Disturbing Facts

How the UK gave Israel the bomb

2005-08-04T21:19:00.000+02:00

London, United Kingdom

04 August 2005 07:38

Britain secretly supplied the 20 tonnes of heavy water to Israel nearly half a century ago which enabled it to make nuclear weapons, according to Whitehall documents which have been discovered at the Public Records Office.

Officials in the Macmillan government deliberately concealed the deal from the United States, according to the files, which were discovered by BBC Newsnight and broadcast on Wednesday night.

Historians and politicians have been startled by the discovery, which sheds new light on the process by which Israel was able to circumvent attempts to restrict membership of the "nuclear club" to the great powers.

Most of those involved are now dead, but Lord (Ian) Gilmour, who was active in Conservative politics during that era, said on Wednesday night: "I would have been astonished and found it absolutely unbelievable." He said he did not believe Harold Macmillan or his ministers knew anything about the sale, which Britain permitted without demanding safeguards against military use.

"They've gone out of their way to do it without safeguards," he said. "One would have thought that any reasonably educated civil servant wouldn't have dreamed of doing anything like this without consulting a minister but as far as I can see they didn't."

A nuclear specialist, Frank Barnaby, said: "I had no idea at all the British were involved."

The sale, in two successive 10-tonne shipments to Israel from a British port, went to Israel's secret underground reactor at Dimona in the Negev desert.

Barnaby said the deal appeared "rather foolhardy" and added: "I would have thought a cautious government would have in no way been seen to be doing anything to help the Israeli nuclear programme."

The primary motive for the sale, according to the documents, appeared to be commercial. The British atomic energy authority was able to get rid of a consignment of heavy water worth £1,5-million, or £20-million in today's prices, which it had bought from Norway but no longer had a use for.

The deal was structured as a resale to Norway, which then traded the consignment on to Israel. This enabled British officials to say they had no responsibility themselves for imposing safeguards.

But, according to the documents, the deal was concealed from the US, which was hostile to proliferation, because the Eisenhower administration might have insisted on unacceptable conditions which would have scuppered the sale.

When Robert McNamara became the US defence secretary in 1961, he and President Kennedy strived to stop Israel from going on to build nuclear weapons. He told Newsnight on Wednesday night that he had never known of Britain's behaviour at the time.

"The fact Israel was trying to develop a nuclear bomb should not have come as a surprise but that Britain should have supplied it with heavy water was indeed a surprise to me," he said.

"It's very surprising to me that we weren't told because we shared information about the nuclear bomb very closely with the British."

The origins of the heavy water used in the Dimona reactor remained almost entirely unknown until the revelations of Mordechai Vanunu, a disaffected Dimona technician, in the 1980s.

It was disclosed then that the 20 tonnes originated from Norway. But Norway itself continued to remain silent about the true nature of the deal.

Heavy water, made by a laborious electrolysis process, is so called because it contains extra neutrons. It was a crucial element of the kind of basic nuclear reactor then being built by Israel with French help, which used natural uranium rather than the more advanced technology involving enriched uranium fuel.

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=247174&area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__international_news/

Belief Systems

2005-07-28T11:33:00.000+02:00

Belief Systems

Henry See

Looking back over the history of the monotheistic religions, one could make a pretty good case for the argument that:

1 - They are systems of control used to manipulate groups of people within societies;

2 - They are systems of control used to provoke hatred between peoples who worship different aspects of the overall monotheistic theology;
3 - They discourage independent thought and critical thinking;
4 - They encourage ritualistic behaviour the real meaning of which has been lost and is not understood by the practitioner;
5 - They have taken whatever germ of spiritual truth they may have had initially and crushed it;
6 - Their impact on human life is overwhelmingly negative.

The foundation of the monotheistic religions are the books of the Jews, works that are claimed to be the word of God himself, but which were more likely to have been artfully cobbled together from various sources during the exile in Babylon to give a common history to disparate tribes. No archaeological work has ever uncovered anything in the way of remains of the supposed Temple of Solomon, nor does it show Jerusalem of the Davidic epoch to be anything more than a "typical hill country village" during the period ascribed to David. You can be certain that both Jewish and Christian archaeologists have been spending years looking for such hard evidence because so much is riding on the find, but they have found nothing to confirm the glorious tales of David and Solomon as told in the Bible.

If the historical veracity of the great kingdom of David goes down the drain, the rest of the Bible goes with it. But the Temple is not the only historical problem.

The story of Moses and the slavery of the Jews in Egypt appears to have been a rewriting of events that occurred during the time of Akhenaton, perhaps mixed with the history of an exodus from Egypt that occurred much earlier. The curious result of accepting the Bible as history is that it is then used to date Egyptian dynasties, usually by Christians from Europe who had a vested interest in making Egyptian history fit the "Biblical record". As result of this, the dating of the reign of Akhenaton is several hundred years after it is most likely that he lived. Events of Akhenaton's rule appear to us to match the period of the eruption of Thera on the island of Santorini which has been dated to 1628 BC. For more information on these topics, we refer you to The Secret History of the World by Laura Knight-Jadczyk.

The Old Testament is not history, it is fantasy. What about the history of Jesus? Was there an historical figure from Nazareth who was crucified by the Romans, whose story is accurately recounted in the Gospels?

No.

Textual analysis of the gospels shows us that they were put together at different times and for different audiences. They were based upon an earlier document, known as Q, that collected the sayings of a Cynic-like teacher. The earliest documents mention nothing of the crucifixion, nothing of the life of the man behind the teachings. That story, in other words, "the historical Jesus", was put together much, much later, and there exists no historical evidence from the period that would independently confirm the gospel stories. All we have to go on are the religious texts of Christianity itself, which as we have seen from the Jewish texts, are being promoted by people with a vested interest in the outcome of the debate.

Islam claims to be a further development of the same tradition. Yet if the historical basis for the first two have been shown to be invalid, then the religion of the sons and daughters of Ishmael is also deprived of its foundations. All three appeal to a divine source, a source that cannot be put into question by mere mortals. Their authority rests upon this divine source and the belief that the texts are literally "the word of God". The literal believers of the Word of God, be it the Judaic, the Christian, or the Islamic, are put into a corner because modern archaeological and textual research have removed the foundations of their belief systems, and we know what happens when someone is backed into a corner and is given no way out. They will fight to the death to preserve themselves. And since each version of monotheism invalidates its predecessor, they must fight each other as well as that modern demon, secular society.

There is something about our root systems of belief, and this extends beyond religion to the modern, rational forms of belief such as humanism, or certain forms of belief in science or even democracy, that they seem to us both self-evident and unquestionable. To question the basis of our beliefs is to put ourselves as individuals into question because we identify so strongly with them. A fervent evangelical Christian could no more put this system of ideas and beliefs into question than could the Pope, the settlers in the occupied territories killing Palestinians to steal their land, an imam in a Moslem country, or Richard Dawkins at his desk at Oxford.

However, we see that these beliefs are constantly under attack because the mere existence of another system claiming the same status as final arbiter of behaviour, custom, and thought, and therefore, of identity, is a threat. There can only be one absolutist position, one place at the top of the pyramid, one boss. Therefore, the true believer must draw around himself a line in the sand that circumscribes Truth, within which stand the faithful, and outside of which are found the pagan, the heathen, the non-believer. Here we find a second level of identification, a negative form of "all that I am not" whereby one takes all attributes of "good" and "holy" for oneself and assigns the opposite attributes to the Other, to those outside of the circle. Having done this calculation, it is then very easy for the believer to be manipulated into believing that the Other is less-than-human. Such demonisation is necessary during periods of conflict and war. When the two sides have thoroughly demonised the opponent, they will stop at nothing, no humiliation, no form of torture or brutality, because inflicting such punishment is a way to reinforce one's own specialness.

This process is repeated by each and every member of any absolutist belief structure, which means just about every person on the face of the planet. No wonder things are such a mess.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the rise of rationalism in the West, the religious structure began to be replaced by the scientific mindset which displaced the Earth from the centre of the universe, posited the existence of other worlds in the Cosmos, and proposed that mankind, rather than being created in the physical image of God, was the result of a long process of evolution from simpler forms of life. The Word of God as transcribed in the Bible was put into question. Identification with national structures became more and more pronounced, so that one's nationality took precedence over one's common religious affiliations in many Western countries. To reconcile the religious and the national, politicians would claim that God was on their side. Many Jews continue to place their tribal or religious affiliation before their national identity, while among the Arabs, there is still a strong pan-Arab sentiment that is closely tied in with Islam.

Against the modern way of structuring the world arose the first forms of modern Christian fundamentalism, an attempt to return to the old days of certainty and unquestionable rules, coupled with the fervent belief that no matter the trials and tribulations in the here and now, there was a better world awaiting in the hereafter for those who maintained their faith in the face of their earthly suffering.

In Arab countries, the existence of corrupt, secular states that were beholden to Western interests laid the groundwork for the rise of calls to a return to traditional Islam, or the return to Islamic law, the Sharia. Here, religious, national, and pan-Arabic structures all come into play because with globalisation, Western customs are imposed, in this case, with appeals to the divinity of "the market", and traditional ways of life, which may only be tangentially linked with Islam, are lost. This interweaving of different levels heightens the tensions. The ruthless use of force on the part of Israel, the United States, and their allies in imposing the belief structures of "the market", Judaism, or Christianity on the Arab and Muslim people calls forth a resistance. This reaction is normal and quite mechanical. Newton described it in his third law of dynamics: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. When one body exerts a force on another, the second body exerts on the first a force of equal magnitude in the opposite direction. We should therefore not be surprised that there is a reaction on the part of Muslims to the modern Crusade launched by Bush and his neocon friends.

As this reaction is easily predictable, the next step is for the aggressor to seek to control it. We know that American intelligence agencies were in Afghanistan while the Russians were there, supporting the Islamic "freedom fighters". This was, of course, before these same people became "terrorists" after the Russians were expelled. There are sites that offer evidence that British intelligence has long been connected with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. None of this should be surprising. It simply makes sense from a strategic point of view for the occupier to infiltrate and seek to manipulate the resistance.

While we may appear to have moved away from our initial discussion on religion, it should be clear that religion is a powerful motivator because it appeals to absolutes. Things are always all or nothing. One is saved or one is not. One is a believer, or one is an infidel. It is a zero-sum game where only one player can win, and every gain for one player means a loss for another player.

Clearly, the only way out of this impasse is to get rid of such belief structures altogether, but as they are so tightly bound with our ideas of who we are, as they are the foundations of all we think and believe, the work of rooting them out can only take place one individual at a time. Such work cannot be imposed on anyone because it would then become nothing more than the replacement of one structure by another, based upon an appeal to the authority of the one with the power to impose it. Rooting out belief structures must be done by each of us, at our own speed, motivated by an internal drive to be free. Only then can we put our basic assumptions into question. A group of like-minded individuals is also necessary because we often are blind to the deepest of our beliefs. They are so "self-evident" that we don't see them. But, here again, the group is not there to impose its point of view. It exists to help us free ourselves and find the answers for ourselves, or to be able to admit where there is not enough data in hand to come to a response and so the answer must be held in abeyance.

Such a liberatory structure is more a method than a system of answers because any answer has the potential to be revised when new data arrives. Furthermore, the more we learn, the more we learn how to learn so the method itself is open to constant improvement. In short, nothing is fixed except the direction we wish to move. When we start, we may not even know enough to have more than an intuition of what the destination is like. We do not have the knowledge to judge it or to know it in detail beforehand.

But of one thing we can be certain from observation: the monotheistic religions are traps. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are walls we erect within us to keep us apart and above others on the ladder of power. Whatever spiritual truths they hold come from a far older tradition, one that encouraged people to see the world objectively and free from the type of all-encompassing explanatory and belief structures these religions have become. It is likely that these religions arose in opposition to this older tradition, as means of co-opting it and turning its deeper, spiritual truths into a tool for power in the material world.

The first step to the spiritual life is the renunciation all forms of belief systems, and that includes religion.

http://signs-of-the-times.org/signs/henry_see_belief_systems.htm

belief

This war on terrorism is bogus

2005-07-28T11:04:00.000+02:00

Flashback - The Guardian - Saturday September 6, 2003

This war on terrorism is bogus

The 9/11 attacks gave the US an ideal pretext to use force to secure its global domination

By Michael Meacher

Massive attention has now been given - and rightly so - to the reasons why Britain went to war against Iraq. But far too little attention has focused on why the US went to war, and that throws light on British motives too. The conventional explanation is that after the Twin Towers were hit, retaliation against al-Qaida bases in Afghanistan was a natural first step in launching a global war against terrorism. Then, because Saddam Hussein was alleged by the US and UK governments to retain weapons of mass destruction, the war could be extended to Iraq as well. However this theory does not fit all the facts. The truth may be a great deal murkier.

We now know that a blueprint for the creation of a global Pax Americana was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), Jeb Bush (George Bush's younger brother) and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defences, was written in September 2000 by the neoconservative think tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says "while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document attributed to Wolfowitz and Libby which said the US must "discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role". It refers to key allies such as the UK as "the most effective and efficient means of exercising American global leadership". It describes peacekeeping missions as "demanding American political leadership rather than that of the UN". It says "even should Saddam pass from the scene", US bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently... as "Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests as Iraq has". It spotlights China for "regime change", saying "it is time to increase the presence of American forces in SE Asia".

The document also calls for the creation of "US space forces" to dominate space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent "enemies" using the internet against the US. It also hints that the US may consider developing biological weapons "that can target specific genotypes [and] may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool".

Finally - written a year before 9/11 - it pinpoints North Korea, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes, and says their existence justifies the creation of a "worldwide command and control system". This is a blueprint for US world domination. But before it is dismissed as an agenda for rightwing fantasists, it is clear it provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis. This can be seen in several ways.

First, it is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9/11. It is known that at least 11 countries provided advance warning to the US of the 9/11 attacks. Two senior Mossad experts were sent to Washington in August 2001 to alert the CIA and FBI to a cell of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation (Daily Telegraph, September 16 2001). The list they provided included the names of four of the 9/11 hijackers, none of whom was arrested.

It had been known as early as 1996 that there were plans to hit Washington targets with aeroplanes. Then in 1999 a US national intelligence council report noted that "al-Qaida suicide bombers could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA, or the White House".

Fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers obtained their visas in Saudi Arabia. Michael Springman, the former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah, has stated that since 1987 the CIA had been illicitly issuing visas to unqualified applicants from the Middle East and bringing them to the US for training in terrorism for the Afghan war in collaboration with Bin Laden (BBC, November 6 2001). It seems this operation continued after the Afghan war for other purposes. It is also reported that five of the hijackers received training at secure US military installations in the 1990s (Newsweek, September 15 2001).

Instructive leads prior to 9/11 were not followed up. French Moroccan flight student Zacarias Moussaoui (now thought to be the 20th hijacker) was arrested in August 2001 after an instructor reported he showed a suspicious interest in learning how to steer large airliners. When US agents learned from French intelligence he had radical Islamist ties, they sought a warrant to search his computer, which contained clues to the September 11 mission (Times, November 3 2001). But they were turned down by the FBI. One agent wrote, a month before 9/11, that Moussaoui might be planning to crash into the Twin Towers (Newsweek, May 20 2002).

All of this makes it all the more astonishing - on the war on terrorism perspective - that there was such slow reaction on September 11 itself. The first hijacking was suspected at not later than 8.20am, and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06am. Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to investigate from the US Andrews airforce base, just 10 miles from Washington DC, until after the third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9.38 am. Why not? There were standard FAA intercept procedures for hijacked aircraft before 9/11. Between September 2000 and June 2001 the US military launched fighter aircraft on 67 occasions to chase suspicious aircraft (AP, August 13 2002). It is a US legal requirement that once an aircraft has moved significantly off its flight plan, fighter planes are sent up to investigate.

Was this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding, or being ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US air security operations have been deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on whose authority? The former US federal crimes prosecutor, John Loftus, has said: "The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9/11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to assert a defence of incompetence."

Nor is the US response after 9/11 any better. No serious attempt has ever been made to catch Bin Laden. In late September and early October 2001, leaders of Pakistan's two Islamist parties negotiated Bin Laden's extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for 9/11. However, a US official said, significantly, that "casting our objectives too narrowly" risked "a premature collapse of the international effort if by some lucky chance Mr Bin Laden was captured". The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Myers, went so far as to say that "the goal has never been to get Bin Laden" (AP, April 5 2002). The whistleblowing FBI agent Robert Wright told ABC News (December 19 2002) that FBI headquarters wanted no arrests. And in November 2001 the US airforce complained it had had al-Qaida and Taliban leaders in its sights as many as 10 times over the previous six weeks, but had been unable to attack because they did not receive permission quickly enough (Time Magazine, May 13 2002). None of this assembled evidence, all of which comes from sources already in the public domain, is compatible with the idea of a real, determined war on terrorism.

The catalogue of evidence does, however, fall into place when set against the PNAC blueprint. From this it seems that the so-called "war on terrorism" is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives. Indeed Tony Blair himself hinted at this when he said to the Commons liaison committee: "To be truthful about it, there was no way we could have got the public consent to have suddenly launched a campaign on Afghanistan but for what happened on September 11" (Times, July 17 2002). Similarly Rumsfeld was so determined to obtain a rationale for an attack on Iraq that on 10 separate occasions he asked the CIA to find evidence linking Iraq to 9/11; the CIA repeatedly came back empty-handed (Time Magazine, May 13 2002).

In fact, 9/11 offered an extremely convenient pretext to put the PNAC plan into action. The evidence again is quite clear that plans for military action against Afghanistan and Iraq were in hand well before 9/11. A report prepared for the US government from the Baker Institute of Public Policy stated in April 2001 that "the US remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma. Iraq remains a destabilising influence to... the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East". Submitted to Vice-President Cheney's energy task group, the report recommended that because this was an unacceptable risk to the US, "military intervention" was necessary (Sunday Herald, October 6 2002).

Similar evidence exists in regard to Afghanistan. The BBC reported (September 18 2001) that Niaz Niak, a former Pakistan foreign secretary, was told by senior American officials at a meeting in Berlin in mid-July 2001 that "military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October". Until July 2001 the US government saw the Taliban regime as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of hydrocarbon pipelines from the oil and gas fields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. But, confronted with the Taliban's refusal to accept US conditions, the US representatives told them "either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs" (Inter Press Service, November 15 2001).

Given this background, it is not surprising that some have seen the US failure to avert the 9/11 attacks as creating an invaluable pretext for attacking Afghanistan in a war that had clearly already been well planned in advance. There is a possible precedent for this. The US national archives reveal that President Roosevelt used exactly this approach in relation to Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941. Some advance warning of the attacks was received, but the information never reached the US fleet. The ensuing national outrage persuaded a reluctant US public to join the second world war. Similarly the PNAC blueprint of September 2000 states that the process of transforming the US into "tomorrow's dominant force" is likely to be a long one in the absence of "some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor". The 9/11 attacks allowed the US to press the "go" button for a strategy in accordance with the PNAC agenda which it would otherwise have been politically impossible to implement.

The overriding motivation for this political smokescreen is that the US and the UK are beginning to run out of secure hydrocarbon energy supplies. By 2010 the Muslim world will control as much as 60% of the world's oil production and, even more importantly, 95% of remaining global oil export capacity. As demand is increasing, so supply is decreasing, continually since the 1960s.

This is leading to increasing dependence on foreign oil supplies for both the US and the UK. The US, which in 1990 produced domestically 57% of its total energy demand, is predicted to produce only 39% of its needs by 2010. A DTI minister has admitted that the UK could be facing "severe" gas shortages by 2005. The UK government has confirmed that 70% of our electricity will come from gas by 2020, and 90% of that will be imported. In that context it should be noted that Iraq has 110 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves in addition to its oil.

A report from the commission on America's national interests in July 2000 noted that the most promising new source of world supplies was the Caspian region, and this would relieve US dependence on Saudi Arabia. To diversify supply routes from the Caspian, one pipeline would run westward via Azerbaijan and Georgia to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Another would extend eastwards through Afghanistan and Pakistan and terminate near the Indian border. This would rescue Enron's beleaguered power plant at Dabhol on India's west coast, in which Enron had sunk $3bn investment and whose economic survival was dependent on access to cheap gas.

Nor has the UK been disinterested in this scramble for the remaining world supplies of hydrocarbons, and this may partly explain British participation in US military actions. Lord Browne, chief executive of BP, warned Washington not to carve up Iraq for its own oil companies in the aftermath of war (Guardian, October 30 2002). And when a British foreign minister met Gadaffi in his desert tent in August 2002, it was said that "the UK does not want to lose out to other European nations already jostling for advantage when it comes to potentially lucrative oil contracts" with Libya (BBC Online, August 10 2002).

The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the "global war on terrorism" has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for a wholly different agenda - the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project. Is collusion in this myth and junior participation in this project really a proper aspiration for British foreign policy? If there was ever need to justify a more objective British stance, driven by our own independent goals, this whole depressing saga surely provides all the evidence needed for a radical change of course.

Michael Meacher MP was environment minister from May 1997 to June 2003

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,9115,1036688,00.html

9/11
Terrorism

Mossad Exposed in Phony `Palestinian Al-Qaeda' Caper

2005-07-27T15:37:00.000+02:00

Flashback - December 20, 2002 - Executive Intelligence Review.

Mossad Exposed in Phony `Palestinian Al-Qaeda' Caper
by Michele Steinberg and Hussein Askary

The United States government has been provided with concrete evidence that the Israeli Mossad and other Israeli intelligence services have been involved in a 13-month effort to "recruit" an Israeli-run, phony "al-Qaeda cell" among Palestinians, so that Israel could achieve a frontline position in the U.S. war against terrorism and get a green light for a worldwide "revenge without borders" policy. The question: Does the United States have the moral fiber to investigate?

Evidence of the Israeli dirty tricks burst onto the public scene on Dec. 6, when Col. Rashid Abu Shbak, head of the Palestinian Preventive Security Services in the Gaza Strip, held a press conference revealing the details of the alleged plot, as his agency had put the pieces together. The revelations undermine the "big lie" that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has used to justify new brutal attacks on Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip and other occupied areas. Sharon claimed on Dec. 4 that Israeli intelligence had "hard evidence" of al-Qaeda operations in the Gaza Strip. Now, the top Palestinian leadership has shown the United States and other nations how Israeli intelligence entities were creating that al-Qaeda link!

American leader Lyndon LaRouche, a Democratic Presidential pre-candidate in 2004, commented that these revelations, if confirmed, could be "of strategic importance" in stopping the American, British, and Israeli warhawks pushing for a Middle East war, beginning with an invasion of Iraq. A war would justify the Sharon government's plan to annihilate the very idea of a Palestinian state. LaRouche warned that if institutions of the American Presidency and the international community successfully block an American pre-emptive war on Iraq, the biggest danger would be that a "mega-terror" attack, blamed on Palestinians, or an "Iraqi-linked" al-Qaeda, would be staged by Israel's ruling Jabotinskyite fanatics, to put the war back on the agenda.

News about the Mossad-run attempt to create an al-Qaeda cell came when well-informed intelligence sources based in Washington had already told EIR that there are many doubts about the Mossad's hasty declaration that "al-Qaeda" had been responsible for the Nov. 28 attack on a hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, where three Israelis were killed, and the failed rocket attack on an Israeli chartered jet that was departing from Mombasa airport. There was no identification of the bombers within the first five days of the incident, the sources pointed out, yet Sharon's government ministers went on an immediate propaganda rampage announcing worldwide revenge (see article in this section). Authorities in Kenya also denied the al-Qaeda link. But the usefulness of blaming al-Qaeda, for the Israeli right, was palpable, when Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the Kenya attacks "a golden opportunity" to prove to the United States that Bush's war on terrorism, and Israel's war with the Palestinians is the same thing. Netanyahu's faction has violently rejected the Palestinian Authority's revelations, and so far, the American and European press have followed suit, despite the dramatic nature of these charges, and the documents that the Palestinians have provided to the international press.

Chronology of the Revelations

On Dec. 7, the British news service, Reuters, the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, and Qatar-based Al-Jazeera TV network, all reported that the Palestinian Authority had accused the Mossad of creating a phony al-Qaeda cell in the Gaza Strip. Ha'aretz reported, "the head of Palestinian Preventive Security" in the Gaza Strip, Col. Rashid Abu Shbak, said on Dec. 6, "that his forces had identified a number of Palestinian collaborators who had been ordered by Israeli security agencies to 'work in the Gaza Strip under the name of al-Qaeda.' He said the investigation was ongoing and evidence would be presented soon." Al-Jazeera TV added that the Palestinian authorities had arrested a group of Palestinian "collaborators with Israeli occupation" in Gaza, involved in the operation.

Reuters' reporter Diala Saadeh, under the headline, "Palestinians: Israel Faked Gaza al-Qaeda Presence," quoted a number of Palestinian Authority (P.A.) senior officials, including President Yasser Arafat, who told reporters at his West Bank Ramallah headquarters, that Sharon's claims of al-Qaeda operations in Palestinian territories "is a big, big, big lie to cover [Sharon's] attacks and his crimes against our people everywhere." P.A. Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo detailed the case: "There are certain elements who were instructed by the Mossad to form a cell under the name of al-Qaeda in the Gaza Strip in order to justify the assault and the military campaigns of the Israeli occupation army against Gaza."

Palestinian officials promised to provide detailed evidence, and did so on Dec. 8, in a press conference addressed by Colonel Shbak, and by Palestinian Minister for Planning and International Cooperation Nabil Shaath. Shbak told the international representatives that, "Over the past nine months, we've been investigating eight cases in which Israeli intelligence posing as al-Qaeda operatives recruited Palestinians in the Gaza Strip." Colonel Shbak said that 3 men were under arrest, and 11 had been released. He explained that those released had voluntarily provided information going back to May 2002, about the contacts that had been made asking them to operate as an "al-Qaeda" group. The alleged al-Qaeda recruiters were traced to Israeli intelligence, said Colonel Shbak. He detailed incidents, some of which were described in official documents, of cell phone calls and e-mails, where Palestinians were asked to "join al-Qaeda." Shbak said, "We investigated the origin of those calls, which used [wireless phone] roaming, and messages, and found out they all came from Israel," reported the publication, IslamOnline. He said that the potential "recruits," had been given money and weapons, "although most of these weapons did not even work." He also noted that the money for these targetted Palestinians "was transferred from bank accounts in Jerusalem or Israel."

Minister Shaath announced at the press conference that the P.A. had "handed ambassadors and consuls of the Arab and foreign countries, documents revealing the involvement of the Israeli intelligence in recruiting citizens from Gaza Strip in a fake organization carrying the name of Qaeda." He said the ploy was intended "to create a new excuse to escalate the aggression on Gaza Strip."

The international community was jolted again on Dec. 10, when Colonel Shbak held another press conference and the Preventive Security Agency presented the Mossad's potential recruiter himself to the international media. According to reports in the Arabic press in Dubai, London and Ramallah, the man appeared in disguise (for security reasons,) and was identified only as "Ibrahim," but explained in great detail that he was one of the "key recruiters" for the potential cell. He said the story started in October 2001, when, after he sent his photo and mobile phone number to a "contact page" in a Jerusalem magazine, he was contacted by a person calling himself "Youssef," and nicknamed "Abu Othman." After building up a personal relationship with "Ibrahim," and telling him how much he resembled his own son, who had been killed, Youssef sent him $2,000, and began encouraging the Gaza man—who appeared to be in his early 20s—to become a more observant and practicing Muslim.

In May 2002, five months after the initial contact, said Ibrahim, Youssef "told me frankly, 'you are a good candidate to work for us in the company of Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda group.' " This Youssef also claimed to have already created an al-Qaeda cell inside Israel. Ibrahim said that he then approached the Palestinian security services and told them about the transactions with Youssef, and that the security services asked him to continue the communications, which they would monitor. He said that the specific instructions were that Ibrahim was to announce through a communiqué—directly from Gaza—that al-Qaeda claimed credit for a bombing attack, or attacks, that Youssef indicated his network was about to carry out in Israel. Ibrahim stressed that the man also said that he (the Mossad officer) "had the capability to carry out major bombing operations inside Israel, but that the al-Qaeda group in Gaza should claim responsibility for the attack and no other group." In an interview with the London-based Arabic daily Al-Hayat, after the press conference, Ibrahim stated, that "the man told him that mega military operations will be conducted inside Israel, and that these operations would be announced through Ibrahim." This would mean that as soon as he gets the signal after a major terrorist act against Israeli civilian targets, Ibrahim and his group would send a communiqué to the press or a videotape, similar to the ones sent by bin Laden to Al-Jazeera, claiming responsibility for the attack.

Ibrahim was also asked to gather specific information for Youssef about a number of persons in Gaza, some of them known to be members of Hamas. When asked why he wanted this information, Youssef said, "I want them to join al-Qaeda." At that point, Palestinian security services cut off the "Ibrahim-Youssef" contact, because it was becoming too dangerous.

At the same press conference, Colonel Shbak said direct money payments "transferred from Israel," had been received by five out of the eight Palestinians who have been giving information to the Preventive Security Agency about this operation. Shbak also explained that his agency traced and obtained a number of telephone numbers, registrations, and bank receipts for money transferred to some of those persons.

Now, said Shbak, the United States and a number of international intelligence and security organs had been supplied with documents and evidence refuting the Israeli allegations about Palestinian connections to al-Qaeda. "These documents prove without any doubt that the ones who are behind this alleged al-Qaeda group are the various Israeli intelligence organizations," Shbak added. He told Al-Hayat Al-Jadidah daily that the "Americans have not responded yet to the documents ... as provided by the Palestinian Preventive Security agency."

The 9/11 Cover Story

The question is whether the U.S. government and other governments will take up the evidence given to them. It is well established that several top Cabinet officials in the current Sharon caretaker government, including Sharon himself, have a long, jaded history of staging precisely these kinds of "countergang" operations, using Israeli covert operatives and Arabs tortured and brainwashed in Israeli jails and recruited as false-flag terrorists. Sharon, Mossad chief Moshe Dagan, and Gen. Effie Eitam are proponents of such dirty-war tactics. As EIR reported in several extensive articles on the Hamas organization, that terrorist capability was actually created by Ariel Sharon and the Israeli right wing, for the purpose of supplanting Yasser Arafat and the organizations of the Palestine Liberation Organization (see EIR, Dec. 6).

Even more to the point, the Osama bin Laden authorship of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has been a cover story from the first moments the media began reporting it as fact. Interviewed on the morning of Sept. 11 as the attacks were unfolding, LaRouche made clear that the breadth and sophistication of these attacks showed that it was "an inside job," involving U.S. military and intelligence operatives capable of defeating or neutralizing all existing and backup security systems. Bin Laden was named as the culprit, explains LaRouche, because his name provided entry into the policy of a Clash of Civilizations against Islam, which right-wing neo-conservatives in the Bush Administration have as their goal. LaRouche has also pointedly asked when Osama bin Laden stopped being an American agent—a reality that the "Islamic card" networks of Zbigniew Brzezinski and the Iran-Contra financiers of the Afghansi mujahideen, want to bury. It must also be asked, when did al-Qaeda stop working for British intelligence? EIR has documented that British foreign intelligence, MI6, worked closely with so-called Islamist terrorist groups safe-housed in Britain, to destabilize Arab and Muslim nations, in the geopolitical service of Her Majesty's government, and an Anglo-American imperial faction.

As recently as November, this coverup of British/U.S. covert support for terrorism continued, with the case of David Shayler, a former MI5 agent who was sentenced to six months in jail for disclosing "government secret information." Shayler told London Guardian reporter Martin Bright that MI6 hired one of Osama bin Laden's closest collaborators—Anas al-Liby, who remains on the U.S. government's Most Wanted List, with a reward of $25 million for his capture—to assassinate Libya's Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi in 1996. Bright, who could not publish the article in the Guardian, but did so in the Pakistani daily, The Dawn, on Oct. 30, received a gag order from the British Attorney General, threatening him with prison, if he publishes any more information from Shayler.

With this background in mind, the public revelations about the Mossad attempts to set up al-Qaeda cells, could have strategic consequences for the discredited Sharon government—and even more broadly for the Clash of Civilizations zealots covering up the truth about Sept. 11. The Palestinian revelations could become the "straw that broke the camel's back," in this dirty war.

http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2002/2949idf_qaeda.html

Al-Qaeda
MOSSAD

Torture, murder, mayhem - the dirty war just got dirtier

2005-07-26T14:42:00.000+02:00

Flashback - Monday May 12, 2003 - The Guardian

Torture, murder, mayhem - the dirty war just got dirtier

John Ware: The unmasking of Stakeknife adds a dramatic twist to the Stevens inquiry

It is hard to overstate the size of the explosion that may eventually be detonated by blowing the cover of the army undercover agent codenamed "Stakeknife". The story now threatens to unravel fast.

Stakeknife was named in several Sunday newspapers as Alfredo Scappaticci, a name that sounds closer to a mafia godfather than an IRA one. It was not a name that was well known even to most ordinary IRA volunteers. The IRA unit Scappaticci is said to have run, known as "the security team", was, however, widely known and feared, especially by the hundreds of informers working as agents for MI5, the special branch and military intelligence.

The team was responsible for the IRA's internal security and was set up after the organisation realised it was being paralysed by informers. Its task was to flush out informers, interrogate them and then execute them. Often, this involved close analysis of IRA operations that were suspected of having been compromised.

The suspect would be watched and, if the security team smelt a rat, lured to a trap. Then the torture would begin: lighters held under the nostrils, cigarette burns, beatings, shocks from cattle prods, submerging the suspect's head under water - until he or she was ready to confess. That would be followed by a drive to some god-forsaken stretch of the border and a bullet in the head.

For military intelligence, the prize of having the IRA's chief mole hunter in their pay for most of the Troubles is a remarkable coup. In the second world war, the equivalent would have been British intelligence running the head of the Reich security service, Reinhard Heydrich.

Stakeknife was reported to have been paid around £80,000 a year and to have had an entire team within military intelligence's most secret unit, the force research unit, dedicated to run him. The critical question is: what did the state get out of this?

No doubt it produced very high-grade intelligence about leading IRA figures and day-to-day activities, which impressed members of the Thatcher and Major cabinets. But how many lives, if any, did Stakeknife actually save, that being the pre-eminent purpose of an agent of the state?

Through Stakeknife, the FRU would also have known who had fallen under the IRA's suspicion as an agent, and when and where they were likely to be "arrested", tortured and executed.

They would have known, because Stakeknife not only witnessed some of the torturing, he himself sometimes administered it. And thus the FRU would have turned a blind eye to several, perhaps many, slow, terrifying deaths. In other words, the army allowed its most prized agent to torture and kill other agents, to ensure that Stakeknife was kept in place.

Some of those executed as agents during Stakeknife's tenure were not working for the security forces. Did Stakeknife and his handlers know this, and allow the executions, to divert attention from real agents?

Reports have suggested that Stakeknife was involved in 40 murders of policemen, soldiers and civilians to protect his cover. Sources close to Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir John Stevens's inquiry into the undercover "dirty war" say they have no evidence to support that number.

However, some 50 men and women were executed by the IRA as suspected agents. Stakeknife was in place during many of those executions. How many of these lives could the FRU have saved, had it exploited his intelligence properly? And did the FRU distribute the products of Stakeknife's intelligence to MI5 and the special branch, as it was required to do in order to save the lives of their agents?

There is clear evidence from the Stevens inquiry that the FRU did not share life-saving intelligence from another of their prized agents, Brian Nelson, with the police special branch. (And for reasons which are now clear: Nelson was used by the FRU to help loyalists target active republicans.) The early stages of Stevens's inquiry into Stakeknife's role suggest this pattern has repeated itself. MI5 and the special branch will want to know why their agents were sacrificed.

Some reports suggest that Stakeknife was once targeted by loyalist death squads, and that the FRU used Nelson to steer them away from Stakeknife by picking another target: an elderly ex-IRA man, Francis Notorantonio, who was shot dead in October 1987. Again, no evidence has yet been uncovered by Stevens to support this. Nelson's private diaries, in which he sometimes wrote candidly about his own involvement and that of the FRU in assassinations, do not support the theory either.

Nonetheless, according to a Stevens source, when it came to Stakeknife, the evidence suggests that the FRU was "playing God", in deciding which suspected informers should live and which should die.

The case is likely to exacerbate tensions between Stevens and the military, which has argued that applying the letter of the law to an urban guerrilla war was unrealistic and that the value of the intelligence picture provided by Stakeknife justified keeping him in place at all costs. Against that is the fact that painting that picture required the FRU to collude in torture and murder.

Stakeknife is potentially the muckiest stone Stevens has yet lifted. "We've looked under the stone and we really don't like what we see," said a source close to his inquiry. That poses a dilemma for the Police Service of Northern Ireland's new chief constable, Hugh Orde. Since he is paying Stevens's bill, he presumably can tell his former Metropolitan Police boss to continue his investigations. Or he can draw a line under the past, which was the tenor of his recent remarks in relation to the long-drawn-out Bloody Sunday inquiry.

Either choice poses major problems. If Orde decides to circumscribe Stevens, his reputation as a mould-breaking chief constable will be at risk and he will be criticised by republicans whose support he needs. On the other hand, if Orde allows Stevens to plough ahead, pressure for a public inquiry will build powerfully.

At the weekend, Scappaticci publicly denied he was Stakeknife. He was even photographed for a Sunday newspaper at his family home in west Belfast with his granddaughter and was seen there on Saturday evening. He looked as if he was going to brazen it out by staying in Belfast.

It was a cute bluff, designed no doubt to trick his former comrades - who would surely have turned executioner - into believing they had time to plan the grisly ritual that he had planned for others so often in the past. By the early hours of Sunday morning, Stakeknife was gone - leaving behind a timebomb that Stevens and Orde now have to deal with.

· John Ware is a reporter for BBC Panorama, whose investigation into collusion, A Licence To Murder, was shown last year

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,953907,00.html

IRA
Stakeknife
Scappaticci
MI5
Force Research Unit
FRU

Bomb squad link in Spanish blasts

2005-07-25T13:22:00.000+02:00

Flashback - London Times - June 21 2004

Bomb squad link in Spanish blasts

From Edward Owen in Madrid

The man accused of supplying the dynamite used in the al-Qaeda train bombings in Madrid was in possession of the private telephone number of the head of Spain’s Civil Guard bomb squad, it emerged yesterday.

Emilio Suárez Trashorras, who is alleged to have supplied 200kg of dynamite used in the bombs, had obtained the number of Juan Jesús Sánchez Manzano, the head of Tedax.

The revelation has raised fresh concerns in Madrid about links between those held responsible for the March bombings, which killed 190 people, and Spain’s security services, and shortcomings in the police investigation. Señor Suárez Trashorras and two other men implicated in the bombings have already been identified as police informers. Other members of the group had evaded police surveillance, despite concerns within the security services about their activities and evidence of their association with al-Qaeda.

The telephone number of Señor Sánchez Manzano was contained in a Civil Guard dossier handed to Juan del Olmo, the investigating judge, at the National Court in Madrid. The number was written on a piece of paper found in the possession of Carmen Toro, the wife of Señor Suárez Trashorras. Both are in custody accused of supplying dynamite used in the Madrid bombs.

http://avantgo.thetimes.co.uk/services/avantgo/article/0,,1150429,00.html

Madrid

London goes back to the strategy of tension

2005-07-20T12:16:00.000+02:00

Stay-behind

London goes back to the strategy of tension By THIERRY MEYSSAN

The leaders of the Coalition took advantage of the terrorist attacks in London to denounce, once more, the existence of an Islamic conspiracy and make a call to fight terrorism. However, facts speak for themselves: the operation was organized in the guise of an anti-terrorist exercise in which British public order forces were supposed to participate. Like in the 1980s, when the Anglo-Saxon secret services would organize bloody attacks in Europe to instil fear for Communism in the population, an Anglo-Saxon military group activates the strategy of tension to cause the “clash of civilizations”.

Understanding an event depends on its context, although the latter is defined according to our previous understanding. Sometimes, actually often, what we see only confirms what we thought we knew. That’s the way it is regarding the bomb attacks in London on July 7th, 2005: they confirm our prejudices to the same extent that their violence stun us. For some people, the attacks in London show, once again, that the Islamists want to destroy the civilization and that, since the attacks in Madrid, they are attacking Europe. For others, on the contrary, they are - along with the attacks in Madrid - a punishment for the Coalition’s colonialism. For other people, including me, they are just another operation in the tension strategy conducted by the Anglo-Saxon industrial-military complex.

With amazing perseverance, since September 11, each analyst follows his own reasoning without analyzing the facts. However, it is not reasonable to believe that time does not allow us to disregard certain hypotheses, that it does not deny some of them.

Let us examine the inner logic of the three positions mentioned above.

For the leaders of the Coalition, along with the ruling class in the world, the attacks of New York (February 26, 1993), Riyadh (November 13, 1995), Khobar (June 25, 1996), Nairobi and Dar-Es-Salaam (August 7, 1998), Aden (October 12, 2000), New York and Washington (September 11, 2001), Djerba (April 11, 2002), Karachi (May 8 and June 14, 2002), Yemen (October 6, 2002), Bali (October 12, 2002), Mombasa (November 28, 2002), Riyadh (May 12, 2003), Casablanca (May 16, 2003), Jakarta (August 5, 2003), Baghdad (August 19, 2003), Riyadh (November 8, 2003), Istanbul (November 15 and 20, 2003), Irbil (February 1, 2004), Madrid (March 11, 2004), Khobar (May 29-30, 2004), Mosul and Ramadi (June 24, 2004), Jakarta (September 9, 2004), Sinai (October 8, 2004), Yeddah (December 6, 2004), Mosul (December 21, 2004), Manila (February 14, 2005), Hilla (February 28, 2005) and London (July 7,
2005) are the work of a sole actor: Al-Qaida.

This belief is based on a series of communiqués to claim responsibility, none of which has been verified.

In the absence of material elements to prove the existence of Al-Qaida, certain leaders of the Coalition have decided to define it, not as a well structured organization but as an ideology around which dispersed groups move. If that were the case, we would have to admit the lack of a formal relation among the 29 operations above mentioned and also that there is not any other tie among their respective perpetrators than an ideological one.

Unfortunately, this reasoning has a circular nature: this hypothesis can not be confirmed as in most of the cases it has been impossible to identify the authors of the attacks and nothing is known about them at all.

Some scholars, whose investigations are vastly financed by the States of the Coalition, that there is an international Jihadist movement in which it is possible to recruit the perpetrators of the attacks. However, it has not been possible to prove the existence of clear links between that movement and all the attacks. The main difficulty is that the attacks have nothing in common, except for the unverified communiqués claiming responsibility. It is not even definite that all of them can be described as “terrorist” attacks.
In effect, far from attempting to sow panic among the population, the attack against the Cole destroyer was against a military target, and the attack that took the live of Sergio Vieira de Mello was a classical political assassination. Some of the attacks included in the list are settling of scores among rival states, like the attack in Karachi against French engineers that sought to exclude France from the sale of weapons to Pakistan, or the one carried out against French oil tanker Limburg off the coast of Yemen, which sought to dissuade France from modifying the final destination of oil shipments.

In sum, the theory according to which these attacks would have had only one financier is not based on any verifiable element. It allows the Coalition to justify its military deployment but it explains it in completely confused terms. The rhetoric of the “war on terror” is effective with regard to communication to the same extent that it is senseless. Terrorism is not an enemy but a combat technique. Therefore, it is impossible to defeat terrorism but it is possible to indefinitely use this rhetoric to justify the continuation of military operations in all fronts.

Developing a speech about terrorism based on cases that have not been clarified, with Al-Quaida claiming responsibility, leads to defining terrorism exclusively according to these operations. Therefore, all the other attacks are excluded, perpetrated in Colombia or China, to get to the equation “terrorism=Muslim” and to generate the paranoia of the world Islamic conspiracy.

( Picture of the Front page of news daily {Le Monde} of July 9th, 2005 )

The theory according to which the attacks in London were perpetrated by Islamists linked to Al-Qaida is then relegated to the propaganda tricks. As an example, I can not resist the temptation to reproduce, as an illustration of this article, the front page of the Le Monde news daily of July 9th, 2005. The main headline contradicts the article lower in the same page.

To its left, there is a headline of the English version (supplement) of Le Monde, by the New York Times and, to its right, there is an ad about a DVD glorifying the Mossad (Israeli Intelligence).

The two other interpretations of the London attacks do not mix the latter with the series of violent actions above mentioned. The fact that we do not understand all these events does not mean that are necessarily linked.

For those who oppose the war, the attacks are a punishment for the invasion.
The Spanish and the British took the war to Baghdad and the Iraqis responded in Madrid and London. Or, as there is no evidence of any Iraqi involvement in those attacks, those attacking the capitals of the countries of the Coalition are Muslims in solidarity with the Iraqis rather.

It is possible, but, it is precisely in that case that the hypothesis of manipulation becomes more valid.

In effect, rather than the litany of deeds of Al-Qaida, the attacks in Madrid and London remind those in Bologna. [1], in 1980. Then, the stay-behind networks of the Atlantic Alliance, jointly headed by the United States and Great Britain, organized an attack in a train station to create political tensions that would favor a toughening of the Italian government.
Of course, the stay-behind network acted behind the back of Italian authorities, using agents within the Italian secret services and recruiting perpetrators among extremist political movements.

The attacks in London coincided, in time and place, with the carrying out of an anti-terrorist exercise organized by the firm Visor Consultants.
According to the testimony of the director of the firm, Peter Powell, recorded by ITV and which is available in our website, those heading the exercise from the headquarters realized that the script they had planned was “truly” taking place in front of their eyes. The deployment of firemen as part of the exercise, before the explosions, explains the speed and effectiveness of the aid actions.

In other words, if the surveillance cameras did not “see” those who planted the bombs it was because they were wearing uniforms. And NATO’s stay-behind network [2] is the only one that has agents within the public order forces.

The tension strategy seeks to impose the “clash of civilizations” so that Europeans support the wars of the Coalition in the Muslim world. [3]. This strategy also favors toughening democracies (hence the opening of files on the people that has been so difficult for Tony Blair to impose in his own country and in the European Union).

In addition, the synchronization of the attacks in London with the beginning of the G-8 meeting in Scotland should alter the agendas of the summit, thus relegating issues like global warming or assistance to the development of Africa and giving priority to others topics relating to security, as it effectively happened.

However, by twisting the arms of the G-8 leaders, the financers of the attacks perhaps went too far. Some heads of state and government could be considering that, in the future, adopting the rhetoric of the war on terror could have more disadvantages than advantages.

http://www.voltairenetwork.net/article617.html

StayBehind
Gladio
London

West turns blind eye as police put Saddam's torturers back to work

2005-07-19T18:16:00.000+02:00

West turns blind eye as police put Saddam's torturers back to work
From James Hider in Baghdad

IRAQI security forces, set up by American and British troops, torture detainees by pulling out their fingernails, burning them with hot irons or giving them electric shocks, Iraqi officials say. Cases have also been recorded of bound prisoners being beaten to death by police.

In their haste to put police on the streets to counter the brutal insurgency, Iraqi and US authorities have enlisted men trained under Saddam Hussein’s regime and versed in torture and abuse, the officials told The Times. They said that recruits were also being drawn from the ranks of outlawed Shia militias.

Counter-insurgencies are rarely clean fights, but Iraq’s dirty war is being waged under the noses of US and British troops whose mission is to end the abuses of the former dictatorship. Instead, they appear to have turned a blind eye to the constant reports of torture from Iraq’s prisons.

Among the worst offenders cited are the Interior Ministry police commandos, a force made up largely of former army officers and special forces soldiers drawn from the ranks of Saddam’s dissolved army. They are seen as the most effective tool the coalition has in fighting the insurgency.

“It’s a gruesome situation we are in,” a senior Iraqi official said. “You have to understand the situation when the special commandos were formed last August. They were taking on an awful lot of people in a great hurry. Many of them were people who served in Saddam’s forces . . . The choice of taking them on was a difficult one. There was no supervision. There still really isn ’t any, and that applies to all the security forces. They’re all doing this.”

“This”, said Saad Sultan, the Human Rights Ministry official in charge of monitoring Iraq’s prisons, includes random arrests, sometimes without a warrant, hanging people from ceilings and beating them, attaching electrodes to ears, hands, feet and genitals, and holding hot irons to flesh.

Four of his 22 monitors have already quit their jobs, leaving a handful of lawyers to inspect scores of prisons.

“Two months ago I could go into a prison and more than 50 per cent of the people had been ill-treated,” Mr Sultan said. Six months ago the situation had been even worse.

Reports of torture and abuse are commonplace. Omar, a 22-year-old student, said that he was picked up in a night raid on his home in Baghdad by police commandos, who dragged him away from his family to a detention facility. No one told him where he was or what he was accused of, he said. As he was marched into prison, policemen lined up to beat him and his fellow detainees. The prisoners’ handcuffs were tightened until the men screamed.

The next day, he and his neighbour were blindfolded and transported to another facility, where his neighbour collapsed unconscious during a beating. He was then led into an interrogation room, where a policeman attached electrodes to his thumbs and toes. “I immediately asked what they wanted and he said something like, ‘You have been targeting police and national guardsmen’. Without waiting for my response, he switched on the electricity, then kept on turning it off and on until I could hardly breathe.

“I screamed under torture,” Omar said. “It’s not a place to prove your courage. These guys are trying to kill you for nothing.” He was released without charge after 12 days.

The abuse has not gone unnoticed by the coalition, but little has been done to address it. A US State Department report in February stated that Iraqi authorities had been accused of “arbitrary deprivation of life, torture, impunity, poor prison conditions — particularly in pre-trial detention facilities — and arbitrary arrest and detention.” A Human Rights Watch report also noted that “unlawful arrest, long-term incommunicado detention, torture and other ill-treatment of detainees (including children) by Iraqi authorities have become routine and commonplace”.

Evidence of extra-judicial killings by the security forces has also come to light. Mr Sultan is investigating the case of three members of the Badr Corps, the paramilitary wing of one of the main Shia parties in government, who were arrested by police, handcuffed and beaten to death.

An Iraqi official said that the Iraqi National Guard, the US-trained paramilitary police, regularly disposed of the corpses of its victims by throwing them in the river. “The problem is that some people have still got that training from the past,” he said. “You have ten or twelve of them in the same unit working, and if they seize terrorists they will torture or kill them.”

He added that while the de facto death squads were not part of government policy, little was being done to counteract them. “These are exceptional times. It’s an emergency.”

General Adnan Thabet, the commandos’ commander and a special adviser to the Interior Minister, was a senior officer under Saddam. He was sentenced to death for plotting against the former dictator and was tortured after his sentence was commuted.

He denied any allegation of torture, but admitted: “This is a dirty war. We are the only ones with the nerves to fight it.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-1683578,00.html

Irak
Torture

Who shorted British pound? (before London terror attacks)

2005-07-18T18:10:00.000+02:00

Who shorted British pound?
Currency fell 6% in 10 days before London terror attacks

WASHINGTON -- In the 1988 Hollywood hit "Die Hard," starring Bruce Willis, a group of "terrorists" take over a Japanese banking institution in Los Angeles, hold hostages and make demands for release of "political prisoners."

But it turns out the terrorists aren't really terrorists. They are bank robbers trying to make off with the fortune in the bank's vaults.

Could it be Osama bin Laden has seen "Die Hard"?

That is a question Scotland Yard and other law enforcement agencies are actually asking themselves following the July 7 London transit system attacks that killed 54 and injured scores more as they continue to scour the planet for evidence and additional conspirators.

Why? Because it appears some profited by short selling the British pound in the 10 days leading up to the attacks.

The pound fell about 6 percent (approximately 1.82 to 1.72) against the dollar for no apparent reason – until, of course, the terror attacks sent the British markets reeling still further.

"This was an almost unprecedented weakness and far too sharp to be a coincidence," one economist with more than 35 years of experience in the investment industry, told Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin, the premium, online intelligence newsletter published by the founder of WND. "That is, after all, an annualized rate of loss of well over 100 percent."

The fall did not go unnoticed by investigators, who are wondering whether the terrorist masterminds behind the attacks decided to make some money on their action or whether other investors with inside information about possible attacks took advantage of that knowledge.

"Currencies of establish countries simply do not fall that fast based upon any kind of economic or financial analysis," said the economist. "Somebody – somewhere – knew something. Or maybe I should say 'somebodies.'"

Could it be the terrorists have learned to make their attacks self-funding operations?

Could it be the terrorists are actually motivated by factors other than Islamic fanaticism?

These are some of the questions law enforcement agencies are asking – but they're not really expecting to get answers.

The problem is that short selling of this kind can be done with near total anonymity.

"Trade currency futures through a Swiss or Austrian bank via an offshore company incorporated in Crete and you have a totally untraceable transaction," the economist noted. "No one will ever know who made the really big money off this situation, but I guarantee you this – someone did."

It's not the first time suspicion about terrorists – or someone – profiting from short-selling prior to an attack.

Following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the U.S., David Ruder, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission from 1987 to 1989, raised the question of whether terrorists may have gotten away with profiting from their attacks by short-selling shares in the U.S. markets.

Then U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill confirmed the government was investigating possible short selling, but was not optimistic those responsible would ever be found.

Short selling allows investors to bet that stocks will fall by borrowing and selling shares in the hope of buying back at a lower price.

After Sept. 11, Chicago Board Options Exchange data showed 1,575 put options purchased in United Airlines' parent company five days before the attacks. On an average day, only 390 such put options are purchased. Investors bought 2,258 put options in American Airlines parent company, compared with 220 on a typical day. Insurance and other stocks also experienced and upswing in short sales.

Investigators never revealed how much money was bet, but short sellers could have made 30 times what they invested, given the huge plunge in the stock prices of those companies.

Government investigators from around the world never learned the identity of the short sellers in 2001. And, despite vigorous efforts being made to find out who was behind the short selling of the British pound in early July, hopes are slim the culprits will be found.

http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=45312

london

US police pursue girl over stone

2005-07-18T17:48:00.000+02:00

US police pursue girl over stone

An 11-year-old girl who threw a stone at a group of boys pelting her with water balloons is being prosecuted on serious assault charges in California.

Maribel Cuevas was arrested in April in a police operation which involved three police cars and a helicopter.

She has since spent five days in detention, in which she was granted one 30 minute visit by her parents, and has spent a month under house arrest.

Her lawyer accuses the authorities of criminalising childhood behaviour.

"They're treating her like a violent parole offender," Richard Beshwate said. "It's not a felony, it's an 11-year-old acting like an 11-year-old."

The girl is due back in court at the beginning of next month.

Police say they had to investigate as the boy who was hit by the stone she threw suffered a deep gash to his head and needed hospital treatment.

He has reportedly acknowledged to officers that he started the fight in late April.

'Obligation'

The confrontation happened in a poor district of Fresno, in central California, where Maribel Cuevas lives with her Spanish-speaking family.

The girl, who speaks little English, has admitted throwing a stone at a group of boys she says were pestering her with water balloons as she walked down the street.

An ambulance was called, but arrived flanked by three police patrol vehicles. A helicopter meanwhile hovered overhead.

The 11-year-old was then read her rights twice in English before being detained.

"We responded. We determined a felony assault had taken place and the officers took the actions that were necessary," said Fresno Police Sergeant Anthony Martinez.

Another police officer told ABC News that the girl, when asked what she thought would happen if she threw the stone, replied that it would make him "bleed".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/4689459.stm

USA
Police

An Email from COINTELPRO and Shocking 9/11 Revelations

2005-04-24T18:20:00.000+02:00

Synchronicity with my last post Pentagon plans propaganda war?

An interesting piece from catalytic converter: An Email from COINTELPRO and Shocking 9/11 Revelations

http://catalyticconverter.blogspot.com/2005/04/email-from-cointelpro-and-shocking-911.html

Cointelpro
Propaganda
9/11

Pentagon plans propaganda war

2005-04-24T14:51:00.000+02:00

The Pentagon is toying with the idea of black propaganda.

As part of George Bush's war on terrorism, the military is thinking of planting propaganda and misleading stories in the international media.

A new department has been set up inside the Pentagon with the Orwellian title of the Office of Strategic Influence.

It is well funded, is being run by a general and its aim is to influence public opinion abroad.

Black and white

It has been canvassing opinion within the Pentagon on what it should do.

The options range from the standard public relations stuff - doing more to explain the Pentagon's role - to more underhand tactics such as e-mailing journalists and community leaders abroad with information that undermines governments hostile to the United States.

These e-mails would come from a .com return address rather than .mil to hide the Pentagon's role.

The most controversial suggestion is the covert planting of disinformation in foreign media, a process known as black propaganda.

All this has sparked off a fierce debate within the Pentagon. The options range from "the blackest of black programmes to the whitest of white," one official told the New York Times.

Some generals are worried that even a suggestion of disinformation would undermine the Pentagon's credibility and America's attempts to portray herself as the beacon of liberty and democratic values.

Under review

Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has asked a team of lawyers to check the proposals' legality.

The Pentagon is forbidden from spreading black propaganda in the American media, but there is nothing to stop an American newspaper picking up a story carried abroad.

The Pentagon is well versed in what it calls "psyops", dropping leaflets and using radio broadcasts to undermine enemy morale.

But these kind of activities have always been confined to the battlefield, such as Afghanistan.

Using covert tactics on media outlets of friendly countries is much more controversia

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1830500.stm

Propaganda
Pentagon

One huge US jail

2005-03-26T13:01:00.000+01:00

'One huge US jail'

Afghanistan is the hub of a global network of detention centres, the frontline in America's 'war on terror', where arrest can be random and allegations of torture commonplace. Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark investigate on the ground and talk to former prisoners

Saturday March 19, 2005 - The Guardian

Kabul was a grim, monastic place in the days of the Taliban; today it's a chaotic gathering point for every kind of prospector and carpetbagger. Foreign bidders vying for billions of dollars of telecoms, irrigation and construction contracts have sparked a property boom that has forced up rental prices in the Afghan capital to match those in London, Tokyo and Manhattan. Four years ago, the Ministry of Vice and Virtue in Kabul was a tool of the Taliban inquisition, a drab office building where heretics were locked up for such crimes as humming a popular love song. Now it's owned by an American entrepreneur who hopes its bitter associations won't scare away his new friends.

Outside Kabul, Afghanistan is bleaker, its provinces more inaccessible and lawless, than it was under the Taliban. If anyone leaves town, they do so in convoys. Afghanistan is a place where it is easy for people to disappear and perilous for anyone to investigate their fate. Even a seasoned aid agency such as Médécins Sans Frontières was forced to quit after five staff members were murdered last June. Only the 17,000-strong US forces, with their all-terrain Humvees and Apache attack helicopters, have the run of the land, and they have used the haze of fear and uncertainty that has engulfed the country to advance a draconian phase in the war against terror. Afghanistan has become the new Guantánamo Bay.

Washington likes to hold up Afghanistan as an exemplar of how a rogue regime can be replaced by democracy. Meanwhile, human-rights activists and Afghan politicians have accused the US military of placing Afghanistan at the hub of a global system of detention centres where prisoners are held incommunicado and allegedly subjected to torture. The secrecy surrounding them prevents any real independent investigation of the allegations. "The detention system in Afghanistan exists entirely outside international norms, but it is only part of a far larger and more sinister jail network that we are only now beginning to understand," Michael Posner, director of the US legal watchdog Human Rights First, told us.

When we landed in Kabul, Afghanistan was blue with a bruising cold. We were heading for the former al-Qaida strongholds in the south-east that were rumoured to be the focus of the new US network. How should we prepare, we asked local UN staff. "Don't go," they said. None the less, we were able to find a driver, a Pashtun translator and a boxful of clementines, and set off on a five-and-a-half-hour trip south through the snow to Gardez, a market town dominated by two rapidly expanding US military bases.

There we met Dr Rafiullah Bidar, regional director of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, established in 2003 with funding from the US Congress to investigate abuses committed by local warlords and to ensure that women's and children's rights were protected. He was delighted to see foreigners in town. At his office in central Gardez, Bidar showed us a wall of files. "All I do nowadays is chart complaints against the US military," he said. "Many thousands of people have been rounded up and detained by them. Those who have been freed say that they were held alongside foreign detainees who've been brought to this country to be processed. No one is charged. No one is identified. No international monitors are allowed into the US jails." He pulled out a handful of files: "People who have been arrested say they've been brutalised - the tactics used are beyond belief." The jails are closed to outside observers, making it impossible to test the truth of the claims.

Last November, a man from Gardez died of hypothermia in a US military jail. When his family were called to collect the body, they were given a $100 note for the taxi ride and no explanation. In scores more cases, people have simply disappeared.

Prisoner transports crisscross the country between a proliferating network of detention facilities. In addition to the camps in Gardez, there are thought to be US holding facilities in the cities of Khost, Asadabad and Jalalabad, as well as an official US detention centre in Kandahar, where the tough regime has been nicknamed "Camp Slappy" by former prisoners. There are 20 more facilities in outlying US compounds and fire bases that complement a major "collection centre" at Bagram air force base. The CIA has one facility at Bagram and another, known as the "Salt Pit", in an abandoned brick factory north of Kabul. More than 1,500 prisoners from Afghanistan and many other countries are thought to be held in such jails, although no one knows for sure because the US military declines to comment.

Anyone who has got in the way of the prison transports has been met with brutal force. Bidar directed us to a small Shia neighbourhood on the edge of town where a multiple killing was still under investigation. Inside a frozen courtyard, a former policeman, Said Sardar, 25, was sat beside his crutches. On May 1 2004, he was manning a checkpoint when a car careened through. "Inside were men dressed like Arabs, but they were western men," he said. "They had prisoners in the car." Sardar fired a warning shot for the car to stop. "The western men returned fire and within minutes two US attack helicopters hovered above us. They fired three rockets at the police station. One screamed past me. I saw its fiery tail and blacked out."

He was taken to Bagram, where US military doctors had to amputate his leg. Afterwards, he said, "an American woman appeared. She said the US was sorry. It was a mistake. The men in the car were Special Forces or CIA on a mission. She gave me $500." Sardar showed us into another room in his compound where a circle of children stared glumly at us; their fathers, all policemen, were killed in the same incident. "Five dead. Four in hospital. To protect covert US prisoner transports," he says. Later, US helicopters were deployed in two similar incidents that left nine dead.

In his builders' merchant's shop, Mohammed Timouri describes how he lost his son. "Ismail was a part-time taxi driver, waiting to go to college," he says, handing us a photograph of a beardless, short-haired 19-year-old held aloft in a coffin at his funeral last March. "A convoy delivering prisoners from a facility in Jalalabad to one in Kabul became snarled up in traffic. A US soldier jumped down and lifted a woman out of the way. She screamed. Ismail stepped forward to explain she was a conservative person, wearing a burka. The soldier dropped the woman and shot Ismail in front of a crowd of 20 people."

Mohammed received a letter from the Afghan police: "We apologise to you," the police chief wrote. "An innocent was killed by Americans." The US army declined to comment on Ismail's death or on a second fatal shooting by another prison transport at the same crossroads later that month. It also refused to comment on an incident outside Kabul when a prison patrol reportedly cleared a crowd of children by throwing a grenade into their midst. However, we have since heard that the CIA's inspector general is investigating at least eight serious incidents, including two deaths in custody, following complaints by agents about the activities of their military colleagues.

There are insurgents active in the Gardez area, as there are throughout the south of Afghanistan, remnants of the old order and the newly disaffected. Every morning it takes Afghan police several hours to pick along the highway unearthing explosives concealed overnight. And so it was mid-morning before we were able to leave town, crawling over the Gardez-Khost pass, some 10,000ft high. No one saw us slipping on to the fertile Khost plain, where Osama bin Laden once had his training camps - the camps were destroyed by US cruise missiles in August 1998. Today a shrine to Taliban loyalists still greets travellers to the city, although no one here would say they preferred the old life.

US Camp Salerno, the largest base outside Kabul, dominates the area around Khost. Inside the city, Kamal Sadat, a local stringer for BBC World Service, told how he was detained last September and found himself locked up in a prison filled with suspects from many countries. "Even though I showed my press accreditation, I was hooded, driven to Salerno and then flown to another US base. I had no idea where I was or why I had been detained." He was held in a small wooden cell, and soldiers combed through his notebooks, copying down names and phone numbers. "Every time I was moved within the base, I was hooded again. Every prisoner has to maintain absolute silence. I could hear helicopters whirring above me. Prisoners were arriving and leaving all the time. There were also cells beneath me, under the ground." After three days, Sadat was flown back to Khost and freed without explanation. "It was only later I learned that I had been held in Bagram. If the BBC had not intervened, I fear I would not have got out." After his release, the US military said it had all been a misunderstanding, and apologised.

Camp Salerno, which houses the 1,200 troops of US Combined Taskforce Thunder, was being expanded when we arrived. Army tents were being replaced with concrete dormitories. The detention facility, concealed behind a perimeter of opaque green webbing, was being modernised and enlarged. Ensconced in a Soviet-era staff building was the camp's commanding officer, Colonel Gary Cheeks. He listened calmly as we asked about the allegations of torture, deaths and disappearances at US detention facilities including Salerno. We read to him from a complaint made by a UN official in Kabul that accused the US military of using "cowboy-like excessive force". He eased forward in his chair: "There have been some tragic accidents for which we have apologised. Some people have been paid compensation."

We put to him the specific case of Mohammed Khan, from a village near the Pakistan border, who died in custody at Camp Salerno: his relatives say his body showed signs of torture. "You could go on for ages with a 'he said, she said'. You have to take my word for it," said Cheeks. He remembered Khan's death: "He was bitten by a snake and died in his cell." He added, "We are building new holding cells here to make life better for detainees. We are systematising our prison programme across the country."

For what reason? "So all guards and interrogators behave by the same code of behaviour," the colonel said. Is it not the case that an ever-increasing number of prisoners have vanished, while others are being shuttled between jails to keep their families in the dark? Cheeks moved towards his office door: "There are many things that are distorted. No one has vanished here ... Look, the war against the Taliban is one small part. I want the Afghan people with us. They are the key to ending conflict. If they fear us or we do wrong by them, then we have lost."

However, many Afghans who celebrated the fall of the Taliban have long lost faith in the US military. In Kabul, Nader Nadery, of the Human Rights Commission, told us, "Afghanistan is being transformed into an enormous US jail. What we have here is a military strategy that has spawned serious human rights abuses, a system of which Afghanistan is but one part." In the past 18 months, the commission has logged more than 800 allegations of human rights abuses committed by US troops.

The Afghan government privately shares Nadery's fears. One minister, who asked not to be named, said, "Washington holds Afghanistan up to the world as a nascent democracy and yet the US military has deliberately kept us down, using our country to host a prison system that seems to be administered arbitrarily, indiscriminately and without accountability."

What has been glimpsed in Afghanistan is a radical plan to replace Guantánamo Bay. When that detention centre was set up in January 2002, it was essentially an offshore gulag - beyond the reach of the US constitution and even the Geneva conventions. That all changed in July 2004. The US supreme court ruled that the federal court in Washington had jurisdiction to hear a case that would decide if the Cuban detentions were in violation of the US constitution, its laws or treaties. The military commissions, which had been intended to dispense justice to the prisoners, were in disarray, too. No prosecution cases had been prepared and no defence cases would be readily offered as the US National Association of Criminal Defence Lawyers had described the commissions as unethical, a decision backed by a federal judge who ruled in January that they were "illegal". Guantánamo was suddenly bogged down in domestic lawsuits. It had lost its practicality. So a global prison network built up over the previous three years, beyond the reach of American and European judicial process, immediately began to pick up the slack. The process became explicit last week when the Pentagon announced that half of the 540 or so inmates at Guantánamo are to be transferred to prisons in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.

Since September 11 2001, one of the US's chief strategies in its "war on terror" has been to imprison anyone considered a suspect on whatever grounds. To that end it commandeered foreign jails, built cellblocks at US military bases and established covert CIA facilities that can be located almost anywhere, from an apartment block to a shipping container. The network has no visible infrastructure - no prison rolls, visitor rosters, staff lists or complaints procedures. Terror suspects are being processed in Afghanistan and in dozens of facilities in Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Jordan, Egypt, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the British island of Diego Garcia in the southern Indian Ocean. Those detained are held incommunicado, without charge or trial, and frequently shuttled between jails in covert air transports, giving rise to the recently coined US military expression "ghost detainees".

Most of the countries hosting these invisible prisons are already partners in the US coalition. Others, notably Syria, are pragmatic associates, which work privately alongside the CIA and US Special Forces, despite bellicose public statements from President Bush (he has condemned Syria for harbouring terrorism, for aiding the remnants of the Saddam Hussein regime, and most recently has demanded that Syrian troops quit Lebanon).

All the host countries are renowned for their poor human rights records, enabling interrogators (US soldiers, contractors and their local partners) to operate. We have obtained prisoner letters, declassified FBI files, legal depositions, witness statements and testimony from US and UK officials, which document the alleged methods deployed in Afghanistan - shackles, hoods, electrocution, whips, mock executions, sexual humiliation and starvation - and suggest they are practised across the network. Sir Nigel Rodley, a former UN special rapporteur on torture, said, "The more hidden detention practices there are, the more likely that all legal and moral constraints on official behaviour will be removed."

The only "ghost detainees" to have been identified by Washington are a handful of high-profile al-Qaida operatives such as Abu Zubayda, Bin Laden's lieutenant, who vanished after being picked up by Pakistani authorities in Faisalabad in March 2002. In June of that year, US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Zubayda was "under US control". He did not say where, although sources in the Pakistani government said Zubayda was being held at a CIA facility in their country.

In May 2003, Bush clarified the fate of Waleed Muhammad bin Attash, an alleged conspirator in the USS Cole bombing, who disappeared after being arrested by police in Pakistan in April 2003. Bush described Attash as "a killer ... one less person that people who love freedom have to worry about"; he is also one more person who has never appeared on a US prison roll.

In June 2004, a senior counterterrorism official in Britain confirmed that Hambali (a nom de guerre) - accused of organising the October 2002 Bali bombings and unseen since Thai police seized him in August 2003 - was "singing like a bird", apparently at the US base on Diego Garcia.

Evidence we have collected, however, shows that many more of those swept up in the network have few provable connections to any outlawed organisation; experts in the field describe their value in the war against terror as "negligible". Former prisoners claim they were released only after naming names, coerced into making false confessions that led to the arrests of more people unconnected to terrorism, in a system of justice that owes more to Stanley Milgram's Six Degrees Of Separation - where anyone can be linked to everyone else in the world in as many stages - than to analytical jurisprudence.

The floating population of "ghost detainees", according to US and UK military officials, now exceeds 10,000.

The roots of the prison network can be traced to the legal wrangles that began as soon as the first terror suspects were rounded up just weeks after the September 11 attacks. As CIA agents and US forces began to capture suspected al-Qaida fighters in the war in Afghanistan, Alberto Gonzales, White House counsel, looked for ways to "dispense justice swiftly, close to where our forces may be fighting, without years of pre-trial proceedings or post-trial appeals".

On November 13 2001, George Bush signed an order to establish military commissions to try "enemy belligerents" who commit war crimes. At such a commission, a foreign war criminal would have no choice over his defence counsel, no right to know the evidence against him, no way of obtaining any evidence in his favour and no right of attorney-client confidentiality. Defending the commissions, Gonzales (now promoted to US attorney general) insisted, "The suggestion that [they] will afford only sham justice like that dispensed in dictatorial nations is an insult to our military justice system."

When the first prisoners arrived at Guantánamo Bay in January 2002, Donald Rumsfeld announced that they were all Taliban or al-Qaida fighters, and as such were designated "unlawful combatants". The US administration argued that al-Qaida and the Taliban were not the official army of Afghanistan, but a criminal force that did not wear uniforms, could not be distinguished from civilians and practised war crimes; on this basis, the administration claimed, it was entitled to sidestep the Geneva conventions and normal legal constraints.

From there, it was only a small moral step for the Bush administration to overlook the use of torture by regimes previously condemned by the US state department, so long as they, too, signed up to the war against terror. "Egypt, Jordan, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and even Syria were all asked to make their detention facilities and expert interrogators available to the US," one former counterterrorism agent told us.

In the UK, a similar process began unfolding. In December 2001, the then home secretary David Blunkett withdrew Britain from its obligation under the European human rights treaty not to detain anyone without trial; on December 18, the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act was passed, extending the government's powers of arrest and detention. Within 24 hours, 10 men were seized in dawn raids on their homes and taken to Belmarsh and Woodhill prisons (some of them will have been among those released in the past week).

Subsequently the Foreign Office subtly modified internal guidance to diplomats, enabling them to use intelligence obtained through torture. A letter from the Foreign & Commonwealth Office directorate sent to Sir Michael Jay, head of the diplomatic service, and Mathew Kidd of Whitehall liaison, a euphemism for MI6, suggested in March 2003 that although such intelligence was inadmissible as evidence in a UK court, it could still be received and acted upon by the British government. The government's attitude was spelt out to the Intelligence and Security Committee of MPs and peers by foreign secretary Jack Straw who, while acknowledging that torture was "completely unacceptable" and that information obtained under torture is more likely to be embellished, concluded, "you cannot ignore it if the price of ignoring it is 3,000 people dead" [a reference to the September 11 attacks].

One former ambassador told us, "This was new ground for the FCO. As long as we didn't do it, we're OK. But by taking advantage of this intelligence, we're encouraging the use of torture and, in my opinion, are in contravention of the UN Convention Against Torture. What worried me most was that information obtained under torture, given credence by some gung-ho Whitehall warrior, could be used to keep another poor soul locked up without trial or charge."

Although the true extent of the US extra-legal network is only now becoming apparent, people began to disappear as early as 2001 when the US asked its allies in Europe and the Middle East to examine their refugee communities in search of possible terror cells, such as that run by Mohammed Atta in Hamburg which had planned and executed the September 11 attacks. Among the first to vanish was Ahmed Agiza, an Egyptian asylum seeker who had been living in Sweden with his wife and children for three years. Hanan, Agiza's wife, told us how on December 18 2001 her husband failed to return home from his language class.

"The phone rang at 5pm. It was Ahmed. He said he'd been arrested and then the line went dead. The next day our lawyer told me that Ahmed was being sent back to Egypt. It would be better if he was dead." Agiza and his family had fled Egypt in 1991, after years of persecution, and in absentia he had been sentenced to life imprisonment by a military court. Hanan said, "I called my mother-in-law in Egypt. Finally, in April, she was allowed to see Ahmed in Mazrah Torah prison, in Cairo, when he revealed what had happened."

On December 18 2001, Agiza and a second Egyptian refugee, Mohammed Al-Zery, had been arrested by Swedish intelligence acting upon a request from the US. They were driven, shackled and blindfolded, to Stockholm's Bromma airport, where they were cuffed and cut from their clothes. Suppositories were inserted into both men's anuses, they were wrapped in plastic nappies, dressed in jumpsuits and handed over to an American aircrew who flew them out of Sweden on a private executive jet.

Agiza and Al-Zery landed in Cairo at 3am the next morning and were taken to the state security investigation office, where they were held in solitary confinement in underground cells. Mohammed Zarai, former director of the Cairo-based Human Rights Centre for the Assistance of Prisoners, told us that Agiza was repeatedly electrocuted, hung upside down, whipped with an electrical flex and hospitalised after being made to lick his cell floor clean. Hanan, who was granted asylum in Sweden in 2004, said, "I can't sleep at night without expecting someone to knock on the door and send us away on a plane to a place that scares me more than anything else. What can Ahmed do?" Her husband is still incarcerated in Cairo, while Al-Zery is under house arrest there. There have been calls for an international independent investigation into the roles of the Swedish, US and Egyptian authorities.

We were able to chart the toing and froing of the private executive jet used at Bromma partly through the observations of plane-spotters posted on the web and partly through a senior source in the Pakistan Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI). It was a Gulfstream V Turbo, tailfin number N379P; its flight plans always began at an airstrip in Smithfield, North Carolina, and ended in some of the world's hot spots. It was owned by Premier Executive Transport Services, incorporated in Delaware, a brass plaque company with nonexistent directors, hired by American agents to revive an old CIA tactic from the 1970s, when agency men had kidnapped South American criminals and flown them back to their own countries to face trial so that justice could be rendered. Now "rendering" was being used by the Bush administration to evade justice.

Robert Baer, a CIA case officer in the Middle East until 1997, told us how it works. "We pick up a suspect or we arrange for one of our partner countries to do it. Then the suspect is placed on civilian transport to a third country where, let's make no bones about it, they use torture. If you want a good interrogation, you send someone to Jordan. If you want them to be killed, you send them to Egypt or Syria. Either way, the US cannot be blamed as it is not doing the heavy work."

The Agiza and Al-Zery cases were not the first in which the Gulfstream was used. On October 23 2001, at 2.40am at Karachi airport, it picked up Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, a Yemeni microbiologist who had been arrested by Pakistan's ISI and was wanted in connection with the USS Cole attack. On January 10 2002, the jet was used again, taking off from Halim airport in Jakarta with a hooded and shackled Mohammed Saeed Iqbal Madni on board, an Egyptian accused of being an accomplice of British shoe bomber Richard Reid. Madni was flown to Cairo where, according to the Human Rights Centre for the Assistance of Prisoners, he died during interrogation.

Since then, the jet has been used at least 72 times, including a flight in June 2002 when it landed in Morocco to pick up German national Mohammed Zamar, who was "rendered" to Syria, his country of origin, before disappearing.

It was in December 2001 that the US began to commandeer foreign jails so that its own interrogators could work on prisoners within them. Among the first were Haripur and Kohat, no-frills prisons in the lawless North West Frontier Province of Pakistan which now hold nearly as many detainees as Guantánamo. In January, we attempted to visit Kohat jail, but as we drove towards the security perimeter our vehicle was turned back by ISI agents and we were escorted back to the nearby city of Peshawar. We eventually located several former detainees, including Mohammed, a university student who described how he was arrested and then initially interrogated in one of many covert ISI holding centres that are being jointly run with the CIA. Mohammed said, "I was questioned for four weeks in a windowless room by plain-clothed US agents. I didn't know if it was day or night. They said they could make me disappear." One day he was bundled into a vehicle. "I arrived in Kohat jail. There were 100 prisoners from all over the Middle East. Later I was moved to Haripur where there were even more."

Adil, another detainee who was held for three years in Haripur after illegally crossing into Pakistan from Afghanistan, where he had escaped from the Taliban, says, "US interrogators came and went as they pleased." Both Mohammed and Adil said they were often taken from the hot cell and doused with ice-cold water. Adil says, "American women ordered us to get undressed. They'd touch us and taunt us. They made us lie naked on top of each other and simulate acts."

Mohammed and Adil were released without charge in November 2004 but, according to legal depositions, there are still 400 prisoners detained in the jails at the request of the US. Among them are many who it is extremely unlikely took part in the Afghan war: they are too young or too old to have been combatants. Some have taken legal action against the Pakistani authorities for breach of human rights.

A military intelligence official in Washington told us that no one in the US administration seemed concerned about the impact of the coercive tactics practised by the growing global network on the quality of intelligence obtained, although there was plenty of evidence it was unreliable. On September 26 2002, Maher Arar, a 34-year-old Canadian computer scientist, was arrested at New York's JFK airport as a result of a paper-thin evidential chain. Syrian-born Arar told us, "I was pulled aside by US immigration at 2pm. I told them I had a connecting flight to Montreal where I had a job interview." However, Arar was "rendered" in a private jet, via Washington, Portland and Rome, landing in Amman, Jordan, where he was held at what a Jordanian source described as a US-run interrogation centre. From there, he was handed over to Syria, the country he had left as a 17-year-old boy. He says he spent the next 12 months being tortured and in solitary confinement, unaware that someone he barely knew had named him as a terrorist.

The chain of events that led to Arar's arrest, or kidnapping, began in November 2001, when another Canadian, Ahmad Abou El-Maati, from Montreal, was arrested at Damascus airport. He was accused of being a terrorist and asked to identify his al-Qaida connections. By the time he'd endured two years of torture, El-Maati had reeled off the names of everyone he knew in Montreal, including Abdullah Almalki, an electrical engineer. Almalki was arrested as he flew into Damascus airport to join his parents on holiday in May 2002, and would spend the next two years being tortured in a Syrian detention facility.

Almalki knew Arward Al-Bousha, also from Ottawa, who in July 2002, upon arriving in Damascus to visit his dying father, was also arrested. El-Maati, Almalki and Al-Bousha all knew Maher Arar by sight through Muslim community events in Ottawa. After his release from jail in Syria, uncharged, in January 2004, El-Maati admitted that he had erroneously named Maher Arar as a terrorist to "stop the vicious torture". Arar, who was eventually released in October 2003 after a Syrian court threw out a coerced confession in which he said he had been trained by al-Qaida, told us, "I am not a terrorist. I don't know anyone who is. But the tolerant Muslim community I come from here in Canada has become vitriolic and demoralised." Arar's case is now the subject of a judicial inquiry in Canada, but since his release and that of Al-Bousha and Almalki, another five men from Ottawa have been detained in Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Five days after the US supreme court ruled in July 2004 that federal courts had jurisdiction over Guantánamo, Naeem Noor Khan, a 25-year-old computer programmer from Karachi, disappeared during a business trip to Lahore. He was not taken to Guantánamo. His father Hayat told us that he learned of his son's fate after a neighbour called on August 2 to say that US newspapers were running a story about "the capture of a figure from al-Qaida in Pakistan" who had led "the CIA to a rich lode of information". An unnamed US intelligence official claimed Naeem Noor Khan operated websites and email addresses for al-Qaida. The following day Pakistan's information minister trumpeted the ISI's seizure of Naeem Noor Khan on behalf of the US on July 13. The prisoner had "confessed to receiving 25 days of military training from an al-Qaida camp in June 1998". No corroborative evidence was offered.

Babar Awan, one of Pakistan's leading advocates, representing the family, said he had learned from a contact in the Pakistani government that Naeem Noor Khan was wanted by the US, having been named by one of a group of Malaysian students who had been detained incommunicado and threatened with torture in Pakistan in September 2003. Awan said, "The student was subsequently freed uncharged and described how he was threatened until he offered the names of anyone he had met in Pakistan. There is no evidence against Naeem Noor Khan except for this coerced statement, and even worse he has now vanished and so there is no prison to petition for his release."

Khan had been swallowed up by a catch-all system that gathers up anyone connected by even a thread to terror. Unable to distinguish its friends from its enemies, the US suspects both.

Dawn broke on the festival of Eid and four US army vehicles gunned their engines in preparation for a "hearts and minds" operation in Khost city, Afghanistan. A roll call of marines, each with their blood group scrawled on their boots, was ticked off and we were added to the muster. The convoy hurtled towards the city. Men and boys began to run alongside. First a handful and then a dozen. The crowd was heading for a vast prayer ground, and soon there were thousands of devotees in brand newEid caps and starched shalwas marching out to pray. The US Humvees pulled over. The armoured personnel carriers, too. A dozen US marines stepped down, eyes obscured by goggles, faces by balaclavas.

They fell into formation and stomped into the crowd while a group of Afghan police looked on incredulously. "Keep tight. Keep tight. Keep looking all around us," a US marines captain shouted. More than 10,000 Pashtun men were now on their knees praying as a line of khaki pushed between them.

An egg flew. Then another. "One more, sir, and the guy who did it is going down," a young sergeant mumbled, as the disturbed crowd rose to its feet. Bearded men with Kalashnikovs emerged from behind a stone wall and edged towards us, cutting off our path. The line of khaki began to panic, and jostled the children. "Back away, back away now," shouted the sergeant. Suddenly an armoured personnel carrier roared to meet us. "Jump up, people," the captain shouted, and the convoy sped back to Camp Salerno.

And perhaps this event above all others - of a nervous phalanx of US marines forcing its way across a prayer ground on one of the holiest, most joyous days in the Islamic calendar, an itching trigger away from a Somalian-style dogfight of their own making - is the one that encapsulates everything that has gone wrong with the global war against terror. The US army came to Afghanistan as liberators and now are feared as governors, judges and jailers. How many US marines know what James Madison, an architect of the US constitution, wrote in 1788? Reflecting on the War of Independence in which Americans were arbitrarily arrested and detained without trial by British forces, Madison concluded that the "accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,1440836,00.html

Afghanistan

America's Has-Been Economy

2005-03-25T01:01:00.000+01:00

Outscourcing Innovation...And Everything Else
America's Has-Been Economy

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

A country cannot be a superpower without a high tech economy, and America's high tech economy is eroding as I write.

The erosion began when US corporations outsourced manufacturing. Today many US companies are little more than a brand name selling goods made in Asia.

Corporate outsourcers and their apologists presented the loss of manufacturing capability as a positive development. Manufacturing, they said, was the "old economy," whose loss to Asia ensured Americans lower consumer prices and greater shareholder returns. The American future was in the "new economy" of high tech knowledge jobs.

This assertion became an article of faith. Few considered how a country could maintain a technological lead when it did not manufacture.

So far in the 21st century there is scant sign of the American "new economy." The promised knowledge-based jobs have not appeared. To the contrary, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a net loss of 221,000 jobs in six major engineering job classifications.

Today many computer, electrical and electronics engineers, who were well paid at the end of the 20th century, are unemployed and cannot find work. A country that doesn't manufacture doesn't need as many engineers, and much of the work that remains is being outsourced or filled with cheaper foreigners brought into the country on H-lb and L-1 work visas.

Confronted with inconvenient facts, outsourcing's apologists moved to the next level of fantasy. Many technical and engineering jobs, they said, have become "commodity jobs," routine work that can be performed cheaper offshore. America will stay in the lead, they promised, because it will keep the research and development work and be responsible for design and innovation.

Alas, now it is design and innovation that are being outsourced. Business Week reports ("Outsourcing Innovation," March 21) that the pledge of First World corporations to keep research and development in-house "is now passé."

Corporations such as Dell, Motorola, and Philips, which are regarded as manufacturers based in proprietary design and core intellectual property originating in R&D departments, now put their brand names on complete products that are designed, engineered, and manufactured in Asia by "original-design manufacturers" (ODM).

Business Week reports that practically overnight large percentages of cell phones, notebook PCs, digital cameras, MP3 players, and personal digital assistants are produced by original-design manufacturers. Business Week quotes an executive of a Taiwanese ODM: "Customers used to participate in design two or three years back. But starting last year, many just take our product."

Another offshore ODM executive says: "What has changed is that more customers need us to design the whole product. It's now difficult to get good ideas from our customers. We have to innovate ourselves." Another says: "We know this kind of product category a lot better than our customers do. We have the capability to integrate all the latest technologies." The customers are America's premier high tech names.

The design and engineering teams of Asian ODMs are expanding rapidly, while those of major US corporations are shrinking. Business Week reports that R&D budgets at such technology companies as Hewlett Packard, Cisco, Motorola, Lucent Technologies, Ericsson, and Nokia are being scaled back.

Outsourcing is rapidly converting US corporations into a brand name with a sales force selling foreign designed, engineered, and manufactured goods. Whether or not they realize it, US corporations have written off the US consumer market. People who do not participate in the innovation, design, engineering and manufacture of the products that they consume lack the incomes to support the sales infrastructure of the job diverse "old economy."

"Free market" economists and US politicians are blind to the rapid transformation of America into a third world economy, but college bound American students and heads of engineering schools are acutely aware of declining career opportunities and enrollments. While "free trade" economists and corporate publicists prattle on about America's glorious future, heads of prestigious engineering schools ponder the future of engineering education in America.

Once US firms complete their loss of proprietary architecture, how much intrinsic value resides in a brand name? What is to keep the all-powerful ODMs from undercutting the American brand names?

The outsourcing of manufacturing, design and innovation has dire consequences for US higher education. The advantages of a college degree are erased when the only source of employment is domestic nontradable services.

According to the Los Angeles Times (March 11), the percentage of college graduates among the long-term chronically unemployed has risen sharply in the 21st century. The US Department of Labor reported in March that 373,000 discouraged college graduates dropped out of the labor force in February--a far higher number than the number of new jobs created.

The disappearing US economy can also be seen in the exploding trade deficit. As more employment is shifted offshore, goods and services formerly produced domestically become imports. Nothink economists and Bush administration officials claim that America's increasing dependence on imported goods and services is evidence of the strength of the US economy and its role as engine of global growth.

This claim ignores that the US is paying for its outsourced goods and services by transferring its wealth and future income streams to foreigners. Foreigners have acquired $3.6 trillion of US assets since 1990 as a result of US trade deficits.

Foreigners have a surfeit of dollar assets. For the past three years their increasing unwillingness to acquire more dollars has resulted in a marked decline in the dollar's value in relation to gold and tradable currencies.

Recently the Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans have expressed their concerns. According to Bloomberg (March 10), Japan's unrealized losses on its dollar reserve holdings have reached $109.6 billion.

The Asia Times reported (March 12) that Asian central banks have been reducing their dollar holdings in favor of regional currencies for the past three years. A study by the Bank of International Settlements concluded that the ratio of dollar reserves held in Asia declined from 81% in the third quarter of 2001 to 67% in September 2004. India reduced its dollar holdings from 68% of total reserves to 43%. China reduced its dollar holdings from 83% to 68%.

The US dollar will not be able to maintain its role as world reserve currency when it is being abandoned by that area of the world that is rapidly becoming the manufacturing, engineering and innovation powerhouse.

Misled by propagandistic "free trade" claims, Americans will be at a loss to understand the increasing career frustrations of the college educated. Falling pay and rising prices of foreign made goods will squeeze US living standards as the declining dollar heralds America's descent into a has-been economy.

Meanwhile the Grand Old Party has passed a bankruptcy "reform" that is certain to turn unemployed Americans living on debt and beset with unpayable medical bills into the indentured servants of credit card companies. The steely-faced Bush administration is making certain that Americans will experience to the full their counry's fall.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: pcroberts@postmark.net

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts03162005.html

Economy

A Warning From Auschwitz: How Do You Shoot Babies?

2005-03-24T15:06:00.000+01:00

A Warning From Auschwitz : How Do You Shoot Babies? By David Edwards

Facing execution for his role in the murder of more than 1 million people, many of them children, Auschwitz commandant, Rudolf Hoess, reflected on his life and works:

"Today, I deeply regret that I did not spend more time with my family." (Hoess, 'Auschwitz, The Nazis and the Final Solution,' BBC2, February 15, 2005)

Hoess of course lies at the extreme end of the spectrum, but his inability to recognise the extraordinary horror of what he had done is by no means exceptional. Mike Wallace of CBS News interviewed a participant in the American massacre of Vietnamese women and children at My Lai.

"Q. You're married?
A. Right
Q. Children?
A. Two.
Q. How old?
A. The boy is two and a half, and the little girl is a year and a half.
Q. Obviously, the question comes to my mind... the father of two little kids like that... how can he shoot babies?
A. I didn't have the little girl. I just had the little boy at the time.
Q. Uh-huh... How do you shoot babies?
A. I don't know. It's just one of those things." (Quoted, Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority, Pinter & Martin, 1974, p.202)

One of the delusions promoted by our society is the idea that great destructiveness is most often rooted in great cruelty and hatred. In reality, evil is not merely banal, it is often free of any sense of being evil - there may be no sense of moral responsibility for suffering at all.

We are all familiar with the words that typically accompany the shrug of the shoulders when someone is asked: "How could you do it?" Time and again during the war on Iraq we have heard obviously well-meaning US and British military personnel insisting that they were just doing their jobs. A typical response is: "I'm just doing what I'm paid to do."

Repeated often enough, these responses can even come to seem reasonable. But consider, by contrast, these comments made by US soldier Camilo Mejia who refused to return to his unit in Iraq after taking leave in October 2003:

"People would ask me about my war experiences and answering them took me back to all the horrors - the firefights, the ambushes, the time I saw a young Iraqi dragged by his shoulders through a pool of his own blood or an innocent man was decapitated by our machine gun fire. The time I saw a soldier broken down inside because he killed a child, or an old man on his knees, crying with his arms raised to the sky, perhaps asking God why we had taken the lifeless body of his son. I thought of the suffering of a people whose country was in ruins and who were further humiliated by the raids, patrols and curfews of an occupying army.

"And I realized that none of the reasons we were told about why we were in Iraq turned out to be true... I realized that I was part of a war that I believed was immoral and criminal, a war of aggression, a war of imperial domination. I realized that acting upon my principles became incompatible with my role in the military, and I decided that I could not return to Iraq." (Mejia, 'Regaining My Humanity,' http://www.codepink4peace.org/National_Actions_Camilo.shtml )

Normally, the implicit assumption is that signing a contract and being paid to do a job absolves us of all further moral responsibility. We have signed an agreement to do as we are told - an ostensibly innocuous act. If the people with whom we made this agreement then choose to send us to incinerate and dismember civilians, that is +their+ moral responsibility, not ours.

The psychologist Stanley Milgram noted that this is a classic evasion used by people unwilling to accept responsibility for their own actions:

"The key to the behaviour of subjects [willing to torture and kill on command] lies not in pent-up anger or aggression but in the nature of their relationship to authority. They have given themselves to the authority; they see themselves as instruments for the execution of his wishes; once so defined, they are unable to break free." (Milgram, op., cit, p.185)

Other studies, on the psychology of torturers, have come to similar conclusions. Lindsey Williams, a Clinical Psychologist, notes:

"...apart from traits of authoritarianism and obedience, and ideological sympathy for the government, there is little evidence that torturers are markedly different from their peers - at least, until the point where they are recruited and trained as torturers." (Williams, Amnesty, May/June 1995, p.10)

The +fundamentally+ immoral act, then - the disaster that clears the way to vast horrors in the complete absence of a sense of responsibility - is the simple one of accepting that we are obliged to 'do as we are told'.

But in our society exactly this self-surrender is promoted and affirmed by the fact that it is demanded of us by every corporation that 'employs' us (like a tool), requiring us to sign our agreement to strict terms and conditions, and by the fact that massive costs are imposed on those of us unwilling to be 'team-players'. In 1937, Rudolf Rocker wrote:

"It is certainly dangerous for a state when its citizens have a conscience; what it needs is men without conscience, or, better still, men whose conscience is quite in conformity with reasons of state, men in whom the feeling of personal responsibility has been replaced by the automatic impulse to act in the interests of the state." (Rocker, Culture and Nationalism, Michael E. Coughlan, 1978, p.197)

The "Gushing" Phenomenon

Like military personnel, corporate journalists also sign themselves over to authority. Individuals may come and go but, year after year, in an all but unvarying pattern, reporters end up demonising official enemies and prettifying their own government's crimes. Like military personnel, they view what happens next as someone else's moral responsibility.

In January 2003, Media Lens wrote to BBC presenter Fiona Bruce asking her why she had described the build-up of troops in Kuwait as being "to deal with the continuing threat posed by Iraq". Bruce replied simply: "I'll forward your point to the news editor - thank you." (BBC 18:00 News, January 7, 2003. Bruce, email to Media Lens, January 7, 2003)

But if we refuse to accept responsibility for the very words that come out of our mouths, have we not lost our humanity? The result, very often, is that other people lose their lives.

ITN's John Irvine recently reported on "the hermit state" of North Korea where people celebrated the birth of the country's leader in a "display of people in perfect unison - cynics might call it Come Dancing, or else!" (Irvine, ITV 22:30 News, February 16, 2005)

The North Korean people, it seems, had been "treated to hours of gushing television" in honour of the leader. "When it comes to propaganda", Irvine concluded, this is a broadcaster beyond comparison."

There are ugly ironies here. The first, of course, is that British TV viewers are also familiar with the "gushing" phenomenon. When Baghdad fell to US tanks on April 9, 2003, British journalists gushed uncontrollably. The BBC's Rageh Omaar, for example, reported his first sight of the invading army:

"In my mind's eye, I often asked myself: what would it be like when I saw the first British or American soldiers, after six years of reporting Iraq? And nothing, nothing, came close to the actual, staggering reaction to seeing American soldiers - young men from Nevada and California - just rolling down in tanks. And they're here with us now in the hotel, in the lifts and the lobbies. It was a moment I'd never, ever prepared myself for." (BBC News At Six, April 9, 2003)

It was to these same young men that ex-Marine Staff Sergeant Jimmy Massey was referring when he said:

"It sickened me so that I had actually brought it up to my lieutenant, and I told him, I said, 'You know, sir, we're not going to have to worry about Iraq - you know, we're basically committing genocide over here, mass extermination of thousands of Iraqis...'"
( http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/24/148212 )

An hour after Omaar's report, the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, told Channel 4 news presenter Jon Snow that he had met with the French foreign minister that day: "Did he look chastened?" Snow asked, wryly. (Channel 4, April 9, 2003)

On the same programme, Washington correspondent David Smith pointedly ended his 'piece to camera' on the fall of Baghdad by quoting "a leading Republican senator":

"I'm just glad we had a commander-in-chief who didn't listen to Hollywood, or the New York Times, or the French."

John Irvine, himself, declared: "A war of three weeks has brought an end to decades of Iraqi misery." (Irvine, ITN, 18:30 News, April 9, 2003)

This at the height of an illegal invasion based on a set of outrageous lies in which literally tens of thousands of Iraqis were being killed.

The deeper irony is that Irvine's comments on North Korea were made from the heart of the West's own propaganda system - a system that consistently demonises official enemies in exactly this way. In April 1950, a US National Security Council Directive stated:

"The citizens of the United States stand in their deepest peril," being threatened with the "destruction not only of this Republic but of civilisation itself" by "international Communism". (Quoted, Mark Curtis, The Ambiguities of Power, Zed Books, 1995, p.43)

The threat was a fraud. Privately, former Under-Secretary of State and future Deputy Secretary of Defence Robert Lovett pointed out (March 1950): "If we can sell every useless article known to man in large quantities, we should be able to sell our very fine story [regarding the communist 'threat'] in larger quantities." (Ibid, p.44)

In May 1985, Ronald Reagan declared a "national emergency" to deal with the "unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States" posed by "the policies and actions of the Government of Nicaragua". (World Court Digest, http://www.virtual-institute.de/en/wcd/wcd.cfm?107090400100.cfm)

Nobody laughed!

In September 2002, Tony Blair declared in his foreword to "the British dossier assessing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq":

"It is unprecedented for the Government to publish this kind of document. But in light of the debate about Iraq and Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), I wanted to share with the British public the reasons why I believe this issue to be a current and serious threat to the UK national interest." ('Full text of Tony Blair's foreword to the dossier on Iraq,' The Guardian, September 24, 2002)

John Morrison, an adviser to the parliamentary intelligence and security committee and a former deputy chief of defence intelligence, told the BBC: "When I heard him using those words, I could almost hear the collective raspberry going up around Whitehall." ('Official sacked over TV remarks on Iraq,' Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian, July 26, 2004)

Morrison was sacked for his honesty. A year later, Blair is up for re-election, while his 'retired' spinmeister Alastair Campbell recently appeared on the quiz show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? Campbell has also been quietly 'welcomed back' into the New Labour fold.

Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh, Panama's Noriega, Nicaragua's Ortega, Cuba's Castro, Haiti's Aristide, indeed any leader or movement obstructing Western corporate or strategic interests, have all been reflexively demonised by journalists who are always happy to rally to their leaders call without a second thought.

The companion to media demonisation is the hagiolatry of Western leaders and apologetics for their crimes. Thus Simon Tisdall writes in the Guardian:

"Groundbreaking elections in Afghanistan, Ukraine, Palestine and Iraq, extolled in President Bush's 'dawn of freedom' inaugural address, have encouraged western hopes that democratic values are gaining universal acceptance." (Tisdall, 'Bush's democratic bandwagon hits a roadblock in Harare,' The Guardian, February 16, 2005)

On the BBC's main news, Clive Myrie describes America as "the champion of democracy", referring to "a role call of newly-minted democracies." (Myrie, BBC1, 13:00 News, February 23, 2005)

A Warning To The Curious

We need to be clear that the commandant of Auschwitz did not for one moment see himself as evil or destructive. Nor did the troopers at My Lai. And nor, of course, do our well-heeled, well-educated, Oxbridge journalists. They may have tempers and egos - they are surely not mass murderers.

But journalists who reflexively reinforce an authorised, Manichean view of the world - a world made up of "humanitarian interventionists" ('Us') and "Monster States" {'Them') - +are+ utterly vital cogs in the machinery of industrial killing. It makes not one jot of difference that no actual blood is visible on their hands.

The 2nd century sage, Nagarjuna, made the points that matter:

"Not doing harm to others,
Not bowing down to the ignoble,
Not abandoning the path of virtue -
These are small points, but of great
Importance."

SUGGESTED ACTION

The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. In writing letters to journalists, we strongly urge readers to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8290.htm

Iraq

Belfast homeopathy results (one of the 13 things that do not make sense)

2005-03-22T13:01:00.000+01:00

Belfast homeopathy results

MADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen's University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.

In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These "basophils" release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute that they probably didn't contain a single histamine molecule - worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths' claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.

So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this "mother tincture" in water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.

You can understand why Ennis remains sceptical. And it remains true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on. "We are," Ennis says in her paper, "unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon." If the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.

Belfast homeopathy results (one of the 13 things that do not make sense)

Water
Homeopathy

Rennes-le-chateau

2005-03-22T01:02:00.000+01:00

Da Vinci Code Part II

Research began with Lincoln's preparation (Lincoln was a television writer and in 1969, he wrote "Holy Blood, Holy Grail") of a 1972 BBC documentary on a 19th century French priest, Berenger Sauniere. The cleric reputedly amassed great wealth after discovering and deciphering four parchments hidden in a hollow pillar of his church at Rennes-le-Chateau, a hilltop village in the south of France.

The authors say they have discovered those parchments, or facsimiles, still exist and disclose the existence of a secret society called the Prieure de Sion, founded in the 11th century at the start of the Crusades. Its aim was to guard the Holy Grail - according to medieval legend, the cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper.

The authors claim the society remains active, and that its adherents over the years included Isaac Newton, Andre Malraux, Victor Hugo, Claude Debussy and Charles de Gaulle.

According to the authors, the words "Holy Grail" are a mistranslation of early French words for "royal blood," and the true purpose of Prieure de Sion is to protect alleged royal descendants of Jesus and prepare the way for their accession to world power. [...]

Did Berenger Sauniere find an ancient hoard of gold and appropriate it to himself? Or did he uncover some other secret that required his silence to be bought?

Continue at Rennes-le-chateau

Rennes-le-chateau

Dubleya Standards

2005-03-21T01:24:00.000+01:00

Dubleya Standards

You Either Censor Our Way, Or the Highway

The low point of the Bush-Putin press conference last month in Bratislava came when a Russian "journalist" in the press pool threw out what appeared to be a clearly-scripted question. It went to the heart of Russia's profound grievance with America-its "double speak" or "double standards" or "hypocrisy."

After several questions aimed at pressing Putin on the sorry state of democracy in Russia, an Interfax journalist asked , "To follow up on the issue of democratic institutions, President Bush recently stated that the press in Russia is not free. What is this lack of freedom all about? :Why don't you talk a lot about violations of the rights of journalists in the United States, about the fact that some journalists have been fired?"

To Americans, especially the American press, the question was absurd. It provoked, at best, a giant sneer, and at worst, a "toldya the Russians are still a bunch of evil commie bastards!" reaction from the Russophobic Right.

Bush's actual response-"I don't know what journalists you're referring to" - summed up American delusional thinking best. Such a thing could not possibly happen in America. Even when it does happen - which is pretty often, in ways both covert and overt-Americans would still look at you like a complete loony, a "conspiracy theorist," if you told them journalists get fired in the US for not behaving the way people in power want them to.

The most recent example of American censorship was also the most personal and threatening example. This past Monday, Jeff Koyen, editor of the alt-weekly The New York Press, was forced to resign (he was given two weeks suspension without pay, which left Koyen with no choice but to resign or accept castration) after New York's top politicians, from Senators Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer down to New York Congressman Weiner and aides to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, all attacked the last issue's cover story, "52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope." The piece was written by former eXile co-editor Matt Taibbi, who writes a regular column now for the Press (both I and Dr. Dolan are also regular contributors). For those of you who don't know, The New York Press is a weekly free alternative newspaper that was founded about a decade ago to challenge the Village Voice, which had withered into cultural and dynamic irrelevance over the years.

The Pope-Dying piece in question was one of those ideas that are hilarious as a concept but wind up getting ruined in the transfer from idea to print, something our readers have grown accustomed to over the years due to our rigorous corporate culture which enforces shoddy work habits at the eXile. Organized types are brutally hazed and find they hit a glass ceiling at about the intern level: after all, we're geniuses, you know: Yet the Pope gag sent the entire East Coast Power Elite into full spectrum mob attack mode, starting with the highest powers in the state. Here are some examples. New York Senator Chuck Schumer: "This is the most disgusting thing I've seen in 30 years of public life"; Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton: "It is outrageously offensive to make light of [the Pope's] physical suffering, which he has borne with such strength, dignity and grace"; and New York Representative Anthony Weiner, a future candidate for mayor, actually called on the people of New York to commit a serious crime when he publicly stated, "Everyone has a right to free speech, but I hope New Yorkers exercise their right to take as many of these rags as they can and put them in the trash."

Throwing away a freely distributed newspaper en masse because you object to its content is sabotage, a serious crime that not only violates property and business, but goes to the heart of what America is supposed to be about-and it's an even greater crime, a Constitutional crime, when a powerful congressman calls on his constituents to dump a newspaper. It's as though he called on his constituents to burn down a church just because its teachings outraged the locals.
As you can see, the Press's "Pope's Upcoming Death" piece caused a scandal that made even the eXile's near-death experience last summer with the Kremlin and Texas Republican Henry Bonilla seem like salted semichki by comparison.

So who won this test of America's alleged checks and balances between the commitment to a free press and government power, checks and balances so widely praised by Bush and all of his mandarins in the Washington press corps? As "duh!" as this rhetorical question is, nearly all Americans would instinctively roll their eyes and say to themselves, "There's no way that our government would censor this kind of crap. They don't censor anything, they wouldn't get away with it." And yet it just happened to my own friend and editor.

Now, let's go back to Bush's press conference in Bratislava a couple weeks ago, back to the planted Russian journalist's question: "Why don't you talk a lot about violations of the rights of journalists in the United States, about the fact that some journalists have been fired": It doesn't sound so crazy anymore, not to me. Not when the two senators, a congressman and the mayor's representative attack a newspaper, and a few days later, the editor is fired.

Here is Bush's longer response, which is almost terrifying for its candid explanation of the American method of censorship:

"People do get fired in [the] American press. They don't get fired by government, however. They get fired by their editors or they get fired by their producers, or they get fired by the owners of a particular outlet or network."

You see? It's a matter of formalities, not substance. Firing journalists is fine! Why, there ain't nothing wrong with that. You just gotta do the firing by slightly less direct means, that's the trick.

Bush is so candid about the American way of censorship that it's almost impossible to attack it, because its very power lies in the fact that it seems to him, and to most Americans, as something self evident. Arguing with this line of reasoning is like arguing with someone over religion.

Here is that reasoning: If a journalist gets fired directly by the government, it's censorship. But owners are business people, and business people fire employees for business reasons. So when a media owner fires a journalist, it's a businessman exercising his right to run his business, even if the pressure to fire his employee came from the mayor and the state's senators.

It's all clear as day! It doesn't matter that the cause-outraging powerful officials-and its effect-the firing of the responsible editor - are the same in the US as in Russia and constitute censorship in each instance. What matters is the formality, who pulled the trap door.

Last September, Izvestia editor Raf Shakirov was fired for printing large front page photos of the Beslan massacre, which the Kremlin found outrageous. Western politicians and media were horrified and alarmed at Shakirov's sacking; it became one of the main pieces of evidence used by Putin's detractors during last autumn's re-branding-Putin campaign, where the Russian leader went from being "the kind of tough bastard we need in these dangerous times" to "the democracy-crushing crypto-Soviet" brand image he's now stuck with today.

I've gone back and looked at those Shakirov articles to see how exactly he was fired, and I was surprised by how my own mind was molded by our propaganda. There was never a censorship smoking gun, an actual Kremlin official who made the phone call. Shakirov said he was fired by his owners, oligarch Vladimir Potanin, who didn't want to piss off the Kremlin. Yet all the news accounts I looked back at quoted a single unnamed Izvestia source as saying there was a specific call from the Kremlin to Izvestia. Can you imagine American newspapers relying on an unnamed source within The New York Press to push a story that the White House called the Press owners and demanded Koyen be fired? It would never fly.

I don't know if the Kremlin directly intervened to fire Shakirov-I'm not sure they need to anymore, but they might just to swing their dicks around-but the funny thing is, even after American officials PUBLICLY called for Koyen's newspaper to be trashed, Koyen still couldn't convince fellow Americans that the attack on the NY Press was really a government attack on outrageous, or rather "free" speech. Yet a single unnamed source within Izvestia is all it takes for the entire American populace to decide that Putin is a censorship-made autocrat (which, to be fair, he is, and a really clumsy, vulgar one at that: or wait, no, rather, he isn't, heh-heh, I hope he didn't hear that, heh-heh, Your Liberalness:).

Readers will object that substantively there's a massive difference between getting stomped for publishing a cheap joke belittling the Pope's impending death, which after all was designed to cause outrage, and getting stomped for printing the unbearable truth in Beslan, a vital truth that the Kremlin very crudely tried to manage. This is absolutely true-and points, in fact, to how much MORE insane America is than Russia. If American politicians can get away with calling for the effective censorship of a newspaper over something so trivial-and get the "owners" to fire the editor, as per the formula explained by Bush-then just think what would happen in America if the stakes were much higher, as they were in the case of Shakirov and Izvestia over Beslan.

But wait, we don't have to imagine! We can just look at the recent past, so effectively white-washed (or purple-washed or orange-washed) from America's collective conscience.

Let's go way, way back in time, to ancient history by American brain-stem standards. Yup, that's right, back to the spring of 2003, if you can put on your thinkin' caps, pop some gingko bilabo, and try remembrin' real hard-like. Cuz that's when Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Peter Arnett, probably America's most famous television war correspondent, was fired by NBC (as well as from National Geographic - which adds a kind of sinister humor to the story) on March 31st, 2003, roughly a week after the war started, for saying this during an interview he gave to Iraqi state television:

"The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance. Now they are trying to write another war plan. Clearly, the American war planners misjudged the determination of the Iraqi forces."

That was it. He said: the flat truth. Nothing could be more threatening to an American than hearing the flat truth.

Almost no one, except for the usual crunchy crowd, objected when Arnett was fired- because technically, the "owner of the outlet" did the firing, not the government. Not that government officials didn't have their say. Former New York Senator Alfonse D'Amato said of Arnett's interview, "He gives aid and comfort to the enemy." Fox News' John Gibson said Arnett's interview seemed "to be supporting the Iraqi regime." A Republican Congresswoman from Florida, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, called Arnett's comments "nauseating," adding, "It's incredible he would be kowtowing to what is clearly the enemy in this way."

NBC News President Neal Shapiro released a statement explaining his firing: "It was wrong for Mr. Arnett to grant an interview to state-controlled Iraqi TV, especially at a time of war, and it was wrong for him to discuss his personal observations and opinions in that interview." Shapiro would have done well in the Soviet Union. "It was wrong, petite-bourgeois, and deviationist for Comrade Arnett to speak to evil foreigners during a time of our historic struggle, offering his personal opinions:it was subjectivism and a betrayal of the Party:"

Never mind that everyone from President Bush, Vice President Cheney and war architect Paul Wolfowitz have all subsequently admitted exactly what Peter Arnett said: that the American war plan misjudged the determination of the Iraqi resistance. The point is that mainstream American journalists are not supposed to try to shape reality our exhibit behavior contrary to what those in power expect.
Just a few weeks after Arnett was fired, NBC's sister station, MSNBC, essentially destroyed one of their most popular TV correspondents for exactly the same "offense." Ashleigh Banfield, who had made her name as the ash-covered correspondent at Ground Zero on 9/11, spoke at a university lecture she gave on April 24th, 2003, just as the Iraq War was winding down. Banfield, who had been an embedded journalist, dared to criticize her fellow members of the media-that is, all the ones who, unlike Arnett, were cheering the war on from inside their military units, making great little careers for themselves as cheerleading Reichspropaganda tools. Here is part of what she said that got her into trouble:

"There are horrors that were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism or was this coverage-? There is a grand difference between journalism and coverage, and getting access does not mean you're getting the story: It was a glorious, wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited about cable news: But we really don't know from this latest adventure from the American military what this thing looked like and why perhaps we should never do it again:"

The reaction was hysterical and universal. NBC President Neil Shapir-yup, him again, some kind of hero to Americans (at least in Russia the censors are considered unredeemable pigs, whether the censorship comes from a Surkov or a Potanin)-publicly rebuked Banfield, while her journalist peers immediately distanced themselves from her like, fleeing from potential controversy like shameless cowards, as captured in this April 29th, 2003, Reuters article: "'I don't think people look to Ashleigh Banfield to set the standards of journalism,' one person said about the reaction inside the [MSNBC News] department. 'People were sort of rolling their eyes.'" [Italics mine.]

Another MSNBC analyst, neo-con shock jock Michael Savage, labeled her "a slut" and a "porn star" and accused her of being an accessory to the murder of Jewish children:and got away with it. In fact, that was reasonable rhetoric, just as Rep. Weiner's call to commit a crime against The New York Press was reasonable.

As for Banfield, she was essentially given the Khruschev treatment, forced into disgrace. Before her lecture, she had her own magazine program for MSNBC focused on the War on Terror; after her critical speech, in which she said, "Free speech is a wonderful thing, it's what we fight for, but the minute it's unpalatable we fight against it for some reason," she was demoted to covering fluff like diet fads and Michael Jackson's kiddie rides, and there she wallowed in the professional backwater of tv tabloid stories.

The most ironic thing of all is that the bravest of these dissidents in the mainstream American television world aren't even American-Arnett is from New Zealand, while Banfield is Canadian-which might explain why they weren't spineless cowards. Real Americans, the ones born and raised in American culture, were the ones in the MSNBC room rolling their eyes as loudly and obviously as possible for as many people to see, tailing the Reuters reporter and making sure he noted that each one of them rolled their eyes and dismissed Banfield from the herd, so that they could all later tell Neal Shapiro, "That was me who rolled my eyes, Mr. Shapiro!": That's how American censorship works. That's how it's so effective.

Censoring Americans has a long history. If you really go far back-say, to the Cambrian period of the American attention span, or rather, to September, 2001-you might recall an attack on free speech that emanated directly from the White House.

Bill Maher used to host a show called "Politically Incorrect" on ABC. After 9/11, Maher made the point that the Al Qaeda hijackers could not be called "cowards" because they knew they were going to die, and cowards by definition don't want to die. He said that if you're going to call someone in war a coward, then certainly a guy who presses a cruise missile fire button from the safety of a ship thousands of miles from a war zone is a far more legitimate candidate for the coward epithet.

And once again, just as with Burnett, and just as with Koyen, the same censorship was effected by the same awesome formula. First, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleisher told reporters, "He should watch what he says." Can you imagine if Putin or one of his spokesmen said that about a Russian TV announcer- "He should watch what he says"-to a Parfyonov or a Kiselyov?

Why, the poor bastard would be fired the next day!

Which is exactly what happened to Bill Maher. He was fired from ABC. Just like Dan Rather was essentially fired from CBS earlier this year-but that's a case far more indirect, because there's evidence it involved a new way to censor unfriendly journalists-intentionally setting them up for false stories that will, once debunked, then destroy their reputations. But that's a story for another article:

Maher's case is actually quite similar to Koyen's. Maher show was called "Politically Incorrect," so theoretically, he shouldn't be punished for being just that, politically incorrect. Indeed the show itself was a celebration of America's free speech-and when it was shut down, most people "rolled their eyes" when Maher and his few supporters tried to say that what Ari Fleischer and ABC did was a violation of free speech. The conventional wisdom was that it was a business decision, and Maher could go find work on another network, like say a cable network-kinda, you know, like how the smaller TV stations in Russia like RenTV aren't as tightly censored.

In the same way, Koyen ran an alternative newspaper with an in-your-face editorial policy, which is what alternative means, but when he got into the wrong face-that is, the government's face-Koyen was forced to resign by "the owners of the media outlet."

There it is again: the emphasis on form over substance. A show called "Politically Incorrect" gets shut down for being politically incorrect; an alternative newspaper gets shut down for being alternative; censorship is when the government fires the journalist, not when the owner fires him.

This is where the huge disconnect, the grievance against America, really starts to boil. Because even after reading this, most Americans would still say, "Yeah, but it's not the same at all. It's different." They'd instinctively refuse to internalize any of this argument, and instead slip into the comfortable denial that is the hallmark of American existence, and that's that. Within ten minutes, you could start arguing again, bring up Peter Arnett's fate, or Ashleigh Banfield's, or Koyen's or Maher's, and, like Bush, the country collectively will ask, "I don't know what journalists you're talking about: they were fired by their owners, not the government."

This is where the Russians just can't get America's double standards and double-speak. It's one thing for government officials to say one thing and do another. Most Russians, particularly those in power, assume those are the rules. But the difference is that since Russians are a naturally skeptical people, somewhere deep down, the ones in power at least know they're cold-blooded liars and hypocrites when, for example, they start yammering about their concerns over democracy and human rights in Iraq or Guantanamo Bay, or whinging over the fate of fired American journalists. It's almost as if that Russian Interfax journalist at the Bratislava press conference was trying to say to Bush, and to his American media counterparts, "Look, we all know we're all liars, right? You, me, Mr. Putin, the Washington Post correspondent there. All of us. We all know we're hypocrites and we're all on the take, so let's just admit it. Please? Cuz this is really starting to freak me out, man."

And Bush had a genuine look of disbelief and shock, and tried, as graciously as possible, without seeming too patronizing, to let the journalist know he had no idea what the little commie robot was talking about.

That is where Russians misunderstand America, and American methods. In Russia, everyone knows there's censorship, and maybe that's why it's effected so crudely as it is on Russian state television. And since Russian censorship is so crude, it only ensures that most people are aware of the censorship.

In America, on the other hand, most people literally don't see the censorship, and refuse to see it even when it happens in front of their faces.

But wait! That means all of America is complicit in this ideological double speak, this enraging imperial hypocrisy! Perhaps this is why, of all the ideologies I've seen tested out on the public over the past ten years, none seems to be catching on more strongly than this increasingly irrational and hysterical anti-Americanism. It's gotten so insane that one TV report recently blamed the US for Russia's loss in the 1904-5 Russo-Japanese War, while another program I watched blamed American drug companies for shipping tainted vaccines to Russia and infecting their children.

I'm just mentioning two small things, but believe me, every time an American helicopter crashes in Iraq or a hurricane hits Florida, nearly all of Russia stands up and cheers.

And no wonder. The whole country I've left behind is a collaborationist country. And the fucked thing is, I'm a refugee in a country whose regime is even worse than America's, but far less effective, thanks to the people, who have remained, in their bitterness, so much more awake.

http://www.exile.ru/2005-March-11/dubleya_standards.html

Press
USA
Russia

Placebo (one of the 13 things that do not make sense)

2005-03-20T15:00:00.000+01:00

The placebo effect

DON'T try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.

So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don't know.

Benedetti has since shown that a saline placebo can also reduce tremors and muscle stiffness in people with Parkinson's disease (Nature Neuroscience, vol 7, p 587). He and his team measured the activity of neurons in the patients' brains as they administered the saline. They found that individual neurons in the subthalamic nucleus (a common target for surgical attempts to relieve Parkinson's symptoms) began to fire less often when the saline was given, and with fewer "bursts" of firing - another feature associated with Parkinson's. The neuron activity decreased at the same time as the symptoms improved: the saline was definitely doing something.

We have a lot to learn about what is happening here, Benedetti says, but one thing is clear: the mind can affect the body's biochemistry. "The relationship between expectation and therapeutic outcome is a wonderful model to understand mind-body interaction," he says. Researchers now need to identify when and where placebo works. There may be diseases in which it has no effect. There may be a common mechanism in different illnesses. As yet, we just don't know.

13 things that do not make sense

Placebo
Mind

Da Vinci Code

2005-03-19T14:00:00.000+01:00

Few weeks ago, I was really puzzled by the beating drums about the "The Da Vinci Code " (at Amazon) by "Dan Brown".

After reading the book, I should say that I am really disappointed by this book.

Not only, Dan Brown is unable to write a correct intrigue but this book is filled with clichés. The esoteric pieces could have been written by a teenager without any trace of classical culture. Maybe MTV and Britney Spears are the height of USan culture and this is the explanation for this library success in USA. Are the people so uneducated or so dumb not to recognize a the first glance a sequence of Fibonacci numbers?

I don't see any explanation for this library success in Europe either. It's maybe a new sign of our decadence.

Should you be really interested in esoteric matters, I advise you to read this article about The Da Vinci Code.

Regarding History and Science, my recommendation will go to this book: The Secret History of The world.

Da Vinci Code

The Secret History of The world

Da Vinci Code

The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2004

2005-03-10T17:36:00.000+01:00

The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2004
By the Information Office of the State Council of the People's Republic of China

March 3, 2005

In 2004 the atrocity of US troops abusing Iraqi POWs exposed the dark side of human rights performance of the United States. The scandal shocked the humanity and was condemned by the international community. It is quite ironic that on Feb. 28 of this year, the State Department of the United States once again posed as the "the world human rights police" and released its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2004. As in previous years, the reports pointed fingers at human rights situation in more than 190 countries and regions (including China) but kept silent on the US misdeeds in this field. Therefore, the world people have to probe the human rights record behind the Statue of Liberty in the United States.

I. On Life, Liberty and Security of Person

American society is characterized with rampant violent crimes, severe infringement of people's rights by law enforcement departments and lack of guarantee for people's rights to life, liberty and security of person.

Violent crimes pose a serious threat to people's lives. According to a report released by the Department of Justice of the United States on Nov. 29, 2004, in 2003 residents aged 12 and above in the United States experienced about 24 million victimizations, and there occurred 1,381,259 murders, robberies and other violent crimes, averaging 475 cases per 100,000 people. Among them there were 16,503 homicides, up 1.7 percent over 2002, or nearly six cases in every 100,000 residents, and one of every 44 Americans aged above 12 was victimized.

The Associated Press reported on June 24, 2004 that the number of violent crimes in many US cities were on the rise. In 2003 Chicago alone recorded 598 homicides, 80 percent of which involved the use of guns. The Washington D.C. reported 41,738 murders, robberies and other violent crimes in 2003, averaging 6,406.4 cases per 100,000 residents. In 2004 the District recorded 198 killings, or a homicide rate of 35 per 100,000 residents. Detroit, which has less than 1 million residents, recorded 18,724 criminal cases in 2003, including 366 murders and 814 rapes, which amounted to a homicide rate of 41 per 100,000 residents.

In 2003 the homicide rate in Baltimore was 43 per 100,000 residents. The Baltimore Sun reported on Dec. 17, 2004 that the city reported 271 killings from January to early December in 2004. It was reported that on Sept. 8, 2004 that by Sept. 4, 2004 there had been 368 homicides in the city, up 4.2 percent year-on-year. The USA Today reported on July 16, 2004 that in an average week in the US workplace one employee is killed and at least 25 are seriously injured in violent assaults by current or former co- workers. The Cincinnati Post reported on Nov. 12, 2004 that homicides average 17 a week and there are nearly 5,500 violent assaults a day at US job sites.

The United States has the biggest number of gun owners and gun violence has affected lots of innocent lives. According to a survey released by the University of Chicago in 2001, 41.7 percent of men and 28.5 percent of women in the United States report having a gun in their homes, and 29.2 percent of men and 10.2 percent of women personally own a gun. The Los Angeles Times reported on Jul. 19, 2004 that since 2000 the number of firearm holders rose 28 percent in California.

About 31,000 Americans are killed and 75,000 wounded by firearms each year, which means more than 80 people are shot dead each day. In 2002 there were 30,242 firearm killings in the United States; 54 percent of all suicides and 67 percent of all homicides were related to the use of firearms. The Associated Press reported that 808 people were shot dead in the first half of 2004 in Detroit.

Police violence and infringement of human rights by law enforcement agencies also constitute a serious problem. At present, 5,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States use TASER -- a kind of electric shock gun, which sends out 50,000 volts of impulse voltage after hitting the target. Since 1999, more than 80 people died from TASER shootings, 60 percent of which occurred between November 2003 and November 2004.

A survey found that in the 17 years from 1985 to 2002, Los Angeles recorded more than 100 times increase in police shooting at automobile drivers, killing at least 25 and injuring more than 30 of them. Of these cases, 90 percent were due to misjudgment. (The Los Angeles Times, Feb. 29, 2004.)

On Jul. 21, 2004 Chinese citizen Zhao Yan was handcuffed and severely beaten while she was in the United States on a normal business trip. She suffered injuries in many parts of her body and serious mental harm.

The New York Times reported on Apr. 19, 2004 a comprehensive study of 328 criminal cases over the last 15 years in which the convicted person was exonerated suggests that there are thousands of innocent people in prison today. The study identified 199 murder exoneration, 73 of them in capital cases. In more than half of the cases, the defendants had been in prison for more than 10 years.

The United States characterizes itself as "a paradise for free people," but the ratio of its citizens deprived of freedom has remained among the highest in the world. Statistics released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation last November showed that the nation made an estimated 13.6 million arrests in 2003. The national arrest rate was 4,695.1 arrests per 100,000 people, 0.2 percent up than that of the previous year (USA Today, Nov. 8, 2004).

According to statistics from the Department of Justice, the number of inmates in the United States jumped from 320,000 in 1980 to 2 million in 2000, a hike by six times. From 1995 to 2003, the number of inmates grew at an annual rate of 3.5 percent in the country, where one out of every 142 people is behind bars. The number of convicted offenders may total more than 6 million if parolees and probationers are also counted. The Chicago Tribune reported on Nov. 8 last year that the federal and state prison population amounted to 1.47 million last year, 2.1 percent more than in 2003. The number of criminals rose by over 5 percent in 11 states, with the growth in North Dakota up by 11.4 percent and in Minnesota by 10.3 percent.

Most prisons in the United States are overcrowded, but still cannot meet the demand. The country has spent an average of 7 billion US dollars a year building new jails and prisons in the past 10 years. California has seen only one college but 21 new prisons built since 1984.

Jails have become one of the huge and most lucrative industries, with a combined staff of more than 530,000 and being the second largest employer in the United States only after the General Motors. Private prisons are more and more common. The country now has over 100 private prisons in 27 states and 18 private prison companies. The value of goods and services created by inmates surged from 400 million US dollars in 1980 to 1.1 billion US dollars in 1994.

Abuse of prisoners and violence occur frequently in US jails and prisons, which are under disorderly management. The Los Angeles Times reported on Aug. 15 last year that over 40 state prison systems were once under some form of court order, for brutality, crowding, poor food and lack of medical care.

The NewsWeek of the United States also reported last May that in Pennsylvania, Arizona and some other states, inmates are routinely stripped in front of others before being moved to a new prison or a new unit within their prison. Male inmates are often made to wear women's pink underwear as a form of humiliation. New inmates are frequently beaten and cursed at and sometimes made to crawl.

At a jail in New York City, some guards bump prisoners against the walls, pinch their arms and wrists, and force them to receive insulting checks nakedly. Some male inmates are sometimes compelled to stand in the nude before a group of women guards. Some female inmates go in shackles to hospital for treatment and nursing after they get ill or pregnant, some give births without a midwife, and some are locked to sickbeds with fetters after Caesarean operation.

Over 80,000 women prisoners in the United States are mothers, and the overall number of the minor children of the American women prisoners is estimated at some 200,000. The country had more than 3,000 pregnant women in jails from 2000 to 2003 and 3,000 babies were born to the prisoners during this period (see Mexico's Milenio on Feb. 21, 2004). It is estimated that at least more than 40,000 prisoners are locked up in the so-called "super jails", where the prisoner is confined to a very tiny cell, cannot see other people throughout the year, and has only one hour out for exercise every day.

Sexual harassment and encroachment are common in jails in the Unite States. The New York Times reported last October that at least 13 percent of inmates in the country are sexually assaulted in prison (Ex-Inmate's Suit Offers View Into Sexual Slavery in Prisons, The New York Times, Oct. 12, 2004). In jails of seven central and western US states, 21 percent of the inmates suffer sexual abuse at least once after being put in prison. The ratio is higher among women inmates, with nearly one fourth of them sexually assaulted by jail guards.

II. On Political Rights and Freedom

The United States claims to be "a paragon of democracy," but American democracy is manipulated by the rich and malpractices are common.

Elections in the United States are in fact a contest of money. The presidential and Congressional elections last year cost nearly 4 billion US dollars, some 1 billion US dollars or one third more than that spent in the 2000 elections. The 2004 presidential election has been listed as the most expensive campaign in the country's history (see http://www.opensecrets.org/overview), with the cost jumping to 1.7 billion US dollars from 1 billion US dollars in 2000. To win the election, the Democratic Party and Republican Party had to try their utmost to raise funds.

The Washington Post reported on Dec. 3 last year that the Democratic Party collected 389.8 million US dollars in electoral funds and the Republican Party raised 385.3 million US dollars, both hitting a record high (see Fundraising Records Broken by Both Major Political Parties, Washington Post on Dec. 3, 2004).

Data released by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) on Dec. 14, 2004 show the average spending for Senate races was 2,518,750 US dollars in 2004, with the highest reaching 31,488,821 US dollars; and the average spending for House races was 511,043 US dollars (see http://www.opensecrets.org/overview), with the highest reaching 9,043,293 US dollars (see http://www.opensecrets.org/overview/topraces.asp?cycle=2004).

The Republican Party, the Democratic Party and their periphery organizations spent a total of 1.2 billion US dollars on TV commercials, making this presidential election the most expensive in history. The TV commercials were broadcast 750,000 times, twice of the airings in the general election in 2000. In the Oct. 1 - 13 period in 2004, the Republican Party spent 14.5 million US dollars on advertising, and the Democratic Party's advertising spending amounted to 24 million US dollars in the first 20 days of October 2004.

In the elections, political parties and interest groups not only donated money for their favorite candidates, but also directly spent funds on maximizing their influence upon the elections. In Maryland, some corporate bosses donated as much as 130,000 US dollars. In return, the candidates after being elected would serve the interests of big political donators. The Baltimore Sun called this "Buying Power" (see "Buying Power", The Baltimore Sun, April 5, 2004). Due to the fact that local judges in 38 states need to be elected, quite a number of candidates began campaign advertising and looking for big donators. Some interest groups also got themselves involved in the judge election campaign.

The US election system has quite a few flaws. The newly adopted Help America Vote Act of 2004 requires voters to offer a series of documents such as a stable residence or identification in registering, which in reality disenfranchises thousands of homeless people.

The United States is the only country in the world that rules out ex-inmates' right to vote, which disenfranchises 5 million ex- inmates and 13 percent male black people (see Milenio, Mexico, Oct. 22 2004).

The 2004 US presidential election reported many problems, including counting errors, machine malfunctions, registration confusion, legal uncertainty, and lack of respect for voters. According to a report carried by the USA Today on Dec. 28, 2004, due to counting errors, a review of election results in 10 counties nationwide by the Scripps Howard News Service found more than 12,000 ballots that weren't counted in the presidential race, almost one in every 10 ballots cast in those counties. Due to machine malfunctions, 92,000 ballots failed to record a vote for president in Ohio alone. Registration confusion made four fifths of the states go into the election without computerized statewide voter databases (see "Election Day Leftovers", USA Today, Dec. 28, 2004). The Democratic Party brought 35 lawsuits against the Republican Party in at least 17 states, charging the latter with threatening and blocking voters from registering or voting, especially minority ethnic groups. In Florida, the cases of black people being removed from voter registration list or their votes being denied were 10 times higher than people of other races. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reported on Sept. 22, 2004 that during the period of election, someone often distributed handbills to black voters to bilk and intimidate them by saying that anyone who defaulted electricity bills, apartment bills or parking fines would be arrested outside the polling booths. Some others pretended to be plainclothes outside polling booths and demanded voters show their identifications. However, black people who were able to present photo identification were less than one fifth of white people, therefore, many of them were rejected.

In the meantime, fabrications of disputable pictures and statements were put in the agenda of political maneuvers. Campaign advertisement and political debates were full of distorted facts, false information and lies. According to statistics of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of University of Pennsylvania, campaign advertisement for the 2004 US presidential election had a large proportion of false information that was enough to mislead voters, far beyond 50 percent in 1996. In the Republican camp, at least 75 percent contained untrue information and personal attacks. The website of the center (http://www.FactCheck.org) listed at least 100 items of such information.

The US freedom of the press is filled with hypocrisy. Power and intimidation hang over the halo of press freedom. The New York Times published a commentary on March 30, 2004, saying that the US government's reliance on slandering had reached an unprecedented level in contemporary American political history, and the government prepared to abuse power at any moment to threat potential critics.

A collected works, Zensor USA, revealed that whenever the faults of government dignitaries or big companies were touched, the strong American press censorship system would snap at the journalists who insisted on investigation and made them the last sacrificial lamb. (see Das Schweigen der Journalisten, Handelsblatt, Germany, March 17, 2004).

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) kept watch on a leader of freedom of speech movement in University of California at Berkeley for a decade long. Although no record showed he violated federal laws, the FBI hired someone to keep monitoring his daily activities and collect his personal information without permission from the court. (see SingTao Daily, Oct. 11, 2004).

On July 16, 2004 the US State Department made a regulation, in violation of the norms of most other countries, that foreign reporters should leave the country while waiting for the valid period of their visas to be extended. The annual report of Native American Journalists Association criticized the US administration for the move, which severely infringes upon press freedom. (see AP story, Antigua, Guatemala Oct. 24, 2004).

Someone with the American Society of Newspaper Editors said that the US administration's measures reflected its repulsion of foreign news media.

In Iraq, the United States on the one hand alleged that it had brought democracy to the Iraqi people, on the other hand it suppressed public opinion. On March 28, 2004 US troops closed down a Shiite newspaper in Baghdad, which triggered a protest demonstration by thousands of Iraqi people.

On Sept. 27, the Association of American University Presses, Association of American Publishers and other organizations jointly lodged a complaint to the district court of Manhattan, New York, charging the Office of Foreign Assets Control under the Department of the Treasury with deliberately preventing literary works of Iranian, Cuban and Sudanese writers from entering the United States and turning the economic sanctions against the three countries into a "censorship system" to stop free dissemination of information and ideology. (see Xinhua story, Sept. 30, 2004).

In another case, eight reporters, including Jim Taricani of the TV station in Providence, Rhode Island with the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), Judith Miller of The New York Times, and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, were declared guilty for they declined to disclose the confidential sources of news. The New York Times pointed out on Nov. 10, 2004 that through these cases, it was found out that press freedom suffered rampant infringement.

In addition, in recent years, over a dozen foreign journalists have been detained in airports in the United States, including the one in Los Angeles. In March 2003, a Danish press-photographer was expelled out of the country after a DNA test. A Swiss journalist was rejected from entry of an airport in Washington D.C. The airport staffs by force took pictures and finger prints of the journalist. Meanwhile, he was not permitted to contact the Swiss embassy in the Unite States. In May, two groups of French journalists, altogether six members, were rejected of entry the US territory. They simply came to the Unite States to cover an exposition. Two Dutch journalists fell into trouble when they were covering a film award ceremony. In October and December, one British reporter and one Austrian journalist were held up at US airports respectively. In early May, 2004, a British female journalist, who was sent by The Guardian to Los Angeles to cover some events, was detained at the Los Angeles airport and faced interrogation and body search, and then was handcuffed and taken to the detention house in the downtown. There, she was detained for 26 hours before sent back to Britain.

III. On Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

The United States refuses to ratify the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural rights and took negative attitude to the economic, social and cultural rights of the laborers. Poverty, hunger and homelessness have haunted the world richest country.

The population of people living in poverty has been on a steady rise. According to a report by The Sun on July, 6, 2004, from 1970 to 2000 (adjusted for inflation), the bottom 90 percent's average income stagnated while the top 10 percent experienced an average yearly income increase of nearly 90 percent. Upper-middle-and- upper-class families that constitute the top 10 percent of the income distribution are prospering while many among the remaining 90 percent struggle to maintain their standard of living. Worsening income disparities have formed two Americas. (Two Americas, The Baltimore Sun, July 6, 2004). According to a report of the Wall Street Journal on June 15, 2004, a study on the fall of 2003 by Arthur Kennickell of the Board of Governor of the Federal Reserve System showed that the nation's wealthiest 1 percent owned 53 percent of all the stocks held by families or individuals, and 64 percent of the bonds. They control more than a third of the nation's wealth. (US Led a Resurgence Last Year Among Millionaires World-Wide, The Wall Street Journal, June 15, 2004). In Washington D.C., the top 20 percent of the city's households have 31 times the average income of the 20 percent at the bottom. (D.C. Gap in Wealth Growing, The Washington Post, July 22, 2004).

Since November 2003, the average income of most American families have been on the decline. The earning of many medium and low-income families could not keep up with the price rises. They could barely handle the situation. According to the statistics released by the US Census Bureau in 2004, the number of Americans in poverty has been climbing for three years. It rose by 1.3 million year-on-year in 2003 to 35.9 million. The poverty rate in 2003 hit 12.5 percent, or one in eight people, the highest since 1998. (Census: Poverty Rose By Million, USA Today, August 27, 2004, More Americans Were Uninsured and Poor in 2003, Census Finds, The New York Times, August 27, 2004).

The homeless population continues to rise nationwide. On Dec. 15, 2004, an annual survey report released at the US Conference of Mayors showed that the number of people seeking emergency food aid increased by 14 percent year-on-year while the number of people seeking emergency shelter aid increased by 6 percent. (http://www. usmayors.org). It is estimated that the homeless population reached 3.5 million in the United States. But the US Federal budget has stopped providing fund to build new affordable housing, which forced many local governments to cut the public housing projects. The city of San Diego has a homeless population of 8,000, but the government could only provide 3,000 temporary beds. Those without lodging tickets are regarded illegal to live on the streets. They would be summoned or detained. In January 2004, an investigator with the US Commission on Human Right denounced the US for large-scale infringement on human rights on housing issue.

The health insurance crisis has become prominent. A report of the Washington Post on Sept. 28, 2004 said health insurance costs posted their fourth straight year of double-digit increases in 2004. Over the past four years, health insurance costs have leaped 59 percent - about five times faster than both wage growth and inflation. Around 14.3 million Americans put one fourth of their income on the health expenses. (Higher Costs, Less Care, The Washington Post, September 28, 2004). Currently, family health insurance plan costs more than 10,000 US dollars each year. Many families could not afford it. Fewer workers have coverage - 61 percent in 2004, compared with 65 percent in 2001. (Health Plan Costs Jump 11%, The Washington Post, September 10, 2004) Compared with 2003, the number of people without health insurance increased 1.4 million to 45 million, or 15.6 percent of the country's population. (Census: Poverty Rose by Million, USA Today, August 27, 2004). In Texas, about one fourth of the workers don't have health insurance. (Spain Uprising newspaper, May 11, 2004). In California, around 6 million Californians don't have health insurance and the welfare system with the annual cost of 60 billion US dollars are about to collapse. (The Los Angeles Times, May 6, 2004). Meanwhile, medical accidents occurred one after another, becoming the third killer following heart disease and cancer. According to a report of Boston Globe on July 27, 2004, one out of every 25 in-patients become the victim of medical accident. From 2000 to 2002, 195,000 people died of medical accidents each year. The actual figure might be twice of that.

Racial discrimination has been deeply rooted in the United States, permeating into every aspects of society.

The colored people are generally poor, with living condition much worse than the white. According to a report of The Guardian of Britain on Oct. 9, 2004, the average net assets of a white family is 88,000 US dollars in 2002, 11 times of a family of Latin American ancestry, or nearly 15 times of a family of African ancestry. Nearly one third of the African ancestry families and 26 percent of the Latin American ancestry families have negative net assets. 74 percent of the white families have their own houses, while only 47 percent of families of the African and Latin American ancestry have their own houses. The market value of houses bought by black families is only 65 percent of those of white people. Black people's encounter of mortgage loans refusal for house purchase or furniture is twice that of white people. Some black families don't even think of buying their own houses. The death rate of illness, accident and murder among the black people is twice that of the white.

The rate of being victim of murders for the black people is five times that of the white. The rate of being affected by AIDS for the black people is ten times that of the whites while the rate of being diagnosed by diabetes for the black people is twice that of the whites. (The State Of Black America 2004, Issued by National Urban League on March 24, 2004, http://www.nuL.org/pdf/sobaexec.pdf).

Statistics show that the number of black people living in poverty is three times that of the white. The average life expectancy of the black is six years shorter than the white.

People of minority ethnic groups are biased against in employment and occupation. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission of the United States received 29,000 complaints in 2003 of racial bias in the workplace (Racism in the 21st Century, published in USA Today May 5, 2004 issue).

Statistics provided by the United States Department of Labor also suggest that by November 2004, the unemployment rate for black and white people is 10.8 percent and 4.7 percent respectively (http://bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf). In New York City, one of every two black men between 16 and 64 was not working by 2003 (see Nearly Half of Black Men Found Jobless, published by The New York Times on Feb. 28 2004).

Black people not only have fewer job opportunities, but also earn less than white people. Even with the same job, a black man only earns 70 percent of that for a white man. Regions such as California, where immigrants make up a larger proportion of the local population, are almost like traps of death. Mexican Laborers who have come to work in the United States have a mortality as high as 80 percent.

Teenagers from at least 38 countries work like slaves (EFE San Francisco, Sept. 26, 2004). Out of 45 million people who are unable to afford Medicare in the United States, 7 million are African-Americans, accounting for about one fifth of the total African-Americans in the States. The proportion is 77 percent higher than that for the white people (available at http://www.johnkerry.com/communities/african-americans/gw--record.html).

The Declaration of Independence said all men are created equal, so the gap between black and white people is simply an insult to the founding essence of the United States (see US News and World Report on March 29, 2004).

Apartheid runs rampant at schools of the United States. On May 17, 1954, Chief justice Earl Warren of the Supreme Court announced the court's decision over a case known as Brown v. Board of Education that the doctrine of "separate but equal" had no place in US public schools. Fifty years later, white children and black children in the United States still lead largely separate lives. One in eight southern black students attends a school that is 99 percent black. About a third attend schools that are at least 90 percent minority. In the Northeast, by contrast, more than half of blacks attend such schools (Schools and Lives Are Still Separate, The Washington Post, May 17, 2004).

Racism recurs on campus of American universities. Fascist slogans and posters promoting superiority of white people, along with threats by weapon or words were found on college campuses including University of California at Berkeley. Protests were sparked off when Santa Rosa Junior College in California published anti-Semitism opinions in a column article in its campus newspaper and the chat room of its website were dominated by white-superior surfers. At Dartmouth College, white girl students auctioned off black slaves in fund-raising activities. At the University of Southern Mississippi, hordes of white students assaulted four black students, chanting racist slogans after a football match was over. At Olivet College of Michigan State, where there are only 55 black students, 51 of the black students quitted school after racial cases of violence or harassment (see The China Press, a Chinese language newspaper published in New York, on April 17, 2004).

Racial prejudice has made social conflicts to become acute, causing a rise in hate crimes. Racial prejudice, most often directed at black people, was behind more than half of the nation' s 7,489 reported hate crime incidents in 2003, the FBI said on Nov. 22 2004. Race bias was behind 3,844 of the total cases in 2003, FBI claimed after having made statistics of hate crimes handled by 16 percent of the law-enforcement organizations in the States.

Reports of hate crimes motivated by anti-black bias totaled 2, 548 in 2003, accounting for 51.4 percent of the total, more than double the total hate crimes against all other racial groups. There were 3,150 black victims in these reports, according to the annual FBI figures (AP, Washington, Jan. 26, 2004). And with regard to the attribute of race, among the 6,934 reported offenders, 62.3 percent were white (http:/www.fbi.gov/pressrel/presssrel04/pressel/12204.htm).

In a related development, because of the "lingering atmosphere of fear" stemming from the Sept. 11 attacks and fallout from the Iraq War, there were 1,019 anti-Muslim incidents in the United States in 2003, representing a 69 percent increase. There were 221 incidents in 2003 of anti-muslim bias in California, tripled a year ago (Los Angeles Times, May 3).

Racial prejudice is ubiquitous in judicial fields. The proportion for persons of colored races being sentenced or being imprisoned is notably higher than whites. In accordance with a report published in November 2004 by the US Department of Justice, colored races accounted for over 70 percent of inmates in the United States. And 29 percent of black people have the experience of being in jail for once. Black people make up 12.3 percent of the population in the United States, but by the end of 2003, out of 1.4 million prisoners who are serving jail terms above one year at the federal or state prisons, 44 percent were blacks, or on average, 3,231 in every 100,000 African-Americans were criminals. Latino-American inmates make up 19 percent of the total prisoners, or 1,778 in every 100,000 Latino-Americans are inmates. Inmates of other color races account for 21 percent (http://wwww.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/P03.htm). At the end of 2003, 12.8 percent of black men aged 25 to 29 were in prison (Chicago Tribune, Nov. 8, 2004), compared 1.6 percent of white men in the same group (A Growing Need for Reform, The Baltimore Sun, June 20, 2004).

Blacks receive, on average, a longer felony sentence than whites. A black person's average jail sentence is six months longer than a white's for the same crime. Blacks who are arrested are 3 times more likely to be imprisoned than whites who are arrested. White felons are more likely to get probation than blacks. (see the State Black America 2004, issued by National Urban League on March 24, 2004, http://www.nul.org/pdf/sobaexec.pdf).

After the Sept. 11 incident, the United States openly restricts the rights of citizens under the cloak of homeland security, and uses diverse means including wire tapping of phone conversations and secret investigations, checks on all secret files, and monitoring transfers of fund and cash flows to supervise activities of its citizens, in which, people of ethnic minority groups, foreigners and immigrants become main victims.

Statistics show that after the Sept. 11 attacks, 32 million were investigated out of racial prejudice concern throughout the United States. Among the people being investigated out of racial prejudice concern, African-Americans made up 47 percent, followed by people of Latino and Asian origins. White Americans only account for 3 percent. On June 23, 2004, authorities with the Los Angeles Police Department and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation authorities investigated the televised beating of a black suspect by white police in Los Angeles that has resurrected the explosive spectre of the 1991 Rodney King assault. Eight police officers have been removed from regular duties following the incident on June 23 in which three of them were seen tackling the suspected black car thief, one beating him repeatedly with a metal flashlight (AFP, Los Angeles, June 24, 2004).

In the meantime, the anti-immigrant trend has become increasingly serious in the States. The US Department of Homeland Security announced in November 2004 that 157,281 immigrants were repatriated in one year, up 8 percent from a year ago, a record high. The number of foreigners arrested without any documents also went up by 112 percent (Argentina La Nacion, Nov. 21, 2004).

Another report says starting from last year, many American cities such as San Francisco, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Miami, Saint Paul, Denver, Kansas and Portland, dozens of immigrants from Mexico or other countries are arrested each day and are forced to wear fetters like suspects. The practice of treating illegal immigrants like criminals has become a national trend. The limit in the definition of terrorists and illegal immigrants has become very blurry.

V. On The Rights of Women and Children

The situation of American women and children was disturbing. The rates of women and children physically or sexually victimized were high. According to FBI Crime Statistics, in 2003 the United States witnessed 93,233 cases of raping. Virtually 63.2 in every 100,000 women fell victims. The statistics also showed that every two minutes one woman was sexually assaulted and every six minutes one woman was raped.

The number of women abused and treated at First Aid Centers exceeded one million every year. More than 1,500 women in the United States were killed every year by their husbands, lovers or roommates (The Milenio, Mexico, Sept. 26, 2004). Nearly 78 percent of American women were physically victimized at least once in their lifetime. And 79 percent of the women were sexually abused at least once. A survey released in November 2004 by the US National Institute of Justice showed by the time they concluded four years of college education, 88 percent of the women had experiences of physical or sexual victimization and 64 percent of them experienced both. In the past decade, charges handled by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against sexual harassment on women surged 22 percent (The Sun, Jul. 16, 2004).

Sex crimes in the US military were on the rise. According to the Washington Post (Jun. 3, 2004), from 1999 to 2002 the number of lawsuits against sexual crimes in the US army that were formally filed grew from 658 to 783, up 19 percent. And the number of rape cases went up from 356 to 445, up 25 percent. The number of such cases rose equally 5 percent between 2002 and 2003. The British Guardian reported on Oct. 25, 2004 that by the end of September 2004 the Miles Foundation had dealt with 242 cases filed between September 2002 and August 2003 about US woman soldiers being raped or sexually harassed in Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain or Afghanistan. In addition, there were 431 cases of US women soldiers being sexually harassed at other military bases.

Women's labor and social rights were violated. According to The Sun newspaper (Jul. 16, 2004), the charges handled by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on sexual discrimination against women grew 12 percent in the past decade. In 2004 two cases drew wide attention. They were a bias class lawsuit involving 1.6 million women employees at Wal-Mart and another case involving 340 women staffers of Morgan Stanley (New York Times, Jul. 13, 2004).

Men and women on the same job were not paid the same. Statistics released by the US Labor Department in Jan. 2004 showed a woman who worked full time had the median earning of 81.1 percent of that for a man. The Chicago Tribune said on Aug. 27, 2004 that the rate of women in poverty went up fast, to 12.4 percent of the entire female population.

The health care for American women was at a low level. The US Family Medical Leave Act guarantees 12 weeks of unpaid leave for childbirth to about half of all mothers and nothing for the rest. A study of 168 countries conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health indicated that US workers have fewer rights to time off for family matters than workers in most other countries, and rank near the bottom in pregnancy and sick leave. "The United States trails enormously far behind the rest of the world when it comes to legislation to protect the health and welfare of working families, " said Jody Heymann, a Harvard associate professor who led the study. (AP Boston, Jun. 17, 2004)

Child poverty was a serious problem. The Chicago Tribune reported on Aug. 27, 2004 that the number of children in poverty climbed from 12.1 million in 2002 to 12.9 million in 2003, a year- on-year increase of 0.9 percent. About 20 million children lived in "low-income working families" -- with barely enough money to cover basic needs (AP Washington, Oct. 12, 2004). In California, one in every six children did not have medical insurance. The Los Angeles Times said on May 6, 2004 that in the metropolitan area the number of homeless children found wondering on the streets at nights numbered 8,000, which had stretched the 2,500-bed government-run emergency shelter system well beyond capacity. Poverty deprived many children the opportunity to obtain higher education. In the 146 renowned institutions of higher learning, only 3 percent of the students came from the low-income class, while 74 percent of them were from the high-income class.

Children were victims of sex crimes. Every year about 400,000 children in the US were forced to engage in prostitution or other sexual dealings on the streets. Home-deserting or homeless children were the most likely to fall victims of sexual abuse. Reports on children sexually exploited, which were received by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, soared from 4, 573 cases in 1998 to 81,987 cases in 2003 (The USA Today, Feb. 27, 2004).

In recent years scandals about clergymen molesting children kept breaking out. According to a study commissioned by the American Catholic Bishops, in 2004 a total of 756 catholic priests and lay employees were charged with child sexual harassment. It is believed that from 1950 to 2002 more than 10,600 boys and girls were sexually abused by nearly 4,400 clergymen (AFP, Feb. 17, 2005).

Moreover, every year over 4.5 million kids in the United States were molested in kindergartens and schools, which amounted to one in every ten (AP, Jul. 14, 2004).

Violent crimes occurred frequently. Studies show nearly 20 percent of US juveniles lived in families that possessed guns. In Washington D.C. 24 people younger than 18 were killed in 2004, twice as many as in 2003 (The Washington Post, Jan. 1, 2005). In Baltimore, 29 juveniles were killed from Jan. 1 to Sept. 27 in 2004. In 2003 35 were killed (The Washington Post, Sept. 28, 2004).

A report released by the US Justice Department on November 29, 2004 said about 9 percent of school kids aged 9 to 12 admitted being threatened with injury or having suffered an injury from a weapon while at school in 2003.

More and more schoolers were reluctant to go to school because of security concerns. Child abuses and neglects were widely reported in the United States. The Sun newspaper reported on May 18, 2004 that in 2002, a total of 900,000 children in the United States were abused, of whom nearly 1,400 died.

Every year, 1.98 out of every 100,000 American children were killed by their parents or guardians. In Maryland, the rate was as high as 2.4 per 100,000. (Md Child Abuse Deaths Exceed National Average, The Sun, May 18, 2004). The Houston Chronicle newspaper reported on Oct. 2, 2004 that in Texas, each staff of local government departments responsible for protecting children's rights handled 50 child abuse cases every month.

Two thirds of juvenile detention facilities in the United States lock up mentally ill youth; every day, about 2,000 youth were incarcerated simply because community mental health services were unavailable. In 33 states, juvenile detention centers held youth with mental illness without any specific charges against them (http://democrats.reform.house.gov/Documents/200408171941-41051.pdf).

The USA Today reported on July 8, 2004 that between Jan. 1 and June 30 of 2003, 15,000 youth detained in US youth detention centers were awaiting mental health services, while children at the age of 10 or younger were locked up in 117 youth detention centers. The detention centers totally ignored human rights and personal safety with excessive use of drugs and force, and failed to take care of inmates with mental problems in a proper way. They even locked up prisoners in cages. There were reports about scandals involving correctional authorities in California, where two juvenile inmates hanged themselves after they were badly beaten by jail police (San Jose Mercury News and Singtao Daily, March 18, 2004).

VI. On the Infringement of Human Rights of Foreign Nationals

In 2004, US army service people were reported to have abused and insulted Iraqi POWs, which stunned the whole world. The US forces were blamed for their fierce and dirty treatments for these Iraqi POWs. They made the POWs naked by force, masking their heads with underwear (even women's underwear), locking up their necks with a belt, towing them over the ground, letting military dogs bite them, beating them with a whip, shocking them with electric batons, needling them sometimes, and putting chemical fluids containing phosphorus on their wounds. They even forced some of the these POWs to play "human-body pyramid" while staying naked, in the presence of US soldiers who were standing on the roof and mocking at them. They sometimes sodomized these POWs with lamp pipes and brooms. Some Iraqi civilians were also fiercely abused.

The newspaper Pyramid pointed out that the true face of Americans was exposed through this incident. A spokesman of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said, sarcastically, that the US has made the whole world see what the hell a democratic, law-ruled nation is.

According to US media like the Newsweek and the Washington Post, as early as several years ago, in US forces' prisons in Afghanistan, interrogators used various kinds of torture tools for acquiring confession, causing many deaths.

British newspaper The Observer reported on March 14, 2004 that according to a report by the ICRC, US soldiers had formed a kind of mode for arresting people even before the Iraq war. "Torture is part of the process."

Over 100 former Iraqi high-ranking government and military officials were put under special custody by the US military. They stayed 23 hours a day in dark, small and tightly closed concrete-made wards, where they were allowed to leave the wards twice a day, with 20 minutes available for taking a bath or going to the toilet.

On Nov. 26, Iraqi Lieutenant General Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti was put in a sleeping bag by force and died after he was physically tortured during an interrogation.

According to a latest report by AP, on Feb. 18, 2005, in November 2003, CIA people hanged dead one of the so-called "ghost" prisoner in the Abu Ghraib Prison by fierce means, with his two hands cuffed behind his back. When he was released with shackles and lowered, blood gushed from his mouth "as if a faucet had been turned on."

Among the 94 abuse cases confirmed and published by the Office of the US Inspector General for the Filed Army, 39 people were killed, 20 of these cases were confirmed as murder. There were also severe child abuses conducted by the US forces.

At least 107 children were imprisoned in seven prisons including the Abu Ghraib Prison run by the US forces in Afghanistan. They were not allowed to get in contact with their families. Their term in prison was undetermined. It was not clear when they were going to be brought court hearing. Some of these children had been abused. One low-ranking US officer who had served in the Abu Ghraib (Abu Ghurayb) Prison testified that US soldiers abused some of these children in custody, and they had even assaulted young girls sexually.

What's more fierce is that US soldiers used military dogs to frighten these juvenile prisoners to see whose dog could scare them to lose control on excretion. US forces had violated the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, by detaining two Palestinian diplomats to Iraq in a prison ward of the Abu Ghraib Prison, together with 90 other men. They spent one year in the prison, suffering from very poor living conditions.

The ICRC believed that abuse of detained Iraqis in the notorious Abu Ghraib Prison was not a single case. It was a systematic behavior. According to some White House documents that were made public on June 22, 2004, the Department of Defense approved to use harsh means to interrogate prisoners in Guantanamo, Cuba.

The US Secretary of Defense said in the public that the Geneva Convention does not mean that all the detainees, especially those who were so-called "non-fighting personnel", should be treated as a POW. A draft memorandum of the Department of Defense also claimed that US laws and international conventions, including the Geneva Convention, which strictly ban the use of torture, do not apply to US President as the General Commander of the US Army. A memorandum of the US Department of Justice makes it even more clearly that the United States could use international laws to measure other countries on the issue of the treatment of POWs, while it is not necessary for Washington to abide by these laws. The interrogators were trained to find ways to torture prisoners, physically, while they should exceed the Geneva Convention, technically.

Media found that the US soldiers' behaviors in humiliating Iraqi prisoners as showed photos were typically what they were trained for. US Brigadier General Yanis Karpinski told the press that her boss once said to her that "prisoners are dogs." If they were made to think that they were a bit better than dogs, they could get out of control.

Meanwhile, the US government has tried for the third successive year to extend the term of a resolution of the UN Security Council that soldiers could be exempted of lawsuit by the International Criminal Court, even if they break the relevant rules. In view of prisoner abuses in Iraq, this has been strongly criticized by the UN General Secretary (Reuters' story on June 17, 2004).

Former US President Jimmy Carter also criticized that the US policies formulated by the high-ranking officials are a kind of retrogression, which has damaged the principles of democracy and rule of law and lacked respect for fundamental human rights.

To avoid international scrutiny, the United States keeps under wraps half of its 20-odd detention centers worldwide which are holding terrorist suspects. And at least seven US-controlled clandestine prisons, one of which dubbed "inferno," in Afghanistan, have not been kept within the bounds of law. (Prensa Latina, Aug. 16, 2004)

In a report by the Human Rights First on 24 US secret interrogation centers, these secret facilities are believed to " make inappropriate detention and abuse not only likely but virtually inevitable." (British newspaper the Times, Sept. 11, 2004)

Moreover, an executive jet is being used by the American intelligence agencies to fly terrorist suspects to other countries, in a bid to use torture and evade American laws. The plane is leased by the US Defense Department and the CIA from a private company in Massachusetts. Being accused of making so-called " torture flights," the jet has conducted more than 300 flights and has flown to 49 destinations outside the United States, including the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba. The suspects are frequently bound, gagged and sedated before being put on board the plane (British newspaper the Times, Nov. 14, 2004).

The United States has secretly shifted thousands of captives worldwide in the past three years, most of whom were not indicted officially.

The United States is the No. 1 military power in the world, and its military spending has kept shooting up. Its fiscal 2005 defense budget hit a historical high of 422 billion US dollars, an increase of 21 billion dollars over fiscal 2004. As the biggest arms dealer in the world, the United States has made a fortune out of war. Its transactions of conventional weapons exceeded 14.5 billion dollars in 2003, up 900 million dollars year-on-year and accounting for 56.7 percent of the total sales worldwide. The Iraq War has been "a helping straw" to the US economic development.

The United States frequently commits wanton slaughters during external invasions and military attacks. Spain's Uprising newspaper on May, 12, 2004 published a list of human rights infringement incidents committed by the US troops, quoting two bloodthirsty sayings of two American generals, "The only good Indians I ever saw were dead" by General Philip Sheridan and "we should bomb Vietnam back to the stone age" by air force general Curtis LeMay. We can still smell a similar bloodiness in the Iraq War waged by the United States.

Statistics from the health department of the interim Iraqi government show 3,487 people, including 328 women and children, have been killed and another 13,720 injured in 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces between April 15 and Sept. 19 in 2004.

A survey on Iraqi civilian deaths, based on the natural death rate before the war, estimates that the US-led invasion might have led to 100,000 more deaths in the country, with most victims being women and children.

Jointly designed and conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and the Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, the survey also finds that the majority of the additional, unnatural deaths since the invasion were caused by violence, while air strikes from the coalition forces were the main factor to blame for the violence-caused deaths. (Associated Press, Oct. 28, 2004)

On Jan. 3, 2004, four US soldiers stationed in Iraq pushed two Iraqi civilians into the Tigris River, making one of them drowned.

On May 19, 2004, an American helicopter fired on a wedding party in a remote Iraqi village close to the Syrian border, killing 45 people, including 15 children and 10 women.

On Nov. 20, 2004, seven people were killed in Ramadi (Al-Ramadi) in the Anbar province when US troops opened fire on a civilian bus.

According to a Staff Sergeant in the US Marines, his platoon killed 30 civilians in six weeks. And he has witnessed the blasphemy and gradual rotting of many corpses, and a lot of wounded civilians were deserted without any medical treatment. (British newspaper The Independent, May 23, 2004)

In addition, the US troops often plunder Iraqi households when tracking down anti-US militants since the invasion. The American forces has so far committed at least thousands of robberies and 90 percent of the Iraqis that have been rummaged are innocent.

The United States has been hindering the work of the United Nation's human rights mechanism. And it either took no notice of or used delaying tactics on the requests of relevant UN agencies to visit its Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba.

Some justice-upholding developing countries introduced draft resolutions on America's democracy and human rights situation to the 59th UN General Assembly, to show their strong concern over the US human rights infringement, prisoner abuse, media control, and loopholes in its election system.

It is the common goal and obligation for all countries in the world to promote and safeguard human rights. No country in the world can claim itself as perfect and has no room for improvement in the human rights area. And no country should exclude itself from the international human rights development process, or view itself as the incarnation of human rights which can reign over other countries and give orders to the others. Even the United States shall be no exception.

Despite tons of problems in its own human rights, the United States continues to stick to its belligerent stance, wantonly trample on the sovereignty of other countries, and constantly stage tragedies of human rights infringement in the world.

Instead of indulging itself in publishing the "human rights country report" to censure other countries unreasonably, the United States should reflect on its erroneous behavior on human rights and take its own human rights problems seriously. The double standards of the United States on human rights and its exercise of hegemonism and power politics under the pretext of promoting human rights will certainly put itself in an isolated and passive position and beget opposition from all just members of the international community.

Via Xinhua News Agency

http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2005/03/prc-humanrights.html

Anti-Anti-smoking

2005-03-07T17:56:00.000+01:00

For light & heavy smokers ... some good news ;-)

-Smoking delays Alzheimer's, possible cure.
-Alzheimer's Disease Is Associated With Non-Smoking
-Could tobacco save your life?

See details at Anti-Anti-smoking

http://signs-of-the-times.org/signs/anti-anti-smoking.htm

smoking
tobacco

Bush has clear run at Syria

2005-03-02T11:26:00.000+01:00

Middle East - Bush has clear run at Syria
By Stephen Zunes

The broader implications of the February 14 assassination of former Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri, who was seen by many as the embodiment of the Lebanese people's efforts to rebuild their country in the aftermath of its 15-year civil war, are yet to unfold. A Sunni Muslim, Hariri reached out to all of Lebanon's ethnic and religious communities in an effort to unite the country after decades of violence waged by heavily armed militias and foreign invaders.

The assassination took place against the backdrop of a growing political crisis in Lebanon. This began in September 2004, when Syria successfully pressured the Lebanese parliament, in an act of dubious constitutionality, to extend the term of the unpopular pro-Syrian President Emile Lahoud, a move roundly condemned by the international community. Washington was particularly virulent in its criticism, which can only be considered ironic, given that the US attempted a similar maneuver in 1958 to extend the term of the pro-American president Camille Chamoun. The result was a popular uprising suppressed only when president Dwight Eisenhower sent in US Marines.

Hariri had his critics, particularly among the country's poor majority, whose situation deteriorated under the former prime minister's adoption of a number of controversial neo-liberal economic policies. There were widespread charges of corruption in the awarding of contracts, many of which went to a company largely owned by Hariri, a multibillionaire businessman prior to becoming prime minister. A number of treasured historic buildings relatively undamaged from war were demolished to make room for grandiose construction projects.

The size and sophistication of the explosion that killed Hariri, his bodyguards and several bystanders have led many to speculate that foreign intelligence units may have been involved. Initial speculation has focused on the Syrians, who had previously worked closely with Hariri as prime minister. That relationship was broken by the Syrians' successful effort to extend the term of Lahoud, with whom Hariri had frequently clashed as prime minister. As a result, Hariri was poised to lead an anti-Syrian front in the upcoming parliamentary elections in May.

Hariri made lots of other enemies as well, however, including rival Lebanese groups, the Israeli government, Islamic extremists and powerful financiers with interests in his multibillion dollar reconstruction efforts. A previously unknown group calling itself "Victory and Jihad in Syria and Lebanon" claimed responsibility for the attack, citing Hariri's close ties to the repressive Saudi monarchy. As of this writing, however, there has been no confirmation that they were responsible for the blast nor that such a group even exists.

While Syria remains the primary suspect, no evidence has been presented to support the charge. Damascus has publicly condemned the killings and denied responsibility. Syria's regime, while certainly ruthless enough to do such a thing, is usually not so brazen. They would have little to gain from uniting the Lebanese opposition against them or for provoking the US and other Western nations to further isolate their government.

The US, however, has indirectly implicated Syria in the attack and has withdrawn its ambassador from Damascus.

Syria's role in Lebanon
Syrian forces first entered Lebanon in 1976 at the invitation of the Lebanese president as the primary component of an international peacekeeping force authorized by the Arab League to try to end Lebanon's civil war. The US quietly supported the Syrian intervention as a means of blocking the likely victory by the leftist Lebanese National Movement and its Palestinian allies.

As the civil war continued in varying manifestations in subsequent years, the Syrians would often play one faction off against another in an effort to maintain their influence. Despite this, they were unable to defend the country from the US-backed Israeli invasion in 1982, the installation of the Phalangist leader Amin Gemayel as president, and the US military intervention to help prop up Gemayel's rightist government against a popular uprising.

Finally, in late 1990, Syrian forces helped the Lebanese oust the unpopular interim prime minister General Michel Aoun, which proved instrumental in ending the 15-year civil war. (Given that General Aoun's primary outside supporter was Iraq's Saddam Hussein, the US quietly backed this Syrian action as well.)

The end of the civil war did not result in the end of the Syrian role in Lebanon, however. Most Lebanese at this point resent the ongoing presence of Syrian troops and Syria's overbearing influence on their government.

The Bush administration, Congressional leaders of both parties, and prominent media commentators have increasingly made reference to "the Syrian occupation of Lebanon". Strictly speaking, however, this is not an occupation in the legal sense of the word, such as in the case of Morocco's occupation of Western Sahara or Israel's occupation of Syria's Golan region and much of the Palestinian Gaza Strip and West Bank (including East Jerusalem), all of which are recognized by the United Nations and international legal authorities as non-self-governing territories.

Lebanon has experienced direct foreign military occupation, however: from 1978 to 2000, Israel occupied a large section of southern Lebanon and - from June 1982 through May 1984 - much of central Lebanon as well, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Lebanese civilians.

A more accurate analogy to the current Syrian role would be that of the Soviets in the Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe during much of the Cold War, in which these nations were effectively client states. They were allowed to maintain their independence and distinct national institutions, yet were denied the right to pursue an autonomous course in their foreign and domestic policies.

Currently, Syria has only 14,000 troops in Lebanon, mostly in the Bekaa Valley in the eastern part of the country, a substantial reduction from the 40,000 troops present in earlier years. This does not mean that calls for an immediate withdrawal of Syrian forces and an end to Syrian interference in Lebanon's political affairs are not morally and legally justified. However, the use of the term "occupation" by American political leaders is an exaggeration and may be designed in part to divert attention from the continuing US military, diplomatic and financial support of the real ongoing military occupations by Israel and Morocco.

In September of last year, the US - along with France and Great Britain - sponsored a resolution before the UN Security Council (UNSC) that, among other things, called on "all remaining foreign forces to withdraw from Lebanon". UNSC resolution 1559 was adopted with six abstentions and no negative votes and builds on UNSC resolution 520, adopted in 1982, which similarly calls for the withdrawal of foreign forces.

The Bush administration, with widespread bipartisan Congressional support, has cited Syria's ongoing violation of these resolutions in placing sanctions on Syria. Ironically, however, no such pressure was placed on Israel for violating UNSC resolution 520 and nine other resolutions (the first being adopted in 1978) calling on Israel to withdraw its forces from Lebanon. In fact, during the Bill Clinton administration, the US openly called on Israel to not unilaterally withdraw from Lebanon as required, even as public opinion polls in Israel showed that a sizable majority of Israelis supported an end to the Israeli occupation, during which hundreds of Israeli soldiers were killed.

Today, many of the most outspoken supporters of a strict enforcement of UNSC resolution 1559 - such as Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer of California - were also among the most prominent opponents of enforcing similar resolutions when they were directed at Israel. In short, both Republicans and Democrats agree that Lebanese sovereignty and international law must be defended only if the government challenging these principles is not a US ally.

(Israel was finally forced out of Lebanon in May 2000 as a result of attacks by the militant Lebanese Shi'ite group Hezbollah. Four months later, the Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip began. Militant Palestinians claim they were inspired by the fact that Israel ended its 22-year occupation not because of the US-led peace process and not because of the United Nations - which was blocked by the US from enforcing its resolutions - but because of armed struggle by radical Islamists. Though, for a number of reasons, such tactics are unlikely to succeed in the occupied Palestinian territories, the support of Islamist groups and their use of violence by large sectors of the Palestinian population under Israeli occupation can for the most part be attributed to the US refusing to support an Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon through diplomatic means.)

What next?
Whether or not the Syrians played a role in Hariri's assassination, his death will likely escalate pressure by the Lebanese to challenge Syria's domination of their government. Once centered primarily in the country's Maronite Christian community, anti-Syrian sentiment is growing among Lebanese from across the ethnic and ideological spectrum. Ultimately, the country's fate will be determined by the Lebanese themselves. If the US presses the issue too strongly, however, it risks hardening Syria's position and allowing Damascus to defend its ongoing domination of Lebanon behind anti-imperialist rhetoric.

While there are many areas in which the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad should indeed be challenged, such as its overbearing influence in Lebanon and its poor human-rights record, there is a genuine fear that increased US efforts to isolate the regime and the concomitant threats of military action against Syria will undermine the efforts of Lebanese and Syrians demanding change.

One major problem is that most charges against the Syrian government by the Bush administration and the Congressional leadership of both parties are rife with hyperbole and double standards.

For example, the US has demanded that Syria eliminate its long-range and medium-range missiles, while not insisting that pro-Western neighbors like Turkey and Israel - with far more numerous and sophisticated missiles on their territory - similarly disarm. The US has also insisted that Syria unilaterally eliminate its chemical weapons stockpiles, while not placing similar demands on US allies Israel and Egypt - which have far larger chemical weapons stockpiles. The US has demanded an end to political repression and called for free and fair elections in Syria, while not making similar demands of even more repressive and autocratic regimes in allied countries like Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan.

Contrary to US charges that Syria is a major state supporter of international terrorism, Syria is at most a very minor player. The US State Department has noted how Syria has played a critical role in efforts to combat al-Qaeda and that the Syrian government has not been linked to any acts of international terrorism for nearly 20 years. The Palestinian Islamist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad have political offices in Damascus, as they do in a number of Arab capitals, but they are not allowed to conduct any military activities. A number of left-wing Palestinian factions also maintain offices in Syria, but these groups are now largely defunct and have not engaged in terrorist operations for many years.

Much has been made of Syrian support for the radical Lebanese Shi'ite group Hezbollah. However, not only has Syrian support for the group been quite minimal in recent years, the group is now a legally recognized Lebanese political party and serves in the Lebanese parliament. During the past decade, its militia have largely restricted their use of violence to Israeli occupation forces in southern Lebanon and in disputed border regions of Israeli-occupied Syria, not against civilians, thereby raising serious questions as to whether it can still be legally considered a terrorist group.

Currently, the Bush administration has expressed its dismay at Russia's decision to sell Syria anti-aircraft missiles, claiming that it raises questions in regard to President Vladimir Putin's commitment against terrorism. The administration has been unable to explain, however, how selling defensive weapons to an internationally recognized government aids terrorists.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and US Congressional leaders have also accused Syria of threatening the Arab-Israeli peace process. However, Syria has pledged to provide Israel with internationally enforced security guarantees and full diplomatic relations in return for a complete Israeli withdrawal from Syrian territory seized in the 1967 war, in concordance with UNSC resolutions 242 and 338, long recognized as the basis for peace. They have also called for a renewal of peace talks with Israel, which came very close to a permanent peace agreement in early 2000. However, the right-wing US-backed Israeli government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has refused to resume negotiations and pledges it will never withdraw from the Golan, thereby raising questions as to whether it is really Syria that is primarily at fault.

Another questionable anti-Syrian charge is in regard to its alleged support of Saddam Hussein and its ongoing support of anti-American insurgents in Iraq. In reality, though both Iraq and Syria were ruled by the Ba'ath Party, Syria broke diplomatic relations with Baghdad back in the 1970s and was home to a number of anti-Saddam exile groups.

Syria and Iraq backed rival factions in Lebanon's civil war. Syria was the only country to side with Iran during the Iran-Iraq war and contributed troops to the US-led Operation Desert Shield in reaction to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.

Syria, as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council in 2002, supported US-backed resolution 1441 demanding that Iraq cooperate with UN inspectors or else face "severe consequences". The Syrian government has substantially beefed up security along its borders with Iraq, and US military officials have acknowledged that relatively few foreign fighters have actually entered Iraq via Syria.

Most critically, there is no reason that Syria would want the insurgents to succeed, given that the primary insurgent groups are either supporters of the old anti-Syrian regime in Baghdad or are Islamic extremists similar to those who seriously challenged the Syrian government in 1982, before being brutally suppressed. Given that Assad's regime is dominated by Syria's Alawite minority, who have much closer ties to Iraq's Shi'ites than with the Sunnis who dominate the Arab and Islamic world, and that the Shi'ite-dominated slate that won the recent Iraqi elections share their skepticism about the US role in the Middle East, they would have every reason to want to see the newly elected Iraqi government succeed so US troops could leave.

Despite the highly questionable assertions which form the basis of the Bush administration's antipathy toward Syria, there have essentially been no serious challenges to the Bush administration's policy on Capitol Hill. Indeed, Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid have strongly defended President Bush's policies toward Iraq and Lebanon and helped push through strict sanctions against Syria based on these same exaggerations and double standards. During the United State's 2004 election campaign, Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, criticized Bush for not being anti-Syrian enough.

Among the few dissenters is Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who expressed his concern to Rice during recent hearings on Capitol Hill that the tough talk against Syria was remarkably similar to what was heard in regard to Iraq a few years earlier. One of only eight members of Congress to vote against the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act in the fall of 2003, he warned his fellow senators that the language was broad enough that the administration might later claim it authorized military action against Syria.

As long as the vast majority of Democrats are afraid to appear "soft" toward the Syrian dictatorship and as long as so few progressive voices are willing to challenge the Democrats, Bush appears to have few obstacles in his way should he once again choose to lead the country to war.

Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics and chair of the peace and justice studies program at the University of San Francisco. He is Middle East editor for Foreign Policy In Focus and the author of Tinderbox: US Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism (Common Courage Press, 2003).

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GC02Ak03.html

Syria
Bush

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Statistics

2005-03-01T01:05:00.000+01:00

Daily U.S. Assistance to Israel and the Palestinians

The U.S. gives $15,139,178 per day to the Israeli government and military and $568,744 per day to Palestinian NGO’s.

UN Resolutions Targeting Israel and the Palestinians

Israel has been targeted by at least 65 UN resolutions and the Palestinians have been targeted by none.

Israelis and Palestinians Killed Since September 29, 2000

1,046 Israelis and 3,590 Palestinians have been killed since September 29, 2000.

Israelis and Palestinians Injured Since September 29, 2000

7,126 Israelis and 28,497 Palestinians have been injured since September 29, 2000.

Israeli and Palestinian Unemployment Rates

The Israeli unemployment rate is 10.4%, while the Palestinian unemployment is estimated at 37-67%.

Israeli and Palestinian Children Killed Since September 29, 2000

118 Israeli children have been killed by Palestinians and 679 Palestinian children have been killed by Israelis since September 29, 2000.

Demolitions of Israeli and Palestinian Homes

0 Israeli homes have been demolished by Palestinians and 4,170 Palestinian homes have been demolished by Israel since September 29, 2000.

New Settlements Built (March 2001 - July 2003)

60+ new Jewish-only settlements have been built on confiscated Palestinian land between March 2001 and July 11, 2003. There have been 0 cases of Palestinians confiscating Israeli land and building settlements.

http://www.ifamericansknew.org/

israel
palestine

How the Bush administration sees things: Canadian sovereignty exists only at its pleasure.

2005-03-01T00:56:00.000+01:00

Linda McQuaig says standing up to U.S. will gain us respect abroad

It's now clear how the Bush administration sees things: Canadian sovereignty exists only at its pleasure. If we do what Washington wants, we retain our sovereignty. If we don't, all bets are off.

This is what U.S. ambassador Paul Cellucci clarified last week in his angered response to Paul Martin's announcement that Canada won't join the U.S. missile defence scheme. Cellucci noted that Washington would simply deploy its anti-missile system over Canadian airspace anyway, and expressed puzzlement over Canada's decision to "in effect, give up its sovereignty."

No doubt the Soviets felt similar puzzlement as they rolled into Czechoslovakia in 1968. What's with these crazy Czechs? Don't they get it? All they have to do is co-operate with Moscow and they can retain their "sovereignty."

Canadian advocates of missile defence have long argued that joining the scheme is the best way to protect our sovereignty ? the logic apparently being that Washington is going to intrude into our airspace anyway, so it's better if we look like that's what we wanted all along. It's only rape if you resist.

Fortunately the Martin government, under enormous pressure from the public, the NDP and the Bloc Québécois, ignored this convoluted logic. After months of dithering on the issue, Ottawa showed surprising spunk last week in standing up to the American empire ? a spunkiness that will only improve our standing in a world increasingly alarmed by U.S. unilateralism.

Accommodating Washington would have made sense if Washington were addressing real security needs. But this isn't about defending America; intercontinental missiles are the least likely means of attack that a "rogue" nation would resort to.

This is about Washington reviving and gaining the upper hand in the arms race, presumably to position itself well for what it sees as its eventual superpower showdown with China.

Washington sees gaining control of space as key to maintaining global military dominance, and missile defence is part of the strategy.

The U.S. plans to eventually have missile defence systems based in space (as well as on land, air and sea). This is part of America achieving "space superiority," a goal unabashedly described in the 2004 U.S. Air Force document Counterspace Operations, which argues the U.S. must have "space control" and be able to "deny an adversary freedom of action in space."

The prospect of the arms race moving into space may thrill Washington strategic planners, but it's long been dreaded by most of the world. In 1967, ninety-seven nations signed the Outer Space Treaty banning weapons from space.

Since then, there's been pressure for a tougher ban. In fact, Canada has played a key role pushing for that tougher line at disarmament talks in Geneva. Virtually all nations now support a proposed new ban.

But the U.S. does not. Instead it wants to take control of space to achieve lasting military dominance. And it wanted Canada ? and our good name as a strong arms control proponent ? to be linked to the missile defence scheme, softening its aggressive image.

So Canada's gutsy refusal to go along was the right move ? and one that, incidentally, will win us higher standing in the world.

Linda McQuaig is a Toronto-based author and commentator. lmcquaig@sympatico.ca

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1109373907994&call_pageid=968256290204&col=968350116795

Examples of hate speech

2005-03-01T00:18:00.000+01:00

Linked by the Signs of the Times. Original source from What Really Happened

EXAMPLES OF HATE SPEECH

1. "There is a huge gap between us (Jews) and our enemies not just in ability but in morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience. They are our neighbors here, but it seems as if at a distance of a few hundred meters away, there are people who do not belong to our continent, to our world, but actually belong to a different galaxy." Israeli president Moshe Katsav. The Jerusalem Post, May 10, 2001

2. "The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more".... Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time - August 28, 2000. Reported in the Jerusalem Post August 30, 2000

3. " [The Palestinians are] beasts walking on two legs." Menahim Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, "Begin and the Beasts". New Statesman, 25 June 1982.

4. "The Palestinians" would be crushed like grasshoppers ... heads smashed against the boulders and walls." " Isreali Prime Minister (at the time) in a speech to Jewish settlers New York Times April 1, 1988

5. "When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle." Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, New York Times, 14 April 1983.

6. "How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to." Golda Maier, March 8, 1969.

7. "There was no such thing as Palestinians, they never existed." Golda Maier Israeli Prime Minister June 15, 1969

8. "The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only bluff, which was born and developed after the war." Israeli General Matityahu Peled, Ha'aretz, 19 March 1972.

9. David Ben Gurion (the first Israeli Prime Minister): "If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti - Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault ? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?" Quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paraddoxe Juif (The Jewish Paradox), pp121.

10. Ben Gurion also warned in 1948 : "We must do everything to insure they ( the Palestinians) never do return." Assuring his fellow Zionists that Palestinians will never come back to their homes. "The old will die and the young will forget."

11. "We have to kill all the Palestinians unless they are resigned to live here as slaves." Chairman Heilbrun of the Committee for the Re-election of General Shlomo Lahat, the mayor of Tel Aviv, October 1983.

12. "Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don't worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it." - Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001, to Shimon Peres, as reported on Kol Yisrael radio. (Certainly the FBI's cover-up of the Israeli spy ring/phone tap scandal suggests that Mr. Sharon may not have been joking.)

13. "We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel... Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours." Rafael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces - Gad Becker, Yediot Ahronot 13 April 1983, New York Times 14 April 1983.

14. "We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinian refugees] never do return" David Ben-Gurion, in his diary, 18 July 1948, quoted in Michael Bar Zohar's Ben-Gurion: the Armed Prophet, Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 157.

15. "We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai." David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff. From Ben-Gurion, A Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978.

16. "We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population." Israel Koenig, "The Koenig Memorandum"

17. "Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population." Moshe Dayan, address to the Technion, Haifa, reported in Haaretz, April 4, 1969.

18. "We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?' Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said 'Drive them out!'" Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979.

19. Rabin's description of the conquest of Lydda, after the completion of Plan Dalet. "We shall reduce the Arab population to a community of woodcutters and waiters" Uri Lubrani, PM Ben-Gurion's special adviser on Arab Affairs, 1960. From "The Arabs in Israel" by Sabri Jiryas.

20. "There are some who believe that the non-Jewish population, even in a high percentage, within our borders will be more effectively under our surveillance; and there are some who believe the contrary, i.e., that it is easier to carry out surveillance over the activities of a neighbor than over those of a tenant. [I] tend to support the latter view and have an additional argument:...the need to sustain the character of the state which will henceforth be Jewish...with a non-Jewish minority limited to 15 percent. I had already reached this fundamental position as early as 1940 [and] it is entered in my diary." Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency's Colonization Department. From Israel: an Apartheid State by Uri Davis, p.5.

21. "Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours... Everything we don't grab will go to them." Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of militants from the extreme right-wing Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, November 15, 1998.

22. "It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism,colonialization or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands." Yoram Bar Porath, Yediot Aahronot, of 14 July 1972.

23. "Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly." Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization, speaking of the Arabs of Palestine,Complete Diaries, June 12, 1895 entry.

24. "One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail." -- Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, Feb. 27, 1994 [Source: N.Y. Times, Feb. 28, 1994, p. 1]

25. "We Jews, we are the destroyers and will remain the destroyers. Nothing you can do will meet our demands and needs. We will forever destroy because we want a world of our own." (You Gentiles, by Jewish Author Maurice Samuels, p. 155).

26. "We will have a world government whether you like it or not. The only question is whether that government will be achieved by conquest or consent." (Jewish Banker Paul Warburg, February 17, 1950, as he testified before the U.S. Senate).

27. "We will establish ourselves in Palestine whether you like it or not...You can hasten our arrival or you can equally retard it. It is however better for you to help us so as to avoid our constructive powers being turned into a destructive power which will overthrow the world." (Chaim Weizmann, Published in "Judische Rundschau," No. 4, 1920)

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/palestinians.html

Hariri’s Assassination: A Step towards Greater Middle East

2005-02-27T22:00:00.000+01:00

Hariri’s Assassination:
A Step towards Greater Middle East

By: Dr. Elias Akleh*

Rafik Hariri, the previous Lebanese President, was assassinated by a tremendous explosion, whose power was estimated to equal 350 kgm of TNT. Hariri was returning from a meeting in the Lebanese Parliament when the explosion lead to his death and the death of other 14 people among them seven of Hariri’s bodyguards. Hariri is hailed as the “Father of modern Lebanon due to his efforts to obtain a cease fire between Lebanese factions during the civil war, due to his political efforts in the Ta’ef Agreement, and especially to his tremendous efforts in rebuilding war-ravaged city of Beirut.

Even before the fire of the explosion was extinguished the Lebanese opposition hastened to point accusation finger to Syrian and the present Lebanese government. They cited Hariri’s withdrawal from the government and his joining the opposition as a motive for his assassination. The opposition called on Lebanese to stage a peaceful “Independence Intifada” to demand a complete Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon and the resignation of the government.

Although the international political community did not initially accuse Syria directly, its reaction came to support the demands of the Lebanese opposition. Ignoring its own occupation to Afghanistan, its occupation to Iraq, and its occupation to Haiti the American administration called Syrian presence in Lebanon an occupation spreading chaos and terror in the country. The administration pulled out it ambassador from Damascus and demanded Syria to implement UN resolution 1559 requiring Syria to withdraw from Lebanon. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described Syrian presence in Lebanon as destabilizing the country, and demanded Syria to abide by the international laws, to spread freedom and democracy, and to stop supporting terrorists in Iraq and in Lebanon. During his European tour President Bush attacked Syria harshly demanded it abides by the rule of law or face more international punishments. French President Jacques Chirac expressed his deep sadness for Hariri’s assassination and asked Syria to withdraw from Lebanon as an implementation of Resolution 1559. British Foreign Minister Jack Strew asked for an international investigation of the assassination since there are doubts of a Syrian involvement. He also asked for the implementation of 1559. The reaction of the Arab leaders came pitiful and negative as usual. Secretary General of the Arab League Amr Mousa was sent to Syria to discuss withdrawal options. Egypt and Jordan expressed their usual position in such cases; applying political pressure on the Arab party to give concessions. Instead of supporting and defending Syria Jordanian king Abdullah requested Syrian withdrawal and Egyptian President Mubark second that request explaining that Syria is in a difficult” position and could not stand up against international will alone.

One cannot but wonder about the motives behind this American-led international meddling in the latest Lebanese assassination. Why didn’t these countries bother themselves when in February 1992 Israel assassinated Hezbollah leader Abbas el-Mousawi? Why didn’t any of these international leaders whisper a word when Israel, again in January 2002, assassinated Eli Hubeika for fear he becomes a persecution witness against Israeli president Sharon for his role in the massacre of Sabra and Shatilla? Why didn’t any of them request an international investigation when Israel, once again in May 2002, assassinated Mohammad Jibriel from Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)? And the list goes on for multiple Israeli assassinations in Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria.

People quickly forget that Syria was lured into Lebanon in 1976 during the civil war for fear that Israel and/or United States of America would invade Lebanon under the guise of ending civil war. Late Syrian President Hafeth Asad was duped by then American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger into believing that if he did not send his troops into Lebanon, Israel would enter Lebanon to end the civil war. Syrian troops entered Lebanon, put an end to its civil war, and designed a plan for a gradual withdrawal in Ta’ef agreement. Syria had carried out, so far, five withdrawals of its troops, latest was last September 20th. Out of original 30 thousands only 14 thousand Syrian troops are still in Lebanon. Syria had trained new Lebanese security forces to ensure peace giving chance for rebuilding process. Under the leadership of Hariri, and with a full cooperation of Syria, Lebanon was able to establish a democratic government; the only democracy in the whole Arab World, where the people had enjoyed personal, political and media freedom no other Arab country had enjoyed, not even in Syria itself. Although Syrian troops never engaged directly with Israeli army, their presence in Lebanon served as a deterrent to any Israeli wide scale invasion. Syria, also, had worked hard to improving relationship with the US, to resume peace talks with Israel to obtain the return of Shib’a Farms region back to Lebanon, its original owner, and requested to keep the Middle East region free from nuclear proliferation. Yet Israel and the American administration had rebuffed all these peaceful gestures.

Hariri’s assassination and its political outcomes do not serve Syrian interests, and the Lebanese government does not need them. To find the real assassins one must recognize the real beneficiary of the assassination, who has the motives and the means to carry it.

If we examine the explosion itself, we would discover that it had caused a 4 meter deep crater, caused the collapse of walls of adjacent buildings, broke the glass windows of buildings on one kilometer distance, and caused the explosions of other 22 vehicles that were parked along the street. It came as a surprise to the German Mercedes vehicle manufacturer to find out that Hariri’s vehicles, enforced with an alloy of steel and titanium to withstand any rocket or mine attack, were melted by the force of the explosion. After a preliminary study of the explosion - its size, its incinerating results, and its penetrating capability of the armored plates retired army generals and explosives experts concluded that the explosion was caused by a highly developed type of depleted uranium explosives, that could not be manufactured except in the United States of America. It was also revealed that the vehicles were fitted with an extremely sophisticated electronic jamming system called “E.M.B.S” to interrupt any signal may be used to remotely detonate a bomb. The system was developed by a combined American/Swedish company. It was reported that the system was rendered inoperative moments before the explosion.

An assassination was needed to cause chaos and to create sectarian conflicts in the northern region of the Arabian Middle East to provide a "legitimacy" to any foreign powers interference under the guise of protecting the Lebanese, spreading freedom and democracy, and to justify any possible future attack against Syria. Hariri was chosen as the target of this assassination because of his popular national personality with an important political position, whose assassination would devastate the majority of Lebanese the same way 911 attacks had devastated Americans. The American administration hastened to capitalize on his assassination. After adopting Syria’s Accountability Act and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act, Bush and his administration blamed Syria for the assassination indirectly by pulling the American ambassador from Damascus, and demanding Syria end it’s “occupation” of Lebanon and implement 1559. Bush went further than that when he incited European leaders against Syria during his recent European tour. Members of his administration worked to coerce Arab leaders to adopt an Arab League resolution annulling Ta’ef agreement and demanding complete Syrian withdrawal. This led Egypt to postpone Arab Minister’s meeting with G8 delegation until after an Arab summit to study the matter. The American media played its role in incrimination Syria by describing it with an occupying country that supports terrorism in the region to derail any peace negotiation between Israel and its neighboring Arab countries. Their cameras had focused on groups of Lebanese in Hariri’s funeral in an exaggerating manner hinting that all Lebanese accuse Syria of Hariri’s assassination.

After the "American Empire" had spread its global hegemony other countries felt threatened. They started building political alliances with equal force to oppose such hegemony. European Union gathered ten more countries under its wings. Russia is forming an alliance with China, India, Iran, Brazil and Venezuela. It is also trying to resume relationship with Syria through its missile deal, and had also re-affirmed its commitment to provide Iran with nuclear technology for peaceful industry in spite of American and Israeli objections. America is also continuously losing its alliance of the willing in Iraq. Suddenly America felt a threat against its "Greater Middle Eastern" project, especially at Iraq had drained its military resources leaving no surplus to use for the fragmentation of what they call the "Sunni Crescent" Iran, Syria, and Lebanon. Iranian alliance with Syria to help neutralize any imposed economic sanctions made it worse for the American administration. Hence the decision came to affect an internal regime change through political assassinations, spreading chaos, and inciting sectarian struggle. These are the same methods Reagan’s administration had used in Latin America under the supervision of then American ambassador John Negroponte.

Negroponte is not far away from the Middle East. He is in Iraq running the American embassy, the largest of its kind in the whole world for it is meant to become the main command center for the execution of the Greater Middle Eastern project. It was noticeable that Negroponte’s arrival to Iraq was accompanied with increasing number of assassinations of important Iraqi political and religious figures, and increase in the number of car bombings killing only Iraqis in Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods. There was also confirmation of the involvement of the Israeli Mosad who is trying to destroy Syrian support to Hezbollah, who is standing guard against any Israeli aggression against Lebanon.

The American administration, along with its bastard child Israel, has the motives, the means, and the opportunity to assassinate Hariri. This assassination is directed towards Lebanon and Syrian in the short run, and to Iran and Russia in the long run. It aims at dividing the region into tiny helpless sectarian states that would be easy for Israel and for America to control. Hariri’s assassination is just a mere step towards the Greater Middle Eastern project.

*Dr. Elias Akleh is an Arab writer from a Palestinian descent, born in the town of Beit-Jala and lives in the US.

http://www.amin.org/eng/uncat/2005/feb/feb27.html

Are you an idiot?

2005-02-27T21:09:00.000+01:00

Another clear and striking editorial from Signs of the Times

Today in 1933 the German Reichstag is set on fire. Discovering a Dutch Communist member called Marinus van der Lubbe in the vicinity of the fire, the authorities soon act to supress most of the human rights in Germany at that time. Although whether van der Lubbe was responsible or the Nazis themselves set the fire, one fact is inescapable - the Nazi Party would rule Germany unchallenged from that point on until 1945.

On September 11th 2001 two planes crash into the WTC in New York. Other than producing flight instruction manuals and Korans that were probably planted, the US government offered no hard evidence to prove their assertion that Islamic terrorists were to blame. What is clear however is the fact that, since that day, the Bush government consolidated its control over the American people and legislature. Basic civil rights were systematically revoked in favor of draconian measures required to "protect against the terror threat". One of the most significant results of the WTC attacks was an immediate (many say preplanned) move by the Bush regime to invade so-called "Arab terrorist" countries. Using fabricated "intelligence" reports, members of the Bush regime strongarmed the American people and much of the rest of the world into accepting what is now understood as a imperialist drive to illegally invade and conquer lands strategically important to both America and Israel.

Are you an idiot? Are you incapable of grasping the most elementary facts and making deductions based on those facts? Most politicians and government leaders believe so. How else can you explain the discrepancy between their public statements and their subsequent private actions?

Take Bush's recent visit to Europe for example. Despite the public show of warm handshakes, back slapping and statements about "unity", a quick read between the lines shows that transatlantic relationships are as strained as ever. Bush achieved little from his jolly to Europe, yet clearly there was a concerted effort made to convince us all that a new era of peace and prosperity is just around the corner. Just what is it that they are trying to hide? Are things really that bad?

You better believe it.

Things are so bad in fact that, as the days and months roll by, our leaders are going to ask us to accept increasingly outlandish and ridiculous notions as fact, all in the name of keeping the people dumbed-down. And they fully expect most of us to swallow the bait.

Of course, our leaders have had a lot of practice over the years to perfect the art of conning the public. In fact, it seems that the power wielded by our "elected" representatives is inversely proportional to the accuracy of the knowledge within the public domain. The dumber the people - the richer the politicians. Of course, we are not saying that all the lies and deceptions passed off on the public over the years have been easy to spot. But there certainly have been some real 'doozies'. JFK was one. Bush's "election" in 2000 was another. Really, it doesn't get much more obvious - unless you're talking about Israel.

Indeed, if we are still in any doubt about the fact that that our leaders credit us with as much intelligence as the average sock-puppet, look no further than the size of the holes in the stories coming out of the 'holie land'.

Two days ago someone detonated some kind of explosive device outside of a Tel Aviv disco, killing 4 Israelis. Of course, even before the mainstream media informed us about the culprits, we were expected to already be muttering "damn terrorists" under our breath. But rather than go on about how ridiculous the mainstream media treatment of the story was, let's just spell out the facts.

Israel has been at some level of war with it's Arab nations for over 50 years - continuously. The primary cause of the conflict is land with religion used as the touch paper to keep the conflict at or just under boiling point. If we were to sift through the many details that could be argued by both sides, we would end up with a single fact: Israel expropriated (or had expropriated for it) land that was occupied by another group of people, who Israel then forcibly ejected. The basis for this action is the claim by Israelis that the land that they annexed was always theirs by "divine right".

Think about this. This is underlying reason for the current Middle East conflict. Now put yourself in the position of Ariel Sharon or any advocate of Israel's divine right to Middle Eastern lands. Knowing the unlawfulness upon which you claims are made, and knowing that the Palestinian people are justified in their reclamations against you, where is THE LAST PLACE that you would want to find yourself?

Clearly it is the negotiating table.

For someone like Sharon, peace means defeat. This is a clearly discernible FACT.

Come back now to the events of the last few days and weeks. The Palestinians have a new leader who is determined to do everything he can to acquiesce to Israeli demands and thereby force them to the negotiating table. At the beginning, Abbas seemed to make some progress, with concessions over security being offered by the Israelis. Then, suddenly and inexplicably, an attack on Israeli civilians comes just a few days before a scheduled international Middle East peace talks in London.

Immediately, Israel blames the Palestinians and all concessions previously offered are withdrawn. Now, given that this outcome could have been predicted even by a sock-puppet, is it really reasonable to believe that a Palestinian group would knowingly destroy any chances for a just and peaceful settlement, something they have been fighting for for so many years?

Apparently, most Western governments and the mainstream media want us to believe that it is, and, more to the point, they think that that average citizen is stupid enough to be fooled.

The question that each of us must answer is: Am I really as stupid as my government thinks I am? Am I going to prove them right or wrong? Do I remember how to get indignant when someone treats me as if I were an idiot?

http://signs-of-the-times.org/signs/signs20050227.htm

The True Identity of Fulcanelli and The Da Vinci Code

2005-02-25T00:44:00.000+01:00

The True Identity of Fulcanelli and The Da Vinci Code

Another brillant article from Laura Knight-Jadczyk on the hidden messages at the Auch's Gothic cathedral.

Built between 1489 and 1560 on the model of the great churches in Ile-de-France, Sainte-Marie is France's last Gothic cathedral. The classical facade, which was completed at the end of the 17th century, reproduces the harmonious lines of Notre-Dame de Paris. The choir, which is lighted by the stained glass windows of Arnaud de Moles, has fine Renaissance furnishings.

http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/fulcanelli_da_vinci_code.htm

Other sources

Patrick Rivière: FULCANELLI FINALLY REVEALED - The enigma of the unknown alchemist is now resolved

Cathédrale Sainte Marie d'Auch (English)

Dark Ages & Comets

2005-02-24T23:58:00.000+01:00

Dark Ages May Have Been, Err, Dark

Scientists at Cardiff University in the UK believe they have discovered the cause of crop failures and summer frosts some 1,500 years ago - a comet colliding with Earth.

The team has been studying evidence from tree rings, which suggests that the Earth underwent a series of very cold summers around 536-540 AD, indicating an effect rather like a nuclear winter.

The scientists in the School of Physics and Astronomy believe this was caused by a comet hitting the earth and exploding in the upper atmosphere. The debris from this giant explosion was such that it enveloped the earth in soot and ash, blocking out the sunlight and causing the very cold weather.

Historical references from this period - known as the Dark Ages - are sparse, but what records there are, tell of crop failures and summer frosts.

The work was carried out by two Cardiff undergraduate students, Emma Rigby and Mel Symonds under the supervision of Dr Derek Ward-Thompson.

Their findings are reported in Astronomy and Geophysics, the magazine of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The surprising result of the new work is just how small a comet is needed to cause such dramatic effects. The scientists calculate that a comet not much more than half a kilometre across could cause a global nuclear winter effect. This is significantly smaller than was previously thought.

Dr. Ward-Thompson said: "One of the exciting aspects of this work is that we have re-classified the size of comet that represents a global threat. This work shows that even a comet of only half a kilometre in size could have global consequences. Previously nothing less than a kilometre across was counted as a global threat. If such an event happened again today, then once again a large fraction of the earth's population could face starvation."

The comet impact caused crop failures and wide-spread starvation among the sixth century population. The timing coincides with the Justinian Plague, widely believed to be the first appearance of the Black Death in Europe. It is possible that the plague was so rampant and took hold so quickly because the population was already weakened by starvation.

http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20040104154407data_trunc_sys.shtml

Injustice, in Secret

2005-02-24T23:46:00.000+01:00

Injustice, in Secret

ATTORNEYS FOR the Justice Department appeared before a federal judge in Washington this month and asked him to dismiss a lawsuit over the detention of a U.S. citizen, basing their request not merely on secret evidence but also on secret legal arguments. The government contends that the legal theory by which it would defend its behavior should be immune from debate in court. This position is alien to the history and premise of Anglo-American jurisprudence, which assumes that opposing lawyers will challenge one another's arguments.

Ahmed Abu Ali was arrested in June 2003 in Saudi Arabia. He and his family claim the arrest took place at the behest of U.S. officials who, though unable to bring a case against him, have encouraged the Saudis to keep him locked up. The facts are murky, and Judge John D. Bates refused in December to dismiss the case, writing that he needed more information before he could decide whether a U.S. court has jurisdiction.

Since then, the U.S. government has acted to frustrate all reasonable searches for answers. It has moved to stay discovery based on secret evidence. It has proposed adding to the facts at Judge Bates's disposal by submitting secret evidence that Mr. Abu Ali's attorneys would have no opportunity to challenge. Most recently, it urged that the case be dismissed on the basis, yet again, of secret evidence -- this time supplemented with what a Justice Department lawyer termed "legal argument [that] itself cannot be made public without disclosing the classified information that underlies it."

Judge Bates is cautious and generally deferential to government concerns. Yet he was evidently disturbed by this argument, at one point asking whether the government could identify "any case in which . . . even the legal theory for dismissal is not known to the other side?" The government could not.

In this case, the liberty of a U.S. citizen is at stake. It is not clear what role the U.S. government played in his arrest, nor that he is innocent. What is clear is that Mr. Abu Ali has been held for 20 months without being charged and that, as Judge Bates wrote in December, his lawyers "have presented some unrebutted evidence that [his] detention is at the behest and ongoing direction of United States officials." It should be unthinkable that the courts would resolve this matter without hearing from both sides on key legal questions. It should have been unthinkable for the government to propose such a step.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A40624-2005Feb20?language=printer

I Want The Earth Plus 5%

2005-02-24T23:41:00.000+01:00

I Want The Earth Plus 5%

Fabian was excited as he once more rehearsed his speech for the crowd certain to turn up tomorrow. He had always wanted prestige and power and now his dreams were going to come true. He was a craftsman working with silver and gold, making jewelry and ornaments, but he became dissatisfied with working for a living. He needed excitement, a challenge, and now his plan was ready to begin.

For generations the people used the barter system. A man supported his own family by providing all their needs or else he specialised in a particular trade. Whatever surpluses he might have from his own production, he exchanged or swapped for the surplus of others.

Market day was always noise and dusty, yet people looked forward to the shouting and waving, and especially the companionship. It used to be a happy place, but now there were too many people, too much arguing. There was no time for chatting - a better system was needed.

Generally, the people had been happy, and enjoyed the fruits of their work.

In each community a simple Government had been formed to make sure that each person's freedoms and rights were protected and that no man was forced to do anything against his will by any other man, or any group of men.

This was the Government's one and only purpose and each Governor was voluntarily supported by the local community who elected him.

However, market day was the one problem they could not solve. Was a knife worth one or two baskets of corn? Was a cow worth more than a wagon … and so on. No one could think of a better system.

Fabian had advertised, "I have the solution to our bartering problems, and I invite everyone to a public meeting tomorrow."

The next day there was a great assembly in the town square and Fabian explained all about the new system which he called "money". It sounded good. "How are we to start?" the people asked.

"The gold which I fashion into ornaments and jewelry is an excellent metal. It does not tarnish or rust, and will last a long time. I will make some gold into coins and we shall call each coin a dollar."

He explained how values would work, and that "money" would be really a medium for exchange - a much better system than bartering.

One of the Governors questioned, "Some people can dig gold and make coins for themselves", he said.

"This would be most unfair", Fabian was ready with the answer. "Only those coins approved by the Government can be used, and these will have special marking stamped on them." This seemed reasonable and it was proposed that each man be given an equal number. "But I deserve the most," said the candle-maker. "Everyone uses my candles." "No", said the farmer, "without food there is no life, surely we should get the most." And so the bickering continued.

Fabian let them argue for a while and finally he said, "Since none of you can agree, I suggest you obtain the number you require from me. There will be no limit, except for your ability to repay. The more you obtain, the more you must repay in one year's time. " And what will you receive?" the people asked.

"Since I am providing a service, that is, the money supply, I am entitled to payment for my work. Let us say that for every 100 pieces you obtain, you repay me 105 for every year that you owe the debt. The 5 will be my charge, and I shall call this charge interest."

There seemed to be no other way, and besides, 5% seemed little enough charge. "Come back next Friday and we will begin."

Fabian wasted no time. He made coins day and night, and at the end of the week he was ready. The people were queued up at his shop, and after the coins were inspected and approved by the Governors the system commenced. Some borrowed only a few and they went off to try the new system.

They found money to be marvelous, and they soon valued everything in gold coins or dollars. The value they placed on everything was called a "price", and the price mainly depended on the amount of work required to produce it. If it took a lot of work the price was high, but if it was produced with little effort it was quite inexpensive.

In one town lived Alan, who was the only watchmaker. His prices were high because the customers were willing to pay just to own one of his watches.

Then another man began making watches and offered them at a lower price in order to get sales. Alan was forced to lower his prices, and in no time at all prices came down, so that both men were striving to give the best quality at the lowest price. This was genuine free competition.

It was the same with builders, transport operators, accountants, farmers, in fact, in every endeavour. The customers always chose what they felt was the best deal - they had freedom of choice. There was no artificial protection such as licences or tariffs to prevent other people from going into business. The standard of living rose, and before long the people wondered how they had ever done without money.

At the end of the year, Fabian left his shop and visited all the people who owed him money. Some had more than they borrowed, but this meant that others had less, since there were only a certain number of coins issued in the first place. Those who had more than they borrowed paid back each 100 plus the extra 5, but still had to borrow again to carry on.

The others discovered for the first time that they had a debt. Before he would lend them more money, Fabian took a mortgage over some of their assets, and everyone went away once moreto try and get those extra 5 coins whichalways seemed so hard to find.

No one realised that as a whole, the country could never get out of debt until all the coins were repaid, but even then, there were those extra 5 on each 100 which had never been lent out at all. No one but Fabian could see that it was impossible to pay the interest - the extra money had never been issued, therefore someone had to miss out.

It was true that Fabian spent some coins, but he couldn't possibly spend anything like 5% of the total economy on himself. There were thousands of people and Fabian was only one. Besides, he was still a goldsmith making a comfortable living.

At the back of his shop Fabian had a strongroom and people found it convenient to leave some of their coins with him for safekeeping. He charged a small fee depending on the amount of money, and the time it was left with him. He would give the owner receipts for the deposit.

When a person went shopping, he did not normally carry a lot of gold coins. He would give the shopkeeper one of the receipts to the value of the goods he wanted to buy.

Shopkeepers recognised the receipt as being genuine and accepted it with the idea of taking it to Fabian and collecting the appropriate amount in coins. The receipts passed from hand to hand instead of the gold itself being transferred. The people had great faith in the receipts - they accepted them as being as good as coins.

Before long, Fabian noticed that it was quite unusual for anyone to actually call for their gold coins.

He thought to himself, "Here I am in possession of all this gold and I am still a hard working craftsman. It doesn't make sense. Why there are dozens of people who would be glad to pay me interest for the use of this gold which is lying here and rarely called for.

It is true, the gold is not mine - but it is in my possession, which is all that matters. I hardly need to make any coins at all, I can use some of the coins stored in the vault."

At first he was very cautious, only loaning a few at a time, and then only on tremendous security. But gradually he became bolder, and larger amounts were loaned.

One day, a large loan was requested. Fabian suggested, "Instead of carrying all these coins we can make a deposit in your name, and then I shall give you several receipts to the value of the coins." The borrower agreed, and off he went with a bunch of receipts. He had obtained a loan, yet the gold remained in the strong-room. After the client left, Fabian smiled. He could have his cake and eat it too. He could "lend" gold and still keep it in his possession.

Friends, strangers and even enemies needed funds to carry out their businesses - and so long as they could produce security, they could borrow as much as they needed. By simply writing out receipts Fabian was able to "lend" money to several times the value of gold in his strong-room, and he was not even the owner of it. Everything was safe so long as the real owners didn't call for their gold and the confidence of the people was maintained.

He kept a book showing the debits and credits for each person. The lending business was proving to be very lucrative indeed.

His social standing in the community was increasing almost as fast as his wealth. He was becoming a man of importance, he commanded respect. In matters of finance, his very word was like a sacred pronouncement.

Goldsmiths from other towns became curious about his activities and one day they called to see him. He told them what he was doing, but was very careful to emphasize the need for secrecy.

If their plan was exposed, the scheme would fail, so they agreed to form their own secret alliance.

Each returned to his own town and began to operate as Fabian had taught.

People now accepted the receipts as being as good as gold itself, and many receipts were deposited for safe keeping in the same way as coins. When a merchant wished to pay another for goods, he simply wrote a short note instructing Fabian to transfer money from his account to that of the second merchant. It took Fabian only a few minutes to adjust the figures.

This new system became very popular, and the instruction notes were called "checks".

Late one night, the goldsmiths had another secret meeting and Fabian revealed a new plan. The next day they called a meeting with all the Governors, and Fabian began. "The receipts we issue have become very popular. No doubt, most of you Governors are using them and you find them very convenient." They nodded in agreement and wondered what the problem was. "Well", he continued, "some receipts are being copied by counterfeiters. This practice must be stopped."

The Governors became alarmed. "What can we do?" they asked. Fabian replied, "My suggestion is this - first of all, let it be the Government's job to print new notes on a special paper with very intricate designs, and then each note to be signed by the chief Governor. We goldsmiths will be happy to pay the printing costs, as it will save us a lot of time writing out receipts". The Governors reasoned, "Well, it is our job to protect the people against counterfeiters and the advice certainly seems like a good idea." So they agreed to print the notes.

"Secondly," Fabian said, "some people have gone prospecting and are making their own gold coins. I suggest that you pass a law so that any person who finds gold nuggets must hand them in. Of course, they will be reimbursed with notes and coins."

The idea sounded good and without too much thought about it, they printed a large number of crisp new notes. Each note had a value printed on it - $1, $2, $5, $10 etc. The small printing costs were paid by the goldsmiths.

The notes were much easier to carry and they soon became accepted by the people. Despite their popularity however, these new notes and coins were used for only 10% of transactions. The records showed that the check system accounted for 90% of all business.

The next part of his plan commenced. Until now, people were paying Fabian to guard their money. In order to attract more money into the vault Fabian offered to pay depositors 3% interest on their money.

Most people believed that he was re-lending their money out to borrowers at 5%, and his profit was the 2% difference. Besides, the people didn't question him as getting 3% was far better than paying to have the money guarded.

The volume of savings grew and with the additional money in the vaults, Fabian was able to lend $200, $300, $400 sometimes up to $900 for every $100 in notes and coins that he held in deposit. He had to be careful not to exceed this nine to one ratio, because one person in ten did require the notes and coins for use.

If there was not enough money available when required, people would become suspicious, especially as their deposit books showed how much they had deposited. Nevertheless, on the $900 in book figures that Fabian loaned out by writing checks himself, he was able to demand up to $45 in interest, i.e. 5% on $900. When the loan plus interest was repaid, i.e. $945, the $900 was cancelled out in the debit column and Fabian kept the $45 interest. He was therefore quite happy to pay $3 interest on the original $100 deposited which had never left the vaults at all. This meant that for every $100 he held in deposits, it was possible to make 42% profit, most people believing he was only making 2%. The other goldsmiths were doing the same thing. They created money out of nothing at the stroke of a pen, and then charged interest on top of it.

True, they didn't coin money, the Government actually printed the notes and coins and gave it to the goldsmiths to distribute. Fabian's only expense was the small printing fee. Still, they were creating credit money out of nothing and charging interest on top of it. Most people believed that the money supply was a Government operation. They also believed that Fabian was lending them the money that someone else had deposited, but it was very strange that no one's deposits ever decreased when a loan was advanced. If everyone had tried to withdraw their deposits at once, the fraud would have been exposed.

When a loan was requested in notes or coins, it presented no problem. Fabian merely explained to the Government that the increase in population and production required more notes, and these he obtained for the small printing fee.

One day a thoughtful man went to see Fabian. "This interest charge is wrong", he said. "For every $100 you issue, you are asking $105 in return. The extra $5 can never be paid since it doesn't exist.

Farmers produce food, industry manufacturers goods, and so on, but only you produce money. Suppose there are only two businessmen in the whole country and we employ everyone else. We borrow $100 each, we pay $90 out in wages and expenses and allow $10 profit (our wage). That means the total purchasing power is $90 + $10 twice, i.e. $200. Yet to pay you we must sell all our produce for $210. If one of us succeeds and sells all his produce for $105, the other man can only hope to get $95. Also, part of his goods cannot be sold, as there is no money left to buy them.

He will still owe you $10 and can only repay this by borrowing more. The system is impossible."

The man continued, "Surely you should issue 105, i.e. 100 to me and 5 to you to spend. This way there would be 105 in circulation, and the debt can be repaid."

Fabian listened quietly and finally said, "Financial economics is a deep subject, my boy, it takes years of study. Let me worry about these matters, and you look after yours. You must become more efficient, increase your production, cut down on your expenses and become a better businessman. I am always willing to help in these matters."

The man went away still unconvinced. There was something wrong with Fabian's operations and he felt that his questions had been avoided.

Yet, most people respected Fabian's word - "He is the expert, the others must be wrong. Look how the country has developed, how our production has increased - we must be better off."

To cover the interest on the money they had borrowed, merchants were forced to raise their prices. Wage earners complained that wages were too low. Employers refused to pay higher wages, claiming that they would be ruined. Farmers could not get a fair price for their produce. Housewives complained that food was getting too dear.

And finally some people went on strike, a thing previously unheard of. Others had become poverty stricken and their friends and relatives could not afford to help them. Most had forgotten the real wealth all around - the fertile soils, the great forests, the minerals and cattle. They could think only of the money which always seemed so scarce. But they never questioned the system. They believed the Government was running it.

A few had pooled their excess money and formed "lending" or "finance" companies. They could get 6% or more this way, which was better than the 3% Fabian paid, but they could only lend out money they owned - they did not have this strange power of being able to create money out of nothing by merely writing figures in books.

These finance companies worried Fabian and his friends somewhat, so they quickly set up a few companies of their own. Mostly, they bought the others out before they got going. In no time, all the finance companies were owned by them, or under their control.

The economic situation got worse. The wage earners were convinced that the bosses were making too much profit. The bosses said that their workers were too lazy and weren't doing an honest day's work, and everyone was blaming everyone else.The Governors could not come up with an answer and besides, the immediate problem seemed to be to help the poverty stricken.

They started up welfare schemes and made laws forcing people to contribute to them. This made many people angry - they believed in the old-fashioned idea of helping one's neighbour by voluntary effort.

"These laws are nothing more than legalised robbery. To take something off a person against his will, regardless of the purpose for which it is to be used, is no different from stealing."

But each man felt helpless and was afraid of the jail sentence which was threatened for failing to pay. These welfare schemes gave some relief, but before long the problem was back and more money was needed to cope. The cost of these schemes rose higher and higher and the size of the Government grew.

Most of the Governors were sincere men trying to do their best. They didn't like asking for more money from their people and finally, they had no choice but to borrow money from Fabian and his friends. They had no idea how they were going to repay. Parents could no longer afford to pay teachers for their children. They couldn't pay doctors. And transport operators were going out of business.

One by one the government was forced to take these operations over. Teachers, doctors and many others became public servants.

Few obtained satisfaction in their work. They were given a reasonable wage, but they lost their identity. They became small cogs in a giant machine.

There was no room for personal initiative, little recognition for effort, their income was fixed and advancement came only when a superior retired or died.

In desperation, the governors decided to seek Fabian's advice. They considered him very wise and he seemed to know how to solve money matters. He listened to them explain all their problems, and finally he answered, "Many people cannot solve their own problems - they need someone to do it for them. Surely you agree that most people have the right to be happy and to be provided with the essentials of life. One of our great sayings is "all men are equal" - is it not?"

Well, the only way to balance things up is to take the excess wealth from the rich and give it to the poor. Introduce a system of taxation. The more a man has, the more he must pay. Collect taxes from each person according to his ability, and give to each according to his need. Schools and hospitals should be free for those who cannot afford them …"

He gave them a long talk on high sounding ideals and finished up with, "Oh, by the way, don't forget you owe me money. You've been borrowing now for quite some time. The least I can do to help, is for you to just to pay me the interest. We'll leave the capital debt owing, just pay me the interest."

They went away, and without giving Fabian's philosophies any real thought, they introduced the graduated income tax - the more you earn, the higher your tax rate. No one liked this, but they either paid the taxes or went to jail.

Merchants were forced once again to raise their prices. Wage earners demanded higher wages forcing many employers out of business, or to replace men with machinery. This caused additional unemployment and forced the Government to introduce further welfare and handout schemes.

Tariffs and other protection devices were introduced to keep some industries going just to provide employment. A few people wondered if the purpose of the production was to produce goods or merely to provide employment.

As things got worse, they tried wage control, price control, and all sorts of controls. The Government tried to get more money through sales tax, payroll tax and all sorts of taxes. Someone noted that from the wheat farmer right through to the housewife, there were over 50 taxes on a loaf of bread.

"Experts" arose and some were elected to Government, but after each yearly meeting they came back with almost nothing achieved, except for the news that taxes were to be "restructured", but overall the total tax always increased.

Fabian began to demand his interest payments, and a larger and larger portion of the tax money was being needed to pay him.

Then came party politics - the people started arguing about which group of Governors could best solve the problems. They argued about personalities, idealism, party labels, everything except the real problem. The councils were getting into trouble.

In one town the interest on the debt exceeded the amount of rates which were collected in a year. Throughout the land the unpaid interest kept increasing - interest was charged on unpaid interest.

Gradually much of the real wealth of the country came to be owned or controlled by Fabian and his friends and with it came greater control over people. However, the control was not yet complete. They knew that the situation would not be secure until every person was controlled.

Most people opposing the systems could be silenced by financial pressure, or suffer public ridicule. To do this Fabian and his friends purchased most of the newspapers, T.V. and radio stations and he carefully selected people to operate them. Many of these people had a sincere desire to improve the world, but they never realised how they were being used. Their solutions always dealt with the effects of the problem, never the cause.

There were several different newspapers - one for the right wing, one for the left wing, one for the workers, one for the bosses, and so on. It didn't matter much which one you believed in, so long as you didn't think about the real problem.

Fabian's plan was almost at its completion - the whole country was in debt to him. Through education and the media, he had control of people's minds. They were able to think and believe only what he wanted them to.

After a man has far more money than he can possibly spend for pleasure, what is left to excite him? For those with a ruling class mentality, the answer is power - raw power over other human beings. The idealists were used in the media and in Government, but the real controllers that Fabian sought were those of the ruling class mentality.

Most of the goldsmiths had become this way. They knew the feeling of great wealth, but it no longer satisfied them. They needed challenge and excitement, and power over the masses was the ultimate game.

They believed they were superior to all others. "It is our right and duty to rule. The masses don't know what is good for them. They need to be rallied and organised. To rule is our birthright."

Throughout the land Fabian and his friends owned many lending offices. True, they were privately and separately owned. In theory they were in competition with each other, but in reality they were working very closely together. After persuading some of the Governors, they set up an institution which they called the Money Reserve Centre. They didn't even use their own money to do this - they created credit against part of the money out of the people's deposits.

This Institution gave the outward appearance of regulating the money supply and being a Government operation, but strangely enough, no Governor or public servant was ever allowed to be on the Board of Directors.

The Government no longer borrowed directly from Fabian, but began to use a system of I.O.U.'s to the Money Reserve Centre. The security offered was the estimated revenue from next year's taxes. This was in line with Fabian's plan - removing suspicion from himself to an apparent Government operation. Yet, behind the scenes, he was still in control.

Indirectly, Fabian had such control over the Government that they were forced to do his bidding. He boasted, "Let me control the nation's money and I care not who makes its laws." It didn't matter much which group of Governors were elected. Fabian was in control of the money, the life blood of the nation.

The Government obtained the money, but interest was always charged on every loan. More and more was going out in welfare and handout schemes, and it was not long before the Government found it difficult to even repay the interest, let alone the capital.

And yet there were people who still asked the question, "Money is a man-made system. Surely it can be adjusted to serve, not to rule?" But these people became fewer and their voices were lost in the mad scrabble for the non-existent interest.

The adminstrations changed, the party labels changed, but the major policies continued. Regardless of which Government was in "power", Fabian's ultimate goal was brought closer each year. The people's policies meant nothing. They were being taxed to the limit, they could pay no more. Now the time was ripe for Fabian's final move.

10% of the money supply was still in the form of notes and coins. This had to be abolished in such a way as not to arouse suspicion. While the people used cash, they were free to buy and sell as they chose - they still had some control over their own lives.

But it was not always safe to carry notes and coins. Checks were not accepted outside one's local community, and therefore a more convenient system was looked forward to. Once again Fabian had the answer. His organisation issued everyone with a little plastic card showing the person's name, photograph and an identification number.

When this card was presented anywhere, the storekeeper phoned the central computer to check the credit rating. If it was clear, the person could buy what he wanted up to a certain amount.

At first people were allowed to spend a small amount on credit, and if this was repaid within a month, no interest was charged. This was fine for the wage earner, but what businessman could even begin? He had to set up machinery, manufacture the goods, pay wages etc. and sell all his goods and repay the money. If he exceeded one month, he was charged a 1.5% for every month the debt was owed. This amounted to over 18% per year.

Businessmen had no option but to add the 18% onto the selling price. Yet this extra money or credit (the 18%) had not been loaned out to anyone. Throughout the country, businessmen were given the impossible task of repaying $118 for every $100 they borrowed - but the extra $18 had never been created at all.

Yet Fabian and his friends increased their standing in society. They were regarded as pillars of respectability. Their pronouncements on finance and economics were accepted with almost religious conviction.

Under the burden of ever increasing taxes, many small businesses collapsed. Special licenses were needed for various operations, so that the remaining ones found it very difficult to operate. Fabian owned and controlled all of the big companies which had hundreds of subsidiaries. These appeared to be in competition with each other, yet he controlled them all. Eventually all competitors were forced out of business. Plumbers, panel beaters, electricians and most other small industries suffered the same fate - they were swallowed up by Fabian's giant companies which all had Government protection.

Fabian wanted the plastic cards to eliminate notes and coins. His plan was that when all notes were withdrawn, only businesses using the computer card system would be able to operate.

He planned that eventually some people would misplace their cards and be unable to buy or sell anything until a proof of identify was made. He wanted a law to be passed which would give him ultimate control - a law forcing everyone to have their identification number tattooed onto their hand. The number would be visible only under a special light, linked to a computer. Every computer would be linked to a giant central computer so that Fabian could know everything about everyone.

________________________________________________________

By the way, the correct terminology used in the financial world for this system is "fractional reserve banking".

The story you have read is of course, fiction.

But if you found it to be disturbingly close to the truth and would like to know who Fabian is in real life, a good starting point is a study on the activities of the English goldsmiths in the 16th & 17th centuries.

For example, The Bank of England began in 1694. King William of Orange was in financial difficulties as a result of a war with France. The Goldsmiths "lent him" 1.2 million pounds (a staggering amount in those days) with certain conditions:
The interest rate was to be 8%. It must be remembered that Magna Carta stated that the charging or collecting of interest carried the death penalty.
The King was to grant the goldsmiths a charter for the bank which gave them the right to issue credit.

Prior to this, their operations of issuing receipts for more money than they held in deposits was totally illegal. The charter made it legal.

In 1694 William Patterson obtained the Charter for the Bank of England.

© Larry Hannigan 1971, Australia

www.wheylite.com.au

Feel free to make as many copies of this article, and to reproduce this article, SO LONG AS YOU ADD A LINK TO www.relfe.com

Quotations:

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th Edition - "Banks create credit. It is a mistake to suppose that bank credit is created to any extent by the payment of money into the banks. A loan made by a bank is a clear addition to the amount of money in the community."

Lord Acton, Lord Chief Justice of England, 1875 - "The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the People v. The Banks."

Mr Reginald McKenna, when Chairman of the Midland Bank in London - "I am afraid that ordinary citizens will not like to be told that the banks can, and do, create and destroy money. And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of governments, and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people.

Mr Phillip A. Benson, President of the American Bankers' Association, June 8 1939 - "There is no more direct way to capture control of a nation than through its credit (money) system."

USA Banker's Magazine, August 25 1924 - "Capital must protect itself in every possible manner by combination and legislation. Debts must be collected, bonds and mortgages must be foreclosed as rapidly as possible. When, through a process of law, the common people lose their homes they will become more docile and more easily governed through the influence of the strong arm of government, applied by a central power of wealth under control of leading financiers.

This truth is well known among our principal men now engaged in forming an imperialism of Capital to govern the world.

By dividing the voters through the political party system, we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance. Thus by discreet action we can secure for ourselves what has been so well planned and so successfully accomplished."

Sir Denison Miller - During an interview in 1921, when he was asked if he, through the Commonwealth Bank, had financed Australia during the First World War for $700 million, he replied; "Such was the case, and I could have financed the country for a further like sum had the war continued." Asked if that amount was available for productive purposes in this time of peace, he answered "Yes".

From "Hand Over Our Loot, No. 2, by Len Clampett:

"There are four things that must be available for paid work to take place:
The work to be done.
The materials to do the work.
The labor to do the work.
The money to pay for the work to be done.

If any of those four things are missing, no paid work can take place. It is a naturally self-regulating system. If there is work to be done, and the material is available and the labour willing, all we have to do is create the money. Quite simple."

"Ask yourself why it was that depressions happened. All that went missing from the community was the money to buy goods and services. The labour was still available. The work to be done was still there. The materials had not disappeared, and the goods were readily available in the shops, or could be produced but for the want of money.

Extract from a letter written by Rothschild Bros of London to a New York firm of bankers on 25 June 1863:

"The few who can understand the System (Cheque Money and Credits) will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favours, that there will be no opposition from that class. While on the other hand, the great body of people mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical (hostile, hurtful) to their interests.

The following quotation was reprinted in the Idaho Leader, USA, 26 August 1924, and has been read into Hansard twice: by John Evans MP, in 1926, and by M.D. Cowan M.P., in the Session of 1930-1931.

In 1891 a confidential circular was sent to American bankers and their agents, containing the following statements:

"We authorise our loan agents in the western States to loan our funds on real estate, to fall due on September 1st 1894, and at no time thereafter.

On September 1, 1894, we will not renew our loans under any consideration.

On September 1st we will demand our money - we will foreclose and become mortgagees in possession.

We can take two-thirds of the farms west of the Mississippi and thousands of them east of the great Mississippi as well, at our own price.

We may as well own three-fourths of the farms of the west and the money of the country.

Then the farmers will become tenants, as in England."

From "Hand Over Our Loot, No. 2"

In the United States, the issuing of money is controlled by the Federal Reserve Board. This is not a government department but a board of private bankers.Most of us would believe that the Federal Reserve is a federal arm of the national government….This is not true…In 1913 President Woodrow Wilson signed the document that created the Federal Reserve, and committed the American people to debt slavery until such time as they awake from their slumber and overthrow this vicious tyranny."…

"The understanding of this issue of money into the community can be best illustrated by equating money in the economy with tickets in a railway system. The tickets are printed by a printer who is paid for his work. The printer never claims the ownership of the tickets … And we can never imagine a railway company refusing to give passengers seats on a train because it is out of tickets. By this same token, a government should never refuse people the access to normal commerce and trade by claiming it is out of money."

Suppose the government borrows $10 million. It only costs the bankers a few hundred dollars to actually produce the funds, and a little more to do the book-keeping. Do you think it is fair that our citizens should struggle to keep their homes and families together, while the bankers grow fat on these profits?

Credit created by a Government-owned bank is better than credit created by private banks, because there is no need to recover the money from people by way of taxes, and there is no interest attached to inflate the cost. The public work completed with the credit by the Government bank is the asset that replaces the money created when the work is finished.

None of our problems will disappear until we correct the creation, supply and circulation of money. Once the money problem is solved, everything else will fall into place.

Each of us can help to turn this ship around:
The first thing is to teach people. VERY FEW know about or understand this information yet. Please pass this information on to those on and off the net.
Research this subject for yourself to increase your understanding.
Join with others who want to return the control of government to the people. Remember - they are 'public SERVANTS'! We are not their servant. They should do OUR bidding.
Regardless of your political leanings, encourage your local Member to investigate and correct our money system. (They probably need to be educated too!). You can do this by email, letter, telephone or personal discussion.
Legislators receive an average of only 100 letters on any given issue. So if you write you opinion and get others to write, say 25 letters, you send a strong message. (Have a letter writing evening).

FURTHER INFORMATION

A Phone Call to the Fed www.rense.com/general29/ringring.htm

Nesara: The National Economic Stabilization and Recovery Act
A Practical Solution to America’s Problems
The original site is at www.nesara.us
There is also another, different site at www.nesara.com

"Nesara, The Phillippine-Austrian Gold and the Fed". Some good news: Some of the big boys up the top are good guys. http://www.rumormillnews.net/cgi-bin/config.pl?read=22472

Money Game - The Greatest Scam Ever:
Excerpt from the book "Knowledge without Wisdom" by Paul Bond.

Billions for the Bankers www.mtl.clubplus.net/ ~clinique/bankers.htm

Liberty Australia: Banks & Money www.alphalink.com.au/~noelmcd

The Money Masters www.themoneymasters.com

FAME-Foundation for the Adancement of Monetary Education www.FAME.org

Rothschild Wealth & Influence www.mega.nu:8080/ampp/rothschild2.html#metatop

www.prolognet.qc.ca/clyde/money.htm

www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/1234/spooner.html

From Moses to Rothschild www.reformation.org/moneychangers.html

WANTED!!! Help your country! Volunteers wanted to translate this page!!! If you are willing and able to translate this page into another language, please email Stephanie Relfe at Stephanie@relfe.c

http://www.relfe.com/plus_5_.html

Flamboyant anthropologist falsified dating of key discoveries

2005-02-20T22:13:00.000+01:00

History of modern man unravels as German scholar is exposed as fraud

Flamboyant anthropologist falsified dating of key discoveries

Luke Harding in Berlin
Saturday February 19, 2005
The Guardian

It appeared to be one of archaeology's most sensational finds. The skull fragment discovered in a peat bog near Hamburg was more than 36,000 years old - and was the vital missing link between modern humans and Neanderthals.

This, at least, is what Professor Reiner Protsch von Zieten - a distinguished, cigar-smoking German anthropologist - told his scientific colleagues, to global acclaim, after being invited to date the extremely rare skull.

However, the professor's 30-year-old academic career has now ended in disgrace after the revelation that he systematically falsified the dates on this and numerous other "stone age" relics.

Yesterday his university in Frankfurt announced the professor had been forced to retire because of numerous "falsehoods and manipulations". According to experts, his deceptions may mean an entire tranche of the history of man's development will have to be rewritten.

"Anthropology is going to have to completely revise its picture of modern man between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago," said Thomas Terberger, the archaeologist who discovered the hoax. "Prof Protsch's work appeared to prove that anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals had co-existed, and perhaps even had children together. This now appears to be rubbish."

The scandal only came to light when Prof Protsch was caught trying to sell his department's entire chimpanzee skull collection to the United States.

An inquiry later established that he had also passed off fake fossils as real ones and had plagiarised other scientists' work.

His discovery appeared to show that Neanderthals had spread much further north than was previously known.

But his university inquiry was told that a crucial Hamburg skull fragment, which was believed to have come from the world's oldest German, a Neanderthal known as Hahnhöfersand Man, was actually a mere 7,500 years old, according to Oxford University's radiocarbon dating unit. The unit established that other skulls had been wrongly dated too.
Another of the professor's sensational finds, "Binshof-Speyer" woman, lived in 1,300 BC and not 21,300 years ago, as he had claimed, while "Paderborn-Sande man" (dated at 27,400 BC) only died a couple of hundred years ago, in 1750.

"It's deeply embarrassing. Of course the university feels very bad about this," Professor Ulrich Brandt, who led the investigation into Prof Protsch's activities, said yesterday. "Prof Protsch refused to meet us. But we had 10 sittings with 12 witnesses.

"Their stories about him were increasingly bizarre. After a while it was hard to take it seriously. You had to laugh. It was just unbelievable. At the end of the day what he did was incredible."

During their investigation, the university discovered that Prof Protsch, 65, a flamboyant figure with a fondness for gold watches, Porsches and Cuban cigars, was unable to work his own carbon-dating machine.

Instead, after returning from Germany to America, where he did his doctorate, and taking up a professorship, he had simply made things up.

In one case he had claimed that a 50 million-year-old "half-ape" called Adapis had been found in Switzerland, an archaeological sensation. In reality, the ape had been dug up in France, where several other examples had already been found.

Prof Terberger said that he grew suspicious about the professor's work in 2001 after sending off the skull fragment to Oxford for tests.

Further tests revealed that all of the skulls dated by Prof Protsch were in reality far younger than he had claimed, prompting Prof Terberger and a British colleague, Martin Street, to write a scientific paper last year.

At the same time, German police began investigating the professor for fraud, following allegations that he had tried to sell the university's 278 chimpanzee skulls for $70,000 to a US dealer.

Why, though, had he done it?

"If you find a skull that's more than 30,000 years old it's a sensation. If you find three of them people notice you. It's good for your career," Prof Terberger said. "At the end of the day it was about ambition."

Other details of the professor's life also appeared to crumble under scrutiny. Before he disappeared from the university's campus last year, Prof Protsch told his students he had examined Hitler's and Eva Braun's bones.

He also boasted of having flats in New York, Florida and California, where, he claimed, he hung out with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Steffi Graf. Even the professor's aristocratic title, "von Zieten", appears to be bogus.

Far from being the descendant of a dashing general in the hussars, the professor was the son of a Nazi MP, Wilhelm Protsch, Der Spiegel magazine revealed last October.

The university is investigating how thousands of documents lodged in the anthropology department relating to the Nazis' gruesome scientific experiments in the 1930s were mysteriously shredded, allegedly under the professor's instructions.

They also discovered that some of the 12,000 skeletons stored in the department's "bone cellar" were missing their heads, apparently sold to friends of the professor in the US and sympathetic dentists.

Yesterday the university admitted that it should have discovered the professor's fabrications far earlier. But it pointed out that, like all public servants in Germany, the high-profile anthropologist was virtually impossible to sack, and had also proved difficult to pin down.

"He was perfect at being evasive," Prof Brandt said yesterday. "He would switch from saying 'it isn't really clear' to giving diffuse statements.

"I'm not a psychologist so I can't say why he did it. But my guess is that when he came back from the States 30 years ago he realised he wasn't up to the job of being a professor. So he started inventing things. It rapidly became a habit.'

Yesterday the professor, who lives in Mainz with his wife Angelina, didn't respond to emails from the Guardian asking him to comment on the affair. But in earlier remarks to Der Spiegel he insisted that he was the victim of an "intrigue".

"All the disputed fossils are my personal property," he told the magazine.

Missing links and planted stone age finds

Piltdown Man
The most infamous of all scientific frauds was unearthed in 1912 in a Sussex gravel pit. With its huge human-like braincase and ape-like jaw, the Piltdown Man "fossil" was named Eoanthropus dawsoni after Charles Dawson, the solicitor and amateur archaeologist who discovered it. For 40 years Piltdown Man was heralded as the missing link between humans and their primate ancestors. But in 1953 scientists concluded it was a forgery. Radiocarbon dating showed the human skull was just 600 years old, while the jawbone was that of an orang-utan. The entire package of fossil fragments found at Piltdown - which included a prehistoric cricket bat - had been planted.

The devil's archaeologist
Japanese archaeologist Shinichi Fujimura was so prolific at uncovering prehistoric artefacts he earned the nickname "God's hands". At site after site, Fujimura discovered stoneware and relics that pushed back the limits of Japan's known history. The researcher and his stone age finds drew international attention and rewrote text books. In November 2000 the spell was broken when a newspaper printed pictures of Fujimura digging holes and burying objects that he later dug up and announced as major finds. "I was tempted by the devil. I don't know how I can apologise for what I did," he said.

Piltdown Turkey
The supposed fossil of Archaeoraptor, which was to become known as the "Piltdown turkey", came to light in 1999 when National Geographic magazine published an account of its discovery. It seemed to show another missing link - this time between birds and dinosaurs. Archaeoraptor appeared to be the remains of a large feathered bird with the tail of a dinosaur. The fossil was smuggled out of China and sold to a private collector in the US for £51,000. Experts were suspicious and closer examination showed the specimen to be a "composite" - two fossils stuck together with strong glue.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/germany/article/0,2763,1418083,00.html

Sword Play - The Strategy of Tension

2005-02-20T12:10:00.000+01:00

Global Eye - Sword Play By Chris Floyd Published: February 18, 2005

'You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple: to force ... the public to turn to the state to ask for greater security."

This was the essence of Operation Gladio, a decades-long covert campaign of terrorism and deceit directed by the intelligence services of the West against their own populations. Hundreds of innocent people were killed or maimed in terrorist attacks -- on train stations, supermarkets, cafes and offices -- which were then blamed on "leftist subversives" or other political opponents. The purpose, as stated above in sworn testimony by Gladio agent Vincenzo Vinciguerra, was to demonize designated enemies and frighten the public into supporting ever-increasing powers for government leaders -- and their elitist cronies.

First revealed by Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti in 1991, Gladio (from the Latin for "sword") is still protected to this day by its founding patrons, the CIA and MI6. Yet parliamentary investigations in Italy, Switzerland and Belgium have shaken out a few fragments of the truth over the years. These have been gathered in a new book, "NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe," by Daniele Ganser, as Lila Rajiva reports on CommonDreams.org.

Originally set up as a network of clandestine cells to be activated behind the lines in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, Gladio quickly expanded into a tool for political repression and manipulation, directed by NATO and Washington. Using right-wing militias, underworld figures, government provocateurs and secret military units, Gladio not only carried out widespread terrorism, assassinations and electoral subversion in democratic states such as Italy, France and West Germany, but also bolstered fascist tyrannies in Spain and Portugal, abetted the military coup in Greece and aided Turkey's repression of the Kurds.

Among the "smoking guns" unearthed by Ganser is a Pentagon document, Field Manual FM 30-31B, which details the methodology for launching terrorist attacks in nations that "do not react with sufficient effectiveness" against "communist subversion." Ironically, the manual states that the most dangerous moment comes when leftist groups "renounce the use of force" and embrace the democratic process. It is then that "U.S. army intelligence must have the means of launching special operations which will convince Host Country Governments and public opinion of the reality of the insurgent danger." Naturally, these peace-throttling "special operations must remain strictly secret," the document warns.

Indeed, it would not do for the families of the 85 people ripped apart by the Aug. 2, 1980 bombing of the Bologna train station to know that their loved ones had been murdered by "men inside Italian state institutions and ... men linked to the structures of United States intelligence," as the Italian Senate concluded after its investigation in 2000.
The Bologna atrocity is an example of what Gladio's masters called "the strategy of tension" -- fomenting fear to keep populations in thrall to "strong leaders" who will protect the nation from the ever-present terrorist threat. And as Rajiva notes, this strategy wasn't limited to Western Europe. It was applied, with gruesome effectiveness, in Central America by the Reagan and Bush administrations. During the 1980s, right-wing death squads, guerrilla armies and state security forces -- armed, trained and supplied by the United States -- murdered tens of thousands of people throughout the region, often acting with particular savagery at those times when peaceful solutions to the conflicts seemed about to take hold.

Last month, it was widely reported that the Pentagon is considering a similar program in Iraq. What was not reported, however -- except in the Iraqi press -- is that at least one pro-occupation death squad is already in operation. Just days after the Pentagon plans were revealed, a new militant group, "Saraya Iraqna," began offering big wads of American cash for insurgent scalps -- up to $50,000, the Iraqi paper Al Ittihad reports. "Our activity will not be selective," the group promised. In other words, anyone they consider an enemy of the state will be fair game.

Strangely enough, just as it appears that the Pentagon is establishing Gladio-style operations in Iraq, there has been a sudden rash of terrorist attacks on outrageously provocative civilian targets, such as hospitals and schools, the Guardian reports. Coming just after national elections in which the majority faction supported slates calling for a speedy end to the American occupation, the shift toward high-profile civilian slaughter has underscored the "urgent need" for U.S. forces to remain on the scene indefinitely, to provide security against the ever-present terrorist threat. Meanwhile, the Bushists continue constructing their long-sought permanent bases in Iraq: citadels to protect the oil that incoming Iraqi officials are promising to sell off to American corporations -- and launching pads for new forays in geopolitical domination.

Perhaps it's just a coincidence. But the U.S. elite's history of directing and fomenting terrorist attacks against friendly populations is so extensive -- indeed, so ingrained and accepted -- that it calls into question the origin of every terrorist act that roils the world. With each fresh atrocity, we're forced to ask: Was it the work of "genuine" terrorists or a "black op" by intelligence agencies -- or both?

While not infallible, the ancient Latin question is still the best guide to penetrating the bloody murk of modern terrorism: Cui bono? Who benefits? Whose powers and policies are enhanced by the attack? For it is indisputable that the "strategy of tension" means power and profit for those who claim to possess the key to "security." And from the halls of the Kremlin to the banks of the Potomac, this cynical strategy is the ruling ideology of our times

http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2005/02/18/120.html

Regarding the "terrorist acts" in Italy linked initialy to the extreme left organizations, an official document stated in 1981 that 67.55% were from extreme right organizations, 26.5% from extreme left organizations, and 5.95 % from other organizations.

[Source: http://www.reseauvoltaire.net/article12840.html (French)]

Regaining My Humanity - "Behind these bars I sit a free man because I listened to a higher power, the voice of my conscience".

2005-02-18T23:38:00.000+01:00

Regaining My Humanity

I was deployed to Iraq in April 2003 and returned home for a two-week leave in October. Going home gave me the opportunity to put my thoughts in order and to listen to what my conscience had to say. People would ask me about my war experiences and answering them took me back to all the horrors—the firefights, the ambushes, the time I saw a young Iraqi dragged by his shoulders through a pool of his own blood or an innocent man was decapitated by our machine gun fire. The time I saw a soldier broken down inside because he killed a child, or an old man on his knees, crying with his arms raised to the sky, perhaps asking God why we had taken the lifeless body of his son.

I thought of the suffering of a people whose country was in ruins and who were further humiliated by the raids, patrols and curfews of an occupying army.

And I realized that none of the reasons we were told about why we were in Iraq turned out to be true. There were no weapons of mass destruction. There was no link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. We weren’t helping the Iraqi people and the Iraqi people didn’t want us there. We weren’t preventing terrorism or making Americans safer. I couldn’t find a single good reason for having been there, for having shot at people and been shot at.

Coming home gave me the clarity to see the line between military duty and moral obligation. I realized that I was part of a war that I believed was immoral and criminal, a war of aggression, a war of imperial domination. I realized that acting upon my principles became incompatible with my role in the military, and I decided that I could not return to Iraq.

By putting my weapon down, I chose to reassert myself as a human being. I have not deserted the military or been disloyal to the men and women of the military. I have not been disloyal to a country. I have only been loyal to my principles.

When I turned myself in, with all my fears and doubts, it did it not only for myself. I did it for the people of Iraq, even for those who fired upon me—they were just on the other side of a battleground where war itself was the only enemy. I did it for the Iraqi children, who are victims of mines and depleted uranium. I did it for the thousands of unknown civilians killed in war. My time in prison is a small price compared to the price Iraqis and Americans have paid with their lives. Mine is a small price compared to the price Humanity has paid for war.

Many have called me a coward, others have called me a hero. I believe I can be found somewhere in the middle. To those who have called me a hero, I say that I don’t believe in heroes, but I believe that ordinary people can do extraordinary things.

To those who have called me a coward I say that they are wrong, and that without knowing it, they are also right. They are wrong when they think that I left the war for fear of being killed. I admit that fear was there, but there was also the fear of killing innocent people, the fear of putting myself in a position where to survive means to kill, there was the fear of losing my soul in the process of saving my body, the fear of losing myself to my daughter, to the people who love me, to the man I used to be, the man I wanted to be. I was afraid of waking up one morning to realize my humanity had abandoned me.

I say without any pride that I did my job as a soldier. I commanded an infantry squad in combat and we never failed to accomplish our mission. But those who called me a coward, without knowing it, are also right. I was a coward not for leaving the war, but for having been a part of it in the first place. Refusing and resisting this war was my moral duty, a moral duty that called me to take a principled action. I failed to fulfill my moral duty as a human being and instead I chose to fulfill my duty as a soldier. All because I was afraid. I was terrified, I did not want to stand up to the government and the army, I was afraid of punishment and humiliation. I went to war because at the moment I was a coward, and for that I apologize to my soldiers for not being the type of leader I should have been.

I also apologize to the Iraqi people. To them I say I am sorry for the curfews, for the raids, for the killings. May they find it in their hearts to forgive me.

One of the reasons I did not refuse the war from the beginning was that I was afraid of losing my freedom. Today, as I sit behind bars I realize that there are many types of freedom, and that in spite of my confinement I remain free in many important ways. What good is freedom if we are afraid to follow our conscience? What good is freedom if we are not able to live with our own actions? I am confined to a prison but I feel, today more than ever, connected to all humanity. Behind these bars I sit a free man because I listened to a higher power, the voice of my conscience.

http://freecamilo.org/words.htm

Iraqi whose corpse was photographed with grinning U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib died under CIA interrogation

2005-02-18T23:16:00.000+01:00

Iraqi Died While Hung From Wrists

Thu Feb 17, 3:58 PM ET

SAN DIEGO - An Iraqi whose corpse was photographed with grinning U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib died under CIA interrogation while in a position condemned by human rights groups as torture — suspended by his wrists, with his hands cuffed behind his back, according to reports reviewed by The Associated Press.

The death of the prisoner, Manadel al-Jamadi, became known last year when the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke. The U.S. military said back then that the death had been ruled a homicide. But the exact circumstances under which the man died were not disclosed at the time.

The prisoner died in a position known as "Palestinian hanging," the documents reviewed by The AP show. It is unclear whether that position was approved by the Bush administration for use in CIA interrogations.

The spy agency, which faces congressional scrutiny over its detention and interrogation of terror suspects at the Baghdad prison and elsewhere, declined to comment for this story, as did the Justice Department.

Al-Jamadi was one of the CIA's "ghost" detainees at Abu Ghraib — prisoners being held secretly by the agency.

His death in November 2003 became public with the release of photos of Abu Ghraib guards giving a thumbs-up over his bruised and puffy-faced corpse, which had been packed in ice. One of those guards was Pvt. Charles Graner, who last month received 10 years in a military prison for abusing detainees.

Al-Jamadi died in a prison shower room during about a half-hour of questioning, before interrogators could extract any information, according to the documents, which consist of statements from Army prison guards to investigators with the military and the CIA's Inspector General's office.

One Army guard, Sgt. Jeffery Frost, said the prisoner's arms were stretched behind him in a way he had never before seen. Frost told investigators he was surprised al-Jamadi's arms "didn't pop out of their sockets," according to a summary of his interview.

Frost and other guards had been summoned to reposition al-Jamadi, who an interrogator said was not cooperating. As the guards released the shackles and lowered al-Jamadi, blood gushed from his mouth "as if a faucet had been turned on," according to the interview summary.

The military pathologist who ruled the case a homicide found several broken ribs and concluded al-Jamadi died from pressure to the chest and difficulty breathing.

Dr. Michael Baden, a distinguished civilian pathologist who reviewed the autopsy for a defense attorney in the case, agreed in an interview that the position in which al-Jamadi was suspended could have contributed to his death.

Dr. Vincent Iacopino, director of research for Physicians for Human Rights, called the hyper-extension of the arms behind the back "clear and simple torture." The European Court of Human Rights found Turkey guilty of torture in 1996 in a case of Palestinian hanging — a technique Iacopino said is used worldwide but named for its alleged use by Israel in the Palestinian territories.

The Washington Post reported last year that after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, the CIA suspended the use of its "enhanced interrogation techniques," including stress positions, because of fears that the agency could be accused of unsanctioned and illegal activity. The newspaper said the White House had approved the tactics.

Navy SEALs apprehended al-Jamadi as a suspect in the Oct. 27, 2003, bombing of Red Cross offices in Baghdad that killed 12 people. His alleged role in the bombing is unclear. According to court documents and testimony, the SEALs punched, kicked and struck al-Jamadi with their rifles before handing him over to the CIA early on Nov. 4. By 7 a.m., al-Jamadi was dead.

Navy prosecutors in San Diego have charged nine SEALs and one sailor with abusing al-Jamadi and others. All but two lieutenants have received nonjudicial punishment; one lieutenant is scheduled for court-martial in March, the other is awaiting a hearing before the Navy's top SEAL.

The statements from five of Abu Ghraib's Army guards were shown to The AP by an attorney for one of the SEALs, who said they offered a more balanced picture of what happened. The lawyer asked not to be identified, saying he feared repercussions for his client.

According to the statements:

Al-Jamadi was brought naked below the waist to the prison with a CIA interrogator and translator. A green plastic bag covered his head, and plastic cuffs tightly bound his wrists. Guards dressed al-Jamadi in an orange jumpsuit, slapped on metal handcuffs and escorted him to the shower room, a common CIA interrogation spot.

There, the interrogator instructed guards to attach shackles from the prisoner's handcuffs to a barred window. That would let al-Jamadi stand without pain, but if he tried to lower himself, his arms would be stretched above and behind him.

The documents do not make clear what happened after guards left. After about a half-hour, the interrogator called for the guards to reposition the prisoner, who was slouching with his arms stretched behind him.

The interrogator told guards that al-Jamadi was "playing possum" — faking it — and then watched as guards struggled to get him on his feet. But the guards realized it was useless.

"After we found out he was dead, they were nervous," Spc. Dennis E. Stevanus said of the CIA interrogator and translator. "They didn't know what the hell to do."

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050217/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/iraqi_prisoner_s_death

British plant missing 30 kilograms of plutonium

2005-02-18T21:30:00.000+01:00

British plant missing 30 kilograms of plutonium

A British nuclear-reprocessing plant cannot account for nearly 30 kilograms of plutonium, but authorities believe it is an accounting issue rather than a loss of potential bomb-making material, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority said Thursday.

The amount of material listed as missing at the Sellafield plant in northwestern England was “within international standards of expected measurement accuracies for closing a nuclear material balance at the type of facility concerned,” the authority said.

There is no evidence to suggest that any of the apparent losses reported were real losses of nuclear material,” the authority added.

In 2003, the processing plant reported it could not account for 19 kilograms of plutonium. The plant said that was consistent with figures published since the 1970s.

Plutonium accounts for 1 per cent of the nuclear material handled at Sellafield, the rest is uranium.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20050217.wplut0217/BNStory/Front

Victor's justice: The Laconia incident

2005-02-17T12:08:00.000+01:00

The Laconia incident was an event in World War II that profoundly affected the operations of the German U-boat fleet and caused the conviction, four years later, of Admiral Karl Dönitz of war crimes.

At 10 p.m. on September 12, 1942, U-156 was patrolling off the coast of West Africa midway between Liberia and Ascension Island. The submarines's commanding officer, Kapitänleutnant Werner Hartenstein, spotted a large British ocean liner sailing alone and attacked.

At 10:22 p.m. the liner, sailing under the name Laconia, transmitted the following message on the 600-meter band
SSS SSS 0434 South / 1125 West Laconia torpeded

As the ship began to sink, Hartenstein surfaced, hoping to capture the ship's senior officers, and was appalled to see over two thousand people struggling in the water. The 20,000-ton Laconia was carrying not only her regular crew of 136 but also some 80 civilians, military material and 268 British soldiers, and about 1800 Italian prisoners of war with 160 Polish soldiers on guard.

Hartenstein immediately began rescue operations. Laconia sank at 11:23pm. At 1:25am September 13 Hartenstein sent a coded radio message to Befehlshaber der Unterseeboote (Commander-in-Chief for Submarines) alerting them to the situation. It read:

Versenkt von Hartenstein Brite "Laconia". Marinequadrat FF 7721 310 Grad. Leider mit 1500 italienischen Kriegsgefangenen. Bisher 90 gefischt. 157 cbm. 19 Aale, Passat 3, erbitte Befehle.

Sunk Hartenstein British "Laconia". Grid FF 7721 310 degrees. Unfortunately with 1500 Italian POWs. So far 90 fished. 157 cubic meters (of oil). 19 eels (slang for torpedoes), trade wind 3, request orders.

Head of submarine operations, Admiral Dönitz immediately ordered two other U-boats to divert to the scene. Soon U-156 was crammed above and below decks with nearly two hundred survivors including five women, and had another 200 in tow aboard four lifeboats. At 6am on September 13 Hartenstein broadcast a message on the 25-meter band in plain English to all shipping in the area giving his position, requesting assistance with the rescue effort and promising not to attack.

It read:
If any ship will assist the ship-wrecked "Laconia" crew, I will not attack providing I am not being attacked by ship or air forces. I picked up 193 men. 4, 53 South, 11, 26 West. --German submarine.

U-156 remained on the surface at the scene for the next two and a half days. At 11:30am on September 15, she was joined by U-506 commanded by Kptlt. Erich Würdeman and a few hours later by both U-507 under Korvettenkapitän Harro Schacht and the Italian submarine Cappellini. The four submarines with lifeboats in tow and hundreds of survivors standing on the hulls headed towards the African coastline and a rendezvous with Vichy French surface warships which had set out from Senegal and Dahomey.

The next morning, September 16, at 11:25am, the four submarines, with Red Cross flags draped across their gun decks, were spotted by an American B-24 Liberator bomber from Ascension Island. Hartenstein signalled to the pilot requesting assistance. Lieutenant James D. Harden of the U.S. Army Air Force turned away and notified his base of the situation. The senior officer on duty that day, Captain Robert C. Richardson III, replied with the order "Sink sub."

Harden flew back to the scene of the rescue effort and at 12:32pm attacked with bombs and depth charges. One landed among the lifeboats in tow behind U-156 while others straddled the submarine itself. Hartenstein cast adrift those lifeboats still afloat and ordered the survivors on his deck into the water. The submarines dived and escaped. Many hundreds of the Laconia survivors perished, but Vichy vessels managed to re-rescue about a thousand later that day. In all, some 1500 passengers survived. An English seaman, Tony Large, endured forty days adrift in an open life boat before he was finally picked up.

The Laconia incident had far-reaching consequences. Until then it was common for U-boats to assist torpedoed survivors with food, water and directions to the nearest land. Now that it was apparent that the Americans would attack rescue missions under the Red Cross flag, Dönitz ordered that rescues were prohibited; survivors were to be left in the sea.

Dönitz's "Laconia order" convicted him of war crimes at Nuremberg in 1946 despite Admiral Chester Nimitz's testimony that American submarines in the Pacific operated under the same instructions.

Dönitz was sentenced to 11 years 6 months in prison; he served just over 10 years in Spandau Prison, West Berlin.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconia_incident

Uranium Skies: What Was Aboard Flight 1862?

2005-02-17T10:23:00.000+01:00

Uranium Skies: What Was Aboard Flight 1862?

Winter '99/2000 Vol. 14, No. 4 by Gar Smith

Plane crash in Holland exposes a global health threat

Within minutes of clearing the runway at Amsterdam's Schi-phol airport at 6:25 PM, October 4, 1992, El Al flight LY1862 was in trouble. Engine #3 was not only on fire, it had broken free of the wing and taken engine #4 along with it. Ten minutes later, Captain Yitzhak Fuchs radioed his last message: "Going down, going down."

The 400-ton Boeing 747-200 careened into a block of 12-story tenements in Bijl-mer, on the outskirts of Amsterdam, killing all three crew, an unidentified "nonrevenue passenger," and at least 43 people on the ground. The exact number of deaths remains unknown, since many of the incinerated victims were undocumented immigrants.

Seán MacCárthaigh, an Irish Times reporter who arrived shortly after the crash, described the scene: "The El Al plane had scythed through the top five stories of two buildings; about 40 flats took a direct hit. Then a huge fireball rolled through the complex and apartment after apartment popped into flames.... A giant cloud of choking white smoke engulfed the area."

Seven years later, the exact chemical composition of that choking white cloud remains a mystery. Since the crash, 850 Bijlmer survivors - residents, police and rescue workers - have sought treatment for a host of maladies including fatigue, breathing problems, hair loss, neurological ailments, mental confusion, depression, encephalomyelitis and disabling joint pains. They ascribe their ills to the crash.

As rescue crews rushed to the crash scene that night, El Al, Israeli and Dutch officials rushed to assure the public that the doomed flight carried nothing but "perfume and gift articles." El Al insisted that the plane carried "a regular commercial load." As late as April 22, 1998, Israeli Transport Minister Shaul Yahalom maintained that there were "no dangerous material on that plane. Israel has nothing to hide."

The denials collapsed on October 4, 1998, when the Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad printed a leaked copy of a page from the plane's cargo manifest. According to the previously secret freight document, Flight 1862 was hauling 10 tons of chemicals, including hydrofluoric acid, isopro-panol and dimethyl methylphosphonate (DMMP) - three of the four chemicals used in the production of sarin nerve gas.

The DMMP had been supplied by Solkatronic Chemicals Inc. of Morrisville, Pennsylvania. The shipment was destined for the Israeli Institute for Biological Research (IIBR) in Nes Ziona, outside of Tel Aviv.

While the export of DMMP is strictly controlled by the US government, the US Department of Commerce had no problem granting Solkatronic's license to ship DMMP. (In fact, after the initial shipment was consumed in the flames of the Bijlmer crash, the Commerce Department quickly authorized a replacement shipment.)

Mouin Rabbani, writing in Middle East International, describes the IIBR as "the Israeli military and intelligence community's front organization for the development, testing and production of chemical and biological weapons. It was IIBR that provided the poison (and the antidote) used in the attempted assassination of a Hamas leader in Jordan in 1998."

On October 4, 1998, a former IIBR biologist told the London Sunday Times: "There is hardly a single known or unknown form of chemical or biological weapon... which is not manufactured at the institute." The IIBR is so secretive that it does not appear on any maps and is off-limits even to members of the Knesset, Israel's Parliament.

Israel maintains that the chemicals were to be used to test gas masks but this explanation is puzzling since it only takes a few grams to conduct such tests. Once combined, the chemicals aboard Flight 1862 could have produced 270 kilos of sarin - sufficient to kill the entire population of a major world city.

Pressing the Question
The Dutch dailies pursued the Bijl-mer story with a vengeance. Vincent Dekker, a reporter for De Trouw, interviewed dozens of Amsterdam police officers who claimed that they had been assisted by rescue specialists who arrived in cars bearing French license plates. But France never sent any rescue crews. Dekker noted that Israel's secret service, the Mossad, maintains an office in Paris. Mossad denied involvement.

There were 126 tons of freight aboard the doomed flight but El Al refused to supply information on 6 tons of "military" cargo. Schiphol cargo handlers told reporters that the plane had been loaded with seven pallets of "unspecified munitions."

Recent disclosures revealed that the disaster could have been much worse: Among some 83 tons of cargo off-loaded at Schiphol was a shipment of "oil industry" explosives.

The Dutch press raised a host of vexing questions: Why were the 12 hours of videotape made during the rescue and clean-up operation (42 cassettes in all) erased and shredded? Why were police audiotapes also run through the shredder? What happened to seized El Al documents that subsequently disappeared? Why had the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) mysteriously disappeared?

In January 1996, the US-based Flight Safety Foundation concluded that "the possibility has to be considered seriously that the CVR was stolen from the area."

Not-so-Depleted Uranium
In the months following the crash, the Dutch citizens' group Onderzoeksgrep Vliegramp Bijlmermeer revealed that, "in addition to the cocktail of toxic chemicals that came free during the disaster," traces of uranium, zirconium and lanthanum had turned up in soil samples taken from the crash site. More alarmingly, the OVB found traces of uranium in feces samples taken from survivors.

One year after the crash, the Laka Foundation, an independent Dutch nuclear research group, revealed that the El Al jet - like all Boeing 747s - carried 1,500 kg of depleted uranium (DU) onboard in the form of cadmium-clad counterweights hidden in the aircraft's tail fins, horizontal stabilizers and wings.

Depleted uranium is an extremely dense metallic by-product of the production of U235, the fissionable uranium isotope used to manufacture nuclear weapons and fuel. Despite its name, DU contains residual amounts of radioactive U235, along with less radioactive U238 and trace amounts of U236.

The journal of the American Society for Metals explains that DU counterweights "are used in the aerodynamic controls of planes, rockets and helicopters to maintain the aircraft's center of gravity... in many civil and military aircraft."

"For many years," reads a December 20, 1984 Boeing document uncovered by Dutch investigators, "aircraft manufacturers have used 'depleted' uranium to balance ailerons, rudders, and elevators on certain jet aircraft and rotor blades on certain helicopters."

The document acknowledges that swallowing or breathing DU dust can cause "a significant and long-lasting irradiation of internal tissue." DU has been implicated as a cause of Gulf War Symptom - a series of physical and mental debilities remarkably similar to the symptoms reported by the Bijlmer survivors.

DU counterweights are manufactured by Nuclear Metals, Inc. Nuclear Metals (which became the Starmet Corporation in 1997) claims to be "one of the leading suppliers of low-cost DU ammunition for US government weapons systems" and boasts that it maintains "the only FAA approved facility for the repair and refurbishing of DU aircraft counterweights." (Starmet's facility in West Concord, Pennsylvania is a toxic superfund site involved in a $6.5 million effort to remove 28 years worth of radioactive sludge containing 175 tons of DU.)

While DU does not burn readily, Starmet admits that its wing and tail-fin counterweights could "oxidize rapidly in a long-lasting fire" at temperatures above 500 C.

Batelle Laboratory experiments have shown that DU begins to oxidize at temperatures as low as 350 C. Above temperatures of 700 C, DU begins to burn on its own. Batelle estimated that an hour-long fire could vaporize from 4 to 20 percent of the DU and that, with the kind of "heavy turbulence" associated with larger fires, incineration losses could reach 30 percent. The kerosene-fueled inferno at Bijlmer reached temperatures around 1100-1400 C.

In an article in Nature, physicist Robert L. Parker estimated that a worst-case 747 crash could expose 250,000 people to health risks from inhaling uranium oxide particles.

When a long-awaited Dutch government report assured the public that the counterweights had remained intact and never posed a threat to health, the Laka Foundation went public with its findings that only 163 kg of the 430 kg of depleted uranium aboard the downed 747 had been recovered. Laka's stunning disclosure helped to trigger the demand for a full Dutch Parliamentary inquiry.

The Bijlmer Hearings
The Bijlmer hearings were chaired by Christian Democratic opposition deputy Theo Meijer. Carried live on Dutch public television, they transfixed viewers, who likened the weekly series to The X-Files. The emotional impact of the broadcasts was so intense that Dutch TV began flashing a special number viewers could call if they felt they needed psychological counseling.

The committee discovered that every Sunday evening a mysterious El Al cargo flight routinely touched down at Schiphol en route from New York to Tel Aviv. These flights were never displayed on the airport arrival monitors and the documentation for the flights was processed in a special, unmarked room. Unlike other Israel-bound flights, the cargo on these flights was not subjected to tests in a buried vacuum bunker (designed to trigger bombs set to explode at high altitudes).

On January 29, 1999, Dutch Attorney General Vrakking testified that the El Al security detachment at Schiphol was a branch of Mossad.

On February 5, a Dutch Air Guidance Organization employee told the hearing that the "policy" since 1973 was to keep quiet about all El Al activities. Schiphol workers testified that El Al planes were never inspected by customs or the Dutch Flight Safety Board.

Two technical maintenance officers told the committee that their supervisors sometimes ordered them to clear El Al flights for take-off when they were not comfortable that it was safe to do so. They testified that the 25-page maintenance sheet for Flight 1862 was filled with numerous "carry-over items" that had not been corrected.

The Dutch press reported that security officials had been waving Israeli air cargo through Schiphol since the 1950s. While shipping the kinds of chemicals aboard LY1862 ordinarily would be a violation of the Chemical Weapons Treaty (which the US has signed), sending cargo jets to commercial airfields for refueling (rather than to a NATO airfield) apparently circumvents the Atlantic Alliance's military treaties.

"Schiphol has become a hub for secret weapons transfers," charged Henk van der Belt, an investigator working on behalf of the Bijlmer survivors. "Dutch authorities have no jurisdiction over Israeli activities at the airport."

A Televisieproduktie Amsterdam (TVA) report identified Schiphol as one of several European airports that allows El Al to transfer cargo without supervision. TVA claimed that Belgian politicians now fear that "a disaster like the crash in Holland in 1992 is possible at [Belgium's] Zaaventem. This airport is, like Schiphol, under control by the secret police of Israel."

Secret Tapes Show Cover-Up
In February, the Meijer committee uncovered secret tapes of phone conversations between El Al and Schiphol Air Traffic Control (SATC). On these tapes (recorded within minutes of the crash and hidden in a safe for more than six years), an El Al employee warns: "There is poison on board: ammunition and flammable liquids." In reply, SATC personnel are heard promising: "We will keep these things under the lid."

The lid remained sealed as Dutch authorities ordered workers to clean up the contaminated area without benefit of protective clothing. The cover-up was so complete that even the Netherlands' Queen Beatrix was not informed of the danger. Unaware of the risks, she was allowed to undertake a "sympathy visit" to the impact site the day after the crash.

For six years, Dutch officials had claimed that the flight carried only "video-record-ers, flowers and perfume." Shortly after the hidden tapes surfaced, Prime Minister Wim Kok suspended three SATC employees for withholding information and several ministers were threatened with firing. On, February 18, Israel finally agreed to hand over top-secret information on the 20 tons of "missing" cargo aboard the El Al jet. (Ironically, only one week earlier, Israel authorities had told Dutch investigators that "the papers are probably destroyed.")

Meijer's 2,000-page report, released on April 22, concluded that there was "a direct link between health complaints and the Bijlmer disaster" and accused the health and transport ministers of providing "unclear, incomplete, late or incorrect information."

The Meijer report also blasted Israel's cover-up as "incomprehensible," especially "given the public concern in the Netherlands over the past six-and-a-half years, the requests for cooperation at a high diplomatic level and the bond of friendship between the Netherlands and Israel."

Hazmat on the Horizon
Seven years after the deadly crash, Robert Jan van den Berg of the Laka Foundation's Bijlmer Project informs the Journal that "El Al is still flying the same routes." Despite calls for greater controls, the public still has little idea of what kinds of cargoes are passing overhead - a matter of mounting concern since the Geneva-based International Air Transport Association (IATA) expects air freight shipments to increase "at an average rate of 5.3 percent per annum between 1998-2002." Air cargo loads are expected to increase 5.7 percent in North America and 7.9 percent in Central America - nearly double the anticipated traffic in Europe's busy air corridors.

Because regulations for carrying hazardous materials ("hazmat") are more stringent for passenger jets, dangerous goods increasingly are being shipped via less-regulated air-cargo jets. Currently, the only source of information on a plane's cargo is the pilot notification (NOTOC) form carried aboard the plane but, as Air Cargo World magazine observes, this is "hardly the best spot for details while the plane itself may be burning."

The National Transport Safety Bureau (NTSB) recommended that carriers "provide consolidated, specific information about the identity" of hazardous cargo "within two years." In the meantime, the NTSB admits that even these regulations won't address the greatest risk in the $143 billion-a-year air-cargo industry - the shipment of "hidden" cargo.

"Transportation of undeclared hazardous materials on airplanes remains a significant problem," the NTSB warns. According to the IATA, nearly 26 million tons of air cargo were shipped in 1997. While hazardous materials comprised a significant portion of that cargo, no one knows how much "hidden" hazmat the world's air freighters carry.

For many carriers, keeping the wraps on one's cargo is tantamount to a First Amendment right. Air Cargo World notes that FedEx opposes reporting "undeclared" goods because "questions about shipment contents will infringe on customers' privacy rights and place an unreasonable burden on carriers." (The undeclared goods aboard a FedEx DC-10 that crashed in New York in 1996 included several bags of marijuana.)

The IATA has established global rules for the air shipment of dangerous goods but, until recently, compliance with these regulations has been voluntary. In 1998, compliance was made mandatory but the US Department of Transportation has created a loophole that allows carriers to receive an exemption from the IATA's safety rules.

With more hazmat traversing the skies, it's only a matter of time before another Bijlmer crash occurs. And, statistically, the next crash most likely will occur in the heavily-trafficked corridors of Europe, Central America or the US.

Gar Smith is the editor-in-chief of Earth Island Journal.

RADIOACTIVE CRASH SITES AROUND THE WORLD

Neither the Federal Aviation Administration nor the major aircraft manufacturers publish information about which planes and helicopters contain DU components. As one industry insider told the Journal, "No one brags about DU."

The Starmet Corp. website, however, states that "wide-body aircraft such as the Boeing 747, Lockheed L-1011, McDonnell Douglas DC-10 and Lockheed military C-130 all require the use of counter-balance weights for proper flight control."

DU weights have been installed on more than 1,600 jumbo jets operated by all major world airlines, including: TWA, United, Delta, Continental, Pan Am, Northwest, American, Air Canada, Lufthansa, Air France, Alitalia, BOAC, British Airways, Qantas, Air China, SAS and Swissair.

Since Boeing 747s were first deployed in 1968, 27 of the superjets have crashed. Several of these accidents, may have left crashsites contaminated with dangerous residues of incinerated DU.

The danger may have begun as early as 1974, when a Lufthansa jet crashed and burned at take-off in Nairobi, Kenya.

In 1977, two 747s burned in a horrendous landingstrip collision on the Spanish island of Tenerife. The Pan Am airliner blown out of the skies by a terrorist bomb over Scotland in 1988 may also have rained DU on the residents of Lockerbie.

Between 1991 and 1993, three 747s crashed after pylon-mounted engines fell off. One was the jet that crashed into Biljmer. The other incidents included a China Airlines jet that crashed in Wanli, Taiwan and a Japan Airlines jet that crashed in Anchorage.

On December 20, 1995, a Tower Air 747 crashed at JFK International. On July 17, 1996 a TWA 747 crashed shortly after take-off in New York. In 1997, a Korean Air Lines 747 crashed in Guam.

Between 1980 and 1997, two DU-equipped Lockheed L-1011s have crashed - in the Arabian Gulf and Malaga, Spain. In the same period, seven DC-10s have gone down - in Spain, Libya, Portugal, New York, Dallas, Boston and Iowa.

The airline industry, aware of the "stigma" of DU, has been quietly replacing the aging radioactive counterweights with equally dense but more expensive tungsten.

In light of the Journal's findings about the health hazards of on-board DU, the Environmental Protection Agency would be well advised to revisit all past 747 crashsites and test both the crashsite environment and the local residents for possible DU contamination.

Epidemiological studies of the neighborhoods surrounding crashsites would also be advisable. - GS

http://www.earthisland.org/eijournal/win2000/fe_win2000uranium.html

Soap said made from Jews in Holocaust found in Israel

2005-02-17T10:09:00.000+01:00

Soap said made from Jews in Holocaust found in Israel

By Amiram Barkat, Haaretz Correspondent, and Haaretz Service

A box of soap which, according to the Romanian Jewish community, was made from the bodies of Jews killed in the Holocaust was found Thursday in a funeral home in Magdiel in central Israel, Army Radio reported.

The box was buried under a tombstone that read "Soap of Holy People."

Sources at Yad Vashem expressed disappointment at the radio report, calling the story a "pure invention that was given a stage by the media."

A Yad Vashem spokeswoman said there is no proof the Nazis made soap from human bodies during the Holocaust.

The sources said similar claims have been made in the past regarding soap made from Jewish bodies, including soap found last year in the Nahariya cemetery. In that case the soap was determined not to have been made from human remains.

In 1990 samples from several soaps claimed to have been made from Jews were sent for DNA testing at Tel Aviv University. Likewise, those tests determined the soaps did not contain human fats.

The director of the Jewish burial society Hevra Kadisha, Moti Elbaum, informed Army Radio of the discovery.

"I was very surprised and terrified. I didn't know that in Israel there is a grave for soap that was made from saints that were placed on the fire," said Elbaum. "It is shocking and horrifying. Each time were are shocked more and more by the things that were done to our nation."

The daughter and associates of the rabbi that performed the burial ceremony said he asked to be buried in a grave next to the soap grave. His associates also expressed anger at the reaction of Yad Vashem casting doubt on the authenticity of the soap. Holocaust survivors claim that the soap was engraved with writing that said it was made from fat from Jewish bodies.

http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=538795&contrassID=1&subContrassID=9&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y

Killing Hariri : Who benefits?

2005-02-17T10:01:00.000+01:00

Stepping back and considering the simple question "Who benefits?" allows us to throw light on the bombing on Monday in Beirut.

Looking at the geo-political situation, we see the United States and Israel working to implement their ongoing strategy to destroy the Arab world. For Israel, growing confusion and destruction means an opportunity to establish the mythical "Greater Israel" which, if realised, will stretch from the Mediterranean through Mesopotamia. Israel has already invaded and occupied portions of Lebanon. It has attacked positions in Syria under the guise of "fighting terrorism". Things are moving along nicely it seems.

France has been a strong opponent of the US agenda in Iraq and has been working to find a negotiated settlement over the issue of Iranian nuclear development. At the same time, the US is attempting to paint Syria as a "terrorist" state. By killing Hariri, one of Jacques Chirac's good friends, and pinning the blame on Syria, another wedge is driven between those who oppose the US presence in Iraq. It might also increase division between France and Russia, two of the key members of the anti-US imperialist coalition that also includes China.

As we see below in another article, Russia is going ahead with the sale of missiles to Syria that would be able to shoot down the Israeli fighters that now bomb Syria with impunity. Given that Israel has been waging a propaganda campaign in the Western media against the Russo-Syrian missile deal, the bombing in Beirut and the resulting public defaming of Syria could not have come at a better time for Sharon and his cohorts. "Who benefits?"

The bombing and assassination also threaten to throw Lebanon back into the chaos it suffered in the 1970's and 80's. That chaos gave Israel an excuse to invade and occupy southern Lebanon. Would the excuse work a second time?

Israel is well-known for its false-flag operations. Why should we think that this operation was any different?

http://signs-of-the-times.org/signs/signs20050216.htm

"It's fun to shoot some people."

2005-02-17T09:56:00.000+01:00

A Marine general who has commanded troops in Afghanistan and Iraq told a forum, "It's fun to shoot some people." The commandant of the Marine Corps said Thursday he has counseled Lt. Gen. James Mattis about choosing his words more carefully.

Mattis, an infantry officer, made the comments Tuesday while speaking to a forum in San Diego about strategies for the war on terror. Mattis is the commanding general of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command in Quantico, Va.

According to an audio recording of Mattis' remarks, he said, "Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot... It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right upfront with you, I like brawling."

He added, "You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil," Mattis continued. "You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them."

His comments were met with laughter and applause from the audience.

Thursday, Gen. Mike Hagee, commandant of the Marine Corps, issued a statement saying, "Lt. Gen. Mattis often speaks with a great deal of candor. I have counseled him concerning his remarks and he agrees he should have chosen his words more carefully."

Hagee also said, "While I understand that some people may take issue with the comments made by him, I also know he intended to reflect the unfortunate and harsh realities of war."

Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he would let Mattis address his comments himself. But, he said, "All of us who are leaders have a responsibility in our words and our actions to provide the right example all the time for those who look to us for leadership."

Pace spoke to a Pentagon press conference. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he had not read Mattis' words and deferred to Pace.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil liberties group, called on the Pentagon to discipline Mattis for the remarks, reports CBS National Security Correspondent David Martin.

"We do not need generals who treat the grim business of war as a sporting event," said CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad. "These disturbing remarks are indicative of an apparent indifference to the value of human life."

Both Pace and Hagee praised the general's service.

"His actions and those of his troops clearly show that he understands the value of proper leadership and the value of human life," Pace said.

Hagee called him "one of this country's bravest and most experienced military leaders."

He said the commitment of Marines "helps to provide us the fortitude to take the lives of those who oppress others or threaten this nation's security. This is not something we relish, yet we accept it as a reality in our profession of arms."

He said he was confident Mattis would continue to serve with distinction.

Mattis was speaking during a panel discussion hosted by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association, a spokeswoman for the general said. His comments were reported by the television station KNSD in San Diego, and the audio recording is posted on the web site www.nbcsandiego.com .

According to Mattis' biography, he commanded, as a lieutenant colonel, an assault battalion during the first war with Iraq. During the war in Afghanistan, he commanded the 1st Marine Expeditionary Brigade; in the second war in Iraq, he commanded the 1st Marine Division during the invasion and when the unit returned to Iraq for counterinsurgency operations last year.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/02/03/national/main671617.shtml

Forgive and Forget

2005-02-17T00:41:00.000+01:00

http://www.newropeans-magazine.org/images/stories/cartoons/2005/europeantour.jpg

Super War Preview: The Iranian Suicide Bombers vs. The American Crusaders

2005-02-17T00:23:00.000+01:00

Super War Preview

The Iranian Suicide Bombers vs. The American Crusaders

By Gary Brecher

Everybody's asking me what'll happen if we attack Iran. To get a quick preview, just do what this guy in my eighth-grade class did: put a firecracker in your mouth, hold it between your front teeth, and light the fuse.

Your friends won't believe you'll go through with it. So when it blows up in your face, you'll expect them to be impressed. And you'll be surprised, just like this guy in junior high was surprised, when all you get is a perforated eardrum and a reputation as the biggest dumbass in the school.

Right now, Bush is standing there with a lit match and a big firecracker labeled "Iran" in his mouth. Except it's more like an M-80 or a whole stick of dynamite than a firecracker. Nobody believes he'll be dumb enough to light it, to actually attack Iran. Even the Iranians don't believe it; Khameini, their head Mullah, said last week "America is in no position to invade Iran."

He's right about that. Even the US Army brass admits we're "overstretched." We don't even have enough troops to control Iraq; a war with Iran would mean calling up every National Guard unit we have. Even then, it would take years to get them combat-ready.

And this time the Brits won't come with us. They've been making that clear, on the quiet. If we go in, it'll be as a coalition of one.

So Khameini's right; we can't attack Iran. But that doesn't mean we won't. Khameini was making the same mistake everybody's been making: assuming Bush and his cronies have a lick of sense.

The best way of guessing what Bush will do is asking, what's the worst thing he could do to America? Whatever it is, that's what he'll do. I think he's been possessed by bin Laden, because everything he's done has been exactly what Al Quaeda hoped for. Right now, bin Laden is praying to Allah that we'll be stupid enough to attack Iran. That would be the cherry on his halal sundae, the one thing that could actually finish us off as a Superpower.

In my "Quagmire Bowl" article I said the Iraq war probably wouldn't be fatal. It's definitely hurt us, but it won't mean the downfall of America. Well, if we invade Iran, that bet is off. All bets are off. People don't realize how fast a Superpower can fall. It only takes one invasion too many.

Napoleon was unstoppable before he invaded Russia. So was Hitler. Now France and Germany are "Old Europe."

Invading the wrong country can age you faster than driving a Long Beach bus on the night shift. Invading Iran helped end the win-streak of the best, biggest Empire of all, the Romans. It was in 260 AD, when emperor Valerius headed east to deal with the Persians who were kickin' up a fuss on the eastern border of the Empire. This Valerian would've risen high in Dubya's administration, because he was a real hard charger, a go-getter...and dumb as a half brick. He charged right into Iraq -- they called it Mesopotamia back then -- even though his troops were dying of plague all around him. The Persians sat back, watched Roman troops keeling over, and had a good laugh, eating pistachios in the shade while Valerian tried to figure out what to do.

Naturally, he decided it was time for bold action. That's the only trick these go-getters know. It reminds me of what one of MacArthur's aides said about him: "When it paid to be aggressive, he was aggressive. And when it didn't pay to be aggressive...he was aggressive."

Valerian figured a little proactive salesmanship would settle things, so he demanded a meeting with the Persian emperor, Sapor--who couldn't believe his luck. Sapor ordered the slaves to cook a big banquet, bring out the best silverware -- and had his troops hide in the banquet hall till he gave the signal. Valerian stomped in, Sapor snapped his fingers and Valerian ended up a live trophy, dragged around in chains through every city in the Persian empire till his purple robes were shreds.

There's a moral to this story: Persians are tricky, clever people. They've always had that reputation. You don't want people like that for enemies. Unfortunately, Bush won't be leading the charge the way Valerian did, so we probably won't get to see him dragged through Tehran in chains. But we'll see worse things: casualty lists that will make Iraq look like a beach volleyball game, American armies losing conventional battles, and after a few years, a humiliating exit.

Iran is scarier than Iraq in every way you can name. First of all, it's physically way bigger, three times the size of Iraq. The population is 65 million, nearly three times as many as Iraq. The Iranians are young, too. Their birthrate is way down now, around 2 kids per woman, but back in the Khomeini years it was one of the highest in the world. So right now, the Iranian population has a demographic profile that's a military planner's dream: not too many little kids to take care of, but a huge pool of fighting-age men -- about 18 million.

And it won't be just young, fit men fighting us. Thanks to the invention of the suicide car bomb, guerrilla commanders will have someplace to send 70 year old volunteers: down to the garage to pick up a Plymouth packed full of fertilizer bomb. You don't have to be young to put the pedal to the metal.

The insurgents' DMV test will be real simple: "OK, Grandpa, can you make out the silhouette of a Bradley or Humvee, and aim your car at it?" Do that and you pass. They hand you the keys, and you get a quick, painless martyr's exit. Everybody will want to get in on the fun: Grandpa, Grandma, even the cripples, with specially adapted pedals so they can chin-pilot their car bombs into our patrols.

The suicide car bomb is a good example of why I don't worship hardware like most war fans do. These cars are actually no-tech guided surface-to-surface cruise missiles--and damn effective. We've found that out the hard way. All it takes is a driver who's willing to die for the pleasure of killing the enemy. Put him (or her) in an old jalopy stuffed with fertilizer and detonators and you've got a highly accurate, fire-and-forget missile.

They're especially deadly in urban warfare, because they're perfectly camouflaged till they actually blow up. And all for the price of a used car and a few bags of Miracle Gro.

Our cruise missiles are real showpieces, ultra hi-tech. They can be launched from subs, surface ships, planes and ground launchers. They can guide themselves over hundreds of miles, they cost millions apiece (usually hundreds of times as much as the huts or sheds we aim them at)--but they're useless to us in Iraq, whereas the suicide car-bomb cruise missiles are hurting us every single day.

It's the software inside people's heads that wins wars nowadays. You hardware freaks are going to have to face that fact one of these days. And it's this brain-software that we're hopeless at programming. Iraq has proved pretty clearly we don't have a clue how to use the Middle-Eastern brain OS. In fact, we've actually done the impossible: reprogrammed the miserable, cowardly Iraqis into fierce warriors.

Remember Gulf War I? Remember those pitiful fags crawling up to our soldiers to surrender on their hands and knees, sobbing like babies? Two years of occupation by Bush's morons has turned those cowards into fearless kamikazes in Oldsmobiles.

So just imagine what the Iranians, the original Islamic suicide squads, will do when we invade. There'll be traffic jams, ten-mile backups, outside every US base, thousands of car bombers honking and changing lanes trying to get to the front of the line and make that final commute to Paradise. It'll be like the San Diego freeway on a Monday morning, except the fenderbenders will be a little more serious.

The Iranians, unlike the Iraqis, have always been willing to die for their country. In the Iran-Iraq War (1980-89) thousands of Iranians volunteered to charge across Iraqi minefields, knowing they were going to die. It scared the Hell out of the Iraqis. They threw everything at those crazy Persian suicide charges, even poison gas. And the Iranians just kept coming. If you want a more complete account of that war, read my column, "The War Nobody Watched" in eXile #178. The short version is simple: Iranians are brave, determined people. Don't mess with them.

Of course all the NeoCon crazies are peddling the old story that "once we invade, the people will rally to the cause of freedom."

Yeah. Just like they did in Iraq. If we couldn't get people on our side after deposing a monster like Saddam, what chance do you think we have of winning hearts and minds in Iran? The kids in Iran are pissed off at the way the old Mullahs won't let 'em rock and roll, but the idea that they'll support an American invasion because they're bored is totally insane. It's like imagining that the kids in Footloose would've backed a Soviet invasion of Nebraska because John Lithgow wouldn't let them hold school dances.

The argument between Mullahs and kids in Iran is a classic family fight. And you know what happens when some intruder crashes in on the middle of one of those: the whole family unites in about a millisecond and tears him apart.

The Iranians already hate us. They have since 1953, when the CIA staged a coup to get rid of a popular Lefty Prime Minister, Mossadeq. Way back in the 70s, when most of the world still kinda liked us, crowds in Tehran chanted "Marg bar Amrika," "Death to America."

We're also getting told we'll be able to exploit the ethnic divisions inside Iran. The fact is, Iran's ethnic problems are nowhere near as bad as Iraq's. More than half of the population is ethnically Persian. The next-biggest group is the Azerbaijani, about a quarter of the population. They squabble with the Iranian majority from time to time, but they're fellow Shi'ites, they intermarry all the time- there's no real hatred between them. There are a few Arabs in Western Iran, maybe 3% of the population. But if you're thinking we could bring them over to our side, forget it. Saddam already tried that during the Iran-Iraq War and got nowhere. And if they're not going to rebel for a fellow Arab who lives next door, you better believe they won't rise up to help us Christian Crusaders.

That leaves us with the Kurds, who are about 10% of the Iranian population. There are all kinds of factions in Kurdistan, all of them armed and ready to kill each other, so we might be able to sign up a few of the really crazy gangs to work with us. But they would have zero chance of controlling a country as big, fierce and clever as Iran.

Face it: we have no friends left in Iran. Thanks to Bush, we have no friends left anywhere in the Muslim world, except a few sleazes like Allawi -- and he'd be torn to pieces if he showed himself in the street without Delta Force bodyguards.

If we attack Iran, that'll make three Muslim countries invaded in three years. We may as well dress our soldiers in white tunics with red crosses on them, like they did in the Middle Ages.

We'd be fighting on three fronts: the conventional war against the Iranian armed forces, guerrilla war in the territories we'd conquered, and worldwide terror attacks by every group that sympathizes with Iran.

The third front, international terror attacks, would be the scariest of all. Because unlike Iraq, Iran actually does have terrorist connections. Very good ones, with some very scary people. Iran is the only country where Shia Islam is the state religion, so Shiites all over think of Iran the way old-time Catholics used to think of Rome. Attacking Iran would drive them insanely angry, not that it takes much to get Shiites in a crazy, suicidal mood.

Would America Do A Thing Like That?

"The possibility of a U.S. attack against Iran is very low. We think America is not in a position to take a lunatic action of attacking Iran,"
Iran President Mohammed Khatami said. January 19, 2005.

"The Americans aren't coming. They wouldn't do a thing like that."
Manuel Noriega, on the eve of the US invasion of Panama, 1989. (Quoted in Commanders by Bob Woodward, page 158).

I've written before about how Shiites see the world ("Shi'ite! Holy Shi'ite!" eXile #197). They love martyrdom, and don't care whether they win or lose as long as they take a few of the enemy with them. So you can't "shock and awe" them with superior firepower, or discourage them by inflicting a lot of casualties. They're the perfect suicide bombers -- in fact, it was the Shi'ites in Lebanon who perfected the suicide car bomb. The first time it happened, a 16-year-old girl drove a car full of explosives into an Israeli APC. The Israelis were shaken; in 25 years of fighting the Arabs, nobody else had done that to them.

Eventually, the Shi'ite Hizbollah guerrillas in Southern Lebanon drove the Israelis out. They were just more willing to take casualties than the Israelis were, even if the exchange was 20 or 30 dead guerrillas for every Israeli killed.

And guess which guerrilla group is closest to Iran? That's right, Lebanese Hizbollah. Iran is tight with all the Shi'ite militias in Lebanon, in the Bekaa Valley and Beirut as well as the South.

We'll also be pissing off the Iraqi Shi'ites, 60% of the Iraqi population. Right now they're cooperating with us -- not because they like us, but because we're helping them use their majority to take over Iraq.

It's a laugh, the way Bush's people say the Shi'ite enthusiasm for voting proves that "democracy is taking hold" in Iraq. All it proves is that Shi'ites can count. They've got 60% of the vote sewed up, and we're riding shotgun for them, absorbing all the violence the Sunnis can dish out, while the Shia go out and grab power by the ballot box. But if we attack Iran, they'll turn on us like Sadr's boys did in April 2004, and cities like Karbala, Najaf and Basra will be on the front page every day. It'll be a Shi'ite tsunami, with terrorism in places you'd never expect. Lots of excitable Iranian expats are going to wire up their Mercs with HE. They'll be the richest, best-groomed suicide bombers in history -- Armani suits instead of death shrouds, and Ferraris instead of old clunkers. It'll put terrorism in a whole new income bracket.

Meanwhile, what'll happen in the big battle between us and the Iranian forces? Iran's conventional forces are the LEAST scary part of the problem. They're in bad shape: lots of men (400,000, with another 120,000 in the Revolutionary Guards) but starved for materiel. Most of their old stock was destroyed in the war against Iraq, and we've been discouraging suppliers from sending replacements. Russia, China and North Korea have been Iran's suppliers lately--a big switch from the 70s, when the Shah preferred to buy his weapons systems from the US and UK.

They claim to have 1500 tanks, but the bulk of their MBTs are old and rusty. Since 1989, all they've acquired was 500-odd T-72s, with about that many BMP-2 APCs. That's not much armor for such a big force, and the T-72 hasn't exactly covered itself in glory in the two Gulf wars.

Their air force, which used to be the second-best in the Mideast (after Israel, obviously) is in even sorrier shape, with a couple squadrons flying MiG-29s and Su-24 CAS fighter/bombers. The rest is rusting hulks left over from the Shah's buying sprees.

One cool bit of trivia: the Iranian AF used to be the only one outside the US to fly the F-14. Most were grounded when we embargoed Iran, and a few were lost in the Iraq War, but I haven't been able to find out what happened to the rest. Anybody know?

Other items they've been buying should be worrying us much more. For instance, they've invested heavily in Chinese anti-ship cruise missiles, which have been fitted on ten new, fast coastal-attack ships. In a column of mine a couple of years ago ("U Sank My Carrier" eXile #156), I talked about the very scary outcome of a Persian Gulf war game, when USMC General Paul van Ripen, who was playing the part of Iranian commander, managed to sink half our Persian Gulf task force, including a carrier, with simultaneous attacks by small planes and fast attack craft.

Their missile forces are another worry -- not for what they could do to our troops but for the havoc they could start up if the Iranians, under attack, lost their cool and started targeting countries supporting the US. Once again, nobody's really sure exactly what missiles Iran has, or what quantities they've got. They definitely do have plenty of our old friend the Scud -- maybe 250 Scud B (range 285-330 miles depending on warhead; accuracy zero) and another 350 Scud C (range 500-700 miles).

As we found out in two Gulf wars, Scuds are all hype -- unless you have the guts to fit them with chemical, biological or nuclear warheads. Saddam never did. (Though he did fire chemical shells against the Iranians and the Kurds.) The Iranians just might. They've got the chemical weapons: mustard gas, cyanide, and the scariest of all, VX, a very potent, hard-to-clean-up nerve gas.

One of the big arguments right now is whether the Iranians can actually field their Shahab-3, a newer better missile designed by North Korea and also supplied to Pakistan (where it's called the Ghauri II). As usual, the warmongers are claiming Iran has 'em and plans to use 'em on us. Cooler heads say that's unlikely; so far there have only been a few failed test flights, with the Shahab-3 blown up mid-flight (which is usually a sign the test failed).

After we all got suckered into believing Saddam could gas London with 45 minutes warmup, I'm not buying the scare stories till I see some proof. We know the Iranians have Scuds; we know they have chemical warheads. That's more than enough to worry about. Because these people aren't cowards like Saddam; I can see them being real sore losers if the US invades and defeats their army. The kind of sore losers who press every Doomsday button they can.

Of course, nobody is claiming the US is going to launch an all-out invasion of Iran. The rumors coming out of the Pentagon say it'll be a mix of air strikes and quick, small special ops raids on nuclear sites and key military installations. The idea is to destroy as much of the military infrastructure as we can, and crush their nuclear program before it can produce working nukes.

The biggest, scariest nuclear site is Bushehr, on the Persian Gulf. It worried the Iraqis so much they bombed it before the two reactors were brought online. The Iranians learned a hard lesson from that raid, and started dispersing the nuke program all over the country. They're working on 15 sites, which they say are going to be used for "peaceful purposes." I love the way nuclear scientists talk about "peace." That was Stalin's favorite word, and the nuclear-science types mean it about as much as he did.

Of course the Iranians want nukes. They're surrounded by traditional enemies, they know the US is itching to attack, and they consider themselves Allah's representatives on earth. If you were in that situation, wouldn't you be going all-out to get some nukes?

The experts all say there's no way Iran could have any nuclear weapons yet. Maybe they're right; even experts have to be right once in a while. So the question is how much time it will take them to develop nukes. Estimates go from a year to six years. The trouble with these estimates is that they're always bent to help somebody's agenda. For instance, the Israelis are the ones saying Iran may go nuke in a year or less. That's because they want us to panic, so we'll do the dirty work of blasting Iran's nuke sites for them.

The six-year estimates are coming out of Europe, because they're such wimps they'll say anything to avoid trouble. Truth is, I have no idea how close the Iranians are to a working nuke, and I don't believe anybody else does either. If the CIA was any good, we'd have a clue, but those poor bastards couldn't infiltrate a public library, let alone an Iranian nuclear plant.

If we do go in with quick commando raids and air strikes, we might get away with it. The Iranians would definitely try to retaliate by proxy, getting Hizbollah and the Iraqi Shi'ites to attack Americans anywhere they go. But we could handle that. The real worry is that these lightning raids are never as simple and quick as they're supposed to be. Remember the all-day firefight in Somalia, where we lost 18 Rangers? That was supposed to be a lightning raid: chopper in, grab Aidid, get out before the locals could react. A few hours later, the whole US force in Somalia was engaged against the whole population of Mogadishu.

Remember the lightning raid by Delta and the Rangers on Mullah Omar's house? That didn't exactly come off according to plan either. Once a raid goes bad, soldiers want to go in to rescue their buddies. Then they're trapped, and more guys go in to rescue them. And without ever meaning to, you've got a conventional battle going on deep in the enemy's homeland. And once that happens, the situation is out of control.

If the Iranian army and revolutionary guards play it smart, they'll harass and retreat, trading land for time the way the Russians did in WW II. In the territory we did control, we'd have a massive insurgency. With the Iraqi Shia all fired up, we'd have garrisons pinned down all over Iraq, and all through whatever chunk of Iran we occupied. And no real guarantee we wiped out all the nuclear sites, because our intelligence is so lousy we might never have heard of the most secret labs (which may well be underground in the Iranian desert).

And we're actually thinking about doing this. Incredible. It's like a man with a pit bull chomping on his leg purposely opening the door to a kennel where there are a dozen rottweilers ready to tear him apart.

In fact, it's such a stupid idea, and it'd be such a total disaster for America, that Bush probably will do it. Anybody else starting to wonder if he and Cheney are actually Al Quaeda moles?

http://www.exile.ru/2005-January-27/war_nerd.html