|
|
|
"You get America out of Iraq and
Israel out of Palestine and you'll stop the terrorism."
- Cindy Sheehan |
P I C T U R E
O F T H E D A Y |
|
©Pierre-Paul Feyte |
Our critics say we have an agenda. Now you can have our agenda, too!
This leatherbound pocket agenda includes a handy notepad as well as a double-page weekly view of all of the important events you need to remember.
Moreover, it's in French, a subtle way to show your disapproval of the
Bush Reich.
Planning a trip to Europe next summer to scout out a safe haven for the
future? An easy-to-use chart includes distances between major European cities.
The Quantum Future Group 2006 Agenda will be available for a limited time for
any donation of 20.06 euros (US$24.00 approximately).
Get in on the agenda!
Click here now to support the Quantum Future Group!
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
The Quantum Future Group
|
|
By Mark Biskeborn
28 Dec 2005
Regardless of their religion, most Americans agree with the teachings of Christ. All main religions and even most secular philosophies reflect these principles: to seek out good, charity, tolerance, peace, and love. Christ drew his teachings from the Jewish Torah as did Mohammed when he founded Islam in the seventh century. Blasphemous fundamentalists, however, are twisting such teachings into a knot, distorting and exploiting the meanings. Most Americans agree –- at a rate of well over 75 percent according to most polls -- that abortion should be legal in most circumstances, but especially in cases of the mother’s health or rape. Most Americans believe that when a woman has been raped, or if she’s likely to die as a result of giving birth, terminating pregnancy should be an option. Not Jeb Bush.
Jeb Bush is pushing his neoconservative agenda while playing abortion politics. He's using a severely disabled 22-year old woman’s life for his own goals.
As in other areas, the Neo-Con Brotherhood stomps on American values. Jeb has stepped in to interfere with this rape victim’s best interests.
The woman is severely retarded and now five months pregnant. Experts say she operates at a one-year-old’s level, emotionally and mentally. Living in a special care home in Orlando, Florida, she was raped many times.
She suffers from cerebral palsyand autism; violent seizures often overcome her. These conditions make having a baby very dangerous for this young woman. She could die if she tries to deliver the baby.
The Neocon Brotherhood Takes Over
The Florida Social Services moved to appoint a guardian for her. State law requires a guardian to grant permission for the woman to receive a thorough medical evaluation. That’s when Jeb jumped in to push the neocon agenda. He fails to mention the problem of sexual predators in care centers for the handicapped.
Although the woman is severely disabled, has been raped, and might die during birthing, Governor Bush felt that the appointment of a guardian for her was not appropriate. Bush stopped the appointment of the woman’s guardian until Social Services appointed a second guardian -- specifically, a guardian for the fetus.
A Florida judge has refused to rule on Bush’s action based on legal technicalities. As a result, the unfortunate young woman, who suffers many medical problems, may not obtain proper medical care. Even if she does not die while birthing, the experience is bound to devastate her.
Time is running out. Someone must be appointed to protect this abused woman. Meanwhile, Jeb Bush occupies his time playing out the neocon fundamentalist’s policies that have nothing to do with the moral principles of most Americans.
Someone should step in and overrule Jeb Bush’s distorted sense of ethics and abuse of power. The balance of power in the political system should allow the judiciary to determine the facts in this case and decide the best course for this woman, already victimized by rapists.
We cannot allow the Neocon Fundamentalists, now the leading element in the Republican Party, to abuse this woman any further, least of all a governor who wants to play politics at the expense of a handicapped rape victim’s life. Bush is not thinking about the disabled woman. He focuses solely on his own narrow view of religious understanding. He obsesses with the fetus. In this regard, he is simply wrong and irrational.
The Rape of a Nation’s Values
America became acquainted with Jeb as governor of Florida during the 2000 election scandals over the voting that skewed mysteriously in favor of his brother, George W.
Jeb and G.W. are members of the Neo-Con Fundamentalist Brotherhood.
Jeb Bush governs Florida with an extremely twisted sense of ethics, with a blasphemous misuse of Christian morality, and with abuse of his political power. Although people have practiced abortion long before King Tut, the Bible never mentions it. The Bible does stress the value of life.
The Neocon Fundamentalist Brotherhood (NFB) often justifies its bizarre morality by citing the Holy Bible. However, most Americans are moderate in their religious beliefs. Not Jeb or George W. Bush.
They believe they have some special connection to God. God has chosen the Neocon Brotherhood to do HIS work. "God speaks through me," says G. W. Bush. With God behind them, the neocons can walk all over American values even at the expense of handicapped rape victims.
Mark Biskeborn is a writer. You can email him at: mbiskeborn@hotmail.com |
|
MSNBC
Nov. 18, 2003
Shame on Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. Most Americans would agree that when a woman has been raped, or if she’s likely to die as a result of giving birth, termination of her pregnancy should be an option. Not Jeb. The governor of Florida is playing hardball abortion politics with a severely disabled woman’s life when he should instead be worried about her best interests. Some time last January, a 22-year-old woman living in a group home in Orlando, Fla., was raped. The woman is now 5-months pregnant. She is also severely mentally retarded. Experts say she has the cognitive and emotional capacity of a 1-year-old child.
In addition to her severe mental retardation, she suffers from cerebral palsy, autism and is prone to violent seizures. These conditions make having a baby a very dangerous proposition for this unfortunate young woman. Because of her physical impairment, she could die if she tries to deliver the baby.
Jeb jumps in
Once they learned of the rape, Florida Social Services moved to appoint a guardian for her. In this situation, a guardian is required to grant permission for the woman to receive a thorough medical evaluation. That’s when Jeb jumped in.
Despite the fact that the woman is severely disabled, has been raped, and might die if allowed to give birth, Bush felt that the appointment of a guardian for her was not appropriate. Instead, he moved to stop the appointment of the woman’s guardian until a second guardian could first be appointed — specifically, a guardian for the fetus.
A Florida judge has refused to rule on Bush’s action based on technical legal grounds. As a result, we now have a situation in which a young woman, who has so many medical problems that she may not be able to survive giving birth, must go without proper medical attention. Even if she does not die in the birthing process, given her emotional and psychological problems the experience could at the very least emotionally devastate her.
Someone must be appointed to protect her. But the governor, who’s busy playing abortion politics, is not letting that happen.
Time's running out
The courts might help, but the courts in Florida move slowly. A pregnancy does not. If the fetus gets much older than 24 weeks, the standard age of viability, then it will be far more difficult for doctors to terminate the pregnancy. And, if the medical facts show the woman must have an abortion in order to prevent her own death, it will be a far more dangerous procedure.
In short, Bush is not thinking about the disabled woman. His focus is solely on the fetus. In this regard, he is simply wrong. His ethical focus ought to be on the young woman.
A victim of rape who might die as a result of childbirth should not be forced to carry a pregnancy to term. Furthermore, a disabled woman who needs a guardian in order to get proper medical attention should have a guardian — yesterday!
Someone needs to determine the facts in this case and decide what is indeed in this woman’s best interest. That person ought not be a governor who wants to play politics with her life.
If Bush has the time on his hands to personally get involved in this case, he should first appoint a guardian for the woman — and then figure out what he can do to ensure that other severely disabled women in his state are not at risk of rape. Perhaps the governor could take steps to make sure that young women like this have access to birth control, or at the very least, that they have adequate protection against sexual predators.
So far all Bush has done is put a helpless woman’s life in grave danger.
Arthur Caplan, Ph.D, is director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. |
|
By KHALID TANVEER
Associated Press
29 Dec 2005
MULTAN, Pakistan - Nazir Ahmed appears calm and unrepentant as he recounts how he slit the throats of his three young daughters and their 25-year old stepsister to salvage his family's "honor" — a crime that shocked Pakistan.
The 40-year old laborer, speaking to The Associated Press in police detention as he was being shifted to prison, confessed to just one regret — that he didn't murder the stepsister's alleged lover too.
Hundreds of girls and women are murdered by male relatives each year in this conservative Islamic nation, and rights groups said Wednesday such "honor killings" will only stop when authorities get serious about punishing perpetrators. The independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said that in more than half of such cases that make it to court, most end with cash settlements paid by relatives to the victims' families, although under a law passed last year, the minimum penalty is 10 years, the maximum death by hanging.
Ahmed's killing spree — witnessed by his wife Rehmat Bibi as she cradled their 3 month-old baby son — happened Friday night at their home in the cotton-growing village of Gago Mandi in eastern Punjab province.
It is the latest of more than 260 such honor killings documented by the rights commission, mostly from media reports, during the first 11 months of 2005.
Bibi recounted how she was woken by a shriek as Ahmed put his hand to the mouth of his stepdaughter Muqadas and cut her throat with a machete. Bibi looked helplessly on from the corner of the room as he then killed the three girls — Bano, 8, Sumaira, 7, and Humaira, 4 — pausing between the slayings to brandish the bloodstained knife at his wife, warning her not to intervene or raise alarm.
"I was shivering with fear. I did not know how to save my daughters," Bibi, sobbing, told AP by phone from the village. "I begged my husband to spare my daughters but he said, 'If you make a noise, I will kill you.'"
"The whole night the bodies of my daughters lay in front of me," she said.
The next morning, Ahmed was arrested.
Speaking to AP in the back of police pickup truck late Tuesday as he was shifted to a prison in the city of Multan, Ahmed showed no contrition. Appearing disheveled but composed, he said he killed Muqadas because she had committed adultery, and his daughters because he didn't want them to do the same when they grew up.
He said he bought a butcher's knife and a machete after midday prayers on Friday and hid them in the house where he carried out the killings.
"I thought the younger girls would do what their eldest sister had done, so they should be eliminated," he said, his hands cuffed, his face unshaven. "We are poor people and we have nothing else to protect but our honor."
Despite Ahmed's contention that Muqadas had committed adultery — a claim made by her husband — the rights commission reported that according to local people, Muqadas had fled her husband because he had abused her and forced her to work in a brick-making factory.
Police have said they do not know the identity or whereabouts of Muqadas' alleged lover.
Muqadas was Bibi's daughter by her first marriage to Ahmed's brother, who died 14 years ago. Ahmed married his brother's widow, as is customary under Islamic tradition.
"Women are treated as property and those committing crimes against them do not get punished," said the rights commission's director, Kamla Hyat. "The steps taken by our government have made no real difference."
Activists accuse President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, a self-styled moderate Muslim, of reluctance to reform outdated Islamized laws that make it difficult to secure convictions in rape, acid attacks and other cases of violence against women. They say police are often reluctant to prosecute, regarding such crimes as family disputes.
Statistics on honor killings are confused and imprecise, but figures from the rights commission's Web site and its officials show a marked reduction in cases this year: 267 in the first 11 months of 2005, compared with 579 during all of 2004. The Ministry of Women's Development said it had no reliable figures.
Ijaz Elahi, the ministry's joint secretary, said the violence was decreasing and that increasing numbers of victims were reporting incidents to police or the media. Laws, including one passed last year to beef up penalties for honor killings, had been toughened, she said.
Police in Multan said they would complete their investigation into Ahmed's case in the next two weeks and that he faces the death sentence if he is convicted for the killings and terrorizing his neighborhood.
Ahmed, who did not resist arrest, was unrepentant.
"I told the police that I am an honorable father and I slaughtered my dishonored daughter and the three other girls," he said. "I wish that I get a chance to eliminate the boy she ran away with and set his home on fire." |
|
By Peter Ford
The Christian Science Monitor
PARIS – Mary Fallot looks as unlike a terrorist suspect as one could possibly imagine: a petite and demure white Frenchwoman chatting with friends on a cell-phone, indistinguishable from any other young woman in the café where she sits sipping coffee.
And that is exactly why European antiterrorist authorities have their eyes on thousands like her across the continent. Ms. Fallot is a recent convert to Islam. In the eyes of the police, that makes her potentially dangerous.
The death of Muriel Degauque, a Belgian convert who blew herself up in a suicide attack on US troops in Iraq last month, has drawn fresh attention to the rising number of Islamic converts in Europe, most of them women.
"The phenomenon is booming, and it worries us," the head of the French domestic intelligence agency, Pascal Mailhos, told the Paris-based newspaper Le Monde in a recent interview. "But we must absolutely avoid lumping everyone together."
The difficulty, security experts explain, is that while the police may be alert to possible threats from young men of Middle Eastern origin, they are more relaxed about white European women. Terrorists can use converts who "have added operational benefits in very tight security situations" where they might not attract attention, says Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert at the Swedish National Defense College in Stockholm.
Ms. Fallot, who converted to Islam three years ago after asking herself spiritual questions to which she found no answers in her childhood Catholicism, says she finds the suspicion her new religion attracts "wounding." "For me," she adds, "Islam is a message of love, of tolerance and peace."
It is a message that appeals to more and more Europeans as curiosity about Islam has grown since 9/11, say both Muslim and non-Muslim researchers. Although there are no precise figures, observers who monitor Europe's Muslim population estimate that several thousand men and women convert each year.
Only a fraction of converts are attracted to radical strands of Islam, they point out, and even fewer are drawn into violence. A handful have been convicted of terrorist offenses, such as Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber" and American John Walker Lindh, who was captured in Afghanistan.
Admittedly patchy research suggests that more women than men convert, experts say, but that - contrary to popular perception - only a minority do so in order to marry Muslim men.
"That used to be the most common way, but recently more [women] are coming out of conviction," says Haifa Jawad, who teaches at Birmingham University in Britain. Though non-Muslim men must convert in order to marry a Muslim woman, she points out, the opposite is not true.
Fallot laughs when she is asked whether her love life had anything to do with her decision. "When I told my colleagues at work that I had converted, their first reaction was to ask whether I had a Muslim boyfriend," she recalls. "They couldn't believe I had done it of my own free will."
In fact, she explains, she liked the way "Islam demands a closeness to God. Islam is simpler, more rigorous, and it's easier because it is explicit. I was looking for a framework; man needs rules and behavior to follow. Christianity did not give me the same reference points."
Those reasons reflect many female converts' thinking, say experts who have studied the phenomenon. "A lot of women are reacting to the moral uncertainties of Western society," says Dr. Jawad. "They like the sense of belonging and caring and sharing that Islam offers."
Others are attracted by "a certain idea of womanhood and manhood that Islam offers," suggests Karin van Nieuwkerk, who has studied Dutch women converts. "There is more space for family and motherhood in Islam, and women are not sex objects."
At the same time, argues Sarah Joseph, an English convert who founded "Emel," a Muslim lifestyle magazine, "the idea that all women converts are looking for a nice cocooned lifestyle away from the excesses of Western feminism is not exactly accurate."
Some converts give their decision a political meaning, says Stefano Allievi, a professor at Padua University in Italy. "Islam offers a spiritualization of politics, the idea of a sacred order," he says. "But that is a very masculine way to understand the world" and rarely appeals to women, he adds.
After making their decision, some converts take things slowly, adopting Muslim customs bit by bit: Fallot, for example, does not yet feel ready to wear a head scarf, though she is wearing longer and looser clothes than she used to.
Others jump right in, eager for the exoticism of a new religion, and become much more pious than fellow mosque-goers who were born into Islam. Such converts, taking an absolutist approach, appear to be the ones most easily led into extremism.
The early stages of a convert's discovery of Islam "can be quite a sensitive time," says Batool al-Toma, who runs the "New Muslims" program at the Islamic Foundation in Leicester, England.
"You are not confident of your knowledge, you are a newcomer, and you could be prey to a lot of different people either acting individually or as members of an organization," Ms. Al-Toma explains. A few converts feel "such a huge desire to fit in and be accepted that they are ready to do just about anything," she says.
"New converts feel they have to prove themselves," adds Dr. Ranstorp. "Those who seek more extreme ways of proving themselves can become extraordinarily easy prey to manipulation."
At the same time, says al-Toma, converts seeking respite in Islam from a troubled past - such as Degauque, who had reportedly drifted in and out of drugs and jobs before converting to Islam - might be persuaded that such an "ultimate action" as a suicide bomb attack offered an opportunity for salvation and forgiveness.
"The saddest conclusion" al-Toma draws from Degauque's death in Iraq is that "a woman who set out on the road to inner peace became a victim of people who set out to use and abuse her." |
|
28 Dec 2005
SkyNews
Britain is bracing itself for more icy blasts and heavy snow with even colder conditions moving in. Workers have already been greeted with freezing and icy weather as they return to work after the Christmas break.
Kent, eastern England and eastern Scotland have experienced the most severe weather conditions.
Some areas of Kent were reported to have received as much as 12 inches of snow
Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, Norfolk, Leicestershire and Northamptonshire have also suffered persistent snow showers.
The snow is causing severe disruption on the roads and railways.
South Eastern and Thameslink train services were among those hit by the wintry conditions, while some major routes in Kent suffered closure or lane closure.
Hastings, Ramsgate, Dover and Ashford were among Kent towns affected by rail disruption. No bus replacement services ran as road conditions were too poor.
More travel chaos is predicted as temperatures plunge to as low as -10C overnight.
The RAC and police have warned people in the worst-hit areas to avoid unnecessary journeys.
Struggling motorists have also been hit by petrol stations running out of fuel following the Buncefield oil depot fire at Hemel Hempstead.
However, oil companies say there are good supplies and there is no need to panic buy.
PA WeatherCentre spokesman Philip Brown said: "A lot of people could wake up to snow on Friday morning, but then a second front will move in, bringing rain and warmer weather."
The weather also affected sporting fixtures with a number of football matches postponed and race meetings at Newbury and Catterick abandoned. |
|
29 Dec 2005
AFP
Grim images of thousands of sub-Saharan asylum-seekers trying to scale razor wire fences around two Spanish enclaves in Morocco brought the problem of immigration brutally home to Europe in 2005.
The decision by Madrid to grant legal status to some 700,000 people already based in Spain also prompted much soul-searching among its European Union partners.
But it was the bloody human drama which unfolded in the north African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla that underlined how urgent it was to evolve a strategy in response. Pictures of bloodied scraps of clothing stuck on the fences and makeshift ladders made of tree branches used to scale the barriers told their own story: but so did further pictures of men and women handcuffed on buses headed for the desert, where they were to be left to their own devices without sustenance.
The attraction for thousands of would-be immigrants of two European pin-pricks on the north African coast was irresistible as they poured up to the enclaves from across the continent, looking for a new life.
A combination of factors brought about the influx which saw Spain and Morocco struggling to respond in late September and early October.
There was the combined effect of exceptional levels of drought and famine in sub-Saharan countries, coupled with the success of the fight to stem clandestine immigration to Spain from Morocco by sea.
Discouraged from pursuing traditional routes across the Straits of Gibraltar or the longer and riskier sea voyage to the Canary Islands, would-be emigrants tramped to Ceuta and Melilla, knowing that if they could only leap the tall fencing they would be into Europe and the Schengen passport-free zone.
As they made their attempts, criticism from around Europe rained down on Spain's Socialist government as EU partner states accused Madrid of attracting the immigrants with the announcement last spring that the country planned to regularise the status of some 600,000 illegal immigrants.
Germany and the Netherlands led a storm of protest which France joined, while also pointing an accusing finger at Italy, Rome having undertaken a similar exercise in 2002.
French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy accused Madrid and Rome of "opening the door wide to the whole of Europe."
Spain, the target of an outcry when it tried to expel 73 immigrants back to Morocco, suffered further embarrassment because of Morocco's clumsy efforts to dispose of the problem, by bussing hundreds of immigrants out into the desert.
They were found by outraged non-governmental organisations, led by Doctors Without Borders (MSF).
"The pressure of the EU on their partner states to control illegal immigration has generated further abuses," complained Amnesty International, which charged that the 25-member EU bloc "respects less and less its international obligations" regarding illegal immigration.
The enclaves crisis which saw at least 11 immigrants shot dead in night time assaults on the fencing prompted Madrid to demand an EU-wide debate, with France swiftly supporting the idea.
The EU summit that followed at Hampton Court in Britain saw a commitment not to leave the Maghreb states of north Africa to shoulder alone the role of policeman of Europe's southwestern flank and an acceptance that African development is the only way to deal with immigration long-term.
In the November Euro-Mediterranean summit in Barcelona, EU states committed themselves, without going into the financial details, to "manage humanely migratory flows" and "provide aid to countries of origin and transit".
A Euro-African conference on emigration is in principle scheduled for the spring in Morocco.
French President Jacques Chirac called earlier this month at a Franco-African summit for a doubling of international development aid to a continent where 320 million people subsist on less than a dollar a day.
In the meantime EU states are coordinating their immigration policies, albeit in generally repressive fashion.
The G5 states -- France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Britain -- have been increasing the number of flights repatriating groups of clandestine immigrants, not just from Africa, but also from Eastern Europe, Afghanistan and Iraq. |
|
Mark Townsend and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday February 22, 2004
The Observer
Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters..
A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.
The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.
'Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,' concludes the Pentagon analysis. 'Once again, warfare would define human life.' The findings will prove humiliating to the Bush administration, which has repeatedly denied that climate change even exists. Experts said that they will also make unsettling reading for a President who has insisted national defence is a priority.
The report was commissioned by influential Pentagon defence adviser Andrew Marshall, who has held considerable sway on US military thinking over the past three decades. He was the man behind a sweeping recent review aimed at transforming the American military under Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Climate change 'should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern', say the authors, Peter Schwartz, CIA consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug Randall of the California-based Global Business Network.
An imminent scenario of catastrophic climate change is 'plausible and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately', they conclude. As early as next year widespread flooding by a rise in sea levels will create major upheaval for millions.
Last week the Bush administration came under heavy fire from a large body of respected scientists who claimed that it cherry-picked science to suit its policy agenda and suppressed studies that it did not like. Jeremy Symons, a former whistleblower at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), said that suppression of the report for four months was a further example of the White House trying to bury the threat of climate change.
Senior climatologists, however, believe that their verdicts could prove the catalyst in forcing Bush to accept climate change as a real and happening phenomenon. They also hope it will convince the United States to sign up to global treaties to reduce the rate of climatic change.
A group of eminent UK scientists recently visited the White House to voice their fears over global warming, part of an intensifying drive to get the US to treat the issue seriously. Sources have told The Observer that American officials appeared extremely sensitive about the issue when faced with complaints that America's public stance appeared increasingly out of touch.
One even alleged that the White House had written to complain about some of the comments attributed to Professor Sir David King, Tony Blair's chief scientific adviser, after he branded the President's position on the issue as indefensible.
Among those scientists present at the White House talks were Professor John Schellnhuber, former chief environmental adviser to the German government and head of the UK's leading group of climate scientists at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. He said that the Pentagon's internal fears should prove the 'tipping point' in persuading Bush to accept climatic change.
Sir John Houghton, former chief executive of the Meteorological Office - and the first senior figure to liken the threat of climate change to that of terrorism - said: 'If the Pentagon is sending out that sort of message, then this is an important document indeed.'
Bob Watson, chief scientist for the World Bank and former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, added that the Pentagon's dire warnings could no longer be ignored.
'Can Bush ignore the Pentagon? It's going be hard to blow off this sort of document. Its hugely embarrassing. After all, Bush's single highest priority is national defence. The Pentagon is no wacko, liberal group, generally speaking it is conservative. If climate change is a threat to national security and the economy, then he has to act. There are two groups the Bush Administration tend to listen to, the oil lobby and the Pentagon,' added Watson.
'You've got a President who says global warming is a hoax, and across the Potomac river you've got a Pentagon preparing for climate wars. It's pretty scary when Bush starts to ignore his own government on this issue,' said Rob Gueterbock of Greenpeace.
Already, according to Randall and Schwartz, the planet is carrying a higher population than it can sustain. By 2020 'catastrophic' shortages of water and energy supply will become increasingly harder to overcome, plunging the planet into war. They warn that 8,200 years ago climatic conditions brought widespread crop failure, famine, disease and mass migration of populations that could soon be repeated.
Randall told The Observer that the potential ramifications of rapid climate change would create global chaos. 'This is depressing stuff,' he said. 'It is a national security threat that is unique because there is no enemy to point your guns at and we have no control over the threat.'
Randall added that it was already possibly too late to prevent a disaster happening. 'We don't know exactly where we are in the process. It could start tomorrow and we would not know for another five years,' he said.
'The consequences for some nations of the climate change are unbelievable. It seems obvious that cutting the use of fossil fuels would be worthwhile.'
So dramatic are the report's scenarios, Watson said, that they may prove vital in the US elections. Democratic frontrunner John Kerry is known to accept climate change as a real problem. Scientists disillusioned with Bush's stance are threatening to make sure Kerry uses the Pentagon report in his campaign.
The fact that Marshall is behind its scathing findings will aid Kerry's cause. Marshall, 82, is a Pentagon legend who heads a secretive think-tank dedicated to weighing risks to national security called the Office of Net Assessment. Dubbed 'Yoda' by Pentagon insiders who respect his vast experience, he is credited with being behind the Department of Defence's push on ballistic-missile defence.
Symons, who left the EPA in protest at political interference, said that the suppression of the report was a further instance of the White House trying to bury evidence of climate change. 'It is yet another example of why this government should stop burying its head in the sand on this issue.'
Symons said the Bush administration's close links to high-powered energy and oil companies was vital in understanding why climate change was received sceptically in the Oval Office. 'This administration is ignoring the evidence in order to placate a handful of large energy and oil companies,' he added. |
|
by Quinn Eastman
Methane trapped under the oceans can save us or destroy us. IN DECEMBER 2003, an international team of geologists announced that they had successfully tapped a new energy source. Methane hydrate, a solidified form of natural gas bound into ice, lurks under the seafloor along the margins of every continent and under the Arctic permafrost. On the Mackenzie River delta in the Canadian Northwest Territories, engineers drilled hundreds of meters below the permafrost into the hydrate deposits. They punched fractures into the layers of sediment and pumped hot water into the earth, releasing the natural gas from its icy prison.
This first harvest of methane hydrate could mark a new direction for the energy industry. Engineers once assumed that the energy costs of melting the frozen fuel would outweigh the gains. But rising oil and gas prices and creative uses of existing technology, like the recent test in the Canadian Arctic, are beginning to change their minds. The United States Geological Survey estimates that the total amount of natural gas in methane hydrates surpasses all of the known oil, coal, and gas deposits on Earth in energy content, although only a fraction of the frozen fuel will be extractable. The hydrates can form at any latitude on Earth if temperature and pressure conditions are right, and are usually mixed with sediment under the ocean floor.
There is a catch, however. Methane hydrates offer the energy industry dangers as well as opportunities, warns Charlie Paull, a geochemist at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, Calif. Deep-sea drilling operations that melt seafloor deposits of the icy fuel might set off an underwater accident under certain circumstances.
The hazard results not just from tapping into hydrates themselves, but from oil companies’ and governments’ drive to explore for petroleum in deeper waters than ever before, Paull says. Propelled by the highest oil prices in a more than a decade, engineers in the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea are extracting oil and natural gas in waters more than a kilometer deep — entering the zone where methane hydrate mingles with sediment and rock.
Normally, the pressure of hundreds of meters of water above keeps the frozen methane stable. But heat flowing from oil drilling and pipelines has the potential to slowly destabilize it, with possibly disastrous results: Melting hydrate might trigger underwater landslides as it decomposes. Scientists hypothesize, in fact, that 8,000 years ago, decomposing hydrate helped to generate a gigantic landslide under the North Sea. The resulting tsunami scoured the Norwegian fjords and scattered seafloor sediment across Holland and Scotland. While no one is predicting that drilling could catalyze an event of such catastrophic proportions, an underwater slide in an oil field could cause enormous environmental damage from oil spills that couldn’t be easily stopped.
More controversially, another danger of the frozen hydrates arises from the fact that methane is a potent greenhouse gas. Some geologists have suggested that methane could accelerate global warming if the oceans’ rising temperature eventually released the gas in large-enough amounts. Rapid, methane-driven global warming has occurred before in Earth’s history, causing mass extinctions, they say, and humans could make it happen again if we keep warming up the planet with the exhaust from cars and electricity plants.
In the near future, what experts such as Paull worry about most is the risk from oil drilling. As the energy industry proceeds into deeper waters in search of fresh oil and gas deposits, Paull says, it has neglected the hazard that melting methane hydrates might pose to its own infrastructure A single $1 billion offshore platform can house 100 people and withstand hurricane-force waves and winds, but Paull suspects that with a big enough nudge from below, pipelines could break.
“Those oil platforms are some of the largest and most expensive structures ever constructed by humans,” he says. “The chance of an incident is very small, but can we afford to have just one? The oil industry has not addressed scientists’ questions about seafloor stability to my satisfaction in a public way.”
Paull is closely familiar with the double-edged nature of methane hydrates because he has been studying them for 15 years. In 1996, when he worked at the University of North Carolina, he ran the first drilling trip dedicated to looking at methane hydrates. He and his colleagues demonstrated the presence of methane hydrates on a part of the Atlantic sea floor off the Carolina coast called the Blake Ridge. Hunting for the icy deposits, in the last five years, he and MBARI scientists have taken samples of sea floor sediment from locations around the world.
Recently, he went to the Gulf of Mexico to map the hydrates and assess their risk to the oil industry. And this summer he will travel to the North Sea to investigate the seafloor at the site of the ancient landslide, where energy companies are developing a huge oil field. Each destination tells a different story about the frozen fuel that can help researchers assess whether methane hydrate is an energy boon, or a disaster waiting to happen.
IN ALL THE PLACES Paull has investigated, the same process that generates methane from swamps, and from human intestines after a meal of baked beans, also supplies the main source of the gas for hydrate formation. Bacteria in ocean mud close to continental coastlines feast on organic material in the sediment and belch out their exhaust. Caps of relatively impermeable hydrates sometimes sit above and trap reservoirs of free natural gas.
To make hydrates, water molecules link up in a cage-like structure — resembling ice — with small “guest” molecules such as methane sticking between them. One cubic meter of methane hydrate is packed with the equivalent of over 160 cubic meters of methane. It melts at room temperature and atmospheric pressure. When the water above is deep enough, methane hydrate’s zone of stability extends from the sea floor down to where the internal heat of the Earth starts to warm things up.
Just like natural gas, methane hydrate would burn more cleanly than coal or oil. The DOE forecasted in 2003 that the world’s natural gas consumption will grow the fastest of all energy sources in the next 25 years. Governments expect that with increasing demand, research into techniques for recovering methane hydrates will pay off in a couple decades.
Until recently, the energy industry mainly regarded methane hydrates as a nuisance. Engineers on oil platforms regularly confront the frozen deposits because they form spontaneously from cold water and gases flowing through pipelines, sometimes plugging them for weeks or even causing blowouts. The $12 million that the U.S. Department of Energy has allotted to research on harvesting hydrates since 2001 is small compared with the estimated $100 million U.S. firms spend every year on antifreeze, repairs, and other gas-flow—assuring remedies.
“It’s an interesting flip,” says Richard Charter, a marine conservation specialist at Environmental Defense in Oakland, Calif. “In the past, the oil industry did everything in their power to avoid disturbing hydrate deposits,” says Charter, who calls himself the “token environmentalist” on a federal advisory board on hydrate research. “Now, it’s a potential resource. Oil engineers’ eyes get really big when you start talking about it.”
In 1999, a USGS report estimated that the world’s free natural gas deposits could yield 368 trillion cubic meters of the methane. By comparison, the report approximated that U.S. offshore areas contain over 10,000 trillion cubic meters of gas in hydrate form. Geologists have since adjusted both figures downward, says USGS scientist Timothy Collett, but the more recent figures still give no sense of how much gas could actually be produced from hydrates. The Mallik test itself produced 1500 cubic meters a day, enough energy to serve about a thousand American households, although a small amount compared to nearby natural gas production.
The most promising places to mine hydrates, he says, are sites where deposits are concentrated, like veins of ore — such as in the Arctic. But the Gulf of Mexico is also a hot target. The Gulf already accounts for 30 percent of U.S oil production and the bulk of exploration for new oil reserves. “The crucial thing about the Gulf of Mexico,” Collett says, “is that when we figure out how much methane hydrate there actually is, the infrastructure to take advantage of it already exists.”
CHARLIE PAULL AND A GROUP of MBARI and USGS scientists spent two weeks in 2002 in the Gulf of Mexico on the French research ship Marion Dufresne. They were there to map methane hydrate — and assess the potential for a landslide triggered by oil drilling. “Ten years ago, we asked: Where can we find methane hydrate?” Paull says. “Now, it’s more: How can we figure out where it is not?”
In the Gulf, geologists have found rich hydrate deposits bursting through the seafloor sediment in mounds a few meters wide. Tubeworms and mussels feed on the methane. Some of it comes from bacteria in the mud, but the gas also is constantly seeping up from pressure-cooked organic material deep within the Earth. To protect these rare delicate ecosystems, federal government regulations prohibit drilling near the seafloor mounds.
In the Gulf, drillers and operators have previously avoided areas where hydrates are close to the surface. “There is a geohazard. It’s worth considering and preparing for,” says Tom Williams, an engineer at Noble Corporation in Houston, which operates mobile offshore drilling units for the oil giants. To lessen the risk, companies can use double casings with refrigeration while drilling to make sure the sediment around a pipe doesn’t heat up.
Williams points out that drillers have bored through hydrate-rich sediment many times in the Arctic with little incident. However, he also says there have been oil-well blowouts in Alaska that some geologists have blamed on hydrate.
Charlie Paull says the danger of geological instability is probably less in the Arctic, compared with other places, because there, methane hydrate is encased by hundreds of meters of sediment or sand. In the Gulf, by contrast, hydrates can lie close to the ocean floor.
Geologists and oil engineers agree that more information about where hydrates are located is essential, but taking measurements of the stuff in seafloor sediment is a challenge, as Paull and colleagues found on their 2002 Gulf trip. Oceanographers initially estimate the locations of hydrate deposits by probing with sonar, or the scientists find them by direct observation. The underwater pressure that stabilizes methane hydrates can get in the way of detailed study. Working from the Marion Dufresne, the MBARI-USGS team took piston cores, giant cylinders of seafloor sediment up to 50 meters long and 10 cm wide, from 21 locations around the Gulf. To release pressure from the free gas produced by decomposing hydrate, they poked holes in the cores along the plastic casings. “Mud worms” of grey goo came squirting out. The pressure can blast sediment out of the top of the core barrel, flying in one instance 10 meters into the air before landing in the water. As soon as the concentration of methane gets high enough to be interesting, Paull says, “it fizzes out like Alka-Seltzer — making your measurements meaningless.”
One possible solution is to keep the core pressurized as it is brought up to the surface. But cumbersome machinery limits the number of samples taken this way, and the cores extend only about a meter long. Instead of measuring methane in cores directly, Paull and Ussler have developed a different method to gauge the amount of gas diffusing up from lower deposits. They look for falling concentrations of chemicals such as sulfate, which is consumed by methane-eating bacteria in the sediment. In seafloor mud, the concentration of sulfate and other chemical signatures are proxies for methane below: The less sulfate, the more methane.
The MBARI-USGS team will soon publish the results of their research: At the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, methane hydrate is only present in small amounts away from the ocean ridges. The risk of structural instability on the seafloor mounds still exists, Paull says, but the team’s work can begin to assure everyone that there isn’t a large-scale danger to the coast extending from Florida to the Yucatan.
Meanwhile, the search for deeper deposits in the Gulf of Mexico is slowly revving up. A DOE-funded project to drill for hydrates in the Gulf, headed by oil giant ChevronTexaco, is scheduled to begin in 6 to 12 months. One of the proposed sites for drilling is directly under a region of the seafloor that geologists know to be rich in hydrates.
THE OTHER HOT SPOT for investigating methane hydrate is in the North Sea. This summer, Paull and colleagues from MBARI will travel there to probe the potential of the frozen fuel deposits to generate a monster landslide. They will take cores from the site of the ancient slide that occurred 8,000 years ago, when a cliff off the coast of Norway at a place called Storegga collapsed. The initial slide generated a wall of water 15 meters high and moved an amount of rock comparable to submerging the state of New Jersey.
Geologists disagree about the prominence of methane hydrate’s role in the Storegga slide. According to one theory, the slow warming of the ocean after the end of the last ice age melted hydrates embedded in sediment under the steep part of the cliff. This made the sediment like a plate of Jello, ready to slip away when the right earthquake came along, according to a recent review by U.S Navy marine scientists. But Norwegian scientists say that pressure from layers of sediment settling from above drove the slide, and that the temperature below the North Sea at the time of the slide is uncertain.
At Storegga, Paull and colleagues want to reconstruct the past. Their research, in cooperation with scientists from the University of Wyoming and the University of Tromso in Norway, will try to answer the questions: How much gas escaped from the ancient landslide, and how much methane hydrate still lies below? Methane leaves a particular chemical signature of carbon and sulfur in the mud that the MBARI scientists plan to analyze.
Their investigation touches present-day developments. The Norwegian state energy company Norsk Hydro is planning production from a $9 billion gas field called Ormen Lange, which lies in the middle of where the Storegga slide occurred. Norsk Hydro will begin building the world’s longest subsurface pipeline this year to deliver gas from Ormen Lange; it will climb up the sloping sea bed to Norway and then across the North Sea to the United Kingdom.
Norwegian research predicts there will be only one major slide at a given site for each ice age, says Martin Hovland, a geologist at the Norwegian state oil company Statoil, a partner in developing the Ormen Lange field. Norsk Hydro and Statoil’s internal data suggest that because of the escape of hydrate deposits after the Storegga slide, the sea floor needs a full climate cycle over tens of thousands of years to recharge sediments with methane. “We take the geohazard issue very seriously of course,” Hovland says. “We’ve performed very stringent drilling and sampling over the last six years, and have come to the conclusion we can develop the field without major problems.”
Paull is not convinced. “While I suspect they have a strong case, it is frustrating because much of the data on which that conclusion has been reached is not yet publicly available,” he says, communicating by e-mail.
A Storegga-scale slide could have consequences beyond making big waves. Some geologists think the amount of methane released in the Storegga disaster could have been enough to warm up the earth. Methane is 20 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. In a 1991 Geophysical Research Letters paper, Paull, Ussler, and USGS geologist Bill Dillon proposed that when glaciers suck up too much water during an ice age, the sea level drops enough to release the pressure on methane hydrates all over the globe. Enough methane could escape into the atmosphere, they hypothesize, to trap the sun’s heat and end the ice age.
The idea that such a release of methane hydrates played a role in mass extinction events in Earth’s history is gaining acceptance. Geochemists at University of California, Santa Cruz, recently reported evidence in Science that methane fuelled a 5 to 10 degree rise in the Earth’s temperature 55 million years ago. About a third of all species of a common marine plankton perished, and the heat drove an exodus of early mammalian species across the continents. Evidence also exists for a similar event 600 million years ago.
James Kennett, a geologist at University of California, Santa Barbara, who discovered evidence of the 55-million-year-old extinction event, warns that the melting and release of methane hydrate on a global scale “is the right mechanism to propel climate change,” he says. “It happens very fast geologically — over a few decades. But the climate fluctuations in the last few thousand years are small compared to the big events 55 million years ago.”
Paull’s collection of data on the fate of methane released in the North Sea landslide at Storegga could provide evidence to help evaluate Kennett’s hypothesis. But scientists such as Roger Sassen, a geochemist at Texas A M University, are skeptical of the theory. Based on his own observations — taken from submarines — of constant leaks of methane into the Gulf of Mexico, Sassen views methane hydrates as a trap for huge volumes of greenhouse gas and a buffer against climate change. He also says that their harvest poses no climate risk because freshly generated methane is always seeping up from below, and using it will just capture what already leaks into the atmosphere.
Geologists may argue about the feasibility of harvesting methane hydrate and its influence on climate, but Paull and Sassen agree on one thing: that deep-water drilling will require a different kind of thinking from the oil industry. Adequately dealing with the hazards of working in deep water and eventually harvesting and transporting methane hydrate, they both suggest, will require new technology that does not yet exist.
“When drilling, oil engineers usually just roar right through the zone where hydrate is stable,” Paull says. “We really have to develop a new set of tools to even know what’s going on in extremely deep water.” |
|
San Jose, Dec 28 (Prensa Latina)
The Costa Rican capital and neighboring cities were shaken by a strong earthquake Wednesday, but with no reported victims or material damages.
The seismographic observatory reported the earthquake registered 5.2 degrees on the Richter Scale and frightened citizens from seven provinces because of its long duration.
Scientists from that institution could not yet specify the earth movement epicenter.
Costa Rica has historically suffered damage from earthquakes, particularly that of May 4, 1910 in the Central Valley.
Several superficial earthquakes occurred between 1910-1912 and 1951-1955, also in the Costa Rican Central Valley. |
|
By Ghion Hagos
Dec 25, 2005
Addis Ababa - A continental rifting process that normally takes millions of years to form has developed over a span of seven weeks in the Afar region of northeastern Ethiopia.
It was a close study, using radar interferometry, of an earth rupture developing into a rare axial rift zone -- a future possible ocean basin. As Associate Professor Atalay Ayele of the Geophysical Observatory of the Addis Ababa University (AAU) tells it, scientists from Ethiopia and Britain made four expeditions to the Da'ure locality in the Afar Depression between mid-September and early October to collect geophysical and geological data.
The series of quakes was first recorded at the AAU on September 14 in Da'ure, an area in the lowlands of the Western Ethiopia Escarpment that stretches from the central part of the country to the Dahlak Islands of Eritrea in the Red Sea.
The volcanic activity, recorded at N 12.651 degrees longtitude and E 40.519 degrees latitude, spewed ash for three continuous days and eventually numerous cracks appeared in the ground, spreading fear among the pastoralist inhabitants.
Unsettled by the unusual phenomena of rumbling tremors they approached the regional authorities to ask the federal government in Addis Ababa to look into it.
The government asked experts in the field at the AAU to investigate the phenomena in the Afar region, and if need be ask for assistance from universities abroad, which is where the British scientist got involved.
'We were thus involved in collaborative undertaking with earth scientists from Britain to undertake further study to collect data in and around the Da'ure locality,' said Dr. Atalay.
An image of the Da'ure locality taken by an earth orbiting NASA satellite showed that an area of 60 kilometres had developed an eight-metre opening.
'This was a fast opening rate within a span of about two months, from September 14 to early November, an exciting event in scientific terms,' said Dr. Atalay.
'Compare this to the very slow movement of the plate tectonic affecting the crust of the earth in the Afar region, which is about 17 mm per year,' he explained.
Professor Cindy Binger of Royal Holloway, University of London, presented the findings at the Fall Meeting of the American geophysical Union in San Francisco.
Dr. Atalay said there were no immediate concerns about the Afar region, noting that it would take a couple of million years before the area turns into an ocean basin.
For scientists researching the phenomena, the Afar Region is a natural laboratory where the transition between oceanic rift and continental rift is visible on land. Such transition is also evident in Iceland.
'The events we witnessed in the Afar region for about seven weeks, beginning in mid-September, have enabled us to look into the possible faster rate of rifting in the Afar region,' said Atalay.
'What we saw was a microcosm of a process of an earth split that takes millions of years to evolve into an ocean basin,' he declared. |
|
By First Coast News Staff
22 June 05
CLAUDE, TX -- A massive crack in the earth opened up last week in Claude, Texas and it's creating a stir among geologists.
Geologists said Tuesday the crack was a joint in the earth's crust. They believe the opening is the result of a weak point in the joint where one spot slips away from the other.
Some parts measure more than 30-feet deep and it drained what used to be a pond. Experts say earth cracks are common but the size of the crack in Claude is not. |
|
Dec. 29, 2005
CROSS PLAINS, Texas - By the time the smoke cleared Wednesday, more than 100 homes across wildfire-stricken Texas and Oklahoma lay in ruins and at least five people were dead, including two elderly women trapped in their homes by the flames. The hardest-hit community during Tuesday’s blazes was Cross Plains, a West Texas ranching and oil-and-gas town of 1,000 people some 150 miles from Dallas. Cross Plains also lost about 50 homes and a church after the flames raced through grass dried out by the region’s worst drought in 50 years.
Two elderly women there were killed after being trapped in their homes, said Sparky Dean, a spokesman for the Department of Public Safety.
Another woman died in Cooke County, near the Oklahoma line, after she apparently fell while helping her husband pour water on the grass around their house, said Mike Murphree, a division chief for the Gainesville Fire Department. He did not know how she died.
No information was immediately available on the fourth death in Texas. A fifth person was killed in Yeager, Okla., where fire destroyed eight homes.
“We had a tornado here years ago and we thought that was devastating. This lasted for hours and hours,” said Patricia Cook, a special education aide whose Cross Plains home was saved by her 18-year-old son, J.D., and a friend. They saw the flames approaching the house from across a field and ran to save it.
Fire on the run
“The fire was literally nipping at their heels,” she said. “He just picked up the hose and started watering things down.”
Elsewhere on her block, the front brick wall and part of a side wall were all that were left standing of the First United Methodist Church. The steeple lay across the ground. Ten other homes on her street also were reduced to charcoal.
Most of the homes destroyed in Cross Plains were modest, working-class houses built during the 1930s and ’40s. The fire spared a town landmark, the nearly century-old house — now a museum — of Robert E. Howard, author of the “Conan the Barbarian” books.
All together, the grass fires destroyed more than 100 buildings across Texas, including 78 homes, the state emergency management agency said. About 50 homes have been destroyed in Oklahoma, authorities said.
Some residents of Mustang, just west of Oklahoma City, returned to their homes Wednesday to pick through what remained after wildfires whipped through the community a day earlier.
‘There was smoke everywhere’
Daniel Gonzales, 27, briefly tried to save his parents’ home with a garden hose but ended up just retrieving some family photos, a file cabinet, a painting and two antique chairs while the house burned.
“The front door was on fire, and I could hear the flames going crazy through the roof,” said Gonzales. “There was smoke everywhere.”
On Wednesday, a charred, grinning snowman decoration stood beside a birdbath filled with black water and splinters of broken wood on the front lawn.
“We were planning on dying here,” said Gonzales’ stepfather, Pat Hankins, 62, who lived in the home with his wife for 13 years. “We loved this piece of property. Whether we’ll rebuild, I just don’t know.”
Wind gusting to 40 mph drove the flames across nearly 20,000 acres in the two states. At least 73 blazes were reported in Texas over two days, and dozens more broke out in Oklahoma.
Fires were still smoldering Wednesday in four Texas counties. One new fire broke out Wednesday in an isolated area of eastern Oklahoma, but was quickly contained.
Drought sets the stage
Severe drought set the stage for the fires, which authorities believe were started mostly by people shooting off fireworks, tossing cigarettes or burning trash in spite of bans imposed because of the drought. A fallen power line apparently started one Oklahoma blaze.
“If we have a situation where we are able to prove that someone intentionally started this, we will probably prosecute them to the full extent of the law,” said Jim Norwood, mayor of Kennedale, near Fort Worth.
Rainfall this year in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of North Texas, where most of the fires broke out, is about 16 inches below the average of about 35 inches, National Weather Service meteorologist Alan Moller said.
“The last time we had something quite this bad, you got to go back to about 1956, when we had 18.55 inches,” Moller said.
The weather service’s long-term forecasts show the drought intensifying through early 2006.
Oklahoma has received about 24 inches of rain this year, about 12 inches less than normal.
More may be on the way
The agency cited “a potential for another round of red flag events Friday” over southwest Texas, then on Sunday in western Texas and Tuesday over much of north Texas. A similar warning was issued for parts of Oklahoma.
Texas Forest Service spokeswoman Traci Weaver called the wildfires the state’s worst since February 1996, when blazes that covered 16,000 acres destroyed 141 structures around Poolville, about 40 miles northwest of Fort Worth.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry issued a disaster declaration Tuesday after more than 70 fires were reported in the northern and central parts of the state. Firefighters from surrounding states were called in to help.. |
|
December, 12 2005
KINGFISHER, Okla. -- An outbreak of geysers spewing mud and gas into the air in rural Kingfisher County is puzzling state and local officials.
Kingfisher Fire Chief John Crawford says initial reports of the geysers came in Friday morning, and that firefighters and Oklahoma Corporation Commission officials were on the scene yesterday.
The geysers have appeared throughout the countryside of rural Kingfisher, with stretches of up to 12 miles between spots, and some as short as a quarter of a mile. |
|
July 11, 2005
KRON4news
SANTA BARBARA, Calif. -- Scientists are puzzled by a mysterious Los Padres National Forest hot spot where 400-degree ground ignited a wildfire.
The hot spot was discovered by fire crews putting out a three-acre fire last summer in the forest's Dick Smith Wilderness.
"They saw fissures in the ground where they could feel a lot of heat coming out," Los Padres geologist Allen King said. "It was not characteristic of a normal fire."
Fire investigators went back to the canyon days later and stuck a candy thermometer into the ground. It hit the top of the scale, at 400 degrees. A dozen scientists, including University of California, Santa Barbara, mineralogist Jim Boles, have been looking for answers since August. Robert Mariner, a U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist who studies volcanic gas vents at Mt. Shasta, Mt. Hood and Mt. Rainier was also called in.
"When I heard about the candy thermometer, I was amazed," Mariner said, noting that the temperature of the volcanic vents he studies is typically 200 degrees, around the boiling point of water. "I thought these guys were pulling my leg."
With the help of an air reconnaissance flight and thermal infrared imaging, scientists found that the hot spot covers about three acres. The hottest spot was 11 feet underground, at 584 degrees.
They found no oil and gas deposits or vents nearby and no significant deposits of coal. The Geiger counter readings were normal for radioactivity, and there was no evidence of explosions or volcanic activity.
One possible explanation still under study is that an earthquake fault may be the source of the heat.
"We can't rule out anything definitely yet," King said. |
|
26 Dec 2005
Insight
The Bush administration's surveillance policy has failed to make a dent in the war against al Qaeda.
U.S. law enforcement sources said that more than four years of surveillance by the National Security Agency has failed to capture any high-level al Qaeda operative in the United States. They said al Qaeda insurgents have long stopped using the phones and even computers to relay messages. Instead, they employ couriers.
"They have been way ahead of us in communications security," a law enforcement source said. "At most, we have caught some riff-raff. But the heavies remain free and we believe some of them are in the United States." Several members of Congress have been briefed on the effectiveness of the government surveillance program that does not require a court order.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania Republican, who was briefed by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on the matter, said he plans to hold hearings on the program by February 2006.
"There may be legislation which will come out of it [hearings] to restrict the president's power," Mr. Specter said.
The law enforcement sources said the intelligence community has identified several al Qaeda agents believed to be in the United States. But the sources said the agents have not been found because of insufficient intelligence and even poor analysis.
The assertions by the law enforcement sources dispute President Bush's claim that the government surveillance program has significantly helped in the fight against terrorism. The president said the program, which goes beyond the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, limits eavesdropping to international phone calls.
The sources provided guidelines to how the administration has employed the surveillance program. They said the National Security Agency in cooperation with the FBI was allowed to monitor the telephone calls and e-mails of any American believed to be in contact with a person abroad suspected of being linked to al Qaeda or other terrorist groups.
At that point, the sources said, all of the communications of that American would be monitored, including calls made to others in the United States. The regulations under the administration's surveillance program do not require any court order.
"The new regulations don't require this because it is considered an ongoing investigation," a source familiar with the program said.
The sources said the Patriot Act was based on the assessment that al Qaeda had established cells in Muslim communities in the United States.
Documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union confirm that the FBI has monitored and infiltrated a range of Muslim and Arab groups, including the Washington-based American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.
But despite the huge amount of raw material gathered under the legislation, the FBI has not captured one major al Qaeda operative in the United States. Instead, federal authorities have been allowed to use non-terrorist material obtained through the surveillance program for investigation and prosecution.
In more than one case, the sources said, a surveillance target was prosecuted on non-terrorist charges from information obtained through wiretaps conducted without a court order. They said the FBI supported this policy in an attempt to pressure surveillance targets to cooperate.
"The problem is not the legislation but lack of intelligence and analysis," another source said. "We have a huge pile of intercepts that never get translated, analyzed and thus remain of no use to us. If it [surveillance] was effective, that's one thing. But it hasn't been effective." |
|
By ANICK JESDANUN
AP Internet Writer
Dec 28, 2005
NEW YORK - The National Security Agency's Internet site has been placing files on visitors' computers that can track their Web surfing activity despite strict federal rules banning most of them. These files, known as "cookies," disappeared after a privacy activist complained and The Associated Press made inquiries this week, and agency officials acknowledged Wednesday they had made a mistake. Nonetheless, the issue raises questions about privacy at a spy agency already on the defensive amid reports of a secretive eavesdropping program in the United States. "Considering the surveillance power the NSA has, cookies are not exactly a major concern," said Ari Schwartz, associate director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a privacy advocacy group in Washington, D.C. "But it does show a general lack of understanding about privacy rules when they are not even following the government's very basic rules for Web privacy."
Until Tuesday, the NSA site created two cookie files that do not expire until 2035 _ likely beyond the life of any computer in use today.
Don Weber, an NSA spokesman, said in a statement Wednesday that the cookie use resulted from a recent software upgrade. Normally, the site uses temporary, permissible cookies that are automatically deleted when users close their Web browsers, he said, but the software in use shipped with persistent cookies already on.
"After being tipped to the issue, we immediately disabled the cookies," he said.
Cookies are widely used at commercial Web sites and can make Internet browsing more convenient by letting sites remember user preferences. For instance, visitors would not have to repeatedly enter passwords at sites that require them.
But privacy advocates complain that cookies can also track Web surfing, even if no personal information is actually collected.
In a 2003 memo, the White House's Office of Management and Budget prohibits federal agencies from using persistent cookies _ those that aren't automatically deleted right away _ unless there is a "compelling need."
A senior official must sign off on any such use, and an agency that uses them must disclose and detail their use in its privacy policy.
Peter Swire, a Clinton administration official who had drafted an earlier version of the cookie guidelines, said clear notice is a must, and `vague assertions of national security, such as exist in the NSA policy, are not sufficient."
Daniel Brandt, a privacy activist who discovered the NSA cookies, said mistakes happen, "but in any case, it's illegal. The (guideline) doesn't say anything about doing it accidentally."
The Bush administration has come under fire recently over reports it authorized NSA to secretly spy on e-mail and phone calls without court orders.
Since The New York Times disclosed the domestic spying program earlier this month, President Bush has stressed that his executive order allowing the eavesdropping was limited to people with known links to al-Qaida.
But on its Web site Friday, the Times reported that the NSA, with help from American telecommunications companies, obtained broader access to streams of domestic and international communications.
The NSA's cookie use is unrelated, and Weber said it was strictly to improve the surfing experience "and not to collect personal user data."
Richard M. Smith, a security consultant in Cambridge, Mass., questions whether persistent cookies would even be of much use to the NSA. They are great for news and other sites with repeat visitors, he said, but the NSA's site does not appear to have enough fresh content to warrant more than occasional visits.
The government first issued strict rules on cookies in 2000 after disclosures that the White House drug policy office had used the technology to track computer users viewing its online anti-drug advertising. Even a year later, a congressional study found 300 cookies still on the Web sites of 23 agencies.
In 2002, the CIA removed cookies it had inadvertently placed at one of its sites after Brandt called it to the agency's attention. |
|
by Randolph T. Holhut
28 Dec 2005
DUMMERSTON, Vt. — Last year at this time, the Republicans felt triumphant. They were now firmly in control of everything. They thought they had a mandate.
However, they forgot their natural inclination to overreach. They soon discovered how few people actually supported the most extreme parts of their agenda. When the truth started to seep out, everything imploded.
Despite the narrowest win for an incumbent president since Woodrow Wilson's victory in 1916, President Bush spoke of all the "political capital" he had earned and his intention to spend it. We heard grand talk about the creation of an "ownership society" and how the cornerstone of it would be the privatization of Social Security.
But the GOP underestimated the widespread support for Social Security, arguably the best run and most successful government program in history. The scaremongering by the Bush administration that Social Security was approaching bankruptcy was seen as being as trustworthy as the myriad of lies used to justify the invasion of Iraq. Bush and the GOP overreached in the Terri Schiavo case, piously inserting themselves in a family tragedy for political gain. Except there was no political gain, only millions who were disgusted by the GOPs phony concern.
The threats by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to employ "the nuclear option" and end filibusters on judicial nominees failed to bring Congress to a standstill, for enough members of the Senate realized that doing this would destroy the Senate and forced Frist to back down.
Hurricane Katrina and the woeful federal response to the storm stripped away the thin veneer of confidence from the Bush administration. No amount of spin could erase the images of New Orleans after the storm.
We learned that the era of cheap energy is over. Global demand is so high and the production and distribution system is so maxed out that the slight disruption can cause huge price spikes. Prices have come down slightly from the post-Katrina highs, but the warning has been presented to all Americans. We must either rethink the lavish American lifestyle and start planning for a post-oil future, or watch our economy collapse.
Finally, the revelations of recent weeks of widespread covert domestic surveillance by the Pentagon, the FBI and the National Security Agency confirmed the suspicions of many that the Bush administration was more interested in intimidation of its political enemies than in fighting terrorism.
Sure, odious legislation did get passed. The bankruptcy bill that condemns millions of Americans to debt slavery. Cuts in Medicaid and student loans to pay for tax cuts for the rich. An energy bill that gives subsidies to the oil companies and does little for energy conservation. A highway bill loaded with pork barrel spending.
But Social Security was saved. The Patriot Act may not survive in its current form. And the mendacity of the Bush administration was exposed for all to see.
Overshadowing everything was Iraq, and the steady drip of revelations that confirmed what many knew was true, that the Bush administration lied to the nation to justify this nation's invasion of Iraq.
The Downing Street Memos showed the Bush administration was determined to attack Iraq even though there was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction, no evidence of links to foreign terrorists and no evidence that Iraq posed a direct or indirect threat to the United States. That no investigation took place shows the impossibility of integrity in a one-party Congress.
The news that the United States operated secret prisons and employed torture on detained "suspects," most of whom were never charged with any crime, was a deep embarrassment. Almost as embarrassing was the clumsy attempts to smear one of the most hawkish member of Congress, Pennsylvania Democrat John Murtha, for suggesting a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. The spectacle of Republicans who never served in the military attacking a decorated combat veteran was a sorry one to see.
The president still clings to the hope that freedom and democracy is on the march in Iraq. The reality on the ground suggests otherwise.
President Bush's approval rating is among the all-time lowest for a second-term president. Impeachment suddenly is not a far fetched idea. Future historians will see 2005 as the year that the Bush presidency and the conservative movement both started to unravel.
We have many to thank for this.
In the press, we have Seymour Hersh's dogged reporting in The New Yorker. We have the underrated work of the Knight Ridder newspapers' Washington bureau. We have The Washington Post and The New York Times finally finding their spines and printing stories over the objections of the White House. And we have the many blogs and news sites on the Web that have been the antidote to an all too drowsy corporate media.
In Congress, we had brave people such as Murtha, Bernie Sanders, John Conyers, Russ Feingold, Pat Leahy and Barbara Boxer stand up and challenge the Bush agenda.
And above all, we had Cindy Sheehan. The Gold Star Mother's actions this year were in keeping with the great American traditions of dissidence, civil disobedience and plain old hellraising.
I have much more hope going into 2006 than I did last year at this time. The events of 2005 showed that the impossible can still happen, but that it can happen a lot faster with people power behind it.
George W. Bush and company didn't just pop up overnight, and they won't go away overnight. But the end may indeed be near for the Bush Crime Family.
Randolph T. Holhut has been a journalist in New England for more than 25 years. He edited "The George Seldes Reader" (Barricade Books). He can be reached at randyholhut@yahoo.com. |
|
29 Dec 2005
AFP
Lawyers for an American 'war on terror' detainee said they had petitioned the Supreme Court to examine the US president's powers, citing "the danger of an unchecked Executive Branch".
In a filing on Tuesday, lawyers for terror suspect Jose Padilla cited evasive government moves to avoid a high court examination of his case as reason for requesting a "certiorari" review of a lower court decision challenging the president's wartime powers.
"The government's actions highlight the need for this court to grant certiorari to preserve the vital checks and balances" implicit in the US Constitution, the petition said. Referring to a series of "strategic maneuvers" to keep Padilla's case from being heard in court, the petition said the government's actions "highlight the danger of an unchecked Executive Branch."
Padilla's detention "raises questions of profound constitutional importance about the government's military power over citizens in the homeland," the petition said.
The petition comes as there are growing questions about President George W. Bush's use of executive war powers to authorize certain treatments of detainees -- allegedly including torture -- and surveillance of US citizens without court orders.
Padilla, a US citizen who converted to Islam, was arrested in May 2002 after returning from Pakistan and has been detained without trial ever since in a military prison as an "enemy combatant".
In September his lawyers petitioned the Supreme Court to review the government's powers to detain him without charge or trial.
In response, the government moved to transfer Padilla to civilian custody for trial.
Arguing the government's case, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales declared that there was no longer any reason for a Supreme Court hearing, because Padilla himself asked to be freed from military custody to be charged and tried.
Nevertheless, on December 21 a Virginia appeals court rejected Padilla's transfer, questioning the government's tactics as appearing to be an attempt to avoid Supreme Court scrutiny.
That ruling led to Tuesday's petition for a broader hearing on the president's wartime powers to detain US citizens. Padilla's lawyers point out in their petition that the government has changed the basis for holding him several times.
Originally, Padilla was arrested for planning to plant a nuclear "dirty bomb" inside the United States, but on November 17 the government advanced charges only that Padilla had plotted to wage "jihad" on the country.
On Wednesday government lawyers challenged the newest petition as a "mischaracterization of events and an unwarranted attack on the exercise of Executive discretion."
It attacked the Virginia court's denial of permission to transfer Padilla as exercising "an unidentified and unprecedented judicial authority to disregard a presidential directive to transfer an enemy combatant out of military custody." |
|
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
29 December 2005
Defence lawyers in several terrorism cases in the United States are planning to appeal against the convictions of their clients on the ground that evidence may have been garnered from illegal wiretapping by a federal government surveillance agency.
The threat is the latest repercussion of the disclosure two weeks ago that the Bush administration had used the National Security Agency (NSA) - supposed to go after foreign targets - to conduct electronic surveillance without warrants inside the US, and against American citizens.
Among the cases is that of Ali al-Timimi, a Muslim scholar, who is serving a life sentence for involvement with an alleged "Virginia jihad" cell, and for inciting his students to wage war overseas against the US.
Edward McMahon, Timimi's lawyer, told The New York Times he always had doubts about the explanation offered by federal investigators of how they came to suspect his client of links with terrorism. "The case against a lot of these guys just came out of nowhere because they were really nobodies. It makes you wonder whether they were being tapped."
The focus of the appeals would be on whether prosecutors misled the courts about the source of some evidence, and whether the authorities held back other NSA wiretaps suggesting that individuals charged might be innocent.The NSA programme was revealed by The New York Times. Opponents said it was a blatant violation of civil liberties, but the White House insisted it was an essential tool in the fight against terrorism.
President George Bush has defended the wiretaps and said that the leak concerning their use was "shameful".
The debate is set to continue in the new year - assuming that Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee, goes ahead with his threat to hold hearings on the eavesdropping when Congress reconvenes next month.
Not only Democrats but several senior Republicans have expressed unease at the way the NSA has been used to bypass a federal court set up in 1978 to authorise warrants for clandestine wiretaps. One of the court's 10 judges resigned in protest, while its chief has demanded a full briefing from the administration on why it had been cut out of the process.
The affair has complicated Bush administration efforts to extend the Patriot Act, the anti-terror law passed by Congress in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Key provisions of the Act that were to expire at the end of 2005 have been granted only a one-month extension, despite angry complaints from Mr Bush.
The White House maintains that speed is of the essence in combating terrorism, and that NSA domestic surveillance had been sparingly used. It was "designed to monitor calls from very bad people to very bad people," an official told The New York Times.
But for many Americans, the very notion of intelligence agencies eavesdropping on domestic targets raises the spectre of Watergate, "dirty tricks," and how Richard Nixon used the CIA to snoop on his political opponents.
There are also profound constitutional implications. Many experts see the episode as more proof of how Mr Bush, urged on by Vice-President Dick Cheney, is relentlessly expanding the power of the executive, freeing it from the fetters of Congress. For that reason, reopening the cases could be very difficult, some analysts say - even in cases where mistakes have been made.
The victim of one such error was Brandon Mayfield, an Oregon lawyer who was wrongly arrested in connection with the March 2004 Madrid train bombings before being released. Mr Mayfield is now suing the government and is likely to raise the NSA wiretapping issue.
Meanwhile, the independent watchdog body that oversees the CIA is investigating up to 10 cases where suspected terrorists may have been handed over in error by the agency to foreign governments, under the contested "rendition" programme. The practice pre-dates 11 September 2001, but after the attacks on New York and Washington, President Bush gave the CIA authority to act without case-by-case approval by the government. Some 100 to 150 people have been targets, either arrested in the US or snatched from the streets of a foreign city and handed back to their home country for questioning - frequently, it is said, for torture.
|
|
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Dec 28, 2005
As I was saying to a fellow peasant just the other day, it is ironic that this country should rebel against one King George only to bow down before another monarch of the same name more than 200 years later.
That our own King George -- he of the House of Bush -- is truly of royal blood has become clear in recent days with the announcement that he has empowered the National Security Agency to spy on whomsoever and whatsoever it wishes under royal decree.
Happily for him if not his subjects, this cannot be challenged by the picky laws and constitutional concerns that rule us poor common folk. It cannot be challenged because he says so, which is the traditional way of kings. Previously, before His Majesty assumed his sovereign powers, the president -- as he was then quaintly known -- had to go to a secret court if he wanted permission for his agents to snoop on enemies within the realm. The esteemed judges of this court would take out their official rubber stamp, and the matter would be handled satisfactorily for all concerned except for the knaves and scoundrels, hopefully not all of them Democrats.
Although a rubber stamp administered in secret was about the same covering for civil liberties as a lace pasty applied to an exotic dancer, the common people nevertheless rested easily, because a genuflection had been made to their beloved Constitution.
But kings do not bow down before anyone or anything. It is for us, the commoners, to prostrate ourselves before their highnesses. Thus did King George decree that it was too risky for the security of his kingdom to rely on a rubber stamp, which, after all, might wear out.
Moreover, it was insulting for his agents to be kept waiting while the judges came in from the golf course.
So he reasoned that, as he was fighting a war, one that conveniently for him was never going to end, he could do anything he liked because he was the king, or the commander in chief in the old manner of speaking. Laws, shmaws _ what were they to one so noble?
Now everything is changed. Faith-based policies have rediscovered the divine right of kings. I hope the royal court realizes that I am writing this in the groveling position like the uncouth but humble person that I am.
To show my fealty, I tug my forelock in the old ritual of subservience except that I haven't got a forelock, as a result of male pattern baldness, and therefore, as a substitute, I tug my back mullet-lock in all honor and obedience.
I pray King George for his gentle forbearance because he has said that even discussing his new royal powers may aid the enemy. Of course, the last thing I wish to do is aid the enemy. It's just that the old habit of free speech dies hard.
Now that King George has enthroned himself, it is only right that he assume the other trappings of monarchy. May I, his lowly and worthless servant, suggest a coat of arms? Perhaps a church built on the ruins of the wall of separation between church and state. Maybe lobbyists rampant on a field of money.
His Majesty also needs royal titles tailored to the American context. It is my honor to suggest the following, which I hope the NSA will record to my credit ...
Henceforth, throughout the land, let him be proclaimed as His Royal Texas-ship, Defender of the Faith, Interpreter of the Constitution, Protector of the SUVs, Guardian of the Malls, Warrior King, Scourge of the Liberals, Bane of the Activist Judges, His Most High Majesty and Most Excellent King George W. the First of Many.
We beseech you, your kingship, to institute a system of hereditary peerage based upon merit and loyalty (i.e., campaign contributions) so that we peasants will have someone to look up to other than the tawdry celebrities on TV. Sir Rush of Bloviation, Sir Karl of Spin, these will be names to conjure with in the future days of dynasty. Perhaps, as a goodwill gesture, you could name Bill Clinton as a knight of the garter belt.
Please, sire, forgive us our petulant Bush-bashing of former days before we realized you wore a crown. Spy on us as much as you want because we understand now that your knowledge of the Constitution is infinitely greater than our own.
Indeed, it is good to be the king, at least for the king.
Reg Henry is a columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. His e-mail address is rhenry(at)post-gazette.com. |
|
By MARTIN SCHRAM
Dec 28, 2005
"Big Brotherism is back in the news. The specter of it surfaced in the last days of the old year and now it's slopping over into the new. It is as though we have all fallen into an Orwell and can't get out." We can drop the glittering ball amid the crush in Times Square. We can count the final seconds in the crush-free solitude of our TV parlors. We can wear silly party hats, blow silly noisemakers, kiss significants or strangers, inadvertently miss midnight by falling asleep in our Lazy Boys, or advertently miss it by banishing ourselves early to bed in the grandiloquent philosophy of, like, whatever.
We can ring out 2005 and ring in 2006. But we can't seem to rid ourselves of 1984.
Big Brotherism is back in the news. The specter of it surfaced in the last days of the old year and now it's slopping over into the new. It is as though we have all fallen into an Orwell and can't get out.
The Big Brother in question here is the super-secret National Security Agency, America's global stethoscope. Super-secret, that is, until Dec.16, when The New York Times reported that since shortly after 9/11, President Bush has allowed the NSA to electronically eavesdrop on conversations involving individuals inside the United States _ without getting a warrant from a judge in a secret court created three decades ago for just that purpose. Yes, it revealed some security info about surveillance. But what made this a story that had to be reported was that a president was deliberately ignoring the law. So the Times reported and now the American people can decide.
But faster than you could say "George Orwell, report to rewrite!" the scoop ignited firestorms of criticism and explanation. Distortion became the weapon of choice for Bush bashers and Bush defenders (including Himself). Soon Americans were eavesdropping on a loud debate about a now-unrecognizable reality.
Our job today is to clean up the Old Year's mess by making clear what is really happening and what is not; what is unlawful and what is not; and _ mainly _ what is needed to keep Americans safe in the global terror age and what is not.
The controversy began with a national security need that is undeniably urgent. Shortly after al Qaeda's terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, computers and cell phones seized in raids on al Qaeda suspects overseas revealed contacts with people in the United States.
The President: Quite appropriately, President Bush sought to immediately begin eavesdropping on those al Qaeda-connected people. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act permits him to do so instantaneously _ for 48 hours while he seeks a warrant from a secret court that since the 1970s granted more than 18,000 and denied just four. But Bush ignored the law, ordering the continued surveillance in a way that, by any definition, is unwarranted.
The Critics: Republicans as well as Democrats criticized the president's disregard of the law. But many Democrats labeled it a sweeping program to spy on Americans _ that goes too far. It is spying on people in America who, evidence shows, were in contact with suspected terrorists _ and must be monitored. On Dec. 21, a page-one New York Times report headlined "Spying Program Snared U.S. Calls," fanned the flames while covering the fire by reporting some NSA intercepts were "purely domestic communications." Example: a foreign-based cell phone thought to be overseas was actually in America and called another U.S.-based person. Technically it was domestic and should have been an FBI snoop under existing rules.
Rethink and Reform: The globalization of economics, communications and terrorism, demands that we rethink old rules requiring the NSA to conduct only foreign snooping and the FBI only domestic. (As if the FBI never violated individual's rights!) Consider this: An al Qaeda operative in Pakistan e-mails someone in New York, who instantly forwards it to someone in Chicago. Requiring a bureaucratic handoff in mid-snoop invites a catastrophic snafu (recall the FBI's pre-9/11 bungling). Our protection comes only from requiring a secret court judge's warrant to eavesdrop. And, of course, our unshakeable trust that our leader will not lie to us.
A Guarantee President Bush Cannot Ignore: Our final word comes not from a mere pundit but from an informed source familiar with Bush's thinking: "... any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires _ a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution."
The source: Bush, speaking in Buffalo, on April 20, 2004 _ more than two years after he had begun ordering wiretaps without a court order.
(Martin Schram writes political analysis for Scripps Howard News Service. E-mail him at martin.schram(at)gmail.com.) |
|
John W. Whitehead
28 Dec 2005
"As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances there is a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such a twilight that we must be aware of the change in the air, however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."
Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas Not since the notorious McCarthy era of the 1950s, when American freedoms faced extinction, has there been such an attack against the Bill of Rights. The recent media focus on President Bush's authorizing the National Security Agency to spy on ordinary Americans has brought this issue to the forefront. On secret orders from President Bush, the NSA has been monitoring the international phone calls and emails of Americans without warrants.
Moreover, the Bush Administration has consistently harassed citizens who exercise their First Amendment freedoms and voice concerns about government policies. The main weapon used in this war is intimidation, specifically through governmental surveillance and government agents.
Indeed, the American government has a near paranoia about dissenting citizens. "The Administration and campaign of George W. Bush," writes former Congressman Bob Barr (R-Ga.), "is squelching any possible hint of disagreement or protest at every political rally or gathering." For example, in March of this year, three citizens were removed from President Bush's town hall meeting in Aurora, Colo., because the car they arrived in featured the bumper sticker, "No More Blood for Oil."
This past summer, FBI agents went to Windsor, Conn., with a document marked for delivery by hand. On Matianuk Avenue, across from the tennis courts, two special agents found their man. They gave George Christian the letter, which warned him to tell no one - ever - what it said. The letter, which was on FBI stationery, directed Christian to surrender "all subscriber information, billing information and access logs of any person" who used a specific computer at a library branch some distance away.
Christian, who manages digital records for three dozen Connecticut libraries, said in an affidavit that he configures his system for privacy. But the vendors of the software Christian operates said their databases can reveal the websites that visitors browse, the e-mail accounts they open and the books they borrow. Christian refused to hand over the records, and his employer, Library Connection, Inc., filed suit for the right to protest the FBI demand in public.
This case affords a rare glimpse of an exponentially growing practice of domestic surveillance under some of the heinous provisions of the USA Patriot Act. National security letters, such as the one issued to George Christian, were created in the 1970s for espionage and terrorism investigations.
They were originally intended as narrow exceptions in consumer privacy law, enabling the FBI to review in secret the customer records of suspected foreign agents. However, the Patriot Act and Bush Administration guidelines for its use have transformed those letters by permitting clandestine scrutiny of U. S. residents and visitors who are not alleged to be terrorists or spies.
"The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year," writes Barton Gellman in The Washington Post, "a hundredfold increase over historic norms. The letters - one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people - are extending the bureau's reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans." Indeed, according to a previously classified document released recently, the FBI has conducted clandestine surveillance on some U. S. residents for as long as 18 months at a time without proper paperwork or oversight.
Thus, the government does not limit its attacks to actual terrorists. Ordinary American citizens are the focus as well. Take the case of Selena Jarvis, a social studies teacher at Currituck County High School in North Carolina. She assigned her senior civics and economics class to use photographs to illustrate their freedoms as found in the Bill of Rights. One student photographed a picture of George W. Bush next to his own hand in a thumbs-down position as a way to express his freedom to dissent.
However, while developing the student's photographs, a Wal-Mart photo department employee, in obvious need of some education on the Bill of Rights, called the police. They then contacted the Secret Service. But rather than dismissing the case, the Secret Service decided to investigate the matter. The agents interrogated the student and questioned Jarvis. While questioning Jarvis, an agent asked her if she thought the photo was suspicious. Dumbfounded, Jarvis responded, "No, it was a Bill of Rights project!" Jarvis was startled at the claim that the student was a terrorist and called the whole thing "ridiculous."
Why would the Secret Service, which is not run by incompetent individuals, take the time to investigate a high school student and his class project? It is safe to assume that the Secret Service knew the student was not a terrorist and wanted to make an example of him for others who might be bold enough to use their right to dissent. After the ordeal, Selena Jarvis commented, "I blame Wal-Mart more than anybody. I was really disgusted with them. But everyone was using poor judgment, from Wal-Mart up to the Secret Service."
Unfortunately, this is not the only "ridiculous" case of individuals tattling on their neighbors. For example, Barry Reingold was questioned by the FBI after he criticized the war in Afghanistan in the locker room of his local health club. In another case, Derek Kjar's neighbors reported his bumper sticker of George Bush wearing a crown with the heading "King George - off with his head." As a result, Kjar was interrogated by the Secret Service. In both instances, close contacts of the two men reported them to the authorities.
And as if things weren't bad enough, the military is now spying on us. A secret database obtained by NBC News recently reveals that the Department of Defense and the Pentagon have also increased intelligence collection on American citizens inside the country. This includes monitoring peaceful anti-war groups and protests and involves video taping, monitoring the Internet and collecting the name of anyone critical of the government.
There is even a toll-free number for anyone interested to report on fellow Americans to the military. And the spying even includes religious groups such as those attending the Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Florida. "On a domestic level, this is unprecedented," says NBC News analyst William Arkin. "I think it is the beginning of enormous problems and enormous mischief for the military."
Since 9/11, it has been consistently drummed into our heads by the government, with all its alerts and multi-colored alarms, that terrorists are everywhere and even your next door neighbor could be one. As a result, the government's promotion of fear and paranoia has moved us closer to an Orwellian state where citizens inform on one another. The result is that the citizens often do the job of the police and no longer use good judgment before reporting their neighbors. In the process, such informing citizens are doing away with their own freedoms.
These tactics are not new to the world. The Nazi and Soviet secret police of former regimes were infamous for such tactics. The police controlled the people through fear, and the subsequent result was a totalitarian state. They turned their respective population into a society of informers.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning author and former Soviet dissident, once spoke of how fear destroys the will of the people. He noted how the Russian people would kneel inside the doors of their apartments, pressing their ears to listen when the KGB came at midnight to arrest a neighbor who had spoken out against the government. Solzhenitsyn said that if all the people would have come out and driven off the secret police, sheer public opinion would have demoralized the effort to subdue a free people. But fear and paranoia kept the people at bay.
We should not be afraid of government agents, whether employed by the FBI, the military or local authorities. Their salaries are paid through our tax dollars. Supposedly, they are our servants. Truly free societies do not function that way. Our fear of government servants is a clear indication of ominous things to come. If citizens are too frightened to use their freedoms, then those freedoms will become extinct. And the darkness will be complete.
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org |
|
By RAYMOND DANIEL BURKE
December 23, 2005
Baltimore Sun
The authorization of domestic spying without warrants amounts to nothing less than a surrender of our civil liberty, the precise thing that guarantees our freedom and makes us so different from those enemies of freedom from whom the Bush administration is so determined to protect us.
Expanding the power of federal agents to pry into private lives suggests that we have already surrendered in the war on terror. If we willingly sacrifice the privacy, civil liberties and individual rights that are the heart of our Constitution, have we not handed victory to the terrorists? If the terrorists have caused us to be so frightened and cowed that we are willing to summarily dispense with the rudiments of our freedom, we have effectively capitulated to our enemies. In keeping with the system of checks and balances devised to prevent any branch of government - particularly an executive seeking to assume the trappings of a monarch - from acting in derogation of the rights of the people, the showing of probable cause to a court of competent jurisdiction was established in the Fourth Amendment as the fundamental protection of individual liberty.
The administration has seen fit to unilaterally and fundamentally change that system to one in which the executive alone decides who is secure in his or her personal liberty. It has the remarkable effect of a constitutional amendment accomplished in secret. Essentially, an "except for the following circumstances" clause has been added to the Fourth Amendment, with government agents free to fill in the blanks as to what circumstances might apply.
The horrific acts of 9/11 called on the full measure of our determination to eradicate an evil enemy of civilization and decency. So long as wholesale murder is deemed to be a viable means to a political end, when killers are knighted as freedom fighters, there can be no peace and no context for justice and prosperity. Those who practice such barbarism cannot be permitted to roam freely, and we were vested with the right, and indeed the responsibility, to respond with the full measure of our capacity.
But that bloodthirsty attack did not constitute a justification for secret acts that diminish the rights of American citizens to be secure against invasions of their privacy by federal agents. On the contrary, it called on us to display an emphatic appreciation for the freedoms with which we have been blessed - the things that set us apart from the forces of hate and destruction.
Freedom is the most powerful weapon against enemies who recruit from the ranks of those burdened by hopelessness fostered by being subjects to the yoke of tyranny. In the face of such an enemy, we should be wearing our freedoms proudly on our sleeves, not surrendering them in covert eavesdropping operations against our own citizens.
We have established a system in which a secret federal court serves to expedite search warrants in national security matters while providing the judicial oversight called for in the Constitution. The president, by executive order, set up a separate system to bypass the court in connection with matters federal agents determine are related to terrorism. Not only does such a system deprive citizens of the fundamental right to judicial review for probable cause, it also ignores the duly enacted legal process set up by the legislative branch to address these very matters.
This administration needs to be held accountable for failings in connection with squandering the worldwide sympathy and outrage of the international community in response to 9/11. But the clandestine abrogation of our constitutional liberties is of far greater consequence than any administrative bumbling. It strikes at the heart of who we are as a nation, which established self-government by the people under the protection of law.
If the terrorists have taken from us the freedom that makes us who we are, we have given up our identity as a people. Our Constitution and laws provide the means of our domestic protection against acts of evil but do so in a way that ensures that government intrusion is permitted only where the courts determine that probable cause exists.
The terrorists apparently have frightened the president into giving up that assurance against tyranny. If he was going to surrender that constitutional right on our behalf, he should have at least told us first.
Raymond Daniel Burke is a principal in a Baltimore law firm. His e-mail is rdburke@ober.com. |
|
Chris Floyd
28 December 2005
So now, at last, the crisis is upon us. Now the cards are finally on the table, laid out so starkly that even the Big Media sycophants and Beltway bootlickers can no longer ignore them. Now the choice for the American Establishment is clear, and inescapable: do you hold for the Republic, or for autocracy?
There is no third way here, no other option, no wiggle room, no ambiguity. The much-belated exposure of George W. Bush's warrantless spy program has forced the Bush-Cheney Regime to openly declare what they have long implied -- and enacted -- in secret: that the president is above the law, a military autocrat with unlimited powers, beyond the restraint or supervision of any other institution or branch of government. Outed as rank deceivers, perverters of the law and rapists of the Constitution, the Bush gang has decided that their best defense -- their only defense, really -- is a belligerent offense. "Yeah, we broke the law," they now say; "so what? We'll break it again whenever we want to, because law don't stick to our Big Boss Man. What are you going to do about it, chump?" That is the essence, the substance and pretty much the style of the entire Bushist response to the domestic spying scandal. They are scarcely bothering to gussy it up with the usual rhetorical circumlocutions.
The attack is being led by the fat, sneering coward, Dick Cheney, who has crawled out of his luxurious hidey-holes to re-animate the rotting husk of Richard Nixon and send it tottering back onto the national stage. Through the facade of Cheney's pig-squint and peevish snarl, we can see the long-dead Nixonian visage, his grave-green, worm-filled jowls muttering once more the lunatic mantra he brought to the Oval Office: "If the president does it, it can't be illegal." This is what we've come to, this is American leadership today: ugly, stupid men mouthing the witless drivel of failed, dead, discredited, would-be petty tyrants.
But not even Nixon was as foul as this crew. When he was caught, he folded; some faint spark of republican conscience restrained him from pushing the crisis to the end. He was a vain, stupid, greedy, grasping, dirty man with blood on his hands, but in the end, he did not identify himself with the government as a whole. He did not say, "l'etat, c'est moi," he had no messianic belief that the life of the nation was somehow bound up with his personal fate, or that he and his clique and his cronies had a God-given right to rule. They just wanted power and loot -- as much of it as they could get -- and they pushed and pushed until the Establishment pushed back.
It has long been evident, however, that Bush and Cheney do believe their clique should by all rights rule the country -- and that anyone who opposes their unrestrained dominion is automatically "anti-American," an enemy of the state. For them, there is no "loyal opposition," or even political opponents in any traditional understanding of the term; there are only enemies to be destroyed, and herd-like masses to be manipulated. They believe that their dominion is more important than democracy, which they despise as a brake and hindrance to the arbitrary leadership of an all-wise elite -- i.e., them. They are the state; a police state.
Elections are just necessary evils, a way to manufacture the illusion of consent, shake down corporations for big bucks and calibrate the loyalty of courtiers. Democracy is simply another system to be gamed, subverted, turned to factional advantage -- in precisely the same way that Enron gamed the California electric grid. This accounts for the strange, omnipresent tang of unreality that permeated the last three national elections, in 2000, 2002, and 2004. It's because they were unreal: the results were gamed, sometimes in secret, sometimes in plain sight; the "issues" and rhetoric were divorced from the reality that we all actually lived and felt -- and the outcomes were as phony as an Enron balance sheet.
Dominion seized on such sinister and cynical terms will almost certainly be defended -- and extended -- by any means necessary. That is the great danger. The Bushists have already pushed on further than Nixon ever dared; will they "bear it out even to the edge of doom"? This is the crux of the matter; this is the crossroads where we now stand. Will the American Establishment push back at last? Will they say, This far we will go, but no further; this much we will swallow, but no more?
Some of us have been writing for years about Bush's piecemeal assumption of dictatorial powers. We have watched in rage and amazement as the Establishment meekly accepted Bush's repeated, brutal insults to democracy. Time and again, I've quoted the words of the Emperor Tiberius, after the lackeys of the Senate grovelled to do his bidding: "Men fit to be slaves." In one sense, then, the Rubicon was crossed long ago. Yet "we live in hope and die in despair," as my father always says. In the back of the minds of many an embittered dissident, there has been a spark of hope that somewhere down the line, one of the many, many Bush outrages would somehow take hold, gain critical mass, and force the Establishment to act, to rein in the renegade, break him, box him in if not remove him from office.
For let's be clear about this: only the Establishment -- the institutional powers-that-be -- can break an outlaw president. Millions marched in the street against Nixon and the system; whole city quadrants went up in flames in those days; but none of this was decisive in the corridors of power. (Nor to much of the American public, to be frank; after Kent State, after My Lai, after Cambodia, Nixon was still re-elected in a landslide.) It was his insult to the institutions -- the Watergate break-in of Democratic headquarters, the subsequent cover-up and subversion of the legal system, the defiance of Congress -- that led to his downfall. He pushed too far, tried to grab too much -- and the Establishment pulled him short.
And it will have to be the Establishment that breaks Bush -- or he won't be broken. All the blogs in the world won't bring him down, no matter how much truth they tell, how much bloodsoaked Bushist dirt they expose. Yes, perhaps if we had millions of outraged citizens marching in the street day after day across America, a sustained mass movement and popular uprising for liberty and democracy, this might obviate the need for Establishment action. But we all know that such marches are not going to happen. If there was sufficient fire for liberty and democracy in America, there would have already been a popular uprising -- and Bush would never have garnered enough public support to keep the election results close enough to be fudged. No, it will be the Establishment -- or no one.
That's why the spy scandal is so pivotal. Because it is a direct, open and unignorable challenge to the institutional life of the American Establishment. In it, the Bush Regime is saying to the various powers-that-be, especially in Congress and the courts, but also to centers of power and influence outside government: you no longer have any power. All real power is now in our gift. Your laws, your institutions, your traditions, the whole complex infrastructure of checks and balances that have sustained society are now essentially meaningless. As in ancient Rome, we will keep the old forms, but the life of the state has now passed into the hands of the autocrat and his court. His arbitrary will can override any law -- although of course, strong law will still be applied to his enemies, and to the riff-raff in the lower orders.
How will the Establishment deal with this direct challenge? The past few years give little grounds for hope: the Democrats spineless, conflicted, co-opted and corrupt; the Republicans slavish, bellicose, cruel and criminal; the media timorous, witless, corporate-controlled; big business absolutely rolling in gravy from the autocrat's larder; academia cowed, silenced, ignored, demonized; the military acquiescent in criminal aggression, top-heavy with time-servers currying autocratic favor. Only the courts provide some stray sparks of hope, although they too are now loaded with political sycophants, corporate bagmen and knuckle-dragging throwbacks produced by the Right's decades-long devolution of American jurisprudence. Prosecutors like Patrick Fitzgerald and Elliot Spitzer "keep hope alive," but their efforts will mean little in a system where lawlessness at the top has been countenanced by the rest of the Establishment. And in any case, the outcome of their work lies ultimately with the Supreme Court -- the same court that shredded the Constitution in awarding power to Bush in the first place, and which is now led by a Bushist apparatchik.
Still, you don't go through a constitutional crisis with the Establishment you want; you go through a constitutional crisis with the Establishment you have. And this sad, sick crew, ladies and gentlemen, is all we have. If they swallow the spy scandal, if they don't push back now -- and I mean really push back, not just make a lot of harrumphing noise or hold a few toothless hearings or get a couple of underlings offered up as ritual sacrifices to save the Leader -- then we will have well and truly and finally lost the Republic that Franklin, Jefferson and Madison gave us so long ago.
The next few weeks will show us if there is still some hope of restoring the Republic through the old institutions, or if we will have to follow the course laid out by Bob Dylan some 40 years ago: "Strike another match, go start anew." Who knows? Maybe we can make a better republic next time: one not born of blood, greed and fury -- those all-too-common elements of human organization -- but made from a new compound of mercy, justice, communion and liberty. Still imperfect, of course, still corrupt -- because that's our intractable human nature -- but with our worst instincts restrained by enlightened, ever-evolving law, and the predatory ambitions of the rich and powerful reined by elaborate checks and balances.
It's just a dream, of course; probably a vain one. But we will need some vision to guide us if, as seems likely, we must soon set forth into the unknown territory of an openly declared American autocracy. |
|
By Jeff Franks
Dec 28, 2005
Reuters
HOUSTON - Enron's former chief accountant, Richard Causey, on Wednesday pleaded guilty to securities fraud in exchange for a maximum seven-year jail sentence for his role in the financial scandal that led to the 2001 collapse of the power-trading giant.
Causey, 45, had been scheduled to go on trial next month with former Enron chief executives Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, facing the possibility of more than 20 years behind bars, but now may cooperate with federal prosecutors against them in a switch legal experts said could hurt his former bosses. U.S. District Judge Sim Lake postponed the start of the trial to January 30 from January 17 after Causey's plea, at the defense's request.
"He was poised to be a very key part of the defense. He is one of the most honest and decent men you can ever get to know," Skilling lawyer Daniel Petrocelli said outside court.
"They broke an innocent man," he said, referring to pressure from prosecutors.
With Causey's plea, 16 former Enron executives have pleaded guilty to crimes related to the company's failure.
"For the remainder of his life he will regret the damage and the hurt that so many people suffered as a result of this tragedy," Causey attorney Reid Weingarten told reporters outside the federal courthouse in downtown Houston.
Causey pleaded guilty to a single count of securities related to false filings and statements about Enron's financial performance. He also agreed to forfeit $1.25 million as part of a sentence that Lake said would be set April 21.
"Did you knowingly deceive the investing public?" Lake asked Causey, who replied, "Yes, your honor."
When asked if he knew he knew that giving false public documents and statements was illegal, Causey said, "Yes." He appeared relaxed throughout the hearing and before it began winked and smiled at his wife, who wept after it was all over.
Whether Causey will testify in the trial of Lay and Skilling is uncertain, but his deal with prosecutors calls for them to request a seven-prison sentence that could be reduced to five years if he cooperates fully.
Causey was a key figure in the huge financial scandal that drove Enron to bankruptcy in December 2001 amid revelations the company had used off-the-books partnership deals to hide billions of dollars in losses and inflate profits.
The scandal opened a window on corporate accounting misdeeds and abuses generally that led to a toughening of federal security laws. It also tainted the Bush administration because Lay had been a close ally of the Bush family for years and one of its biggest political donors.
OFF-THE-BOOKS DEALS
Causey, after joining Enron from accounting firm Arthur Andersen in 1991, worked closely with Lay, Skilling and former Chief Financial Officer Andy Fastow, who has pleaded guilty to fraud in exchange for a likely 10-year sentence and is cooperating with prosecutors.
Fastow created the off-the-books deals that Enron used to meet its earnings targets and has admitted making millions of dollars from the partnerships, often at Enron's expense.
Prosecutors charge that Causey and Fastow wrote what is known as the "global galactic" agreement, ensuring the Fastow partnerships would not lose money in the deals, which would have made the way Enron accounted for them illegal.
Before the plea deal, Causey would have faced 36 charges including conspiracy, fraud, insider trading, money laundering and making false statements on financial reports, but prosecutors said all but the one count would be dismissed if terms of the plea bargain are fulfilled.
Skilling and Lay will face 35 and 11 criminal counts, respectively.
Attorneys following the case said Causey's turn was generally bad news for Skilling and Lay.
"Less rope is needed for two necks, as the government's noose tightens," former federal prosecutor Jacob Frenkel said. "The government always benefits from the addition of high-level insiders who would have been party to conversations with most senior executives."
Lawyer Jamie Wareham said Causey would make a good witness if called by prosecutors to testify.
"It's a bad development for Lay and Skilling in the main because Causey is a likable, chubby, hail-fellow-well-met kind of guy," said Wareham, global chairman of the litigation department at Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker.
"He just has a demeanor about him that you would like to have as a defense lawyer sitting next to you."
But Petrocelli said Causey would be a good defense witness because he would tell the truth about Enron.
"The fact is, it was a great company," he said. |
|
By Paul Craig Roberts
28 Dec 2005
The US continues its descent into the Third World, but you would never know it from news reports of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ July payroll jobs release.
The media gives a bare bones jobs report that is misleading. The public heard that 207,000 jobs were created in July. If not a reassuring figure, at least it is not a disturbing one. On the surface things look to be pretty much OK. It is when you look into the composition of these jobs that the concern arises. Of the new jobs, 26,000 (about 13%) are tax-supported government jobs. That leaves 181,000 private sector jobs. Of these private sector jobs, 177,000, or 98%, are in the domestic service sector.
Here is the breakdown of the major categories: 30,000 food servers and bartenders, 28,000 health care and social assistance, 12,000 real estate, 6,000 credit intermediation, 8,000 transit and ground passenger transportation, 50,000 retail trade and 8,000 wholesale trade.
(There were 7,000 construction jobs, most of which were filled by Mexicans.)
Not a single one of these jobs produces a tradable good or service that can be exported or serve as an import substitute to help reduce the massive and growing US trade deficit. The US economy is employing people to sell things, to move people around, and to serve them fast food and alcoholic beverages. The items may have an American brand name, but they are mainly made off shore. For example, 70% of Wal-Mart’s goods are made in China.
Where are the jobs for the 65,000 engineers the US graduates each year? Where are the jobs for the physics, chemistry, and math majors? Who needs a university degree to wait tables and serve drinks, to build houses, to work as hospital orderlies, bus drivers, and sales clerks?
In the 21st century job growth in the US economy has consistently reflected that of a Third World country—low productivity domestic services jobs. This goes on month after month and no one catches on—least of all the economists and the policymakers.
Economists assume that every high productivity, high paying job that is shipped out of the country is a net gain for America. We are getting things cheaper, they say. Perhaps, for a while, until the dollar goes. What the cheaper goods argument overlooks are the reductions in the productivity and pay of employed Americans and in the manufacturing, technical, and scientific capability of the US economy.
What is the point of higher education when the job opportunities in the economy do not require it?
These questions are too difficult for economists, politicians, and newscasters. Instead, we hear that "last month the US economy created 207,000 jobs."
Television has an inexhaustible supply of optimistic economists. Last weekend CNN had John Rutledge (erroneously billed as the person who drafted President Reagan’s economic program) explaining that the strength of the US economy was "mom and pop businesses." The college student with whom I was watching the program broke out laughing.
What mom and pop businesses? Everything that used to be mom and pop businesses has been replaced with chains and discount retailers. Auto parts stores are chains, pharmacies are chains, restaurants are chains. Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and Lowes, have destroyed hardware stores, clothing stores, appliance stores, building supply stores, gardening shops, whatever—you name it.
Just try starting a small business today. Most gasoline station/convenience stores seem to be the property of immigrant ethnic groups who acquired them with the aid of a taxpayer-financed US government loan.
Today a mom and pop business is a cleaning service that employs Mexicans, a pool service, a lawn service, or a limo service.
In recent years the US economy has been kept afloat by low interest rates. The low interest rates have fueled a real estate boom. As housing prices rise, people refinance their mortgages, take equity out of their homes and spend the money, thus keeping the consumer economy going.
The massive American trade and budget deficits are covered by the willingness of Asian countries, principally Japan and China, to hold US government bonds and to continue to acquire ownership of America’s real assets in exchange for their penetration of US markets.
This game will not go on forever. When it stops, what is left to drive the US economy?
Dr. Roberts, email him a former Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal and a former Contributing Editor of National Review, was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during the Reagan administration. He is the author of The Supply-Side Revolution and, with Lawrence M. Stratton, of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct. |
|
Economyincrisis.org
28 Dec 2005
The following staggering amount of our wealth producing companies has been sold to foreign owners in the 10 years from 1995 through 2005. It is critical to understand that even if these are not all familiar corporate names, they are all very valuable strategic companies with vast amounts of technology, assets, production facilities, tax base, and employment attached to each one. In fact, many of the smallest, most unfamiliar acquisitions represent some of the most significant strategic and proprietary technology losses to this country. Many of these companies took decades, and in some cases generations, to build to their size and scope prior to acquisition. Not only does the US lose control of the assets and technologies of these companies as of the date they were acquired, the US also loses all future profit and title to all future advancements of these companies.
These companies were the means through which America created much of its present wealth. With the loss of these companies and having no comparable replacement, it's easy to see that our future will not be as good as our past, especially since the countries that acquired these companies are now able to compete with us in almost all industries. Why are we doing this? Don't we have alternatives? Who is responsible, demand answers from your congressperson.
The following table lists only a few of the 8,600 foreign acquisitions during this period. The $1.3 Trillion figure and complete list can be verified at the US Bureau of Economic Analysis. Click link to original article to see the list. |
|
By David Barboza
The New York Times
DECEMBER 21, 2005
SHANGHAI China said Tuesday that its economy was far bigger than previously estimated and that new figures suggested it had probably passed France, Italy and Britain to become the world's fourth-largest economy.
The announcement sent economists and financial prognosticators scrambling to rethink their assessments of the rise of China and its role on the world stage. Many of them even brought forward their estimations of when China might eclipse the United States as the world's biggest economy. "We now have a new snapshot of the Chinese economy," said Hong Liang, an economist at Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong. "This is not slightly bigger, it's a significantly bigger economy."
China revised its economic data Tuesday after a yearlong nationwide economic census uncovered about $280 billion in hidden economic output in China for 2004. The amount is roughly equivalent to an economy the size of Turkey or Indonesia, or 40 percent of India's economy.
That means that China's gross domestic product in 2004 was nearly $2 trillion, not the $1.65 trillion previously reported. With its GDP up 17 percent, China was the sixth-largest economy in the world last year.
And with China expected to report another year of sizzling economic growth in 2005, its economy may already be ranked fourth, trailing only that of the United States, Japan and Germany.
Economists say there is little doubt now that China is a full-fledged economic superpower. While still far behind the United States, whose economy was valued at about $12.6 trillion last year, China continues to be home to the world's fastest-growing major economy, jumping more than 9 percent over the past few years.
In 2005, it is expected to record a huge $100 billion trade surplus as its toys, electronics, textiles and other goods flood the world markets.
China's currency, the yuan, has also become a greater force in global markets since it was revalued slightly this year, dropping its longstanding peg to the dollar.
It has also been accumulating foreign currency reserves at a very high rate over the past few years. By the end of 2006, economists say, China could have $1 trillion in foreign currency reserves, much of it in U.S. dollar-denominated Treasury notes, making it an even more powerful force in the global markets.
The new figures provide good news for China, economists say, suggesting that the country's economy is healthier, more diversified and more capable of sustaining growth than previously believed.
The revised figures, for instance, show that a much stronger services sector has emerged in the Chinese economy, taking some weight off the manufacturing sector. They also show that there are more small and medium-size companies in the country.
The larger size of the economy bodes well for China because experts had long cited its high investment to GDP ratio as a troubling and unsustainable factor that could eventually overheat its economy.
That ratio appears slightly more reasonable and sustainable today.
Stephen Green, a senior economist at Standard Chartered Bank in Shanghai, said the new figures calm some fears about imbalances in the economy here.
"A bigger economy means all the dangerous ratios, such as investment as a percentage of GDP, all fall," Green said. "And they are usually cited as showing the Chinese economy is in danger or headed for a fall."
Dong Tao, an economist at Credit Suisse First Boston, said in a statement that China might still be underestimating the size of its services sector by about $200 billion.
Other experts are moving forward their forecasts of when China might overtake the United States as the world's largest economy. Some have advanced their estimation to about 2035, from 2040.
The figures are expected to affect government planners and policy makers, altering everything from monetary policy and inflation forecasts to how government officials allocate funds to different regions and sectors of the economy.
"The most significant implication of this is: Does China have some structural illness or cancer? Or is there an error with the x-ray?" said Hong of Goldman Sachs.
"The last few years so many famous economists cited the very high investment to GDP ratio as a serious problem," Hong said. "Now it looks like the x-ray machine had a problem, not the patient." |
|
James Bamford
28 Dec 2005
Rolling Stone
"Rendon is a man who fills a need that few people even know exists. Two months before al-Haideri took the lie-detector test, the Pentagon had secretly awarded him a $16 million contract to target Iraq and other adversaries with propaganda. One of the most powerful people in Washington, Rendon is a leader in the strategic field known as "perception management," manipulating information -- and, by extension, the news media -- to achieve the desired result. His firm, the Rendon Group, has made millions off government contracts since 1991, when it was hired by the CIA to help "create the conditions for the removal of Hussein from power." Working under this extraordinary transfer of secret authority, Rendon assembled a group of anti-Saddam militants, personally gave them their name -- the Iraqi National Congress -- and served as their media guru and "senior adviser" as they set out to engineer an uprising against Saddam. It was as if President John F. Kennedy had outsourced the Bay of Pigs operation to the advertising and public-relations firm of J. Walter Thompson." 
The road to war in Iraq led through many unlikely places. One of them was a chic hotel nestled among the strip bars and brothels that cater to foreigners in the town of Pattaya, on the Gulf of Thailand.
On December 17th, 2001, in a small room within the sound of the crashing tide, a CIA officer attached metal electrodes to the ring and index fingers of a man sitting pensively in a padded chair. The officer then stretched a black rubber tube, pleated like an accordion, around the man's chest and another across his abdomen. Finally, he slipped a thick cuff over the man's brachial artery, on the inside of his upper arm.
Strapped to the polygraph machine was Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a forty-three-year-old Iraqi who had fled his homeland in Kurdistan and was now determined to bring down Saddam Hussein. For hours, as thin mechanical styluses traced black lines on rolling graph paper, al-Haideri laid out an explosive tale. Answering yes and no to a series of questions, he insisted repeatedly that he was a civil engineer who had helped Saddam's men to secretly bury tons of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. The illegal arms, according to al-Haideri, were buried in subterranean wells, hidden in private villas, even stashed beneath the Saddam Hussein Hospital, the largest medical facility in Baghdad.
It was damning stuff -- just the kind of evidence the Bush administration was looking for. If the charges were true, they would offer the White House a compelling reason to invade Iraq and depose Saddam. That's why the Pentagon had flown a CIA polygraph expert to Pattaya: to question al-Haideri and confirm, once and for all, that Saddam was secretly stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.
There was only one problem: It was all a lie. After a review of the sharp peaks and deep valleys on the polygraph chart, the intelligence officer concluded that al-Haideri had made up the entire story, apparently in the hopes of securing a visa.
The fabrication might have ended there, the tale of another political refugee trying to scheme his way to a better life. But just because the story wasn't true didn't mean it couldn't be put to good use. Al-Haideri, in fact, was the product of a clandestine operation -- part espionage, part PR campaign -- that had been set up and funded by the CIA and the Pentagon for the express purpose of selling the world a war. And the man who had long been in charge of the marketing was a secretive and mysterious creature of the Washington establishment named John Rendon.
Rendon is a man who fills a need that few people even know exists. Two months before al-Haideri took the lie-detector test, the Pentagon had secretly awarded him a $16 million contract to target Iraq and other adversaries with propaganda. One of the most powerful people in Washington, Rendon is a leader in the strategic field known as "perception management," manipulating information -- and, by extension, the news media -- to achieve the desired result. His firm, the Rendon Group, has made millions off government contracts since 1991, when it was hired by the CIA to help "create the conditions for the removal of Hussein from power." Working under this extraordinary transfer of secret authority, Rendon assembled a group of anti-Saddam militants, personally gave them their name -- the Iraqi National Congress -- and served as their media guru and "senior adviser" as they set out to engineer an uprising against Saddam. It was as if President John F. Kennedy had outsourced the Bay of Pigs operation to the advertising and public-relations firm of J. Walter Thompson.
"They're very closemouthed about what they do," says Kevin McCauley, an editor of the industry trade publication O'Dwyer's PR Daily. "It's all cloak-and-dagger stuff."
Although Rendon denies any direct involvement with al-Haideri, the defector was the latest salvo in a secret media war set in motion by Rendon. In an operation directed by Ahmad Chalabi -- the man Rendon helped install as leader of the INC -- the defector had been brought to Thailand, where he huddled in a hotel room for days with the group's spokesman, Zaab Sethna. The INC routinely coached defectors on their stories, prepping them for polygraph exams, and Sethna was certainly up to the task -- he got his training in the art of propaganda on the payroll of the Rendon Group. According to Francis Brooke, the INC's man in Washington and himself a former Rendon employee, the goal of the al-Haideri operation was simple: pressure the United States to attack Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein.
As the CIA official flew back to Washington with failed lie-detector charts in his briefcase, Chalabi and Sethna didn't hesitate. They picked up the phone, called two journalists who had a long history of helping the INC promote its cause and offered them an exclusive on Saddam's terrifying cache of WMDs.
For the worldwide broadcast rights, Sethna contacted Paul Moran, an Australian freelancer who frequently worked for the Australian Broadcasting Corp. "I think I've got something that you would be interested in," he told Moran, who was living in Bahrain. Sethna knew he could count on the trim, thirty-eight-year-old journalist: A former INC employee in the Middle East, Moran had also been on Rendon's payroll for years in "information operations," working with Sethna at the company's London office on Catherine Place, near Buckingham Palace.
"We were trying to help the Kurds and the Iraqis opposed to Saddam set up a television station," Sethna recalled in a rare interview broadcast on Australian television. "The Rendon Group came to us and said, 'We have a contract to kind of do anti-Saddam propaganda on behalf of the Iraqi opposition.' What we didn't know -- what the Rendon Group didn't tell us -- was in fact it was the CIA that had hired them to do this work."
The INC's choice for the worldwide print exclusive was equally easy: Chalabi contacted Judith Miller of The New York Times. Miller, who was close to I. Lewis Libby and other neoconservatives in the Bush administration, had been a trusted outlet for the INC's anti-Saddam propaganda for years. Not long after the CIA polygraph expert slipped the straps and electrodes off al-Haideri and declared him a liar, Miller flew to Bangkok to interview him under the watchful supervision of his INC handlers. Miller later made perfunctory calls to the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, but despite her vaunted intelligence sources, she claimed not to know about the results of al-Haideri's lie-detector test. Instead, she reported that unnamed "government experts" called his information "reliable and significant" -- thus adding a veneer of truth to the lies.
Her front-page story, which hit the stands on December 20th, 2001, was exactly the kind of exposure Rendon had been hired to provide. AN IRAQI DEFECTOR TELLS OF WORK ON AT LEAST 20 HIDDEN WEAPONS SITES, declared the headline. "An Iraqi defector who described himself as a civil engineer," Miller wrote, "said he personally worked on renovations of secret facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in underground wells, private villas and under the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad as recently as a year ago." If verified, she noted, "his allegations would provide ammunition to officials within the Bush administration who have been arguing that Mr. Hussein should be driven from power partly because of his unwillingness to stop making weapons of mass destruction, despite his pledges to do so."
For months, hawks inside and outside the administration had been pressing for a pre-emptive attack on Iraq. Now, thanks to Miller's story, they could point to "proof" of Saddam's "nuclear threat." The story, reinforced by Moran's on-camera interview with al-Haideri on the giant Australian Broadcasting Corp., was soon being trumpeted by the White House and repeated by newspapers and television networks around the world. It was the first in a long line of hyped and fraudulent stories that would eventually propel the U.S. into a war with Iraq -- the first war based almost entirely on a covert propaganda campaign targeting the media.
By law, the Bush administration is expressly prohibited from disseminating government propaganda at home. But in an age of global communications, there is nothing to stop it from planting a phony pro-war story overseas -- knowing with certainty that it will reach American citizens almost instantly. A recent congressional report suggests that the Pentagon may be relying on "covert psychological operations affecting audiences within friendly nations." In a "secret amendment" to Pentagon policy, the report warns, "psyops funds might be used to publish stories favorable to American policies, or hire outside contractors without obvious ties to the Pentagon to organize rallies in support of administration policies." The report also concludes that military planners are shifting away from the Cold War view that power comes from superior weapons systems. Instead, the Pentagon now believes that "combat power can be enhanced by communications networks and technologies that control access to, and directly manipulate, information. As a result, information itself is now both a tool and a target of warfare."
It is a belief John Rendon encapsulated in a speech to cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1996. "I am not a national-security strategist or a military tactician," he declared. "I am a politician, a person who uses communication to meet public-policy or corporate-policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior and a perception manager." To explain his philosophy, Rendon paraphrased a journalist he knew from his days as a staffer on the presidential campaigns of George McGovern and Jimmy Carter: "This is probably best described in the words of Hunter S. Thompson, when he wrote, 'When things turn weird, the weird turn pro.'"
John Walter Rendon Jr. rises at 3 a.m. each morning after six hours of sleep, turns on his Apple computer and begins ingesting information -- overnight news reports, e-mail messages, foreign and domestic newspapers, and an assortment of government documents. According to Pentagon documents obtained by Rolling Stone, the Rendon Group is authorized "to research and analyze information classified up to Top Secret/SCI/SI/TK/G/HCS" -- an extraordinarily high level of clearance granted to only a handful of defense contractors. "SCI" stands for Sensitive Compartmented Information, data classified higher than Top Secret. "SI" is Special Intelligence, very secret communications intercepted by the National Security Agency. "TK" refers to Talent/Keyhole, code names for imagery from reconnaissance aircraft and spy satellites. "G" stands for Gamma (communications intercepts from extremely sensitive sources) and "HCS" means Humint Control System (information from a very sensitive human source). Taken together, the acronyms indicate that Rendon enjoys access to the most secret information from all three forms of intelligence collection: eavesdropping, imaging satellites and human spies.
Rendon lives in a multimillion-dollar home in Washington's exclusive Kalorama neighborhood. A few doors down from Rendon is the home of former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara; just around the corner lives current Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. At fifty-six, Rendon wears owlish glasses and combs his thick mane of silver-gray hair to the side, Kennedy-style. He heads to work each morning clad in a custom-made shirt with his monogram on the right cuff and a sharply tailored blue blazer that hangs loose around his bulky frame. By the time he pulls up to the Rendon Group's headquarters near Dupont Circle, he has already racked up a handsome fee for the morning's work: According to federal records, Rendon charges the CIA and the Pentagon $311.26 an hour for his services.
Rendon is one of the most influential of the private contractors in Washington who are increasingly taking over jobs long reserved for highly trained CIA employees. In recent years, spies-for-hire have begun to replace regional desk officers, who control clandestine operations around the world; watch officers at the agency's twenty-four-hour crisis center; analysts, who sift through reams of intelligence data; and even counterintelligence officers in the field, who oversee meetings between agents and their recruited spies. According to one senior administration official involved in intelligence-budget decisions, half of the CIA's work is now performed by private contractors -- people completely unaccountable to Congress. Another senior budget official acknowledges privately that lawmakers have no idea how many rent-a-spies the CIA currently employs -- or how much unchecked power they enjoy.
Unlike many newcomers to the field, however, Rendon is a battle-tested veteran who has been secretly involved in nearly every American shooting conflict in the past two decades. In the first interview he has granted in decades, Rendon offered a peek through the keyhole of this seldom-seen world of corporate spooks -- a rarefied but growing profession. Over a dinner of lamb chops and a bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape at a private Washington club, Rendon was guarded about the details of his clandestine work -- but he boasted openly of the sweep and importance of his firm's efforts as a for-profit spy. "We've worked in ninety-one countries," he said. "Going all the way back to Panama, we've been involved in every war, with the exception of Somalia."
It is an unusual career twist for someone who entered politics as an opponent of the Vietnam War. The son of a stockbroker, Rendon grew up in New Jersey and stumped for McGovern before graduating from Northeastern University. "I was the youngest state coordinator," he recalls. "I had Maine. They told me that I understood politics -- which was a stretch, being so young." Rendon, who went on to serve as executive director of the Democratic National Committee, quickly mastered the combination of political skulduggery and media manipulation that would become his hallmark. In 1980, as the manager of Jimmy Carter's troops at the national convention in New York, he was sitting alone in the bleachers at Madison Square Garden when a reporter for ABC News approached him. "They actually did a little piece about the man behind the curtain," Rendon says. "A Wizard of Oz thing." It was a role he would end up playing for the rest of his life.
After Carter lost the election and the hard-right Reagan revolutionaries came to power in 1981, Rendon went into business with his younger brother Rick. "Everybody started consulting," he recalls. "We started consulting." They helped elect John Kerry to the Senate in 1984 and worked for the AFL-CIO to mobilize the union vote for Walter Mondale's presidential campaign. Among the items Rendon produced was a training manual for union organizers to operate as political activists on behalf of Mondale. To keep the operation quiet, Rendon stamped CONFIDENTIAL on the cover of each of the blue plastic notebooks. It was a penchant for secrecy that would soon pervade all of his consulting deals.
To a large degree, the Rendon Group is a family affair. Rendon's wife, Sandra Libby, handles the books as chief financial officer and "senior communications strategist." Rendon's brother Rick serves as senior partner and runs the company's Boston office, producing public-service announcements for the Whale Conservation Institute and coordinating Empower Peace, a campaign that brings young people in the Middle East in contact with American kids through video-conferencing technology. But the bulk of the company's business is decidedly less liberal and peace oriented. Rendon's first experience in the intelligence world, in fact, came courtesy of the Republicans. "Panama," he says, "brought us into the national-security environment."
In 1989, shortly after his election, President George H.W. Bush signed a highly secret "finding" authorizing the CIA to funnel $10 million to opposition forces in Panama to overthrow Gen. Manuel Noriega. Reluctant to involve agency personnel directly, the CIA turned to the Rendon Group. Rendon's job was to work behind the scenes, using a variety of campaign and psychological techniques to put the CIA's choice, Guillermo Endara, into the presidential palace. Cash from the agency, laundered through various bank accounts and front organizations, would end up in Endara's hands, who would then pay Rendon.
A heavyset, fifty-three-year-old corporate attorney with little political experience, Endara was running against Noriega's handpicked choice, Carlos Duque. With Rendon's help, Endara beat Duque decisively at the polls -- but Noriega simply named himself "Maximum Leader" and declared the election null and void. The Bush administration then decided to remove Noriega by force -- and Rendon's job shifted from generating local support for a national election to building international support for regime change. Within days he had found the ultimate propaganda tool.
At the end of a rally in support of Endara, a band of Noriega's Dignity Battalion -- nicknamed "Dig Bats" and called "Doberman thugs" by Bush -- attacked the crowd with wooden planks, metal pipes and guns. Gang members grabbed the bodyguard of Guillermo Ford, one of Endara's vice-presidential candidates, pushed him against a car, shoved a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. With cameras snapping, the Dig Bats turned on Ford, batting his head with a spike-tipped metal rod and pounding him with heavy clubs, turning his white guayabera bright red with blood -- his own, and that of his dead bodyguard.
Within hours, Rendon made sure the photos reached every newsroom in the world. The next week an image of the violence made the cover of Time magazine with the caption POLITICS PANAMA STYLE: NORIEGA BLUDGEONS HIS OPPOSITION, AND THE U.S. TURNS UP THE HEAT. To further boost international support for Endara, Rendon escorted Ford on a tour of Europe to meet British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the Italian prime minister and even the pope. In December 1989, when Bush decided to invade Panama, Rendon and several of his employees were on one of the first military jets headed to Panama City.
"I arrived fifteen minutes before it started," Rendon recalls. "My first impression is having the pilot in the plane turn around and say, 'Excuse me, sir, but if you look off to the left you'll see the attack aircraft circling before they land.' Then I remember this major saying, 'Excuse me, sir, but do you know what the air-defense capability of Panama is at the moment?' I leaned into the cockpit and said, 'Look, major, I hope by now that's no longer an issue.'"
Moments later, Rendon's plane landed at Howard Air Force Base in Panama. "I needed to get to Fort Clayton, which was where the president was," he says. "I was choppered over -- and we took some rounds on the way." There, on a U.S. military base surrounded by 24,000 U.S. troops, heavy tanks and Combat Talon AC-130 gunships, Rendon's client, Endara, was at last sworn in as president of Panama.
Rendon's involvement in the campaign to oust Saddam Hussein began seven months later, in July 1990. Rendon had taken time out for a vacation -- a long train ride across Scotland -- when he received an urgent call. "Soldiers are massing at the border outside of Kuwait," he was told. At the airport, he watched the beginning of the Iraqi invasion on television. Winging toward Washington in the first-class cabin of a Pan Am 747, Rendon spent the entire flight scratching an outline of his ideas in longhand on a yellow legal pad.
"I wrote a memo about what the Kuwaitis were going to face, and I based it on our experience in Panama and the experience of the Free French operation in World War II," Rendon says. "This was something that they needed to see and hear, and that was my whole intent. Go over, tell the Kuwaitis, 'Here's what you've got -- here's some observations, here's some recommendations, live long and prosper.'"
Back in Washington, Rendon immediately called Hamilton Jordan, the former chief of staff to President Carter and an old friend from his Democratic Party days. "He put me in touch with the Saudis, the Saudis put me in touch with the Kuwaitis and then I went over and had a meeting with the Kuwaitis," Rendon recalls. "And by the time I landed back in the United States, I got a phone call saying, 'Can you come back? We want you to do what's in the memo.'"
What the Kuwaitis wanted was help in selling a war of liberation to the American government -- and the American public. Rendon proposed a massive "perception management" campaign designed to convince the world of the need to join forces to rescue Kuwait. The Kuwaiti government in exile agreed to pay Rendon $100,000 a month for his assistance.
To coordinate the operation, Rendon opened an office in London. Once the Gulf War began, he remained extremely busy trying to prevent the American press from reporting on the dark side of the Kuwaiti government, an autocratic oil-tocracy ruled by a family of wealthy sheiks. When newspapers began reporting that many Kuwaitis were actually living it up in nightclubs in Cairo as Americans were dying in the Kuwaiti sand, the Rendon Group quickly counterattacked. Almost instantly, a wave of articles began appearing telling the story of grateful Kuwaitis mailing 20,000 personally signed valentines to American troops on the front lines, all arranged by Rendon.
Rendon also set up an elaborate television and radio network, and developed programming that was beamed into Kuwait from Taif, Saudi Arabia. "It was important that the Kuwaitis in occupied Kuwait understood that the rest of the world was doing something," he says. Each night, Rendon's troops in London produced a script and sent it via microwave to Taif, ensuring that the "news" beamed into Kuwait reflected a sufficiently pro-American line.
When it comes to staging a war, few things are left to chance. After Iraq withdrew from Kuwait, it was Rendon's responsibility to make the victory march look like the flag-waving liberation of France after World War II. "Did you ever stop to wonder," he later remarked, "how the people of Kuwait City, after being held hostage for seven long and painful months, were able to get hand-held American -- and, for that matter, the flags of other coalition countries?" After a pause, he added, "Well, you now know the answer. That was one of my jobs then."
Although his work is highly secret, Rendon insists he deals only in "timely, truthful and accurate information." His job, he says, is to counter false perceptions that the news media perpetuate because they consider it "more important to be first than to be right." In modern warfare, he believes, the outcome depends largely on the public's perception of the war -- whether it is winnable, whether it is worth the cost. "We are being haunted and stalked by the difference between perception and reality," he says. "Because the lines are divergent, this difference between perception and reality is one of the greatest strategic communications challenges of war."
By the time the Gulf War came to a close in 1991, the Rendon Group was firmly established as Washington's leading salesman for regime change. But Rendon's new assignment went beyond simply manipulating the media. After the war ended, the Top Secret order signed by President Bush to oust Hussein included a rare "lethal finding" -- meaning deadly action could be taken if necessary. Under contract to the CIA, Rendon was charged with helping to create a dissident force with the avowed purpose of violently overthrowing the entire Iraqi government. It is an undertaking that Rendon still considers too classified to discuss. "That's where we're wandering into places I'm not going to talk about," he says. "If you take an oath, it should mean something."
Thomas Twetten, the CIA's former deputy of operations, credits Rendon with virtually creating the INC. "The INC was clueless," he once observed. "They needed a lot of help and didn't know where to start. That is why Rendon was brought in." Acting as the group's senior adviser and aided by truckloads of CIA dollars, Rendon pulled together a wide spectrum of Iraqi dissidents and sponsored a conference in Vienna to organize them into an umbrella organization, which he dubbed the Iraqi National Congress. Then, as in Panama, his assignment was to help oust a brutal dictator and replace him with someone chosen by the CIA. "The reason they got the contract was because of what they had done in Panama -- so they were known," recalls Whitley Bruner, former chief of the CIA's station in Baghdad. This time the target was Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the agency's successor of choice was Ahmad Chalabi, a crafty, avuncular Iraqi exile beloved by Washington's neoconservatives.
Chalabi was a curious choice to lead a rebellion. In 1992, he was convicted in Jordan of making false statements and embezzling $230 million from his own bank, for which he was sentenced in absentia to twenty-two years of hard labor. But the only credential that mattered was his politics. "From day one," Rendon says, "Chalabi was very clear that his biggest interest was to rid Iraq of Saddam." Bruner, who dealt with Chalabi and Rendon in London in 1991, puts it even more bluntly. "Chalabi's primary focus," he said later, "was to drag us into a war."
The key element of Rendon's INC operation was a worldwide media blitz designed to turn Hussein, a once dangerous but now contained regional leader, into the greatest threat to world peace. Each month, $326,000 was passed from the CIA to the Rendon Group and the INC via various front organizations. Rendon profited handsomely, receiving a "management fee" of ten percent above what it spent on the project. According to some reports, the company made nearly $100 million on the contract during the five years following the Gulf War.
Rendon made considerable headway with the INC, but following the group's failed coup attempt against Saddam in 1996, the CIA lost confidence in Chalabi and cut off his monthly paycheck. But Chalabi and Rendon simply switched sides, moving over to the Pentagon, and the money continued to flow. "The Rendon Group is not in great odor in Langley these days," notes Bruner. "Their contracts are much more with the Defense Department."
Rendon's influence rose considerably in Washington after the terrorist attacks of September 11th. In a single stroke, Osama bin Laden altered the world's perception of reality -- and in an age of nonstop information, whoever controls perception wins. What Bush needed to fight the War on Terror was a skilled information warrior -- and Rendon was widely acknowledged as the best. "The events of 11 September 2001 changed everything, not least of which was the administration's outlook concerning strategic influence," notes one Army report. "Faced with direct evidence that many people around the world actively hated the United States, Bush began taking action to more effectively explain U.S. policy overseas. Initially the White House and DoD turned to the Rendon Group."
Three weeks after the September 11th attacks, according to documents obtained from defense sources, the Pentagon awarded a large contract to the Rendon Group. Around the same time, Pentagon officials also set up a highly secret organization called the Office of Strategic Influence. Part of the OSI's mission was to conduct covert disinformation and deception operations -- planting false news items in the media and hiding their origins. "It's sometimes valuable from a military standpoint to be able to engage in deception with respect to future anticipated plans," Vice President Dick Cheney said in explaining the operation. Even the military's top brass found the clandestine unit unnerving. "When I get their briefings, it's scary," a senior official said at the time.
In February 2002, The New York Times reported that the Pentagon had hired Rendon "to help the new office," a charge Rendon denies. "We had nothing to do with that," he says. "We were not in their reporting chain. We were reporting directly to the J-3" -- the head of operations at the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Following the leak, Rumsfeld was forced to shut down the organization. But much of the office's operations were apparently shifted to another unit, deeper in the Pentagon's bureaucracy, called the Information Operations Task Force, and Rendon was closely connected to this group. "Greg Newbold was the J-3 at the time, and we reported to him through the IOTF," Rendon says.
According to the Pentagon documents, the Rendon Group played a major role in the IOTF. The company was charged with creating an "Information War Room" to monitor worldwide news reports at lightning speed and respond almost instantly with counterpropaganda. A key weapon, according to the documents, was Rendon's "proprietary state-of-the-art news-wire collection system called 'Livewire,' which takes real-time news-wire reports, as they are filed, before they are on the Internet, before CNN can read them on the air and twenty-four hours before they appear in the morning newspapers, and sorts them by keyword. The system provides the most current real-time access to news and information available to private or public organizations."
The top target that the pentagon assigned to Rendon was the Al-Jazeera television network. The contract called for the Rendon Group to undertake a massive "media mapping" campaign against the news organization, which the Pentagon considered "critical to U.S. objectives in the War on Terrorism." According to the contract, Rendon would provide a "detailed content analysis of the station's daily broadcast . . . [and] identify the biases of specific journalists and potentially obtain an understanding of their allegiances, including the possibility of specific relationships and sponsorships."
The secret targeting of foreign journalists may have had a sinister purpose. Among the missions proposed for the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence was one to "coerce" foreign journalists and plant false information overseas. Secret briefing papers also said the office should find ways to "punish" those who convey the "wrong message." One senior officer told CNN that the plan would "formalize government deception, dishonesty and misinformation."
According to the Pentagon documents, Rendon would use his media analysis to conduct a worldwide propaganda campaign, deploying teams of information warriors to allied nations to assist them "in developing and delivering specific messages to the local population, combatants, front-line states, the media and the international community." Among the places Rendon's info-war teams would be sent were Jakarta, Indonesia; Islamabad, Pakistan; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Cairo; Ankara, Turkey; and Tashkent, Uzbekistan. The teams would produce and script television news segments "built around themes and story lines supportive of U.S. policy objectives."
Rendon was also charged with engaging in "military deception" online -- an activity once assigned to the OSI. The company was contracted to monitor Internet chat rooms in both English and Arabic -- and "participate in these chat rooms when/if tasked." Rendon would also create a Web site "with regular news summaries and feature articles. Targeted at the global public, in English and at least four (4) additional languages, this activity also will include an extensive e-mail push operation." These techniques are commonly used to plant a variety of propaganda, including false information.
Still another newly formed propaganda operation in which Rendon played a major part was the Office of Global Communications, which operated out of the White House and was charged with spreading the administration's message on the War in Iraq. Every morning at 9:30, Rendon took part in the White House OGC conference call, where officials would discuss the theme of the day and who would deliver it. The office also worked closely with the White House Iraq Group, whose high-level members, including recently indicted Cheney chief of staff Lewis Libby, were responsible for selling the war to the American public.
Never before in history had such an extensive secret network been established to shape the entire world's perception of a war. "It was not just bad intelligence -- it was an orchestrated effort," says Sam Gardner, a retired Air Force colonel who has taught strategy and military operations at the National War College. "It began before the war, was a major effort during the war and continues as post-conflict distortions."
In the first weeks following the September 11th attacks, Rendon operated at a frantic pitch. "In the early stages it was fielding every ground ball that was coming, because nobody was sure if we were ever going to be attacked again," he says. "It was 'What do you know about this, what do you know about that, what else can you get, can you talk to somebody over here?' We functioned twenty-four hours a day. We maintained situational awareness, in military terms, on all things related to terrorism. We were doing 195 newspapers and 43 countries in fourteen or fifteen languages. If you do this correctly, I can tell you what's on the evening news tonight in a country before it happens. I can give you, as a policymaker, a six-hour break on how you can affect what's going to be on the news. They'll take that in a heartbeat."
The Bush administration took everything Rendon had to offer. Between 2000 and 2004, Pentagon documents show, the Rendon Group received at least thirty-five contracts with the Defense Department, worth a total of $50 million to $100 million.
The mourners genuflected, made the sign of the cross and took their seats along the hard, shiny pews of Our Lady of Victories Catholic Church. It was April 2nd, 2003 -- the start of fall in the small Australian town of Glenelg, an aging beach resort of white Victorian homes and soft, blond sand on Holdback Bay. Rendon had flown halfway around the world to join nearly 600 friends and family who were gathered to say farewell to a local son and amateur football champ, Paul Moran. Three days into the invasion of Iraq, the freelance journalist and Rendon employee had become the first member of the media to be killed in the war -- a war he had covertly helped to start.
Moran had lived a double life, filing reports for the Australian Broadcasting Corp. and other news organizations, while at other times operating as a clandestine agent for Rendon, enjoying what his family calls his "James Bond lifestyle." Moran had trained Iraqi opposition forces in photographic espionage, showing them how to covertly document Iraqi military activities, and had produced pro-war announcements for the Pentagon. "He worked for the Rendon Group in London," says his mother, Kathleen. "They just send people all over the world -- where there are wars."
Moran was covering the Iraq invasion for ABC, filming at a Kurdish-controlled checkpoint in the city of Sulaymaniyah, when a car driven by a suicide bomber blew up next to him. "I saw the car in a kind of slow-motion disintegrate," recalls Eric Campbell, a correspondent who was filming with Moran. "A soldier handed me a passport, which was charred. That's when I knew Paul was dead."
As the Mass ended and Moran's Australian-flag-draped coffin passed by the mourners, Rendon lifted his right arm and saluted. He refused to discuss Moran's role in the company, saying only that "Paul worked for us on a number of projects." But on the long flight back to Washington, across more than a dozen time zones, Rendon outlined his feelings in an e-mail: "The day did begin with dark and ominous clouds much befitting the emotions we all felt -- sadness and anger at the senseless violence that claimed our comrade Paul Moran ten short days ago and many decades of emotion ago."
The Rendon Group also organized a memorial service in London, where Moran first went to work for the company in 1990. Held at Home House, a private club in Portman Square where Moran often stayed while visiting the city, the event was set among photographs of Moran in various locations around the Middle East. Zaab Sethna, who organized the al-Haideri media exclusive in Thailand for Moran and Judith Miller, gave a touching tribute to his former colleague. "I think that on both a personal and professional level Paul was deeply admired and loved by the people at the Rendon Group," Sethna later said.
Although Moran was gone, the falsified story about weapons of mass destruction that he and Sethna had broadcast around the world lived on. Seven months earlier, as President Bush was about to argue his case for war before the U.N., the White House had given prominent billing to al-Haideri's fabricated charges. In a report ironically titled "Iraq: Denial and Deception," the administration referred to al-Haideri by name and detailed his allegations -- even though the CIA had already determined them to be lies. The report was placed on the White House Web site on September 12th, 2002, and remains there today. One version of the report even credits Miller's article for the information.
Miller also continued to promote al-Haideri's tale of Saddam's villainy. In January 2003, more than a year after her first article appeared, Miller again reported that Pentagon "intelligence officials" were telling her that "some of the most valuable information has come from Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri." His interviews with the Defense Intelligence Agency, Miller added, "ultimately resulted in dozens of highly credible reports on Iraqi weapons-related activity and purchases, officials said."
Finally, in early 2004, more than two years after he made the dramatic allegations to Miller and Moran about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, al-Haideri was taken back to Iraq by the CIA's Iraq Survey Group. On a wide-ranging trip through Baghdad and other key locations, al-Haideri was given the opportunity to point out exactly where Saddam's stockpiles were hidden, confirming the charges that had helped to start a war.
In the end, he could not identify a single site where illegal weapons were buried.
As the war in Iraq has spiraled out of control, the Bush administration's covert propaganda campaign has intensified. According to a secret Pentagon report personally approved by Rumsfeld in October 2003 and obtained by Rolling Stone, the Strategic Command is authorized to engage in "military deception" -- defined as "presenting false information, images or statements." The seventy-four-page document, titled "Information Operations Roadmap," also calls for psychological operations to be launched over radio, television, cell phones and "emerging technologies" such as the Internet. In addition to being classified secret, the road map is also stamped noforn, meaning it cannot be shared even with our allies.
As the acknowledged general of such propaganda warfare, Rendon insists that the work he does is for the good of all Americans. "For us, it's a question of patriotism," he says. "It's not a question of politics, and that's an important distinction. I feel very strongly about that personally. If brave men and women are going to be put in harm's way, they deserve support." But in Iraq, American troops and Iraqi civilians were put in harm's way, in large part, by the false information spread by Rendon and the men he trained in information warfare. And given the rapid growth of what is known as the "security-intelligence complex" in Washington, covert perception managers are likely to play an increasingly influential role in the wars of the future.
Indeed, Rendon is already thinking ahead. Last year, he attended a conference on information operations in London, where he offered an assessment on the Pentagon's efforts to manipulate the media. According to those present, Rendon applauded the practice of embedding journalists with American forces. "He said the embedded idea was great," says an Air Force colonel who attended the talk. "It worked as they had found in the test. It was the war version of reality television, and for the most part they did not lose control of the story." But Rendon also cautioned that individual news organizations were often able to "take control of the story," shaping the news before the Pentagon asserted its spin on the day's events.
"We lost control of the context," Rendon warned. "That has to be fixed for the next war."
James Bamford is the best-selling author of "A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies" (2004) and "Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency" (2001). This is his first article for Rolling Stone. |
|
By YOCHI J. DREAZEN and JOHN D. MCKINNON
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
December 28, 2005
WASHINGTON -- The television commercials are attention-grabbing: Newly found Iraqi documents show that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, including anthrax and mustard gas, and had "extensive ties" to al Qaeda. The discoveries are being covered up by those "willing to undermine support for the war on terrorism to selfishly advance their shameless political ambitions."
The hard-hitting spots are part of a recent public-relations barrage aimed at reversing a decline in public support for President Bush's handling of Iraq. But these advertisements aren't paid for by the Republican National Committee or other established White House allies. Instead, they are sponsored by Move America Forward, a media-savvy outside advocacy group that has become one of the loudest -- and most controversial -- voices in the Iraq debate.
While even Mr. Bush now publicly acknowledges the mistakes his administration made in judging the threat posed by Mr. Hussein, the organization is taking to the airwaves to insist that the White House was right all along. Similar to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth -- the advocacy group that helped derail John Kerry's presidential campaign -- Move America Forward has magnified its reach by making small television and radio ad buys and then relying on cable - and local-television news outlets to give the commercials heavy coverage. Move America Forward has no discernible formal ties to the White House or the Republican National Committee, and the group says it operates independently from the Republican Party establishment. Still, the organization provides a clear benefit to the administration by spreading a pro-war message that goes beyond what administration officials can say publicly.
The effect of the ads hasn't been measured. Amid a simultaneous flurry of speeches by the president and a ramped-up RNC effort aimed at boosting the war, polls show that Mr. Bush's job-approval ratings, specifically his handling of the Iraq situation, have risen this month from all-time lows.
"The White House has really done a poor job of getting the message out, which is why we've had to step into the breach," says California-based Republican political strategist Sal Russo, one of the group's three founders. "They should do a better job of coordinating with those willing to get out and tell the story. We shouldn't be the only ones out here fighting."
The White House didn't return several calls seeking comment. A Republican National Committee spokesman declined to comment.
Move America Forward has raised more than $1 million, mainly in small donations, over the past two years. The group grew out of the successful 2003 effort to recall Democratic California Gov. Gray Davis. It was officially founded in 2004 by Mr. Russo, whose company provides office space for the organization; Melanie Morgan, a conservative San Francisco radio host; and Howard Kaloogian, a Republican former state assemblyman seeking the congressional seat of former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, who resigned recently after admitting to taking bribes from defense contractors.
One of their early efforts was a campaign supporting John Bolton's contentious nomination as United Nations ambassador. Another involved backing U.S. detention policies at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, by selling "I [Heart] Gitmo" bumper stickers.
When the White House was caught flat-footed this summer by the emergence of Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a fallen soldier turned vocal administration critic, Move America Forward sent pro-war protesters to her camp in Texas and mounted a parallel bus tour of war supporters that culminated in a large rally in Washington. The counter-Sheehan campaign showed how the organization has raised its profile by staging well-publicized rallies and public events that attract substantial media coverage, even if the number of participants is relatively low.
In July, with the administration facing a torrent of negative media coverage of the war in Iraq, Move America Forward sent five conservative radio-talk-show hosts to U.S. military bases in Baghdad for a week of upbeat broadcasts. Ms. Morgan says that, during her time in Iraq, she rode up and down the so-called highway of death leading from Baghdad's airport seven times to prove to her listeners that it wasn't as dangerous as media reports suggested.
In addition to his Iraq political work in the U.S., Mr. Russo has an open-ended political-advertising contract with the Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq for whom he produces advertisements that run in the U.S. seeking investment in Kurdistan. Some critics accuse him of having a vested financial interest in prolonging the U.S. presence there.
Liberals question how the group has maintained its status as a tax-exempt nonprofit organization, which requires strict nonpartisanship, given the anti-Democratic tone of its campaigns. The group's Web site, www.moveamericaforward.org, for example, attacks the current chairman of the Democratic National Committee, referring to "Howard Dean types who only see a future of failure for this country."
"When you have people participating in partisan activities with nonprofit dollars, that's really something the IRS needs to look at," says Tom Matzzie, the Washington director of the liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org, another frequent target for Move America Forward's rhetoric. "An organization with a shady tax status participating in partisan activities and saying things that aren't true is a rogue element in American politics."
An Internal Revenue Service spokeswoman declined to address the issue, saying that it is agency policy not to "comment on individual taxpayers or organizations." MoveOn is a "political action committee," meaning its donations aren't tax-deductible and must be disclosed.
Move America Forward officials acknowledge that the group's leadership is conservative, but insist they are nonpartisan and point out that the organization also has criticized Republicans. They say that the organization has no connections to the Bush administration or the Republican Party and has been unable to get meetings with White House personnel. And they say there is no conflict between the organization's advocacy work and Mr. Russo's financial ties to the Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq.
"If you consider being pro-America and pro-troop to be Republican, then we'll proudly take that label," Ms. Morgan says. "But we've never been embraced by the White House or made part of a secret-right wing conspiracy."
Indeed, Ms. Morgan says she is baffled that the White House no longer makes the case that Mr. Hussein had WMDs. The White House dropped the claims after a variety of investigators found no evidence to substantiate them. But Ms. Morgan says her ads are justified, based on documents given to her in Iraq by an Iraqi general she identified as Abdul Qader Jassim, and on information from U.S. officials involved in the hunt for weapons there. She believes Mr. Hussein possessed WMDs, and that those weapons remain in Iraq today. It couldn't be ascertained that Mr. Jassim is a general and he couldn't be reached for comment.
The organization has kept up a steady drumbeat of pro-military and pro-war commercials in recent weeks. Its newest radio ads, timed to the holiday season, feature parents of service people killed in Iraq or on their way back to the country. In one spot, a woman described as military parent Deborah Johns observes that the "the terrorists know they can not defeat our military -- they can only win by beating down the morale of the American people."
Several Move America Forward officials hope to participate in the Iraq debate more actively than through mere advocacy. Mr. Kaloogian has an early fund-raising lead in the crowded field of Republicans hoping to succeed Mr. Cunningham, the former U.S. representative who resigned after admitting taking bribes. And Move America Forward Executive Director Robert Dixon, furious over a recent troop withdrawal resolution passed by the Sacramento City Council, is weighing a run for a seat in the hopes of getting the declaration reversed.
Write to Yochi J. Dreazen at yochi.dreazen@wsj.com and John D. McKinnon at john.mckinnon@wsj.com |
|
James Petras
December 26, 2005
It is commonplace to read each day in the most prestigious newspapers (Financial Times, New York Times, London Times, Washington Post) of Israeli “retaliation”. The reportage frequently mentions a Palestinian attack on an Israeli colonial settlement in the West Bank or urban population center in Israel. The action and reaction always is located in a limited time frame. Palestinian action is always the initial moment and the Israeli military attack is always described as a response or “retaliatory” and therefore, presumably a form of defensive action, “justifiable”.
Thus what appears as objective reportage on two sets of military actions, is in fact an arbitrary selection of time frames which lays the basis for a highly biased interpretive framework. The pro-Israeli tilt, evident in the chosen time sequence, and the framework, are derived from the general ideological argument which portrays Israel as a democracy, defending itself from Arab-Muslim terrorists and not an expansionist colonial power engaged in violent ethnic cleansing and large-scale long-term forced population expulsion.
What is absent from the reportage of the prestigious “news” accounts is the sequence of events preceding the Palestinian attacks. Here we are likely to find a series of Israeli military incursions, bombings and killing of non-combatants, summary executions of political prisoners, as well as arbitrary arrests, home demolitions and illegal (even by colonial standards) land seizures. An examination of readily available, well-documented weekly reports by Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), throws a wholly different light on the context and framework for understanding the sequence of events and, equally important, the nature and goals of the Israeli state.
For the week of December 8-14, 2005, the PCHR recorded:
- 10 Palestinians killed by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) of which 7 of victims were extra-judicially executed by the IOF in the Gaza Strip.
- 34 Palestinian civilians, including 17 children were wounded by the IOF.
- IOF attacked civilian targets in the Gaza Strip
- IOF conducted 40 incursions into Palestinian communities in the West Bank
- Houses were raided and 91 Palestinian civilians; including, university professors, parliamentary candidates and 4 children were arrested.
- The closure of the Moslem Youth Association in Hebron for 2 years
- A Palestinian house was seized, its occupants evicted and it was transformed into an IOF military site.
- IOF continued a total siege on the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) and imposed severe restrictions on the movement of Palestinian civilians in the West Bank.
- IOF arrested 12 Palestinian civilians, including 6 children, at various checkpoints in the West Bank.
- IOF used rubber-coated metal bullets to disperse peaceful demonstrations protesting the Annexation Wall wounding a child and 6 demonstrators.
- Israeli settlers continued to attack Palestinian civilians and property in the OPT, while the IOF confiscated land from several Palestinian villages, near Bethlehem, Hebron and Jerusalem evicting 30 Palestinian families.
In this context Palestinian military actions are clearly defensive of community, family and livelihood.
A survey of previous reports covering 2005, indicates that the data for the week of December 8-14, 2005 was fairly representative of Israeli activity. If we were to multiply the weekly findings by years: 52 X 5 X military assaults???? We would capture the magnitude of Israeli offensive military action. The overwhelming evidence, both in terms of scale, scope and time frame of Israeli military attacks clearly points to persistent Israeli offensive activities linked to territorial expansion, colonial oppression and ethnic cleansing.
The indiscriminant attacks on civilians and children, the systematic destruction and blockage of essential transportation and travel routes, and the vigorous application of policies of collective guilt (arresting family members of suspected guerrillas, the blowing up of family homes of suspects) have everything to do with destroying the basis of economic activity, the social fabric of civil society and family networks.
The empirical evidence provides the basis for concluding that Israeli military attacks on Palestinians, by their systematic and continuous nature, are not retaliatory; they are clearly detonators of Palestinian military responses. Israelis are not victims rather victimizers, as it evident from a multiplicity of actions: seizing homes, land, prisoners, transport routes etc. The initiative and design of the Israeli actions are directed at intimidating and impoverishing Palestinians and ultimately forcing them to abandon their country to achieve the goal of a “pure Jewish state” based on rabbinically approved “blood ties” not dissimilar from previous racialist clerical regimes.
The respectable media’s constant reiteration of the colonialist “retaliatory” rhetoric can be seen as a propaganda weapon designed to obfuscate Israeli ethnic cleansing and its military expansion, and the underlying racialist-clerical underpinnings of its strategic goal of a pure Jewish state. The media’s choice of works – adjectives and verbs – is part of a cultural war, which is embedded in the structural hegemony of pro-Israeli followers and supporters. |
|
28 Dec 2005
Reuters
BERLIN - A German woman held hostage in Iraq for three weeks believes a group allied to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq, abducted her and yet also set her free.
"I was quite clearly told about whom it concerned, namely a grouping of the Abu Musab al-Zarqawi group," Susanne Osthoff said in an interview conducted by German public television station ZDF on Tuesday and broadcast on Wednesday. Zarqawi, who has a $25 million reward offered for his capture, is blamed for a relentless series of attacks, suicide bombings and beheadings in Iraq. His supporters have killed many, if not most, of the people they are known to have abducted.
Groups not allied to him have also kidnapped Westerners and have been more ready to free them in return for ransoms.
Osthoff, speaking from Doha and dressed in a yashmak or black veil covering all but her eyes, did not say why she believed she had been released.
The archaeologist, who converted to Islam and lived in Iraq, was seized heading north from Baghdad on November 25 by gunmen who threatened in a videotape to kill her and her driver unless Germany ended all support for the Iraqi government.
She was freed by December 18 after the intervention of the German government, which has declined to comment on any conditions for her release.
Osthoff, 43, has made it clear she is not rushing back to Germany, but there have been conflicting reports about whether she plans to return to Iraq.
She gave her first interview since her ordeal to Al Jazeera, telling the Arabic station her kidnappers had promised not to hurt her because she was a Muslim. Some German media wrongly referred to her saying she planned to return to Iraq.
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and other leading government figures have strongly urged Osthoff not to go back to Iraq.
Asked by ZDF if it was indeed her intention to head for Iraq, Osthoff replied:
"That's a lie, I have the cassette here ... I have never said that, I wouldn't do so to such a dumb question and it has never been asked by the Arabs."
ZDF broadcast excerpts from the interview, in which Osthoff gives few direct answers and digresses at length.
She ended by thanking former Chancellor
Gerhard Schroeder, who made a televised appeal for her release, but pointedly declined to thank her sister who did the same. |
|
By Richard Wolffe and Holly Bailey
Newsweek
Dec. 28, 2005
It only seems fair to judge someone’s year on their own terms. So in the holiday spirit, it’s worth looking back at President George W. Bush’s 2005 by using the standard he set for himself: the success of liberty. As he explained in his Inaugural Address in January, his second term--and his legacy--depends on spreading democracy and the rule of law around the world. “We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion,” Bush declared on the steps of the Capitol. “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.” That wasn’t just something for future generations to worry about. Just before flying off to Camp David last week, and then his Texas ranch for a holiday, the president summarized his own year in front of the cameras on the South Lawn of the White House. “This has been a year of strong progress toward a freer, more peaceful world, and a prosperous America,” he said before citing the elections in Iraq. “This is an amazing moment in the history of liberty.”
Set aside, for a moment, the question of civil liberties at home--even though the debate has barely begun into why the administration bypassed the courts to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens. Just how amazing was the year in terms of liberty around the world?
One of the administration’s strongest claims to spreading freedom in 2005 was the elections in Egypt. Staging the first multicandidate elections for president, Egypt seemed to support Bush’s thesis that events in Iraq were pushing other countries in the region to edge toward a more democratic future. But Egypt’s severely limited elections (with a handful of approved and constrained opposition parties) failed to live up to the hype. Security forces allegedly fired live ammunition and rubber bullets at voters in recent parliamentary elections, and by year’s end the only half-serious challenger to President Hosni Mubarak was jailed on charges of fraud. Ayman Nour was sentenced to five years of hard labor just two days after Bush declared 2005 to be an amazing year for liberty.
In a statement, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said the United States was “deeply troubled” by Nour’s conviction, saying it threw into doubt “Egypt’s commitment to democracy, freedom and the rule of law.” In his Inaugural Address, Bush said the promotion of democracy was “the urgent requirement of our nation’s security” and promised to use American influence “confidently in freedom’s cause.” One of his first tests in 2006 will be how confident he feels in using American influence (to the tune of $2 billion a year in aid) to promote freedom in Egypt.
In the Palestinian territories, 2005 started out looking like a historic year for democracy. That was the result of Yasir Arafat’s death more than events in Iraq, but the year still began with an extraordinary sight: free presidential elections for the Palestinians. It ended in another extraordinary sight: electoral victories for a terrorist group. Hamas won a series of elections in major towns, mounting a serious challenge to Arafat’s ruling Fatah party ahead of parliamentary elections early next year. Hamas has widespread support for its educational and charitable activities. It also has some popular support for its murderous terrorist operations and its stated goal of destroying Israel. As such, Hamas poses one of the critical tests of Bush’s democracy thesis. Does democracy really help to fight terrorism?
Other countries in the region showed such a glacial movement toward democracy in 2005 that Bush’s timeline for freedom may need to extend another millennium. According to the independent group Freedom House, Saudi Arabia has slightly improved its civil-liberties status. Now it ranks marginally better than countries such as Syria, North Korea and Cuba. Its equals, in terms of political rights and civil liberties, are the dictatorships of Belarus and Zimbabwe.
Of course the greatest advances in democracy have come in Iraq, and the recent parliamentary elections are good reason for Bush and his aides to celebrate 2005. The high turnout, especially among Sunni Arabs, was especially important for democracy to take root in Iraq. The test now is for the Sunnis to accept the final results of those elections, which should be announced this week, as well as their status as a minority group after decades of power under Saddam’s regime. Several thousand Sunni protestors have taken to the streets in recent days to complain about alleged fraud by their Shiite and Kurdish rivals.
The new year will be a critical test of Iraq’s emerging democracy, and its ability to pull a fractured country together. But even if the Shiite majority includes minority Sunnis in government, the new Iraq will test Bush’s thesis in another vital way. The whole premise of the mission in Iraq--and the promotion of freedom--is that a democratic government will help America’s national security. As the president said in his recent TV address, he believes the Iraqi vote “means that America has an ally of growing strength in the fight against terror.”
That may be true when it comes to fighting the insurgents in Iraq. But it’s less clear where an Iraqi government, led by religious Shiite parties, will stand in the broader war on terror--especially when it comes to jihadi groups supported by its neighbor. The new regime in Tehran is most definitely not an American ally in the fight against terror, yet the two main Iraqi Shiite parties have enjoyed decades of support from Iran. Iraq seems unlikely to become an Iranian-style theocracy, or an Iranian satellite state. But it also seems unlikely to join in a “fight against terror” with Iran or Iranian-backed groups.
Bush’s test in 2006 is not just about his commitment to the noble vision of his Inaugural Address. His real challenge is to show that democracy--whether gradual or dramatic--can really be the silver bullet in the war on terror. |
|
28 Dec 2005
AP
Politicians from the left and right today criticised new Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz’s decision to extend Poland’s military mission in Iraq.
Marcinkiewicz announced yesterday that his conservative minority government had asked President Lech Kaczynski to keep Polish troops in Iraq for another year, reversing plans by the previous government to bring them home in January.
Under the plan, Polish forces are to be reduced from nearly 1,500 to 900 in March. But opposition leaders from across the political spectrum condemned the decision.
“This decision overstretches Poles’ patience,” former Defence Minister Jerzy Szmajdzinski was quoted as saying.
Szmajdzinski served in the previous left-wing government, which decided in 2003 to send Polish forces to Iraq.
Another former defence minister, Bronislaw Komorowski of the centre-right Civic Platform, said Poland had fulfilled its obligations in Iraq “110 per cent”.
“I find no justification for our further presence,” he said.
Roman Giertych, the leader of the nationalist League of Polish Families, called for Poland’s withdrawal and said the extension would be “a great strategic mistake”.
The left-leaning daily newspaper Trybuna said Marcinkiewicz’s Cabinet was “driven by servility toward the USA,” and warned that the decision increases threats to Poland and weakens its position in the European Union.
There was no word today on when Kaczynski would make his decision on the troop extension. However, his approval is considered a formality as the new president is politically close to the government. |
|
28 Dec 2005
Reuters
TOKYO - Nearly three-fourths of Japanese voters want the country's troops withdrawn from Iraq within the next six months, a newspaper poll said on Wednesday. Twenty-eight percent of respondents to a poll out by the financial daily Nihon Keizai Shimbun said Japan should pull its troops out immediately. Another 46 percent want the forces withdrawn in the first half of next year "along with the British army and others," the newspaper said.
Just 11 percent said the troops should stay until the United States withdraws its forces, it said.
Japan recently extended to December 2006 the mandate for its 550 troops, who are based in the southern Iraqi town of Samawa.
Media reports have said the government is considering a withdrawal before Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi steps down in September. Koizumi's approval of the mission helped cement his close ties with U.S. President George W. Bush.
With their activities strictly limited by Japan's pacifist constitution, the Japanese troops are carrying out humanitarian and reconstruction tasks such as repairing schools and building roads.
The mission is nevertheless Japan's most dangerous overseas dispatch since World War Two, and the troops rely on British and Australian troops to maintain security in the region.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair said on a lightning visit to Iraq last week that British troops could start leaving Iraq next year. Australia has said its troops will likely stay beyond May.
The Nikkei poll was carried out on Dec. 23 and Dec. 24. |
|
FOCUS News Agency
28.12.2005
Sofia. Bulgarian Minister of Defense Veselin Bliznakov said Tuesday that Bulgarian troops from the International Forces Personnel in Iraq have been pulled out of the country, the Macedonian daily Vest reported. Bliznakov confirmed that the troops of the Bulgarian contingent have left Iraq and are now in Kuwait and added that four soldiers would remain in Iraq until the middle of January 2006 because of transport of equipment. |
|
By: Jim Hightower
28.12.2005
This giant government contractor with tentacles running straight into the White House has previously been caught overcharging U.S. taxpayers and shortchanging U.S. troops for its work in Iraq. But now we learn that Halliburton has been profiting in Iraq by mistreating foreign workers.
By "foreign," I don't mean Iraqis, even though thousands of folks there are desperate for jobs. Instead, I mean impoverished Asian laborers brought by the thousands into Iraq from southern India, Thailand, and the Philippines to work for Halliburton on U.S. bases as cooks, electricians, launderers, custodians, etc. They are mostly 20-somethings, powerless... and exploited. When recruited, most had no idea they were headed for a war zone. Once there, they are branded as TCNs — Third Country Nationals — which is both a derogatory term and an assurance of third class treatment, at best. Their pay is a fraction of what other Halliburton workers get, and their meager paychecks are often several months behind, keeping them in debt and in place. They work 12-hour days and get only one day a month off — without pay.
The TCNs live in cramped trailers jammed end-to-end with bunk beds. They're forbidden to eat with the Americans, nor do they even get to eat the same food — theirs is shipped in from elsewhere and often is cold and tasteless. They cannot use the Internet, the phone center, or the recreation facility. Even though their bases regularly come under attack, TCNs are issued no body armor or helmets.
It's bad enough that Halliburton is doing this at all, but it's far worse that it's doing it under our flag, in our name. What must Iraqis and Asians think as they watch how one of our country's most favored corporations treats workers who are non-white and poor?
To learn more, go to the globalization watchdog group, corpwatch: www.corpwatch.org |
|
H.D.S. Greenway
27.12.2005
Boston Globe
ON ONE level, of course, there is no comparison between America's lost war in Vietnam and the current enterprise in Iraq. After all, Vietnam is in Southeast Asia and Iraq is the Middle East. That conflict was fought in rain forests, this one in desert towns. One was fought by draftees, this one by a volunteer army. The list goes on.
Yet, although the Bush administration takes pains to deny it, the comparison keeps creeping into the national conversation, and the most obvious link is the word ''quagmire." For the dwindling band of reporters who covered the war in Vietnam, a trip to Baghdad cannot help but bring forth ghosts. America fought in Vietnam to contain communism. In this war the reasons for fighting keep shifting, but the central idea seems to have been to create a friendly democracy in the heart of the oil-producing Middle East that could transform the region by example.
Forty years ago the best and the brightest," as David Halberstam called them, got us into Vietnam to prevent other neighboring countries from falling like dominoes, or so the theory went. The best and the brightest this time around believed in a domino theory in reverse — the transformative power of democracy. Lots of talk about an Arab Spring" by prowar professors is beginning to sound a little hollow, however.
Both Vietnam and Iraq were wars of choice. Neither Saddam Hussein nor Ho Chi Minh threatened the United States directly, but in both cases our leaders in Washington took the road to intervention to further perceived American interests. In Vietnam, however, there really was a communist threat, while in Iraq, Islamic extremism was not a problem before we got there, nor did Saddam Hussein possess the means to harm us.
In Vietnam then and in Iraq now, the administration finds itself engaged in a war it is unable to win and reluctant to lose. The American people are walking away from this war, as they did in Vietnam, and the Bush administration knows that staying the course is not a long-term option. The recently announced troop drawdown is a reflection of this domestic pressure, not conditions in Iraq.
But Bush today, as did Lyndon Johnson before him, vows to fight on until victory, and some of the same ridiculous rhetoric prevails — such as that we are fighting them there so we won't have to fight them at home. In Iraq, war is actually helping Al Qaeda to recruit terrorists to one day attack us at home.
Both Vietnam and Iraq saw monumental miscalculations on the part of our war leaders. Hubris played a big role in both. It seemed inconceivable to both Johnson's and George W. Bush's defense departments that these weak opponents could stand up to America's modern arms. In both cases it was thought that the Americans could prevail quickly and go home.
As Richard Nixon's defense secretary, Melvin Laird, recently wrote: ''Both the Vietnam War and the Iraq war were launched based on intelligence failures and possibly outright deception." To deception, add willful self-deception as well. For in both wars there was a tendency to ignore those who could tell our government about what Vietnam and Iraq were about. Johnson's defense secretary, Robert McNamara, would confess years later that he didn't know anything about Vietnamese culture and history, but as far as I know he hasn't confessed that he went out of his way to ignore people who could have informed him as to the difficulties ahead.
Likewise, Donald Rumsfeld went out of his way to ignore the advice of those who knew something about Iraq. In both cases any information that would get in the way of doctrine was unsought and unheard.
America's former viceroy, Paul Bremmer, and his young ideologues ran Iraq in blissful ignorance. I am told that making sure that there was no room for abortion in Iraq's Constitution was a goal — likewise a flat tax for Iraq. John Negroponte's team would later call Bremmer's people ''the illusionists."
Consider the author of The Assassins' Gate, George Packer's account of briefings in Baghdad: Daily press conferences about the coalition's intentions toward the rebels that were usually at odds with the facts, on occasion flatly untrue, and often in direct contradiction to statements made a day or a week earlier. . ." Packer might have been describing the ''5 o'clock follies" briefings in Saigon.
Likewise, in Saigon of old, there were bright young people working long and hard hours to have the Vietnamese do things in the American way totally removed from the reality of the country around them.
That being said, however, compared to Iraq there were quite a few Vietnamese speakers among the Americans who got themselves out and about in the countryside in Vietnam. In comparison, Americans in Iraq live in near total isolation with few Arab speakers and very little contact with Iraqis outside their fortified compounds. The civilian theorists and intellectuals that came to power with George W. Bush, and promoted this war, had almost to a man no military experience. They had ''other priorities" than to fight for their country, as Vice President Cheney so famously put it.
Although President Bush is finally admitting to some problems in Iraq, Washington's dreary drip of propaganda has the same Vietnam-era ring. The famous ''light at the end of the tunnel" of the Vietnam War is reflected in all the overly optimistic statements from the Bush White House about the Iraq insurgency's bitter-enders and last gasps.
Today the training of an Iraqi Army is being pushed at a frantic pace so that we can withdraw, much in the same way President Nixon's ''Vietnamization" was supposed to prop up Vietnam so that we could bring our armies home.
It is not that there is no progress being made in Iraq. There is. But the question is, as it was in Vietnam: What does this progress mean for our ultimate goals? In Vietnam it became all to clear that no matter how many wells we dug or schools we built, there would be Vietnamese who might drink from the wells and accept the schools, but remain adamantly opposed to Americans in their country.
The same strikes me as true in Iraq. It is perfectly logical for an Iraqi to have opposed Saddam yesterday and oppose us today. As nationalism became our adversary in Vietnam, more so than communism, so is nationalism in Iraq growing against us.
US troops, with their reliance on fire power, caused great destruction and loss of civilian life in both wars. The Nixon administration also agonized about how atrocities committed by Americans in Vietnam would hurt the war effort, and how the information could be contained. The Bush administration's handling of the Abu Ghraib horrors are hauntingly similar.
Melvin Laird wrote that, in Vietnam, ''elections were choreographed by the United States to empower corrupt, selfish men who were no more than dictators in the garb of statesmen." It may be too early to make that same judgment in Iraq, but it is clear that too many Iraqi politicians are cast in the same mold as were our Saigon politicians.
And that old chimera the ''body count," which the Americans first avoided in Iraq, is creeping back into usage — as if the number of insurgents we killed today had any bearing on whether we are actually winning the war.
Likewise the search-and-destroy missions that General William Westmoreland employed in Vietnam seem to be in vogue today in Iraq. But then as now, the insurgents melt away before our armies and come back again when we have passed on. And somehow they always seem to know when we are coming.
It was interesting for someone like me who spent years in Vietnam to meet even US generals in Iraq who are too young to have fought in Southeast Asia. But then as now, it is clear that this protracted war is putting tremendous strain on the US Army. It was something that General Creighton Abrams worried about aloud to me in Saigon, and it worries our military commanders today. It took years for the US Army to recover from Vietnam, and it will take years for it to recover from the strains put upon it in Iraq. But the most haunting parallel to me is that it will be possible to win every battle in Iraq and yet lose the war.
US involvement in Iraq will not end with American helicopters flying from the roof of the embassy. But it may end badly with Iraq split among ethnic and sectarian warlords, empowering those who wish America ill — destabilizing the Middle East rather than transforming it.
Or Iraq could emerge united with some kind of representational government. But ultimately, all that will be up to the Iraqis, not the Americans, who do not, and cannot, control events. Once again, as in Vietnam, we are learning the limits of American power.
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe. |
|
By Gerd Ruge
Die Welt
Translated By Hartmut Lau
December 27, 2005
The Chinese Tiger 'made its appearance as a superpower on the world stage' this year,' and is 'well on the way to becoming the Asian tiger that can compete with the American eagle.' According to this overview of global affairs for 2005 from Germany's Die Welt, the U.S. and the rest of the world's major powers failed to map out a shared approach to the challenges of terrorism and post-Communist upheaval. It was not a year of new beginnings or glorious political performances. In the rubble of New Orleans, people waited for a long time and without avail for their president. When he did come, he didn't have much to say and couldn't do very much either. President Chirac was only a little bit better at saving face in his country's suburbs. Blair's Labour Party deserted him on the subject of the war against terror. The heads of state and government in Poland, Italy and Spain didn't fare much better. A German chancellor called an election and lost - but won a seat on the board of Putin's gas pipeline.
In Moscow President Putin was already thinking of 2008, the year in which he is to leave office. He promised stability - his constant theme - even for the time thereafter. Even if he were no longer in the Kremlin, he would still be in Russia - thus a number of trusted colleagues were maneuvered into the starting blocs [in the race for succession] and a number of domestic initiatives were launched.
Putin also lost support in his second term, but he didn't suffer as much of a loss as his colleagues in the U.S., France or Germany had to accept. Russians had directed their anger and displeasure against his government and the parliament. Since the middle of the year Putin has announced his intentions to use the increased income from oil exports to improve the lot of Russia's people. Sometimes he sounded as if he were the harshest critic of the governmental system he leads. The country is experiencing internal contradictions. A high growth rate and a steadily increasing foreign trade surplus have not yielded a higher standard of living for most Russians. Their country is on the way to again becoming an economic giant while, domestically, Putin's government remains, to the detriment of civil society and freedom of the press, the unpredictable guarantor of order.
At the same time, xenophobia is finding new life. Mistrust of foreign nations has been growing since countries like Ukraine and Georgia removed themselves, with Western help, from Russia's sphere of influence. In Europe, the revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine were greeted with sympathetic speeches, but there was no recognizable foreign policy strategy at work. Rather, it seemed that the French president and the German chancellor were aiming for more cooperation with Putin while ignoring both Eastern Europe and the E.U. The central European governments sought insurance from Washington against Russian power. And Washington was all too happy to push its political influence and military bases further east. Moscow's concerns over the increasing political attractiveness of the ex-communist countries is growing at the same pace as its economic situation is stabilizing, while Brussels [the E.U.] has no clear goals or limits for future cooperation with the former Warsaw Pact countries. Thus East-West relations continue in a fog of mistrust.
Putin is seeking an independent role for Russia on the international stage. He is not a constant partner of the Western European Alliance or its policies of integration. The U.S.-China relationship failed to embark on a more consistent path and partnership. Russian patriotism, which Putin has declared to be the country's ideology, sees Russia as a major power that will see to its interests, either alone or with various partners. While the West still thinks it faces a weakened Russia, Putin is using [the country's] riches in natural gas and oil to weave a pipeline web that will secure its interests - in Europe, but also along Russia's eastern borders. There, China and Japan are trying to best each other in the struggle for oil and gas, and the huge Indian market is also making itself felt.
China, above all, made its appearance as a superpower on the world stage in 2005. Just as rich Uncle [Sam] from America used to, China's Party Chairman and President Hu Jin Tao traveled the world carrying billion dollar deals in his luggage. Many of the deals were financed by Western contractors themselves. After a quarter century of incredible transformation, the country is well on the way to becoming the Asian tiger that can compete with the American eagle. The Chinese say their country has no interest in being a superpower with military dominance, but the Army's influence on foreign and industrial policy causes concern in the Pacific Rim countries about whether Chinese foreign policy will be long be marked by such modesty. But all are also considering their wish to have access to China's gigantic market, which is both frightening and attractive.
China itself is facing the tremendous task of a second industrial revolution, of re-locating many hundreds of millions of its people from the hinterlands into new centers of industry, and ameliorating the social tensions that have already emerged during almost 100,000 demonstrations, strikes, and clashes. For its neighbors, partners and competitors, China nevertheless looks like a future world power of American dimensions.
After its show of strength in the Iraq invasion, America has reached the limits of its power and ability to control events. President George W. Bush saw his approval ratings fall to less than 40 percent. His comments about the war can't hide the fact that the issue is no longer how America can achieve its vision of an Iraqi democracy and assured access to oil, but rather when and how to withdraw. Is a rapid troop withdrawal more dangerous and more costly than the strategy of gradually replacing America's military power with Iraqi security forces?
Bush called his critics' bluff. In the House of Representatives, the Republicans called for a vote on whether or not the U.S. should immediately withdraw its troops. The result: 403 against, three for. Even the president's harshest critics think the consequences of a rapid withdrawal would be dangerous, and only a minority of 20% of voters wants an end to the war at any cost. Hillary Clinton, who is constantly being talked about as the Democrat's next presidential candidate, knows why she's not taking a strong position.
This is in contrast to Condoleezza Rice, who some pollsters think will attract not only traditional Republican votes, but also Black and moderate votes. Far more effective as Secretary of State than her predecessor Colin Powell, she seemed to break with the ideological rigidity of the "neocons," incarnated by Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. During foreign negotiations she earned a reputation as an intelligent and forthcoming representative of American foreign policy. But in December, before it was possible to determine whether or not a more substantive, constructive discourse was possible across the Atlantic, a shadow from the struggle against terrorism cast a pall over her European trip: revelations about secret prisons, torture, the transport of prisoners and violations for national sovereignty. The European trip was not the end of the chain of contrasts and misunderstandings, but looks to have been the beginning of a new period of trans-Atlantic concerns and misunderstandings.
The European Union, two years after its enlargement, seemed more than ever without a goal and torn by internal strife. The quarrels about money, about subsidies that the old members wanted to cut and that the new members expected [to be paid out] deteriorated into haggling. A departing generation of weak political leaders from Warsaw to Madrid and from Rome to London led the E.U. into fruitless disputes. The fact that a destructive crisis was avoided is not least to the credit of the new Federal Chancellor [Merkel]. But it remains unclear whether Europe's fascination [with her] will ebb, or if it can be used to lead the way to a common understanding of the role that Europe is to play vis-a-vis Russia, China and the U.S.
Actually none of the big three [Germany, France and Britain] showed any sign of having a concept of international relations beyond short term self-interest. All emphasized the so-called patriotic values - that is their own economic and power interests - while they weighted the scales of international politics with their wealth in natural resources, their potential as a market, or their high-tech military prowess.
2005 was not a year of new solutions, but rather a year of problems ignored and hopes lost.
Gerd Ruge was ARD's Chief Correspondent und served there for many years as a foreign correspondent. Now 77, he chronicled Russia's development for decades. He also reported from the USA during the Vietnam War and from communist China. |
|
by Jorge Hirsch
28 Dec 2005
In the "global war on terror," Iran is the next target, having been designated by the U.S. State Department [.pdf] as "the most active state sponsor of terrorism" in the world. The United Nations has given its blessing, and the U.S. will fill in the blanks.
Before we analyze this, however, let us ask ourselves: why not Florida instead? In fact, Florida should be way ahead on the list. Family considerations should not play a role in U.S. policy decisions. Let's compare the cases. For Florida:
* At least 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers had Florida connections.
* Thirteen of the 19 were in Florida before Sept.11.
* Eight of the hijackers took flying lessons in Venice, Fla.
* Five of the hijackers trained in Florida gyms.
* Two of the hijackers got drunk in a Hollywood, Fla. bar a few days before the attack.
Instead, the connections between 9/11 and Iran are much more tenuous, according to the 9/11 Commission:
* "Senior al-Qaeda operatives and trainers traveled to Iran to receive training in explosives" in 1993.
* "Iran facilitated the transit of al-Qaeda members into and out of Afghanistan before 9/11, and some of these were future 9/11 hijackers."
* "We have found no evidence that Iran or Hezbollah was aware of the planning for what later became the 9/11 attack."
The 9/11 hijackers used planes, not explosives. So I very much hope that the Pentagon is revising its Nuclear Strike Plan. A precision-guided missile with a nuclear warhead – or a low-yield nuclear gravity bomb – should be effective in vaporizing both aboveground and underground facilities of Huffman Aviation School in Venice, Fla., with minimal collateral damage.
The fact is, terrorists do not need "state sponsors" to do their job. The 9/11 hijackers lived in the U.S., rented apartments, opened bank accounts, got drivers licenses, rented cars, took English lessons, had jobs, joined gyms, learned the needed flying skills, bought their box-cutter knives, and blew themselves up in the good old United States. And so will the next terrorists who strike us.
Furthermore, some of the 9/11 hijackers lived and studied in Hamburg, Germany. And they met in Madrid. So are Hamburg and Madrid next on the strike list?
Does anybody really believe that the "training camps" in Afghanistan played any significant role in 9/11? Can somebody please explain what exactly the 9/11 hijackers learned at those training camps that they couldn't learn elsewhere?
Does anybody really believe that the purported meeting, which in fact never took place, of Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague would have played a significant role even if it had taken place?
Yet we are embarked in a "global war of terror" in response to the 9/11 attacks that has led to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and is about to lead to a U.S. nuclear attack against Iran.
Because make no mistake, an aerial attack on Iran that will include low-yield nuclear bombs is the next step in the "global war on terror," unless something extraordinary happens to derail it. |
|
ISN SECURITY WATCH
28/12/05
The Israeli Air Force attacked a Palestinian militant faction base in Lebanon on Wednesday morning in response to the firing of rockets into northern Israeli towns overnight.
Warplanes blasted a training base of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), at Naameh south of Beirut, in the deepest Israeli strike into Lebanese territory since June 2004. According to reports, the base consists of a maze of concrete-reinforced tunnels built into a hill seven kilometers south of the Lebanese capital. Witnesses said that two air-to-surface missiles had been fired at the facility before Lebanese security forces sealed the area, preventing journalists from approaching.
In comments to Reuters, the group's spokesman Anwar Raja said that two PFLP-GC members had been lightly wounded in the attack. He denied that his organization had anything to do with the series of rocket attacks hours before on towns in northern Israel, which precipitated the air strikes.
Raja criticized Israel for the attack on his movement's base: "The air strike is an Israeli attempt to depict the presence of Palestinian groups in Lebanon as a source of instability while they continue to violate Lebanon's sovereignty in the air, land, and sea."
A spokesperson for the Israeli military confirmed that the air strike had come "in response to the firing of projectile rockets last night toward Israeli communities".
Katyusha rockets, fired from southern Lebanon, knocked out power and struck three buildings in the Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona shortly before midnight on Tuesday. Municipal officials used megaphones to urge residents to hurry to bomb shelters and sealed rooms. The all-clear was sounded after two hours.
Explosions were also reported in Nahariyya, and in the Galilee village of Shlomi, which was struck by at least three Katyushas.
The mayor of Kiryat Shmona, Haim Barbivai, told ISN Security Watch: "One house was demolished by a direct hit. The whole staircase fell and made the floor collapse. Four people had to go to the hospital from shock, but you can't really tell what the full affect of the damage will be because lots of people will require psychological treatment."
Asked what the impact will be on his town, Barbivai said: "The hardest thing is the fear of what will happen tomorrow […] This one incident won't make people leave, though it is hard to tell," he said, adding, "if it will happen again in the near future, we will see a big wave of people leaving Kiryat Shmona."
The mayor urged the Sharon government to pressure Lebanon in order to prevent future attacks. "The Israeli government needs to make sure that the government of Lebanon will act […] [and] needs to make sure that innocent people won't have to live in fear. It cannot be that the Lebanese government will let something like this happen from its own territory," he said.
An official Israeli army statement blamed the Lebanese government for the rocket attack: "The State of Israel holds the Lebanese government responsible for these attacks, in that it has done nothing to dismantle the terror organizations operating from within Lebanon, in violation of UN decisions 425 and 1559."
In comments carried by Israel Radio, the Israeli army's northern commander Udi Adam said that the PFLP-GC was responsible for the rocket fire. "I hope the other side understands the message of the IDF strike […] We will not allow Katyusha fire to become a routine of daily life," he said.
Adam was asked if Israel would bomb Syrian targets, as it has in the past in response to attacks across the northern border: "I won't answer that [ ...] we reserve the right to retaliate in any way we see fit," he said.
Since the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000, Israel has repeatedly requested that the Lebanese government move security forces into the area to prevent violence, without response.
There has been no claim of responsibility for the Katyusha attacks. A Hizbollah spokesman denied Israeli allegations that the Islamist movement had played a role in the rocket strikes. Sultan Abu Iynayn, who leads Fatah in Lebanon, told a local television station that he did not believe that any Palestinians were involved.
The PFLP-GC is a small leftist splinter group of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Formed in 1968, the group's founder, Ahmed Jibril, favored a military rather than political struggle for Palestinian statehood. With several other small Palestinian factions based in Lebanon, the PFLP-GC is understood to have close ties to Syria. It is described by some commentators as a Syrian proxy.
The bombing of the PFLP-GC base is intended to send a message to Syria to encourage groups over which it has influence in Lebanon to refrain from attacks on Israel. |
|
29 Dec 2005
AFP
The European Union successfully deployed the first satellite in a 3.8 billion euro (4.5 billion dollar) navigation system which is planned to rival the reigning US GPS network and allow civilians to calculate their geographic position to the nearest metre.
"We have a working satellite," the European Space Agency's (ESA) project leader Javier Benedicto told AFP by telephone from Russia's Baikonur launch centre in northern Kazakhstan, after the British-built GIOVE-A successfully opened its solar panels and booted onboard computers.
The GIOVE-A blasted off from Kazakhstan on a Russian Soyuz rocket at 0519 GMT on a mission to test equipment, including an atomic clock, in preparation for future phases of the project.
The satellite will help set the stage for a 30-satellite constellation giving mariners, pilots, drivers and others an almost pinpoint-accurate navigational tool. Next year, a second test satellite will go into space, followed by four working satellites in 2008 and the first commercial use of the system in 2010.
Satellite navigation, originally developed by the US military for targeting and military manoeuvres, has become indispensible for civilians, with uses ranging from letting drivers find their way through unfamiliar cities without a map to keeping track of criminals under home detention.
The difference is that Galileo will be even more accurate than the US Global Positioning System (GPS) and will stay under civilian control, while at the same time increasing the European bloc's strategic independence from the United States.
The GPS is run by the US military, meaning that the Pentagon can switch off or interfere with the system without warning civilian users around the world.
In Paris, French President Jacques Chirac voiced "great satisfaction" over the launch of the test satellite, saying that "space is an essential part of the great European project."
European Union transport commissioner Jacques Barrot said in Brussels that the launch was "proof that Europe can deliver ambitious projects to the benefit of its citizens and companies."
Mission control described the launch as trouble free after the GIOVE-A was successfully placed in orbit 23,000 kilometers (14,000 miles) above Earth.
"In fact, everything happened even better than expected because of a high quality placement in orbit, thanks to the Soyuz rocket," Benedicto said Wednesday.
"A perfect mission in difficult conditions," said Jean-Yves Le Gall, chief of Arianespace and Starsem, the Russian-European company in charge of Soyuz rocket launch services.
The launch was delayed by two days after ground stations tasked with following the satellite's progress in space found anomalies. It was the first time that the ESA, which runs the Galileo project's initial phase along with the European Union, had launched a satellite into a medium orbit.
The United States and the EU last year reached an accord to adopt common operating standards for the two systems, overcoming American concerns that the Galileo system will compromise the security of GPS, on which the US military is heavily dependent.
Galileo will also be compatible with the Russian GLONASS network, which is controlled by military operators.
According to the ESA, Galileo is designed to deliver real-time positioning accuracy down to the meter (yard) range, which is unprecedented for a publicly available system.
It will guarantee service under all but the most extreme circumstances and will inform users within seconds of a failure of any satellite, which will make it especially valuable where safety is crucial, such as running trains, guiding cars and landing aircraft.
The date for opening the network to commercial use has been pushed back two years to 2010.
Indicating the growing importance of satellite navigation technology, Russia is in the midst of revamping GLONASS. Three new satellites were launched on Sunday, bringing the total to 17, and President Vladimir Putin has called for a fully working system by 2008. |
|
Stephen Bates, religious affairs correspondent
Thursday December 29, 2005
The Guardian
In what remains of the season of goodwill, a religious newspaper has uncovered spectacular examples of Christians falling short of religious ideals in their treatment of fellow churchgoers.
When the Church Times, which has recorded the foibles of the Church of England for more than a century, asked readers for examples of rudeness, its editor, Paul Handley, admitted to having his breath taken away by the results. A wheelchair user was advised to go home instead of attending a service, a vicar was told by a church warden that new families attending a service "weren't really our type", and a visiting vicar told bereaved relatives he had drawn the short straw in being asked to conduct a funeral service. At a choral evensong in one of the royal peculiar chapels - churches such as Westminster Abbey which are under the direct authority of the Queen - a disabled woman was manhandled by a sidesman because she could not get up for the national anthem.
Mr Handley said: "I thought nothing could surprise me in the readers' responses ... but as the emails and letters came in they constantly took my breath away. Correspondents have been driven to write at length about clergy who, on the face of it, ought to be pursuing another occupation, preferably one that doesn't involve anyone else."
Other examples in today's Church Times show that rudeness can afflict the highest, such as the bishop who told a curate looking for a parish: "You have to ask yourself who would want you at your age?", to a vicar's wife who said to a woman who had just lost her new-born child: "Maddening, isn't it?" |
|
George Monbiot
Tuesday December 27, 2005
The Guardian
In reading reports of the trial of the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, you are struck by two things. The first, of course, is the anachronistic brutality of the country's laws. Mr Pamuk, like scores of other writers and journalists, is being prosecuted for "denigrating Turkishness", which means that he dared to mention the Armenian genocide in the first world war and the killing of the Kurds in the past decade. The second is its staggering, blithering stupidity. If there is one course of action that could be calculated to turn these massacres into live issues, it is the trial of the country's foremost novelist for mentioning them. As it prepares for accession, the Turkish government will discover that the other members of the EU have found a more effective means of suppression. Without legal coercion, without the use of baying mobs to drive writers from their homes, we have developed an almost infinite capacity to forget our own atrocities.
Atrocities? Which atrocities? When a Turkish writer uses that word, everyone in Turkey knows what he is talking about, even if they deny it vehemently. But most British people will stare at you blankly. So let me give you two examples, both of which are as well documented as the Armenian genocide.
In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, published in 2001, Mike Davis tells the story of famines that killed between 12 and 29 million Indians. These people were, he demonstrates, murdered by British state policy. When an El Niño drought destituted the farmers of the Deccan plateau in 1876 there was a net surplus of rice and wheat in India. But the viceroy, Lord Lytton, insisted that nothing should prevent its export to England. In 1877 and 1878, at the height of the famine, grain merchants exported a record 6.4m hundredweight of wheat. As the peasants began to starve, officials were ordered "to discourage relief works in every possible way". The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 prohibited "at the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices". The only relief permitted in most districts was hard labour, from which anyone in an advanced state of starvation was turned away. In the labour camps, the workers were given less food than inmates of Buchenwald. In 1877, monthly mortality in the camps equated to an annual death rate of 94%.
As millions died, the imperial government launched "a militarised campaign to collect the tax arrears accumulated during the drought". The money, which ruined those who might otherwise have survived the famine, was used by Lytton to fund his war in Afghanistan. Even in places that had produced a crop surplus, the government's export policies, like Stalin's in Ukraine, manufactured hunger. In the north-western provinces, Oud and the Punjab, which had brought in record harvests in the preceeding three years, at least 1.25m died.
Three recent books - Britain's Gulag by Caroline Elkins, Histories of the Hanged by David Anderson, and Web of Deceit by Mark Curtis - show how white settlers and British troops suppressed the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya in the 1950s. Thrown off their best land and deprived of political rights, the Kikuyu started to organise - some of them violently - against colonial rule. The British responded by driving up to 320,000 of them into concentration camps. Most of the remainder - more than a million - were held in "enclosed villages". Prisoners were questioned with the help of "slicing off ears, boring holes in eardrums, flogging until death, pouring paraffin over suspects who were then set alight, and burning eardrums with lit cigarettes". British soldiers used a "metal castrating instrument" to cut off testicles and fingers. "By the time I cut his balls off," one settler boasted, "he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket." The soldiers were told they could shoot anyone they liked "provided they were black". Elkins's evidence suggests that more than 100,000 Kikuyu were either killed or died of disease and starvation in the camps. David Anderson documents the hanging of 1,090 suspected rebels: far more than the French executed in Algeria. Thousands more were summarily executed by soldiers, who claimed they had "failed to halt" when challenged.
These are just two examples of at least 20 such atrocities overseen and organised by the British government or British colonial settlers; they include, for example, the Tasmanian genocide, the use of collective punishment in Malaya, the bombing of villages in Oman, the dirty war in North Yemen, the evacuation of Diego Garcia. Some of them might trigger a vague, brainstem memory in a few thousand readers, but most people would have no idea what I'm talking about. Max Hastings, on the opposite page, laments our "relative lack of interest" in Stalin and Mao's crimes. But at least we are aware that they happened.
In the Express we can read the historian Andrew Roberts arguing that for "the vast majority of its half-millennium-long history, the British empire was an exemplary force for good ... the British gave up their empire largely without bloodshed, after having tried to educate their successor governments in the ways of democracy and representative institutions" (presumably by locking up their future leaders). In the Sunday Telegraph, he insists that "the British empire delivered astonishing growth rates, at least in those places fortunate enough to be coloured pink on the globe". (Compare this to Mike Davis's central finding, that "there was no increase in India's per capita income from 1757 to 1947", or to Prasannan Parthasarathi's demonstration that "South Indian labourers had higher earnings than their British counterparts in the 18th century and lived lives of greater financial security.") In the Daily Telegraph, John Keegan asserts that "the empire became in its last years highly benevolent and moralistic". The Victorians "set out to bring civilisation and good government to their colonies and to leave when they were no longer welcome. In almost every country, once coloured red on the map, they stuck to their resolve".
There is one, rightly sacred Holocaust in European history. All the others can be denied, ignored, or belittled. As Mark Curtis points out, the dominant system of thought in Britain "promotes one key concept that underpins everything else - the idea of Britain's basic benevolence ... Criticism of foreign policies is certainly possible, and normal, but within narrow limits which show 'exceptions' to, or 'mistakes' in, promoting the rule of basic benevolence". This idea, I fear, is the true "sense of British cultural identity" whose alleged loss Max laments today. No judge or censor is required to enforce it. The men who own the papers simply commission the stories they want to read.
Turkey's accession to the European Union, now jeopardised by the trial of Orhan Pamuk, requires not that it comes to terms with its atrocities; only that it permits its writers to rage impotently against them. If the government wants the genocide of the Armenians to be forgotten, it should drop its censorship laws and let people say what they want. It needs only allow Richard Desmond and the Barclay brothers to buy up the country's newspapers, and the past will never trouble it again.
www.monbiot.com |
|
By Colin Brown, Deputy Political Editor
28 December 2005
Tony Blair has become embroiled in a new "cash for favours" row over his nomination of prominent Labour Party donors for peerages.
The parliamentary sleaze watchdog has blocked the Prime Minister's working list of 28 peers, which includes businessmen who have donated thousands of pounds to his party. He submitted the list of 11 Labour peers, eight Tory peers, five Liberal Democrat peers and four Northern Ireland peers in November. It was first revealed in The Independent on Sunday.
Now the House of Lords Appointments Commission has put a hold on the peerages, pending further checks. "The appointments commission is holding it up because they are dissatisfied with some of the names on the Prime Minister's list. Some members of the commission are holding out as a matter of principle," one source close to the cross-party commission of peers said.
"They think it's getting ridiculous. The embarrassment for Labour is that some people are due to get honours and, if they don't get them, they will have a right to be peeved. They have told these people they are going to get ermine and it's being held up."
Those nominated by Mr Blair for peerages include Labour donors such as Dr Chai Patel, who runs the Priory clinics, Sir Gulam Noon, founder and chairman of an Indian food company in the UK, Barry Townsley, a stockbroker who gave £6,000 to Labour and sponsored a city academy in Hillingdon, and Sir David Garrard, a property developer millionaire who donated to Labour and contributed £2.4m to the Bexley city academy but who has previously given £70,000 to the Conservatives under William Hague.
A number of Tory donors are also on the Conservative list drawn up by David Cameron's predecessor as leader, Michael Howard. It threatens to reopen the row over "cronyism" that erupted when Mr Blair awarded a peerage to Paul Drayson, a Labour supporter who donated more than £1m to the party. Lord Drayson of Kensington founded the pharmaceutical company PowderJect, which secured Government contracts for smallpox vaccine. He has since been made Defence Procurement minister.
The commission was set up as part of the reform of the upper chamber after the removal of hereditary peers to answer criticism that future Prime Ministers could abuse their power of patronage over life peerages.
There is no suggestion of any wrongdoing by any of those on the list but Commission members asked for further evidence on the tax status of some of the nominees, who are normally required to pay tax in the UK.
The list also raises the issue of the use of peerages to reward party donors. Cash for peerages caused a furore in the early 20th century when the then Liberal Prime Minister, Lloyd George, accepted bribes for honours.
Trade union leaders were traditionally given Labour peerages, but it has now become common for businessmen who have donated large sums to parties to be given peerages. Labour's list contains more traditional Labour figures, such as Sir Bill Morris, 67, the former general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union, Maggie Jones, of the health workers' union Unison, and Joyce Quin, 60, the former home office minister who stood down at the last election.
PM's nominations
* Sir David Garrard, property millionaire, co-founder of the Minerva Corporation that controlled Allders stores; gave £200,000 to Labour and donated £2.4m to Bexley city academy. Also gave Tories £70,000 for a call centre at central office. Knighted in 2003 for charity work.
* Dr Chai Patel, 69, CEO of Westminster Health Care group which owns The Priory Clinic; gave £5,000 to Labour Party funds. One of the architects of the Government's policies on the elderly and also an adviser to the Department of Health.
* Sir Gulam Noon, 69, founder of Noon Products which specialises in ready-made curries in the UK; donated more than £220,000 to Labour since 2001 in nine separate donations. Knighted in the Queen's Birthday Honours in June 2002 for services to business. |
|
By Simon Watts
BBC News
The socialist president-elect of Bolivia, Evo Morales, has said he will cut his salary by half when he takes office next month.
Mr Morales said his cabinet would follow suit and that members of Bolivia's parliament would be expected to cut their allowances.
He also reaffirmed his commitment to change Bolivia's economic system.
At the moment, Mr Morales, an Aymara Indian born into poverty, rents a single room in a shared house. When he moves into the presidential palace next month, Mr Morales is not planning to switch to a jet-set lifestyle.
Wealth tax
Announcing the salary cut, he said that in a country as poor as Bolivia, the president and his cabinet should share the burden.
The money saved will go on social programmes, particularly in the field of education.
Mr Morales also confirmed that his government plans to introduce a new tax on the wealthy as soon as possible.
His advisors say they are planning to revoke a decree from 1985 which switched Bolivia to the sort of free-market economy recommended by Washington.
These announcements will go down well with the poor voters who gave Mr Morales a resounding election victory.
Huge expectations
The real task for the president-elect, however, is to manage the huge expectations he has generated in Bolivia.
Mr Morales will be able to point to the sort of measures unveiled on Tuesday if, as seems likely, he moves more slowly on other pledges such as nationalisation of the gas industry or easing restrictions on growing the coca plant.
Mr Morales also announced that his first foreign trip as president-elect would be to Cuba, a country he has long admired.
This visit will be closely watched in Washington, which fears the potential influence in Latin America of an alliance between Cuba, Bolivia and oil-rich Venezuela. |
|
By Michael Mainville in Moscow
28 December 2005
A dispute between Russia and Ukraine about gas prices has escalated, with Kiev threatening to tap Russian gas shipments heading for Europe - and Moscow warning that attempts to raise the rent it pays to base its Black Sea fleet in a Ukrainian port would have "fatal" consequences.
The two are locked in a dispute over plans by the state-controlled Russian gas giant Gazprom to more than quadruple the price it charges Ukraine for natural gas, from about $50 (£29) per 1,000 cubic metres to $230, in line with world prices. Gazprom provides one-third of Ukraine's gas and has warned it will turn off the taps on Sunday if Kiev refuses.
Ukraine has sought to have the increase phased in over several years and upped the stakes this month by saying it was considering raising the $98m in annual rent Moscow pays for the use of its naval base in Sevastopol, on Ukraine's southern Crimean peninsula.
The Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov warned yesterday any attempt to change the terms of Moscow's lease would threaten agreements recognising Ukraine's post-Soviet borders. "The accord on conditions for the presence of the Russian Black Sea fleet is part of the main Russian-Ukrainian treaty, the second part of which includes the point on recognition of the inviolability of state borders ," he told state television. "To revise those agreements would be fatal."
The Ukrainian Prime Minister, Yuriy Yekhanurov, said Ukraine had the "unquestionable legal right" to take 15 per cent of Russian gas shipments to Europe that pass through its territory as a transit fee. About 80 per cent of Gazprom's European exports pass through Ukraine and the company supplies about half the European Union's gas.
Sergei Kuprianov, at Gazprom, said any attempt by Ukraine to siphon off gas destined for Europe would be regarded as theft. "All responsibility for shortage of Russian gas supplies to European customers will lie completely with Ukraine."
Mr Kuprianov denied claims by Ukraine's Energy Minister Ivan Plachkov that a deal had been reached to phase in the price rise. Mr Kuprianov called Mr Plachkov's statement "a provocation." Russia's Energy Minister Viktor Khristenko also denied an agreement was in place.
Russian officials insist the gas price rise is financially justified because it will end Moscow's long-standing energy subsidies to its former Soviet satellite. But many Ukrainians see the move as punishment for the country's pro-Western course under President Viktor Yushchenko, elected after last year's Orange Revolution. Gazprom has also announced gas price rises for Georgia and Moldova, both ex-Soviet republics seeking stronger ties with the West, but has extended a deal with Belarus, which is strongly allied with Russia, that will price natural gas at $46.68 per 1,000 cubic metres.
Mr Yushchenko's deputy chief of staff, Anatoly Matviyenko, raised the issue of the Black Sea fleet this month, saying if Gazprom wanted to charge world prices for gas, Ukraine "has the right to raise the question about suitable world prices... for the existence of foreign troops."
|
|
28 Dec 2005
AFP
New Year is supposed to be a time of hope and fresh starts -- but more and more Americans seem to be stressed out, miserable and depressed, according to two new opinion polls. One long term survey shows that personal misery among Americans is at its highest levels since the early 1990s, with people saddled with woes over healthcare, unemployment, paying bills and romance.
The University of Chicago survey published Wednesday found people reporting at least one significant "negative life event" jumped from 88 percent to 92 percent since 1991.
Eleven percent of 1,340 respondents reported being unable to afford needed medical care, compared with seven percent in 1991, and 18 percent said they had no healthcare insurance coverage -- up from 12 percent in the early 1990s.
Some 15 percent of people surveyed said had been unemployed for a month, four points higher than in 1991.
The survey, part of a broader study of American society conducted by the university every two years, found that troubles were greatest among those with low income, poor education levels and among unmarried mothers.
Another snapshot of American life published this week suggests that as 2006 dawns, Americans are under more stress than a year ago.
Fifty-six percent of those surveyed said they had experienced more stress in 2005 than in 2004 this year, as hurricanes ravaged the Gulf Coast, fuel prices climbed and economic progress seemed not to filter down to many Americans.
The independent survey, conducted for Brookstone Inc. a retail firm that specialises in stress relieving methods like massage products, also found that 75 percent of people promised to take better care of their health in 2006.
The survey was conducted among 1000 people aged over 18 during December. |
|
Bernard O'Riordan in Sydney
Thursday December 29, 2005
The Guardian
A fat-busting diet craze that knocked Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code off the top of Australia's bestseller list has been branded a "recipe for trouble" by the science journal Nature.
Australia's publicly funded science agency, the CSIRO, has also been roundly criticised for attaching its name to the Total Wellbeing Diet, which has become the fastest-selling Australian title to date. The book, funded by the Australian meat and livestock industry, has already sold 550,000 copies in Australia and more than 100,000 in Britain and New Zealand. The low-carbohydrate, high-protein diet, conceived by Manny Noakes and Peter Clifton from CSIRO Human Nutrition in Adelaide, claims to offer a "scientifically proven" programme that "challenges old conventions and theories".
But Nature said the success of the book was irritating some scientists. The way the diet was marketed as scientifically proven was "decidedly unsavoury".
The controversy lies in the book's emphasis on eating lean red meat. Patrick Holford, from the Surrey-based Institute for Optimum Nutrition, told Nature he thought the diet was dangerous in the long term and could result in higher levels of breast and prostate cancer, along with stressed kidneys and reduced bone mass.
But Dr Oakes said she had been more surprised by the book's success than the animosity it had generated. "It was always going to be contentious. Nutrition is an emotional issue and there are lots of preconceptions. If the diet was about promoting a bunch of beans and vegetables, no one would have blinked."
The book has already made more than A$1m (£420,000) in royalties for the CSIRO. |
|
By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor
28 December 2005
A daily dose of vitamin D could cut the risk of cancers of the breast, colon and ovary by up to a half, a 40-year review of research has found. The evidence for the protective effect of the "sunshine vitamin" is so overwhelming that urgent action must be taken by public health authorities to boost blood levels, say cancer specialists.
A growing body of evidence in recent years has shown that lack of vitamin D may have lethal effects. Heart disease, lung disease, cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, schizophrenia and multiple sclerosis are among the conditions in which it is believed to play a vital role. The vitamin is also essential for bone health and protects against rickets in children and osteoporosis in the elderly. Vitamin D is made by the action of sunlight on the skin, which accounts for 90 per cent of the body's supply. But the increasing use of sunscreens and the reduced time spent outdoors, especially by children, has contributed to what many scientists believe is an increasing problem of vitamin D deficiency.
After assessing almost every scientific paper published on the link between vitamin D and cancer since the 1960s, US scientists say that a daily dose of 1,000 international units (25 micrograms) is needed to maintain health. " The high prevalence of vitamin D deficiency combined with the discovery of increased risks of certain types of cancer in those who are deficient, suggest that vitamin D deficiency may account for several thousand premature deaths from colon, breast, ovarian and other cancers annually," they say in the online version of the American Journal of Public Health.
The dose they propose of 1,000IU a day is two-and-a-half times the current recommended level in the US. In the UK, there is no official recommended dose but grey skies and short days from October to March mean 60 per cent of the population has inadequate blood levels by the end of winter.
The UK Food Standards Agency maintains that most people should be able to get all the vitamin D they need from their diet and "by getting a little sun". But the vitamin can only be stored in the body for 60 days.
High rates of heart disease in Scotland have been blamed on the weak sunlight and short summers in the north, leading to low levels of vitamin D. Differences in sunlight may also explain the higher rates of heart disease in England compared with southern Europe. Some experts believe the health benefits of the Mediterranean diet may have as much to do with the sun there as with the regional food.
Countries around the world have begun to modify their warnings about the dangers of sunbathing, as a result of the growing research on vitamin D. The Association of Cancer Councils of Australia acknowledged this year for the first time that some exposure to the sun was healthy.
Australia is one of the world's sunniest countries and has among the highest rates of skin cancer. For three decades it has preached sun avoidance with its "slip, slap, slop" campaign to cover up and use sunscreen. But in a statement in March, the association said: "A balance is required between avoiding an increase in the risk of skin cancer and achieving enough ultraviolet radiation exposure to achieve adequate vitamin D levels." Bruce Armstrong, the professor of public health at Sydney University, said: " It is a revolution."
In the latest study, cancer specialists from the University of San Diego, California, led by Professor Cedric Garland, reviewed 63 scientific papers on the link between vitamin D and cancer published between 1966 and 2004. People living in the north-eastern US, where it is less sunny, and African Americans with darker skins were more likely to be deficient, researchers found. They also had higher cancer rates.
The researchers say their finding could explain why black Americans die sooner from cancer than whites, even after allowing for differences in income and access to care.
Professor Garland said: "A preponderance of evidence from the best observational studies... has led to the conclusion that public health action is needed. Primary prevention of these cancers has been largely neglected, but we now have proof that the incidence of colon, breast and ovarian cancer can be reduced dramatically by increasing the public's intake of vitamin D." Obtaining the necessary level of vitamin D from diet alone would be difficult and sun exposure carries a risk of triggering skin cancer. "The easiest and most reliable way of getting the appropriate amount is from food and a daily supplement," they say.
The cost of a vitamin D supplement is about 4p a day. The UK Food Standards Agency said that taking Vitamin D supplements of up to 1,000IU was " unlikely to cause harm".
What it can do
Heart disease
Vitamin D works by lowering insulin resistance, which is one of the major factors leading to heart disease.
Lung disease
Lung tissue undergoes repair and "remodelling" in life and, since vitamin D influences the growth of a variety of cell types, it may play a role in this lung repair process.
Cancers (breast, colon, ovary, prostate)
Vitamin D is believed to play an important role in regulating the production of cells, a control that is missing in cancer. It has a protective effect against certain cancers by preventing overproduction of cells.
Diabetes
In type 1 diabetes the immune system destroys its own cells. Vitamin D is believed to act as an immunosuppressant. Researchers believe it may prevent an overly aggressive response from the immune system.
High blood pressure
Vitamin D is used by the parathyroid glands that sit on the thyroid gland in the neck. These secrete a hormone that regulates the body's calcium levels. Calcium, in turn, helps to regulate blood pressure, although the mechanism is not yet completely understood.
Schizophrenia
The chance of developing schizophrenia could be linked to how sunny it was in the months before birth. A lack of sunlight can lead to vitamin D deficiency, which scientists believe could alter the growth of a child's brain in the womb.
Multiple sclerosis
Lack of vitamin D leads to limited production of 1.25-dihydroxyvitamin D3, the hormonal form of vitamin D3 which regulates the immune system, creating a risk for MS.
Rickets and osteoporosis
The vitamin strengthens bones, protecting against childhood rickets and osteoporosis in the elderly. |
|
By Barbara Kantrowitz and Pat Wingert
Newsweek
Dec. 27, 2005
Whatever else went wrong in the world this year, no one can complain about a shortage of celebrity breakups. From Jennifer Aniston's split with Brad Pitt in January to Jessica Simpson's divorce from Nick Lachey in December, 2005 was awash in ruined romance. But hold the tears--at least for the ex-wives. Bad marriages might have been making them sick. Researchers say that say long-term anger and hostility between partners is much more dangerous for women than men and can impair our immune system and put us at risk for depression, high blood pressure and even heart disease. In a study published in the current issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry, Dr. Janice Kiecolt-Glaser and her colleagues at Ohio State University recruited 42 healthy couples who had been married an average of 12 years to spend two 24-hour stretches in a hospital research unit. On the first visit, the couples were encouraged to be loving and supportive of each other. On the second visit, they talked about their areas of conflict. On each visit, a special vacuum tube created blister wounds on their arms that were monitored for healing. The most antagonistic couples took an average of a day longer to heal. "Hostile marital interactions really enhance production of stress hormones, especially for women," Kiecolt-Glaser says. "And immune change is greater for women than for men."
What makes women so vulnerable to a husband's hostility? Kiecolt-Glaser, a professor of psychiatry and psychology, says women remember both positive and negative interactions more than men because they're generally more aware of the emotional content of a relationship. Women have larger and broader social networks than men, she says, and they're more sensitive to "adverse events" in their networks—a friend, a child, or a sister in trouble. That sensitivity is especially acute when it comes to their most intimate relationship, with their husband. A common laboratory strategy for studying marriage, Kiecolt-Glaser says, is to watch couples talk about a disagreement and then have each partner rate their own and their spouse's behavior. "Women's ratings of the behavior are much closer to the outside observer's codings of hostility than men's," she says. "Men simply don't see it."
Long-term unhappy marriages have serious health consequences. In another study published earlier this year in the Archives of Internal Medicine, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and San Diego State University looked at data from more than 400 healthy women who were followed for 13 years before and after menopause. They found that marital dissatisfaction tripled a woman's chances of having metabolic syndrome, a group of heart-risk factors. Only widows were more likely to have metabolic syndrome than the unhappy wives; even divorced and single women had better health-risk profiles.
In other words, a bad relationship hurts a woman's heart in more ways than one. Unhappiness at home could even be fatal after a heart attack. A Swedish study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2000 found that women with coronary heart disease had a greater risk of recurrence if they had severe stress in their marriages or live-in relationships. The researchers said that emotional strain and lack of support from a partner may mean that a woman is less likely to stick with heart healthy behavior and may not seek essential medical support. On the other hand, stress at work didn't appear to affect the health of the women who worked outside the home.
But before you kick your husband out, consider this: several studies have also shown that good marriages help keep women healthy. It's not just the absence of relationship stress (although that's certainly a factor). Women in happy marriages have strong social support, which generally encourages healthier behaviors. In fact, researchers have found that women in positive relationships actually benefit from spending more time with their partners.
What should you take away from all this? Kiecolt-Glaser says couples should learn to keep hostility in check. "When relationships are stressed," she says, "you see a 'tit for tat' kind of behavior where things really escalate. The most important thing is to cut that off early." All couples argue, she says, "[but] it's the quality of the disagreement that matters." She suggests that when you reach an impasse, you might say, "We really see this differently," rather than, "You idiot! How could you possibly think that?"
Kiecolt-Glaser's considerable expertise in this area no doubt benefits from the experience of her own happy marriage. She and her husband, Dr. Ronald Glaser, director of the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research at Ohio State, have been together since 1978, both at home and in the lab. "He's a sweetie," she says. "I'm really, really fortunate. We disagree on some things, but it's a really good working partnership." And apparently, he's learned to value her judgment. When they were first dating, they sometimes socialized with a couple who were friends of his. "I couldn't stand to be around them because they were so abrasive with each other," she says. "He couldn't see it. Then they got divorced. He said, 'You were right.' And I said, 'Of course I was right'." A woman always knows. |
|
29 Dec 2005
AFP
Augusto Pinochet was fingerprinted and photographed for the first time as police opened a criminal file on the former dictator for his alleged role in the deaths of political opponents in 1975. Officers came to Pinochet's home in the elegant La Dehesa neighborhood, where he has been under house arrest for five weeks, to fingerprint and photograph the aging strongman, taking both a head shot and profile.
Judge Victor Montiglio, who ordered the procedure, granted a 46,000-dollar bail to the former strongman. The bail must be ratified by a court of appeals.
It was the first time ever that the former Chilean president was booked, although he has faced prosecution three times in the last five years on charges related to the deaths or disappearances of some 3,000 people during his 1973-1990 regime.
"There is no doubt, it's an insult," said Pinochet lawyer Pablo Rodriguez after Montiglio ordered the procedure.
Pinochet, 90, who was put under house arrest on November 23 after being charged in connection with the deaths of political opponents in 1975, lost a second appeal for release on grounds of ill health Monday in Chile's Supreme Court.
Judges voted three to two against Pinochet's habeas corpus appeal to have his house arrest lifted and the charges against him dropped.
Pinochet is accused on involvement in the deaths of 119 political opponents in 1975 at the hands of the secret police in the notorious Operation Colombo.
He has also been charged with fraud, providing falsified documents and making false declarations to avoid paying taxes, in connection with 27 million dollars he allegedly hid in US and other overseas bank accounts.
The Supreme Court rejected an earlier habeas corpus appeal for Pinochet on December 2.
In both cases, Pinochet's attorneys argued that his mental health would prevent him from receiving a proper trial. |
|
by Peter Kornbluh
Director, Chile Documentation Project
September 19, 2000
After twenty-seven years of withholding details about covert activities following the 1973 military coup in Chile, the CIA released a report yesterday acknowledging its close relations with General Augusto Pinochet’s violent regime. The report, “CIA Activities in Chile,” revealed for the first time that the head of the Chile’s feared secret police, DINA, was a paid CIA asset in 1975, and that CIA contacts continued with him long after he dispatched his agents to Washington D.C. to assassinate former Chilean Ambassador Orlando Letelier and his 25-year old American associate, Ronni Karpen Moffitt.
“CIA actively supported the military Junta after the overthrow of Allende,” the report states. “Many of Pinochet’s officers were involved in systematic and widespread human rights abuses....Some of these were contacts or agents of the CIA or US military.” Among the report’s other major revelations:
Within a year of the coup, the CIA was aware of bilateral arrangements between the Pinochet regime and other Southern Cone intelligence services to track and kill opponents—arrangements that developed into Operation Condor.Gen. Manuel Contreras, head of Chile's National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), was on the CIA payroll
The CIA made Gen. Manuel Contreras, head of DINA, a paid asset only several months after concluding that he “was the principal obstacle to a reasonable human rights policy within the Junta.” After the assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt in Washington D.C., the CIA continued to work with Contreras even as “his possible role in the Letelier assassination became an issue.”
The CIA made a payment of $35,000 to a group of coup plotters in Chile after that group had murdered the Chilean commander-in-chief, Gen. Rene Schneider in October 1970—a fact that was apparently withheld in 1975 from the special Senate Committee investigating CIA involvement in assassinations. The report says the payment was made “in an effort to keep the prior contact secret, maintain the good will of the group, and for humanitarian reasons.”
The CIA has an October 25, 1973 intelligence report on Gen. Arellano Stark, Pinochet’s right-hand man after the coup, showing that Stark ordered the murders of 21 political prisoners during the now infamous “Caravan of Death.” This document is likely to be relevant to the ongoing prosecution of General Pinochet, who is facing trial for the disappearances of 14 prisoners at the hands of Gen. Stark’s military death squad.
According to Peter Kornbluh, director of the National Security Archive’s Chile Documentation Project, the CIA report “represents a major step toward ending the 27-year cover-up of Washington’s covert ties to Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship.” Kornbluh called on the CIA “to take the next step by declassifying all the documents used in the report, including the full declassification of the CIA’s first intelligence report on the Letelier assassination, dated October 6, 1976.”
The CIA’s Directorate of Operations is currently blocking the release of hundreds of secret records covering the history of U.S. covert intervention in Chile between 1962 and 1975.
The CIA issued “CIA Activities in Chile” pursuant to the Hinchey amendment in the 2000 Intelligence Authorization Act--a clause inserted in last year’s legislation by New York Representative Maurice Hinchey calling on the CIA to provide Congress with a full report on its covert action in Chile at the time of the coup, and its relations to General Pinochet’s regime.
The National Security Archive applauded Hinchey’s effort to press for the disclosure of this history and commended the CIA for a substantive response to the law. “This is a sordid and shameful story,” Kornbluh said, “but a story that must be told.” |
|
By Jay Miller
Dec 28, 2005
Reuters
CLEVELAND - A U.S. judge ruled on Wednesday that John Demjanjuk, once wrongly convicted of being the sadistic Nazi death camp guard "Ivan the Terrible," should be deported to his native Ukraine for his Nazi past.
Chief U.S. Immigration Judge Michael Creppy's decision that Demjanjuk was unlikely to face persecution in Ukraine followed a ruling three years ago that he had been a "willing" participant with the Nazis, "dedicated to exploiting and exterminating" Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland. Demjanjuk, a retired auto worker who has fought to keep his U.S. citizenship for 30 years, can appeal the deportation order to the Board of Immigration Appeals within 30 days.
He had argued he could be prosecuted or face torture if he were sent back to Ukraine -- or Germany or Poland if Ukraine refuses to accept him. Demjanjuk's lawyers could not be reached for comment on Wednesday.
"After 30 years, it appears that some measure of justice has finally been achieved," said Elan Steinberg, executive director emeritus of the New York-based World Jewish Congress.
"And I say 'some measure of justice' because, after all, we're talking about somebody who was found to have been a Nazi persecutor," Steinberg said in a telephone interview.
"All that is happening to him, really, is that he's been stripped of his citizenship and is being deported to Ukraine.
Demjanjuk was first stripped of his U.S. citizenship in 1981 and extradited to Israel, where he was sentenced to death in 1988 on eyewitness testimony from Holocaust survivors that he was the notorious Ivan of the Treblinka death camp where 870,000 died.
The Israeli Supreme Court overturned his death sentence in 1993 and freed him after newly released records from the former Soviet Union showed another man, Ivan Marchenko, was probably the sadistic guard at Treblinka.
In 1998, the United States restored Demjanjuk's citizenship based on the wrongful accusations, but the Justice Department refiled its case against him, arguing he had worked for the Nazis as a guard at three concentration camps.
Demjanjuk was stripped of his citizenship again after the 2002 ruling found in favor of the Justice Department.
Documentary evidence, including a frayed German identity card with a photograph and Demjanjuk's signature, convinced the judge that Demjanjuk had been a Nazi guard.
Demjanjuk, who maintained he had been drafted into the Soviet army and became a prisoner of war, was found guilty of lying to gain entry into the United States.
The case was then brought before the immigration judge to approve deportation.
"Whether he was Ivan the Terrible or some other terrible person, is really irrelevant," said Steinberg. "The facts are clear and, at last, we have achieved some justice," he added. |
|
By Colin Brown and Jerome Taylor
28 December 2005
The lawyer of a man who claims he was taken to Syria by the CIA and tortured said yesterday there were examples of similar cases.
His remarks sparked renewed demands for a full inquiry into "extraordinary rendition" in the UK.
Lorne Waldman, the human rights lawyer representing Maher Arar, said it was "ridiculous" for the US Ambassador to London, Robert Tuttle, to deny any renditions by the US of terrorist suspects to Syria had taken place.
Mr Tuttle denied there was evidence of a rendition to Syria but the US Embassy in London later issued a clarification admitting there were reports of one case involving Mr Arar.
"The case of Mr Arar is too public for someone to claim they are not aware of it,'' Mr Waldman said on BBC radio. "To suggest, as the US ambassador did, that they were not aware of the case is ridiculous.''
The lawyer said other suspects had also been shipped for torture by the CIA to Syria. "This is part of a larger pattern. We know of other cases of other individuals who have been rendered,'' said Mr Waldman. "He [Maher Arar] landed in Jordan - and was driven overland by the Jordanians to Syria - in the same CIA plane that was used to render other people to Egypt and other countries where they were tortured. So this was part of a well-known, well-documented pattern."
There was further embarrassment for the US when a former British ambassador to Damascus, Henry Hogger, appeared to confirm that Syria was being used by the CIA.
"What was going on in Syria at the time was not unlike the way it has been described," Mr Hogger said. The US and Syria had worked together, particularly on counter-terrorism, despite public antagonism, he added.
A spokesman for the Commons all-party group on rendition said: 'The momentum for a full inquiry is now becoming unstoppable. There are now inquiries in European countries, including Switzerland, Italy, Germany, and a public inquiry in Canada. Why should Britain be the odd one out?"
Mr Arar's lawyer said he had been "brutally physically tortured" and had been held in a cell about the size of two coffins without light for months. Mr Waldman's claims appear to be backed by the case of a German citizen, Syrian-born Mohammed Haydar Zammar, who claims to have spent four years in a Syrian dungeon after he was abducted in Morocco and transported to Damascus, as part of the US "extraordinary rendition" programme. |
|
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
28 Dec 2005
Since his retirement by Ronald Reagan, President Carter has given active service to the causes of human rights and peace. He has written a number of books, and now he has delivered a humdinger: Our Endangered Values (Simon & Schuster, 2005) in which he takes the Bush administration to task.
Jimmy Carter is an uncommonly decent and sincere person to have gone so far in American politics. His presidency failed because it coincided in time with three crises: economic malaise resulting from the exhaustion and failure of postwar Keynesian demand management, the outburst of long-simmering hatred in Iran of US interference in Iran's internal affairs, and a run-up in the oil price (small compared to what Bush and Cheney have achieved).
President Carter finds it unpleasant to write his assessment of the Bush administration, but he steadfastly makes it clear that the Bush/Cheney/neocon "war on terror" is in fact a war on America's reputation and civil liberties. He points out that the Bush administration has used the "war on terror" to justify actions "similar to those of abusive regimes that we have historically condemned." Consequently, "the United States now has become one of the foremost targets of respected international organizations concerned about these basic principles of democratic life."
Carter reports that the deception, naked aggression, and torture that define the Bush administration have caused a tremendous setback for human rights throughout the world. At an international human rights conference in June 2005, "Participants explained that oppressive leaders had been emboldened to persecute and silence outspoken citizens under the guise of fighting terrorism . . . The consequence is that many lawyers, professors, doctors,and journalists had been labeled terrorists, often for merely criticizing a particular policy or for carrying out their daily work. We heard about many cases involving human rights attorneys being charged with abetting terrorists simply for defending accused persons." Carter is especially disturbed that the Bush administration is encouraging these abusive policies in the name of "fighting terrorism."
Who among us ever expected to hear an American president, vice president, and attorney general justify torture as essential to the protection of the American way of life? Carter quotes attorney general Alberto Gonzales, who sounds more like a third world tyrant than an American when he dismisses the Geneva Convention's provisions as "quaint." Bush threatened to veto any congressional limitation on his right to torture, and Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon declared that "the president, despite domestic and international laws constraining the use of torture, has the authority as Commander in Chief to approve almost any physical or psychological actions during interrogation, up to and including torture."
It is not only Carter who is disturbed, but also members of the previous Bush administration, including the current president's own father and former National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft. Carter quotes Dr. Burton J. Lee III, President George H.W. Bush's White House physician as follows:
"Reports of torture by US forces have been accompanied by evidence that military medical personnel have played a role in this abuse and by new military ethical guidelines that in effect authorize complicity by health professionals in ill-treatment of detainees. . . . Systematic torture, sanctioned by the government and aided and abetted by our own profession, is not acceptable. . . . America cannot continue down this road. Torture demonstrates weakness, not strength. . . . It is not leadership. It is a reaction of government officials overwhelmed by fear who succumb to conduct unworthy of them and of the citizens of the United States."
Carter notes that the illegal detentions following 9/11 were hurriedly legalized by dubious methods which violate a number of constitutional protections of civil liberties. Carter is distressed that children as young as 8 years old are being held in indefinite detention and tortured. Confronted by Seymour Hersh, a Pentagon spokesman replied that "age is not a determining factor in detention."
The similarity of Bush administration policies to " those of abusive regimes that we have historically condemned" is brought home to us by historian Nikolaus Wachsmann's Hitler's Prisons (Yale University Press 2004).
Wachsmann's book is a detailed history of the conflict and cooperation between the traditional legal/judicial/prison system on the one hand and the police/SS/concentration camp system on the other. He does not mention George Bush or Bush's "war on terror." However, the similarities leap off the pages.
Just as 9/11 was a crystallizing event for Bush's seizure of executive power to suspend civil liberties, detain people indefinitely without evidence, and spy on American citizens without warrants, the Reichstag fire of 27 February 1933 was followed the next morning by Hitler's Decree for the Protection of People and State. This decree became the constitutional charter of the Third Reich. It "suspended guarantees of personal liberty and served as the basis for the police arrest and incarceration of political opponents without trial."
In a frightening parallel to our own situation, Wachsmann writes: "Various police activities during the 'seizure of power' clearly damaged legal authority. Indefinite detention without due judicial process was incompatible with the rule of law. But, on the whole, there were no loud complaints or protests from legal officials." I read this passage the same day I heard on National Public Radio University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner defend President Bush's use of extra-legal, extra-Constitutional authority to protect the people and state from terrorists.
The precedent for Alberto Gonzales' declaration that Bush is the law was Reich Minister of Justice Franz Gurtner, who agreed in a cabinet meeting on 3 July 1934 that "Hitler was the law." Bush's claim that extraordinary powers are necessary for him to be able to defend our country under extraordinary circumstances is identical to Hitler's claim that he was entitled to ignore the rule of law because he was "responsible for the fate of the German nation and thereby the supreme judge of the German people." What is the difference between HItler's claim and the US Department of Defense's claim that President Bush has the right to violate domestic and international laws?
Wachsmann's book shows that it is extremely easy for extraordinary measures in the name of national emergency to become permanent.
Germans did not understand that the Decree for the Protection of People and State was the beginning of legal terror.
Carter, being a former president, must write with restraint. Wachsmann sticks closely to his subject. But Robert Higgs in his Resurgence of the Warfare State (Independent Institute 2005) lays it all on the line.
With ruthless logic Higgs shreds every claim of the Bush administration and its apologists. Reading Higgs leaves no doubt that the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq was an illegal act based in deception. Under the Nuremberg standard established by the US itself, Bush's invasion is a war crime. Widespread slaughter of the civilian Iraqi population and torture of detainees are also war crimes. In one of his best chapters Higgs destroys the claim that US "smart weapons" are expressions of our morality in warfare because they target only enemy combatants.
Higgs explains that the accuracy within a few yards of smart weapons is meaningless. The blast, heat, and pressures from the weapons destroys everything within 120 yards of the hit. No one within 365 yards can expect to remain unharmed. Injuries can extend to persons 1000 yards away from the blast. The odds are zero, Higgs writes, that the use of such weapons on towns and cities will not kill and maim large numbers of civilians.
And they have done so. American forces in Iraq have killed far more Iraqi civilians than they have insurgents. It is safe to say that Iraqis never experienced such terror from Saddam Hussein as they have experienced from the American invasion and occupation.
Bush claims that his war crimes are justified because they are committed in the name of "freedom and democracy." The entire world rejects this excuse. Sooner or later even Bush's remaining Republican supporters will turn away in shame from the dishonor Bush has brought to America.
Paul Craig Roberts has held a number of academic appointments and has contributed to numerous scholarly publications. He served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. His graduate economics education was at the University of Virginia, the University of California at Berkeley, and Oxford University. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com |
|
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
28 Dec 2005
Before Bush boarded his helicopter for evacuation into the Maryland hill country for Christmas at Camp David, the president-in-lycra made the inexplicable observation that "it's been a great year for Americans."
He probably wasn't speaking for the families of the 735 US troops who had been killed in Iraq in 2005, although increasingly the military death toll there is claiming the lives of recent Mexican immigrants, who Bush may not consider fully "American".
Also Bush likely wasn't talking about the 300,000 people still displaced by Hurricane Katrina, perhaps because the First Mother has assured him that those who were dropped off in Texas have never had it so good.
And he certainly wasn't referring to Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, once the most powerful man on the Hill, who whined in a threnody worthy of a passage from Aeschylus, that the close of this year's congressional session had been the worst day of his life. What tragedy could have cast such a gloomy pall across the mighty man from Anchorage, who, as chairman of the Senate appropriations committee, commands the flow of trillions of dollars from the federal treasury?
The final days of congress are usually a joyous time for Stevens. This is the season when he gets to play Santa, by implanting into the final budget bills billions of dollars of porkbarrel projects in the states of senators who have shown him the proper obeisance over the previous year and by stripping out cherished projects from those few who had dared to defy him.
But this year, it was Stevens who was rudely jolted by a last second reversal of fortune, when his brethren and sistren in the senate blocked his stealthy maneuver to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration.
Surely, the Porcupine caribou herd raised their heads at Stevens's long-distance howl and snorted in celebration at the news that their calving grounds on the Arctic plain had been spared for yet another year from intrusion by oil derricks and pipelines and that their nemesis for the last 30 years had received a rare rebuke.
Stevens's agony must be all the more acute because he was so tantalizingly close to achieving what he has said is his last major objective as a senator. Indeed, earlier this year, after the senator had slipped the ANWR drilling measure into the budget reconciliation bill in an effort to evade the senate filibusters that had frustrated his efforts in the past, Stevens told his hometown paper, the Anchorage Daily News, that his work in the senate was done and he could now retire a contented man.
Stevens wasn't counting on the Republican-controlled House of Representatives to throw a monkey wrench into his devious plans. But that's exactly what happened this fall when 25 Republicans, staring at polar-bear friendly poll numbers and not wanting to risk aligning themselves with the oil company executives who had gloated about making record profits in the wake of Katrina, demanded that the ANWR provision be stripped from the budget bill. The defeat of ANWR in what Stevens contemptuously calls the "other body" may also reflect the collapse of House discipline now that Tom DeLay has been forced to stand aside as leader following his indictment in Texas.
While the Sierra Club feted itself over a rare environmental victory in the GOP-ruled House, Stevens went back to his laboratory and brewed up another recipe from his book of legislative alchemy. The senator single-handedly affixed the ANWR measure to the Defense Appropriation Bill, hoping that Democrats and anti-drilling Republicans wouldn't have the guts to launch a last minute filibuster that might be seen as denying weapons, body armor, food and Humvees to the troops in Iraq. The senate also linked Katrina relief money to the ANWR measure. "There'll be no Katrina money without ANWR drilling," Stevens brayed. But Stevens's gambit failed, when he fell four votes shy of overcoming a filibuster.
It is a sweet irony that within a matter of months, both houses had approved opening ANWR to drilling and, then, they both rejected it. In a mournful editorial, the Wall Street Journal called the turn of events "surreal." And for once they're right.
Of course, next spring, with the regularity of migrating warblers, the ANWR drilling forces will press their case once more, with Ted Stevens leading the charge. But the window of vulnerability is closing for ANWR. Stevens is in his twilight. He seems a frail and diminished figure these days, ranting in the well of the Senate, a Republican version of Bobby Byrd, who also once ruled the appropriations game and steered federal wealth to the carved hills of West Virginia.
Stevens must feel that the oil cartel has let him down, first by the orgy of profiteering in the wake of the hurricanes, then with the utterly unrepentant performance of the oil executives during the congressional show hearings into their record profits, where the CEOs refused to even feign the slightest blush of contrition.
The final blow, though, was the distinct lack of vigor shown by oil industry lobbyists in the battle for ANWR. For Stevens this must seem like a kind of heresy. He is a crusader now, for whom the conquest of ANWR has assumed a religious fervor. Stevens wants to drill a well through the heart not only of ANWR, but the idea of ANWR, the paganistic precedent of a swath of public land in his state that is off-limits to industrial exploitation.
"It's an empty, ugly place," Stevens snarled. "It's almost treasonous that environmentalists are sacrificing our national security for such a place." The mad senator raged that he planned to visit the states of each senator who voted against him to inform the citizens of their treachery.
But for the oil companies it's always been about maximizing profits and there's mounting evidence that without generous federal subsidies or a major spike in global oil prices there might not be enough oil lurking under the permafrost of ANWR to justify the legislative fight and the years of protracted litigation.
No one really knows how much oil lies under ANWR. There's only been a single test hole drilled in the area and that was on native lands and the results have been kept a closely guarded secret for years. The geology of ANWR is suggestive of an oil field holding between 5 billion and 10 billion barrels. But if the price of oil stays below $60 a barrel, fully 30 percent of that total won't be economically recoverable. That leaves somewhere between 3.5 billion and 7 billion barrels-a big find, but not huge. At peak production, ANWR oil, sluiced down the Alaska pipeline, might satiate about 5 percent of US oil demand. But only for about three years. Then production would begin a steady decline until the reserves are exhausted in 20 years or so. Add to this prospectus, the expense and risk of transporting the crude from the Arctic to US refineries in southern California-assuming the crude isn't shipped across the Pacific to refineries in China and South Korea.
From the oil cartel's vantage, there's easier prey to be had in the Alaskan National Petroleum Reserve just west of Prudhoe Bay, in the Canadian Yukon or in the Gulf of Mexico. If Stevens can deliver them ANWR gift-wrapped with production subsidies as his senatorial swan song, so much the better. If not, there's no reason to sweat it. As Exxon and its brethren proved this year, oil shortages, real or engineered, yield eye-popping profits with little costs. And when the price gets high enough, every last drop of crude will once again be within their clutches.
As for the environmental movement, ANWR has functioned as their own private cash reserve since the 1980s when James Watt put a bullseye on that austere stretch of Arctic coastline. There's been no more lucrative fundraiser for the Sierra Club than the annual threat of oil wells being drilled in the home of the polar bear and musk oxen. To the political cynic, it might appear that the environmental movement profits from having ANWR under perpetual threat.
But with Stevens weakened and the oil industry distracted, it's time for the green cabal in Washington to push hard for permanent protection of the American Serengeti by demanding that the entire wildlife refuge to be designated a federal wilderness area forever immune from attack by the oil and gas companies, a stratagem they inexplicably chose not to pursue during Clintontime.
Of course, a successful wilderness campaign might mean a diminished flow of revenues in the future. But these green groups are supposed to be non-profits, aren't they?
Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon, just published by Common Courage Press. |
|
By LARA JAKES JORDAN
Dec 28, 2005
The Homeland Security Department, created in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, has failed to fulfill 33 of its own pledges to better protect the nation, according to a report released Tuesday by House Democrats. The report concludes that gaps remain in federal efforts to secure an array of areas, including ports, borders and chemical plants. There also are still delays in the department's sharing terror alerts and other intelligence with state and local officials, the review said.
Compiled for 13 Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee, the report analyzes public statements and congressional testimony on Bush administration security goals since 2002.
Responding, Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said the department is prioritizing resources and programs based on "today's greatest threats."
"Rather than looking backward at yesterday's threats, we are building upon what we have already accomplished to meet evolving threats," said Knocke.
According to the Democrats, since the department began operating in March 2003, it has failed to:
_Compile a single, comprehensive list prioritizing protections for the nation's most critical and potentially vulnerable buildings, transportation systems and other infrastructure.
_Install monitors at borders and every international seaport and airport to screen for radiation material entering the country.
_Install surveillance cameras at all high-risk chemical plants.
_Create one effective network to share quickly security-related intelligence and alerts with state, local and private industry officials.
_Track foreign visitors through a computerized system that takes their fingerprints and photographs as they enter and exit the country.
"It would be one thing if the department didn't identify security lapses in the first place, but a more troubling situation when they make promises to the American people and then leave them unfulfilled," Rep. Bennie G. Thompson of Mississippi, the committee's top Democrat, said in a statement accompanying the report.
Although the department has missed many of the original deadlines it set for some programs, it is working to complete them.
In June, for example, Homeland Security for the first time agreed to pursue federal security regulations for chemical plants that have been mostly policed by private industry.
And last week, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the department will have finished the entry portion of the system to track foreigners - named US-VISIT - by the end of the year at 115 airports, 14 seaports and 150 land crossings into the country. |
|
Ian Sample, science correspondent
Wednesday December 28, 2005
The Guardian
· Digital technology records scientist's every step
· Experiment could help sufferers of brain disease
Gordon Bell doesn't need to remember, but has no chance of forgetting. At the age of 71, he is recording as much of his life as modern technology will allow, storing it all on a vast database: a digital facsimile of a life lived. If he goes for a walk, a miniature camera that dangles from his neck snaps pictures every minute or so, immediately committing the scene to a memory built not of neurons but ones and noughts. If he wanders into a cafe, sensors note the change in light, the shift of temperature and squirrel the information away. Conversations are recorded and steps logged thanks to a GPS receiver carried with him.
Dr Bell has now stored so much of his life on computer that he is in danger of forgetting how to remember. "I look at it as a surrogate memory," he says. If he wants to recall something, he switches on and picks his way through days and months of information until he finds what he is after. It was all dreamt up at Microsoft's Bay Area Research Centre in San Francisco, where Dr Bell works.
He agreed to become a guinea pig in his own life's experiment, to push the boundaries of information computers can handle. In an era of relationships defined by informal emails, of mobile phones snapping crimes as they unfold, the project was seen as an extension of our desire to store snippets of our existence. By recording his life in the present, Dr Bell hopes to give a glimpse of all our lives in the future.
At first, he merely scanned books and work documents, but the project ballooned, embracing the mundane and the moving: details of plumbers, of others he's met, sit digitally alongside letters from his children, his advice when they hit difficult times. Conversations with his grandchildren, his wife, are there too. Occasional musings on the world that would otherwise be confined to a diary now go straight into the database, accompanied by a thousand pages of medical records.
The trickiest decision came a few years ago when Dr Bell was trawling through old files and scanning them in. His assistant found a memo with a stern note urging: "Do not ever reproduce this." It was an extremely frank letter purging his thoughts on a company he was involved with at the time. It named names, pointed the finger, ranted. It was never meant to be posted, copied, or seen by anyone other than himself. "I decided we should put it on the system after all. I still feel the same about it, but it's on there," he says.
As far as Microsoft is concerned, the digital database, known as MyLifeBits, is a unique challenge for the company's programmers. If all of our computers will one day store even a minor mountain of detail from our public and private lives, how will we ever be able to organise it? What software will rummage through our electronic minds for connected events, perhaps a conversation about a picture taken on some seaside trip on a dank day one May?
While Microsoft's researchers find new ways to probe Dr Bell's digital memory, others are keeping a close eye on the issues Dr Bell faces as the project unfolds.
A perennial problem is privacy. Dr Bell has logged all but a handful of his most personal experiences, those few left out because no computer system is completely secure against a determined hacker. Some of the information held on the database is also of ambiguous ownership. Who decides who else can pore over the details of the conversations he has had, the people he has met? "I'm not worried about someone going in there and mining my innermost thoughts, but there is the whole issue of security and control that I think we can solve."
An early insight into a weakness of the system revealed how reliant Dr Bell had become on his "surrogate memory". The hard drive of his computer crashed, losing four months of data.
In a report on the project, he describes it as "a severe emotional blow, perhaps like having one's memories taken away."
Dr Bell has also had to wrestle with the knowledge that, barring crashes, he has lost the luxury of forgetting. Even though he has to retain less in his own memory, an experience he describes as liberating , much of his life is stored, warts and all. Frank Nack at the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam says a perfect memory is in many ways a curse. "There are stages when it's good to be able to forget, so in that case, this technology is counterproductive," he says.
More worrying to Dr Nack is the effect Dr Bell's vision could have on a future society. Stick a video camera in someone's face and they will behave differently. "If everything we do is recorded for scrutiny, it can hinder social development," adds Dr Nack. In short, surveillance of the people, by the people, could lead to an unsettling society of conformists, he warns.
Dr Bell is less worried about such problems, instead highlighting the potential the system could have, not least for those who are literally losing their minds. Already, a similar system is being tested by a small group of people with degenerative brain disease in Cambridge. In the evening, the husband of one woman on the trial reviews the recorded day with his wife. It reduces her anxiety that she will forget important moments.
For Dr Bell, MyLifeBits is more of a back-up memory. "There were people walking around New Orleans after Katrina with soggy shoeboxes of things. My whole life moves with me, I don't need to carry these things," he said.
FAQ: MyLifeBits
How much of Gordon Bell's life has been recorded?
The project began in 2001 and has since recorded 1,300 videos, 5,067 sound files, including conversations, 42,000 digital pictures, nearly 100,000 emails and 67,000 webpages. Recently, the system has started logging every step Mr Bell takes using GPS (Global Positioning Systems) and is beginning to store health data, from calories burned to individual heart beats.
What happens to the information?
Access to the life database is restricted, but Bell says he might pass it on to his children at some point. His computer logs a number of parallel lives, including his work life and his private life. In future, companies may demand that any information in a person's work life is deleted after three years, he says.
How much memory does a life need?
Microsoft researchers believe that technological advances will ensure one terabyte of memory is enough to store everything except video for 83 years. Many iPods have 20 gigabytes of memory, or one fiftieth of a terabyte. If we recorded video constantly, we would need an extra 200 terabytes of memory. |
Readers
who wish to know more about who we are and what we do may visit
our portal site Quantum
Future
Remember,
we need your help to collect information on what is going on in
your part of the world!
We also need help to keep the Signs of the Times online.
Send your comments and article suggestions to us 
Fair Use Policy Contact Webmaster at signs-of-the-times.org
Cassiopaean materials Copyright ©1994-2014 Arkadiusz Jadczyk and Laura Knight-Jadczyk. All rights reserved. "Cassiopaea, Cassiopaean, Cassiopaeans," is a registered trademark of Arkadiusz Jadczyk and Laura Knight-Jadczyk.
Letters addressed to Cassiopaea, Quantum Future School, Ark or Laura, become the property of Arkadiusz Jadczyk and Laura Knight-Jadczyk
Republication and re-dissemination of our copyrighted material in any manner is expressly prohibited without prior written consent.
|
