12/29/01
11:50:08 AM
Official Count of Attacks Victims December 28, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Official count of victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks:
NEW YORK: 2,937
World Trade Center: City officials say 380 are missing. The medical examiner's office has issued 585 death certificates. An additional 1,972 death certificates have been issued without a body, at the request of victims' families.
Includes passengers and crew on hijacked planes:
American Airlines Flight 11: 92
United Airlines Flight 175: 65
WASHINGTON: 189
Pentagon: 125
American Flight 77: 64 passengers and crew
PENNSYLVANIA: 44
United Flight 93: 44 passengers and crew
TOTAL: 3,170
As of Friday, an Associated Press list of Sept. 11 victims included 3,012 names.
That list is based on information collected from the Defense Department, medical examiners, the courts, AP foreign bureaus, companies, families, member newspapers, funeral homes and places of worship.
12/29/01
11:43:58 AM
t r u t h o u t | 12.29
SANDERS | Courage, Sacrifice And - Corporate Greed
http://www.truthout.com/12.29A.Sanders.Year.htm
Enron Is Symbolic of Bush Blunders
http://www.truthout.com/12.29B.Scheer.Enron.htm
Bush Ok's Contractors Who Break the Law
http://www.truthout.com/12.29C.Bush.Contractors.htm
Saudis Ignored Fighters | Threat Wasn't Seen as Thousands Left for Jihad
http://www.truthout.com/12.29D.Saudis.Ignored.htm
NYT Editorial | The Antiterror Bandwagon
http://www.truthout.com/12.29E.Anti.Band.htm
Official Dead at WTC Drops Below 3000
http://www.truthout.com/12.29F.WTC.2937.htm
12/28/01
4:55:24 PM
When we see ourselves as greater than others, when we place humankind above other creatures, above and beyond the realms of the birds and the fishes, outside the world of stone and the colors, we give away our power. Only when we see we are part of everything, joined to creation, bound to all the realms and integrated into the web of life, do we begin to call on our full potential."
Barry Brailsford from "Song of the Silence"
12/28/01
4:28:05 PM
FDA Ignoring Evidence that New Chemicals Created in Irradiated Food Could Be Harmful
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has ignored growing evidence that a new class of chemicals formed when food is irradiated could be harmful, according to a report released today by Public Citizen and the Center for Food Safety.
The groups are urging the FDA to refrain from legalizing irradiation for any additional types of food until the new chemicals are tested for safety.
The chemicals, called cyclobutanones, do not occur naturally anywhere on Earth. They recently were found to cause genetic damage in rats, and genetic and cellular damage in human and rat cells.
The groups' report, Hidden Harm, details how the FDA has ignored this unique class of chemicals, which are created in many irradiated foods that the agency has legalized for sale in this country -- including beef, pork, chicken, lamb, eggs, mangoes and papayas. It is expected that cyclobutanones also would be formed in many other foods the FDA is currently considering to legalize for irradiation.
The organizations today also released a sworn affidavit of toxicologist William Au, who was retained by the groups to independently review the risks posed by cyclobutanones and other chemicals formed by irradiation that could cause genetic damage.
Along with a letter outlining numerous health concerns caused by food irradiation, the groups filed Hidden Harm and Au's affidavit with the FDA to oppose pending petitions to legalize irradiation for processed foods, which comprise 37 percent of the typical American's diet; molluscan shellfish, such as clams and oysters; crustacean shellfish, such as lobsters and shrimp; and meat products.
A fifth petition seeks to double the maximum dose of radiation to which poultry can legally be exposed.
"The risk that the FDA is taking with the health of the American people cannot be overstated," said Wenonah Hauter, director of Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program. "If government officials knowingly allow people to eat food that contains these chemicals, they are courting a major public health disaster."
Though federal regulations require the FDA to determine whether food additives proposed for human consumption are likely to cause cancer, birth defects or other health problems, the agency has not done so for cyclobutanones, nor have agency officials explained why they have failed to do so. Under federal law, irradiation is considered a food additive.
Americans likely are unwittingly eating irradiated foods containing cyclobutanones.
Though most irradiated food sold in stores must be labeled, there is no such requirement for restaurants, schools, hospitals, nursing homes and other institutional settings. And there is no labeling requirement for foods with irradiated ingredients, except those containing irradiated meat. Moreover, due to a lack of reporting requirements for food companies, it is unknown how much irradiated food is sold in the US, or where.
"Children are likely to be especially vulnerable to the risks of these untested chemicals in their food," said Peter T. Jenkins, policy analyst at the Center for Food Safety. "It is beyond me why the FDA would take a chance by exposing American children in this way. The science is against it."
Au, an environmental toxicology professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, is internationally recognized for his work on the toxicological mechanisms that induce human disease. For more than 20 years he has taught, published peer-reviewed research and served on expert committees. He has received numerous awards, and has published or co-published more than 100 articles.
"An emphasis should be placed on the products that are unique to the irradiation process and that are potentially mutagenic, e.g. 2-DCB [2-dodecylcyclobutanone]," Dr. Au wrote in the affidavit. "Without conclusive evidence regarding the safety of these products, the safety of irradiated food cannot be assured." Au urged the FDA to "seriously and explicitly" consider "repeated observations" of genetic damage and reproductive toxicity in feeding experiments.
Though cyclobutanones were first identified in irradiated food in 1971, it was not until 1998 that German government scientists discovered that one type of cyclobutanone, 2-DCB, caused genetic damage in rats, and genetic and cellular damage in human and rat cells.
Subsequently, the scientists found that two other types of cyclobutanones -- 2-TCB and 2-TDCB -- caused genetic and cellular damage in human cells. Rat feeding studies of these two chemicals are expected to be completed soon.
Despite these findings, the FDA not only has failed to publicly acknowledge the potential risks posed by cyclobutanones, but the agency proceeded to legalize irradiation for three classes of food even after the first two German studies were made public.
Last year, the FDA legalized the irradiation of eggs, juice and sprouting seeds despite the fact that several high-ranking agency officials four months earlier had attended an international conference in Beijing at which the 2-DCB toxicity findings were presented and discussed.
Ironically, cyclobutanones are so easily detectable and have been known to remain in food for such lengthy periods - more than a decade - that they are commonly used as "markers" to determine whether food has been exposed to ionizing radiation.
The groups are calling on the FDA to take several steps:
- refrain from legalizing irradiation for any additional foods until comprehensive, published, peer-reviewed research is conducted on cyclobutanones;
- conduct a comprehensive analysis of the cyclobutanone levels in foods covered by irradiation petitions already approved by or pending before the FDA;
- convene public hearings to thoroughly explore the potential health effects of cyclobutanones.
Hidden Harm can be viewed at
http://www.citizen.org/documents/HiddenHarm_-_PDF.pdf.
Au's affidavit is available at
http://www.citizen.org/cmep/foodsafety/food_irrad/articles.cfm?ID=6516
12/28/01
4:26:20 PM
NO US TROOPS IN CANADA!
NO MORE FBI DETACHMENTS
NO U.S. TROOPS STATIONED IN CANADA
Toronto, ON - In a strongly worded press release Paul Hellyer, Leader of the Canadian Action Party today urged Ottawa to say no to U.S. demands to establish a new Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) detachment in Toronto as well as refusing to allow U.S. soldiers to be stationed in Canada.
"The idea of soldiers being used to patrol the Canada-U.S. border is repulsive enough," Mr. Hellyer said, "but allowing them to be stationed here is totally unacceptable. Cooperation is one thing, and we support it fully, but occupation is something else and that is our principal concern."
"An invasion by the FBI is equally intolerable," Mr. Hellyer added. "First the government of Canada accedes to U.S. pressure to pass legislation that makes this country a police state and then considers a U.S. request to allow their police to be involved in how this Draconian legislation will be used. The answer Ottawa must give Washington is a polite but absolutely firm NO!
What the United States has been doing since September 11th goes far beyond what is necessary for security purposes. It is in the process of establishing an Imperial Empire with considerations far broader than security concerns. In fact geopolitics is foremost.
"This is the reason we must say no to the FBI. Their initial concerns might be security but they would soon be involved in industrial espionage and keeping Washington posted about any Canadian activity that might be primarily in Canada's interest," Mr. Hellyer alleged. "That is one of the functions of U.S. police and CIA operations worldwide, and we have more than enough of them in Canada already.
Even before September 11th the propaganda war in favour of a common perimeter, a customs union and the adoption of the U.S. dollar, all measures designed to bring Canada more tightly into the elephant's embrace, was intensified. "Since September 11th, using the tragic events of that day as a cover, an all-out assault on our sovereignty has begun," Mr. Hellyer added.
"It is time for Ottawa to draw a line in the sand and say, "This far and no further. No common perimeter, no customs union, no monetary union, no more FBI detachments in Canada and American troops stationed on Canadian soil." If they don't, they might just as well run up the white flag and admit surrender."
For more information, please contact:
Hon. Paul Hellyer: (416) 535-4144 or Toll Free (877) 629-0841
Email: MailTo:phellyer@canadianactionparty.ca
Website: http://www.canadianactionparty.ca
12/28/01
4:10:11 PM
The Taliban of the west
This war is threatening the very freedoms it claims to be defending
George Monbiot Guardian
Tuesday December 18, 2001
The pre-Enlightenment has just been beaten by the post-Enlightenment. As the last fundamentalist fighters are hunted through the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, the world's most comprehensive attempt to defy modernity has been atomised. But this is not, as almost everyone claims, a triumph for civilisation; for the Taliban has been destroyed by a regime which is turning its back on the values it claims to defend.
In West Virginia, a 15-year-old girl is fighting the state's supreme court. Six weeks ago, Katie Sierra was suspended from Sissonville high school in Charleston. She had committed two horrible crimes. The first was to apply to found an anarchy club, the second was to come to classes in a T-shirt on which she had written "Against Bush, Against Bin Laden" and "When I saw the dead and dying Afghani children on TV, I felt a newly recovered sense of national security. God bless America." The headmaster claimed that Katie's actions were disrupting other pupils' education. "To my students," he explained, "the concept of anarchy is something that is evil and bad." The county court upheld her suspension, and at the end of November the state's supreme court refused to hear the case she had lodged in defence of free speech.
Katie is just one of many young dissenters fighting for the most basic political freedoms. A few days before Katie was suspended, AJ Brown, a 19-year-old woman studying at Durham Tech, North Carolina, answered the door to three security agents. They had been informed, they told her, that she was in possession of "anti-American material". Someone had seen a poster on her wall, campaigning against George Bush's use of the death penalty. They asked her whether she also possessed pro-Taliban propaganda.
On October 10, 22-year-old Neil Godfrey was banned from boarding a plane travelling from Philadelphia to Phoenix because he was carrying a novel by the anarchist writer Edward Abbey. At the beginning of November, Nancy Oden, an anti-war activist on her way to a conference, was surrounded at Bangor airport in Maine by soldiers with automatic weapons and forbidden to fly on the grounds that she was a "security risk". These incidents and others like them become significant in the light of two distinct developments.
The first is the formal suspension of certain civil liberties by governments backing the war in Afghanistan. The new anti-terror acts approved in Britain and the US have, like the reinstatement of the CIA's licence to kill, been widely reported. The measures introduced by some other allied governments are less well known. In the Czech Republic, for example, a new law permits the prosecution of people expressing sympathy for the attacks on New York, or even of those sympathising with the sympathisers. Already one Czech journalist, Tomas Pecina, a reporter for the Prague-based investigative journal Britske Listy, has been arrested and charged for criticising the use of the law, on the grounds that this makes him, too, a supporter of terrorism.
The second is the remarkably rapid development of surveillance technology, of the kind which has been deployed to such devastating effect in Afghanistan. Unmanned spy planes which could follow the Taliban's cars and detect the presence of humans behind 100 feet of rock are both awesome and terrifying. Technologies like this, combined with CCTV, face-recognition software, email and phone surveillance, microbugs, forensic science, the monitoring of financial transactions and the pooling of government databases, ensure that governments now have the means, if they choose to deploy them, of following almost every move we make, every word we utter.
I made this point to a Labour MP a couple of days ago. He explained that it was "just ridiculous" to suggest that better technologies could lead to mass surveillance in Britain. Our defence against abuses by government was guaranteed not only by parliament, but also by the entire social framework in which it operated. Civil society would ensure there was no danger of these technologies falling into the "wrong hands".
But what we are witnessing in the US is a rapid reversal of the civic response which might once have defended the rights and liberties of its citizens. Katie Sierra's suspension was proposed by her school and upheld by the courts. The agents preventing activists from boarding planes were assisted by the airlines. The student accused of poster crime may well have been shopped by one of her neighbours. The state is scorching the constitution, and much of civil society is reaching for the bellows.
This, I fear, may be just the beginning. The new surveillance technology deployed in Afghanistan is merely one component of the US doctrine of "full-spectrum dominance". The term covered, at first, only military matters: the armed forces sought to achieve complete mastery of land, sea, air, airwaves and space. But perhaps because this has been achieved too easily, the words have already begun to be used more widely, as commercial, fiscal and monetary policy, the composition of foreign governments and the activities of dissidents are redefined as matters of security. Another term for "full-spectrum dominance" is absolute power.
There are, of course, profound differences between the US and Britain. The US sees itself as a wounded nation; many of its people feel desperately vulnerable and insecure. But while our cowardly MPs seek only to dissociate themselves from the victims being persecuted by Torquemada Blair's inquisitors, the lord chancellor's medieval department is preparing to dispense with most jury trials, which are arguably now the foremost institutional restraint on the excesses of government.
The paradox of the Enlightenment is that the universalist project is brokered by individualism. The universality of human rights, in other words, can be defended only by the diversity of opinion. Most of the liberties which permit us to demand the equitable treatment of the human community - privacy, the freedom of speech, belief and movement - imply a dissociation from coherent community.
While those who seek to deny our liberties claim to defend individualism, in truth they gently engineer a conformity of belief and action, which is drifting towards a new fundamentalism. This is an inevitable product of the fusion of state and corporate power. Capital, as Adam Smith shows us, strives towards monopoly. The states which defend it permit the planning laws, tax breaks, externalisation and blanket advertising which ensure that most of us shop in the same shops, eat in the same restaurants, wear the same clothes. The World Trade Organisation, World Bank and IMF apply the same economic and commercial prescription worldwide, enabling the biggest corporations to trade under the same conditions everywhere.
Some of those who, in defiance of this dispensation, write their own logos on their T-shirts are now being persecuted by the state. The pettiness of its attentions, combined with its ability to scrutinise every detail of our lives, suggest that we could be about to encounter a new form of political control, swollen with success, unchecked by dissent. Nothing has threatened the survival of "western values" as much as the triumph of the west.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4321856,00.html
12/28/01
4:04:56 PM
BUSH'S INTERNATIONAL CHARADE
Bush claims that the War on Terrorism has united America with the world. But by rejecting treaties and thumbing his nose at international law, he proves exactly the opposite.
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12134
12/28/01
3:51:00 PM
The United States: Rogue Nation
by Richard Du Boff, Centre for Research on Globalisation (CRG)
1. In December 2001, the United States officially withdrew from the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty, gutting the landmark agreement-the first time in the nuclear era that the US renounced a major arms control accord.
2. 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention ratified by 144 nations including the United States. In July 2001 the US walked out of a London conference to discuss a 1994 protocol designed to strengthen the Convention by providing for on-site inspections. At Geneva in November 2001, US Undersecretary of State John Bolton stated that "the protocol is dead," at the same time accusing Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya, Sudan, and Syria of violating the Convention but offering no specific allegations or supporting evidence.
3. UN Agreement to Curb the International Flow of Illicit Small Arms, July 2001: the US was the only nation to oppose it.
4. April 2001, the US was not re-elected to the UN Human Rights Commission, after years of withholding dues to the UN (including current dues of $244 million)-and after having forced the UN to lower its share of the UN budget from 25 to 22 percent. (In the Human Rights Commission, the US stood virtually alone in opposing resolutions supporting lower-cost access to HIV/AIDS drugs, acknowledging a basic human right to adequate food, and calling for a moratorium on the death penalty.)
5. International Criminal Court (ICC) Treaty, to be set up in The Hague to try political leaders and military personnel charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity. Signed in Rome in July 1998, the Treaty was approved by 120 countries, with 7 opposed (including the US). In October 2001 Great Britain became the 42nd nation to sign. In December 2001 the US Senate again added an amendment to a military appropriations bill that would keep US military personnel from obeying the jurisdiction of the proposed ICC.
6. Land Mine Treaty, banning land mines; signed in Ottawa in December 1997 by 122 nations. The United States refused to sign, along with Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Vietnam, Egypt, and Turkey. President Clinton rejected the Treaty, claiming that mines were needed to protect South Korea against North Korea's "overwhelming military advantage." He stated that the US would "eventually" comply, in 2006; this was disavowed by President Bush in August 2001.
7. Kyoto Protocol of 1997, for controlling global warming: declared "dead" by President Bush in March 2001. In November 2001, the Bush administration shunned negotiations in Marrakech (Morocco) to revise the accord, mainly by watering it down in a vain attempt to gain US approval.
8. In May 2001, refused to meet with European Union nations to discuss, even at lower levels of government, economic espionage and electronic surveillance of phone calls, e-mail, and faxes (the US "Echelon" program),
9. Refused to participate in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)-sponsored talks in Paris, May 2001, on ways to crack down on off-shore and other tax and money-laundering havens.
10. Refused to join 123 nations pledged to ban the use and production of anti-personnel bombs and mines, February 2001
11. September 2001: withdrew from International Conference on Racism, bringing together 163 countries in Durban, South Africa
12. International Plan for Cleaner Energy: G-8 group of industrial nations (US, Canada, Japan, Russia, Germany, France, Italy, UK), July 2001: the US was the only one to oppose it.
13. Enforcing an illegal boycott of Cuba, now being made tighter. In the UN in October 2001, the General Assembly passed a resolution, for the tenth consecutive year, calling for an end to the US embargo, by a vote of 167 to 3 (the US, Israel, and the Marshall Islands in opposition).
14. Comprehensive [Nuclear] Test Ban Treaty. Signed by 164 nations and ratified by 89 including France, Great Britain, and Russia; signed by President Clinton in 1996 but rejected by the Senate in 1999. The US is one of 13 nonratifiers among countries that have nuclear weapons or nuclear power programs. In November 2001, the US forced a vote in the UN Committee on Disarmament and Security to demonstrate its opposition to the Test Ban Treaty.
15. In 1986 the International Court of Justice (The Hague) ruled that the US was in violation of international law for "unlawful use of force" in Nicaragua, through its actions and those of its Contra proxy army. The US refused to recognize the Court's jurisdiction. A UN resolution calling for compliance with the Court's decision was approved 94-2 (US and Israel voting no).
16. In 1984 the US quit UNESCO (UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and ceased its payments for UNESCO's budget, over the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) project designed to lessen world media dependence on the "big four" wire agencies (AP, UPI, Agence France-Presse, Reuters). The US charged UNESCO with "curtailment of press freedom," as well as mismanagement and other faults, despite a 148-1 in vote in favor of NWICO in the UN. UNESCO terminated NWICO in 1989; the US nonetheless refused to rejoin. In 1995 the Clinton administration proposed rejoining; the move was blocked in Congress and Clinton did not press the issue. In February 2000 the US finally paid some of its arrears to the UN but excluded UNESCO, which the US has not rejoined.
17. Optional Protocol, 1989, to the UN's International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, aimed at abolition of the death penalty and containing a provision banning the execution of those under 18. The US has neither signed nor ratified and specifically exempts itself from the latter provision, making it one of five countries that still execute juveniles (with Saudi Arabia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Iran, Nigeria). China abolished the practice in 1997, Pakistan in 2000.
18. 1979 UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. The only countries that have signed but not ratified are the US, Afghanistan, Sao Tome and Principe.
19. The US has signed but not ratified the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which protects the economic and social rights of children. The only other country not to ratify is Somalia, which has no functioning government.
20. UN International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 1966, covering a wide range of rights and monitored by the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The US signed in 1977 but has not ratified.
21. UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 1948. The US finally ratified in 1988, adding several "reservations" to the effect that the US Constitution and the "advice and consent" of the Senate are required to judge whether any "acts in the course of armed conflict" constitute genocide. The reservations are rejected by Britain, Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, Greece, Mexico, Estonia, and others.
22. Is the status of "we're number one!" Rogue overcome by generous foreign aid to given less fortunate countries? The three best aid providers, measured by the foreign aid percentage of their gross domestic products, are Denmark (1.01%), Norway (0.91%), and the Netherlands (0.79), The three worst: USA (0.10%), UK (0.23%), Australia, Portugal, and Austria (all 0.26).
Source: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/DUB112B.html
12/28/01
3:42:40 PM
The Hole In The Ozone Policy
Are higher temperatures the price of saving the ozone layer?
by Jason Anderson
After 15 years as the poster child for international environmental agreements, the Montreal Protocol has slipped into the relative anonymity of a well-functioning accord. As Kyoto Protocol negotiations grab headlines before even yielding a ratified deal, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are quietly on their way to oblivion, through unprecedented, concerted efforts worldwide.
That was some of the reassuring news coming out of Montreal earlier this month, during the 10th anniversary meeting of the committee in charge of financing the phase out of ozone-depleting gases in developing countries. Among other things, the Multilateral Fund of the Montreal Protocol approved World Bank projects to finalize CFC phase-out in four countries, ahead of schedule. Another success in the Hair Spray revolution.
But success notwithstanding, looking at the detail of what the fund is approving could make some eyebrows start to arch. During the meeting, the Executive Committee vetted 47 projects to replace CFC-11 with HCFC-141b, and 46 projects to replace CFC-12 with HFC-134a. Odd, considering HCFCs are also slated to be phased out by the selfsame Montreal Protocol. Odd, considering the Kyoto Protocol to limit greenhouse gas emissions put HFC-134a on its hit list. High on its hit list: HFC-134a is 1,300 times more potent than CO2 in warming the planet. Odd, considering that non-ozone-depleting, non-greenhouse gas alternatives are readily available for the same applications. What gives?
HCFCs are touted as a "transitional" substance, necessary as readily available replacements for CFCs, but bad enough (10 percent as bad as CFCs in the long term) to warrant eventual phase-out themselves. Unfortunately, the 10 percent figure overlooks the short-term impact of HCFCs, which in the decade following release are 30 percent as bad as CFCs. It is during this period that ozone depletion will reach its peak. HCFC phase-out plans are also fuzzy. In the developing world, the phase-out is supposed to be complete by 2040, but no interim targets have been set. And as the Multilateral Fund pays for conversion to HCFCs, it makes it clear to recipients that the fund will not be responsible for a second phase-out later. Businesses in developing countries will have to shoulder that responsibility when the time comes. But will they be able to?
Unlike the interim HCFCs, HFCs earn a clean bill of health as "permanent solutions" in the jargon of the Montreal Protocol. This is because they have no ozone-depleting potential and thus fulfill the mandate of the protocol. This blinkered environmental view ignores the impact HFCs could have on global warming. Concerns about HFCs have led most of Northern Europe to adopt a refrigerator technology developed by Greenpeace ten years ago, the Greenfreeze, which incorporates an isobutane refrigerant that has negligible warming impact and yields improved system efficiency. Yet by 1998, only 18 of 311 projects financed by the Multilateral Fund used similar technology.
Many consider the long-term use of HCFCs and HFCs as the price paid in order to gain the cooperation of the chemical industry in the Montreal Protocol. Because these substances have more recent patents and are significantly more expensive to purchase than CFCs, the big chemical concerns like Dupont, Honeywell, and ICI Klea aren't doing badly, even while losing business to other alternative substances. They're getting rid of a product that permeated daily life worldwide for decades, while staying in business and earning environmental kudos -- a major coup. But revisions to the Montreal Protocol establishing quicker HCFC phase-out dates, and the Kyoto Protocol's inclusion of HFCs, have understandably put fluorocarbon manufacturers on the defensive, as they watch their remaining aces slip from their sleeve.
Phased-out and Confused
The significance of replacing ozone-depleting gases with greenhouse gases has long been recognized -- and long been downplayed. Industry has claimed a kind of moral immunity from global warming concerns in exchange for agreeing to the phase-out of CFCs, which are also powerful greenhouse gases. That makes their phase-out all the more important -- but then why replace them with other greenhouse gases, when alternatives are there? The relationship between ozone-depleting gases and greenhouse gases was the subject of a handful of heated debates early on in the history of the Montreal Protocol, leading to little more than a workshop and a resolution exhorting caution. Predictably, neither had much impact. Switching to hydrocarbons like isobutane could have had a huge impact, significantly reducing the greenhouse gas emissions problem. But conservatism about new technologies, and unwillingness to accept the additional expense of training and safety precautions, delayed their early adoption. As the years have passed, it has become harder and harder to consider alternative substances; markets are standardizing around fluorinated substances, and smaller enterprises that are interested in alternatives have even less money to buck the trend.
In fact, the questions about alternatives don't stop with HCFCs and HFCs. There are foam technologies based on the toxic methylene chloride, and solvent replacements using trichloroethylene, recently linked to infertility in men. While both of these substances are accepted for industrial use, does the multilateral fund have a duty, as part of a United Nations environmental agreement, to undertake a more holistic review of their human and environmental impact? Shouldn't U.N. protocols on ozone and climate work towards the same long-term environmental goals? To several multilateral fund donor countries, most notably the United States, the answer is a resounding "No." For years, the U.S. has stymied efforts to give preference to non-fluorocarbon alternatives (coincidentally helping a powerful domestic industry) and has kept a firm grip on the reins of the protocol's commitments, never letting them stray beyond the letter of the CFC phase-out deal, at the lowest cost possible.
The recent announcement in Montreal fits the pattern: complete phase out plans of CFCs ahead of schedule -- what could be better than that? The attraction to the United States is clear: The commitment to finance phase-out needs to have a defined end-point. What replaces CFCs is a secondary issue. In fact, whether the replacement actually happens is a secondary issue, because once developing countries sign the finalization plans and accept the money, meeting the targets is their own responsibility.
It's hard to be too disparaging, of course. CFCs are nearly gone in rich countries, and these same countries are footing the bill for eradication in developing countries as well. Replacement has turned out to be easier and cheaper than expected, and newer technologies are much more efficient. But many opportunities to incorporate multiple environmental considerations into current changes are being wasted, due to the rigid division of environmental issues. The interaction (or lack thereof) between U.N. protocols will undoubtedly be a hot topic at next fall's World Summit on Sustainable Development. By replacing ozone-depleting gases with greenhouse gases, the Montreal Protocol provides a crystalline example of why that discussion is needed.
Jason Anderson is an energy specialist at Climate Network Europe in Brussels.
Source: http://www.gristmagazine.com/grist/maindish/anderson121401.asp
12/28/01
3:31:31 PM
India - Pakistan Tensions Escalate
http://www.truthout.com/12.24C.India.Pakistan.htm
Nuclear-Armed India, Pakistan Prepare for War
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/1226-02.htm
FBI wants access to worm's pilfered data The FBI is asking for access to a massive database that contains the private communications and passwords of the victims of the Badtrans Internet worm. (...) The United States is becoming an Orwellian nightmare!
http://www.dailyrotten.com/articles/archive/189387.html
Right-Wing Media Research Center Targets ANYONE That Disagrees With Bush
http://www.buzzflash.com/alerts/2001/12/121701_Media_Research_Center.html
VISIT also http://www.buzzflash.com - LOTS of good stuff!
The hole in the ozone layer policy -- are higher temperatures the price of saving the ozone layer? HCFCs and HFCs, the chemicals replacing CFCs, are powerful greenhouse gases. Yet non-ozone depleting, non-greenhouse gas alternatives are readily available for the same applications.
http://www.gristmagazine.com/grist/maindish/anderson121401.asp
12/28/01
3:24:12 PM
With Taliban Gone, Poppy Crops Return
by Paul Salopek Chicago Tribune Foreign Correspondent
SORUKH ROAD, Afghanistan -- The muddy waters of the Red River are eked out carefully in the fields of Sorukh Road, a parched farming village largely depopulated by two punishing years of drought.
Some of the irrigation water trickles into plots of cauliflower. A little is channeled to struggling crops of winter wheat. But a growing volume of the precious liquid is being diverted--as it is in hundreds of other Afghan villages today--to fields greening with tiny new leaves.
"It is good to be growing poppies again," said Muhammad Tauib, a barefoot farmer who is replanting his fields with the narcotic plant once banned by Afghanistan's ousted Taliban regime. "At least my family will be able to eat."
In fact, Tauib's family never stopped relying on the illicit crop, even when the Taliban outlawed all drug cultivation in Afghanistan last year. To survive the drought, he and other villagers simply fell back on sales from their large hoards of opium gum, the source of heroin.
As the political seasons change in Afghanistan, a troubling new crop of drugs is sprouting once more, boding poorly for the return of law and order to this war-battered country.
With the recent defeat of the Taliban regime by the United States and its Afghan allies, the harsh anti-drug laws imposed by the old Islamic government have fallen by the wayside. According to United Nations drug-control analysts, poppy plantations that had been abolished on religious grounds are under renewed cultivation.
Of particular concern is a surge of drug-growing in the former heroin strongholds of Kandahar and Nangarhar provinces, experts say.
The trend worries global law-enforcement organizations because of Afghanistan's appalling track record: Until 1999, the year before the Taliban decreed a ban on drug growing, Afghanistan was exporting more heroin than any other nation--some 5,000 tons annually, or 75 percent of the world's supply.
"We clearly face major new challenges in Afghanistan," said Bernard Frahi, a UN drug-control expert who traveled to Kabul last month to hurriedly consult with the new leadership. "But we have been promised complete cooperation."
Yet, just as clearly, the UN and other drug fighters have their work cut out for them in the lawless fields of Afghanistan.
TALIBAN PROFITED
The UN's own research shows that many of the Northern Alliance commanders who dominate the interim government have long histories of growing poppies. And the deeply entrenched roots of the trade, whose immense profits in a poor land even corrupted the ultra-pious Taliban, are nowhere more evident than in hard-bitten villages such as Sorukh Road, which means "red river."
"The Taliban were very hard," said Abdul Wakil, 23, a farmer who has started planting small plots of his land openly with poppies. "They threw us in jail and they shaved the heads of our tribal leaders if they caught us growing.
"But they were dealing in it too. They bought and resold the refined opium."
Like other villagers, he accused a senior Taliban official in the nearby city of Jalalabad of running a heroin-processing lab out of his car repair garage. An opium dealer in the town's bazaar, speaking on condition of anonymity, added that Taliban authorities often looked the other way when he resold villagers' stockpiled opium gum in neighboring Pakistan.
The allegations support recent U.S. State Department reports that the fundamentalist regime may have been earning as much as $50 million a year by quietly skimming drug profits--an essential source of cash for buying weapons to fight the Northern Alliance.
Still, even American drug-enforcement officials admit that the Taliban's ban on opium cultivation, imposed by supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar in July 2000, was remarkably successful.
According to the UN International Drug Control Program, heroin exports from Afghanistan had plummeted 90 percent by October.
Yet why that drug-free status is fading fast is obvious in the mud-walled villages and cracked fields around Jalalabad.
Besides the irresistible economics of the drug trade--a pound of wheat earns a local farmer 3 cents while a pound of raw opium brings in at least $15--nature and war have conspired against growing legitimate crops.
"I have a big field where I can grow lots of wheat or cotton, but I have no water," Shukrudeen, a local farmer, said of the region's brutal drought.
"So what should I do with my few drops of irrigation water?" said Shukrudeen, who has only one name. "Grow a small bag of vegetables? Or a small bag of opium?"
He decided to finally give up growing food a month ago, he said, after trying to sell his cauliflower crop in a nearby village. Impoverished by years of war, the residents couldn't afford his produce. So he gave it away. Now he is planting drugs for export.
Before the Taliban decree, most of Afghanistan's opium and heroin was smuggled to addicts in Pakistan, Iran and Russia, say trafficking experts. Roughly half ended up on the European market. Some 20 percent of the U.S. heroin supply was believed to come from Afghanistan.
NEW CROPS ALREADY GROWING
More appears to be headed that way via dirt-poor villages such as Sorukh Road, which is only 6 miles outside Jalalabad, the eastern administrative center of the new government.
In plain view, hundreds of new poppy fields on the city's outskirts are fuzzed with green shoots that will be ready for harvest come springtime.
Farmer Batin Shah, who gave his age as "80 or more," hoped Afghanistan's new leaders would clamp down on the trade before it spiraled out of control.
"In our religion, growing poppies is sinful," the white-bearded Shah said during a break from hoeing his wheat field. "The government needs to tell this to the people instead of just letting them do it."
Source: http://www.truthout.com/12.28G.Poppy.Return.htm
12/28/01
12:41:07 PM
t r u t h o u t | 12.28
Transcript Latest Bin Laden Video
http://www.truthout.com/12.28A.OBL.Vid.Exrpts.htm
Holy War Lured Saudis as Rulers Looked Away
http://www.truthout.com/12.28B.Saudi.Holy.War.htm
Bin Laden May Be in Pakistan
http://www.truthout.com/12.28C.OBL.Pak.htm
Bush Agent Removed From Flight
http://www.truthout.com/12.28D.Bush.Agent.htm
Al Qaeda Prisoners Headed to Cuba
http://www.truthout.com/12.28E.Al.Qaeda.Cuba.htm
No Help on Social Security
http://www.truthout.com/12.28F.SS.No.Help.htm
With Taliban Gone, Poppy Crops Return
http://www.truthout.com/12.28G.Poppy.Return.htm
12/28/01
12:38:09 PM
Planet Ark World Environment News
Equilon Martinez catcracker up after long outage - USA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13861/story.htm
Scotland warned to brace for arctic weather - UK http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13862/story.htm
Lithuania sees lower power export in January - LITHUANIA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13854/story.htm
FEATURE - Japan bets on fuel cells for tech-toy power - JAPAN http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13855/story.htm
Japan to build US military airport on coral reef - JAPAN http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13860/story.htm
Mitsui to build carbon nanotube mass-output plant - JAPAN http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13864/story.htm
UPDATE - Japan firm to stop MOX processing at COGEMA unit - JAPAN http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13865/story.htm
EIB extends EUR 43 mln to Hungary for environment - HUNGARY http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13857/story.htm
UPDATE - Brazil rain, mudslides leave 52 dead, more missing - BRAZIL http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13858/story.htm
Bangladesh bans polythene bags, promotes jute - BANGLADESH http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13863/story.htm
Australian officials fear fires will flare again - AUSTRALIA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13856/story.htm
Australia livestock, crops escape worst of fires - AUSTRALIA http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13859/story.htm
12/28/01
12:34:26 PM
Stop American Billions For Israeli Bombs
Anti-Occupation Activists Question U.S. Aid
by Alisa Solomon
here weren't any surprises in the foreign-aid bill Congress passed last week, least of all in the appropriation the U.S. handed Israel: more than 17 percent of the entire foreign-aid expenditure, $2.7 billion. That's on top of the $2.5 billion in military support from the defense budget, forgiven loans, and special grants the tiny state rakes in each year. Up to 80 percent of this aid never leaves the U.S., because it's earmarked for arms purchases that must be made here.
As usual, there wasn't any significant debate, and to be sure, nobody seriously suggested America's largesse be linked to Israel's compliance with human rights accords, UN resolutions, or international law. The prevailing view—as the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC puts it—is that "U.S. aid to Israel enhances American national security interests by strengthening our only democratic ally in an unstable and vital region of the world."
Nonetheless, in the 15 months since the outbreak of the Al Aqsa Intifada, scores of groups around the country have come out against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem—some pressing for a two-state solution, others emphasizing the Palestinian right of return. Now the question of U.S. aid is at the cutting edge of this activism. Campaigns from Berkeley to Boston are connecting demands for peace and justice in the region to Congress's underwriting of the occupation and Israel's use of F-16s, Apache helicopters, and other American-made weapons against Palestinian neighborhoods and refugee camps.
SUSTAIN (Stop U.S. Tax-Funded Aid to Israel Now) has point people in a dozen cities around the country organizing teach-ins and letter campaigns. The San Francisco group A Jewish Voice for Peace is, among other things, conducting a petition drive, asserting that "as Americans, we do not want our foreign aid dollars used to deprive Palestinians of justice and human rights. As Jews, although we support a democratic Israel, we must criticize its security policies that have the effect of making it less safe, not more." And on campuses like the universities of California, Michigan, and Illinois, a movement modeled on the anti-apartheid activities of the 1980s is beginning to call for divestment of university funds from companies with strong ties to Israel.
Even if none of these groups actually expects Uncle Sam to cancel Israel's allowance anytime soon, they understand how effectively American aid can function as a focal point for the most important step in any movement for Israeli-Palestinian peace: basic public education. "People don't understand that there's still an occupation," says Chicago-based writer and analyst Ali Abunimah. "Even so, they are paying for it."
Between corporate media's presentation of foreign policy from the State Department's point of view and a pro-Israeli PR machine that treats the conflict as if the parties were both powerful nations, a common perception persists of Israel as a besieged little democracy under constant attack from preternatural Jew haters. But even with the horrific suicide bombings—a series of bloody attacks claimed more than 30 Israeli lives in the last month alone—Israel remains the powerful partner, controlling the lives of 3 million disenfranchised and dispossessed people and responsible for killing more than 800 Palestinian civilians since the hostilities boiled over last year. Nothing is likely to shift in the conflict without significant pressure from the U.S., so cracking public perception here is key.
"Like Cuba," explains Hussein Ibish, of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, "Israel is as much a domestic as a foreign issue, especially given the incredible power of the Christian right and Jewish pro-Israel lobbies as well as the major defense contractor lobbies. To get through to people in ways that can counteract those lobbies," Ibish adds, "you need to describe the reality of occupation precisely. You can't substitute a slogan for the details; it's just not helpful. In the U.S., the most important activism is discursive."
The divestment movement growing on dozens of campuses—and Jewish organization efforts to discount it—provides an example in miniature of the way different narratives of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict compete in the U.S. Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of California, Berkeley, have used street theater to drive their campaign, once setting up a mock checkpoint at a campus gate, for example. According to SJP member Snehal Shingavi, the group has already collected 5000 student signatures on a divestment petition, specifically targeting, among others, General Electric, which produces propulsion systems for Apache helicopters and F-16s and in which UC invests hundreds of millions of dollars. Currently SJP is planning a national student conference for mid February; they expect several hundred students from all over the country.
If UC regents have so far shrugged off SJP demands, major Zionist organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League have expressed some alarm, creating resource kits for Jewish students so they can rebut anti-occupation claims. True, the rhetoric can get overheated (it's not all that rare for somebody to charge Israel with "genocide" at campus rallies). Still, progressive Jewish students find themselves equally turned off by the one-sided bromides proffered at the local Hillel. "I don't agree with the Israel-is-always-right attitude I get from Jewish groups on campus because I think the occupation is absolutely wrong and must end," says an Ann Arbor student who requested anonymity. "But I can't join a demonstration with banners that say 'Zionism Equals Racism' because I don't buy into that, either. It's also too knee-jerk and simplistic."
For longtime activists, recognizing how much discursive ground has been lost in recent years is profoundly demoralizing. "I feel like we've taken so many steps backwards," said Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz after a meeting last Sunday in which she and half a dozen other Jewish feminists, all anti-occupation veterans of 10 to 20 years, planned a midtown vigil in solidarity with a Jerusalem rally organized by Israel's Women in Black for December 28. "True, some things are better. It used to be you couldn't even say 'Palestine,' " Kaye/Kantrowitz explained. "But now we have to correct the almost universally held but completely wrong idea that Israel offered peace and the Palestinians answered with violence."
A little more than a decade ago, as the first intifada brought the occupation into American living rooms with TV coverage of Israel's bone-crushing response to a mostly nonviolent popular uprising, at least some of the public understood who was the occupier and what that meant, and a movement to link aid to human rights compliance began to take shape. The taboo on questioning Israel's foreign-aid entitlement was even broken on the floor of Congress in 1990, when Wisconsin Democrat David Obey suggested future budgets reduce aid to Israel by the amount that country spends to build or expand settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Two months later, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, setting off the Persian Gulf War and foreclosing any statements—much less actions—that might have made America's Middle East ally fear abandonment. Soon after, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat signed the Oslo accords at the White House, heartening all who hadn't bothered to actually read the agreement or look at a map with the hallucination that the occupation was ending and peace was at hand. Congressional criticism, as well as grassroots activism, faded away. But the occupation did not. And despite Representative Obey's suggestion—and worse, despite the Oslo agreement—Israel rapidly expanded settlements, doubling their population in the years since the accords were signed.
Palestinians' lives got worse: Israel continued to demolish homes; Jewish-only bypass roads connecting settlements to Israel increasingly chopped up the West Bank, dividing Palestinian communities into disconnected Bantustans; Israel retained control of water and other resources and continued to confiscate Palestinian land. And it certainly didn't help that corrupt officials in Arafat's Palestinian Authority pocketed funds meant for economic development. So when the Al Aqsa Intifada erupted, it was easy enough to sell the Israeli version of what had gone wrong: the Palestinians simply didn't want peace.
"We had done a good job during the first intifada of showing the occupation," says Phyllis Bennis, a fellow with the Institute for Policy Studies who specializes in the Middle East. "But our mistake was in not continuing to talk about human rights violations as an ongoing reality of a repressive, spirit-killing, military occupation. It seemed as though if guns weren't being fired, then things must have been fine. But you don't have to fire a gun to control someone, you only have to have it. That's why if you hold up a store by aiming a gun at the cashier, you've committed armed robbery, even if you never pulled the trigger. Israel was still holding the gun, but we had stopped pointing at it."
Now that the guns are blazing again and the wider war rages nearby, threatening to expand ever more explosively, Israel-Palestine activists feel both that their efforts are more urgent and more inadequate. Despite last week's declaration of a ceasefire by Hamas, nobody expects a miracle. Though "not an optimist in the short run," Ali Abunimah remains convinced that "a broad-based movement against the occupation and in favor of a just peace, based on equality and ending domination," can succeed. "People forget that there was a strong business lobby in this country for South Africa during apartheid and that American policy was turned around entirely due to public pressure," he says. "There are precedents."
Tell us what you think. editor@villagevoice.com
Source: http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0152/solomon.php
12/28/01
12:23:47 PM
W.W.J.D.?
by Stephanie Salter
My dear brother George:
May the peace of our Lord (and me) be upon you in this celebration season of my birth.
You have been much in my heart of late. Partly this is because I know the crushing pressure you feel as leader of the richest and most powerful nation on Earth.
Also, it is impossible not to think of you: Millions of people -- millions, George -- pray for you every day. People of all faiths and denominations. People in countries you have never visited.
Even people who believe in no God offer up prayers of hope when they hear you speak or see you on television because you hold their fate in your hands.
Since Sept. 11, dear brother, I have noticed that you have turned away from me. I do not hear you ask yourself or anyone else the question you once asked all the time: "What would Jesus do?"
Remember, George? It was so familiar, it became an abbreviation: W.W.J.D.? When you ran for president, you told the world I was your favorite philosopher.
I know why you turned away. To face me, and all that I demand of those who follow me, requires tenacious courage and, in politics, a kind of leadership that is rare.
Some very sick, twisted and hate-filled men have inflicted great suffering upon you and your people. They have murdered in the name of The One Who Creates All, and they seem determined to go on murdering.
You want not only to keep them from hurting you again, you and your nation's people want to hurt them back. And you are willing to rationalize all manner of destruction, waste and -- if necessary --killing toward those ends.
Dear brother, you are right to want to stop evil. The tricky part for humans has always been, what is the best way to stop it? My four-letter answer is written, over and over, in the Bible, but it has been ignored by potentates, peons and sometimes popes for 2,000 years.
Why? Because it contradicts the human instinct for vengeance.
Our Father said, "Vengeance is mine," George, not, "Vengeance belongs to those who have been wronged." Vengeance is never the answer to "What would Jesus do?" Especially vengeance that masquerades as "justice."
This is why I came, remember? Why I grew from Baby Jesus to Christ who suffered humiliation, unspeakable physical pain and a heart that was broken more times than there are stars in the skies.
As one who has accepted me as the light and the way, George, you have a great opportunity -- and a duty -- to show the world my way. The way of love.
As you know, I never said it would be easy.
Following me means forsaking the desire to hurt back, to rob your enemies of their humanness, even when their inhuman acts aim to rob you of yours. It means refusing to buy the Great Lie of evil -- that true peace and justice can be achieved through deliberate and systematic violence.
It means enduring the insults of angry and frightened people who wrongly equate "love thine enemies" with "have no spine."
To borrow from our holy brother Mahatma Gandhi, following me means donning the heavy cloak of peace and wearing it forever -- not just when it is convenient, or when you are watching someone else's war.
"Blessed are the peacemakers," was not a throw-away line I mumbled to Matthew. In Proverbs, "Seek peace and pursue it" listed no exemptions for world leaders.
Dear brother, as you celebrate my birth and reflect upon my life, I beg you, reverse the course. Pursue peace with the fervor, and resources, with which you now pursue our damaged and insane brother Osama bin Laden and the infested souls who follow his malicious path. They may be beyond reason and love, but millions more are not.
For God's sake, George, for the sake of your nation's future, face me again and ask what I would do.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/12/23/ED68324.DTL
12/28/01
12:13:39 PM
Witchhunt In South Florida
Pro-Palestinian professor is first casualty of post-9/11 conservative correctness
by Bill Berkowitz
A Florida University professor has become the first post-September 11, academic casualty of the war against terrorism. Dr. Sami Al-Arian, a tenured professor of computer sciences at the University of South Florida (USF), had been under fire since his late-September appearance on "The O'Reilly Factor," the Fox News Channel's nightly talkfest. In his fevered rush to tie Professor Al-Arian to terrorists, host Bill O'Reilly engaged in a shameful McCarthyite exercise of guilt by association.
Although Dr. Al-Arian has continually denied being involved with terrorist organizations -- he had been investigated by the FBI and had never been arrested or charged with a crime -- reaction to the O'Reilly interview came fast and furious. Professor Al-Arian received death threats and was quickly suspended, with pay, by university President Judy Genshaft. It's been almost three months and now the efforts of O'Reilly and several conservative columnists, most notably Debbie Schlussel, have paid off. According to Vickie Chachere's Associated Press report, "University of South Florida's trustees agreed [that] a Palestinian professor linked to known terrorists should be fired for disrupting university operations." (For more on the Al-Arian appearance on "The O'Reilly Factor", see "Factoring in news bias: FOX's Bill O'Reilly's personal witch-hunt" and "The FOX and the red herring: 'The O'Reilly Factor' hits rock bottom.”
As noted in the AP story, the recommendation came from the 12-member Board of Trustees. Last summer, the management of each of the campuses in Florida's state's university system was handed over to 12-member Boards of Trustees, replacing the state's Board of Regents. The Boards, appointed by Florida Governor Jeb Bush despite protests from many academics and others concerned with the independence of the university system, are now running the university system.
Firing Dr. Al-Arian
On December 18, Board Chairman Richard A. Beard, III called an Emergency Meeting of the University of South Florida Board of Trustees "for an end-of-semester review of the situation regarding Dr. Sami Al-Arian." According to an eyewitness, the meeting was more like a "kangaroo court" than a sober decision-making event. Because of sunshine laws, the meeting had to be publicized and open. Officials publicized it via the USF news listserv, which has relatively few subscribers, at 4:12 p.m.; the meeting took place at 9:00 a.m., far less than 24 hours notice, on a day when most faculty and nearly all students had left for Christmas vacation.
One person who attended the meeting described it this way: "[The] meeting was held in a room with a seating capacity of about 50, although word spread quickly and it was standing room only. Professor Al-Arian, who had been barred from campus, was not allowed to attend. No one except the trustees, the university president, their lawyers, and the head of campus police was allowed to speak. The lawyer, Thomas Gonzalez, expressed the opinion that the board could recommend firing because Dr. Al-Arian had caused disruption. He cited a 1994 Alabama case decided by the Supreme Court where a nurse at a public hospital had criticized the obstetrics unit and was promptly fired for doing so. The majority upheld that action, because her speech had caused disruption in the unit and undermined the confidence of patients and staff. Gonzalez said that under this ruling public employees could be fired if they make their co-workers 'uncomfortable.' It begged an incredibly broad interpretation, and the only board member to discuss the fact that tenure was at stake was Howard President H. Patrick Swygert -- the only Black member and the only trustee involved with higher education -- who participated via conference call.
"Further discussion reinforced that fact that Dr. Al-Arian had negatively impacted the university's fundraising efforts and that was sufficient reason to fire him. The campus police representative explained that they are not really able to handle sustained security threats, don't have the staff or money so this inability to provide a safe environment is cause to fire a tenured professor. The Board chair repeatedly referred to Dr. Al-Arian as a terrorist, implying that he was responsible for recent incidents in Israel. The chair went on to explain that this was not about unpopular views or speech, but that it was necessary in order to protect the students and faculty and staff. The campus officer testified that there had been no new threats for the past six weeks, so by their own admission, security problems are not ongoing.
"Former Senator Connie Mack was the only one present who questioned the rectitude of denying academic freedom on the basis of the criminal and threatening actions of others, but he relented and voted in favor of firing him. Trustee Margarita R. Cancio, MD, a Cuban native who has spoken out many times in support of free speech insisted that Dr. Al-Arian had to be fired because he was not performing his duties in the classroom -- he was suspended and barred from coming on campus --and had abandoned his job, so [they] had little choice but to fire him. The Dean of Engineering argued that the university's fundraising activities had been adversely affected. And so on, ad nauseum.
"Dr. Al-Arian was not there; his lawyer may have been there, but he was not allowed to speak. The President of the union was there but he was not allowed to speak. No faculty member or student was allowed to speak. The President of the student body, the student representative on the board, gave a truly disgusting speech about this being USF's finest hour. It was pretty amazing."
After the meeting, not everyone remained silent. According to a statement by the Tampa Bay Coalition for Justice and Peace, former USF Faculty senate president Nancy Tyson said: "It's unjust that such a meeting was held without any notice or due process afforded to Dr. Al-Arian. It's also quite disturbing that many statements that were said at the meeting were factually incorrect including the allegation that Dr. Al-Arian ever spoke on behalf of USF."
In accepting the board's recommendation and firing Dr. Al-Arian South Florida President Judy Genshaft was no profile in courage. In a statement cloaked in the defense of academic freedom and free speech but in reality a capitulation to the Board, Genshaft said that "the fundamental question [was] how much disruption the University must endure because of the manner in which a professor exercises his right to express political and social views that are outside the scope of his employment." If that was the "fundamental question" then she has completely misread what the fight against terrorism is about. A question that she should be asking is, Why haven't law enforcement and university officials fully investigated where the threats to Dr. Al-Arian have come from?
Genshaft, giving in to a highly politicized Board of Trustees as well as to those making the threats, complained that the "controversy is consuming resources of many divisions of the University, and based on information presented to trustees today, it will continue to do so as long as the current arrangement continues. The University Police advise that we cannot guarantee the safety of Dr. Al-Arian and students, faculty and staff around him if he were back on campus." Imagine if those in charge of investigating the anthrax letters decided that it was too costly to pursue the investigation. There would be a righteous and justified outcry about "giving in to terrorism."
Dr. Al-Arian's attorney Robert A. Cannella said that the professor would "refrain from making any comments on this matter. Dr. Al-Arian is considering all the options available to him in order to insure that his rights are protected."
A Board in bed with Bush
USF's Board of Trustees is in no way representative of Florida's diverse population. The following bios of USF trustees are taken from a June 2001 state-issued release. The Board is made up of mostly wealthy white men who are well-connected corporate leaders with little-to-no professional educational credentials. According to a source close to USF, they are also mostly donors to the Republican Party and friends of the Governor.
Lee E. Arnold, Jr. is the CEO and chairman of the board of Arnold Companies, Colliers Arnold and a member of the Florida Council of 100; Richard A. "Dick" Beard, III is a real estate advisor with R. A. Beard, Co. who served on the Florida Board of Regents and is a member of the Florida Council of 100; Steven G. Burton is managing partner of the Tampa Office of Broad and Cassel Attorneys at Law; Margarita R. Cancio, MD, is a native of Cuba who emigrated to Florida from Spain; Ann Wilkins Duncan is the senior vice president of CLW Real Estate Services Group; Rhea F. Law is an attorney with the firm of Fowler, White, Gillen, Boggs, Villareal & Banker, P.A; Former conservative Republican Senator Connie Mack, who is currently senior policy advisor for Shaw Pittman in Washington, DC.; John B. Ramil, is the president of the Tampa Electric Company; Robert L. Soran is currently president and COO of Uniroyal Technology Corp. and is a member of the Florida Council of 100; Gus A. Stavros chairman of PELAM Investments, Inc.; Chris T. Sullivan, the founder, chairman, and CEO of Outback Steakhouse, Inc., is active in a number of business organizations including the Florida Council of 100 and the Florida Chamber of Commerce; H. Patrick Swygert who since 1995 has been president of Howard University; and USF student body president, Michael Griffin is the 13th member of the Board of Trustees.
American Council of Trustees and Alumni in the house
Last month the Lynn Cheney and Joseph Lieberman founded American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) issued a report titled "Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America, and What Can Be Done About It." The report reproduced statements from some 117 college and university faculty who dared to speak-out against or raise questions about the president's war on terrorism. "Defending Civilization" called these academics, the "weak link in America's response to the attack" of September 11. While it wasn't the first shot fired by right-wing organizations against liberal academics since September 11 - -the ubiquitous former leftie turned right-winger David Horowitz of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture is usually the first to spot reds on campus -- the publication did receive a lot of attention from the media. And while much of it criticized ACTA's methodology and shoddy scholarship, the media paid no attention to ACTA's role in helping shape the new paradigm for university governance in Florida.
ACTA is straightforward about its long-term mission and goals. It believes that since its members give enormous sums of money to colleges and universities they should have a voice in making policy decisions. According to its web site, ACTA members contributed $3.4 billion to colleges and universities last year, making the organization "the largest private source of support for higher education." This key aspect of ACTA's agenda was ignored in the press accounts I've seen dealing with ACTA's high-profile report. (For more on ACTA and its report, see "Lynne Cheney's campus crusade: Second Lady's ACTA launches campaign against 'Blame America First' academics.")
In the USF case, as the AP story points out, university president Genshaft also admitted that Professor Al-Arian's "continued employment has prompted alumni and university donors to withdraw their support." By caving to pressure from donors, Genshaft has set the stage for a troubling precedent -- unpopular or dissenting faculty members could be dismissed because some disgruntled donors register their disapproval and threaten to withhold their financial support.
In Florida last summer, ACTA was a major participant during the transition from the Board of Regents run system to the one now under the control of separate boards of trustees. Anne Neal, a vice president and lawyer for ACTA and co-author with Jerry L. Martin, President of ACTA, of the "Defending Civilization" pamphlet, led orientation sessions for all of the state's new trustees. Neal told them that they now had the power over their schools' budgets and academic standards and will also be able to select their schools' presidents. "That's the easy part," she said. She pointed out that the more difficult problem would be revising their schools' policies and examining their personal and business relationships to assure there isn't even the appearance of impropriety.
Is the Al-Arian firing a one-time witchhunt? Is it an aberration owing to the highly charged climate created by the war on terrorism? Could this only happen in Florida? By all accounts, ACTA's work is just beginning.
Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His WorkingForChange column Conservative Watch documents the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the American Right.
To see more of his work:
http://www.workingforchange.com/column_lst.cfm?AuthrId=1
Source: http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemId=12547
12/27/01
6:16:27 PM
THE CHRISTMAS TRUCE
On Christmas Day, 1914, in the first year of World War I, German, British, and French soldiers disobeyed their superiors and fraternized with "the enemy" along two-thirds of the Western Front. German troops held Christmas trees up out of the trenches with, signs, "Merry Christmas." "You no shoot, we no shoot." Thousands of troops streamed across a no-man's land strewn with rotting corpses. They sang Christmas carols, exchanged photographs of loved ones back home, shared rations, played football, even roasted some pigs. Soldiers embraced men they had been trying to kill them a few short hours before. They agreed to warn each other if the top brass forced them to fire their weapons, and to aim high.
A shudder ran through the high command on either side. Here was disaster in the making: soldiers declaring their brotherhood with each other and refusing to fight. Generals on both sides declared this spontaneous peacemaking to be treasonous and subject to court martial. By March, 1915 the fraternization movement had been eradicated and the killing machine put back in full operation. By the time of the armistice in 1918, fifteen million would be slaughtered.
Not many people have heard the story of the Christmas Truce. Military leaders have not gone out of their way to publicize it. On Christmas Day, 1988, a story in the Boston Globe mentioned that a local FM radio host played "Christmas in the Trenches," a ballad about the Christmas Truce, several times and was startled by the effect. The song became the most requested recording during the holidays in Boston on several FM stations. "Even more startling than the number of requests I get is the reaction to the ballad afterward by callers who hadn't heard it before," said the radio host. "They telephone me deeply moved, sometimes in tears, asking, `What the hell did I just hear?'"
I think I know why the callers were in tears. The Christmas Truce story goes against most of what we have been taught about people. It gives us a glimpse of the world as we wish it could be and says, "This really happened once." It reminds us of those thoughts we keep hidden away, out of range of the TV and newspaper stories that tell us how trivial and mean human life is. It is like hearing that our deepest wishes really are true: the world really could be different.
Excerpted from David G. Stratman, We Can Change the World: The Real Meaning of Everyday Life New Democracy Books, 1991 Available for $3.00 from New Democracy Books P.O. Box 427 Boston MA 02130
12/27/01
6:11:12 PM
A Holy Day Story
A woman came out of her house and saw 3 old men sitting in her front yard. She did not recognize them. She said "I don't think I know you, but you must be hungry. Please come in and have something to eat."
"Is the man of the house home?", they asked.
"No", she replied. "He's out."
"Then we cannot come in", they replied.
In the evening when her husband came home, she told him what had happened.
"Go tell them I am home and invite them in!"
The woman went out and invited the men in"
"We do not go into a House together," they replied.
"Why is that?" she asked.
One of the old men explained: "His name is Wealth," he said pointing to one of his friends, and said pointing to another one, "He is Success, and I am Love." Then he added, "Now go in and discuss with your husband which one of us you want in your home."
The woman went in and told her husband what was said. Her husband was overjoyed. "How nice!!", he said. "Since that is the case, let us invite Wealth. Let him come and fill our home with wealth!"
His wife disagreed. "My dear, why don't we invite Success?"
Their daughter-in-law was listening from the other corner of the house. She jumped in with her own suggestion: "Would it not be better to invite Love? Our home will then be filled with love!"
"Let us heed our daughter-in-law's advice," said the husband to his wife.
"Go out and invite Love to be our guest."
The woman went out and asked the 3 old men, "Which one of you is Love? Please come in and be our guest."
Love got up and started walking toward the house. The other 2 also got up and followed him. Surprised, the lady asked Wealth and Success: "I only invited Love, Why are you coming in?"
The old men replied together: "If you had invited Wealth or Success, the other two of us would've stayed out, but since you invited Love, wherever He goes, we go with him. Wherever there is Love, there is also Wealth and Success!!!!!!"
Have a happy, safe, and healthy holiday season and new year.
12/27/01
6:02:06 PM
THE YEAR'S DUMBEST PEOPLE AND THINGS
The Rev. Jerry Falwell tops MAD Magazine's list of "The Dumbest People, Events and Things of 2001." The evangelist receieved the dubious honor for blaming the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 on "the abortionists, feminists, gays and lesbians."
"We thought Falwell had reached his personal pinnacle of dumbness a few years ago when he accused the Teletubbies of promoting homosexuality," said MAD co-editor John Ficarra. "Give the guy credit, we underestimated him."
The MAD editors point out that the millennium is off to an extraordinarily dumb start. "The botched presidential election made 2000 a very dumb year," said Ficarra, "but between Falwell's moronic comments after Sept. 11, the Gary Condit affair and the XFL debacle, 2001 was even dumber!"
The previous winners of MAD's "dumbest thing of the year" were Monicagate (1998), The Y2K Panic (1999) and last year's presidential election.
THE MAD 20: The Dumbest People, Events and Things of 2001
1. Jerry Falwell's Ugly Remarks About Sept. 11
2. Celebrity Substance Abuse As A Career Move
3. "13-Year Old" Danny Almonte And The Bronx Little League Scandal
4. Bill Clinton Gets A Sweet $10 Million Book Deal
5. Anne Heche Says Bye "Bi," Goes Hetero
6. NASCAR's Abysmal Safety Record
7. Err Jordan: Michael's Foolish Comeback
8. The Supreme Court Snuffs Out Medical Marijuana
9. The Timothy McVeigh Death Lottery
10. Fuzzy Math: The Bush Tax Rebate
11. McDonald's McFixed Monopoly Game Contest
12. Puff Daddy Changes His Name To "P. Diddy"
13. The Butchers Of Beijing Awarded Olympic Games
14. Elton John Duets With Eminem At Grammy Awards
15. Weird Beard: Al Gore Grows Facial Hair
16. The XFL Debacle
17. The Bush Daughters Drunken Adventure
18. That Millionaire Guy Who Bribed The Russians To Launch Him Into Space
19. The Gary Condit Affair
20. MAD Magazine Sells Out, Accepts Ads
12/27/01
5:52:05 PM
Who's Watching The Watchers?
In Joe McCarthy's day they were called "snitch lines." They worked like this: if you suspected your colleague or neighbor or employee was up to something un-American - leaving lights on when nobody was home, sympathizing with the Communists, etc. - you could call up a special phone number and anonymously rat them out.
In this time of heightened national security, the snitch lines are back. In the aftermath of September 11th, the FBI received tens of thousands of calls on so-called "tip" lines, and folks were broadly rounded up for questioning.
One tip-line caller reported a suspicious-looking billboard near Times Square in New York. Soon after, a Department of Defense agent paid a visit to Chashama, the theater and art gallery that had leased space to Adbusters for its Corporate American Flag billboard. The agent had a lot of questions: Why were they displaying the billboard? Who paid for it? Who created it? (One clue might have been the website listed on the sign.)
You might call this vigilant grassroots anti-terrorism work. Or you might call it low-level intimidation. In the current climate, it seems, some types of social commentary are off-limits. If you've chosen this time to exercise your First Amendment rights in a critical way, you may find yourself under investigation.
We don't want these individual voices to get lost in the chorus of programmatic patriotism. That's why we're setting up our own "snitch" line. If you know of valid protests or social-marketing messages that are being suppressed, investigated or otherwise discouraged, or if you come across any other story of low level intimidation, tell us about it.
Source: http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/flag/nyc.html
12/27/01
5:44:38 PM
Evil Unleashed
Israel's move to destroy the Palestinian Authority is a calculated plan, long in the making
In mainstream political discourse, Israel's recent atrocities are described as 'retaliatory acts' - answering the last wave of terror attacks on Israeli civilians. But in fact, this 'retaliation' had been carefully prepared long before. Already in October 2000, at the outset of the Palestinian uprising, military circles were ready with detailed operative plans to topple Arafat and the Palestinian Authority. This was before the Palestinian terror attacks started.
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/RHE112A.html
12/27/01
5:41:32 PM
EIR Blows Israeli Spies' Cover In September 11 Case
By Jeffrey Steinberg and Edward Spannaus Executive Intelligence Review
Years of tracking down an important set of drug-trafficking cases, led EIR investigators to what has now become a contender for the story of the new century: the investigation of connections between Israeli spies detained in the United States, and the events of Sept. 11. EIR's own, Nov. 29, 2001 release, which was circulated to subscribers in the Dec. 4, 2001 Executive Alert Service, was the opening gun.
To properly appreciate the significance of the EIR expose, it is crucial to first restate some essential features of Lyndon LaRouche's now-indisputable assessment of the events of Sept. 11, first aired on the Jack Stockwell radio show, as the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were still occurring.
LaRouche stated that the New York and Washington attacks could not have occurred without the witting complicity of high-level "rogue elements" within the U.S. military-intelligence command structures.
The actions of Sept. 11 constituted a coup d'état attempt against the Bush Administration, aimed at drawing the United States into precisely the kind of "Clash of Civilizations" Eurasian war, openly advocated by such individuals as Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel Huntington, and Bush Administration "moles" like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle.
The Israeli government of Ariel Sharon and the present Israeli Defense Force command is the most significant "marcher-lord" asset of the Anglo-American faction pressing the "Clash of Civilizations" war-plan, as evidenced by Sharon's persistent efforts to provoke a new religious war in the Middle East against the Palestinian Authority and a range of other Arab targets.
Thus the events of September 11 and the ongoing coup threat must be first understood from the standpoint of the interaction of these three elements: the as-yet unidentified rogue operators within the military-security command; the strategic policy figures promoting the new Eurasian Thirty Years War; and the Israeli apparatus of Sharon and the IDF, which, as part of their war aims, has carried out an aggressive espionage and covert operations penetration of the U.S.A., including the recruitment of American-born assets. It is so far unknown, but to be suspected, that some of these Israeli assets may have been an included feature of the rogue networks whose complicity was vital to the successful attacks of Sept. 11.
With that said, the story can be told.
The Jones-Powell Exchange
That Executive Alert Service item of Dec. 4 reported, under the headline, "A Sharon spy network in the Americas?", that "A well-placed Washington source has alerted EIR that there is growing suspicion among U.S. government law enforcement and intelligence agencies that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has dispatched special operations teams into North America. The warning came in the context of a discussion about the recent deportation of five Israelis who were detained on Sept. 11 for suspicious behavior."
Since Secretary of State Colin Powell's answer to a question from EIR's Washington Bureau Chief Bill Jones, at a Dec. 13 special State Department briefing, the lid is off the Israeli spy scandal and suggestions of its links to the Sept. 11 irregular warfare attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon--despite desperate efforts at suppressing the Israeli spy story by most leading news media.
At the Dec. 13 State Department briefing, Jones asked Powell: "There were 60 Israeli citizens who have been picked up in the post-Sept. 11 sweep, many of whom, if not all of whom, are connected to Israeli intelligence... Are you concerned about such intelligence operations on U.S. soil, and have you taken up this issue with your counterpart in Israel?"
Secretary Powell responded: "I'm aware that some Israeli citizens have been detained, and I've been in touch with the Israeli government as to the fact that they have been detained, in making sure that they have rights of access to Israeli diplomatic personnel here in the United States. With respect to why they are being detained, and the other aspects of your question, whether it's because they are in intelligence services or what things they were doing, I will defer to the Department of Justice and the FBI to answer that; because, frankly, I deal with the consular parts of that problem, not the intelligence or law-enforcement parts of that problem."
Spies, Criminals, And Terrorists
What was behind that exchange between Jones and Powell?
Since the Alert report of the Israeli spy story, and the suspected links to Sept. 11, EIR has compiled evidence of a vast network of Israeli drug and diamond smugglers, spies, and communications intelligence operatives--all working under Israeli, American and Canadian corporate covers, on behalf of the mafia-riddled Sharon government, and Sharon's international sponsors in the Mega Group and allied Anglo-American circles (See EIR, Aug. 31, 2001, "Mega Was Not An Agent--Mega Was the Boss;" and Nov. 16, 2001, "The `Mega-maniacs' Steering Sharon's Mideast War Drive").
A number of sources have confirmed earlier EIR investigative findings that this network is engaged in:
* A massive ecstasy trafficking operation, delivering hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal drugs, manufactured in the Netherlands, to cities across the United States. The drug trafficking operation is also engaged in black market diamond smuggling, using Hassidic Jews as couriers.
* Portions of the funds garnered from the illegal operations, according to sources, are funneled to offshore bank accounts of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Some of these dirty funds were reportedly diverted to Sharon's election campaigns. This Israeli mafia apparatus receives technical support via a number of Israeli communications firms, that subcontract with major American telephone companies and U.S. law enforcement agencies.
* Spy operations, targeted at mosques and other centers of the Islamic-American communities. According to sources, the goal is to foment nominally "Arab" or "Islamic" labeled violence and terrorism inside the United States, to win Bush Administration support for an Israeli war against the Palestinians and Arabs. These sources believe further, Israeli-abetted terror attacks are to be expected.
* Surveillance of U.S. government law enforcement, military and intelligence facilities, to gather profile information for such terrorist attacks, as well as espionage penetration. Organized teams of young, "recently retired" Israeli Defense Force soldiers, often associated with specialty units engaged in electronic signal intercepts and explosive ordinance, have targeted at least 36 domestic U.S. military bases, and many federal law enforcement and intelligence installations. A second feature of this targeting of USG facilities is the recruitment of "a new generation of Jonathan Pollards" (Israeli spies).
Pattern Of Arrests
Between 1998 and early 2001, more than 200 Israeli nationals were arrested or detained inside the United States, on a variety of visa violations and other nominally petty violations, including low-level drug trafficking. The majority of these detainees claimed they were Israeli art students, peddling art work to cover their college tuitions; or were toy vendors, employed by an Israeli-owned Miami Beach company, Quality Sales Corporation, which investigations link to Israel's equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency. The attorney for Quality Sales Corp., Thomas W. Dean, is also the director of litigation for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Legislation (NORML), one of the oldest of the drug legalization lobbies, which enjoys the financing of mega-speculator George Soros.
The emerging pattern of surveillance of American government facilities, and established links to suspected Arab and Islamic terrorist cells prior to Sept. 11, by these Israeli nationals, set off alarm bells, following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Prior to Sept. 11, a series of highly-classified government memos had been circulated by the CIA and the NSA, pronouncing this Israeli espionage operation a major national security problem.
A drug probe in Los Angeles provided one crucial clue to the broader drug/espionage/terror nexus. From 1997, up until he was arrested by a joint anti-drug task force in April 2000, Jacob "Cookie" Orgad ran one of the biggest ecstasy smuggling operations in America--for the Israeli dope-and-diamond crime syndicate. Orgad has been named as the "enforcer" of the infamous Heidi Fleiss Hollywood prostitution ring.
Every time the DEA, FBI and Los Angeles Police Department task force infiltrated an agent inside the Orgad ring, his or her identity was blown within a matter of days. Everytime a court ordered wiretap was put in place, the target immediately "began behaving like Mother Teresa," according to a source familiar with the case.
A highly confidential federal counter-surveillance effort eventually revealed that the Orgad gang was receiving inside information about phone taps, and even details of conversations between the federal and local police officials on the task force, as well as their home addresses and phone numbers.
Investigations into the sources of the leaks converged on two prominent Israeli corporations, which are both core service providers to the American telecommunications industry and to U.S. law enforcement agencies. The two companies are Amdocs and Comverse.
Amdocs was first identified in the Aug. 31, 2001 EIR expose of the Mega Group as part of the Israeli "inside" apparatus in the Clinton White House, that tapped the President's phone conversations with Monica Lewinsky, and used the tapes as blackmail leverage against the U.S. peace efforts in the Middle East.
Amdocs was incorporated in 1982 on the notorious offshore British financial safe-haven of Guernsey. It provides a wide range of top-end telecommunications services, including phone billings and fraud detection, to the 25 largest telephone companies in the United States and to companies in 50 other countries around the world. The overwhelming majority of its 9,000 employees are Israelis, and the top management are largely former high-ranking officers of Israeli military and intelligence bureaus.
Comverse, along with the Canadian company, JSI International, handles the majority of contracts, worldwide, for wiretaps, including in the United States. Comverse is a major sub-contractor for both the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration. Comverse, too, primarily employs Israeli military and intelligence veterans. The company is a leading manufacturer of facial-recognition and voice-recognition technology, employed by American law enforcement and intelligence.
Both firms have also been linked to the Israeli "art students" and toy vendors.
Where It Stands
To summarize the EIR investigation as of this moment: The same billionaires' club, called "Mega," which was pointed to as the orchestrator of the 1997-99 operations against U.S. President Bill Clinton, is multiply linked to the authors of the current Israeli killing operations. It is situated in a network of U.S.A., Canada, Israeli, and other business organizations at the center of the Israeli military intelligence service's international operating capabilities. These businesses, like those involved in the Clinton White House message system scandal, represent wiretapping and other espionage capabilities beyond the means enjoyed by most leading governments.
These connections should have been shut down totally, even for no other reason than U.S. interest in protection of its citizens against foreign and other spying, and in the protection of the secrets of our sovereign government, and integrity of our intelligence and law-enforcement functions. While this Israeli-linked spying against the United States and its most sensitive military, intelligence, and law-enforcement agencies continues, the United States has no real national security. As long as this is not cleaned up, the drug-traffickers, including those tied to international terrorist operations, often have more authority in criminal matters than properly constituted law-enforcement and related official agencies.
Executive Intelligence
Review 1-888-347-3258 w
12/27/01
5:25:57 PM
9/11 - WHAT WAS ISRAEL'S ROLE?
by Justin Raimondo
Fox News revelations point to an ominous conclusion
When is American foreign policy going to start putting America first? The US had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by vetoing a UN resolution condemning violence on all sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The resolution condemned terrorism, no matter what the source, called for the creation of a "monitoring mechanism" to prevent violence, denounced executions without trial, and said the destruction of property must cease. You gotta problem with that?
NEGROPONTE'S VETO
This administration does: John Negroponte, American ambassador to the UN, justified the US veto by averring that the resolution aimed to "isolate politically one of the parties to the conflict through an attempt to throw the weight of the Council behind the other party." The resolution, said Negroponte, was unsatisfactory because it didn't specifically mention "recent acts of terrorism" against Israelis. Naturally, this scuttled the whole thing, as it was intended to do.
THE VICTIMOLOGICAL OLYMPICS
For this argument, if carried on long enough, would lead to an infinite regression of victimological examples: the pro-Arab bloc would insist on specifically mentioning the supposedly accidental killing of five Palestinian children by an Israeli booby-trap bomb planted near a school. This would be the cue for the Israeli side to come up with a Hamas-Hizbollah atrocity that merits inclusion - and, before you know it, we're all the way back to 1948 with the pro-Arabists demanding the inclusion of the massacre at Deir Yassein, and, naturally, the Zionist bloc doing them one better by moving for some mention of the Roman conquest and persecution of the Jews.
THE WAR AGAINST THE WORLD
The US veto undermines the war effort, and makes the Americans seem as if they are waging a war not only on Islam, but against the entire world on behalf of Israel. After decades of trying to prove its bona fides as an honest broker of peace in the region, it is the US that is effectively isolated. The resolution was co-sponsored (or amended) by France and the Security Council vote was 12-1, with Britain and Norway abstaining. Whatever credibility the US had in the Arab world - very little, I'm afraid - was lost with that one arrogant gesture. So much for the grand "coalition" that Colin Powell has been building: the Israeli lobby in the US has demolished it with a single blow.
BATTLEGROUND AMERICA
Speaking of sabotage, the story of the gigantic Israeli spy operation in the US - and its mysterious activities in the weeks prior to 9/11 -continues to amaze and shock even me. When I wrote, a few weeks ago, that the detention of some 60 Israelis in connection with 9/11 was "ominous" little did I realize just how much of an understatement that would turn out to be. It is often said that, post-9/11, the US is going through what the Israelis have had to endure for decades. The series of Fox News special reports on Israeli penetration of US intelligence assets puts this insight in an entirely new light. For it appears, from what we are learning, that the struggle between two desert tribes in a far away land has truly been brought home to the US: America, we are discovering to our horror, has become a battleground for both sides in that ancient conflict.
ENDS & MEANS
As I related last week, the first part of this astonishing four-part series by Fox News reporter Carl Cameron presents credible evidence suggesting Israeli intelligence had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks. The second and third parts show they had the means to acquire this knowledge. According to Cameron,
"Fox News has learned that some American terrorist investigators fear certain suspects in the Sept. 11 attacks may have managed to stay ahead of them, by knowing who and when investigators are calling on the telephone."
ALL ROADS LEAD TO AMDOCS
Cameron takes us through an explanation of how and why virtually all telephone calls in the US are billed by a single company, Amdocs Ltd., which just happens to be headquartered in Israel. Chances are that when you make a call, the record of the call and the billing is done through Amdocs. With a virtual monopoly in the US, and tentacles worldwide, Cameron reports that "it is virtually impossible to make a call on normal phones without generating an Amdocs record of it." Amdocs denies any wrongdoing, but sources tell Fox News that, in 1999,
"The super secret national security agency, headquartered in northern Maryland, issued what's called a Top Secret sensitive compartmentalized information report, TS/SCI, warning that records of calls in the United States were getting into foreign hands - in Israel, in particular."
SPIES IN THE WOODWORK
It's not that anyone is listening in on all these calls, but that these methods are a way to know who is calling whom, when, and for how long -vital information in and of itself. Cameron assures us that the White House and the Pentagon are immune from such surveillance, but an article in Insight, the magazine put out by the Washington Times, showed how Israeli intelligence had thoroughly penetrated the communications system at the Clinton White House. According to co-authors J. Michael Waller and Paul M. Rodriguez, writing in May of last year, the FBI was
"Probing an explosive foreign-espionage operation that could dwarf the other spy scandals plaguing the U.S. government. Insight has learned that FBI counterintelligence is tracking a daring operation to spy on high-level US officials by hacking into supposedly secure telephone networks. The espionage was facilitated, federal officials say, by lax telephone-security procedures at the White House, State Department and other high-level government offices and by a Justice Department unwillingness to seek an indictment against a suspect."
"The espionage operation may have serious ramifications," wrote Waller and Rodriguez, "because the FBI has identified Israel as the culprit."
OUT OF THE MURK
Ah, but the deepness of these consequences is just beginning to be known. As the Fox News revelations make all too clear, they are a lot deeper than anyone, including Waller and Rodriguez, could possibly have imagined last year. The picture that is beginning to emerge out of the murk is this: the Israelis were watching the hijackers and/or their associates, and they very possibly had access to a complete set of the conspirators' phone records, if not direct access to the content of their conversations. In the months prior to the attacks, the Israelis did indeed issue a warning of "massive" terrorist attacks, but, in an effort to protect both their sources and methods, their warning gave no details and was therefore practically useless.
THE COMVERSE CONNECTION
The third part of the Fox series shows how the Israelis had access, not only to phone records, but also to the wiretaps being conducted by US law enforcement agencies. This access could have easily been provided, Cameron points out, by yet another hi-tech Israeli communications company, Comverse, which operates as practically a branch of the Israeli government, and enjoys near monopolistic status here in the US.
When you place a call, it goes through a complicated network of routers and switchers. The way wiretapping works is that customized computers are linked to that network via specialized software, and the system intercepts, records, and stores wiretapped calls. But this system has a "back door" that could have easily been opened by Israeli intelligence. Comverse maintains a link to the wiretapping computers, on the grounds that it is necessary for system "maintenance." Over the opposition of some patriotic law enforcement officers, this process was authorized by the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). But that wasn't the end of it. According to Fox News,
"Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller were both warned Oct. 18 in a hand-delivered letter from 15 local, state and federal law enforcement officials, who complained that 'law enforcement's current electronic surveillance capabilities are less effective today than they were at the time CALEA was enacted.'"
ASHCROFT'S COMPLICITY
But Ashcroft is too busy rounding up Arabs and closing down their organizations to worry about the wholesale penetration of our communications system - including "secure" networks at the White House, the Defense Department, and elsewhere - by our wonderful allies, the Israelis. Cameron cites several unnamed law enforcement agents - concerned about the ominous implications of the Israeli penetration in light of 9/11 - who say that even raising the issue is "career suicide."
I HOPE YOU'RE SITTING DOWN
Okay, so the Israelis have the phone lines over at the White House, the Defense Department, the Justice Department, and, for all we know, your local dogcatcher's office bugged to the max. So they have the capability to know where and when practically every phone call in the US, and large sections of the rest of the world, is made, and to whom. As fantastic as it sounds, given the advance of technology and the reputation of the Mossad, I'm willing to believe it. What's really alarming, however, is that, as Cameron reports:
"On a number of cases, suspects that they had sought to wiretap and survey immediately changed their telecommunications processes. They started acting much differently as soon as those supposedly secret wiretaps went into place."
BEYOND THE BEGUINE
The implications of this stunning news go far beyond my original contention: that the Israelis had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks and simply failed to let us know the details. For it all depends on the intended target of the wiretaps: was it the Israelis, or Bin Laden's agents? If the former were acting differently after wiretaps were put in place, it means only that the Israelis were using their sources and methods to protect their own: if the latter, it means the Israelis were using their sources and methods to protect the Bin Ladenites. That is a possibility no one - including me - wants to contemplate, and, in all truthfulness, I must confess I cannot believe it. I am forced to concede, however, that, given what we now know, it is possible. Until and unless the government comes clean, we won't know for sure.
INVESTIGATE THE ISRAELI CONNECTION
At the end of his second report, Carl Cameron remarked to Brit Hume that the question of the Israeli connection to 9/11 "came up in the select intelligence committee on Capitol Hill today," and "they intend to look into what we reported last night." Naturally, all this is occurring in secret, with the likelihood of a cover-up all but certain. What is needed is a public investigation, and full disclosure of the Israeli role, if any, in 9/11.
WHERE IS THE MEDIA?
That, of course, is the role of the media - and, in this regard, it is interesting to note that Cameron's explosive investigation has not been picked up by a single news outlet, as far as I know (although I would be happy to be proved wrong) or discussed by a single "mainstream" columnist. Yet Fox News is hardly a marginal news source. In a business where scandal and especially spy stories are hot, you would think that a story like this, with its tie-in to 9/11, would have the other networks and the major media falling all over themselves to get a piece of the action. But not this time, at least so far.
THE ANTI-SEMITIC FALLACY
I can only hope, for Mr. Cameron's sake, that what amounts to "career suicide" in law enforcement doesn't hold true at Fox News. Israel certainly has many vocal and very active supporters, who are quick to make their opinions known. But it is false to posit a "Jewish-controlled" media, no matter what the ethnicity or political persuasion of editors, owners, or whatever: these media companies are beholden to their shareholders, and to the market. Reporting the news is an intensely competitive business: there is no way to enforce an embargo on certain information, not in this day and age. There is no "Jewish conspiracy" - only the machinations of a particular foreign government and its uncritical supporters in this country, who span the ethnic and religious as well as the political spectrum.
THE TRUTH, AT LAST
It is too soon to say whether or not this story has "legs," as they say, and is going anywhere soon. But one thing's for sure: Fox News has blown the mystery of 9/11 wide open. This isn't going to just go away. On September 11, the American people looked on in disbelief at the sight of not only the World Trade Center going down but the Pentagon - the Pentagon, fer chrissake! - under attack and apparently defenseless. My first thought, at any rate, was: How could this happen? With these latest surprising developments - pointing to an ambiguous Israeli role, at best, in all this - I fear we are just beginning to discover the answer to that question.
Source: http://www.antiwar.com/justin/justincol.html
12/27/01
5:23:22 PM
December 1st - "It Just Did Not Happen"
Village elders