Saturday 24 November 2007

One Million Dead in Iraq: Our Own Holocaust Denial

Institutionally unwilling to consider America’s responsibility for the bloodbath, the traditional media have refused to acknowledge the massive number of Iraqis killed since the invasion.

By Mark Weisbrot

Institutionally unwilling to consider America’s responsibility for the bloodbath, the traditional media have refused to acknowledge the massive number of Iraqis killed since the invasion.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s flirtation with those who deny the reality of the Nazi genocide has rightly been met with disgust. But another holocaust denial is taking place with little notice: the holocaust in Iraq. The average American believes that 10,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the US invasion in March 2003. The most commonly cited figure in the media is 70,000. But the actual number of people who have been killed is most likely more than one million.

This is five times more than the estimates of killings in Darfur and even more than the genocide in Rwanda 13 years ago.

The estimate of more than one million violent deaths in Iraq was confirmed again two months ago in a poll by the British polling firm Opinion Research Business, which estimated 1,220,580 violent deaths since the US invasion. This is consistent with the study conducted by doctors and scientists from the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health more than a year ago. Their study was published in the Lancet, Britain’s leading medical journal. It estimated 601,000 people killed due to violence as of July 2006; but if updated on the basis of deaths since the study, this estimate would also be more than a million. These estimates do not include those who have died because of public health problems created by the war, including breakdowns in sewerage systems and electricity, shortages of medicines, etc.

Amazingly, some journalists and editors - and of course some politicians - dismiss such measurements because they are based on random sampling of the population rather than a complete count of the dead. While it would be wrong to blame anyone for their lack of education, this disregard for scientific methods and results is inexcusable. As one observer succinctly put it: if you don’t believe in random sampling, the next time your doctor orders a blood test, tell him that he needs to take all of it.

The methods used in the estimates of Iraqi deaths are the same as those used to estimate the deaths in Darfur, which are widely accepted in the media. They are also consistent with the large numbers of refugees from the violence (estimated at more than four million). There is no reason to disbelieve them, or to accept tallies such as that the Iraq Body Count (73,305 - 84,222), which include only a small proportion of those killed, as an estimate of the overall death toll.

Of course, acknowledging the holocaust in Iraq might change the debate over the war. While Iraqi lives do not count for much in US politics, recognizing that a mass slaughter of this magnitude is taking place could lead to more questions about how this horrible situation came to be. Right now a convenient myth dominates the discussion: the fall of Saddam Hussein simply unleashed a civil war that was waiting to happen, and the violence is all due to Iraqis’ inherent hatred of each other.

In fact, there is considerable evidence that the occupation itself - including the strategy of the occupying forces - has played a large role in escalating the violence to holocaust proportions. It is in the nature of such an occupation, where the vast majority of the people are opposed to the occupation and according to polls believe it is right to try and kill the occupiers, to pit one ethnic group against another. This was clear when Shiite troops were sent into Sunni Fallujah in 2004; it is obvious in the nature of the death-squad government, where officials from the highest levels of the Interior Ministry to the lowest ranking police officers - all trained and supported by the US military - have carried out a violent, sectarian mission of “ethnic cleansing.” (The largest proportion of the killings in Iraq are from gunfire and executions, not from car bombs). It has become even more obvious in recent months as the United States is now arming both sides of the civil war, including Sunni militias in Anbar province as well as the Shiite government militias.

Is Washington responsible for a holocaust in Iraq? That is the question that almost everyone here wants to avoid. So the holocaust is denied.

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Wednesday 21 November 2007

Qinetiq Q-branch and Area 51 tech sell-off due a roasting

A long-anticipated report by the National Audit Office (NAO) into the privatisation of defence-tech research company Qinetiq is due out on Friday. Advance hints suggest damning criticism of the sell-off.

Qinetiq's basic assets are various laboratories and facilities full of top boffins, formerly operated by the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) of the MoD. In the late 1990s, a large proportion of DERA became Qinetiq. Those assets remaining under MoD ownership are now under the aegis of the Defence Science and Technology Laboratories (DSTL).

The manner in which the sell-off of Qinetiq was conducted became hugely controversial. Part of the new company was sold to American private-equity group Carlyle for £42m; three years later Carlyle was able to sell the stake and make profits of £300m, an 800 per cent return on its investment. Former senior civil servants who became Qinetiq bigwigs and shareholders saw £100k investments turn into £20m private fortunes.

Some of Qinetiq's market value derives from the fact that it has a guaranteed revenue stream from the MoD. A lot of the rest is in the form of intellectual capital developed at taxpayer expense - and not always UK taxpayer expense, apparently.

Bruce George, the MP who was chairman of the Commons defence committee until he was superseded by former Tory procurement minister James Arbuthnot, says much of the knowhow which makes Qinetiq a hot market property actually came from within the American defence establishment. The Pentagon's boffins are apparently none too chuffed at the way in which the UK government has sold off their war-winning special sauce to the wide world for the enrichment of private sector fatcats.

"The more serious point [regarding the selloff] - which I am not sure will be contained in [Friday's] report - is the damage done to the special relationship between Britain and the US," George told the Guardian today (http://www.guardian.co.uk/military/story/0,,2214477,00.html).

"The work exchanging British and US research work is the glue that binds [the special relationship] together. It is this, above all, that was damaged by a sale to a private company... the US intelligence services were unhappy about this research arm being sold to a private company."

The American spooks' concern could be understandable. Now that Qinetiq is private sector, the chance is there for people to buy things that formerly only the US-UK military/spy alliance might have had access to.

"Whilst QinetiQ are not a manufacturing organisation," says (http://www.qinetiq.com/home/defence/technology_solutions/capabilities/capabilities/hardware.html) the company, "we do occasionally produce hardware ourselves. This happens when clients need small volumes of specialist equipment that are not available in the wider marketplace".

Would you like a piece of kit (http://www.qinetiq.com/home/defence/technology_solutions/military_radar/electronic_warfare.SupportingPar.0007.File.pdf) which can "intercept... and direction-find" against "modern communications systems including TDMA & CDMA" (that is, cellphones) with "unique intelligence analysis software"?

Who did DERA develop that for? Who is Qinetiq selling it to nowadays?

Qinetiq even sells Stealth technology (http://www.qinetiq.com/home/defence/technology_solutions/military_radar/0.html) (It "offers expert consultancy, tools and facilities to... the wider commercial markets", including "design of aircraft" and "radar absorbing materials"). It probably didn't acquire that without help from across the pond.

No wonder the market is confident that Qinetiq will make money - it seems to be flogging off the technological crown jewels of the British and US militaries.

Friday's Audit Office report is expected to focus on the financial aspects of the Qinetiq sale, and will probably give the MoD something of a roasting. However, if Bruce George is right, it might be that the really interesting stories remain untold. The MoD may consider itself to have got off rather lightly. ®

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Gordon Brown backs bank robbers: Billions for Northern Rock bailout

(Socialist Worker) - As the vultures circle around Northern Rock the government seems set to feed them with billions of pounds from the public purse.

Not content with buying into the bank at a knock down price, these asset strippers and privateers want working people in Britain to subsidise their takeover.

Chancellor Alastair Darling has already handed out £24 billion to bail out the bank and is set to shell out up to £50 billion. That is more than double what New Labour spends on housing and the environment, and two thirds of what it spends on education every year.

Families on the housing waiting list or children being taught in Victorian schools with leaking roofs might wonder why they are valued less than the hedge funds and speculators seeking to profit from Northern Rock’s collapse.

Public sector workers might ask why Gordon Brown demands they accept below inflation pay rises – wage cuts in other words – for the next four years “because the country can’t afford it”.

A year ago 150,000 people, many low paid workers, lost up to £40 million they had saved with Christmas hamper company Farepak. Now they face a second Christmas having received nothing back and with no sign of compensation. A report by the public sector union, Unison, this week revealed many have been forced into a “cycle of debt”.

One of the report’s authors, Richard Garside, director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, said, “Many are asking why, if the government was prepared to underwrite Northern Rock to the tune of billions of pounds, no comprehensive help has been forthcoming.”

The government has refused to publish its Companies Investigations Branch report into Farepak’s collapse, from which directors walked away scot free. Meanwhile some people centrally involved in the Northern Rock scandal will be having a merry Christmas despite its collapse.

The chief executive of the bank, Adam Applegarth, was allowed to sail away into the sunset last week with £2.2 million in his pension and having trousered £2.7 million after selling his shares prior to the collapse.

Among those circling round the bankrupt bank is Richard Branson, who wants to rebrand it as Virgin Money.

Joining Branson’s consortium is Wilbur Ross, an American millionaire investor who has just bought up the loan servicing unit of the bankrupt American Home Mortgage Investment Corporation. He paid $500 million for the unit which handles mortgages worth $40 billion.

Last week Ross predicted that between 1.25 million and

2 million homes in the US would face repossession next year following the financial collapse there.

Also in the chase are the US private equity firm JC Flowers, which has bought up a string of banks.

In 2000 it acquired the Long Term Credit Bank of Japan, renamed it Shinsei Bank, cut jobs, and four years later sold it on for a big profit. They and other investors in the buy out took six times what they paid in.

Investment company Olivant says if it got its hands on Northern Rock, it would invest between £80m to £100m in it.

That sounds like big money but when compared to the value of the Rock’s deposits and mortgages, it amounts to very little.

All the bids rely on continued financial support from the British state. Yet there is an alternative to subsidising these vultures. A word that New Labour thought it had excised from the dictionary has crept back into the debate – nationalisation.

It has found favour among some in the City of London and political circles. They want a state takeover that “rewards investors”.

There is a better alternative – Northern Rock should be nationalised without compensation for the bosses, while providing a guarantee to those who saved or borrowed from the bank.

This move would penalise all the parasites that sought to profit from Northern Rock but who are now demanding that they be shielded from all the risk.

© Copyright Socialist Worker (unless otherwise stated). You may republish if you include an active link to the original and leave this notice in place.
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Radioactive Ammunition Fired in Middle East May Claim More Lives Than Hiroshima and Nagasaki

By Sherwood Ross

(OpEdNews) - By firing radioactive ammunition, the U.S., U.K., and Israel may have triggered a nuclear holocaust in the Middle East that, over time, will prove deadlier than the U.S. atomic bombing of Japan.

So much ammunition containing depleted uranium(DU) has been fired, asserts nuclear authority Leuren Moret, “The genetic future of the Iraqi people for the most part, is destroyed.”

“More than ten times the amount of radiation released during atmospheric testing (of nuclear bombs) has been released from depleted uranium weaponry since 1991,” Moret writes, including radioactive ammunition fired by Israeli troops in Palestine.

Moret is an independent U.S. scientist formerly employed for five years at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and also at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, both of California.

Adds Arthur Bernklau, of Veterans For Constitutional Law, “The long-term effect of DU is a virtual death sentence. Iraq is a toxic wasteland. Anyone who is there stands a good chance of coming down with cancer and leukemia. In Iraq, the birth rate of mutations is totally out of control.”

Moret, a Berkeley, Calif., Environmental Commissioner and past president of the Association for Women Geoscientists, says, “For every genetic defect that we can see now, in future generations there are thousands more that will be expressed.”
She adds, “the (Iraq) environment now is completely radioactive.”

Dr. Helen Caldicott, the prominent anti-nuclear crusader, has written: “Much of the DU is in cities such as Baghdad, where half the population of 5 million people are children who played in the burned-out tanks and on the sandy, dusty ground.”

“Children are 10 to 20 times more susceptible to the carcinogenic effects of radiation than adults,” Caldicott wrote. “My pediatric colleagues in Basra, where this ordnance was used in 1991, report a sevenfold increase in childhood cancer and a sevenfold increase in gross congenital abnormalities,” she wrote in her book, “Nuclear Power is not the Answer”(The New Press).

Caldicott goes on to say the two Gulf wars “have been nuclear wars because they have scattered nuclear material across the land, and people---particularly children--- are condemned to die of malignancy and congenital disease essentially for eternity.”

Because of the extremely long half-life of uranium 238, one of the radioactive elements in the shells fired, “the food, the air, and the water in the cradle of civilization have been forever contaminated,” Caldicott explained.

Uranium is a heavy metal that enters the body via inhalation into the lung or via ingestion into the GI tract. It is excreted by the kidney, where, if the dose is high enough, it can induce renal failure or kidney cancer. It also lodges in the bones where it causes bone cancer and leukemia, and it is excreted in the semen, where it mutates genes in the sperm, leading to birth deformities.

Nuclear contamination is spreading around the world, Caldicott adds, with heaviest concentrations in regions within a 1,000-mile radius of Baghdad and Afghanistan.

These are, notably, northern India, southern Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Tibet, Pakistan, Kuwait, the Gulf emirates, and Jordan.

“Downwind from the radioactive devastation in Iraq, Israel is also suffering from large increases in breast cancer, leukemia and childhood diabetes,” Moret asserts.

Doug Rokke, formerly the top U.S. Army DU clean-up officer and now anti-DU crusader, says Israeli tankers fired radioactive shells during the invasion of Lebanon last year. U.S. and NATO forces also used DU ammunition in Kosovo. Rokke says he is quite ill from the effects of DU and that members of his clean-up crew have died from it.

As a result of DU bombardments, Caldicott writes, “Severe birth defects have been reported in babies born to contaminated civilians in Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan and the incidence and severity of defects is increasing over time.”

Like symptoms have been reported among infants born to U.S. service personnel that fought in the Gulf Wars. One survey of 251 returned Gulf War veterans from Mississippi made by the Veterans Administration found 67% of children born to them suffered from “severe illnesses and deformities.”

Some were born without brains or vital organs or with no arms, hands, or arms, or with hands attached to their shoulders.

While U.S. officials deny DU ammunition is dangerous, it is a fact Gulf War veterans were the first Americans ever to fight on a radioactive battlefield, and their children apparently are the first known to display these ghastly deformities.

Soldiers who survived being hit by radioactive ammunition, as well as those who fired it, are falling ill, often showing signs of radiation sickness. Of the 700,000 U.S. veterans of the first Gulf War, more than 240,000 are on permanent medical disability and 11,000 are dead, published reports indicate.

This is an astonishing toll from such a short conflict in which fewer than 400 U.S. soldiers were killed on the battlefield.

Of course, “depleted uranium munitions were and remain another causative factor behind Gulf War Syndrome(GWS),” writes Francis Boyle, a leading American authority on international law in his book “Biowarfare and Terrorism,” from Clarity Press Inc.

“The Pentagon continues to deny that there is such a medical phenomenon categorized as GWS---even beyond the point where everyone knows that denial is pure propaganda and disinformation,” Boyle writes.

Boyle contends, “The Pentagon will never own up to the legal, economic, tortious, political, and criminal consequences of admitting the existence of GWS. So U.S. and U.K. veterans of Gulf War I as well as their afterborn children will continue to suffer and die. The same will prove true for U.S. and U.S. veterans of Bush Jr.’s Gulf War II as well as their afterborn children.”

Boyle said the use of DU is outlawed under the 1925 Geneva Convention prohibiting poison gas.

Chalmers Johnson, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, writes in his “The Sorrows of Empire”(Henry Holt and Co.) that, given the abnormal clusters of childhood cancers and deformities in Iraq as well as Kosovo, the evidence points “toward a significant role for DU.”

By insisting on its use, Johnson adds, “the military is deliberately flouting a 1996 United Nations resolution that classifies DU ammunition as an illegal weapon of mass destruction.”

Moret calls DU “the Trojan Horse of nuclear war.” She describes it as “the weapon that keeps killing.” Indeed, the half-life of Uranium-238 is 4.5-billion years, and as it decays it spawns other deadly radioactive by-products.

Radioactive fallout from DU apparently blew far and wide. Following the initial U.S. bombardment of Iraq in 2003, DU particles traveled 2,400 miles to Great Britain in about a week, where atmospheric radiation quadrupled.

But it is in the Middle East, predominantly Iraq, where the bulk of the radioactive waste has been dumped.

In the early Nineties, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority warned that 50 tons of dust from DU explosions could claim a half million lives from cancer by year 2000. Not 50 tons, but an estimated two thousand radioactive tons have been fired off in the Middle East, suggesting the possibility over time of an even higher death toll.

Dr. Keith Baverstock, a World Health Organization radiation advisor, informed the media, Iraq’s arid climate would increase exposure from its tiny particles as they are blown about and inhaled by the civilian population for years to come.

The civilian death toll from the August, 1945, U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been put at 140,000 and 80,000, respectively. Over time, however, deaths from radiation sickness are thought to have claimed the lives of another 100,000 Japanese civilians.

(Sherwood Ross is a Miami, Florida-based free-lance writer who covers military and political topics. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com. Ross has worked as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and several wire services and is a contributor to national magazines.)
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Sunday 18 November 2007

Water Fuel Cell - Panacea Presentation

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Vitamin consumers interests at stake again at Codex

As the 29th session of the Codex committee on nutrition opens today, a rather surprising attack on our efforts has already been made...

PRESS RELEASE

CODEX MEETING IN GERMANY SET TO DECIDE FUTURE FOR VITAMIN CONSUMERS AROUND THE WORLD

12 November 2007

The US-based National Health Federation (NHF), the world’s longest-standing health-freedom organisation, is today beginning a week of meetings at the 29th session of the Codex Committee on Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses (CCNFSDU) in Bad Neuenahr, Germany. Expected to be attended by over 300 delegates, observers and advisors, representing about 70 member countries and over 30 international organizations, the Committee, sponsored by the Food & Agriculture Organization and World Health Organization, is the world’s highest international body setting global standards and guidelines on nutrition.

With consumer members all over the world, and a board of governors and advisory board containing representatives from six countries, the NHF is unique as being the only consumer health-freedom organization in the world to enjoy official observer delegate status at Codex. The NHF therefore has the opportunity to make representations on behalf of natural health interests all over the world, which are presently being threatened by over-regulation stimulated by spurious science, misinformed media attacks and corporate pressure from large food and pharmaceutical concerns.

Making up the three-person NHF delegation at this year’s meeting is Scott Tips, NHF’s President and Legal Counsel, Dr Robert Verkerk, scientific advisor to the NHF and also Executive and Scientific Director of the Alliance for Natural Health, and Paul Anthony Taylor, the NHF’s Chairman and also External Relations Director for the Dr Rath Foundation.

Since Codex sets international principles, guidelines, and standards for all types of foods,” said Scott Tips, “it is essential that the voice of vitamin consumers be heard adequately—and this has been our key focus at Codex ever since we’ve been involved. We are here to make a difference at these meetings and we can already see from our attendance at yesterday's Electronic Working Group meeting on risk assessment that a number of delegations are receptive to our ideas. ”

Addressing some serious scientific concerns, Dr Robert Verkerk added, “In yesterday’s meeting, we have managed to make a strong case that risk-assessment approaches presently being used in Europe—which are being pushed as global guidelines to be adopted through Codex—need to be urgently amended if they are not to prevent millions of people in both the less-developed and developed world from obtaining health-promoting levels of nutrients in foods and food supplements.”

To find out more about Codex, and its potential implications to natural health, listen to the Codex special on the Alliance for Natural Health’s Natural Health Hour on Californian-based internet radio station, www.aimhealthyradio.com, to be broadcast for the first time at 13:00h GMT today.

In an unfortunate development late last night, Dr Rima Laibow of the US-based Natural Solutions Foundation, issued an unprovoked attack on the NHF delegation through her daily email blog. The attack appeared to stem from Dr Laibow’s frustration at not being able to make any comment during Codex meetings owing to the refusal of the Natural Solution Foundation’s application for Codex ‘observer status’ in July 2006 (see further discussion in Editor’s Notes below).

END.


For further information contact:

Dr Robert Verkerk
Scientific Advisor, NHF
Executive & Scientific Director, ANH
Tel: +44 (0)1306 646 600
Email: info@anhcampaign.org
www.anhcampaign.org

Cheri L. Tips
Executive Director, NHF
Tel: +1 626-357-2181
Email: ct@thenhf.com
www.thenhf.com


Editor’s Notes:

1. Codex Committee on Nutrition and Food for Special Dietary Uses (CCNFSDU): one of 27 committees of the Codex Alimentarius Commission, established under the auspices of the Food & Agricultural Organization and World Health Organization.
www.codexalimentarius.net.

2. National Health Federation: established in 1955, the National Health Federation is a consumer-education, health-freedom organization working to protect individuals' rights to choose to consume healthy food, take supplements and use alternative therapies without unnecessary government restrictions. The NHF is the only such organization with recognized observer status at Codex meetings.
www.thenhf.com.

3. Alliance for Natural Health: The Alliance for Natural Health (ANH), founded in 2002, is a UK-based, internationally-active not-for-profit campaign organisation working to protect and promote sustainable approaches to healthcare through the use of ‘good science’ and ‘good law.’
www.anhcampaign.org.

4. Natural Solutions Foundation blog, issued 11 November 2007, http://www.healthfreedomusa.org/index.php/?p=442

As is customary with a large body of the outputs from the Natural Solutions Foundation (NSF), this most recent email blog from the NSF’s Medical Director, Dr Rima Laibow, contained numerous inaccuracies and misrepresentation of facts. Such inaccuracies have been reported previously by the Dr Rath Foundation, viz: http://www4.dr-rath-foundation.org/THE_FOUNDATION/Events/codex-beware.htm.

Dr Laibow’s vehicle, the NSF, was founded in 2004 and applied for Codex ‘observer status’ in March 2006 (see full application on ftp://ftp.fao.org/codex/ccexec58/ex58_04e.pdf, p. 6). The application was refused by the Executive Committee of the Codex Alimentarius Commission in mid-2006 (www.codexalimentarius.net/download/report/661/al2903Ae.pdf, p. 14, item 109), and was confirmed at the 30th session of the Codex Alimentarius Commission in July 2007 (ftp://ftp.fao.org/Codex/CAC/CAC30/if30_02e.pdf).

The main attack in Dr Laibow’s blog against the NHF, which is clearly identified yet unnamed, seems to surround the NHF delegation’s numerous vocal interventions during yesterday’s meeting of the Electronic Working Group on risk assessment. The NHF’s ability to make interventions during Codex meetings is a function of its ‘observer status,’ which it was granted in 2002.

However, it is clear from the NSF’s application for Codex ‘observer status,’ that the NSF was itself planning to make interventions had it been successful in its application. An extract from its application reads as follows:

“The Natural Solutions Foundation anticipates making salient contributions to the Joint FAO/WHO Food Standards Programme by submitting commentary and suggestions to this body on issues which touch on
consumer well being, crafted by affiliated attorneys at law and physicians.”
(Source: ftp://ftp.fao.org/codex/ccexec58/ex58_04e.pdf)

Could your attack on the NHF be a case of sour grapes, Dr Laibow?

The NHF’s many interventions during the Electronic Working Group meeting contrasted with Dr Laibow’s enforced silence. Each one of the NHF’s interventions was carefully considered and was made solely in a bid to help protect the future of natural healthcare and benefit vitamin consumers around the world.

Dr Rima Laibow, in her typical fashion, has hit out at the only team in Codex that is actively working in the interests of vitamin consumers, and—once again—Dr Laibow has deeply misunderstood both what the NHF delegation is doing at Codex and what she has the capacity to achieve on the outside, given her unsuccessful application for ‘observer status.’

A more comprehensive discussion of the misstatements, deliberate or otherwise, made by Dr Laibow will be issued shortly on the National Health Federation’s website, www.thenhf.com. In the meantime, the NHF delegation has real work to do protecting your health freedoms through its participation as an INGO in the current session of this Codex committee meeting.

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Hydrogen plane runs for three days without refuelling

Hydrogen plane runs for three days without refuelling

Iain Thomson

Boeing and Ford have successfully tested a new hydrogen aircraft engine with a simulated flight that lasted nearly four days.

The project, called the High Altitude Long Endurance (HALE) aircraft, is being run to test the feasibility of having unmanned craft in permanent flight to act as communications systems that can be quickly and cheaply set up where coverage by traditional means isn’t available.

“This test could help convince potential customers that hydrogen-powered aircraft are viable in the near-term,” said Boeing Advanced Systems president George Muellner.

“This is a substantial step towards providing the persistent intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities our customers desire.”

The HALE’s engine is a modified four cylinder Ford engine that can use hydrogen as a fuel and run for extended period. In a simulation chamber the engine ran for nearly four days, powering the craft up to an equivalent of 65,000 feet.

“This simulated flight allows us to showcase the capabilities of Ford’s proprietary hydrogen engine technology and the durability of our four-cylinder engines,” said Gerhard Schmidt, vice president of Ford Research and Advanced Engineering.

“We are very pleased with the results. The gasoline version of this same engine can be found in our Ford Fusion and Escape Hybrid vehicles.”

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Arrest warrant issued for Eubank

Chris Eubank
Mr Eubank was arrested in May
A judge has issued a warrant for the arrest of ex-boxer Chris Eubank after he failed to turn up to court over an unlawful protest in Whitehall.

Eubank was charged after he tried to park his seven-tonne truck outside the gates to Downing Street in May in protest at UK policy in Iraq.

Eubank, 41, from Hove, East Sussex, was due to appear at City of Westminster Magistrates' Court on Friday.

District Judge Mike Snow fined Eubank £500 in his absence.

The former world champion was also ordered to pay £380 costs. He has 14 days to pay.

Eubank overseas

Eubank was charged under the Serious and Organised Crime Act, relating to the staging of a unlawful demonstration in a designated area.

During the incident he drove his truck emblazoned with a message calling on Gordon Brown to withdraw troops from Iraq.

It read: "Mr Brown, you know that the policy in Iraq cannot succeed. Democracy cannot be exported with a gun. You can be the great leader and the great peace maker."

A smaller sign read: "This is not a protest."

Mel Goldberg, Mr Eubank's agent, said on Friday his client was overseas and would not be back for a few days.

He said: "He will come back and face the music."

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The Declaration of Arbroath

To the most Holy Father and Lord in Christ, the Lord John, by divine providence Supreme Pontiff of the Holy Roman and Universal Church, his humble and devout sons Duncan, Earl of Fife, Thomas Randolph, Earl of Moray, Lord of Man and of Annandale, Patrick Dunbar, Earl of March, Malise, Earl of Strathearn, Malcolm, Earl of Lennox, William, Earl of Ross, Magnus, Earl of Caithness and Orkney, and William, Earl of Sutherland; Walter, Steward of Scotland, William Soules, Butler of Scotland, James, Lord of Douglas, Roger Mowbray, David, Lord of Brechin, David Graham, Ingram Umfraville, John Menteith, guardian of the earldom of Menteith, Alexander Fraser, Gilbert Hay, Constable of Scotland, Robert Keith, Marischal of Scotland, Henry St Clair, John Graham, David Lindsay, William Oliphant, Patrick Graham, John Fenton, William Abernethy, David Wemyss, William Mushet, Fergus of Ardrossan, Eustace Maxwell, William Ramsay, William Mowat, Alan Murray, Donald Campbell, John Cameron, Reginald Cheyne, Alexander Seton, Andrew Leslie, and Alexander Straiton, and the other barons and freeholders and the whole community of the realm of Scotland send all manner of filial reverence, with devout kisses of his blessed feet.

Most Holy Father and Lord, we know and from the chronicles and books of the ancients we find that among other famous nations our own, the Scots, has been graced with widespread renown. They journeyed from Greater Scythia by way of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Pillars of Hercules, and dwelt for a long course of time in Spain among the most savage tribes, but nowhere could they be subdued by any race, however barbarous. Thence they came, twelve hundred years after the people of Israel crossed the Red Sea, to their home in the west where they still live today. The Britons they first drove out, the Picts they utterly destroyed, and, even though very often assailed by the Norwegians, the Danes and the English, they took possession of that home with many victories and untold efforts; and, as the historians of old time bear witness, they have held it free of all bondage ever since. In their kingdom there have reigned one hundred and thirteen kings of their own royal stock, the line unbroken a single foreigner.

The high qualities and deserts of these people, were they not otherwise manifest, gain glory enough from this: that the King of kings and Lord of lords, our Lord Jesus Christ, after His Passion and Resurrection, called them, even though settled in the uttermost parts of the earth, almost the first to His most holy faith. Nor would He have them confirmed in that faith by merely anyone but by the first of His Apostles -- by calling, though second or third in rank -- the most gentle Saint Andrew, the Blessed Peter's brother, and desired him to keep them under his protection as their patron forever.

The Most Holy Fathers your predecessors gave careful heed to these things and bestowed many favours and numerous privileges on this same kingdom and people, as being the special charge of the Blessed Peter's brother. Thus our nation under their protection did indeed live in freedom and peace up to the time when that mighty prince the King of the English, Edward, the father of the one who reigns today, when our kingdom had no head and our people harboured no malice or treachery and were then unused to wars or invasions, came in the guise of a friend and ally to harass them as an enemy. The deeds of cruelty, massacre, violence, pillage, arson, imprisoning prelates, burning down monasteries, robbing and killing monks and nuns, and yet other outrages without number which he committed against our people, sparing neither age nor sex, religion nor rank, no one could describe nor fully imagine unless he had seen them with his own eyes.

But from these countless evils we have been set free, by the help of Him Who though He afflicts yet heals and restores, by our most tireless Prince, King and Lord, the Lord Robert. He, that his people and his heritage might be delivered out of the hands of our enemies, met toil and fatigue, hunger and peril, like another Macabaeus or Joshua and bore them cheerfully. Him, too, divine providence, his right of succession according to or laws and customs which we shall maintain to the death, and the due consent and assent of us all have made our Prince and King. To him, as to the man by whom salvation has been wrought unto our people, we are bound both by law and by his merits that our freedom may be still maintained, and by him, come what may, we mean to stand.

Yet if he should give up what he has begun, and agree to make us or our kingdom subject to the King of England or the English, we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own rights and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us our King; for, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom -- for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.

Therefore it is, Reverend Father and Lord, that we beseech your Holiness with our most earnest prayers and suppliant hearts, inasmuch as you will in your sincerity and goodness consider all this, that, since with Him Whose Vice-Regent on earth you are there is neither weighing nor distinction of Jew and Greek, Scotsman or Englishman, you will look with the eyes of a father on the troubles and privation brought by the English upon us and upon the Church of God. May it please you to admonish and exhort the King of the English, who ought to be satisfied with what belongs to him since England used once to be enough for seven kings or more, to leave us Scots in peace, who live in this poor little Scotland, beyond which there is no dwelling-place at all, and covet nothing but our own. We are sincerely willing to do anything for him, having regard to our condition, that we can, to win peace for ourselves.

This truly concerns you, Holy Father, since you see the savagery of the heathen raging against the Christians, as the sins of Christians have indeed deserved, and the frontiers of Christendom being pressed inward every day; and how much it will tarnish your Holiness's memory if (which God forbid) the Church suffers eclipse or scandal in any branch of it during your time, you must perceive. Then rouse the Christian princes who for false reasons pretend that they cannot go to help of the Holy Land because of wars they have on hand with their neighbours. The real reason that prevents them is that in making war on their smaller neighbours they find quicker profit and weaker resistance. But how cheerfully our Lord the King and we too would go there if the King of the English would leave us in peace, He from Whom nothing is hidden well knows; and we profess and declare it to you as the Vicar of Christ and to all Christendom.

But if your Holiness puts too much faith in the tales the English tell and will not give sincere belief to all this, nor refrain from favouring them to our prejudice, then the slaughter of bodies, the perdition of souls, and all the other misfortunes that will follow, inflicted by them on us and by us on them, will, we believe, be surely laid by the Most High to your charge.

To conclude, we are and shall ever be, as far as duty calls us, ready to do your will in all things, as obedient sons to you as His Vicar; and to Him as the Supreme King and Judge we commit the maintenance of our cause, csating our cares upon Him and firmly trusting that He will inspire us with courage and bring our enemies to nought.

May the Most High preserve you to his Holy Church in holiness and health and grant you length of days.

Given at the monastery of Arbroath in Scotland on the sixth day of the month of April in the year of grace thirteen hundred and twenty and the fifteenth year of the reign of our King aforesaid.

Endorsed: Letter directed to our Lord the Supreme Pontiff by the community of Scotland.

Additional names written on some of the seal tags: Alexander Lamberton, Edward Keith, John Inchmartin, Thomas Menzies, John Durrant, Thomas Morham (and one illegible).

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Friday 16 November 2007

Milk, cheese and pork 'are being invaded by GM'

By SEAN POULTER
Link

Most of our milk, cheese, yoghurt and pork comes from animals raised on genetically-modified food, a campaigning group claims.

The Soil Association said the widespread use of GM crops, such as maize and soya, flies in the face of consumer opposition to the controversial technology.

It believes the public is being kept in the dark about farmers and supermarkets' reliance on GM animal feed because there is no legal requirement to mention it on food labelling.

A spokesman said: "This GM stealth invasion of the UK food chain is denying consumers their right to make fully- informed choices."

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Cows

Dairy cattle: Seven out of ten are given GM feed at some point

It is thought more than 70 per cent of dairy cattle and pigs are given GM feed at some point.

Campaigners said there is evidence that genetically-modified DNA is getting into the milk and meat that reaches consumers.

A Daily Mail campaign over the socalled "Frankenstein foods", coupled with mass consumer opposition, was instrumental in the decision by all the major supermarkets to ban GM ingredients from their own-brand foods.

But these bans, which were imposed more than five years ago, did not extend to the feed given to animals. Only Marks & Spencer took a stand by removing GM ingredients from the diet of meat and dairy animals. GM feed is also banned by organic farmers.

Waitrose, the Co-op and Sainsbury's offer a few non-organic meat and dairy items produced from non-GM feed. These include Sainsbury's "farm promise" milk. Most modified animal feed crops have been altered to include a gene that gives them resistance to spraying with certain chemicals, which means they can survive being treated with weedkillers.

A spokesman for the Soil Association, which has long lobbied against GM, said: "Most consumers are unwittingly eating food produced from GM crops every day."

Unlike the dairy and pig industry, poultry farmers have largely dropped the use of GM feed. However, a third of eggs come from GMfed hens.

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GM crops info box

A spokesman for the British Retail Consortium, which speaks for supermarkets, said: "Our view is that all the evidence shows that there is no transference of GM material from feedstuffs to meat and dairy products.

"Given that this is the case, there is nothing to be gained from labelling the use of GM feed."

The Agriculture Biotechnology Council, which represents GM companies such as Monsanto and Bayer Cropscience, accused the Soil Association of "scaremongering".

"If they have any evidence to support their claims, it should be submitted to the official regulatory authorities," a spokesman said.

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Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything

Telegraph
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor

An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which has received rave reviews from scientists.

Garrett Lisi, 39, has a doctorate but no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii, where he has also been a hiking guide and bridge builder (when he slept in a jungle yurt).

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The E8 pattern (click to enlarge), Garrett Lisi surfing (middle) and out of the water (right)

In winter, he heads to the mountains near Lake Tahoe, Nevada, where he snowboards. "Being poor sucks," Lisi says. "It's hard to figure out the secrets of the universe when you're trying to figure out where you and your girlfriend are going to sleep next month."

Despite this unusual career path, his proposal is remarkable because, by the arcane standards of particle physics, it does not require highly complex mathematics.

Even better, it does not require more than one dimension of time and three of space, when some rival theories need ten or even more spatial dimensions and other bizarre concepts. And it may even be possible to test his theory, which predicts a host of new particles, perhaps even using the new Large Hadron Collider atom smasher that will go into action near Geneva next year.

Although the work of 39 year old Garrett Lisi still has a way to go to convince the establishment, let alone match the achievements of Albert Einstein, the two do have one thing in common: Einstein also began his great adventure in theoretical physics while outside the mainstream scientific establishment, working as a patent officer, though failed to achieve the Holy Grail, an overarching explanation to unite all the particles and forces of the cosmos.

Now Lisi, currently in Nevada, has come up with a proposal to do this. Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, describes Lisi's work as "fabulous". "It is one of the most compelling unification models I've seen in many, many years," he says.

"Although he cultivates a bit of a surfer-guy image its clear he has put enormous effort and time into working the complexities of this structure out over several years," Prof Smolin tells The Telegraph.

"Some incredibly beautiful stuff falls out of Lisi's theory," adds David Ritz Finkelstein at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. "This must be more than coincidence and he really is touching on something profound."

The new theory reported today in New Scientist has been laid out in an online paper entitled "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" by Lisi, who completed his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1999 at the University of California, San Diego.

He has high hopes that his new theory could provide what he says is a "radical new explanation" for the three decade old Standard Model, which weaves together three of the four fundamental forces of nature: the electromagnetic force; the strong force, which binds quarks together in atomic nuclei; and the weak force, which controls radioactive decay.

The reason for the excitement is that Lisi's model also takes account of gravity, a force that has only successfully been included by a rival and highly fashionable idea called string theory, one that proposes particles are made up of minute strings, which is highly complex and elegant but has lacked predictions by which to do experiments to see if it works.

But some are taking a cooler view. Prof Marcus du Sautoy, of Oxford University and author of Finding Moonshine, told the Telegraph: "The proposal in this paper looks a long shot and there seem to be a lot things still to fill in."

And a colleague Eric Weinstein in America added: "Lisi seems like a hell of a guy. I'd love to meet him. But my friend Lee Smolin is betting on a very very long shot."

Lisi's inspiration lies in the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics, called E8 - a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points first found in 1887, but only fully understood by mathematicians this year after workings, that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan.

E8 encapsulates the symmetries of a geometric object that is 57-dimensional and is itself is 248-dimensional. Lisi says "I think our universe is this beautiful shape."

What makes E8 so exciting is that Nature also seems to have embedded it at the heart of many bits of physics. One interpretation of why we have such a quirky list of fundamental particles is because they all result from different facets of the strange symmetries of E8.

Lisi's breakthrough came when he noticed that some of the equations describing E8's structure matched his own. "My brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing," he tells New Scientist. "I thought: 'Holy crap, that's it!'"

What Lisi had realised was that he could find a way to place the various elementary particles and forces on E8's 248 points. What remained was 20 gaps which he filled with notional particles, for example those that some physicists predict to be associated with gravity.

Physicists have long puzzled over why elementary particles appear to belong to families, but this arises naturally from the geometry of E8, he says. So far, all the interactions predicted by the complex geometrical relationships inside E8 match with observations in the real world. "How cool is that?" he says.

The crucial test of Lisi's work will come only when he has made testable predictions. Lisi is now calculating the masses that the 20 new particles should have, in the hope that they may be spotted when the Large Hadron Collider starts up.

"The theory is very young, and still in development," he told the Telegraph. "Right now, I'd assign a low (but not tiny) likelyhood to this prediction.

"For comparison, I think the chances are higher that LHC will see some of these particles than it is that the LHC will see superparticles, extra dimensions, or micro black holes as predicted by string theory. I hope to get more (and different) predictions, with more confidence, out of this E8 Theory over the next year, before the LHC comes online."

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Monday 12 November 2007

Will 9/11 and BAE Derail Cheney’s Plan To Bomb Iran?

Will 9/11 and BAE Derail Cheney’s Plan To Bomb Iran?

by Jeffrey Steinberg

Two recent events, both occurring in the context of Saudi Arabian King Abdullah’s visit to London at the end of October, have once again cast the dark shadows of 9/11 and the BAE scandal over Vice President Dick Cheney. Coupled with mounting opposition to Cheney’s war schemes from within the U.S. military and factions of the Bush Administration, as well as from Persian Gulf states, Russia, and even Israel, the spotlight, once again focussed on two of the biggest Cheney-linked scandals, could help derail the Vice President’s accelerating drive for a U.S. bombing of Iran, and avert what would certainly devolve into a new Eurasian Hundred Years War.

On Nov. 1, Prince Bandar bin-Sultan, the longtime former Saudi ambassador in Washington, and the current national security advisor to King Abdullah, gave an interview to the Arabic-language satellite TV network Al-Arabiya, in which he made the startling claim that the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks could have been avoided, if the United States had taken Saudi intelligence efforts more seriously.

Bandar claimed that Saudi intelligence was “actively following” most of the 9/11 hijackers “with precision,” prior to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. “If U.S. security authorities had engaged their Saudi counterparts in a serious and credible manner, in my opinion, we would have avoided what happened.”
Finger-Pointing on 9/11

Bandar’s accusations that the U.S. government could have stopped 9/11, had they pursued leads provided by Saudi intelligence, were met with skepticism by some U.S. intelligence officials consulted by EIR. They pointed to EIR’s own June 29, 2007 revelations, drawn from the 9/11 Commission Report and other sources, that then-Saudi Ambassador Bandar had funnelled more than $50,000 through two Saudi intelligence operatives, to some of the 9/11 hijackers. One source emphasized that the Bandar payments were so controversial that a 28-page segment of the 9/11 Commission report, dealing with this incident, was classified and blocked, to this day, from publication. But the Prince’s charges of U.S. failures, leading to the 9/11 attacks, could signal a rift between the Saudi prince and his “war party” ally Dick Cheney, that could set back the Vice President’s schemes to build up a Sunni versus Shi’ite confrontation in the Persian Gulf—a scheme he launched with his November 2006 trip to Riyadh, arranged by Bandar personally.

Whether legitimate or not, Prince Bandar’s extraordinary claims mirrored comments made by King Abdullah on Oct. 29, in an interview with the BBC on the eve of his state visit to London. King Abdullah claimed that British authorities also failed to listen to Saudi intelligence warnings about terror plots in England; and the July 7, 2005 London subway bombings, which killed 52 people, could have been prevented, if British authorities had acted on specific warnings passed from Riyadh in advance of the attacks.

U.S. intelligence sources, canvassed by EIR following the Bandar and Abdullah statements, reported that the Saudis had been devastated by the public revelation that 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers had been Saudi nationals, and that they were now launching a public relations offensive to get beyond the stigma. But, the sources observed, the effort to shift the blame for the 9/11 attacks carried considerable risks—for all parties concerned, including the Vice President, who has counted on the Saudis to back up his war plans against Iran.

Bandar’s blunt allegations raised some dramatic questions, which echo charges made by Lyndon LaRouche, most recently, during his Oct. 10, 2007 international webcast from Washington, D.C. In his opening remarks, LaRouche declared: “I shall say, that I do know, beyond doubt, that 9/11 was an inside job. It was an inside job on behalf of what the Bush-Cheney Administration represents.” Later, LaRouche added, “I know more than I’m saying: With complicity of certain people in Saudi Arabia, with the British Empire, which shares power with Saudi Arabia, through the BAE, a job was done on the United States on 9/11. And we’ve been living under the heat of that, ever since. That I stand by. Other facts will come out at a suitable time.”

With Bandar’s charges that U.S. officials failed to cooperate with the Saudis, who were tracking the 9/11 hijackers “with precision,” a question must be posed to Vice President Cheney and others inside the Bush White House:

Did the Saudis, in fact, provide the Bush-Cheney Administration with “actionable intelligence” on a pending al-Qaeda attack on America? By July 2001, both the FBI and the CIA were circulating warnings about an al-Qaeda terrorist action. On July 10, 2001, then-CIA director George Tenet and Cofer Black, the Agency’s counterterrorism director, met with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to sound the alarms about an imminent al-Qaeda attack, but they were given the “brush-off”—by Rice, in particular.

This led up to the now infamous Aug. 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing, with a section titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside US,” which again warned of imminent al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, based on a pattern of U.S.- and foreign-generated intelligence.

Despite all of the FBI and CIA warnings, and the new claims by Prince Bandar that Saudi Arabia had also been warning about pending al-Qaeda attacks on the U.S.A., the Bush-Cheney White House did absolutely nothing to act on the warnings.

Who bears the greatest burden of responsibility within the U.S. government for 9/11, whether or not the Bandar allegations pan out? At the time of the 9/11 attacks, Cheney was the counter-terrorism czar at the White House, a title bestowed on him by President Bush on May 17, 2001—at the very moment that the White House was shelving the findings of the Hart-Rudman U.S. Commission on National Security, which conducted a two-and-a-half year study of America’s vulnerability to terrorist attack, and demanded a major overhaul of U.S. domestic security planning and structures.

The Bandar accusations, on the heels of the LaRouche Oct. 10 webcast, are now certain to push the 9/11 matter back onto the front burner, which is particularly bad news for Cheney, whom LaRouche has branded the “Hermann Göring” of the Bush Administration.

The BAE Scandal: Back With a Vengeance

With much pomp and circumstance, King Abdullah paid a state visit to Great Britain during the last week of October, in what was billed as the “Two Kingdoms” celebration. Over 500 people accompanied the King—including Prince Bandar, Defense Minister Prince Sultan (Bandar’s father), Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal, and Interior Minister Prince Naif.

The visit once again placed a spotlight on the scandal surrounding the longstanding “Al-Yamamah” arms-for-oil deal between Britain’s premier arms manufacturer, BAE Systems, and the Saudis. Vince Cable, the acting leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, boycotted the entire British-Saudi ceremony in protest over the British government’s coverup of the BAE scandal, and over Saudi human rights violations.

As one of his last official acts as Prime Minister, Tony Blair had ordered the Serious Fraud Office to shut down its investigation into the Al-Yamamah deal—including the reported $2 billion in kickbacks paid to Prince Bandar, the architect of the entire arms-for-oil scheme, since the mid-1980s. Just before packing his bags and leaving 10 Downing Street, Blair had signed a new BAE arms deal with the Saudis, worth an estimated $20 billion.

As EIR exclusively revealed earlier this year, the real BAE Al-Yamamah scandal centered around a $100 billion offshore covert action fund, which was administered by the British, with Saudi complicity and American participation, utilizing the spot market sales of the Saudi oil, paid to BAE for the weapons and support systems. These clandestine funds, according to Bandar’s semi-authorized biography, went to a wide range of secret war schemes, including bankrolling the Afghani mujahideen, who battled the Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan throughout the 1980s; arming Chad with Soviet-made weapons, to repel a Libyan invasion in the late 1980s; and U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia, bypassing Congressional oversight. Some of the BAE slush funds went to Bandar—and may have even been part of the money that went to some of the 9/11 hijackers, through Saudi intelligence operative Osama Basnan.

According to one U.S. intelligence source, the resurfacing of the BAE Al-Yamamah scandal during the Saudi royal visit to Britain could lead to new frictions between Riyadh and London. In an interview with BBC during the visit, Prince Faisal answered a question about the BAE scandal, saying that the focus of any investigation should be on the party that did the bribing, not on the recipients—i.e., blame BAE for any funny money passed to Prince Bandar.

The BAE scandal remains a subject of serious investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice. So far, according to official sources, the probe is centered around possible BAE violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act—for making the $2 billion in payoffs to Bandar, via Saudi bank accounts at Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C. If the DOJ investigation were to be expanded to include money laundering, the finances of the Saudi Embassy, during Bandar’s more than two decades as ambassador, could be opened to scrutiny. And that is something that Dick Cheney, the Republican National Committee, and a whole lot of others do not wish to see happen

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Saturday 10 November 2007

PENTAGON INSIDER HAS DIRE WARNING


Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department analyst who leaked the secret Pentagon Papers history of the Vietnam War, offered insights into the looming attack on Iran and the loss of liberty in the United States at a recent American University symposium. What follow are his comments from that speech. They have been edited only for space.

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By Daniel Ellsberg

Let me simplify . . . and not just to be rhetorical: A coup has occurred. I woke up the other day realizing, coming out of sleep, that a coup has occurred. It’s not just a question that a coup lies ahead with the next 9-11. That’s the next coup that completes the first.

The last five years have seen a steady assault on every fundamental of our Constitution . . . what the rest of the world looked at for the last 200 years as a model and experiment to the rest of the world—in checks and balances, limited government, Bill of Rights, individual rights protected from majority infringement by the Congress, an independent judiciary, the possibility of impeachment.

There have been violations of these principles by many presidents before. Most of the specific things that Bush has done in the way of illegal surveillance and other matters were done under my boss Lyndon Johnson in the Vietnam War: the use of CIA, FBI, NSA against Americans.

All these violations were impeachable had they been found out at the time but in nearly every case the violations were not found out until [the president was] out of office so we didn’t have the exact challenge that we have today.

That was true with the first term of Nixon and certainly of Johnson, Kennedy and others. They were impeachable. They weren’t found out in time. But I think it was not their intention, in the crisis situations that they felt justified their actions, to change our form of government.

It is increasingly clear with each new book and each new leak that comes out, that Richard Cheney and his now chief of staff David Addington have had precisely that in mind since at least the early 1970s. Not just since 1992, not since 2001, but [they] have believed in executive government, single-branch government under an executive president—elected or not—with unrestrained powers. They did not believe in restraint.

When I say this, I’m not saying they are traitors. I don’t think they have in mind allegiance to some foreign power or have a desire to help a foreign power. I believe they have in their own minds a love of this country and what they think is best for this country—but what they think is best is directly and consciously at odds with what the Founders of this country [and the Framers of the Constitution] thought.

They believe we need a different kind of government now, an executive government essentially, rule by decree, which is what we’re getting with ‘signing statements.’

Signing statements are talked about as line-item vetoes which is one [way] of describing them which are unconstitutional in themselves, but in other ways are just saying the president says: ‘I decide what I enforce. I decide what the law is. I legislate.’

It’s [the same] with the military commissions, courts that are under the entire control of the executive branch, essentially of the president—a concentration of legislative, judicial, and executive powers in one branch, which is precisely what the founders meant to avert, and tried to avert and did avert to the best of their ability in the Constitution.”

* * *

Now I’m appealing to that as a crisis right now not just because it is a break in tradition but because I believe in my heart and from my experience that on this point the Founders had it right. It’s not just ‘our way of doing things’— it was a crucial perception on the corruption of power to anybody, including Americans.

On procedures and institutions that might possibly keep that power under control because the alternative was what we have just seen, wars like Vietnam, wars like Iraq, wars like the one coming.

That brings me to the second point. This executive branch, under specifically Bush and Cheney, despite opposition [even] from most of the rest of the branch, even of the cabinet, clearly intends a war against Iran, which, even by imperialist standards, [violates] standards in other words which were accepted not only by nearly everyone in the executive branch but most of the leaders in Congress.

The interests of the empire, the need for hegemony, our right to control and our need to control the oil of the Middle East and many other places. That is consensual in our establishment. …

But even by those standards, an attack on Iran is insane. And I say that quietly, I don’t mean it to be heard as rhetoric. Of course it’s not only aggression and a violation of international law, a supreme international crime, but it is by imperial standards, insane in terms of the consequences.

Does that make it impossible? No, it obviously doesn’t; it doesn’t even make it unlikely.

That is because two things come together that with the acceptance for various reasons of the Congress—Democrats and Republicans—and the public and the media, we have freed the White House — the president and the vice president—from virtually any restraint by Congress, courts, media, public, whatever.

And on the other hand, the people who have this unrestrained power are crazy. Not entirely, but they have crazy beliefs.

And the question is what then, can we do about this?

We are heading toward an insane operation. It is not certain. [But it] is likely.… I want to try to be realistic myself here, to encourage us to do what we must do, what is needed to be done with the full recognition of the reality. Nothing is impossible.

What I’m talking about in the way of a police state, in the way of an attack on Iran, is not certain. Nothing is certain, actually. However, I think it is probable, more likely than not, that in the next 15, 16 months of this administration we will see an attack on Iran. Probably. Whatever we do.

And . . . we will not succeed in moving Congress, probably, and Congress probably will not stop the president from doing this. And that’s where we’re heading. That’s a very ugly, ugly prospect.

However, I think it’s up to us to work to increase that small, perhaps—anyway not large—possibility and probability to avert this within the next 15 months, aside from the effort that we have to make for the rest of our lives.

* * *

Getting back the constitutional government and improving it will take a long time. And I think if we don’t get started now, it won’t be started under the next administration.

Getting out of Iraq will take a long time. Averting Iran and averting a further coup in the face of a 9-11, another attack, is for right now, it can’t be put off. It will take a kind of political and moral courage of which we have seen very little.

We have a really unusual concentration here and in this audience, of people who have in fact changed their lives, changed their position, lost their friends to a large extent, risked and experienced being called terrible names, ‘traitor,’ ‘weak on terrorism’—names that politicians will do anything to avoid being called.

How do we get more people in the government and in the public at large to change their lives now in a crisis in a critical way? How do we get Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid for example? What kinds of pressures, what kinds of influences can be brought to bear to get Congress to do their jobs? It isn’t just doing their jobs. Getting them to obey their oaths of office.

I took an oath many times, an oath of office as a Marine lieutenant, as an official in the Defense Department, as an official in the State Department as a Foreign Service officer. A number of times I took an oath of office which is the same oath of office taken by every member of Congress and every official in the United States and every officer in the armed services.

And that oath is not to a commander in chief, which is not [even] mentioned. It is not to a Fuehrer. It is not even to superior officers. The oath is precisely to protect and uphold the Constitution of the United States.

Now that is an oath I violated every day for years in the Defense Department without realizing it when I kept my mouth shut when I knew the public was being lied into a war as they were lied into Iraq, as they are being lied into war in Iran.

I knew that I had the documents that proved it, and I did not put it out then. I was not obeying my oath, which I eventually came to do.

I’ve often said that Lt. Ehren Watada—who still faces trial for refusing to obey orders to deploy to Iraq which he correctly perceives to be an unconstitutional and aggressive war—is the single officer in the United States armed services who is taking seriously [the matter of] upholding his oath.

The president is clearly violating that oath, of course. [All the personnel] under him who understand what is going on — and there are myriad — are violating their oaths. And that’s the standard that I think we should be asking of people.

On the Democratic side, on the political side, I think we should be demanding of our Democratic leaders in the House and Senate—and frankly of the Republicans —that it is not their highest single absolute priority to be reelected or to maintain a Democratic majority so that Pelosi can still be speaker of the House and Reid can be in the Senate, or to increase that majority.

I’m not going to say that for politicians they should ignore that, or that they should do something else entirely, or that they should not worry about that.
Of course that will be and should be a major concern of theirs, but they’re acting like it’s their sole concern. Which is business as usual. “We have a majority, let’s not lose it, let’s keep it. Let’s keep those chairmanships.”

Exactly what have those chairmanships done for us to save the Constitution in the last couple of years?

I am shocked by the Republicans today that I read [about] in The Washington Post who threatened a filibuster if we … get back habeas corpus. The ruling out of habeas corpus with the help of the Democrats did not get us back to George the First it got us back to before King John 700 years ago in terms of counter-revolution.

I think we’ve got to somehow get home to them [in Congress] that this is the time for them to uphold the oath, to preserve the Constitution, which is worth struggling for in part because it’s only with the power that the Constitution gives Congress responding to the public, only with that can we protect the world from madmen in power in the White House who intend an attack on Iran.

And the current generation of American generals and others who realize that this will be a catastrophe have not shown themselves —they might be people who in their past lives risked their bodies and their lives in Vietnam or elsewhere, like [Colin] Powell, and would not risk their career or their relations with the president to the slightest degree.

That has to change. And it’s the example of people like those up here who somehow brought home to our representatives that they as humans and as citizens have the power to do likewise and find in themselves the courage to protect this country and protect the world. Thank you.”

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Ex-Wall Street Journal Editor: Dollar Collapse Will Cripple European Economy

Former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury says world economy could return to barter system
Paul Joseph Watson

Prison Planet

The father of Reagonomics and former Wall Street Journal editor Paul Craig Roberts has warned that the collapsing dollar will eventually cripple the European economy and may even return the world economy to a barter system as financial chaos ensues.

Roberts served as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration and is a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service.

Speaking on the Alex Jones Show yesterday, Roberts cautioned that "The loss in value of the dollar is becoming so rapid it's alarming....we've got unmanageable trade deficits, budget deficits, the economy is set for recession, the wars show no end."

Asked how bad the dollar crisis can get, Roberts responded, "It can get awfully bad - the trouble is where can they go?"

"If China removes the peg and all the surplus dollars drive up the value of the Chinese currency then given our dependence on China....it's going to drive the prices up here a tremendous amount and Americans don't have any discretionary income left," said Roberts.

"At some point the foreigners will stop financing our budget and trade deficits - then we're going to have a massive crisis the likes of which we've not experienced....if you're totally dependent on imports of manufactured goods and you can't pay for them, what do you do?" asked Roberts, explaining that the only recourse would be to print more money, pushing the dollar down even further.

Citing the fact that the dollar had lost more than 60 per cent of its value against the Euro since 2001, Roberts said that the flight from the dollar could eventually wreck the European economy because it would cripple their exports.

Asked how low the dollar could go, Roberts said that there was a limit because "There's simply so many dollars, there's not enough room in other currencies to absorb them - at some point the flight of investors from the dollar to the Euro will cause amazing troubles in Europe - they won't be able to export anything because the prices are driven up so high."

Roberts said investors will eventually desert the Euro as a safe haven from the dollar and the same process will cause a crisis in Britain as the pound is devalued due to exports being hit.

"Wages are being frozen, profit margins are shrinking, exports are down - so it's starting to impact on Europe," said Roberts.

Roberts warned that the potential destruction of the dollar as the world's reserve currency could eventually return us to a system of barter, completely altering the landscape of the economic structure as we know it.

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Tuesday 6 November 2007

With Washington’s complicity, Musharraf imposes martial law in Pakistan

By Vilani Peiris and Keith Jones
WSWS

akistani military strongman General Pervez Musharraf, a key ally of the Bush administration in its purported “war on terror,” has again bared his fangs. On Saturday evening—as security forces fanned out across Islamabad to occupy the parliament and supreme court buildings, force private television stations off the air, and take oppositionists into “preventive detention”—Musharraf, who seized power in a military coup in October 1999, declared a state of emergency.

In what is tantamount to a second coup, Musharraf has indefinitely suspended the constitution and the rights to free speech, free assembly, free association, and free movement; abrogated the courts’ constitutional authority to issue orders against himself as president, against the prime minister, or against anyone acting in their name; imposed rigorous press censorship; and introduced harsh penalties for the “crime” of “ridiculing” the president, the armed forces or any other executive, legislative or judicial organ.

Security forces have arrested and are holding indefinitely and without charge hundreds, possibly thousands, of opposition politicians and lawyers who helped spearhead the recent popular agitation against military rule. Those detained include Javed Hashmi, the acting head of Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz), and Aitzaz Ahsan, the head of Pakistan’s Supreme Court Bar Association and a prominent Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) supporter.

All non-state television stations and some international radio services, including BBC World, remained off the air Sunday. Police and paramilitary forces are manning checkpoints in the capital and, according to press reports, have moved quickly to break up any protests

Musharraf has stripped the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, of his post. Chaudhry and six other Supreme Court justices who refused to endorse the General’s emergency order—the so-called Provisional Constitutional Order (PCO)—are said to have been placed under house arrest. A Musharraf toady, Justice Abdul Hameed Dogar, has been sworn in as Chaudhry’s replacement. The provincial high courts have also been purged, with many justices either refusing, or not even being asked, to pledge to uphold Musharraf’s PCO.

All these measures carry with them the threat that the military will resort to mass violence should the Pakistani people resist. But the breadth of Musharraf’s power grab and his readiness to militarize the country is exemplified by his decision to proclaim a Provisional Constitutional Order and do so in his capacity as Chief of Pakistan’s Armed Services, rather than use his authority as president to invoke the emergency powers in the country’s 1973 constitution.

“This is the imposition of real military rule,” observed Hasan Askari Rizvi, an expert on Pakistani military affairs. “Because there is no Constitution and Pakistan is being run under a provisional constitutional order issued by Musharraf as the army chief, not as the president of Pakistan.”

US complicity

The Bush administration, Britain’s Labour government and the other western powers have responded to Musharraf’s coup with the mildest, perfunctory criticism.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who like her boss, George W. Bush, has repeatedly lauded Musharraf and his supposed commitment to democracy, described the declaration of a state of emergency as “highly regrettable,” while reaffirming that Washington will continue to cooperate closely with Pakistan’s military regime. Rice called on “all parties to act with restraint in what is obviously a very difficult situation.”

Speaking from a plane while en route to Israel, Rice said that the US had been counseling Musharraf not to take this step and wanted “a prompt return to the constitutional course”. But she quickly qualified even this guarded criticism by adding that Musharraf had done “a lot” previously to put Pakistan on the “path to democratic rule.”

On Sunday, Rice said that Washington will review its aid to Pakistan. Since September 2001 Washington has given Islamabad at least $10 billion, mostly in military aid. Rice’s statement, however, was not a threat, but an acknowledgement that certain US statutes may compel the Bush administration to cut back its financial support for Pakistan’s military regime.

The Pentagon has been, if anything, even less critical of Musharraf’s coup. Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said, “The declaration [of emergency] does not impact on our military support for Pakistan’s efforts in the war on terror.”

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband echoed Rice’s comments. “We are working closely with friends of Pakistan across the international community to encourage all parties to show restraint and to work together for a peaceful and democratic resolution.” Claiming to be “gravely concerned,” Miliband said he would voice Britain’s opposition to Musharraf’s suspension of the constitution by speaking personally with the Pakistani Foreign Secretary, Khurshid Kasuri.

The placid reaction to Musharraf’s coup and its implicit threat of a bloodbath is in stark contrast to the vigorous denunciations that emanated from Washington, London, and other western capitals last month after Burma’s military junta violently suppressed demonstrations against oil price rises and the lack of democracy in that country.

The difference is that the Pakistani regime is a pivotal ally of Washington in the pursuit of its predatory interests in the oil-rich regions of Central Asia and the Middle East. Musharraf has given vital logistical support for the US invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq and has provided US intelligence agencies with offshore torture facilities. He has also reportedly allowed the US military to use Pakistan to prepare for a war with Iran, by conducting training exercises in Pakistan and staging exploratory cross-border incursions into its western neighbor.

That said, Musharraf’s resort to emergency rule constitutes a major debacle for the Bush administration.

Recognizing that the Musharraf regime was unraveling in the face of mounting popular opposition, Washington had long been trying to broker a rapprochement between Musharraf’s military-dominated regime and Benazir Bhutto and her Pakistan People’s Party.

As the New York Times noted Sunday, in an article titled “Straying Partner Leaves White House in the Lurch,” “For more than five months the United States has been trying to orchestrate a political transition in Pakistan that would manage to somehow keep Gen. Pervez Musharraf in power without making a mockery of President Bush’s promotion of democracy in the Muslim world.

“On Saturday, those carefully laid plans fell apart spectacularly.”

And it is not only that Musharraf’s imposition of martial has once again put the lie to the democratic verbiage that the Bush administration and the US political and financial elite have used in justifying their criminal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Washington and London recognize that Musharraf’s coup is a desperate gamble, which could well backfire, precipitating a popular explosion that would redound against the interests of the Pakistani generals, the Pakistani bourgeoisie as a whole, and US imperialism.

To forestall precisely such a development the Bush administration and the British government have been seeking to broker a deal between Musharraf and the populist PPP, which, on two previous occasions when US-backed military dictatorships collapsed, rescued the military from the wrath of the people and thereby preserved the principal bulwark of bourgeois rule.

Just before the October 6 sham presidential election, the US engineered a shaky understanding between the PPP and Musharraf, under which the PPP broke ranks with the rest of the opposition thereby lending legitimacy to the general’s latest perversion of the constitution. Twelve days later Bhutto returned from exile, but within hours of her arriving in Karachi, she was the target of an assassination attempt in which 139 people died. Bhutto has charged elements in the military-dominated regime, but not Musharraf himself, of being the authors of the assassination attempt.

Mimicking her sponsors in London and Washington Bhutto’s response to Musharraf’s coup has been muted to say the least. While the military parades its contempt for the democratic rights of the Pakistani people, Bhutto has said that she does not want confrontation. Speaking on CNN Sunday, she refused to rule out holding further power-sharing negotiations with the General-President.

Mounting popular opposition

Musharraf and his cronies have for months been threatening to impose emergency rule, in the face of mounting opposition amongst all layers of society—opposition that has been fueled by the lack of democracy, spiraling food prices and increasing social inequality, rampant corruption and the crony capitalism practiced by the military regime and, last but not least, Musharraf’s support for Washington’s wars.

The trigger for last Saturday’s coup was Musharraf’s apparent failure to bully the Supreme Court into giving a judicial-constitutional imprimatur to last month’s sham presidential election.

Pakistan’s judiciary has a long and notorious record of sanctioning the illegal acts of military dictators. But, reflecting elite fears that military rule is fuelling mass popular discontent and elite complaints that the military has monopolized the benefits of capitalist growth, the Supreme Court under Justice Chaudhry issued a number of judgments that cut across the agenda of the military and its political cronies. Last March when Musharraf fired Chaudhry, because he feared the chief justice couldn’t be relied on to do his bidding in fixing the forthcoming elections, it became the occasion for mass protests and ultimately a humiliating defeat for Musharraf, when an emboldened Supreme Court ordered Chaudhry restored to his seat on the court.

For weeks this fall, a panel of the Supreme Court had been hearing petitions challenging the legality of the presidential election and Musharraf’s candidacy. From a legal standpoint, it was an open and shut case: the Pakistani constitution bars a member of the military, let alone the Chief of Armed Services from running for elected office. It also clearly forbids Musharraf’s ploy of having a national parliament and provincial assemblies that were elected in 2002, in a poll manipulated the military, choose a president for a five year term beginning in November 2007.

But Musharraf still hoped that by combining threats of a resort to emergency rule if his presidential election was deemed unconstitutional with participation in the US-sponsored rapprochement with Benazir Bhutto, he could coerce the court into endorsing his election.

Ultimately, however, Musharraf came to the conclusion that the court was about to rule against him. In the middle of last week, the court announced that it was suspending its deliberations on the case until November 13, that is just two days before Musharraf’s current presidential term is to expire; then it reversed itself and indicated it could issue a ruling as early as yesterday. Hence Musharraf’s sudden decision to impose martial rule.

Musharraf began his proclamation of emergency rule by referring to the growth of terrorist attacks and other challenges to state authority from armed Islamic groups—groups that historically have been nurtured by the military and intelligence services as a bulwark against the working class and as a tool of Pakistan’s geo-political maneuvers against India.

But the bulk of the proclamation and Musharraf’s justification for martial law is the claim that “some members of the judiciary are working at cross purposes with the executive and legislature.” The proclamation charges that the judiciary has undermined the fight against terrorism by ordering the release of persons detained without charge and is destabilizing the Pakistani state by effecting some modest checks on the government and military.

It complains of “constant” judicial “interference in executive function, including but not limited to the control of terrorist activity, economic policy, price controls, downsizing of corporations and urban planning [that] has weakened the writ of the government” and that as a result of the judiciary’s abuse of its constitutional authority “the police force has become completely demoralized and is fast losing its efficacy to fight terrorism and Intelligence Agencies have been thwarted in their activities and prevented from pursuing terrorists.”

These complaints are not just a rationale for dictatorial measures. They constitute a warning that the Musharraf regime intends to use its authoritarian powers to intensify its implementation of neo-liberal economic policies and to use state repression to stamp out the growing opposition to the lack of democratic right and social inequality.

The Bush administration and the US political elite have for years sustained the Musharraf dictatorship. They no less than the general himself are responsible for the systematic rape of the democratic rights of the Pakistani people and the threat of state terror that now hangs over Pakistan.

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