computers to store all of this information has led to a new era of electronic identity theft, with Social Security numbers being of particular value for cybercriminals.

More than 51 million Americans have had their personal information compromised since February 2005 through a variety of means, including software programs that monitor keystrokes to acquire passwords, phishing, and low-tech techniques such as eavesdropping and dumpster diving, according to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a nonprofit consumer watchdog organization.

The Justice Department, meanwhile, touts its efforts to crack down on identity theft and identity fraud through the 1998 Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act, which prohibits using or transferring another person's identifying information with the intent to commit, or aid or abet, any unlawful activity. The law, in most circumstances, carries a maximum prison term of 15 years.

Recognizing the threat to public well-being, not to mention the proliferation of E-commerce and E-government, government has stepped up its efforts to penalize companies that are criminal or careless with personal information. Since March 2005, more than 20 states have enacted legal requirements for notifying the public regarding security breaches involving personal information.

But the government's role in protecting its citizens from identity theft and fraud is likely to get murky in 2006. Bills in both the House and Senate would impose a less-stringent standard for notification and pre-empt state laws. While identity-theft notification standards differ from state to state, one of the federal bills in play would require agencies and persons in possession of computerized data containing sensitive personal information to disclose security breaches only when such a breach poses a significant risk of identity theft.

Yet the availability of Social Security numbers on one of its own Web sites indicates the federal government may need to pay closer attention to its own adherence to identity-theft prevention.

Mann's legal troubles began in 2002, when his 13-year-old son assaulted him and was sent to a juvenile detention center. Mann, who was unemployed and on disability benefits, was ordered to pay $50 a month for the boy's housing but never did, according to court records.

Prosecutors sought to have Mann held in contempt of juvenile court, which led to an order that he be brought before a judge.

The judge then incarcerated him in September 2004 for three warrants alleging that Mann wrote bad checks. Then he waited more than a year as his contempt case was postponed again and again.

"He wasn't lost in the system," said Sheriff's Department spokesman Sgt. Don Peritz. "We knew he was here ... we hold them until the judge says to hold him no longer."

An October 2004 court docket entry suggests the judge's order was lifted, but Sheriff's Department records do not show it being lifted or Mann's release ordered.

Had he been convicted in the contempt case, he would have served a maximum of six months in jail and faced a $500 fine.

His release came after cellmate Jim Brooks, 64, heard from Mann that he had never seen a lawyer.

"I said, 'Man, why don't you call your people?' He said, 'Nah, I don't want to bother them with anything,'" Brooks said.

Brooks, jailed on minor theft charges, told his public defender, who told another public defender, Shoshana Paige. She made several calls and Mann was released the same day.

"I was shocked, and then part of me was shocked that I was shocked because I've read enough other stories about things like this," Paige said. "This one seems to be pretty egregious."

"It is a waste of time, it is a waste of resources and it is causing us to be concerned about our citizenship, our constitutional rights," Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told CNN.

Several sources said the covert program is legal because the authorities conduct the testing in areas like parking lots.

"You do not need to be on anyone's property to get radiation levels," one person familiar with the program told CNN. "How close you need to be depends on search techniques, the equipment used and the substance you are looking for."

The source asked not to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the program.

The program is part of an FBI program supported "from a technical standpoint" by the Department of Energy's Nuclear Emergency Support Team, said an administration official, who declined to be identified because of the classified nature of the operation.

The Energy Department refused to comment on the program.

The purpose of the program -- first reported in U.S. News and World Report -- is to find any radioactive material that could be used to make a dirty bomb, which combines radioactive material with conventional explosives to spread radiation over a large area. A dirty bomb is one of the greatest concerns of U.S. counterterrorism officials.

An FBI spokesman said that all of the agency's investigations and operations are lawful, "intelligence-driven" and based on information about criminal or terrorist threats.

"There is no nuclear- or radiation-monitoring program targeting mosques or other places of gathering by Muslim or any other particular group of citizens," said Mike Mason, head of the FBI field office in Washington.

Another government official said agents would weigh additional information -- not just a person's religion -- before deciding to conduct such tests.

"That is not the only criterion," he said.

Most of the testing is conducted in Washington because the nation's capital is considered a potential target for such an attack. However, an official said testing also has been conducted in Chicago, Illinois; Detroit, Michigan; Las Vegas, Nevada; Seattle, Washington; and New York City.

The program's activity varies "dependent on a number of factors, such as the information we get from a particular part of the world," one official explained.

Federal officials familiar with the program maintain that warrants are unneeded for the kind of radiation sampling the operation entails, but some legal scholars disagree. News of the program comes in the wake of revelations last week that, after 9/11, the Bush White House approved electronic surveillance of U.S. targets by the National Security Agency without court orders. These and other developments suggest that the federal government's domestic spying programs since 9/11 have been far broader than previously thought.

The nuclear surveillance program began in early 2002 and has been run by the FBI and the Department of Energy's Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST). Two individuals, who declined to be named because the program is highly classified, spoke to U.S. News because of their concerns about the legality of the program. At its peak, they say, the effort involved three vehicles in Washington, D.C., monitoring 120 sites per day, nearly all of them Muslim targets drawn up by the FBI. For some ten months, officials conducted daily monitoring, and they have resumed daily checks during periods of high threat. The program has also operated in at least five other cities when threat levels there have risen: Chicago, Detroit, Las Vegas, New York, and Seattle.

FBI officials expressed concern that discussion of the program would expose sensitive methods used in counterterrorism. Although NEST staffers have demonstrated their techniques on national television as recently as October, U.S. News has omitted details of how the monitoring is conducted. Officials from four different agencies declined to respond on the record about the classified program: the FBI, Energy Department, Justice Department, and National Security Council. "We don't ever comment on deployments," said Bryan Wilkes, a spokesman for DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration, which manages NEST.

In Washington, the sites monitored have included prominent mosques and office buildings in suburban Maryland and Virginia. One source close to the program said that participants "were tasked on a daily and nightly basis," and that FBI and Energy Department officials held regular meetings to update the monitoring list. "The targets were almost all U.S. citizens," says the source. "A lot of us thought it was questionable, but people who complained nearly lost their jobs. We were told it was perfectly legal." [...]

It’s too bad George W. Bush evaded regular military service by hiding out in the Texas Air National Guard during war time. If Bush had any real military experience, he and his mentor, Dick Cheney, who was `too busy’ to do his military service during Vietnam, might have learned one of the basic laws of military science: only a fools and megalomaniacs say `no retreat.’

Retreat is as much a part of warfare as advance, and often an even more useful tactic. No general worth his stripes embarks on a battle or campaign without leaving open a secure line of retreat behind him. War is by nature uncertain and filled with nasty surprises.

The hallmark of a good commander is being able to quickly change plans when faced by unexpected adversity and withdraw, trading space for time, when his forces are in peril.

One of history’s greatest modern generals was Erich von Manstein who conducted a brilliant series of fighting withdrawals on the Eastern Front that are a classic of military art.

Two of the most egregious recent examples of the failure to retreat when military/political conditions demand it were Stalingrad and Kuwait. After the German Sixth Army was enveloped by vastly superior Soviet forces at Stalingrad in late 1942, Hitler refused his general’s pleas to break out. He thundered `no retreat’ and accused his generals who urged a retreat to the west of `defeatism.’

Hitler’s refusal to allow the Sixth Army to break out of encirclement and link up with advancing German forces condemned it to total destruction. Stalingrad marked the beginning of the end of Hitler’s dream of a thousand-year Reich. Hitler, who was wounded three times in World War I, was a good soldier and understood strategy. He refused to allow his Sixth Army to retreat because he feared it would undermine his authority and aura of invincibility. A dictator cannot afford to lose face by retreating.

Saddam Hussein faced the same problem in Kuwait in 1990-1991. Saddam invaded the US protectorate after its rulers had gravely insulted Iraq by demanding its war widows be sent to Kuwait’s harems in lieu of billions in loans for the Iran-Iraq War that bankrupt Baghdad owed the Kuwaitis.

Facing certain destruction from the US-led coalition, Saddam wanted to withdraw but feared doing so would fatally undermine his authority and lead to a coup. So he sat transfixed, hoping the Soviets would somehow rescue him from the jaws of disaster. In the end, Saddam’s armies in Kuwait were destroyed and Iraq submitted to siege.

Fools and megalomaniacs don’t know when to retreat. Just as the distant oil fields of the Caucasus lured Hitler ever east into the wastes of southern Russia and destruction, so Iraq’s oil treasure continues to mesmerize Bush, Cheney

These falsehoods, Cohen wrote, "are a direct consequence of the administration's repeated lies--lies of commission, such as Cheney's statements, and lies of omission."

Fourteen months later, no widely syndicated columnist or major newspaper editorial has called for the impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Not even Cohen again. Yet the case for impeachment is so strong that, recently, hardly a day goes by without more disclosures which strengthen any number of impeachable offenses that could form a Congressional action under our Constitution. An illegal war, to begin with, against our Constitution which says only Congress can declare war. An illegal war under domestic laws, and international law, and conducted illegally under international conventions to which the US belongs, should cause an outcry against this small clique of outlaws committing war crimes who have hijacked our national government.

An illegal, criminal war means that every related U.S. death and injury, every related Iraqi civilian death and injury, every person tortured, every home and building destroyed become war crimes as a result--under established international law.

There are those on talk radio or cable shows who scoff at international law. They rarely tell their audiences that the United States has played a key role in establishing these treaties, like the Geneva Conventions, and the United Nations Charter. When these treaties are agreed to by the U.S. government, they become as binding as our federal laws.

By these legal standards and by the requirements of the U.S. Constitution (Article 1, Section 8, the war-declaring authority), George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are probably the most impeachable President and Vice President in American history. An illegal war based on lies, deceptions, cover-ups and their repetition even after being told by officials in their own administration--not to mention critical retired generals, diplomats and security specialists--of their falsity should have prodded the House of Representatives into initiating impeachment proceedings. But then, Bush did not lie under oath about sex.

A majority of the American people have turned against this war-quagmire, against its intolerable human and economic costs, against the increased danger this war is bringing to our nation's interests. They want the soldiers to return safely home. In increasing numbers they sense what Bush's own CIA Director, Porter Goss, told the U.S. Senate last February. He noted, along with other officials since then, that U.S. soldiers in Iraq are like a magnet attracting and training more terrorists from more countries who will return to their nations and cause trouble. Many national security experts have said, in effect, you do not fight terrorists with policies that produce more terrorists.

Now comes the most recent, blatant impeachable offense--Bush ordering the spying on Americans in our country by the National Security Agency. This disclosure stunned many N.S.A. staff who themselves view domestic surveillance as anathema, according to Matthew M. Aid, a current historian of the agency.

Domestic eavesdropping on Americans by order of the President to the National Security Agency violates the 27-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act unless they obtain a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court. This court meets in secret and has rejected only four out of 19,000 applications.

So why did Bush violate this law and why does he defiantly say he will continue to order domestic spying as he has since 2002? Not because the FISA Court is slow. It acts in a matter of hours in the middle of the night if need be. The law actually permits surveillance in emergencies as long as warrants are requested within 72 hours or 15 days in times of war.

Bush violated the law because of the arrogance of power. Ostensibly, he believes that a vague Congressional resolution after 9/11 to fight al-Qaeda overrides this explicit federal law and the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. Bush even claims he can unilaterally decide to domestically spy from the inherent powers of the Presidency to fight wars. (To him Congressionally-undeclared wars are still wars).

Other than his legal flaks in the White House and Justice Department making such transparently specious arguments as "good soldiers", the overwhelming position of legal scholars is that Bush and Cheney have violated grave laws protecting the liberties of the American people.

The crime, says Professor David Cole of Georgetown Law School, is "punishable by five years in prison." Professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University Law School said that the President ordered such a crime and ordered US officials to commit it.this is a serious felony. What happened here is not just a violation of Federal law, it's a violation of the U.S. Constitutionan impeachable offense."

It matters not that a Republican-dominated Congress has no present interest in moving to impeach Bush-Cheney. What matters is that impeachment in this case--based on the authority of Congress to charge the President and Vice President with "high crimes and misdemeanors"--is a patriotic cause rooted in the wisdom of our founding fathers who did not want another King George III in the guise of a President.

As Senator Russell Feingold said a few days ago: The President is not a King, he is a President subject to the laws and Constitution of the land. Apparently, George W. Bush seems to believe and behave as if his unlimited inherited powers flow from King George III, given the way he has shoved aside both federal law and the nation's Constitution.

Both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney should resign. They have disgraced their office and bled the nation. They have shattered the public trust in so many serious ways that will only become worse in the coming months.

DEPLETED URANIUM

Recent evidence proves that depleted uranium (DU) is the definite cause of Gulf War Syndrome. Fourteen years after its introduction, DU has revealed as a death sentence, lately brought forth by Leuren Moret (cf. e.g. http://www.sfbayview.com/081804/Depleteduranium081804.shtml and the sources to this article).

The biological particulate effect targets the Master Code in the DNA and causes numerous diseases difficult to define, but in effect devastating the human body for example with multiple malignancies and developing cancers. Out of 580,400 soldiers in first Gulf War, 11 thousand have died and already by 2000 there were 325,000 permanently disabled, the number increasing by 43,000 every year.

Besides, DU has internally contaminated their sexual partners, who have developed endometriosis and have been forced to have hysteroctomies due to health problems. 67 percent of a test group of 251 soldiers have had babies with severe birth defects (missing members, organs, immune system diseases).

The United States has deliberately developed the DU in order to utilize the deadly properties of the DU and contaminated not only 42 states in United States, Sinai in Yom Kippur war (1973), Yugoslavia, southern Iraq (and areas nearby) in the first Gulf War and from 2003 on again in Iraq.

One of the reasons that the US deploys it allies in the southern parts of the Iraq, because it does not want to expose its own troops to the deadly radiation there from the first Gulf War. Thus the British, and the other coalition troops have been generously given the responsibility of the southern Iraq.


BAGHDAD BOIL

In a story 'Skin ulcers plague men from N.C. unit’ (cf. http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/news/local/13454217.ht
m ) we are told:

"In addition to the combat casualties suffered during a tour of duty in Iraq last year, an N.C. National Guard brigade also had to medevac 13 men back to a U.S. hospital after volleyball games left them vulnerable to one of the Iraq war's most exotic hazards – an outbreak of skin ulcers that can grow for years.

The victims, all men from the same small unit, contracted cutaneous leishmaniasis, characterized by weeping sores that refuse to heal, said Lt. Col Tim Mauldin, the brigade's top medical officer.

The illness is nicknamed "Baghdad Boil." At the time the guardsmen contracted it last year, the only way to treat it was to fly them back to Walter Reed Army Medical Center for up to three weeks of intravenous treatments with a drug called Pentostam"

Using Pentostam in the treatment of sand fly bite is most curious for two main reasons:

(1) One is tempted to suspect the US diagnosis, because for leishmaniasis, phlebotomus argentipes (also known as Kala-azar), a disease indeed caused by the bite of sand fly, there is a new, oral drug (Miltefosine( is now available. The medicine is effective (cf. http://www.who.int/tdr/diseases/leish/press_release.htm ), which makes the US use of sodium stibogluconate (commercial names: Pentostam or Stibanate) instead very curious, until we read the comment of Lt. Col Tim Mauldin concerning the sores (rather: 'malignancies’) known as Baghdad Boils: "No matter what you do, it just keeps getting bigger and bigger.")

(2) Pentostam is administered into veins and "results in a greater than 50% decrease in parasite DNA, RNA protein and purine nucleoside triphosphate levels" (cf. http://emc.medicines.org.uk/emc/assets/c/html/displaydoc.asp
?documentid=2182, section 5, Pharmacological properties ). It is not immediately obvious how the bites of tiny sandflies could cause changes in the Master Code in the DNA?

(3) Although the sand flies are unlikely cause for the Baghdad Boils, we can seek a different, more natural explanation for the disease is from the the unit itself, to which all thirteen man belong. The 30th Enhanced Heavy Separate Brigade (Mech), "Old Hickory", has one battalion of M-1 Abrams Main Battle Tanks and two battalions of M-2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles (cf. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/agency/army/30in-bde.
htm ).
The main weapon of the M1A1 is the M256 120mm smoothbore cannon, designed by the Rheinmetall Corporation of Germany. Engagement ranges approaching 4000 meters were successfully demonstrated during Operation Desert Storm. The primary armor-defeating ammunition of this weapon is the armor-piercing, fin-stabilized, discarding sabot (APDS-FS) round, which features a depleted uranium penetrators (cf. http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/m1.htm ).
On the other hand, we know already from the first Gulf War that: "Soldiers who served in Bradley fighting vehicles, where it was common to sit on ammunition boxes where depleted uranium ammunition was stored, are now reporting that many have rectal cancer."


CONSEQUENCES:

Having recognized the previous facts we are left with the following consequences:

(1) Depleted uranium explains the changes in the Master Code in the DNA caused by Baghdad Boils much better than the 'sand flies’ (if the sand flies are not simply considered as an army code word for 'uranium particles’ or alike). In fact, the diagnosis of Baghdad Boils as 'leishmaniasis’ put forth in several connections by Dr. Roger Bate is itself highly suspicious as Dr. Bate is a visiting fellow at American Enterprise Institute, a front for international armed looting around the world.

(2) As the United States treats the cancer developing multiple malignancies of its tank crews with Pentostam (and not Miltefosine), this shows that the US Armed Forces and the Pentagon are indeed aware of the effects of the depleted uranium, which again shows that they are lying in their denials of its cancer-producing effect, thus giving a direct answer to "QUESTION 11. WHAT DOES THE U.S. GOVT. KNOW ABOUT DU?"
in http://traprockpeace.org/moret_25nov03.pdf. They know everything, even how to slow down the mutations caused by DU.

(3) More than 2000 U.S. service members have officially contracted the disease since the Iraq War began in early 2003, most of them in Iraq (though some also in Afghanistan). When these 'walking dead’ are added to the current DoD casualty figure (2160) as soon to be dead, the US death toll tops 4,000 with a single jump. The entire US colonial expeditionary force, the 300,000 having served in Iraq are soon to be counted as US Casualties, either dead or disabled by DU.

(4) As the depleted uranium penetrators are the main rounds of the US M1A1 tanks, and the extra rounds for the tanks are carried in the M2 Bradleys, there is no doubt, that after 1000 days of war, the entire US armored equipment in Iraq is totally contaminated making these vehicles literarily dead man’s chests. Actually the US tank crews are more safe outside than inside of them, despite the current conditions in Iraq.

(5) As the US Armed Forces in Iraq are actually living dead, a zombie army soon to follow the destiny of the previous army in the First Gulf War and their Armored Vehiles hopelessly contaminated by DU, the US army actually has no troops nor tanks. This means that its fate is sealed. The United States has lost the war in Iraq as soon as the troops get the information of how they are and have been deceived by an enemy worse than that they face in Iraq, the US government.

(6) Despite of this we may have even more to worry: in her recent articles Leuren Moret tell that the US has used more DU since 1991 than the atomicity equivalent of 40,000 Nagasagi Bombs, making four nuclear wars together. This, according to her may be enough for a death sentence for all of us, who will die in silent ways. To prevent this from happening we must not listen to Mr. Bush, who claims that the future generations will be grateful for sacrifices in Iraq (cf. http://www.denverpost.com/nationworld/ci_3331907 ). The current deception of the US solders themselves by the US Government could not make the issue more clear: no matter whether you are friend or foe, there is nobody the Government of the United States wouldn’t betray. To stop them all you have to do is pass this story to the US combat troops in Iraq. Explaining them what exactly stepping into US tanks means, will leave them unmanned. This in turn will stop the armoured brigades, which in turn stops the US divisions and armies – and in the end the US government war. As soon as the war is stopped, the entire human kind must step in and help the Iraqi people to clean the country from the depleted uranium.

I’m most thankful for your assistance in this already.

jouna, iraq-war.ru



Section I: Depleted Uranium
(more sources from articles themselves)

1. Depleted uranium: "Dirty bombs, dirty missiles, dirty bullets: A death sentence here and abroad"
LINK: http://www.sfbayview.com/081804/Depleteduranium081804.shtml

2. Depleted Uranium: The Trojan Horse of Nuclear War
LINK: http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2004/DU-Trojan-Horse1jul04.htm

3. QUESTION 11. WHAT DOES THE U.S. GOVT. KNOW ABOUT DU?
LINK: http://traprockpeace.org/moret_25nov03.pdf

4. A Monumental War Crime ... DU
http://www.iraqwar.mirror-world.ru/article/74185

5. Leuren Moret Speaking on Depleted Uranium
LINK: http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2003/DU-Leuren-Moret21apr03.ht
m

6. Cancer Epidemic Caused by U.S. WMD
LINK: http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/cancer_epidemic_.html

7. Marin Depleted Uranium Resolution Heats Up GI's Will Come Home To A Slow Death
LINK: http://www.coastalpost.com/04/08/01.htm

8. The United States is Actively Engaged in War Crimes and Polluting with Deadly Nuclear Materials
LINK: http://www.albasrah.net/en_articles_2005/1205/HRA_141205.htm

9. New Information on Iraq
LINK: http://www.albasrah.net/en_articles_2005/1205/du_141205.htm

10. The UNITED STATES of MONSTERS: DEPLETED URANIUM
LINK: http://uruknet.info/?p=18218&hd=0&size=1&l=x

11. Iranian president calls for war crimes charges on US
LINK: http://www.iraqwar.mirror-world.ru/article/71438

12. Squeezed To Death
LINK: http://uruknet.info/?p=18640&hd=0&size=1&l=x

13. World Uranium Weapons Conference 2003
LINK: http://www.uraniumweaponsconference.de/speakers.htm

14. International Criminal Tribunal For Afghanistan at Tokyo
LINK: http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2004/Afghanistan-Criminal-Tr
ibunal10mar04.htm

15. Leuren Moret: Depleted Uranium Is WMD
LINK: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0510/S00138.htm

16. Discounted casualties – the human cost of depleted uranium
LINK: http://www.chugoku-np.co.jp/abom/uran/index_e.html

17. Heads roll at Veterans Administration
Mushrooming depleted uranium (DU) scandal blamed
LINK: http://www.sfbayview.com/012605/headsroll012605.shtml

18. Casualties in Iraq
LINK: http://democracyrising.us/content/view/46/74/

19. Pentagon Brass Suppresses Truth About Toxic Weapons
LINK: http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/pentagon_brass.html

Section II: Baghdad Boil
(some samples, google yourself for more hits):

Baghdad Boil to Return? (by Dr. Roger Bate, 05/13/2004)
LINK: http://www.techcentralstation.com/051304C.html

Topic: BAGHDAD BOIL: parasites infect many U.S. troops
LINK: http://knoxville.wate.com/sound_off/index.php/topic,132.0.ht
ml

Baghdad Boil' Afflicting U.S. Troops
LINK: http://www.veteransforpeace.org/Baghdad_boil_041804.htm

Soldiers, Civilians Returning from Middle East: Be Aware of "Baghdad Boil"
LINK: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=27577

RELIEF FROM BAGHDAD BOILS
LINK. http://www.tothepointnews.com/content/view/1346/44/

The transformation of the geeky but ambitious Christian Jozefowicz, who just a few years ago was growing up in a modest terraced house in Godalming, Surrey, to the charming, baby-faced multimillionaire Christian Bailey now rubbing shoulders with some of the most powerful figures in Washington — and who next year will probably face questions on Capitol Hill about his company — is one of the more extraordinary stories to have emerged from the Iraq war.

This month it was revealed that Mr Bailey’s US company, the Lincoln Group, was the recipient of a Pentagon contract to help to fight the information war in Iraq. It then emerged that the company was paying Iraqi journalists to plant optimistic news “stories” in Iraqi papers that had been written by the US military.

Interference with the press touches a raw nerve in America. The fake stories revelation provoked a furore among Republicans and Democrats. President Bush said he was “very troubled” by it. Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, has promised a Pentagon investigation. Congress plans hearings into the scandal.

The journey from the Royal Grammar School, Guildford, which Mr Bailey left in 1994, to the heart of K Street in Washington, the centre of money and influence in the US capital, has been remarkably rapid. Today he has a reputation in Washington for being a socialite with links to influential Republicans. He is a helicopter and aircraft pilot and his home is in a fashionable area.

Through a Lincoln Group spokesman, Mr Bailey answered questions from The Times to help to explain how, at just 30, he landed the Pentagon as an important client. He was born Christian Martin Jozefowicz on November 28, 1975, in Kingston upon Thames, to Jerzy and Anne Jozefowicz.

His father, a Polish architect, died in April 1998. His mother, who has since reverted to her maiden name of Seifert, was born in West Germany. The family lived in East Molesey, southwest London, before moving to Godalming, Surrey.

Mr Bailey’s Royal Grammar School contemporaries recall a business-obsessed, “geeky” individual with few friends. “He was a nerd at school,” one told The Times. Another described him as a “school joke” who told everyone he was going to be a millionaire. He was the first at school to have a mobile phone and was interested in early versions of the personal computer.

He founded a Young Enterprise company, Chameleon, which led to his selection as one of the top six Young Enterprise participants in Britain.

His school yearbook records Christian Jozefowicz as “Mr Business himself” and that he was elected vice-president of the International Student Forum, a business gathering in the US. In 1994 he won a place at Lincoln College, Oxford, where he read economics and management. He kept computers in his room, thought for monitoring the stock markets.

In his third year at Oxford he hired an assistant to help him to run his first proper company, Linck Ltd, which sold self-help tapes. In 1998, he changed his name to Bailey. “Following his father’s death, Bailey assumed the name for family reasons, something which children commonly do,” a Lincoln Group spokesman said. In the late 1990s he moved to San Francisco to try his hand as a dotcom entrepreneur, and then to New York, where he became treasurer of the Oxonion Society, a club for intellectual Anglophiles. He became co-chairman of a networking group for young Republicans. With his Republican contacts growing, Mr Bailey moved to Washington, where he spotted a golden business opportunity: the looming war in Iraq. He formed a partnership with Paige Craig, a former US Marine who served in Iraq.

In early 2003, just before the invasion, Mr Bailey formed a Lincoln subsidiary, the Lincoln Alliance Corp, offering “tailored intelligence services [for] government clients faced with intelligence challenges”. He also formed another subsidiary, Iraqex, which won a $6 million Pentagon contract to launch “an aggressive advertising and PR campaign that will accurately inform the Iraqi people of the c oalition’s goals and gain their support”.

The big breakthrough came in June this year when the Pentagon awarded the Lincoln Group a contract worth up to $100 million over five years to support the US military’s “joint psychological operations”, known as “psyops”.

Lincoln group defended the planting of stories and the company has emphasised that none of them were factually incorrect. “By not speaking through the local media, the coalition would allow a vacuum for rumours and untruths perpetrated by the insurgents’ thuggery and threats,” a spokesman said.

LIFE AND WORK

November 28, 1975: Born Christian Jozefowicz, Kingston upon Thames

1987-94: Attends the fee-paying Royal Grammar School, Guildford

1993-94: Listed on electoral roll as Christian Jozefowicz-Seifert

1994-97: Obtains a 2:1 in economics and management from Lincoln College, Oxford. While at university, runs Linck Ltd.

October 1998: Founds Linck Corporate Finance under the name of Christian Bailey. Fails to declare previous surname or other directorship

1999: Moves to America

2003: Co-founds Lincoln Group, now subject to investigation into planting of US military propaganda in Iraqi newspapers

Analysts are looking for home sales to dip by around 6 percent next year under the impact of rising mortgage rates. Analysts believe that house prices, which had been soaring at double digit rates, will moderate as well.

Some of that price moderation was evidenced in the November report, which showed that the median price of a new home sold was $225,200 last month. That was up just 0.3 percent from November 2004, the weakest year-over-year price change in two years. The November median price was down 4.1 percent from the October median sales price of $234,800.

In other economic news, the Commerce Department reported that orders to U.S. factories for big-ticket manufactured goods jumped to a record $223 billion in November. That was a 4.4 percent increase from October, representing the largest percentage advance in six months. Orders for durable goods had risen 3 percent in October.

The gain in demand for durable goods was far above the 1.1 percent increase Wall Street analysts had been expecting. But the strength was concentrated in a surge in demand for commercial aircraft, which shot up 133.8 percent to $25.9 billion from $11.1 billion the previous month.

Outside of this area, manufacturing demand was weak. Excluding transportation, durable goods orders dropped by 0.6 percent, the third straight monthly decline in these categories.

In turn, this brain trust is being used by China both as a control on its own Internet revolution and as a potential resource for North Korea' cyberwar program.

South Korea’s defense ministry said North Korean hackers are targeting the most tightly-guarded systems of that country's main foes to extract intelligence information and to spread viruses capable of wiping out material or, at least, slowing down computers.

Defense officials said privately that North Korea, with no great pool of computer whizzes from which to select, is relying on Chinese aid and advice to train some 600 qualified hackers in five years.

One Hong Kong-based specialist said China has a budget for hiring the best IT graduates from U.S. universities to monitor and control Internet news reporting, and useage within its own borders as well as for a national security resource. "They've got the money, and they are spending it," he said.

In North Korea, the campaign ranks as a priority for Kim Jong-Il, who whetted his appetite for computer skullduggery during visits to China and Russia several years ago. Kim made a point of visiting computer labs in both countries and decided that all North Koreans should somehow become adept at operating computers even though Internet access is forbidden except for the highly privileged elites.

Those having access include Kim Jong-Il’s closest relatives, friends and allies, notably from the armed forces, as well as extremely well-trained technicians who had to pass strenuous tests of loyalty before being accepted into the elite computer course.

Students are studying in China and also at an academy that South Korean officials say has been educating a cadre of elite technicians for more than 20 years in a remote mountainous region.

The two-year budget deal was later ratified without a vote by the 191-member General Assembly at a late night session, clearing the way for many bleary-eyed diplomats to head home for Christmas holidays.

"The budget agreed upon today will enable the organization to continue its work uninterrupted while member states pursue the reform proposals adopted during the 2005 world summit," UN chief Kofi Annan said in a statement.

Annan had repeatedly warned that the US proposal for an interim budget for three or four months instead of the full two-year budget would lead to a serious financial crisis for the world body.

Friday's deal capped tough negotiations between major UN contributors -- the United States, Japan, the European Union, Canada and Australia and New Zealand -- and the 132-member G-77 group of developing countries and China.

Disagreement focused on an EU proposal for a six-month spending cap of 950 million dollars, after which the UN secretary general would come to the General Assembly to seek authority to spend the rest of the money for the year.

"It's a new concept, it is to cap the expenditure within a year for a given an amount and to then say when you've run out of that money or are about to, come ask us for some more but then people can make a judgment," said Britain's UN envoy Emyr Jones Parry, who played a key role in the talks on behalf of the European Union.

A group led by Egypt and India within the G-77 submitted a counter-proposal for a minimum cap of 1.35 billion dollars to cover a nine-month period.

Egypt's UN envoy Maged Abdelaziz, who earlier had said a nine-month cap was "the least we G-77 can accept", emerged from a final negotiating session to announce: "There is a deal."

"We have shown flexibility and restraint in our efforts but we think we have accomplished what we set out to do, which was ensure the inextricable linkage of budget and (UN) management reform," said Bolton.

"I am happy for the UN ... I hope we did the right thing," said South African UN envoy Dumisani Kumalo, a key G-77 negotiator along with his colleagues from Singapore and Jamaica.

Jamaican UN envoy Stafford Neil, the chairman of the G-77 group, said his side and China negotiated "in good faith with a constructive attitude," but only reluctantly accepted the six-month spending cap on the understanding that this was "an exceptional measure not to be repeated and used for the future."

"We still believe this is not a good thing," he said. "We find unpalatable the fact there is this ax hanging over our heads," he added, referring to the cap.

"It is our expectation that the membership will ensure that the request for further spending of the outstanding balance will be honored when the secretary general makes his request in mid-year 2006," Neil added.

Abdelaziz said some developing countries were concerned that a six-month cap amounted to pressure to ram through "within an artificial time" frame the UN reforms agreed by world leaders at their summit here in September.

Jones Parry for his part hailed the EU's role in building bridges with both the G-77 and countries such as the United States and Japan. He also reaffirmed that "management reform is for all of us a priority."

He said the deal produced "a budget sufficient for the UN, which recognized the compelling need to maintain the pressure for reform, but in a cooperative fashion."

Bolton had earlier proposed an interim budget for three or four months pending the resolution of the stalemate over UN management reforms that Washington strongly backs.

The management reforms, strongly pushed by Washington in the wake of the oil-for-food scandal, include giving the secretary general greater powers in exchange for greater accountability, creating a new ethics office and establishing a whistle-blower protection program to root out corruption.

But negotiations on the reform package have so far stalled due to an apparent power struggle between UN chief Kofi Annan's secretariat and the General Assembly.

Beijing Benz-DaimlerChrysler is a new joint venture of DaimlerChrysler and Beijing Automotive Industry Holding Company (BAIC). The joint venture has built a new plant in the Beijing Economic and Technological Development Zone at Yizhuang, southern Beijing.

DaimlerChrysler and BAIC each have a 50 percent stake in the joint venture, with a cooperation term of 30 years. The joint venture, which has a registered capital of 400 million U.S. dollar, is responsible for production of Mercedes-Benz E- and C-Class sedans in China.

Production in the new plant began in mid-2005.

An predicted 900 Mercedes-Benz E-Class cars would be sold by the end of the year, and the volume of sale would amount to 500 million yuan (61.65 million US dollars).

Some of the tissue may have even ended up in Canada.

Worse, health officials fear some of the stolen body parts were diseased, and could infect patients who received them in skin grafts, dental implants or other orthopaedic procedures, a risk concealed by paperwork doctored with forged signatures and false information.

"It's not just disrespectful to my father," said Vito Bruno, who's sued one funeral home. "It's an absolutely hideous crime against other people."

In the Cooke case, authorities confirmed this week that investigators contacted the late broadcaster's family after finding paperwork indicating his bones had been removed and sold by a Fort Lee, N.J., tissue bank, Biomedical Tissue Services, before he was cremated. Cooke, best known as the host of PBS's Masterpiece Theatre, died from cancer last year at 95 in Manhattan.

The family insists it never signed off on the procedure, and that someone had falsified documents by changing his cause of death to heart attack, and by lowering his age to 85.

Harvesting bones from cancer patients violates rules by the Food and Drug Administration.

A daughter, Susan Cooke Kittredge, said the family was "shocked and saddened" by the news.

"That people in need would have received his body parts, considering his age and the fact he was ill when he died, is appalling to the family, as is that his remains were violated," she said.

The probe, first reported by the New York Daily News in October, has uncovered other gruesome images.

In one instance, the corpse of a Queens grandmother that investigators exhumed last month had nearly all the bones removed below the waist and replaced with pipes.

A state grand jury in Brooklyn has been hearing evidence against at least a half dozen funeral homes in the borough and against Biomedical Tissue Services. Authorities allege they illegally profited by conspiring to sell stolen body parts, and say indictments could be handed up early next year.

In the fall, the FDA ordered a recall of products produced by tissue processors in New Jersey, Florida, Georgia and Texas, all customers of Biomedical Tissue Services. Since then, authorities in Canada have determined that about 300 potentially tainted products were imported there, and used for dental surgery on at least two patients.

Health officials, including Health Canada, advised physicians that patients implanted with the tissue should be tested for HIV, hepatitis and other infectious diseases. The officials say they believe the health hazards were minimal, and no infections have been reported in Canada or the U.S. since the FDA warning.

Theresa Farrisi stood in for Schaeffer’s regular music teacher one day last week. One of her assignments was to read Clement C. Moore’s famous poem, “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” to a first-grade class at Lickdale Elementary School.

“The poem has great literary value, but it goes against my conscience to teach something which I know to be false to children, who are impressionable,” said Farrisi, 43, of Myerstown. “It’s a story. I taught it as a story. There’s no real person called Santa Claus living at the North Pole.”

Farrisi doesn’t believe in Santa Claus, and she doesn’t think anyone else should, either. She made her feelings clear to the classroom full of 6- and 7-year-olds, some of whom went home crying.

Schaeffer got off the school bus later that day, dragging her backpack in the mud, tears in her angry little eyes.

“She yelled at me, ‘Why did you lie?’” recalled Jamey’s mother, Elizabeth. “‘Why didn’t you tell me Santa Claus died?’”

Elizabeth Schaeffer said she was appalled by Farrisi’s bluntness.

“I had to call the school,” said Schaeffer, a part-time custodial employee for the school district who is on temporary leave after complications from her last child’s birth. “I had to do something.”

Meanwhile, Farrisi, who is well versed on the history of “Santa Claus” — the traditional and literary figure — clarified her comments.

“I did not tell the students Santa Claus was dead,” she explained. “I said there was a man named Nickolas of Myrna who died in 343 A.D., upon whom the Santa Claus myth (is based).”

On Monday night, Jamey started to recite Moore’s famous poem while sitting on a couch next to a freshly cut tree, trimmed in tinsel and topped with a golden star: “’Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house. No creatures stirred.”

She paused, looked up, and said that’s when the teacher interjected, just a few lines before the verse that announces the arrival of “a miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer.”

“The teacher stopped reading and told us no one comes down the chimney,” Jamey said, curling into a ball on the couch, bracing her chin on her knees, her voice shrinking away like melting ice cream. “She said our parents buy the presents, not Santa.”

Sharing in the belief of Santa Claus is a very special event in the Schaeffer home. Jamey’s the second youngest of five children. The three oldest have already grown up and left the family nest. Only Jamey and her 18-month-old sister, Amanda, remain.

Last year, Elizabeth Schaeffer recalled, Santa left a trail of boot prints in charred ashes from his feet-first landing in the fireplace. And this year, the family will continue their tradition of leaving him a plate of cookies, a tall glass of milk and a ripe, shaved carrot for Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer.

The Schaeffer family wasn’t the only one taken aback by Farrisi’s approach to Santa.

Tim and Beth Rittle said they found their 7-year-old daughter, Holly, in tears in the back seat of their car after they picked her up from school that day.

“All of a sudden, Holly just started crying,” Beth Rittle said. “She said she had a substitute in music class, and she told the class there’s no such thing as Santa Claus.”

Schaeffer and Rittle both called Northern Lebanon School District Superintendent Don L. Bell.

Since the issue involves personnel, Bell said Monday, there is little he can say about the incident, adding that it has not been determined if any disciplinary action is warranted against Farrisi.

Bell said he was aware that several parents have expressed concerns about the incident.

He also noted that the handling of Santa Claus isn’t covered in the school code.

“We do not have a Santa Claus policy,” he said. “It’s unfortunate, but I really can’t say anything about it.”

Farrisi said she considered approaching the school’s administration with her concerns about how to handle Santa Claus in class. Instead, she said, she decided to add a disclaimer to her lesson.

“Those same children are going to know someday that what their parents taught them is false,” she ex-plained. “There is no Santa Claus.”

Meanwhile, Elizabeth Schaeffer was carefully thinking about her next step. She decided to make a photocopy of editor Francis P. Church’s famous response to a little girl, who wrote to The New York Sun many decades ago, asking the same question Schaeffer’s daughter struggled with last week.

“I mailed (Farrisi) a copy of ‘Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,’” she said, giggling with satisfaction. “I wish I could be there when she opens it.”

As for Jamey, in an attempt to reaffirm her spot on Santa’s nice list, she drew up a new letter in bright red magic marker, a message destined for the Santa she refuses to abandon.

“Dear Santa ... How is the North Pole?” she said, reading her letter loudly and proudly. “How is Mrs. Claus? You are Great. From Jamey.”

The animal, whose natural habitat is the frozen Arctic tundra, was part of a Christmas show in 'Olli's Wild World', a children's zoo in Baden-Baden.

After hours of hot pursuit the officers were finally able to approach the exhausted reindeer and secure it using a dog's lead.

The zoo now faces a substantial damages claim to repair the golf course's greens ruined by the reindeer's hooves.

Claus was particularly concerned that NORAD uses this opportunity to glorify warplanes which are used to drop bombs on and mutilate children in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, where an intense (and largely unreported) aerial bombing campaign has been going on this past fall.

Santa says he is disturbed to again find himself the focus of the annual military public affairs operation, designed to normalize for children the idea that the military, as well as military alliances which plan and constantly threaten life on the planet with nuclear warfare, pre-emptive invasions, and environmental destruction, is a benign outfit.

In a War Department press release, we learn that “Canadian fighter pilots will gather the first pictures of Santa and his sleigh as he arrives over the continent using special NORAD SantaCams mounted on their aircraft.” The release comes at a time when new revelations of illegal spying on people across North America have raised renewed concerns about privacy rights, rights which are certainly being violated in Santa's case.

The release then goes on to tell the following falsehood: “At Santa's request, millions of curious children will be able to closely follow his progress by viewing digital photographs and technical information compiled by NORAD on their Internet site.”

Reacting to this news, Claus's red cheeks were no doubt beet red.

“I have made no such request, nor would I. Kids going to this web site are taught to view war and the instruments of war as normal, acceptable, inevitable. When I went to the website, I saw downloadable colouring pages for the most destructive warplanes on the planet, planes whose only purpose is to deliver death and destruction. They describe the technology which is part of the star wars program as ultra-cool, and actually have the gall to say that Rudolph, a lifelong pacifist who is also a vegetarian, has helped them develop their infrared tracking technology!”

Rudolph, unavailable for comment, nonetheless issued a brief statement declaring, “I have no desire to be tracked by the same equipment which is being used to plan future, destructive wars against the very kinds of children who may be going on to this silly website.”

North Pole spokespeople have said Santa annually views the painful reality that is a result of relying on military might to enforce injustice and resolve conflicts. “We see all the children of the world, the ones who have lost legs and arms and eyes to landmines, the ones who have watched parents murdered with Canadian bullets and machine guns in Iraq and Afghanistan, the ones whose only wish for Christmas is peace on Earth, or the return of a parent or sibling killed by an aerial bombardment.”

Claus has joined Homes not Bombs members on many occasions through the years as an ambassador of peace through justice and goodwill. As such, he has been arrested by Loblaws for helping distribute food he took from their shelves (to help pay back the tens of millions of dollars in unpaid taxes owed by Loblaws), protesting sanctions against the people of Iraq which killed over one million Iraqis (this with the aid of the Canadian military whose warplanes are set to tail Santa), the use of secret trial security certificates, the production of war toys, the Hamilton War Show, and many others.

“There are so many causes for me to support, and I want to support them all, but half the time I'm busy trying to correct the false information about me and what I stand for that's presented by the military and the media,” Claus said. “I barely have time to speak with you, much less all the other media outlets who request interviews.”

Although he is not prepared at this point in time to get a press spokesperson, Claus says the idea is tempting.

“When someone like me gets misquoted as often as I do, I could hire a whole crew. Know anyone who could use some full time work?”

Homes not Bombs, concerned at this latest slagging of Santa's character, has campaigned for years against the very apparent Canadian involvement in Star Wars, which has its most visible manifestation through NORAD and numerous corporate contracts and government research and development programs. Concerned as well that none of the major federal political parties supports peaceful resolutions to international crises (instead all are silent about the ballooning $20 billion war budget, the new troops being sent to Afghanistan, Canadian bullets being sold by the millions to the Pentagon, etc.), the group urges Canadians to demand an end to the country's burgeoning war economy.

In the meantime, Santa says that if you are concerned about the misuse of his image to sell the military to young children, you can certainly call the military's own press people and register a complaint. You can call the following numbers for the Canadian military wings that have offered press interviews on this topic, as well as NORAD:

* 3 Wing Public Affairs, 3 Wing Bagotville, Que. — (418) 677-4000 extension 8277
* 4 Wing Public Affairs, Cold Lake, Alta. — (780) 840-8000, extension 8121
* Canadian Air Defence Sector Air Operations Centre, 22 Wing North Bay, Ont. -- (705)-494-2011 ext. 2495

The NORAD Tracks Santa program is at Canadian NORAD Region Headquarters, Winnipeg, MB. — (204) 833-2500 ext. 6795 or NORAD Headquarters, Colorado Springs, Colo. — (719) 554-6889 or 1-877-HI NORAD.

The spokesman said Rebecca Mews became upset Tuesday during a birthday celebration for an attorney, who Mews says was her date. While Conyers was speaking with the man, Mews "came over and literally started spewing obscene names," and shoved Conyers, said Conyers' chief of staff, Sam Riddle.

"This woman was obviously drunk, and the councilwoman vigorously defended herself," he said.

Mews, who appeared on WDIV-TV on Thursday with a black eye, denied she was intoxicated. Mews said that when Conyers began speaking to her date with her back to her, she tapped her on the shoulder and said, "Pardon me."

"She turned around and began yelling at me," Mews said. "When I began yelling back at her, she punches me in my left eye several times," Mews said. "I never struck her. Never once did I hit her."

A message seeking comment was left Friday at a telephone listing for Mews.

Both women filed police reports. A message left with police Friday was not immediately returned.

As NASA plans to return to the moon, the agency has a need to understand what happens after lunar impacts in order to protect lunar explorers. On Earth, the atmosphere vaporizes most small meteoroids, leaving nothing behind but a brief streak of light. The vacuum environment on the moon, however, means there is nothing to slow incoming meteoroids before they strike.

"The likelihood of being struck by a meteoroid on the lunar surface is very, very small," said Bill Cooke, an astronomer in Marshall's Meteoroid Environment Office. "The challenge is learning what happens to high-velocity ejecta, the debris kicked up by a meteoroid strike, which is not hindered by atmospheric friction or Earth gravity. What threat does that debris pose to humans or equipment?"

Suggs, who heads the impact study, used commercial software tools to study the video frame by frame, and spotted a very bright flash. The burst of light diminished gradually over the course of five video frames, each 1/30th of a second in duration. Suggs called in Cooke, and both scientists agreed that the bright light was an impact flash, captured by video from some 248,000 miles away.

Immediately, the team began ruling out other possible causes. Two telling characteristics won out – the gradual diminishment of the flash rather than an on-off "winking" effect, and its motionlessness. A flicker of light from a moving satellite, Cooke noted, would have appeared to shift perceptibly, even in five brief frames of video.

Suggs and Cooke next consulted star charts and lunar imaging software and determined the meteoroid was likely a Taurid, part of an annual meteor shower active at the time of the strike. Based on the amount of light produced the object was roughly five inches in diameter, traveling more than 60,000 mph, and may have gouged a crater nearly 10 feet in diameter out of the moon's surface.

The Taurids, which approach Earth from the direction of the Taurus constellation, are believed to be ancient remnants of comet Encke, which orbits the Sun every 3.3 years.

NASA scientists previously studied lunar meteor strikes during the Apollo moon program, but lacked the sophisticated video cameras and high-powered image processors to capture the tiny, telling flashes. Now, however, as NASA readies its next-generation spaceship to carry explorers back to the moon for potential long-term stays, Suggs and Cooke say lunar impact research is more vital than ever.

"Large-scale lunar facilities are sure to be well-protected, using impact-resistant technologies much like those developed to shield the space shuttle and the International Space Station," Suggs said. "We want to support additional measures that safeguard personnel working in the lunar field – early-alert systems, emergency protective measures and new technologies that will mitigate risks from flying impact debris."